Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  There was sharp disagreement within the task force about jurisdiction over the Job Corps. An insider, according to A. H. Raskin, said that “the walls dripped with blood as the empire-builders clashed with the empire-wreckers.” Yarmolinsky wanted his “people” in the Department of Defense to handle the logistics. They were “best” at housing, clothing, feeding, training, and moving people, and the military was eager—if reimbursed—to take on the responsibility. But liberals objected to the possible militarization of the program; Shriver and Moyers were opposed; and Congress would not vote for it. The public lands encampments went to the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture and the urban centers were contracted to universities and corporations. Since support by the conservation lobby was considered necessary to pass the law, the proportion of Job Corps centers that would do conservation work, Yarmolinsky said, “was negotiated out very delicately.” Both Wirtz and Shriver claimed the Job Corps. The secretary argued that the idea came from the Labor Department bill and that manpower training was already a departmental function. The Job Corps, however, was Shriver’s darling because he was convinced that, unlike community action, it would produce quick results for which he wanted to take credit. Shriver, Sundquist said, “was running for vice president, and he wanted to do something that would get him into the limelight.”

  The work-training program, soon to be called the Neighborhood Youth Corps, was meant for the same age group, but without boarding. Young people would be hired for low-skilled work on projects sponsored by state and local public agencies or those run by private nonprofit organizations (not church-related). Youths would earn income, learn job discipline, and acquire minimal skills. The budget was $150 million. Again, there was a jurisdictional conflict between Labor and the Office of Economic Opportunity, the administrative arm of the poverty program, but here Wirtz won.

  The final youth program was work-study in educational institutions. Francis Keppel, the Commissioner of Education, had been trying to get this program through Congress without success. He now asked Shriver to put it into the poverty bill, get it adopted, and then give it to the Office of Education for administration. Shriver readily agreed.

  Students from low-income families would work for their schools or other public or nonprofit organizations, but not more than 15 hours a week while classes were in session. The $72.5 million cost would be shared: no more than 90 percent from OEO and at least 10 percent by the institution.

  Title II defined a community action program as one which (1) mobilizes public and private resources for an attack on poverty; (2) provides services designed to eliminate poverty; (3) encourages the “maximum feasible participation” of residents of the poverty area; and (4) is administered by an agency which broadly represents the community. OEO could make a grant of no more than 90 percent of the cost of a program to a CAP. Projects could be in the fields of education, employment, job training, health, vocational rehabilitation, housing, home management, welfare, and “other fields.” In making grants OEO would consider the incidence of poverty in the community. OEO would receive $315 million for community action.

  Title II aroused little disagreement within the task force, perhaps because of the broad language in which it was framed. As Schlei said, “The community action program can take on anything and everything. It absolves you of the necessity of picking and choosing between the problems on which you ought to focus.” The origin of the phrase “maximum feasible participation” is unclear. Though it would provoke controversy later, at this stage there was none. Perhaps this was because others shared Yarmolinsky’s understanding: “My conception of what it meant was that you involved poor people in the process, not that you put them in charge.”

  Title III established programs in rural areas that Sundquist and Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman insisted on; they would appeal politically to southern legislators because rural poverty was heavily concentrated in their region. The title provided for grants of up to $1500 and loans of up to $2500 to low-income families to improve the efficiency of their farms. The grants did not survive the congressional hurdle. There was also a loan program for small agricultural cooperatives.

  Title VI established the Office of Economic Opportunity. President Johnson instructed Shriver to put the OEO in the executive office of the President. Good public administration called for placing a line agency elsewhere and the Bureau of the Budget so argued, but to no avail. Johnson expected the program to be “very controversial” and he wanted Congress to know that he was shielding it from attack by putting it in his personal office. Shriver thought he deserved “extremely high marks” for this display of courage. The director of the OEO was authorized under Title VI to recruit Volunteers for America—later Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA—to work with Indians, migratory workers, residents of the territories, the mentally ill, and the developmentally disabled.7

  Richard Rovere, Washington correspondent for the New Yorker, wrote the President that “he could do nothing better for himself both as a domestic and world leader” than to help the poor. Johnson replied, “I think you are probably right.” No probabilities about it. He was absolutely convinced that poverty was a powerful campaign issue as long as he could convince the white middle class that its elimination could be achieved with no sacrifice on their part. As A. H. Raskin wrote, “Every Johnson campaign speech conjured up visions of slumless cities populated by prosperous, happy, well-educated people. …” He not only electioneered for addressing poverty, he also lobbied Congress tirelessly to get the legislation enacted.

  The political problem of the poverty bill was to win the support of southern Democrats in both chambers, but particularly the House. The vote shaped up as a standoff between northern Democrats and Republicans. Thus, the South held the balance. The congressional process, therefore, was largely one of wooing Dixie.

