The Great Society at 50
LBJ’s unprecedented and ambitious domestic
vision changed the nation. Half a century later, it continues to define
politics and power in America.
The
Washington Post, May 17, 2014
President
Lyndon B. Johnson launched the most ambitious set of social programs ever
undertaken in the United States. In just a few years, Congress churned out
nearly 200 new laws. The "Great Society," as the effort became known,
also launched a decades-long political battle that still rages over the size and
role of the federal government. This is the first of four stories examining the
legacy of the "Great Society".
One
day shortly after starting his new job as presidential adviser and
speechwriter, Richard N. Goodwin was summoned to see the boss. Not to the Oval
Office, but to the White House swimming pool, where Lyndon B. Johnson often
went to ruminate.
Goodwin
found the leader of the free world naked, doing a languorous sidestroke.
Johnson invited him and top aide Bill Moyers to doff their own clothes: “Come
on in, boys. It’ll do you good.”
It
was an unorthodox manner of conducting official business. As they bobbed in the
tepid water, the president “began to talk as if he were addressing some larger,
imagined audience of the mind,” Goodwin later wrote in his memoir.
The
32-year-old speechwriter forgot his chagrin as he was drawn by “the powerful
flow of Johnson’s will, exhorting, explaining, trying to tell me something
about himself, seeking not agreement — he knew he had that — butbelief.”
This
happened in early April 1964, just a little more than four months after a
tragedy in Dallas had made Johnson the 36th president of the United States.
“I
never thought I’d have the power,” Johnson told Goodwin and Moyers. “I wanted
power to use it. And I’m going to use it.”
“We’ve got to use the Kennedy program as a
springboard to take on the Congress, summon the states to new heights, create a
Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive,” he said. “Hell,
we’ve barely begun to solve our problems. And we can do it all.”
Johnson’s
vision would come to be known as the Great Society — the most ambitious effort
ever to test what American government is capable of achieving. And in doing so,
to discover what it is not.
In
laying it out, LBJ even set out a specific time frame for it to come to
fruition — 50 years, a mark that will be reached on Thursday. Johnson launched
his program with a University of Michigan commencement address, delivered on
the clear, humid morning of May 22, 1964, in Ann Arbor.
Today,
the laws enacted between 1964 and 1968 are woven into the fabric of American
life, in ways big and small. They have knocked down racial barriers, provided
health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and
museums in cities across the country, put seat belts and padded dashboards in
every automobile, garnished
Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington with red oaks.
“We
are living in Lyndon Johnson’s America,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was
LBJ’s top domestic policy adviser from 1965 through the end of his presidency.
“This country is more the country of Lyndon Johnson than any other president.”
The
backlash against the Great Society has been as enduring as its successes.
Virtually
every political battle that rages today has roots in the federal expansion and
experimentation that began in the 1960s. It set terms of engagement for
ideological warfare over how to grapple with income inequality, whether to
encourage a common curriculum in schools, affirmative action, immigration, even
whether to strip federal funding for National Public Radio. (Yes, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another Great Society program.)
Many
Great Society programs are now so popular it is hard to imagine the country as
we know it without them. Others — including some of its more grandiose urban
renewal efforts — are generally regarded as failures. Poverty remains with us,
with the two parties in deep disagreement over whether government has
alleviated it or made it harder to escape.
When
Johnson spoke that day in Michigan, before a crowd of 70,000, the country was
enjoying unprecedented affluence.
So
he beckoned Americans to consider what they could do with their riches, to
imagine ahead — to today — a time that many who heard his words have lived to
see.
“The
challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that
wealth to enrich and elevate our national life and to advance the quality of
our American civilization,” the president said. “Your imagination and your
initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where
progress is the servant of our needs or a society where old values and new
visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time, we have the
opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society
but upward to the Great Society.”
The
import of that pronouncement was lost on the graduates of the Michigan Class of
1964. Their college years had been framed by the thrill of John F. Kennedy’s
election when they were freshman and the heartbreak of his death when they were
seniors. They graduated six months to the day after his assassination; their
speaker was a stand-in for the president they had originally invited.
Undergraduate
student-body president Roger Lowenstein sat onstage behind Johnson. When he saw
the words “GREAT SOCIETY” roll by on the teleprompter — in his recollection,
the phrase was underlined and written in big letters — Lowenstein snickered
with Michigan Daily newspaper editor Ron Wilton, who was next to him.
“It
did sound corny, and it wasn’t catchy,” said Lowenstein, who went on to become
an attorney, then write for the hit TV show “L.A. Law,” and now runs a charter
school in Los Angeles.
“We
were just typical 21-year-old wise guys,” he said, “with complete ignorance
that history was happening in front of us.”
