Poverty in America
Considering how an estimated 43.1 million Americans live in poverty (14%) and one in every 31 adults in the United States are under some form of penal control (one out of eleven African American men), no one can claim that important aspects of our society are not fundamentally “broken” in the United States. This issue is taken up by Elizabeth Hinton in her 2016 book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.
In this book, her research question is a simple one: how did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system?
Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem simply originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Hinton reveals the bipartisan Federal roots of mass incarceration in the United States. To really understand what went wrong, she argues that we have to go back to the administrations of Johnson and Kennedy to learn about how the programs were originally launched.
Hinton, in other words, challenges the prevailing understanding of mass incarceration (that it simply started with Reagan). Instead, she locates the seeds of mass incarceration within an ironic source: the era of liberal reform and the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which occurred at the height of the civil rights era. Johnson’s poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous war on crime.
Briefly put, Hinton shows us how federal policy helped drive up the number of people incarcerated by or under the supervision of the criminal justice system. On the flip side, considering how much effort was put into “making” this problem, we can similarly invest effort to unmake it.
I Knew the Welfare State Was Evil!
Before you lapse into thinking “Of course, welfare programs are a waste of money and they make people lazy/criminal” you should note that this is not Hinton’s argument. She’s making a far more nuanced argument than is typically related through the lens of partisan politics by directing us to follow the policy and law changes over time.
This need that people have, which is to reduce understanding of important issues to mere partisan politics (left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative) gets in the way of attaining a full understanding of what went wrong and what continues to go wrong. Consequently, people are left to think that it is simply too difficult to fix the problems.
Hinton is not saying that social welfare programs and poor people themselves are the cause of poverty and mass incarceration. Nor is she reducing what is a massive problem to a technical debate over a narrow set of economic issues. The story she is telling is more complicated. For as it turns out, the road to failure, not surprisingly, is often paved with good intentions.
Hinton’s work reflects the methodological approach of a careful historian. That is, she argues by pointing to data and information contained in archival records, taking care to excavate and cite specific programs, policies, and laws, which she argues worked together and failed over the course of successive presidential administrations.
One of her aims is to challenge conventional thinking, which is to simply locate the beginning of the mass incarceration problems with Reagan era policies – this is a major point of distinction and represents an important contribution to scholarship. Now, let’s hold this thought for a moment because we need to unpack things a bit before examining Hinton’s claims.
First, we need to agree on an operational definition of things like “poverty” and how we measure it before we proceed to examine the poverty/crime/mass incarceration connection. Anything short of this prevents an evaluation of truth claims in regards to how or whether or not poverty increased/decreased over time. Likewise, it makes it difficult to evaluate whether or not government stimulus is an essential and viable mechanism to engage as well as accomplish poverty problem-solving.
Robert Kennedy on Gates Avenue, Brooklyn, New York
How Do We Define and Measure Poverty?
Poverty is measured in many different ways by not only governments but also international organizations, policymakers and practitioners. Typically, poverty is understood as multidimensional comprising social, natural, and economic factors situated within wider socio-political processes.
Poverty is understood based on the terms “absolute” and “relative” poverty. Absolute poverty refers to a set standard that is consistent over time and between countries. One example of an absolute measurement takes as a measure the percentage of a given population eating less food than is required to sustain the human body (approximately 2000–2500 calories per day).
By way of contrast, relative poverty privileges poverty within a social context. One relative measurement would be to compare the total wealth of the poorest one-third of the population with the total wealth of the richest 1% of the population. In this case, the number of people counted as poor could increase even as income levels rise.
There are several different income inequality metrics. One that is common is referred to as the Gini coefficient. This is by far the most common measure of social inequality. The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution (i.e. levels of income). A Gini coefficient of zero expresses perfect equality, where all values are the same (for example, where everyone has the same income). For OECD countries, in the late 20th century, the income Gini coefficient in 2014 ranged between 0.24 and 0.49, with Slovenia exhibiting the lowest inequality and Chile exhibiting the highest.
Absolute poverty, however, is more common in developing countries, even though poverty and inequality exist across the world.
The main poverty line used by OECD countries and the European Union is a relative poverty measure based on “economic distance,” a level of income usually set at 60% of the median household income.
In the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau counts people in poverty by using two measures: the official and supplemental poverty measures are based on estimates of the level of income needed to cover basic needs.
Both the official and supplemental poverty measures are annual estimates based on a sampling of U.S. households. In 2016, the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) was sent to about 95,000 U.S. households across the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Since the CPS is a household survey, the sample excludes many who might otherwise be considered to be living in poverty. For example, the sample excludes those who are homeless and not living in shelters. It also excludes military personnel who do not live with at least one civilian adult, as well as people in institutions such as prisons, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes.
The supplemental poverty measure (SPM) provides a more complex statistical understanding of poverty by including money income from all sources, including government programs, and an estimate of real household expenditures. This information is valuable, but this measure’s thresholds are not the basis for government program income eligibility.
Measuring Poverty in the United States
The Federal initiative to establish a poverty level originated during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. His administration developed the guideline to function as a policy tool to help eradicate poverty. In his Inaugural address, Johnson challenged “the richest nation on earth” to win the war on poverty. His declaration of “war” in this instance created many of today’s social welfare programs.
Following the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Statistical Policy Directive 14, the Census Bureau uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. Those who live in households with earnings below those incomes are considered to be living in poverty.
HHS prefers the term “poverty guidelines” instead of “poverty level” because it is considered to be more precise. Nonetheless, people still use the term poverty level or “poverty line” to describe poverty guidelines and the federal poverty threshold. The official poverty threshold does not vary geographically, but it is adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U).