  Lampman had written that “a politically acceptable program must avoid completely any use of the term ‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution of income or wealth.’ ” The President must not play Robin Hood by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Johnson could not have agreed more. No one, he insisted, must be taxed a dime more to pay for the program. When the task force decided to increase the jobs program, it required more money, and a cigarette tax was suggested. Shriver and Yarmolinsky went to a cabinet meeting at the which the former advanced the proposal. “I have never seen a colder reception from the President,” Yarmolinsky said. “He just—absolute blank stare—implied without even opening his mouth that … we weren’t even going to discuss that one.” James Reston of the New York Times called this Johnsonian logic “the Franklin Delano Hoover twist.”

  Another basic argument could not be stated directly. This was not a program intended mainly for blacks either in the rural South or in the urban ghettoes of the North. Those who thought that Negroes were shiftless and looking for a handout could sleep peacefully. Poor people would be taught to work and would be given the opportunity to find jobs. The Johnsons made highly publicized visits to the white poor, not to the black ghettoes. Lady Bird journeyed to the anthracite district of eastern Pennsylvania to talk to displaced white miners and their families. The President made a whirlwind tour of five states in Appalachia in one day and repeated it soon afterward. He liked to say that he told Tom Fletcher, an unemployed sawmill worker in eastern Kentucky, the father of eight children, “to keep those kids in school.” In a later speech Fletcher’s brood had grown to eleven. The poverty program, Yarmolinsky said, “was in no sense a help-the-blacks program, and not only were we saying this, but we didn’t think it was.”

  This effort to divert attention from black poverty did not escape reply. Whitney Young of the Urban League gave the most eloquent testimony presented to the House committee by stressing the plight of the Negro, “a catastrophe, a disaster, and it is fast becoming a national disgrace.” The civil rights bill, of course, was important, but it was only part of the solution. Poverty must also be addressed, p
articularly in the ghettoes. “The demonstrations … in the streets today are … fostered by despair and hopelessness and those of us who try to represent responsible Negro leadership in this country desperately need some tangible evidence of the intentions of this country to right a historic wrong.”

  The southern strategy dominated the administration’s tactics on the Hill, as was evident in two key events. Shriver achieved a coup: he recruited Phil S. Landrum of Georgia to steer the poverty bill through the House of Representatives. Landrum was a mainline southern conservative; he was a certified racist; and his name was on the 1959 Landrum-Griffin law which organized labor detested. In fact, the President phoned George Meany to head off a labor denunciation of the selection of Landrum. The Georgian accepted in part because his district was becoming more liberal. Yarmolinsky thought the choice “a great stroke . … without it the bill might never have become law.” The other event was the dumping of Yarmolinsky himself, recounted below, a sacrifice to southern conservatives.

  Another tactical problem was keeping Adam Clayton Powell, chairman of both the House Committee on Education and Labor, and the Subcommittee on the War on Poverty Program, reliably at work for the bill. This handsome, expensively dressed Harlem congressman could with some under-statement be described as unpredictable. But Powell wanted a $1 million community action grant for Haryou, a juvenile delinquency program for young people in Harlem. When Powell’s mind wandered, the administration caught it by warning that Haryou funding depended on passage of the bill. On that the President would not tolerate delay.

  The House subcommittee held 20 days of hearings between March 17 and April 28, 1964, that were dominated by supporters of the bill. The administration trotted out its heavy artillery, joined by many members of Congress as well as spokesmen for state and local governments and private organizations. The opposition was sparse—the Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and four Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee who accused the Council of Economic Advisers of exaggerating the number of the poor.

  Shriver and Heller opened with a broad justification for the bill. Secretary of Defense McNamara described the need for helping youthful males as an “urgent national problem”:

  Each year we examine more than 1 million young men to determine their qualifications for military service. The medical examinations and the mental achievement tests administered to these youth are the same throughout the country. …

  Early this year an interdepartmental task force reported on the number and characteristics of the young men who were found unqualified for military service. They found that fully one out of three young men do not meet the minimum physical and mental standards. They also found that conditions resulting from poverty were closely related to their failure to qualify. Four out of five of the mentally unqualified had dropped out of school. … Many of those failing the medical examination were found to need medical attention but were not receiving it. …

  Unfortunately, a large proportion of the young men who knock on our door do not have the basic educational equipment needed to function effectively as a soldier, seaman, or airman in our military forces.

  McNamara also pointed out that a number of inactive military installations could be converted into most of the Job Corps conservation camps.