Settled
in a comfortable chair in his study, Dick Goodwin pulled eight typewritten
pages from a folder. They show a work in progress: notes penciled in the
margins, phrases underlined for emphasis, entire paragraphs scratched out.
“He
knew his ambitions,” Goodwin said of Johnson. “When I first drafted that
speech, somebody else on the staff took it upon himself to redo it so it became
just another anti-poverty speech. In fact, it was rewritten. I went in to see
Johnson. This was intended to be much more than anti-poverty. It was a grand
master plan. Johnson had it changed back to what it had been.”
The transformation
LBJ’s
brand of government activism was inspired by his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and the New Deal of his Depression-era youth. (At 26, he had run FDR’s National
Youth Administration work and training program in Texas.)
But
the reach of Johnson’s Great Society was broader, its premise even more
idealistic.
“Roosevelt
did not set out to start a revolution in this country. He was trying to put out
the fire” of an economic catastrophe, said political scientist Norman J.
Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Coming at a
time of prosperity, Johnson really was looking for a way to transform America.”
LBJ
prodded the 89th Congress , which was seated from January 1965 to January 1967,
to churn out nearly
200 major bills. It is regarded by many as the most productive legislative
body in American history — and the starkest contrast imaginable to the Capitol
Hill paralysis of today.
In
the space of a few years came an avalanche of new laws, many of which were part
of LBJ’sWar
on Poverty: Civil rights protections. Medicare and Medicaid. Food stamps.
Urban renewal. The first broad federal investment in elementary and high school
education. Head Start and college aid. An end to what was essentially a
whites-only immigration policy. Landmark consumer safety and environmental
regulations. Funding that gave voice to community action groups.
One
of them sits in the Oval Office.
Critics
said some of the Great Society programs perpetuated the problems they aimed to
solve, stirred social discontent and worked mostly to the benefit of the
massive, intractable bureaucracies they created.
Enormous
sums were spent on ideas that had never been tested outside of social-science
theory, and some proved unworkable in the real world.
The
Model Cities program, for instance, was shut down in 1974. Dick Lee, the
slum-clearing mayor New Haven, Conn., who had overseen one of the most
ambitious of the federally financed initiatives, once said, “If New Haven is a
model city, God help America’s cities.”
The
Office of Economic Opportunity, which ran the War on Poverty, was abolished in
1981.
“We
were coming up with programs so fast, even Johnson could barely remember what
he proposed,” Goodwin said.
Disillusionment
gained force as the Vietnam War sapped Johnson of his political capital and his
moral authority, and squeezed his budget.
In
a 1978 book, Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution wrote that the speed and
intensity with which the country shifted gears “is unique in American political
history.”
Johnson
was acutely aware of that. “He was conscious of how limited time there was to
get things done,” Califano said, “and how he was spending capital all the
time.”
LBJ
was elected in 1964 with what was then the biggest landslide in U.S. history.
Just two years later in the midterm contests, his party lost three seats in the
Senate, 47 in the House and eight governorships. Republicans would win five of the
next six presidential elections.
Among
those presidents was Ronald Reagan, who memorably said that the United States
had waged a war on poverty and poverty won.
Reagan
wrote in his diary on Jan. 28, 1982: “The press is dying to paint me as now
trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I’m
trying to undo the ‘Great Society.’ It was L.B.J.’s war on poverty that led to
our present mess.”
The
irony, of course, is that while Reagan and other presidents tried to eradicate
Great Society programs, nearly all survived in some form, and spending on them
continued to rise. The federal government has grown even larger — more than
five times as big as it was in 1960, in real dollars — while public faith in it
stands near all-time lows.
“That’s
the paradox of the Great Society,” said Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at
Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution. “It has never been more
entrenched.”
The right time
The
debate over the proper size and role of the federal government is a distinctly
American one. In no other country has that question been argued for so long and
with such intensity, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton (who wanted a
powerful central authority) and Thomas Jefferson (who feared one).
But
there have also been eras when the country has opened its arms to a more
expansive, muscular Washington. Sometimes, it has been because of a thirst for
reform, as happened during the progressive movement of the early 20th century.
At others, because the problems are so dire, as was the case with the New Deal
in the 1930s.
LBJ
recognized that, in the early 1960s, another set of atmospheric forces was
building a storm system for government activism.
The
economy was booming, ginned up by a big tax cut. America was mourning a slain
president who had ignited its idealism. The civil rights movement had awakened
its conscience. The nation was led by a president of unmatched legislative
skills. And confidence in Washington was as high as pollsters have ever seen
it.
Back
then, when Americans were asked how often they trusted the federal government
to do what is right, nearly 80 percent said just about always or most of
the time, according to data
compiled by the Pew Research Center.
That
confidence would begin to erode dramatically in the mid-1960s as Vietnam and
social disruption surrounding the Great Society shook Americans’ faith in the
government that had brought them through the Depression and World War II.
