Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Shriver’s freewheeling approach carried genuine benefits and drew many admirers. No proposal was too impractical to consider. Experts were flown in from universities and think tanks at the eleventh hour. There were countless salon-style dinners at Timberlawn, where “doctors, theologians . . . psychologists . . . all manner of people” debated long into the night. A friend remarked that Sarge was “crazy about these ideas, and many of these ideas were, in fact, crazy.” But the hurried pace and emphasis on bold experimentation and immediate results—qualities that many observers so admired about the Peace Corps—sometimes translated poorly to the War on Poverty. In a rush to introduce a program before Congress, Shriver’s committee never reached consensus on the meaning of its central premise: “community action.”

  Some participants did not believe that community action required “any radical shift of authority to the poor.” Rather, they assumed that “the appointment of poor people or their representatives to program governing bodies or advisory committees” was essentially “more symbolic than substantive.” On the other side of the spectrum, Mankiewicz and some of the younger members of the task force assumed that community action was “an essentially revolutionary activity”—a way to equip the poor with resources to challenge local institutions, both in the public sector and in the private sector, in the pursuit of greater opportunity. They regarded municipal and county governments, school districts, and old-line social service agencies as entrenched interests that were fundamentally hostile to the aspirations of poor people.

  Among the skeptics was Lyndon Johnson, who told Bill Moyers in August, “You—all, you boys got together and wrote this stuff, and I thought we were just going to have [another] NYA [National Youth Administration]. . . . I thought that we’d say to a high school boy that was about to drop out, ‘We’ll let you work for the library or sweep the floors or work in the shrubs or pick the rocks, and we’ll pay you enough,’ so he can stay in school.”

  “We’ve got that,” Moyers responded, referring to the bill’s inclusion of a Job Corps program for impoverished youth.

  “I thought we were going to have community action, where a city or county or a school district or some governmental agency could sponsor a project. I never heard of liberal outfits where you could subsidize anybody. I think I’m against that. If you want to do it in the Peace Corps, then that’s your private thing. That’s Kennedy.”

  LBJ preferred that Mayor Richard Daley run antipoverty programs in Chicago rather than the Urban League. “He’s got heads of departments, and he’s got experienced people at handling hundreds of millions of dollars.” Though he envisioned his War on Poverty through the prism of the New Deal, LBJ ultimately permitted Moyers and Shriver to pursue their more unconventional and potentially disruptive initiative.

  The antipoverty legislation that Shriver’s group moved through Congress—the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964—ultimately contained six sections, or, in legislative parlance, “titles.” The bill did in fact authorize the creation of the Job Corps, modeled in part after the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps and NYA, with a mandate to relocate, socialize, and train tens of thousands of young men who were otherwise outside the labor force and lacking the basic skills to become gainfully employed. In addition, it established the Neighborhood Youth Corps, which would provide basic medical care, food security, and supplementary education to urban youth, and a work-study program for low-income undergraduates. The second, and by far the most controversial, section of the act authorized public and private organizations to operate government-funded community action programs. Critically, the bill required “maximum feasible participation” in such activities by local residents. The bill also authorized loans and grants to help impoverished farmers buy new tools and equipment—a provision that the Department of Agriculture strongly championed; provided funds for small-business loans and work-experience initiatives aimed at helping unemployed heads of households; and established Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a “domestic Peace Corps” that would deploy college graduates to help impoverished communities ameliorate their local conditions. In total, the measure devoted approximately $1 billion to LBJ’s War on Poverty: $500 million in new funding, and $500 million that the administration redirected from existing programs. Most of its functions would be housed under the aegis of a new executive branch bureau—the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)—whose director, Sargent Shriver, would enjoy cabinet-level status.

  In building the OEO’s programs, Shriver was deprived of his most valuable asset: Adam Yarmolinsky. Southern congressmen who still fumed at his forced integration of military base towns now seized the opportunity to exact their price. Focusing on his alleged affiliation with a radical student group during his undergraduate days at Harvard, they insisted that Yarmolinsky was subversive—unfit to run the OEO (though, ironically, they voiced little objection to his return to the Pentagon). Shriver had only been able to secure passage of the Economic Opportunity Act by pledging that Yarmolinsky would play no forward role in the War on Poverty. It was an unfortunate development. Shriver excelled at vision and inspiration; Yarmolinsky, at organization. “Sarge’s idea of administration is to give three guys the same assignment and see who finished first,” an anonymous official told the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Even as late as December, they reported, OEO officials routinely telephoned their former colleague at his Pentagon office, seeking direction and counsel.

