Governmental policies designed to alleviate the privations of the poor go back much further
than President Johnson’s “war on poverty,” and of course reach far beyond the boundaries
of the United States.
What was different about this particular set of social programs, first proposed to Congress
during the Kennedy administration and later enacted into law during the Johnson administration,
was that their stated purpose was a reduction of dependency, not simply the provision of
more material goods to the poor.
This was the recurring theme of the “war on poverty,” from the time President Kennedy
introduced this legislation in 1962 until President Johnson saw it passed and signed
it into law in 1964.
John F. Kennedy stated the purpose of the “war on poverty” to be “to help our
less fortunate citizens to help themselves.”
He said: “We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence.”
The whole point of currently increased federal spending on this effort was “to strengthen
and broaden the rehabilitative and preventive services” offered to “persons who are
dependent or who would otherwise become dependent,” so that long-run savings in government spending
were expected from a subsequent decline in dependency.
As President Kennedy put it: Public welfare, in short, must be more than a salvage operation,
picking up the debris from the wreckage of human lives.
Its emphasis must be directed increasingly toward prevention and rehabilitation—on
reducing not only the long-range cost in budgetary terms but the long-range cost in human terms
as well.
The same theme of increased short-run spending for long-run savings, as a result of reduced
dependency, was a theme repeated in a New York Times editorial: President Kennedy’s
welfare message to Congress yesterday stems from a recognition that no lasting solution
to the problem can be bought with a relief check.
Financial help to the needy must be supplemented by a vastly expanded range of professional
and community services.
Their aim: to keep men, women and children from having to rely on public assistance by
making them useful, creative citizens.
The President does not pretend it will be cheap to provide the needed build-up in staff,
facilities and rehabilitation allowances.
The initial cost will actually be greater than the mere continuation of handouts.
The dividends will come in the restoration of individual dignity and in the long-run
reduction of the need for government help.
The Congressional Quarterly of the same date (February 2, 1962) likewise reported: “The
President stressed that the welfare program should be directed toward the prevention of
dependence and the rehabilitation of current relief recipients.”
The same theme carried over into the Johnson administration, where the antipoverty program
was sold as a way to “break the cycle of poverty” and to make “taxpayers out of
taxeaters.”
“Give a hand, not a handout” was the slogan of the “war on poverty.”
In keeping with that theme, President Johnson said in August 1964, when the legislation
was finally passed: “The days of the dole in our country are numbered.”
This initial thrust of the war on poverty programs must be clearly recognized at the
outset, for one of many responses to the failures of government programs has been to redefine
their goals after the fact, to make the programs look “successful.”
A subsidiary theme of the “war on poverty” was that social programs were a way of heading
off urban violence.
Lyndon Johnson spoke of “conditions that breed despair and violence.”
He said: All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty,
disease, not enough jobs.
The same theme was echoed in the celebrated 1968 Kerner Commission report on ghetto riots,
which proclaimed that pervasive discrimination and segregation were “the source of the
deepest bitterness and lie at the center of the problem of racial disorder.”
The riots of 1967 were attributed to “the failure of all levels of government—Federal
and state as well as local—to come to grips with the problems of our cities.”
In keeping with this theme that bad social conditions and official neglect lead to despair,
which in turn leads to violence, civil rights leaders and other minority spokesmen began
regularly predicting “a long hot summer” of violence if their demands for more government
programs were not met.
Such predictions became a staple of political discourse and have remained so over the years.
Government agencies seeking to expand their budgets and extend their powers likewise encouraged
the belief that social programs reduced the incidence of riots and other violence, while
a reduction of such programs would escalate civil disorder.
A diametrically opposite set of beliefs and predictions came from critics of the “war
on poverty” proposals.
Senator Barry Goldwater predicted that these programs would “encourage poverty” by
encouraging “more and more people to move into the ranks of those being taken care of
by the government.”
Nor did he expect expanded social programs to lead to a more harmonious society, for
he saw their underlying philosophy as an “attempt to divide Americans” along class lines,
to “pigeon-hole people and make hyphenated Americans.”
As these programs got underway, the mayors of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit
blamed the “war on poverty” for “fostering class struggle” through its support of community
activists, radical intellectuals, and others with a vested interest in disaffection and
turmoil.
The assumption that initial increases in government spending on social programs would lead to
reduced spending in later years, as dependency declined, was likewise disputed by opponents
like columnist Henry Hazlitt, who said, “we can expect the price tag to increase geometrically
as the years go on.”
From an analytical standpoint, the issues were virtually ideal for testing: Two conflicting
sets of belief led logically to opposite conclusions, stated in terms that could be tested empirically.
Almost never, however, were such empirical tests made.
The views expressed in the vision of the anointed became axiomatic.
A re-examination of that vision, as it applied to the “war on poverty,” shows that it
went through the four stages already described: STAGE 1: THE “CRISIS”: Given that the
purpose of the “war on poverty” was to reduce dependency, the question is: How much
dependency was there at the time and was it increasing or decreasing before the new policies
were instituted?
In short, what was the “crisis” for which the anointed were proposing a “solution”?
As of the time the “war on poverty” programs began, the number of people who lived below
the official poverty line had been declining continuously since 1960, and was only about
half of what it had been in 1950.