The official poverty threshold is computed using money income before taxes (it does not include capital gains or noncash benefits such as money benefits for public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).
Put simply, the poverty threshold for a household of four in 2022 is an annual income of $27,750.
Programs That Use Poverty Guidelines
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is available to those who earn 130 percent of the federal poverty level. Households must also have less than $3,500 in assets with an elderly or disabled person or $2,250 or less in households without an elderly or disabled member.
Medicaid is available to families whose income is 138 percent of the poverty level.
The Affordable Care Act provides insurance subsidies for households between 138 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level.
Other programs include Head Start, the National School Lunch Program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Note that Federal programs that hand out cash don’t use the poverty guidelines. These programs include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Security Income.
1964 – LBJ’s Great Society
In 1964 “The Great Society” was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson had been sworn in as President of the United States after the killing of President John F. Kennedy. The year 1964 also saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and marked the launching of the War on Poverty.
Inspired by the previous efforts of President Kennedy and his New Frontier, Johnson pledged to fulfill his promise of equal opportunity for all by enacting several comprehensive changes within the federal government. In August of that same year, the Economic Opportunity Act was signed into law by President Johnson creating the nationwide Community Action Network.
No doubt Johnson was also keenly focused on reelection that year (1964), and as a result, Johnson set into motion his ideas for a Great Society, which turned out to be the largest social reform plan in modern history. The Great Society, in terms of its breadth and scope, shared much in common with former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. Johnson first used the term “Great Society” during a speech at Ohio University on May 7, 1964, he described “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.”
Often invoked interchangeably with the “War on Poverty,” Johnson’s Great Society antipoverty programs were ambitious, to say the least. He wanted nothing less than to create an opportunity for every citizen to maximize their abilities so they might reach their fullest potential. As he put it in an another expansive speech given weeks later at the University of Michigan, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all.” It was here that he vowed he would lead an effort to put “an end to poverty and racial injustice.”
Kennedy’s assassination in many respects created an opportunity for Johnson, who was able to leverage public support to enact key provisions from Kennedy’s legislative agenda— namely, civil rights legislation and tax cuts. The main goal of the programs was to eliminate poverty, social inequality, and racial injustice, which had become entrenched due to discriminatory institutions and practices that were carried over from the Civil War time period. Additionally, Johnson wanted to institutionalize programs to improve the environment.
New major spending programs addressed to education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation were all launched during this period. Though there were some other figures in the Johnson administration that supported what were considered to be more radical redistributive wealth policies—notably, i.e. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, others like Sargent Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, who were eventually appointed to run Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, he never gave serious consideration to these policy recommendations.
In the case of Shriver, he didn’t have adequate funding to begin the process of addressing national poverty issues. He did, however, assemble an impressive team of advisers, including Michael Harrington, author of “The Other America” and began to implement new policies and actions to resolve these issues.
Why Community Action?
Taking a community action approach was a bold idea for its time, especially for the federal government. For the government was essentially handing over control of important programs to be administered at the local level, this way programs could be geared specifically to target population needs. The concept of “maximum feasible participation,” represented a new paradigm in the government and many sectors were wary of its innovative ideas.
Community Action equips low-income citizens with the tools and potential for becoming self-sufficient. The structure of the program is unique – federal dollars are used locally to offer specialized programming in communities. It is a coordinated effort to address the root effects of poverty and, ultimately, to move families and individuals to self-sufficiency.
Depression -Era Hangover
It was against the backdrop of Depression-era failures that Keynesian economic reformers suggested the U.S. government should play a more active role in mitigating the worst ravages of economic markets. They argued that by making broad and even radical changes to capitalism’s underlying structure (this included things like public ownership of utilities and factories, guaranteed family income, regulating wages and prices, and breaking up monopolies and trusts), events like the Depression might in the future be circumvented.
Johnson’s programs never went as far as many advised him to go. Nonetheless, this spirit of government-led reform was put into play – the idea that government might step in to influence financial markets, as they were understood to be unstable, subject to fluctuations that hurt people, and were prone to periodic catastrophic failure [this is the basic argument that underlies the famous work of Karl Marx, who in Capital argued that capitalism and markets don’t fail by accident; they fail OFTEN and predictably because failure is, in essence, hard-wired into the system].
Moynihan, who got his start working in the Kennedy administration, served in Johnson’s labor department, where he studied black poverty and eventually issued policy recommendations based on his research in the now-famous Moynihan report – The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.
As part of the process of analyzing statistics in connection with black poverty, Moynihan documented a contradiction: rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, instead of running parallel as had previously occurred, began to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.”
Moynihan’s key finding was that welfare dependence was not correlated with unemployment (this was later disproven). He claimed his research demonstrated that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls. These recipients were families with children who had only one parent (almost invariably the mother/black mothers), as the laws at that time permitted such families to receive welfare payments in certain parts of the United States. Moynihan’s claims about single-parent households eventually influenced the administrations shift toward more punitive policies.
Critics on the left attacked Moynihan’s report as a classic case of “blaming the victim” for structural problems. Moynihan was accused of relying on stereotypes of the black family and black men, where he implied that blacks had inferior academic performance (not accounting for the fact that black schools were underfunded and cultural bias and racism in standardized tests contributed to lower achievement by blacks in school), and he portrayed crime as a pathology endemic to the black community.
