Great Society, The
Great Society, The
The term Great Society, which refers to the set of domestic programs initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson, who became the U.S. president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, was coined by Johnson’s speechwriter Richard N. Goodwin early in 1964. In an address during commencement exercises at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on May 22, Johnson used the term publicly for the first time. The new chief executive, eager to map out his own legislative agenda, challenged the American people to build a society “where progress is the servant of our needs,” a society “where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth,” a society that “rests on abundance and liberty for all,” a society that “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.” Johnson identified the three places to begin the building of the Great Society—in the cities, in the countryside, and in the classrooms. He catalogued the social ills that needed to be corrected—urban decay, inadequate housing, poor transportation, environmental pollution, overburdened seashores, disappearing green fields, a poorly educated adult population, overcrowded classrooms, outdated curricula, unqualified teachers, and inadequate college funding. The far-thinking president envisioned a society where people are more concerned with the “quality of their goals” than the “quantity of their goods,” a glorious America where the meaning of people’s lives matches the marvelous products of their labor (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, pp. 704–707).
Johnson, who came to Washington during the 1930s, modeled his domestic initiatives on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the policies implemented to combat the effects of the Great Depression. At the same time, the concept of the Great Society was meant to continue the legislative program begun by President Kennedy, called the New Frontier, and its implementation followed the same path.
The 1960s legislation, in contrast to the New Deal of the 1930s, was begun in a period of economic prosperity. After Johnson’s Ann Arbor speech, fourteen separate task forces comprised of government experts and university scholars were assembled to study all major aspects of American society. One task force addressed foreign affairs, and the rest tackled domestic policies concerning agriculture, economic recession, civil rights, education, economic efficiency, health, income maintenance, intergovernmental cooperation, natural resources, environmental pollution, preservation of natural beauty, transportation, and urban problems. During the 1964 presidential campaign, however, the proposed Great Society agenda, other than civil rights, was not widely discussed. Johnson’s popular vote majority of 61 percent, combined with the Democrats’ winning enough seats to control two-thirds of the House and Senate, set the stage for the subsequent passage of bills submitted to both chambers. Lingering public and congressional sympathy for the slain president’s program undoubtedly helped as well.
In late 1964 Johnson reviewed the task force reports submitted to the White House, and a number of recommendations were briefly mentioned in his State of the Union address on January 7, 1965. The president, now elected in his own right, confidently talked about the “beginning of the road to the Great Society” and summit meetings ahead with foreign heads of state, “where freedom from the wants of the body can help fulfill the needs of the spirit.” He sought opportunity for all, a just nation that would provide hospital care for the elderly under social security, eliminate poverty in the midst of plenty, assure civil and voting rights for blacks, and provide to immigrants the promise of America based on the work they could do and not where they were born. In 1965 eighty-seven bills were submitted to Congress by the new administration, eighty-four of which were signed by Johnson. With this legislation, in addition to the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, the core of the Great Society was created.
LEGISLATIVE ACTIONS
It was in the areas of civil rights and economic assistance that the Great Society was most effective. The Civil Rights Act (1964) made employment discrimination and segregation in public accommodations—on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin—illegal. This legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act (1965), which guaranteed minority voter registration and voting by restricting the use of literacy tests and poll taxes. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act (1965) did away with the national origin quotas put in place in 1924; this law opened the door to waves of Asian and Latin American immigrants, a pattern still apparent in the early twenty-first century. The 1968 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in housing and granted constitutional protections to Native Americans living on reservations. Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty had its roots in the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), which established an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to manage a variety of “community action” programs. The OEO was never meant to deal with poverty by raising welfare payments or guaranteeing wages, but to help the poor help themselves through education, job training, and community development. The Job Corps, Project Head Start, the Model Cities Program, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Upward Bound, and VISTA were the most important new programs designed to assist poor people.