  Wirtz, who had been the most independent member of the task force, now closed ranks. “The bill before you represents the unanimous conclusion of the cabinet officers, Mr. Shriver, and the other members of the administration.” But he remained committed to jobs. “Our object is not to make poverty more endurable, but to get rid of it. We are therefore concentrating on jobs, and education and training for work. … ”

  The crusty congresswoman from Oregon, Edith Green, was the only female among the 30 members of the Education and Labor Committee. A noted spokesperson for women’s rights, she loved to take on men on that issue. She cornered Shriver, demanding to know why the Job Corps was limited to young men. He said that was because males tended to be heads of families and wage earners. But she forced him to admit that many families were fatherless and were supported by women. If she wished, Shriver conceded, they could establish centers for females. She wished, and gave McNamara the same treatment. “Couldn’t constructive programs be designed for young women as well as for young men?” “I think,” the secretary said, “the simple answer is yes.” The department could readily supply installations to permit the training of women. Wirtz and Robert Kennedy needed no prodding. Wirtz testified that the program “must include action that affects women as well as men.” The Attorney General agreed. The bill was amended to allow young women to enter the Job Corps.

  The church-state issue, which had torpedoed the proposals for federal aid for education, arose in the poverty debate. The administration bill for both work-training and work-study authorized payment for services to private nonprofit organizations, including churches, provided “That no such work shall involve the construction, operation, or maintenance of any facility used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship.” This language did not appear in Title II, community action. Representative Charles E. Goodell, the progressive New York Republican, asked the Attorney General whether it should apply to Title II. Kennedy had no objection and had no problem with a grant to a church so long as it “expended the funds … in a nondiscriminatory way, and, therefore, did not discriminate against anyone because of his religion.”

  This did not satisfy the Roman Catholic Church. Yarmolinsky, therefore, drafted an amendment to Title II which he called noncurricular education, that the subcommittee accepted. Grants could be made for community action programs which involved churches or church-related organizations, but they must be offered without discrimination and could not include sectarian instruction or religious worship. Aid to elementary and secondary schools of all types, however, was explicitly prohibited.

  An issue which arose peripherally during the House hearings, not addressed by either the task force or the committee, was a program for disadvantaged preschoolers, later called Head Start. Again, Congresswoman Green was the point lady and she went after Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. The bill, she noted, was addressed to those 16 and older. “Are we not dreaming,” she asked, “that we can really change attitudes and get people motivated and equip them with employable skills if we only begin at this age 16 level?” Keppel said, “You are quite right that educationally the effort … must start at a younger age.” But nothing was done in 1964.

  The Committee on Education and Labor reported the poverty bill favorably on a straight party-line vote on June 3, 1964. Johnson held all the Democrats; the Republicans would not give him a big victory before the election without a contest.

  The Senate Select Subcommittee on Poverty held brief hearings on four days between June 17 and 25. Again, the proponents were in firm control and the committee reported the bill with partisan lines holding firm.

  There was a close vote in the Rules Committee on July 28. The eight who voted out a rule were all Democrats; the seven opposed consisted of five Republicans and the two southern reactionary racists, Smith of Virginia and William Colmer of Mississippi.

  The Senate seemed in the bag. On July 16 Shriver had given the President a head count: “I am estimating a total of sixty-seven votes for the bill.” Nevertheless, the Republicans and the very conservative southern Democrats tried to win over the other southerners. On July 22, the proponents took the ball away from them with an amendment by Democrat George Smathers of Florida which applied exclusively to the Job Corps. No camp or training center could be established in a state unless the proposal was submitted to its governor in advance and he did not disapprove of it within 30 days. The Smathers amendment was adopted without debate.

  But on July 23 Republican Winston Prouty of Vermont introduced another amendment which would forbid any assistance to a community action program in any state “without the prior approval of the Governor.” Russell had drafte
d the language in order, he said, to preserve states’ rights. The amendment went down to defeat 46 to 45. The Senate then adopted the poverty bill by the overwhelming vote of 61 to 34, six votes shy of Shriver’s forecast.

  The House was far more complicated and its proceedings were soiled by the Yarmolinsky affair. He was certainly vulnerable to a smear campaign. If one wrote an espionage novel and named the chief Soviet spy Adam Yarmolinsky, no reader would find it amiss. A quarter of a century earlier, according to A. H. Raskin, he had attended leftist rallies as a schoolboy. More recently General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist, had attacked him. There had been charges that his mother was a Communist poet. “His mother happened to be a poet,” Norbert Schlei said, “but the charges about her politics were (a) false, and (b) amazingly irrelevant. … ” Yarmolinsky himself was strongly anti-Communist and supported a tough anti-Soviet line in the Cold War.

  Nevertheless, a group of congressmen from the Carolinas, led by Harold D. Cooley of North Carolina, chairman of the Agriculture Committee, decided to destroy Yarmolinsky as the price for their votes on the poverty bill. Several motives have been suggested. One was that he was the “architect” of the Defense Department’s racial integration policy. This was partly true. While McNamara and Cyrus Vance were ultimately responsible for that policy, Yarmolinsky pushed it and had hired Alfred B. Fitt, the deputy assistant secretary (civil rights), and Fitt reported to him. Another motive, in Shriver’s words, was that these congressmen were “anti-Jewish and … anti-liberal and … anti-anybody named Yarmolinsky. It was just real, lowdown racial bigotry and political venom. … ”