Not surprisingly, it was suggested that even as Moynihan was apparently sympathetic, he was propagating the views of racists. Large portions of his report focused on the problem of children being born into single-parent families. The report called attention to “out-of-wedlock” birthrates among blacks, noted to be 25 percent, which was much higher than that of whites. The disparity was not looked at as a consequence of patterns established during slavery and for reasons that black men were discriminated against and denied employment opportunities – it inferred the pattern was a result of black pathology.
Despite Moynihan’s warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program included rules for payments, which stipulated they could only be made if no “Man [was] in the house.” The effect, in the view of the policy’s critics, was that it would incentivize payments to poor women on the condition that they throw their husbands out of the house.
Moynihan concluded, “The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”
After working in the Johnson administration, Moynihan went on to formulate President Richard Nixon’s idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). He also formulated important work on the topic of Basic Income Guarantee with Russel B. Long and Louis Kelso.
World War II & Military Keynesianism
Our natural tendency in the United States is to think of American history as divided into discrete time periods – the New Deal era, the Progressive era, the Civil Rights era. Similarly, we might prefer to think of this history in terms of war – the Civil War era, the era of the World Wars I & II, the Vietnam War era. Regardless of how one thinks about it, there can be no doubt that all of these events forever changed the trajectory of the nation’s development.
I have argued in my own research that military stimulus or what some refer to as “Military Keynesianism,” or more generally the war economy, has been simultaneously responsible for some of our worst social ills while at the same time it has fostered economic growth (though admittedly uneven in terms of its effects) it has both helped and hindered social change and progress (Trappen, 2016).
In the Keynesian perspective, government military expenditures produce military equipment, which in turn fosters multiplier effects in terms of power and economic supremacy that are further supported by technology developments and employment opportunities. Put another way, the chief characteristic of economic-political integration in the twentieth century is a merging of “the welfare-warfare state” (Marcuse, 1964).
More recently, in his (2000) book From Warfare State to Welfare State, Marc Allen Eisner argues that the federal government lagged behind the private sector in institutional development in the early twentieth century. Consequently, in order to make up for this deficiency and to cope with the crisis of war, government leaders, spurred by Keynesian economists, opted to pursue a path of “compensatory state-building” through a process of seeking alliances with private-sector associations. Unfortunately, it turned out that these associations were more inclined to pursue their own interests and they did so in ways that were ultimately constraining of the government’s autonomy and effectiveness when it came to dealing with the country’s problems. This handicap, as indicated by relatively unchecked military spending, continues to account for/ explain many of the shortcomings of government and its policy-making efforts today. Because these are funds that could be allocated to programs that benefit the general public, as opposed to military leaders, politicians, and their corporate sponsors.
The experience of World War II, which was economically devastating to the world’s industrialized countries, nonetheless, saw the United States emerge as the sole-standing leading economic power. The events of the war forced a re-evaluation of government policy. The resources that were spent, as the United States supplied and deployed a military force of 16 million men to defeat Hitler and fascism in Europe and the Pacific, eventually helped establish the relatively peaceful postwar economic order around the globe –Pax Americana.
The result of all of this military spending is that it not only helped lift the country out of the Depression, it demonstrated that economists and policymakers could play a role, through skilled planning and spending, and provide the country with an equitable distribution of resources, while it achieved and sustained maximum production levels and full employment within the framework of political democracy. Postwar liberals came to believe that through the carefully managed application of Keynesian economics, expert bodies like the Council of Economic Advisers—created in 1946—could manage government spending to ensure sustained growth.
In the wake of the war, given signs of economic prosperity all around, it was hard to argue with this logic. The decades following World War II saw nothing short of an economic cultural “revolution,” as American society and its vast expanse of neighborhoods were transformed by the injection of money, which was plowed into roads, bridges, and homes around the country. Pittsburgh, it’s steel mills/industry and bridges, are emblematic of the legacy impact of how war powered the local economy. Absent this stimulus….the rest is history.
It was during this time period that increasing numbers of middle-class and working-class men and women enjoyed previously unimaginable economic success. The GI Bill helped pave the way for homeownership (unless you were black and lived in redlined neighborhoods).
The tax code reflected new benefits, wages and salaries included annual cost-of-living adjustments. In order to compete in tight labor markets, employers started to offer their employees employer-based health insurance, paid vacations and private pensions. Many people took the opportunity to move out of the cities and into the suburbs. But the dye was cast and the stage was set for urban deterioration and increased urban poverty.
It is this memory of America – the America that was “Great”– that still has many people (old and young) waxing nostalgic about a mythical time that they idealize; a time when capitalism was functioning at peak efficiency and where the rewards were distributed throughout society to those who worked hard. This was the era of the American Dream realized. But that’s not entirely true. The memory, sadly, is an illusion that belies an era rife with problems.
Keep in mind, in the 1950s there were no civil rights for black people, women were still largely dependent on men, the age of sexual consent in many states was nine or ten, alcoholism and drug abuse were more rampant than they are today, and teenage childbearing was at its peak.
As Stephanie Coontz points out in her (1993) book The Way We Never Were, the period of the 1950s (World War II era) nor any other moment from our past presents workable models for how to conduct our personal lives today. One of the most powerful takeaways from this book that is that consoling nostalgia for a mythical past of “traditional values” is a trap that cripples our capacity to solve today’s problems.
Setting aside nostalgia for a moment, it is important to distinguish how Capitalism, as an economic system, and government are not separate discrete entities; they worked (and continue to work) together, before and after the war. These economic gains occurred in the United States while the world burned, as many countries were the wars were fought (both I &II) had to rise from the ashes of the devastation to recover what was lost in the fighting.
