‘We can do it and do it better’: lessons from LBJ’s War on Poverty at 60

“In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.” Ronald Reagan’s 1987 pithy dismissal of the War on Poverty, a cornerstone of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s Great Society, would probably not be so memorable if it did not so accurately reflect the political and historiographic consensus at the time. However, as we mark the 60^th anniversary of the week the War on Poverty was launched, that consensus appears to have collapsed, at the same point that many of its solutions are back in vogue. In an election year on both sides of the Atlantic, both Labour and Democrats would do well to revisit the political and policy achievements of  the War on Poverty, which vaunted the eradication of poverty as a deliverable priority for government action. The era allows us to glimpse the transformative potential of combining strong political and mission-led co-ordination from the centre, partnered with decentralised community action at the local level.

Since the final phase of the Johnson Presidency, amidst disaster in Vietnam and social turbulence at home, the War on Poverty has had a curious lack of sympathetic advocates. The right succeeded in painting the efforts as naïve and wrongheaded, at best eroding personal responsibility and at worst encouraging civil disorder and riots that blighted many U.S. cities in the late 1960s. Even those on the left who refuted the Reaganite view that the War on Poverty was doomed to fail still regarded it as a missed opportunity, a fundamentally unserious programme that left power hierarchies untouched. This has no doubt contributed to the failure of successive Presidents to offer anything like the level of attention and advocacy on the issue of poverty that occurred during the 1960s.

Despite its flaws – not least an overreliance on the provision of services compared to cash and income-based solutions – notable reductions in poverty were achieved. What is more, studying its impacts on the ground offers a model for how individual and community agency can be channelled into concerted action to address structural causes of poverty in partnership, instead of blaming individuals for their poverty or assuming labour market participation will solve all.  The War on Poverty is particularly worthy of reconsideration in our current moment when the merits of devolving power to communities, co-production, and the call of ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’ are only growing in salience.

Arousing the conscience of the nation

On 8^th January 1964, in his State of the Union Address President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty” as a defining priority for this administration. In the spring the President embarked on a series of what he called ‘poverty tours’ through deprived Appalachian communities. Just months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his ascendency to the Presidency, Johnson told his audiences that “We will not win our war against poverty until the conscience of the entire nation is aroused…We will not succeed until every citizen regards the suffering of neighbours as a call to action.” Channelling his own experience of boyhood poverty, he stated that “it is almost insulting to urge you to enlist in this war for just economic motivations…this is a moral challenge that goes to the very root of our civilization, and asks if we are willing to make public, personal sacrifices for the public good”.

This grandiose rhetoric set the stage for the ambitious Economic Opportunity Act which founded forty new programmes and established the Office of Economic Opportunity. Johnson drove this forward in just a few months, fearing he would lose Congressional majorities in the 1966 mid-terms. Emerging in this context, the federal War on Poverty was haphazard and often inconsistent– at once empowering and paternalistic, offering both a structural and a cultural account of poverty which sat uneasily alongside one another. Despite these tensions, the high-level political commitment to the mission of eradicating poverty bore long-term legacies which last to this day.

The War on Poverty is best remembered for the creation of initiatives such as Head Start to support low-income preschool children, Medicaid to provide health insurance in older age, as well as Job Corp and a range of affordable housing programs. Head Start has had international influence, as demonstrated in its namesake Sure Start, established under New Labour some thirty years later. Spending on health, education, and welfare nearly doubled under the Johnson administration, from $23bn to $46.7bn. What is more, poverty didn’t ‘win’ – rates fell from 22.2% in 1963 to 12.7% in 1969 – although reductions stalled thereafter. The conventional debate over this era has been around the extent to which such reductions were attributable to the War on Poverty, or longer-term economic performance. But while important, this traditional focus misses the transformative effects of the War on Poverty on the ground, which are not captured by headline poverty rates and spending totals.

War on Poverty programmes were required by legislation to deliver the ‘maximum feasible participation’ of low-income communities in their operations, and this clause transformed the relationship between services and service users. It sought to transfer power to people experiencing poverty themselves, rather than assuming and enacting what was best for them. This proposition was deeply threatening to the often institutionally racist power structures of the time, and it encountered fierce resistance at all levels.

Among the key pivots for this were the new Community Action Programs (CAPs), established with broad latitude to deliver services and support to tackle poverty or its causes, including employment and skills training, integrated health care, early years support, and welfare rights. CAPs were often run by Community Action Agencies (CAAs), usually run by non-profits, funded by the federal government, and charged with delivering programmes in partnership with people in poverty. The dramatic growth of CAAs, run by and for people in poverty created a completely new kind of service provision. As Greta De Jong notes, an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) report in 1968 found that more than half of those employed by CAPs ‘were poor until employed’, with 51,000 people from low income target populations serving on CAP boards. The requirement for ‘maximum feasible participation’ of low incomes communities provided a window of opportunity that black communities in particular used to successfully leverage power.