By
the end of 1966, their favorable view of Washington had declined sharply, to
65 percent — and it had a lot farther to go. It stood at 19 percent
after last year’s government shutdown.
Yale
Law School emeritus professor Peter Schuck, who was an official at the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Jimmy Carter
administration, argues that the extension of the government’s reach and
ambitions has deepened public cynicism.
“In
short, the public views the federal government as a chronically clumsy,
ineffectual, bloated giant that cannot be counted upon to do the right thing,
much less do it well,” Schuck wrote in his new book, “Why Government Fails So
Often.” “It does not seem to matter much to them whether the government that
fails them is liberal or conservative, or how earnestly our leaders promise to
remedy these failures.”
The
Great Society promised too much. Sargent
Shriver, whom LBJ put in charge of the War on Poverty, said that “ending
poverty in this land” was actually achievable by 1976.
Decades
later, Shriver reflected on why such a righteous undertaking should have become
so reviled. One reason was the explosion of disorder, even riots, that
followed.
“We
weren’t quite prepared for the bitterness and the antagonism and the violence —
in some cases, the emotional outbursts — that accompanied an effort to
alleviate poverty,” Shriver told Michael Gillette, director of the LBJ
Presidential Library’s oral-history program.
“There
were an awful lot of people, both white and black, who had generations of
pent-up feelings,” Shriver said. “. . . The placid life of most middle-class
Americans was stunned, shocked, by all this social explosion, and then a lot of
fear came into the hearts and minds of a lot of middle-class people — not only
fear, but then real hostility.”
“There
were an awful lot of people, both white and black, who had generations of
pent-up feelings. . . . The placid life of most middle-class Americans was
stunned, shocked, by all this social explosion, and then a lot of fear came into
the hearts and minds of a lot of middle-class people — not only fear, but then
real hostility.”
Liberals
and conservatives disagree on why the War on Poverty fell short — whether it
was abandoned or was destined to fail from the start.
“Government
has crowded out civil society in many ways, inadvertently,” said House Budget
Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). “. . . The federal government has a very
important role to play here. I’m not suggesting they don’t. But it needs to be
a supporting role, not a commanding role, not a displacing role.”
In
the past few years, the plight of those on the bottom has gotten new attention
as the country has struggled to reach escape velocity from its latest
recession. The disparity between the rich and the poor has grown.
Ryan,
who was on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket as Mitt Romney’s running mate, said
his committee did a yearlong study of federal anti-poverty initiatives and
discovered that Washington is spending $800 billion on nearly 100 programs,
with no accountability for results.
In
March, Ryan’s
committee issued a reportnoting that the official poverty rate in 2012 was
15 percent, just a couple of points lower than where it stood in 1965.
But
the president’s Council of Economic Advisers uses a broader measure — including
tax credits and benefits such as food assistance — that estimates
that poverty has dropped by more than a third, from more than
25 percent of the population in the mid-1960s to 16 percent in 2012.
So
who is right?
“Economists
always argue over the ‘counterfactual’ outcome,” said Austin Nichols, senior
research associate at the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center.
“You don’t know what things would have looked like if the programs hadn’t
existed, and how many external factors there are, like economic growth.”
“It’s
even harder with the Great Society programs, since a lot of them were
constantly being modified,” he added.
For
instance, Nichols noted in a recent blog post, federal spending on food stamps
“mushroomed in size in the 2000s as it was called on to replace shrinking cash
welfare programs.”
For
some, the Great Society clearly made life better. In 1964, despite Social
Security, more than one out of three Americans over 65 were living below the
poverty line, in no small part because of their medical bills. (Forty-four
percent had no coverage.) Today, with Medicare available, fewer than one
out of seven do.
“These
endeavors didn’t just make us a better country,” President Obama said earlier
this year. “They reaffirmed that we are a great country.”
The Great Society did not just seek
to redistribute wealth.
Johnson
also set out to shift power in America — from states to Washington, from the
legislative branch to the executive, from corporations to federal regulators,
from big-city political machines to community groups.
That
latter concept of “community action” — funding residents of poor communities so
they could organize and mobilize — was one of the Great Society’s most
controversial ideas. The concept was to put the poor in a position to help
themselves, but it frequently played out in tense and even violent
confrontations with the existing local power structure.
It
also created a new generation of up-and-coming leaders, rising from the ranks
of those who had previously been disenfranchised.
“My
mother was clearly the person Lyndon Johnson had in mind with civic action, and
she took full advantage of that,” said Ron Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas who
served as U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration.
Willie
Mae Kirk, who died in September, became a renowned community organizer whose
victories included stopping the city of Austin from shutting down its only
library branch in a black neighborhood. (One there now is named for her.)
