tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/the-great-society-14436/articlesThe Great Society – The Conversation2015-03-06T11:05:00Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/384102015-03-06T11:05:00Z2015-03-06T11:05:00ZThe choice: LBJ’s decision to go to war in Vietnam<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73951/original/image-20150305-3321-1emdf86.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">LBJ and his troops in Vietnam</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lyndon_Johnson_greets_American_troops_in_Vietnam_1966_2.JPEG">US Information Agency </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago, during the first six months of 1965, Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam. </p>
<p>His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/vietnam/showdoc.php?docid=64">advised</a> him against it. So did his long time mentor and friend, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Inside the administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball also made the case for restraint. </p>
<p>The war, they said, would have to be limited in scope. The job, therefore, couldn’t be finished which would mean an open-ended commitment.</p>
<p>Communist China made it clear that it would not permit an invasion of North Vietnam. For fear of provoking an all-out war with the communist superpowers, the Johnson administration would forswear not only an invasion but also any attempts to sponsor an anti-communist insurgency in the North. </p>
<p>The state of South Vietnam was in many ways artificial. Instead of a nation with a unique history, South Vietnam was a political compromise, the creation of the Great Powers (the US, the Soviet Union, China, France and the United Kingdom) at the <a href="http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/7/geneva-conference-of-1954">1954 Geneva Conference</a>. </p>
<p>The flag of Vietnamese nationalism had been captured by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his followers in the north: it would not be easily wrested from them. </p>
<p>Indeed, George Ball predicted that the United States would eventually have to put half a million troops in Vietnam, a prediction which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara vehemently rejected. </p>
<p>During the intense debated that occurred within the foreign policy establishment in the spring and summer of 1965, Johnson himself was frequently the leading dove. </p>
<p>In conversation with Dick Russell, he said, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of lot less.” </p>
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<p>Shortly after, he vented to adviser McGeorge Bundy in a now <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Taking_Charge.html?id=soYmluPdF5cC">familiar</a> monologue: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I don’t think it’s [South Vietnam] worth fighting for and I don’t think that we can get out. It’s just the biggest damned mess that I saw…What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?…What is it worth to this country? …this is…a terrible thing that we’re getting ready to do…” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But in February 1965 Johnson approved <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/operation-rolling-thunder">Operation Rolling Thunder</a>, the aerial assault on North Vietnam. And in July he agreed to the dispatch of two combat divisions to Vietnam. </p>
<p>Why?</p>
<h2>Containing communism</h2>
<p>In April 1964 US intelligence reported that substantial numbers of regular North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating into South Vietnam via the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/268322/Ho-Chi-Minh-Trail">Ho Chi Minh Trail</a>.</p>
<p>The CIA predicted that if Washington and its allies did not act, South Vietnam would fall within the year. American intelligence and Foreign Service operatives on the ground began requesting new assignments. </p>
<p>Johnson believed that if he permitted South Vietnam to fall through a conventional North Vietnamese invasion, the whole <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/kennan">containment </a>edifice so carefully constructed since World War II to stop the spread of communism (and the influence of the Soviet Union) would crumble. </p>
<p>There were also domestic considerations. </p>
<h2>Negotiating with southerners and living in shadow of JFK</h2>
<p>In the spring and summer of 1965 Johnson was laboring to get through Congress some of the most controversial of his Great Society programs: the Voting Rights Act, federal aid to education, and Medicare, among others. </p>
<p>Both the education bills and Medicare were civil rights measures in their own right, making federal funding to schools and hospitals dependent on desegregation. </p>
<p>Johnson, a southerner himself, worked to persuade congressmen and senators from the former Confederacy to acquiesce in, if not actively support, passage of these measures. </p>
<p>The South was both the most segregationist region of the country and the most hawkish on foreign affairs. Johnson <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674026995">believed</a> he could not ask the region to accept both the demise of Jim Crow and the loss of South Vietnam to the communists. </p>
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<p>Matters were further complicated by the fact that right-wingers led by FBI Director J Edgar <a href="http://todayinclh.com/about/">Hoover</a> and Alabama governor George Wallace were trying to portray the civil rights sit-ins and demonstrations as communist inspired. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Johnson was acutely aware that he was JFK’s successor. </p>