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  From the start, the community action programs, which absorbed almost half of the OEO’s budget for fiscal year 1965, proved a political lightning rod. Working within broad guidelines, organizations in and outside government—including public colleges, nonprofits, and municipal and county bodies—submitted grant proposals to deliver services as wide-ranging as health care, job training, child care, and housing assistance. To their credit, Shriver and his staff moved quickly to disperse money and initiate programming. “Sarge . . . and many others in the Congress were pressing the program people to get the money out and to go, go, go,” recalled an OEO official. “It became obvious after a while that the only safety valve in the place was our office.” By the end of the decade, over a thousand community action agencies participated in the initiative. Yet the safety valve was anything but tight. By early 1965, elected officials from across the country began complaining to Moyers, Johnson, and Shriver that CAPs were bypassing their offices or, worse, organizing pickets, lawsuits, and political action against them. “Many mayors assert that the CAP is setting up a competing political organization in their own backyards,” Charles Schultze confided to the president. (Indeed, in 1965 the U.S. Conference of Mayors pressed the administration to turn control of community action programs over to local political authorities.) He urged that “we ought not to be in the business of organizing the poor politically.” Jim Rowe warned that local CAPs were “using public funds to instruct people how to protest.” The implications of this dynamic were “obvious”: the administration was providing antipoverty activists with funds to organize against the very same political machines that powered the Democratic Party at the state and local levels. Of course this approach was precisely how many of the OEO’s framers understood the strategic value of community action. There could be no other purpose behind the grant to Syracuse University for a program that trained local poor people in the political organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky. In turn, they used their newly acquired skills to agitate for better sanitation services, rent subsidies, tenant rights, and parks and—in a move that raised the ire of the city’s Republican mayor—to register voters. “We are experiencing a class struggle in the traditional Karl Marx style,” the mayor complained, “and I do not like it.”

  When a CAP in Albuquerque organized pickets outside city hall, in demand of greater services for poor neighborhoods, Senator Clinton Anderson, a Democrat, called Shriver to complain. “The demonstration is being led by an ex
–Peace Corps volunteer who’s working in the Community Action Program now,” he said with bewilderment. As Mankiewicz remembered the episode, it gave the senator cold comfort when Shriver replied, “Both of the agencies I’m running are successful. A guy who agitated the poor in Peru for two years took that training and used it and is now working for OEO to get the poor to demand that they be allowed to participate in city council meetings. That’s what it’s all about.” Community programs in Newark, San Francisco, and other cities drew sharp scrutiny for their radicalism, financial irregularities, and palpable animosity toward established institutions, be they public or private. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Mobilization for Youth—one of the first products of the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas project—sued the New York Police Department and clamored for the establishment of a civilian review board. When a police shooting of a black teenager prompted riots in Harlem, conservative critics scored Mobilization for Youth as a radical and incendiary organization.

  In Chicago, where the OEO insisted that the city government comply with the requirement that its program include “maximum feasible participation” on the part of local poor people, Mayor Richard Daley grew enraged. “What in the hell are you people doing?” he berated Moyers. “Does the President know he’s putting M-O-N-E-Y in the hands of subversives? To poor people that aren’t a part of the organization? Didn’t the President know they’d take that money to bring him down?” Daley was an indispensable ally whose complaints resonated sharply within the West Wing, as was also the case with Sam Yorty and John Shelley, the Democratic mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. “Mayors all over the United States are being harassed by agitation prompted by Sargent Shriver’s speeches urging those he calls ‘poor’ to insist upon control of local poverty programs,” Yorty complained in mid-1965. Though in many instances the administration interceded on behalf of elected officials—including in Syracuse, where Shriver folded the controversial action program under an umbrella organization governed by municipal officials and old-line welfare agencies—there was no clear consensus about the definition of “maximum feasible participation” or even its very purpose. Hubert Humphrey, who often served as mediator with local officials after his election to the vice presidency in 1964, argued that the administration could ensure “maximum feasible participation” without antagonizing mayors. But many poor people who participated in community action initiatives explicitly set out to disrupt local politics.

