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The War on Poverty
Contributing teacher: Michael Flamm
Time period: 1960s
Point
In his e-seminar Kennedy, Johnson and the Great
Society, Alan Brinkley offers a measured assessment of the
Great Society and, in particular, of the War on Poverty. He
rejects the radical contention that the War on Poverty was a
political response to social turmoil and mass pressure. He
observes that, on the contrary, the Great Society was an elite
initiative crafted by liberal policy makers who were confident about the future. But Professor Brinkley disputes the conservative contention that the War on Poverty was an unmitigated failure. He notes that poverty declined significantly between 1960 and 1970, particularly among the elderly, and asserts that, while the expansion of the American economy during that period contributed to that trend, Head Start, food stamps, Medicare, and other government programs also contributed much.
Counterpoint
In the decades since 1970, the War on Poverty has generated
fierce partisan debate among social scientists and policy makers. Many liberal scholars contend that the Great Society reduced poverty, improved health care, and provided overdue aid to public education and job training. They also argue that the success of the War on Poverty was limited by political and fiscal constraints that urban unrest and the Vietnam War imposed on the Johnson administration. This view was put forth, for example, by Sar A. Levitan and Robert Taggart in The Promise of Greatness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). By contrast, conservative scholars maintain that the War on Poverty was fought and that it was lost. Charles Murray, for example, argues that ultimately the Great Society had little impact on poverty but instead led to an increase in welfare dependency and family disintegration, particularly among the urban poor.
Conservative critiques of the War on Poverty include Martin Anderson's Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981), and Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984; 2d ed., 1994).
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