<p>The American commitment to South Vietnam was one of Kennedy’s legacies. Johnson saw no evidence that President Kennedy had intended to deescalate. Johnson had chosen to keep on Kennedy’s foreign policy team – McNamara, Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. They were unanimous and vehement in their advice to stay the course in Vietnam (although McNamara would very <a href="https://archive.org/details/TheFogOfWarElevenLessonsFromTheLifeOfRobertS.Mcnamara">publicly</a> do a mea culpa years later.) </p>
<h2>The gamble</h2>
<p>LBJ was a nation-builder. The Great Society comprised more than 1,000 pieces of legislation and forever altered the social and political landscape of America. </p>
<p>Johnson was reluctant to intervene in South East Asia but once strategic and politic exigencies seemd to demand it, he began to develop a not unreasonable vision for the future of South Vietnam, one that helped him stay the course. In thinking about Vietnam, the model LBJ <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9050.html">had in mind</a> was South Korea. </p>
<p>Here was a nation born under the direst of circumstances. After a devastating war with the North (1950-1953) and one of the lowest living standards in the world in 1950, South Korea had by 1963 emerged from military rule and in 1965 was already beginning to see real economic gains. So why couldn’t South Vietnam follow this model? </p>
<p>The war was, however, impossible to win as Ball and Humphrey had predicted. </p>
<p>Out of fear of a great power confrontation with the Soviet Union, the United States fought a limited war, with the South China Sea to the east and the open borders of Laos and Cambodia to the west. </p>
<p>The Soviets supplied North Vietnam by sea. The North Vietnam Army and the underground Vietcong were free to move in and out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Never during the ten-year-long Second Indochinese war did a government emerge in Saigon worthy of the support of the people of South Vietnam. The regimes that followed in the wake of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted in a <a href="http://www2.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/">coup</a> in 1963, were particularly weak and corrupt.</p>
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<span class="caption">A message to the White House in 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vietnam_War_protestors_at_the_March_on_the_Pentagon.jpg">LBJ Library</a></span>
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<p>In the end, Johnson understood. </p>
<p>At a post-retirement dinner in New York with McNamara, Bundy, and other former aides in attendance, LBJ accepted full responsibility. Looking at his former defense chief and national security adviser, he <a href="http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/Krim-A/Krim3Addendum.pdf">said,</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You know, I want you fellows to know everything that went wrong in Vietnam that’s being criticized, it was my decision, not yours…” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>What if Johnson had heeded Humphrey’s advice and his own doubts? </p>
<p>South Vietnam would have fallen to the communists much sooner than it did, saving thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives. </p>
<p>But segregationists and red-baiters might well have blocked the civil rights achievements of the Great Society, prompting racial conflict at home that would have made Detroit seem like a picnic. </p>
<p>There are no easy choices when you are chief executive of a nation which is both a democracy and the most powerful nation on earth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38410/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Randall B Woods does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fifty years ago Lyndon Johnson made the decision to Americanize the conflict in Vietnam. Why?Randall B Woods, Distinguished Professor, John A. Cooper Professor of History, University of ArkansasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/353142015-01-15T11:02:15Z2015-01-15T11:02:15ZWe don’t fight poverty anymore<p>Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson spoke of war on poverty and pursuit of a great society. He talked about investing in education and employment and about eliminating social exclusion that comes with poverty. </p>
<p>Above all, he pointed to opportunity for all as the backbone of a great society. </p>
<p>Since then, LBJ and the social programs that emerged during that time have been justifiably criticized. Nonetheless, that period of domestic policy gave rise to a conviction that fighting poverty was a national cause because the whole society is stunted and degraded when millions of people live poor.</p>
<p>Fifty years later, we don’t fight poverty anymore. </p>
<h2>No safety nets today</h2>
<p>We don’t even promise to keep low-income children cared for and safe. Forget safety nets; if parents can’t buy their way out of economic harm, their kids lose – a lot. </p>
<p>We have a surfeit of data that show how poverty undermines health, development, emotional well-being and our whole life course. For example, poor children are more likely to have chronic respiratory and stress-related problems, experience obesity and to leave school before graduating, all affecting life opportunities.</p>
<p>We know that today <a href="http://www.nccp.org/publications/fact_sheets.html">almost half</a> of US children – some thirty million – live in or near poverty. </p>