  In later years, Moynihan, who played a leading role in developing the War on Poverty as the Labor Department’s representative to Shriver’s interagency task force, would claim that “maximum feasible participation” was originally narrow in its intent—a safeguard to ensure that southern officials did not direct federal antipoverty funds toward segregated or all-white programs. Only later, when radicals inside the OEO leveraged the statutory language to enforce an adversarial agenda toward local institutions, did community action go off the rails. It was, Moynihan quipped, a singular case of “maximum feasible misunderstanding.” Frederick Hayes, who served as assistant director of the agency’s Community Action Program, agreed that the framers never intended to antagonize local governments and were surprised by the hostility that community action engendered. In most cities, “the program got off the ground smoothly and with enormous good results right away. . . . [I]t was only in Syracuse, New York, and Chicago and Mississippi and a few places like that where the cutting edge of the conflict was.”

  In its first year, community action programs accounted for roughly half of the OEO’s authorized budget of $1 billion. Critics then and later would compare this total unfavorably with the New Deal, which authorized billions of dollars in jobs, housing, and relief programs. Yet despite Johnson’s occasional inconsistency—“You tell Shriver no doles,” he instructed Moyers, though on other occasions he envisioned the OEO as a latter-day National Youth Administration—the agency was never intended to furnish poor people with employment or income assistance. It all came back to the common understanding that if government managed economic growth and unlocked opportunity, poverty would recede. “I think it is a Liberal view, rather than a Conservative view, that there are too many Americans forced to live on our welfare rolls,” Busby advised Johnson to say. The administration was addressing the roots, not just the symptoms, of poverty. “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.”

  In cities as diverse as Oakland, Newark, New Haven, Durham, and Boston, a rising generation of elected officials cut their teeth as local program organizers. In 1977, a survey of black mayors, city council members, and state representatives found that 20 percent had been involved with community action programs in the prior decade, while many others worked or volunteered with a broader range of OEO initiatives. Some activists would complain that the “major beneficiaries of these programs have been non-poor persons who have been afforded the opportunity of executive, technical and professional positions in the program,” a charge that Alinsky sounded when he denounced the “vast network of sergeants drawing general’s pay.” But such objections sidestepped one of the original intentions of community action: to empower individuals and communities to forge their own destiny. Ironically, though the Great Society did not create mass work programs for poor people, many of its major initiatives, including Medicare and Medicaid and aid to elementary and secondary education, required a larger federal and state workforce to administer. The resulting expansion of public-sector employment benefited a rising black professional class that now enjoyed protections against workforce discrimination. In the decades that followed Johnson’s War on Poverty, government employment helped lift millions of African Americans—particularly teachers, social service workers, and nurses—into the middle class. In addition to serving poor clients, community action programs were both a fundamental training ground for black professionals and a powerful mechanism to grow black political power.

  Almost as controversial as community action programs was the Job Corps, a program modeled after the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration, both of which provided temporary jobs to young men who repaired roads and national parks and provided labor to support land conservation and improvement. By 1967, its year of peak operation, the Job Corps employed forty-two thousand young people—mostly men—at a combination of rural work camps and urban skill centers, where enrollees learned basic carpentry, electrical wiring, welding, and other manual trades. The Office of Economic Opportunity blanketed poor neighborhoods with over 300,000 application cards and promotional pamphlets. From the start, the program’s directors determined to accept “almost the toughest”—young men and women from blighted neighborhoods who lacked formal education or life and work skills. With the exception of recidivist criminals and applicants suffering serious mental or physical handicaps, the Job Corps drew its ranks from a group of Americans who otherwise seemed destined for prison or penury.

  It was a noble endeavor, and for a small number of corpsmen like George Foreman, the future heavyweight boxing title holder, it was probably life changing. A native of Houston, where he grew up in slum conditions and, as a teenager, had already fallen into a pattern of petty crime, Foreman was, by his own later admission, destined to graduate to “robbing and armed robbing.” But for the Job Corps, he “would eventually have moved to dope and . . . spent the rest of the days in prison.” His journey from Texas to a job site in Oregon was eye-opening—“I had never been on an airplane,” he remembered. “We didn’t know airports existed.” He had never owned a set of new clothes—non-hand-me-down—in his life, but at the program center administrators furnished him with black trousers and a blazer for formal occasions, work attire, and exercise clothing. “The Job Corps teachers . . . embraced me like I was a rich guy,” he
remembered. “They taught me how to read. They taught me how to build fences. They taught me how to construct a radio. I was so proud of that.” Years later, Foreman still viewed the OEO director as a “celestial figure.” When he visited their camps, “his hair tucked to the side of his head real neatly, and dressed very fancy,” shaking the corpsmen’s hands as though they were his own kin, this Kennedy family in-law became an “in-house hero to us. . . . All the boys felt that way about Sarge Shriver.”