It is against this backdrop that American Democrats and their Great Society programs are (in the minds of many Americans) now demonized, as they are argued to haven been initiated out of step with the prosperity that happening all around. The alternative view is that people were working hard and progress was happening organically on the backs of working-class men and women (or so many believed); that government assistance and intervention was never necessary.
Despite this, Democrats remained (and still remain) committed to the view that government has a role to play. As veteran columnist Walter Lippmann, whose 1937 book The Good Society partly inspired the framing and naming of Johnson’s domestic agenda, argued in 1964:
“A generation ago it would have been taken for granted that a war on poverty meant taking money away from the haves and turning it over to the have-nots. … But in this generation, a revolutionary idea has taken hold. The size of the pie can be increased by intention, by organized fiscal policy and then a whole society, not just one part of it, will grow richer.”
Liberals in the early 1960s, despite the economic success that many achieved after the war, were acutely aware that poverty still remained a trenchant feature of American society. In 1962 the socialist activist and writer Michael Harrington published an arresting volume on American poverty. Titled The Other America, he argued that poverty had become effectively hidden in America, as upwards of 50 million people—over a quarter of the population—live in a “system designed to be impervious to hope.”
This “other America” was “populated by the failures, by those driven from the land and bewildered by the city, by old people suddenly confronted with the torments of loneliness and poverty, and by minorities facing a wall of prejudice.” Largely “invisible” to members of the newly prosperous “middle class,” many of their fellow Americans were trapped in a “ghetto, a modern poor farm for the rejects of society and of the economy.”
Unfortunately, the much-vaunted war stimulus didn’t extend to everyone. So in spite of superficial evidence of progress, there remained 34 million Americans—more than one out of six— who lived beneath the poverty line. Three-quarters of those individuals were children and senior citizens. The trends that were visible in the 60’s if anyone cared to look only got worse over time.
1960’s
President Johnson decided the federal government needed to lead welfare reform efforts due to the sheer size and scale of poverty reform efforts.
As it was already mentioned here before, it is interesting that Johnson’s aides – the ones who were the principal architects that helped conceive and implement parts of the War on Poverty, rejected the more ambitious left-wing solutions that were in vogue at the time, particularly in academic circles. These were written off by a Democratic President as being too “radical.”
For example, they rejected economic stimulus policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth or condition and did not support quantitative measures like cash transfers or a guaranteed minimum income (what policy people now refer to as “basic income,” which has a lot of powerful research that demonstrates it’s success). Walter Heller, one of LBJ’s top economic aides, voiced the consensus opinion that creating a minimum family income was neither politically expedient nor wise. It would be costly—as much as $11 billion annually (over $90 billion in today’s money)—and would “leave the roots of poverty untouched and deal only with its symptoms,” he believed.
Instead, Johnson’s aides advocated for more qualitative measures like making education and workforce training more widely accessible to poor people, ensuring that the poor and elderly had access to medical care. Likewise, they bolstered supplementary programs to ensure that poor families and children enjoyed greater food security. The idea, in theory, if not always in practice, was to ensure every American could access a level playing field and be provided an equal opportunity, thereby sharing in the nation’s prosperity. In adopting these measures, they further considered but ultimately rejected calls for a massive federal jobs program for the unemployed and underemployed.
“You tell Shriver no doles,” Johnson once instructed Bill Moyers. He put stock in the thinking at the time, which was that if the government, through its various stimulus programs, could effectively help manage economic growth and unlocked opportunity, the scourge of poverty would recede. His administration, in his view, sought to address the roots and not only the symptoms, of poverty, as he said:
“We have an obligation in our society … to support a principle of public policy which will permit every citizen not only to live at a certain minimum standard but to be able to live at a rising standard by his own effort and his own training and ability.”
Key Provisions of Johnson’s Great Society Programs
The major policy fronts for Kennedy and later Johnson included a focus on the following:
Education Reform – Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1964); Headstart (early pre-K for low socioeconomic status areas); Increased funding for poor schools
Healthcare – Attack disease with Medicare & Medicaid (1965)
Urban Renewal – Beautification & Environment Conservation programs;
Arts & Humanities – National Endowment for Arts & Humanities (1965)
Environmental Initiatives – Water & Air Quality Act (1965)
Civil Rights – Civil Rights Act (1964); Right to Vote Legislation – Voting Rights Act (1965)
Immigration – Lift quotas; Immigration Act (1965)
Law Enforcement & Crime Control – LEA Law Enforcement Assistance Act (1965)
Education Reform
To empower parents and make sure every child had a shot of success in life no matter their social or economic circumstances, Johnson, politician, and activist Sargent Shriver, and a team of child development experts launched Project Head Start.
The Head Start program started as an eight-week summer camp run by the Office of Economic Opportunity for 500,000 children ages three to five. Since the program’s inception, it has served over 32 million vulnerable children in America.
Education reform was also a key part of the Great Society. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. It guaranteed federal funding for education in school districts whose student majority was low-income. It also:
- funded preschool programs
- supported school libraries
- purchased school textbooks
- provided special education services
Healthcare – Medicare & Medicaid
While President Kennedy had originally championed government-backed health care for the needy during the 1960s, there were many Republicans as well as southern Democrats in Congress who did not support Medicare/Medicaid legislation.
When Johnson first took office, there remained mainly two groups of Americans who were uninsured: the elderly and the poor. After Johnson became President and Democrats took control of Congress in 1964, Medicare and Medicaid became law.
Medicare covered hospital and physician costs for the elderly who qualified; Medicaid covered health care costs for poor people that qualified for cash assistance from the government. Both programs served as safety nets to protect these poor and vulnerable groups.