Alongside this flourishing of community action, there was just as strong a drive towards national level co-ordination, and mission-led delivery from the centre. Tara J. Melish has argued that this was based on the “understanding that such decentralized problem-solving could not be fully effective without national-level orchestration and support”. This saw the situating of the new OEO in the Executive Office of the President itself, supporting “community-based plans of action for poverty alleviation, as identified and prioritized by the poor themselves.”

You can’t eat freedom: Head Start and co-operatives in the rural south

The War on Poverty went hand in hand with the civil rights struggle in much of the U.S. Indeed War on Poverty funding was contingent on Civil Rights Act compliance, while poorer and non-white areas received “systematically more funding” according to one study. Recent scholarship has also captured the qualitative impacts of maximum feasible participation in the south, which upended local power relations as demonstrated in A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle (Crystal Sanders, 2016), and You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement(Greta de Jong, 2016). The outlook of many of those involved in delivery proceeded from Alabama civil rights activist Ezra Cunningham’s refrain that “you can’t eat freedom, and a ballot is not to be confused with a dollar bill”.

In a study by Crystal Sanders on the War on Poverty in Mississippi, the qualitative improvements to communities when Head Start was delivered with the maximum feasible participation of those who would use such services is striking. The Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) was formed by a group of working class black mothers in Mississippi in 1965, receiving $1.5 million funding by the OEO, one of the largest grants made throughout the country that year.  In addition to delivering holistic educational, health and wellbeing support in poor children’s early years, the programme opened up opportunities for building community leadership and power by black working-class women. CDGM provided economic and social opportunities to women who lacked formal qualifications but possessed insight to get the best out of students. Bringing in women outside of the professional class provided new job opportunities, while devolving decision making power to communities through membership of boards and programme direction dramatically expanded the social and political agency of people in poverty. Many of those involved in the programme had cut their teeth in the civil rights movement, and this experience translated into an educational programme that emphasised Socratic learning, critical thinking and black history.Sanders shows how both the hard economic impact combined with the local leadership of poor black women in a highly segregated local society amounted to a “social revolution” in the communities served, “one of the most impressive examples of participatory democracy in the country”.

The War on Poverty did not stop at the delivery of public services, but also recognised the need for stimulating the kinds of productive economic activity which would help to build community wealth. Greta De Jong notes that rural areas in the south were a key focus of these initiatives, as an analysis prepared by USDA in October 1966 recognised that “the weed of urban poverty…has its roots in a rural America lacking enough jobs and health and education services”. One of the key drivers of this activity in rural communities was the establishment of a network of co-operatives, to whom federal government allocated multimillion dollars grants across the country. The Federation of Southern Co-operatives was one of the most notable examples of this practice. Supported by OEO funding, by 1972, the FSC had 110 member co-operatives serving 30,000 people across the south.

The Alabama FSC member co-operative formed the Panola Land Buyers Association (PLBA), which provided self-help housing for displaced farmworkers. PLBA brought forty families together, stewarding 1,164 acres for co-operative housing, and supported by loans from a new local black-led credit union. These anti-poverty initiatives went hand in hand with local economic development, and in stimulating local businesses created positive outcomes for white-owned enterprises too, which De Jong identifies as helping to thaw race relations locally. Like many War on Poverty initiatives, federal funding was a lifeline to sustaining these initiatives, and like CDGM, many co-operatives were locked in a constant battle to retain funding in the face of outright state opposition. But the leadership of these entities came from within poor communities themselves, channelling the knowledge, insight, and energy of historically marginalised communities. These were a form of radical self-help which challenged the economic and social forces which kept communities poor.

Ruling our own lives: Operation Life and whole person care in Las Vegas

The consensus has been that the War on Poverty hit the buffers by the late 1960s, as resources were redirected to the war in Vietnam and the war on crime at home. This is true at the national level – the “guns and butter” approach of seeking to simultaneously fight a doomed war in southeast Asia while delivering substantial domestic social reform became unsustainable, and political and budgetary pressure led to dramatic cuts to War on Poverty programmes. .However at a local level, the infrastructure established by the War on Poverty continued to deliver transformative change well into the 1970s, particularly where the reigns had been handed to local leaders with experience of poverty. Individual local leaders with experience of poverty were a key motor for this. Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Annelise Orleck, 2005) explores this through the case study of Operation Life, an anti-poverty one stop-shop in Las Vegas founded by working class black mothers in May 1972.

Operation Life was built around the insight that services needed to take a whole-person approach to poverty, addressing the multiple barriers people  faced due to ill health, lack of transport, and institutional distrust… Services included job training and placement, nursery care, free hot breakfast, on site medical services, consumer counselling and drug rehabilitation. The organizing principle was centralisation of services in the heart of the poor Westside community of Las Vegas. One of its high profile black leaders was Ruby Duncan, a single mother whose experience of poverty had led her into welfare rights activism. An influential figure on the national stage, Duncan would testify to Congress that Operation Life’s aim was “to rule our own lives. We want a piece of the American pie”. Duncan said Operation Life was conceived as “a self-help project…the decisions will be made here and be made by poor people”. In her study of the programme, Orleck says its success came because “the women knew how exhausting it was dragging children on and off buses, climbing stairs at one agency after another in their spread-out city”. The women’s intimate knowledge of poverty, service access, gender and urban design gave them a unique insight into how social services should be delivered.