<p>Working hard, caring for each other, trying to juggle two or three jobs with schooling and bills that outstrip wages, people living these conditions are a big part of the nation. But they slipped off the policy map years ago along with the national conviction that the welfare of our people is worth a fight. </p>
<p>Over the last decade I have heard a lot about what happens when a nation backs down. </p>
<h2>Living in poverty: the mother’s experience</h2>
<p>In doing research on wages and family life, I have <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/moral-underground">listened</a> to hundreds of parents – mostly mothers – describe relentless waves of crises in housing, childcare, transportation and the loss of public aid. They report a morass of obstacles to receive even the tiniest public help. They talk about a quagmire of low-wage, go-nowhere jobs that have irregular schedules, unpredictable hours and few or no benefits. </p>
<p>As one young mother explained recently, “There’s no one that cares but you, so you do what’s best for your child and forget them….” Another said that if your children are “…minority…or just poor,” no one seems to notice what is happening – “they just don’t see,” she said. </p>
<p>A grandmother asked me the question, “How would you feel if you couldn’t keep your children warm?” She went right to the heart of matter; how is it that we simply accept the damage and suffering that poverty is doing to so many?</p>
<h2>A centuries-old commitment to public responsibility</h2>
<p>Back in colonial times, poverty was common cause; everyone had to pony up whether they liked it or not. </p>
<p>If you were well heeled in a colonial-era town, you would be expected to house a struggling family or apprentice a youngster to your trade and pay a tithe for the common good. </p>
<p>While adults were expected to work hard and overcome hardship, the whole society was responsible for creating the opportunity to make that possible. </p>
<p>This principle – individual effort coupled with societal responsibility – remained a tense partnership for centuries, tipping back and forth. </p>
<p>Social programs such as mothers’ aid programs, social security for the elderly and disabled, child health services, unemployed workers’ jobs corps, and general “relief” for poor families were programs that would rise and fall back. </p>
<p>In the 1960s, LBJ <a href="http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4498971/lbj-great-society-speech-1964">described</a> the war on poverty as society’s commitment to “…millions of Americans – one fifth of our people – who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the gates of opportunity have been closed.” </p>
<p>While the great society programs that emerged may have been deeply flawed, that did not negate the nation’s responsibility for alleviating poverty. Yet in the 1990s, domestic policy went into a full retreat, dramatically cutting support for poor families. </p>
<h2>Change in the 1990s</h2>
<p>Arguably, the greatest achievement of the <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-104publ193/html/PLAW-104publ193.htm">1996 welfare reform </a>was the consolidation of bipartisan support for making sure jobs – any job, at any wage – became the sole option for poor families. </p>
<p>Messaged as a mix of personal responsibility and work opportunity, what was omitted was wage responsibility. </p>
<p>The low-wage labor market gained access to hungry workers who had no option but minimum wage, no-future work <a href="http://www.epi.org">disproportionately affecting</a> African American and Latino families. </p>
<p>The meanest betrayal of all was a collective shrug at the impact on children. Safety nets gone, parents were tied to jobs but were unable to cover rent and heat, far be it buy childcare. </p>
<p>What happened – what is happening – to all those kids when parents work multiple jobs, shifts, unpredictable schedules, and still can’t pay the bills? Actually, there’s not a lot of effort to find out anymore. But we do know <a href="http://www.nccp.org/publications/fact_sheets.html">half</a> of US children live poor and that black and Latino children are <a href="http://www.diversitydatakids.org/">disproportionately affected</a>. </p>
<p>We know reams about the effects of economic instability on children and family well-being and it is not good news. </p>
<h2>Wage responsibility: the elephant in the room</h2>
<p>How would we renew a commitment to poverty alleviation in the US? </p>
<p>This nation has every possible resource to face the challenge. Foremost, we have a remarkably hard-working population committed to being responsible and independent. We also have a centuries-old commitment to public responsibility and investing in human development and providing aid for those who are young, elderly, disabled or otherwise need some assistance. </p>
<p>But the elephant in the room, when it comes to responsibility for causing as well as reducing poverty, is wage responsibility, decent jobs responsibility and business responsibility for ensuring that working people can take care of their families. </p>
<p>This has been a decade of unsurpassed wealth gain for the richest few. Now we are beginning to see evidence of a renewed antipoverty spirit at least on the local, city and state levels. <a href="http://www.raisetheminimumwage.org">Raising the minimum wage</a> is a growing focus all across the country with ballot initiatives on the issue passed in five states in the November elections, including in so-called red states. </p>