Urban Renewal
The mass exodus to suburbia after World War II left many major cities in poor condition. Affordable, dependable housing was hard to find, especially for the poor.
The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 provided federal funds to cities for urban renewal and development. For cities to receive the funds, they had to establish minimum housing standards.
The law also provided easier access to home mortgages and a controversial rent-subsidy program for vulnerable Americans who qualified for public housing.
In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act. It declared “the arts and humanities belong to all the people of the United States” and that culture is a concern of the government, not just private citizens.
The law also established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts to study the humanities and fund and support cultural organizations such as museums, libraries, public television, public radio, and public archives.
Environmental Initiatives
To help battle worsening water pollution, Johnson signed the Water Quality Act in 1965 to help set national water quality standards. Also signed in 1965, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act formed the first vehicle emissions standards.
Furthermore, Johnson’s administration passed laws to protect wildlife and rivers and form a network of scenic trails among historic landmarks.
On the consumer protection front, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Child Safety Act were created to develop consumer product safety rules to make sure products were safe for both children and adults.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act was passed in October 1965. It ended immigration nationality quotas, although it focused on reuniting families and still placed limits on immigrants per country and total immigration.
Law Enforcement Assistance & Crime Control
President Johnson established his President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice and in 1965 the Law Enforcement Assistance Act was enacted into law. The new law empowered the federal government to take a direct role in local police operations. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons.
Later, under President Richard Nixon and his successors, the expansion of these programs (policing & prison) would cause spending on social welfare programs to fall by wayside. Anticipating future crime, policymakers instead funded states to build new prisons. Further, they introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, which while “getting tough on crime” had the effect of turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance.
Launching the War on Poverty
Many of Johnson’s Great Society programs fell under the War on Poverty umbrella. In March 1964, Johnson introduced the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Economic Opportunity Act during a special message to Congress. He hoped to help underprivileged Americans break the poverty cycle by assisting with the development of job skills, which they might use to further their education and find work.
To do this, he created a Job Corps for 100,000 disadvantaged men. Half would work on conservation projects and the other half would receive education and skills training in special job training centers.
In addition, Johnson tasked state and local governments with creating work training programs for up to 200,000 men and women. A national work-study program was also established to offer 140,000 Americans the chance to go to college who could otherwise not afford it.
Other initiatives the so-called War on Poverty offered were:
- a Community Action program for people to tackle poverty within their own communities
- the ability for the government to recruit and train skilled American volunteers to serve poverty-stricken communities
- loans and guarantees for employers who offered jobs to the unemployed
- funds for farmers to purchase land and establish agricultural co-ops
- help for unemployed parents preparing to enter the workforce
Johnson knew battling poverty wouldn’t be easy. Still, he said, “…this program will show the way to new opportunities for millions of our fellow citizens. It will provide a lever with which we can begin to open the door to our prosperity for those who have been kept outside.”
Was the War on Poverty a Success?
Fifty years later, it is a perfectly legitimate question to ask: was the war on poverty a success? Did Johnson’s programs make a difference? Did poverty change over time?
Today, fewer workers enjoy employer pensions and health care, 31% of children live in single-parent families (up from 12 percent in 1960), household wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. And social inequality, after a period of improvement, has now reverted to levels we have not seen since the eve of the Great Depression.
Despite all of this, it would be a myth to say the Great Society failed. Because we have data that tells a different story. Likewise, it would be unfair to reduce Johnson’s legacy to a caricature of radical and redistributive politics, where the programs are cast reductively as “radical” left-wing, big-government projects.
Whatever one thinks about the desirability of a “war on poverty” or the way that it has been implemented ideologically or politically, we should all be able to agree that the incidence of poverty — as measured by the SPM (Supplemental Poverty Measure) — has dropped dramatically since the 1960s.
A major explanation for the drop is government programs focused on the poor, as documented by Wimer et al (Columbia University study, 2013 here).
The overall poverty rate fell by almost 40% from 1967 to 2012.
The poverty rate for children fell by a similar amount, for those of working-age the rate fell by 23% and for the elderly a remarkable 78%.
The War on Crime
The expansion of the welfare state under Johson coincided with a new era of law enforcement. Another way to look at this is to understand that social welfare programs were intended to fight future poverty, whereas surveillance and policing patrol programs were designed to deal with the immediate effects of racial and social inequality – plus they conveyed the added benefit of monitoring future criminals.
The War on Crime constituted a major job creation program for policing and corrections that continues to this day. Even liberal reformers like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who believed in support for strong social welfare programs, remained convinced that a malignant pathology existed in black communities, as evidenced by unstable black families. Moynihan argued that poor African American families were trapped in a self-perpetuating “tangle of pathology” that could only be made right by federal policies that created jobs for black men, which would by extension promote stable families and two-parent households (Hinton, p.58).
Both Johnson and Moynihan understood that urban crisis was rooted in black pathology. Their approach to law enforcement here removed from accountability the fact that joblessness and racism were independent causes of the “culture of poverty” (defective culture) in black communities. Nevertheless, it was this logic that underlined efforts to merge the War on Poverty with the War on Crime, which was characterized by the adoption of more punitive measures to deal with the real-time effects of structural/systemic poverty.
Los Angeles Watts Riots (1965)
The Watts riots marked a turning point for the Johnson administration. In all, 34 people were killed, more than 1,000 were injured, and 200 buildings were destroyed. Lasting for six days in South Central Los Angeles, Watts proved to be a litmus test for the War on Crime (Hinton, p. 64).