The Great Society also spawned well-known legislation in the areas of education and healthcare. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) provided significant federal aid to public education, and secured Head Start, originally a summer program, as a permanent component. Since education was a state and local matter, the federal government previously had refrained from assisting public schools for fear of violating the principle of “separation of powers.” The Higher Education Act (1965) raised federal aid to public and private universities, granted scholarships and low-interest loans to students, and set up a National Teachers Corps. The Bilingual Education Act (1968) helped local school districts address the English-language needs of minority children. Medicare and Medicaid, today the bedrock of the U.S. healthcare system, had their origins in the Social Security Act of 1965. Initially bitterly opposed by the American Medical Association, these publicly funded programs that covered hospital costs and doctors’ fees have been indispensable to older Americans, welfare recipients, and low-income families.
Legislative actions in the areas of culture, transportation, consumer protection, and the environment are likewise the direct result of President Johnson’s vision for a better America. The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act (1965) created two separate federal agencies for the funding of artistic and humanistic pursuits to counterbalance the emphasis given to scientific endeavors. The Urban Mass Transportation Act (1964) provided hundreds of millions of dollars in matching funds to cities for public and private rail projects, and the Highway Safety Act (1966) was enacted to protect motorists from unsafe roads and vehicles. American consumers benefited from a number of laws such as the Child Safety Act (1966), the Flammable Fabrics Act (1967), the Wholesale Meat Act (1967), and the Truth-in-Lending Act (1968).
More than any of the other sets of laws associated with the Great Society, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s stirred public controversy, which has continued for four decades. Johnson issued in 1965, and later expanded in 1967, Executive Order 11246, which required federal contractors to “take affirmative action” to ensure that people are hired and treated during employment without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. By 1972 this presidential mandate, together with the legal ban on discrimination, led to federal pressure on employers (and then schools and housing providers) to take positive steps to correct past wrongs by giving “preferential treatment” to minorities and women. Before long, quotas were introduced, setting “goals” for protected classes of Americans and “timetables” for achieving them. White males responded with cries of “reverse discrimination”: Complaints before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, state human rights agencies, and federal and state courts numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A few cases reached the Supreme Court.
In a series of split and often very close decisions on both sides of the affirmative action debate, the Supreme Court itself added to the controversy. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, the Court in a five-to-four decision prohibited a California medical school from using a quota—reserving a specific number of places—for minorities in admissions. A year later, however, in United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, the same court ruled that it was okay for the steelworkers union to select only minorities for a special training program. Two cases two years apart, both involving firefighters, are also contradictory. In 1984, in Firefighters Local Union No. 1784 v. Stotts, it was decided that seniority was more important than race, that the City of Memphis could lay off recently hired minorities first in staff reductions. However, in International Association of Firefighters v. City of Cleveland (1986), the municipality was permitted to promote minorities over more senior whites. Three recent cases, two concerning the same educational institution, have further confused the issue of affirmative action with decisions that alternately sustained and reversed earlier rulings. In Texas v. Hopwood (1996) the high court let stand a lower court decision that race could not be used in college admissions. In Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), in a six-to-three decision the University of Michigan’s strict formula awarding advantage based on race for admissions was struck down, but in the very same year, in Grutter v. Bollinger, by five to four the University of Michigan Law School was permitted to use race as a factor in admissions.
FUNDING PROBLEMS
Funding the Great Society initiatives became difficult beginning in 1968 because of the burden of the Vietnam War, Johnson’s reluctance to ask Congress for a tax increase, and the goal of reaching a balanced budget. Many of the programs had no political constituencies, that is, they did not originate from outside lobbying and thus lacked the support necessary for continued financing. Johnson’s decision to withdraw from the 1968 presidential race further weakened his advocacy of government intervention on the side of racial justice and economic equality. Under the Republican administration of President Richard M. Nixon, in 1969 the OEO was dismantled and its poverty programs transferred to other federal agencies. Democrat Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, bogged down with the twin problems of inflation and recession, did little to restore the earlier funding for social causes. Carter offered no new initiatives along the lines of Johnson’s program, focusing instead on international affairs.