<p>At the community level nationwide, there are <a href="http://9to5.org">organizations</a> working to improve child care and other safety net programs for low-wage families. </p>
<p>Working <a href="http://familyvaluesatwork.org">people</a> are joining up with progressive legislators, mayors and business leaders to take responsibility for building a better society.</p>
<p><em>This article is part of a series commemorating Lyndon B Johnson’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/great-society">Great Society</a> programs</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35314/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Dodson has received funding from the Ford Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, WK Kellogg Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.</span></em></p>Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson spoke of war on poverty and pursuit of a great society. He talked about investing in education and employment and about eliminating social exclusion that comes with poverty…Lisa Dodson, Senior Scientist and Senior Lecturer, the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/358362015-01-06T10:45:54Z2015-01-06T10:45:54ZThe speech that launched the Great Society<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68237/original/image-20150105-13843-1vc481h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Just one of the Great Society programs: the Civil Rights Act </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#mediaviewer/File:Lyndon_Johnson_signing_Civil_Rights_Act,_July_2,_1964.jpg">Cecil Stoughton </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In May 1964, Lyndon Johnson described his vision of a great society in a commencement address delivered to the University of Michigan. </p>
<p>The audience could not have been more receptive to his message. Speaking to a university where President John F. Kennedy had announced the Peace Corps and which had supplied some of the leaders of the activist group, <a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/">Students for a Democratic Society</a>, Johnson called out to the audience a series of questions, each one eliciting vocal waves of affirmative answers from the graduating class.</p>
<p>The speech, in some respects, was a cornerstone of Johnson’s 1964 election campaign. He used the speech to articulate his own program, distinct not only from Kennedy but also from his political mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, in whose shadow he stood. </p>
<p>LBJ wanted to put a stamp on a program of his own. He believed that the power he had in his hands was to be maximized for progressive ends. More importantly, though, liberalism was undergoing a series of shifts in direction. Johnson’s speech helped channel and accelerate the new mood.</p>
<p>To many liberals, prosperity had come to seem an almost permanent characteristic of American life. A broad, expanding middle-class was taken for granted by the date of Johnson’s speech. </p>
<p>If sixties liberals saw the New Deal as primarily an architecture to provide an economic floor for citizens when industrial capitalism faltered, they also concluded that a new program was needed to address the anxiety and discomfort that was festering in America. Liberals had concluded that government’s mission had less to do with ensuring economic fairness than with helping people to find meaning in their lives and to achieve a level of spiritual fulfillment.</p>
<p>Above all, Johnson wanted to deliver a speech that called Americans to a greater purpose. Without this context it’s difficult to grasp why Johnson announced a vision of such sweep. </p>
<h2>Why was it called ‘the great society?’</h2>
<p>LBJ began the speech with a call, simple and bold, to bring an end to the twin scourges of racism and poverty in his time. But that was just the start, he announced. </p>
<p>In his brilliant <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Remembering_America.html?id=tIJ0_IgrY10C">memoirs</a>, Richard Goodwin – who was the primary author of Johnson’s speech – recalled how almost as an afterthought he had inserted the phrase “Great Society” into a minor speech. “In our time,” he wrote, “we have the opportunity to move not just toward the rich society or the powerful society, but toward the great society.” Johnson admired the phrase and continued to use it in his remarks. Reporters soon were describing Johnson’s entire program as “the Great Society.” </p>
<p>Goodwin explained that “the very engine of prosperity—growth, development, technology, the golden liberators – were themselves corroding the spiritual and material conditions of American life,” and Johnson’s speech, which put a stamp on the phrase and outlined the philosophy behind it, took aim at the developments. </p>
<p>Johnson declared that the government, working with a citizenry motivated to improve community life, had to make cities more livable, protect the natural environment, and provide education that gave all citizens regardless of race or class the chance to rise in society and find meaning in life. </p>
<p>The speech was a spiritual invocation as much as a political statement to fulfill Jefferson’s promise in the Declaration of Independence to give all the right to “pursuit of happiness.”</p>
<p>“The Great Society,” Johnson declared, “…demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,” but it also had to be “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talent…where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” </p>