The urban riot represents one of the most aggressive encounters between police and civilians in American history. Watts was comprised of mostly low-income African Americans. Over the course of the uprising, more than 35,000 people actively participated in destroying white-owned businesses while they also directed attacks on police officers. The incident that sparked the uprising was an encounter that involved police brutality, setting off long-simmering resentment in a highly segregated community that offered its residents few economic opportunities.
Due to the violence, government officials, policymakers, and journalists all agreed that what was needed was a strong military response. National Guardsmen were deployed to quell the uprising and chaos that ensued.
An armed National Guard patrolman leans against a street sign, smoking a cigarette and standing in rubble following the Watts riots, Los Angeles, California, August 1965. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The reason Watts remains so important is that it marked the first turn away from policy focused on social welfare to manage urban crisis to an approach characterized by punitive intervention.
The principle of “maximum feasible participation” once touted by Johnson as the optimal way to address poverty and social inequality was effectively set aside and ignored, as the administration proceeded with funding nothing short of a counter-insurgency based para-military response to dealing with urban problems. The Watts insurgency was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong,” according to LA Police Chief William Parker (Hinton, p.69).
Media coverage of the uprising evoked long-held assumptions and fears about African Americans – that they were disobedient, criminal, violent, and ungovernable. Black youth were portrayed as “Public Enemy No. 1” and this reinforced the belief that they must be brought under social control.
Old debates were argued yet again: Liberals said that poverty caused crime and disorder; Conservatives said that black pathology in addition to federal welfare and housing policies caused crime and disorder; the latter, they said, demoralized black people.
Johnson’s war on crime drew from Moynihan’s work, which was originally well-intended, nonetheless, it came to rely too heavily on an understanding of what he termed as a “post-industrial pathology” that defined the black community. This understanding could not ultimately conceive of blacks being able to help themselves, even with government assistance.
Of course, there were many who thought that Moynihan among others were simply “using” social science in “war on poverty” and inequality; the policies themselves were the bi-product of a system that promised greater prosperity, but ultimately failed to deliver the “Great Society” that it promised. This led students to engage in protests, against those they perceived to be academic enablers and against increasingly militarized forces of social control.
A month after Watts, Johnson signed into law the Law Enforcement Assistance Act in September 1965. The Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) appointed a Crime Commission, made up of law enforcement experts, academics, and corporate leaders, which served the function of conducting research, which would be used to inform law enforcement programs in the United States. They targeted research on “slums” and argued for the escalation of police patrols using tactics like “stop and frisk.”
FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, was fully on board with the law enforcement approach to solving urban social problems, as he too saw problems of crime and violence as being rooted in black pathology. The President and his Director referred to police officers as “frontline soldiers” in the War on Crime (Hinton, p. 87).
The new police tactics excluded community-based leaders and activists from problem-solving and instead prioritized military equipment – tanks, military-grade rifles, riot gear, and helicopters (Hinton, p. 89). Think tanks like RAND Corporation teamed up with government officials to look at how military logics and techniques could be employed by local law enforcement.
In the end, the Johnson administration skirted both the Liberal and Conservative positions, believing in the ideas of the former, though it ultimately acted in ways that were intended to appease the latter. They worried that if something forceful wasn’t done, the public might abandon entirely any effort to address the structural causes of poverty.
In other words, the Johnson Administration decided to manage the symptoms of poverty instead of continuing to work to disrupt the racial and economic status quo. That they did so was due in large part to the fact that they were particularly sensitive to being seen as “weak” and conceding to rioters (Hinton, p. 95).
Backlash – 1970’s & 1980’s
Not every American citizen or politician was satisfied with the results of Johnson’s Great Society agenda. And some outright resented what they saw as government handouts to “undesirables” – people who weren’t willing to work hard. There was a simmering resentment that the government should butt out of American’s lives altogether.
Despite Johnson’s Great Society having a lasting impact on almost all future political and social agendas, his success was overshadowed by the Vietnam War. He was forced to divert funds from the War on Poverty to the War in Vietnam.
Consequently, despite the enormous amount of legislation passed by his administration, Johnson is seldom remembered as a champion of the underprivileged and at-risk. Instead, he’s arguably better known as the commander-in-chief who forced America into an unwinnable war that resulted in over 58,000 American military fatalities.
Dismantling the Great Society
Beginning in 1968, President Richard M. Nixon set out to undo or revamp much of the Great Society’s legislation. He and other Republicans at that time still wanted to help the poor and the needy, but they wanted to cut the red tape and reduce costs. But Nixon had other concerns about getting re-elected (which, of course, didn’t happen). To win re-election, Nixon and the Republican Party embraced white supremacy while provoking white backlash in the late1960s and early 1970s. His famed “Southern strategy” was undertaken with the intent to win over white voters, who were angry about the victories of the civil rights movement.
Reagan continued to consolidate political and economic power by pushing a revised version of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Marrying “friendly fascism” with what was essentially no-holds-barred “gangster capitalism,” he successfully managed to convince many Americans that their main problem was the “lazy blacks” and not the U.S. corporations (assisted by the government), who were holding down wages and shipping their jobs overseas.
Note that the original strategy required converting of conservative Southern Democrats, who harbored racial antipathy, to become members of the Republican party. While Nixon’s strategy was focused mainly on the South, Reagan’s reboot was intended to be more broadly successful in areas far outside the South (i.e. Pittsburgh), places where people identified themselves as Wallace voters and ultimately “Reagan Democrats.” Reagan’s aspirational template set the stage for the progressively more extreme party politics and policies that would later follow him.