On the more fundamental issue of dependency, the situation was even more clearly improving.
The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level without counting
government benefits declined by about one third from 1950 to 1965.
In short, dependency on government transfers as a means of warding off poverty was declining
when the “war on poverty” began.
STAGE 2: THE “SOLUTION”: The Economic Opportunity Act was passed in 1964, creating
the Office of Economic Opportunity, the “war on poverty” agency.
As an historian of poverty programs put it, “Congress was quick to buy a program that
might help welfare wither away.”
The Council of Economic Advisers declared, “conquest of poverty is well within our
power.”
STAGE 3: THE RESULTS: The percentage of people dependent upon the federal government to keep
above the poverty line increased.
Although the number of such dependent people had been declining for more than a decade
before the “war on poverty” programs began, this downward trend now reversed itself and
began rising within a few years after that program got underway.
Official poverty continued its decline for some time, as massive federal outlays lifted
many people above the official poverty line, but not out of dependency—the original goal.
Eventually, however, even official poverty began to rise, so that a larger number of
people were in poverty in 1992 than had been in poverty in 1964, when the “war on poverty”
began.
Although the Office of Economic Opportunity itself was modestly funded, by government
standards, it was a spearhead, a catalyst, and to some extent a coordinator of anti-poverty
programs in other agencies as well.
The massive expansion of anti-poverty social programs continued even after the Office of
Economic Opportunity was disbanded in 1974 and its programs were reassigned to other
agencies.
Over-all federal spending on programs for the poor escalated as eligibility rules for
welfare and Social Security were loosened, the size of benefits was increased, and unemployment
insurance was made more available to more people, and for longer periods of time.
Despite initial claims that various government services would lead to reduced federal outlays
on welfare programs as more people became selfsufficient, the very opposite happened.
The number of people receiving public assistance more than doubled from 1960 to 1977.
The dollar value of public housing rose nearly five-fold in a decade and the amount spent
on food stamps rose more than ten-fold.
All government-provided in-kind benefits increased about eight-fold from 1965 to 1969 and more
than 20-fold by 1974.
Federal spending on such social welfare programs not only rose in dollar terms and in real
terms, but also a percentage of the nation’s Gross National Product, going from 8 percent
of GNP in 1960 to 16 percent by 1974.
As for urban ghetto riots, they raged across the country during this era.
Later, they declined sharply after the beginning of the Nixon administration, which opposed
the whole “war on poverty” approach and eventually abolished the Office of Economic
Opportunity, which had been the spearhead of this program.
Still later, during the eight years of the Reagan presidency—supposedly the nadir of
neglect—major urban riots became virtually extinct.
The fact that the actual course of events followed a pattern diametrically the opposite
of what was assumed and proclaimed by those with the vision of the anointed made not the
slightest dent in the policies they advocated or in the assumptions behind those policies.
In this respect as in others, the vision of the anointed had achieved a sacrosanct status,
hermetically sealed off from the contaminating influence of facts.
STAGE 4: THE RESPONSE: The failure of the “war on poverty” to achieve its goal of
reducing dependency—and in fact an increasing dependency as these policies went into effect—brought
no acknowledgement of failure.
In the many retrospective evaluations of these programs in later years and decades, most
of their political and media proponents resolutely ignored the original goal of reducing dependency.
The goal was instead redefined as reducing poverty by transferring resources.
As former Johnson White House aide Hodding Carter III put it, “millions of people were
lifted out of poverty during the period, or had their plight considerably alleviated,
by government programs and public expenditures.”
A member of President Johnson’s Cabinet suggested yet another criterion of success:
“Ask the 11 million students who have received loans for their college education whether
the Higher Education Act failed.”
Similar questions were suggested for those who used a wide range of other government
programs.
In short, the test for whether a program was good for the country as a whole was whether
those who personally benefitted from it found it beneficial.
Yet a third line of defense of failed policies has been to claim moral merit for their good
intentions.
Hodding Carter III was only one of many to use this defense when he wrote of the “war
on poverty” as “a clear, steady trend away from the majority’s long and shameful
disregard of the other, hidden America of hard-core hopelessness.”
Related to the moral redemption of the uncaring masses was the excitement and inspiration
of the elite.
At a twentieth anniversary commemoration of the Johnson administration’s social programs,
another former aide to President Johnson referred to “the vision that excited and inspired
the nation.”
Mrs. Johnson spoke of the “sense of caring” and the “exhilaration” of her husband’s
efforts.
Finally, it was asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for these
programs.
“The question is not what the bottom line is today—with poverty up—but where would
we be if we didn’t have these programs in place?” said Professor Sheldon Danziger,
Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
“I think we’d have poverty rates over 25 percent.”
Even though poverty and dependency were going down for years before the “war on poverty”
began, Professor Danziger chose to assert that poverty rates would have gone up.
There is no possible reply to these heads-I-win-and-tailsyou-lose assertions, except to note that they would
justify any policy on any subject anywhere, regardless of its empirically observed consequences.
In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by
the original criteria, then by criteria extemporized later—and if not by empirical criteria,
then by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation.
Evidence becomes irrelevant.