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan’s strong conservative views on the role of government and federal spending, combined with a Republican Congress’s disinclination to continue social programs, led to draconian cuts for the Great Society. The huge increase in appropriations for the military during this period further tolled the bell for the two-decades-old set of domestic programs. The administration of George H. W. Bush (1989–1993) essentially held fast to the new conservative agenda in Washington. By the time Bill Clinton took the oath of office in 1993 the Democrats had accepted the hard fact that most of the Great Society goals had not been, nor could they ever be, accomplished, and they did not push for new social legislation. Clinton’s failure to get approval for a national health insurance program but success at passing a welfare reform bill only served to scale back the accomplishments of earlier Democratic presidents. Welfare reform now meant that time limits were imposed on the benefits received, able-bodied adult recipients were required to perform public service work, and more rigorous eligibility requirements were imposed, changes all contrary to Johnson’s original goals for a better America. Under the administration of George W. Bush, which began in 2001, the Republican Congress did not kill all previous social programs, and it kept up some funding, but Bush’s efforts toward the global war on terror and his initiation of the war in Iraq devoured budget surpluses and rendered impossible any meaningful attempt to reinvigorate Great Society spending, just as the war in Southeast Asia had almost four decades earlier.
THE GREAT SOCIETY REVISITED
The Great Society has always been closely identified with Democratic political agendas and the cold war liberalism of the 1960s. It was premised on Johnson’s “guns and butter” approach, the idea that the United States can wage wars against communism in far-off places and, at the same time, still provide sufficient funding for domestic social programs. Critics of the Great Society were from the start skeptical of the federal government’s ability to bring about the promised social change, and they are credited with paving the way for the conservative backlash of later decades. In the post-Vietnam era, liberal thinking gave way as Americans lost confidence in the effectiveness of military interventions. The cold war liberal Democratic presidents (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson) freely used military might to solve international problems (as in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam), but later Democratic presidents (Carter, Clinton) were reluctant to use force and turned to diplomacy instead (as in Panama, the Middle East, and the Balkans).
The War on Poverty, perhaps the most ambitious feature of the Kennedy-Johnson proposals, was also the most controversial and it has left a mixed legacy. Billions were spent on dozens of programs, but the poverty rate was just modestly reduced in the late 1960s, only to rise again in the 1970s and 1980s due to changing economic and social conditions. The leftist critique of the Great Society claimed that throwing money at problems will not solve underlying social problems without fundamental changes in the structure of the economy and the reduction of inequality in America. Nevertheless, Johnson’s “other war” permanently expanded the U.S. welfare system, gave the federal government important new responsibilities, and provided a “safety net” of programs and benefits that poor people rely on today.
Despite reductions in programs and funding, much of what comprised the Great Society has aided the middle class, not just the poor, and is still with us in some form. Medicare and Medicaid, frequently criticized as wasteful and inefficient, have grown considerably and now enjoy wide political backing. Despite welfare reform, with its “workfare” provisions, the poor have not been thrown out on the street, and public assistance to the non-poor has actually increased. Federal funds for public and higher education are appreciably greater since the Great Society days, probably because they have been supported by both Democrats and Republicans over the years. Importantly, funding for transportation and the environment has continued, and funds earmarked for the arts, humanities, and public broadcasting have survived in the face of many attempts to eliminate them.
All of the civil rights laws, amended many times and continually challenged in the courts, remain on the books, but the Supreme Court, much altered with conservative justices appointed by Republican administrations, has weakened attempts at affirmative action in education, housing, and the workplace. In the face of the recent Gratz and Grutter decisions, the reconstituted court may now have an anti-affirmative action majority. The 2004 election, however, may have demonstrated that cold war liberalism is not dead. Senator John Edwards, campaigning for the Democratic nomination on a platform of old Great Society ideas and promises, did well in the primaries. The selection of Edwards as the running mate of John Kerry, a more moderate politician and well-known early critic of the Vietnam War, was perhaps a final accession to Johnson’s outmoded programs.
Well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is apparent that the ideals first proposed by President Kennedy, expanded by President Johnson, and enacted into law by a Congress bent on building a better America, are not forgotten. Perhaps Edward M. Kennedy, in his 1980 speech before the Democratic National Convention, summed it up best. He had just pulled out of the race for his party’s nomination, ostensibly ruling out any further attempt to reclaim his martyred brother’s presidency. The senator from Massachusetts, in a patent reference to the liberalism of the New Frontier, poignantly expressed the sense of the Great Society for future generations when he exclaimed: “… the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
SEE ALSO Desegregation; Head Start; Johnson, Lyndon B.; War on Poverty
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrew, John A. 1998. Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Chicago: I.R. Dee.