But back to Reagan. To implement his strategy, Reagan called upon and old friend, Lee Atwater. It was during this time (1981) that Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. The Nation magazine released a 42-minute audio recording of the interview with Atwater about how the strategy was intended to work:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don’t have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he’s campaigned on since 1964, and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”.
Link to Atwater’s interview:
Atwater thus argued that Reagan did not need to make racial appeals. He suggested more subtle language that was less overtly racist compared to Nixon’s approach in the original Southern Strategy:
Atwater: But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I’ll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.
By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration started to dominate national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade, however, were not so much a departure from the past than they were the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban public policy.
These punitive programs have been implemented by Republicans (Nixon, Reagan, Bush) and Democrats (Clinton, Obama) alike since the 1960s. Ultimately, the Republican Party’s embrace of punitive social policies that hurt blacks and poor people across the board is a story about how “respectable” “establishment” conservatives made bargains and agreements with some of the more fringe/extremist actors in their party in order to win elections and hold power.
Republicans, in particular (but not exclusively) have been the most ideologically committed to efforts to dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It was in 1983 that President Ronald Reagan denounced the Great Society as a bundle of expensive and failed initiatives. According to his view, the programs represented the “central policy error of our time” insofar as he believed they contributed to, rather than alleviated, human suffering.
At the heart of Reagan’s party’s understanding was an ideologically determined belief that “government and bureaucracy” cannot be a “primary vehicle for social change.” Rather, only “free markets,” operating unfettered from government interference can provide the solutions that ensure economic prosperity.
The political infighting for social reform of welfare state programs has been raging ever since. Many of the signature items of Johnson’s legacy—from civil and voting rights to environmental protections and aid to public school are now all in the process of being dismantled.
Simply put, the conservative view of antipoverty programs is that they failed. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan was among the most vocal in his party, claiming that the “top-down approach” of government programs “has created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities.”
While Ryan is not altogether incorrect, Hinton’s research and arguments provide us with a far more nuanced and historically accurate depiction of precisely why they failed.
For what it’s worth today, many of those supposedly mainstream conservative Republicans, who let the arsonists in their party set the world on fire, are now professing shock and horror at the results. In the years since Donald Trump took over leadership of the Republican Party, many of the formerly “respectable” conservatives (who went along for the ride and tolerated racism for political power) have chosen to break away from their party. Their motivations may not yet be fully known. Many acknowledge that the passive racism of the past has led to deeply disturbing developments that are no longer fully under their control, while others continue to hold onto an idealized vision of 1980’s conservatism, denying that it has any connection to recent developments.
Today, we are in a unique moment in the country’s history. Democracy is on the line while fascism knocks at the door. With that, we would all do well to resist engaging in political “purity” tests and embrace working with people, regardless of ideological differences and former party affiliation to save the country and try to create a more just world for everyone. Sadly, time and history are not on our side.
Crime Control As Urban Policy
Concentrated Public Housing – The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project
The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe, were a joint urban housing project that was first occupied in 1954. Located in the suburbs outside of St. Louis Missouri, it didn’t take long for the living conditions there to deteriorate. By the late 1960s, the housing project was famous the world over for its high rates of poverty, crime, and racial segregation. In the mid-1970s, all of the projects original 33 buildings were demolished with explosives. It remains iconic to the extent that it is held up as a paradigmatic failure of urban renewal and public policy planning.
The original building plan was commissioned the city of St. Louis, who hired the firm of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth (the same firm designed the New York World Trade Center Towers. Pruitt–Igoe consisted of 33 11-story apartment buildings on a 57-acre (23 ha) site on St. Louis’s lower north side. The complex included 2,870 apartments, which made it one of the largest in the country at that time. A noted study of the families who lived in the complex was published in 1970 by Harvard sociologist Lee Rainwater in his book Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum.
The apartments were deliberately small, with undersized kitchen appliances. Skip-stop elevators stopped only at the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors. This forced residents to use stairs in an attempt to lessen congestion. The same “anchor floors” were equipped with large communal corridors, laundry rooms, communal rooms, and garbage chutes.
Despite these shortcomings, Pruitt–Igoe was initially seen as a breakthrough in urban renewal. Residents considered it to be “an oasis in the desert” compared to the extremely poor quality of housing they had occupied previously and considered it to be safe. Some referred to the apartments as “poor man’s penthouses.”
Legacy of Failure
Pruitt–Igoe is now a frequently used textbook case study in urban planning, architecture, sociology, and political science studies. The project initially cost the federal government and the taxpayers $36 million – this was 60% above the national average for public housing. Political Conservatives attributed cost overruns to inflated union labor wages, which were heavily influenced by the steamfitters union (this led to the installation of an expensive heating system); cost overruns for the heating system caused a chain of additional cost-cutting measures, which in turn had an impact on other vital parts of the building.
Explanations for the failure of Pruitt–Igoe are complex. How did it devolve from an urban dream to urban nightmare? As it’s famous stairwells became a haven for muggings, drug use, and rampant crime, policymakers were forced to confront questions about how to best approach urban development and social welfare programs.
Critics cite social factors including the economic decline of St. Louis, white flight into suburbs, and problems due to the lack of tenants who were employed. The failure had the effect to politicizing local and national opposition to government housing projects.
Controversy over the project means that its legacy is still debated, though understandings differ mainly due to different racial and social-class perspectives. Housing projects of similar architectural design were successful in New York, but St. Louis’s fragmented political culture and declining urban core contributed to the project’s failure.