“Part
of President Johnson’s absolute genius was putting in place a mechanism that
said: ‘You know what? You’re not going to have to be dependent on these, in
many cases, biased political bodies,’ ” her son said. “They wouldn’t pay you
lip service, give you an audience, much less put power in the hands of the
people.”
For
others, the Great Society opened up horizons, as well as opportunities.
When
Rodney Ellis was 17, a Great Society program gave him a summer job in a
hospital.
“It
let me know I could do something other than what my dad did,” Ellis said. “My
dad was a yard man.”
He
became a slide-rule-team star as part of the Houston’s Inner-City Leadership
Development Program — part of Model Cities. At 29, he was elected to the
Houston City Council, taking a seat that was created because of the Voting
Rights Act. Ellis is now a Texas state senator.
“All
of the things that we aspire for in our country really ended up being
implemented to some extent in the Great Society,” Ellis said.
Yet
in his final years, Johnson mourned what was becoming of his domestic legacy.
“I
figured when my legislative program passed the Congress that the Great Society
had a real chance to grow into a beautiful woman,” Johnson told biographer
Doris Kearns in 1971. “I figured she’d be so big and beautiful that the
American people couldn’t help but fall in love with her, and once they did,
they’d want to keep her around forever, making her a permanent part of American
life, more permanent even than the New Deal.”
“It’s
a terrible thing for me to sit by and watch someone else starve my Great
Society to death,” Johnson said. “Soon she’ll be so ugly that the American
people will refuse to look at her; they’ll stick her in a closet to hide her
away and there she’ll die.”
The legacy
With
50 years’ perspective, there are things that liberals and conservatives agree
the Great Society got right, including some that were politically costly in
their day.
After
signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson gloomily observed to Moyers, “I
think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to
come.”
Few
now, however, would dispute that it was a good thing to remove barriers to
racial equality — or that government dictate was the only way to do it.
“The
anti-discrimination laws that were passed in the 1960s have probably done more
to reduce economic inequality than have government programs,” said Diana
Furchtgott-Roth, who was the Labor Department’s chief economist during the
George W. Bush administration and who is now a senior fellow at the
conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
In
addition to tackling the oldest problems, the Great Society took the federal
government into realms where it had never gone before.
Chief
among them was education. Until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965, Washington had never provided comprehensive funding for education below
the college level. Its aid to college students was largely limited to helping
veterans through the GI Bill.
Where
the federal government spent less than $150 per elementary and high school
student in 1960, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the figure by 2011 had reached
about $1,600. In 2008, more than 64 percent of undergraduates on college
campuses were receiving federal financial assistance of some kind.
The
federal role “has remained controversial to this day,” said Margaret Spellings,
education secretary under Bush, whose No Child Left Behind initiative attempted
to hold schools more accountable for student achievement.
In the
Great Society, “what succeeded is resourcing around poor, minority and
disadvantaged students, an acknowledgment that there was a role for the federal
government to level the playing field,” Spellings said. “. . . What I think has
not worked is thinking that that was enough, that just that input would do the
job. That’s why things like accountability and No Child Left Behind —
fast-forward 40 years — were important, to deliver on the promise.”
Yet the
political battle over the Common Core — a set of achievement standards
developed by governors and encouraged by the Obama administration — is the
latest example of the tension that arises when the federal government puts its
finger on the scale in education. Criticism of the Common Core has come from an
diverse chorus that includes tea party activists and teachers unions.
Some of
the Great Society’s biggest accomplishments are rarely acknowledged today. For
instance, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 scrapped a 1920s-era
quota system that had effectively shut out most of the world, except for blond,
blue-eyed Western Europe.
The 1965
law inviting in Africans, Latin Americans and Asians “was in some ways the most
important determinant of our ethnic composition,” said Schuck, who taught
immigration law and policy at Yale Law School.
Other
Great Society initiatives are being whittled away. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act,
saying that some of its restrictions are outdated, in light of the racial
progress that has been made.
For
Gwendolyn Calvert Baker, there was a poignancy in that court decision.
She had
been sitting near the front of her 1964 University of Michigan graduating class
when Johnson delivered his Great Society speech.
Baker
would have been easy to spot in that sea of caps and gowns. She was older than
most of the students, a mom who had returned to college on a Rotary Club
scholarship. And she was one of only about 200 African Americans on Michigan’s
campus of nearly 28,000 students.
Baker got
her PhD in 1972, joined the Michigan faculty as an education professor, and
went on to run the University of Michigan affirmative-action program that in
more recent years came under court challenge.
“The
content of that speech, I really can’t say I remember a lot of it,” said Baker,
who is now retired and living in Florida. “But it had meaning. I was feeling
good that he was at least thinking in some of the ways I had been thinking.”
A
half-century later, Baker said, she is pretty sure she knows what LBJ would
think of how it all turned out.
“He would
say we’ve come a long way, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