<p>The Great Society, he added, meant making the nation’s cities places where “future generations can come together, not only to live, but to live the good life.” It was a place where “America the beautiful” and “our natural splendor” were protected from the pollution that threatened to destroy “the water we drink, the food we eat, the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/lbj-michigan">very air we breath.”</a> </p>
<p>While Johnson’s 1964 speech dwelled on the problems of the cities, the environment, and education, the constellation of programs that came to be known as the Great Society addressed a much wider agenda. They included not only Medicare, Medicaid and civil rights legislation but also the creation of a department of Housing and Urban Development and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities, to name just a few. </p>
<p>“The liberal assumption that rising wealth more widely distributed would liberate Americans for the ‘pursuit of happiness’ had proven…inadequate,” Goodwin wrote of the genesis of the speech. The address, he argued, represented “the only possible direction for liberating, <a href="http://www.richardngoodwin.com/about.html%20at%20that%20time">progressive change”</a>. </p>
<h2>Unlike today, people had faith in good government</h2>
<p>The speech was also a response to the movements for social change led by the civil rights revolution in the South that were sweeping the country. </p>
<p>The liberals in the White House, Goodwin observed, were very much citizens of their time. African-American, women, consumer and nascent student movements suggested to the liberals in power that citizens and their government could relieve people from the suffocating bonds of past prejudices and free them to fulfill their potential. </p>
<p>Johnson’s speech reflected his faith in the power not just of government but also of ordinary citizens to enact changes that benefitted fellow Americans.</p>
<p>Over the past decades, Democratic politicians have worked hard to put a lot of distance between themselves and Johnson’s call for a Great Society. </p>
<p>Bill Clinton declared the end to the era of big government in 1996, and Barack Obama has resisted in his oratory and policies the kinds of soaring promises of a revolution in society initiated by government.</p>
<p>Johnson’s speech contains sentiments that no major Democrat would dare to voice in 2015 and still hope to be taken seriously. And for good reasons.</p>
<p>The hopes and promises articulated by Johnson were grandiose, and inevitably raised expectations (bringing an end to poverty and racism for example) that no president could realistically hope to achieve. </p>
<p>Johnson’s Great Society by now has also become so associated with big-government connotations that Democrats running for office at a time when government is viewed with extreme displeasure, would be committing political suicide if they embraced Johnson’s soaring rhetoric. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, Johnson’s speech remains a great speech and not only because it defined a program – much of which was enacted into law – that has proven beneficial to millions of Americans for the past 50 years and counting. The Great Society speech marks a key moment in American history because it called on both government and citizens to create a just, more equal and humane society – cutting the poverty rate, protecting the environment, bolstering public education, curbing racism -— in ways that still guide our political debates and capture much that is decent and sensible in the liberal political tradition. </p>
<p>Even as Democratic politicians run from Johnson’s legacy, they are forced, wittingly or not, to operate in the shadow of the words he uttered at Michigan more than 50 years ago.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35836/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Dallek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society speech marks a key moment in U.S. history: it called on government and citizens to create a more equal and humane society in ways that still guide our political debates.Matthew Dallek, Assistant Professor of Political Management, George Washington UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/353132015-01-05T10:54:48Z2015-01-05T10:54:48ZDid we lose the War on Poverty?<p>This year marks the 51st anniversary since Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty and made poverty reduction the centerpiece of his Great Society domestic agenda. </p>
<p>Whether we won this war, however, is still a subject of much debate. </p>
<h2>1960s: significant achievements</h2>
<p>There was considerable optimism in the 1960s that we could defeat poverty. Standards of living rose rapidly in that decade, income inequality declined, and civil rights were expanded for previously disenfranchised groups. </p>
<p>From 1964 -— the year the War on Poverty was declared -— to 1969 the <a href="http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/people.html">poverty rate</a> dropped substantially from 19% to 12% (and reached a low of 11% in 1973). </p>
<p>In 1971, <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Ends_and_means_of_reducing_income_povert.html?id=05fWAAAAMAAJ">Robert Lampman</a>, who had been a key economic adviser to President Lyndon Johnson on antipoverty initiatives, predicted that poverty would be eradicated by 1980. Unfortunately, this did not come to pass. </p>
<h2>1970s - 2000s: down, up and down</h2>