The devolution of power to community groups such as Operation Life often came in service of national priorities. This is shown in the case of the Early Screening Program for Children introduced at the end of the Johnson administration in 1967. Like many War on Poverty measures,  states particularly in the south dragged their feet and obstructed implementation, and its availability was poorly publicised. This changed when Operation Life Community Health Canter secured funding to open in August 1973, delivering the Early Screening service. Their approach was encapsulated in their slogan: “we can do it and do it better”, and over 5 years the programme supported more than 10,000 children. Operation Life was particularly effective in providing outreach to communities who distrusted traditional healthcare providers –including screening for sickle cell anaemia which disproportionately affected black people

This example points to the role of Community Action Agencies and maximum feasible participation both in generating fresh relational approaches, and in delivering national priorities – such as health screening – with insights and trust that central top-down bodies lacked. As Orleck says, the significance of this should not be trivialised: “When the lived experience of poverty is seen as a valid credential, entitling poor mothers and fathers to build their own antipoverty programs, the results can be astounding, both materially and psychologically”.

An abstracted enemy: learnings from the end of the War on Poverty

In 1973 President Nixon abolished the OEO entirely, and ended federal funding for Community Action Programs. As De Jong reports, by 1980 a Community Service Agency spokesperson in an interview said: “we don’t even call it a War on Poverty anymore. The antipoverty campaign has never recovered from Nixon”.

While embodying a serious commitment to ending poverty, the ambiguity of its long-term strategy combined with competing “guns and butter” priorities was central to its ultimate undoing. Central to this was a that failure to present and defend a clear and consistent account of the causes and interests responsible for entrenched poverty. As Randall Woods has argued, whereas the New Deal possessed a clear explanation for the economic depression facing people in poverty, and mounted populist attacks on the ‘economic royalists’ who maintained the status quo, the War on Poverty was imbued with a particular brand of 1960s liberal optimism which “avoid[ed] pitting one group against another”. In doing so “LBJ made the enemy – the ’them‘ – abstract. Poverty, ignorance, ill health were not the fault of a class or group, they were boils on the body politic. These things were not the result of evil intent or greed on the part of groups or individuals, but seemingly free radicals that everyone hoped to see eliminated from the environment”. Lyndon Johnson’s legislative gifts got the legislation passed, but this feigned consensus built a naivety into the rearguard defence of the War on Poverty. The effort was thus less prepared to respond to the vehement resistance encountered at all levels of government.

At the same time, the War on Poverty was always vulnerable in separating out ‘the poor’ as a distinct group requiring special interventions, which created a divergence with ‘the majority’ and increased the risk of middle class resentment. As one of the central architects Sergeant Shriver described it, the War was: “the only national effort ever constructed by the majority for the benefit of the minority”. This contrasted with the New Deal which sought broad based benefits for a struggling middle class at a period of economic depression. It ramped up means testing, and eroded universalist principles in the delivery of social goods. It was partially a worry about claims based on preference, that Martin Luther King would come to advance the case for a Guaranteed Income by the mid-1960s – something which President Nixon would genuinely contemplate implementing partially out of a resistance to the services-led approach of the War on Poverty which critics castigated as wasteful and inefficient.

Foundations for the future

The War on Poverty, despite its apparent medium-term collapse by the 1980s, still left in its wake long-term achievements and institutions present to this day. As Randall Woods argues, while “the fires of the 1960s may have burned the liberals’ house to the ground, but when the smoke had cleared, its foundation – the Great Society – remained and remains intact”.

What relevance does this have to the UK in 2024? While the context is very different, we are living through a timely moment for conversations around community power. For example, the Brown commission’s constitutional proposals for a possible upcoming Labour government included significant devolution of powers to local partnerships, including neighbourhood-level devolution such as a community right to buy local social infrastructure. The principle of delivering services at the neighbourhood level and with deep participation of local communities could offer a generational opportunity to deliver anti-poverty programmes in partnership with people with direct experience of poverty’s impacts. What does America’s experience of maximum feasible participation teach us when embarking on these efforts? The first is that funding clearly matters, but so does providing communities with agency to own and champion the initiatives you deliver to sustain long-term success and buy-in. Secondly, strong central leadership need not be in conflict with bottom-up community action, but rather is essential to setting the framework for effective partnerships. Thirdly, the most transformative interventions will often be the most resisted, particularly in difficult times with finite resources – which is why a compelling vision with clear and consistent diagnosis of the problem and interests involved is essential. Taking these together we can be – as CDGM founder Unita Blackwell said of the original spirit of Head Start in Mississippi – “full of faith that progress is possible”.

Rory Weal is a Churchill Fellow and Thouron Scholar writing on inequality.
He has worked for several years for charities tackling poverty and homelessness.