Beckwith, Francis J., and Todd E. Jones, eds. 1997. Affirmative Action: Social Justice or Reverse Discrimination? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Bergmann, Barbara R. 1996. In Defense of Affirmative Action. New York: Basic Books.
Cohen, Carl, and James P. Sterba. 2003. Affirmative Action and Racial Preference. New York: Oxford University Press.
Helsing, Jeffrey W. 2000. Johnson’s War/Johnson’s Great Society: The Guns and Butter Trap. Westport, CT: Praeger Greenwood.
Jordan, Barbara C., and Elspeth D. Rostow, eds. 1986. The Great Society: A Twenty-Year Critique. Austin, TX: Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64. 1965. Vol. 1, entry 357, 704–707. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Unger, Irwin. 1996. The Best of Intentions: The Triumphs and Failures of the Great Society under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. New York: Doubleday.
Raymond M. Weinstein
The Great Society
The Great Society
Speech
By: Lyndon B. Johnson
Date: May 22, 1964
Source: Johnson, Lyndon B. "The Great Society." Remarks delivered at the University of Michigan commencement exercises, May 22, 1964.
About the Author: Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) served as the thirty-sixth president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. His effort to build a Great Society was significantly hampered by escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War.
INTRODUCTION
President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a great society that would unify the United States and inspire the world. Heavily influenced by his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society was an ambitious domestic program that aimed to improve the quality of American life by expanding the welfare state.
The sheer amount and scope of Great Society legislation was breathtaking. Johnson, a man with a wealth of political experience and a former majority leader in the U.S. Senate, persuaded the U.S. Congress to act on issues that included racial discrimination, education, medical care, consumer and environmental protections, and housing. Since he had personal experience of poverty as a youth, Johnson had a particular interest in bettering the lives of the poor. His antipoverty programs included a new food stamp program that largely replaced surplus food distribution, giving poor people greater choice in obtaining food. Rent supplements allowed poor people more housing options, enabling them to avoid crime-ridden public housing projects. In addition, with the Model Cities Act, Congress authorized more than $1 billion to improve conditions in the nation's slums.
The federal government's responsibility for health care grew even more under the Great Society. Johnson focused on the elderly, who constituted a large portion of the nation's poor. Congress responded with the Medicare program, providing the elderly with universal compulsory medical insurance financed largely through Social Security taxes. A separate program, Medicaid, authorized federal grants to supplement state-paid medical care for poor people under sixty-five years old. These two programs, in particular, did much to better the lives of ordinary Americans and fulfilled the promise that Johnson had made in his speech before the 1964 graduating class of the University of Michigan.
PRIMARY SOURCE
President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow Americans:
It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of your accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said (and I quote), "In choosing a college, you first have to decide whether you want a coeducational school or an educational school." Well, we can find both here at Michigan, although perhaps at different hours. I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his son's education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.
I have come today from the turmoil of your capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak about the future of your country. The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society—in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.
Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans—four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes and highways and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.
Aristotle said: "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all expansion is eroding these precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.
And our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders. New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come, not only to live, but to live the good life. And I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan students are really doing their best to live the good life.
This is the place where the Peace Corps was started.
It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.
A second place where we begin to build the Great Society is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.
A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the "Ugly American." Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.
For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal. Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million—more than one quarter of all America—have not even finished high school.
Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today's youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. And college enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.
In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.
These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems. But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.
I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.
The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.
Woodrow Wilson once wrote: "Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his Nation as well as a man of his time."
Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination.
For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.
So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?
Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?
Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace—as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?
Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?
There are those timid souls that say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will and your labor and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.
Thank you. Good-bye.