During the Nixon Administration, Pruitt–Igoe was widely publicized as a failure of government involvement in urban renewal, and the destruction of the buildings was dramatized in the media to show the American public that government intervention in social problems only leads to waste and to justify cutbacks on social and economic “equalization” programs. Wealthy residents of St. Louis had also objected strongly to the artificial racial integration that the project forced on them, which impacted their schools and caused decreases in property values.
Beyond Pruitt-Igoe – The Bronx, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh
President Jimmy Carter listens as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Harris discusses conditions in the blighted South Bronx section of New York, Oct. 5, 1977. (Harvey Georges/AP)
The Bronx, 1981. Crime on the subway that transported residents to its poor public housing projects became so common that, starting in June 1985, at least one police officer rode every train between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. as part of an effort to restore public confidence in the transit system. | photo credit Martha Cooper
Redlining Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, not unlike many other cities in the United States, has a long history of “Redlining,” – the term used to refer to the racist banking and real estate practice of offering housing loans based on the risk profile of where the applicant lived. The “risk,” as such was defined on the basis of social identity categories that included positive descriptions like: “Desirables,” “White Collar,” and “High-Class Populace,” vs. negative descriptions: “Foreign-born,” “Jewish,” “Polish,” “Negro,” “Relief Families,” “Laborers,” and “Steelworkers.”
Federal Housing Programs, in this case, worked in concert with banks and local real estate companies. Agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), were the architects for America’s “New Deal.” Their collective influence was responsible for laying the racist groundwork that characterizes many American neighborhoods. Through the power of map-making, they effectively encoded social inequality within the spatial topography of U.S. cities and towns in the 20th century.
Briefly put, the residential social patterns established between 1935 and 1940 are responsible for creating what people recognize today as a “bad neighborhood,” or, to use an impolitic term – “the ghetto.”
Mapping Inequality:
Green (6%) Best; Blue (31%) Desirable; Yellow (36%) Declining; Red (Hazardous/Undesirable) – date: 1940
HOLC was the agency responsible for recruiting mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers in nearly 250 cities across the United States (not just Pittsburgh). They made a series of color-coded maps (see below) to assess the “creditworthiness” and “risk” of particular neighborhoods. These maps underlie the unwritten set of rules that governed lending and real estate practices for nearly a century.
Redlining made it difficult for people of color and even some poor white people to obtain housing loans in better neighborhoods; the same dynamic made it difficult for many of them to move out of their neighborhood, even when they had the resources and desire to relocate. Although the practice has been banned since the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregating African-Americans and people of color into discrete communities proved to be a difficult process to unwind.
Pittsburgh continues to reflect a high degree of racial segregation to this day. It contains multiple pockets of neighborhoods, typified by hard boundaries that denote redlined areas. The neighborhoods most impacted by this include the Hill District, Wilkinsburg, Swissvale, Braddock, and Duquesne. Click on the embedded link and note the map details embedded with warnings to buyers.
Social categories like “Desirables,” “White Collar,” and “High-Class Populace” stand out in comparison to “Foreign-born,” “Jewish,” “Polish,” “Negro,” “Relief Families,” “Laborers,” and “Steelworkers.” Many of these neighborhoods continue to struggle today due to large-scale structural changes in the economy in connection with industry loss, job loss…what are referred to collectively as the social forces of deindustrialization.
In the case of the latter, deindustrialization, one of the key factors preserving the old patterns of redlining is funding for school districts. Given how public funds for education funding are based on property taxes tied to the school district, the separation of African American communities from white communities worked synergistically to compound historical impoverishment. Not surprisingly, in what are predominantly African American school districts, a situation of chronic underfunding exists. These schools have comparatively less funding per student than school districts that are predominantly white.
In Pittsburgh, these patterns are easy to see, provided one is looking. Sharp gradations of poverty and low housing values are demarcated from neighborhoods that benefitted from better financing. This shows up in the schools and can be noted when you cross over from one school district to another. Differences between neighborhoods register empirically with respect to home values, income, race, employment. Also not to be overlooked are health outcomes, as research has found there are strong links between wealth and health. People consigned to living in more hazardous areas are further more prone to exposure from environmental toxins.
While there is evidence of development in some places, this development is uneven at best. The river towns have fared comparatively worse than towns that enjoy proximity to the city center. Links to interactive maps can be found here and also here, which connect you to interactive mapping software developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab (Nassre, 2020)
Another term for all of this redlining is “structural racism,” which as it has been demonstrated here, continues to be an issue in our current time. And so it has come to be that almost 60 years after the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act that neighborhoods in and around Pittsburgh continue to reflect persistent patterns of segregation based on race and social class discrimination.
The incarceration and poverty rates in the United States are extremely in high proportions. An option to fixing the incarceration rate is to stop throwing people in prison for stupid crimes. Obviously if you murder someone or rape someone then you should be thrown into prison immediately. An option to fix the poverty rate would be for the government to give more aid to people in need instead of give in themselves so much money. Government officials make too much money for barely doing anything. I understand that their are some people who are poor based on bad decisions like being drug abusers. But if you are honestly poor because you cannot find a job and have a mental illness then I believe you deserve some aid. Law enforcement can help these people in poverty but I think they just honestly do not care. I understand that law enforcement officials have to deal with some crazy stuff, but they are trained to deal with these tough situations. The War on Poverty and the War on Crime both had their ups and downs. In the War on Crime, law enforcement officials were using tactics against the lower class and people of different racial backgrounds. I believe that every human being deserves a chance to live unless they do something to lessen their chances of living. Everyone deserves some help when they are struggling because some people can be great. After reading this article, I believe that our country will continue to struggle with incarceration and poverty rates as long as they continue not to do anything about it.