<p>During the 1970s and 1980s, economic growth slowed and income inequality grew. African Americans, particularly in many inner cities, continued to fare poorly, and the number of Hispanics living in high poverty neighborhoods also grew. Believing that government programs did little to reduce poverty, Ronald Reagan <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=36035">quipped</a> in 1988, “My friends, some years ago the federal government declared war on poverty —-and poverty won.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/people.html">In the 1990s</a>, the economy was stronger and poverty fell for all groups. </p>
<p>But the new millennium has been unkind to a large swath of Americans. Income inequality resumed its upward march and wages stagnated for middle- and low-income workers. Two recessions, including the crippling Great Recession in 2007-2009, threw many out of work and wiped out the wealth of millions through foreclosures and plummeting housing values. In 2013, even years after the official end of the recession, the poverty rate remained high at <a href="https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/">14.5%</a>. </p>
<p>It could hardly be said, therefore, that the War on Poverty has been won. However, it has not been entirely lost either. </p>
<h2>Some battles not lost</h2>
<p>First, the official poverty rate remains lower than at the outset of the war on poverty. Moreover, official poverty figures mask certain improvements in the lives of people near the poverty line. Welfare programs today are less likely to deliver the cash benefits that are counted in official poverty statistics and more likely to include non-cash or near-cash benefits, such as in the form of health and housing subsidies and the Earned Income Tax Credit, that are not. In other words, families are getting more help to meet basic needs than it appears using official statistics. </p>
<p>Second, we’ve waged this war in the face of very stiff economic winds since the early 1970s. </p>
<p>Globalization and de-industrialization eliminated many relatively well-paying jobs for people with modest levels of education. As a result, men’s wages, particularly for men with less than a college degree, <a href="http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2012.pdf">declined markedly</a> after the early 1970s and have not recovered since. Median household incomes continued to rise from the 1970s until 2000 mainly because of the large growth in the number of women working, but even this improvement stalled and reversed in the 2000s. The cost of health care and a college education also have risen markedly in recent decades -— far faster than inflation. </p>
<p>All of these trends mean that working families, including middle-class families, now struggle with issues of affordable child care, health care, and education of their children — the last being increasingly important in securing a good-paying job. These problems do not afflict the nation’s top earners, who have seen spectacular gains in their wealth in recent decades.</p>
<p>With the nation politically divided, it is unlikely that any large-scale legislation directed at the nation’s low-income population will be enacted any time soon. However, there are some policy options that could serve to reduce poverty and which are still broadly consistent with bipartisan goals of reducing hardship while not increasing dependency or stifling economic growth. </p>
<h2>Focus on children</h2>
<p>Generally speaking, policy has been more effective at reducing poverty among the elderly than among children in the United States. For example, according to <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=4037">one estimate</a>, Social Security lifts 15 million elderly Americans out of poverty. We should therefore now consider a number of strategies that assist working parents, reduce poverty, and provide an investment in children.</p>
<p>The United States is one of the very few countries in the world that does not provide paid time off for new parents. Such leave allows parents to stay connected to the labor market while still providing needed care for their infants. Likewise, universal preschool for children ages 3 and 4 would also support parental work and invest in early childhood education. Some of the <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/books_starting_gate/">cognitive inequalities</a> between children of low- and high-income households are already present by the time children reach kindergarten. </p>
<p>Another program that has been implemented by a number of local governments including that of New York City, <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/ofe/html/policy_and_programs/saveusa.shtml">SaveUSA</a>, offers low-income families an incentive to save at tax time by partially matching the amount of money families put aside. Encouraging individuals to save, even a little, can create a path toward longer-term financial stability and investment. Finally, and most challenging, is improving K-12 schooling so that we reduce wide disparities in the quality of education American children receive. </p>
<p>While we have not won the war on poverty, it is important to recognize that many of our efforts have reduced hardship among our most vulnerable citizens. Providing opportunities for upward mobility to children in unequal times remains critical to our future prosperity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35313/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Iceland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This year marks the 51st anniversary since Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty and made poverty reduction the centerpiece of his Great Society domestic agenda. Whether we won this war, however…John Iceland, Professor of Sociology and Demography; Department Head, Department of Sociology and Criminology, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.