SIGNIFICANCE
The winners of the Great Society programs included the poor as well as some unexpected beneficiaries. Most of the funds for economically depressed areas built highways and thus helped the construction industry. Real estate developers, investors, and moderate-income families benefited most from the National Housing Act of 1968. As commercial development and high-income housing often displaced the poor in slum clearance programs, many blacks came to refer to urban renewal as "Negro removal." Physicians' fees and hospital costs soared after the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid.
The 1960s public largely approved of the Great Society, but not all of its measures proved workable over time. The commitment of the federal government to the concept of the welfare state seemed unquestioned. It was this aspect of the Great Society that has aroused the most controversy and backlash in subsequent decades. The expansion of government responsibility for health care has proven particularly worrisome to some political leaders in the twenty-first century who are faced with providing Medicare benefits to the massive baby boom generation. For Johnson, the more immediate problem was how to wage a war on poverty while expanding the war in Vietnam.
FURTHER RESOURCES
Books
Andrew, John A. Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.
Brown, Michael K. Race, Money, and the American Welfare State. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Davies, Gareth. From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.
Gillette, Michael L. Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History. New York: Twayne, 1996.
The Great Society
THE GREAT SOCIETY
The United States mourned when President John F. Kennedy (1960–1963) was assassinated on November 22, 1963. But despite the tragedy, the country was experiencing an era of unprecedented economic health. President Kennedy had already proposed a series of government-funded programs aimed at spreading U.S. prosperity to people still mired in poverty, such as the residents of Appalachia or of the urban ghettoes. When Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1968) assumed the presidency, he pushed to make many of Kennedy's proposals into law. Capitalizing on U.S. stability, as well as the emotions of Kennedy's death, Johnson proposed anti-poverty, civil rights, education, and health care laws. In a speech at the University of Michigan in May 1964, Johnson said he hoped these programs would help create a "Great Society."
Great Society programs, as they came to be known, assisted millions, but they were very controversial. In the short run, funding for these costly programs decreased, as the United States spent more and more fighting the Vietnam War (1964–1975). In the long run, many critics have charged that these initiatives resulted in high taxes, "big government," and that they actually hurt the very people they were designed to help. Nonetheless, Great Society programs such as Medicare, which assists the elderly with medical expenses, remained popular and in the late 1990s they were still a crucial part of many Americans' lives.
Great Society programs were not the first large scale effort by the federal government to aid the disadvantaged. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932–1945) promised a "New Deal" to all Americans when he was elected. This "New Deal" was a long list of employment, income-assistance, and labor legislation, and it also had many critics.
But President Roosevelt's New Deal came at a time of mass poverty, when the United States and the world were living through the tough economic times of the Great Depression (1929–1939). Having emerged from World War II (1939–1945) as the world's most powerful nation, the United States experienced astounding economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. Many Americans who barely had enough to eat during the Depression, now found themselves living in brand new homes and driving automobiles.
President Kennedy believed this national wealth could be used to uplift those who had not yet shared in the good economic times. Particularly disadvantaged were African Americans, who faced legal segregation in the South and poverty and discrimination in the North. In the tradition of Roosevelt's New Deal, Kennedy proposed employment, education, and health care legislation.
This was the legacy President Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969) hoped to fulfill with his Great Society. A masterful politician, Johnson may have lacked Kennedy's public grace, but he made up for it with political savvy. A former leader in the Senate, Johnson would need these skills to enact his ambitious programs which faced serious opposition in Congress.
During the summer of 1964 Johnson challenged Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, the foundation for what came to be known as the "war on poverty." Johnson also proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which combated racial discrimination. Johnson said enacting these bills would be a fitting tribute to Kennedy.
Johnson's initiatives seemed to be popular with voters. He won the 1964 election in a landslide. Capitalizing on what appeared to be a mandate from the American people, Johnson quickly proposed a wide range of programs for mass transportation, food stamps, immigration, and legal services for the poor. Bills aiding elementary, secondary, and higher education were also passed. Medicaid and Medicare were established to assist the poor and elderly, respectively, with medical treatment.
Other initiatives created the Department of Housing and Urban Development, aimed at improving housing conditions, particularly in crowded cities, and Project Head Start, which aided poor children in their earliest years of education. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were created in an effort to expand access to culture.
These programs cost billions of dollars but Johnson presented them not only as moral and just but also as a way to further expand the U.S. economy using education, job training, and income assistance. Johnson's party, the Democrats, won big again in the 1966 elections. However, forces were already converging, which would make it difficult to carry out Great Society programs. Across the country cities were exploding with demonstrations and even riots. Some wondered why problems seemed to be getting worse, just as billions of dollars had been committed to solving them.
A more daunting problem lay halfway around the world. The War in Vietnam claimed an increasing amount of Johnson's attention. And the war became just as controversial as Johnson's War on Poverty. It was also becoming more and more expensive as troops and supplies poured into the region to combat the "Viet Cong" guerilla fighters and the North Vietnamese Army. Johnson was pressured to hike taxes to cover the soaring costs of the war and his Great Society measures. Johnson's need for a tax increase gave political opponents leverage to demand domestic spending cuts. By 1968 Johnson's top economic and political priority was the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. This commitment ultimately led to him refusing to seek reelection as the Democratic presidential candidate.
That year also saw California Governor Ronald Reagan (1911–) fail in his bid to become the Republican presidential candidate. But twelve years later, when the nation's economy was stagnant, Reagan was elected president on a platform that identified many of Johnson's programs as the source of the nation's economic woes. Republicans like Reagan claimed the burden of Great Society initiatives on taxpayers had become too great while poverty only seemed to worsen. "It was 25 years ago that Lyndon Johnson announced his plans for 'The Great Society,"' the conservative magazine National Review wrote in 1989. "Today the phrase refers only to a bundle of welfare programs that have helped make the federal budget a chronic problem."
Republicans stepped up their attack into the 1990s and in 1994 they won majorities in both houses of Congress. They continued to criticize federal spending on programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, more commonly called welfare, which were greatly expanded under the Great Society. Some Democrats said the attacks unfairly singled out society's most vulnerable citizens. Republicans argued that such social programs lead to dependency, which creates problems for both the beneficiary and the nation. Even President Bill Clinton (1993—), a Democrat, declared an "end to welfare as we know it."
Despite the criticism a diverse selection of Great Society programs, from Medicare to public television, remain politically popular. The ultimate legacy of the Great Society will surely be debated for decades to come.
See also: Medicaid, Medicare, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vietnam War
FURTHER READING
Brown-Collier, Elba K. "Johnson's Great Society: Its Legacy in the 1990s." Review of Social Economy, Fall, 1998.
Dallek, Robert. Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960–1973. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Moore, Allison. "From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism." Yale Law Journal, December, 1996.
Unger, Irwin. The Best of Intentions: The Triumph and Failure of the Great Society Under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1964">the great society rests on abundance and liberty for all. it demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. but that is just the beginning.
president lyndon baines johnson, 1964
The Great Society
6 The Great Society
Introduction to The Great Society…. 233
PRIMARY SOURCES
The Great Society … 234
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act … 237
Everett Dirksen, 1964
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ….. 239
Everett Dirksen, 1964
Executive Order 11141—Declaring a Public Policy against Discrimination on the Basis of Age … 243
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964
Proposal for a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty … 245
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964
Social Security Amendments of 1965 ….. 248
United States Congress, 1965
The Establishment of the Robert T. Stafford Federal Student Loan Program … 250
Robert T. Stafford, 1965
Remarks with President Truman at the Signing in Independence of the Medicare Bill … 252
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965
Guns or Butter … 257
Tom Wicker, 1965
Loving v. Virginia… 260
U.S. Supreme Court, 1967
Fair Housing Act of 1968 … 263
United States Congress, 1968
The National Flood Insurance Program ….. 265
United States Congress, 1968
Executive Order 11521 …. 268
President Richard Nixon, 1970
Black Students Arrive at South Boston High School in 1974.… 271
Anonymous, 1974
Executive Order 12127 …. 274
President Jimmy Carter, 1979
Executive Order 12138 …. 277
Jimmy Carter, 1979
Head Start Act… 281
U.S. Congress, 1981
Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 …. 285
Charles Murray, 1985