Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty PDF Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199779864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Head Start, Job Corps, Foster Grandparents, College Work-Study, VISTA, Community Action, and the Legal Services Corporation are familiar programs, but their tumultuous beginning has been largely forgotten. Conceived amid the daring idealism of the 1960s, these programs originated as weapons in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, an offensive spearheaded by a controversial new government agency. Within months, the Office of Economic Opportunity created an array of unconventional initiatives that empowered the poor, challenged the established order, and ultimately transformed the nation's attitudes toward poverty. In Launching the War on Poverty, historian Michael L. Gillette weaves together oral history interviews with the architects of the Great Society's boldest experiment. Forty-nine former poverty warriors, including Sargent Shriver, Adam Yarmolinsky, and Lawrence F. O'Brien, recount this inside story of unprecedented governmental innovation. The interviews capture the excitement and heady optimism of Americans in the 1960s along with their conflicts and disillusionment. This new edition of Launching the War on Poverty adds the voice of Lyndon Johnson to the story with excerpts from his recently-released White House telephone conversations. In these colorful and brutally candid conversations, LBJ exercises his full arsenal of presidential powers, political leverage, and legendary persuasiveness to win one of his most difficult legislative battles. The second edition also documents how the OEO's offspring survived their volatile origins to become broadly supported features of domestic policy.

Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty PDF Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199779864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Get Book Here

Book Description
Head Start, Job Corps, Foster Grandparents, College Work-Study, VISTA, Community Action, and the Legal Services Corporation are familiar programs, but their tumultuous beginning has been largely forgotten. Conceived amid the daring idealism of the 1960s, these programs originated as weapons in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, an offensive spearheaded by a controversial new government agency. Within months, the Office of Economic Opportunity created an array of unconventional initiatives that empowered the poor, challenged the established order, and ultimately transformed the nation's attitudes toward poverty. In Launching the War on Poverty, historian Michael L. Gillette weaves together oral history interviews with the architects of the Great Society's boldest experiment. Forty-nine former poverty warriors, including Sargent Shriver, Adam Yarmolinsky, and Lawrence F. O'Brien, recount this inside story of unprecedented governmental innovation. The interviews capture the excitement and heady optimism of Americans in the 1960s along with their conflicts and disillusionment. This new edition of Launching the War on Poverty adds the voice of Lyndon Johnson to the story with excerpts from his recently-released White House telephone conversations. In these colorful and brutally candid conversations, LBJ exercises his full arsenal of presidential powers, political leverage, and legendary persuasiveness to win one of his most difficult legislative battles. The second edition also documents how the OEO's offspring survived their volatile origins to become broadly supported features of domestic policy.

Legacies of the War on Poverty

Legacies of the War on Poverty PDF Author: Martha J. Bailey
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448146
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Many believe that the War on Poverty, launched by President Johnson in 1964, ended in failure. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, almost as high as when the War on Poverty was declared. Historical and contemporary accounts often portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that created doubts about the ability of public policies to address complex social problems. Legacies of the War on Poverty, drawing from fifty years of empirical evidence, documents that this popular view is too negative. The volume offers a balanced assessment of the War on Poverty that highlights some remarkable policy successes and promises to shift the national conversation on poverty in America. Featuring contributions from leading poverty researchers, Legacies of the War on Poverty demonstrates that poverty and racial discrimination would likely have been much greater today if the War on Poverty had not been launched. Chloe Gibbs, Jens Ludwig, and Douglas Miller dispel the notion that the Head Start education program does not work. While its impact on children’s test scores fade, the program contributes to participants’ long-term educational achievement and, importantly, their earnings growth later in life. Elizabeth Cascio and Sarah Reber show that Title I legislation reduced the school funding gap between poorer and richer states and prompted Southern school districts to desegregate, increasing educational opportunity for African Americans. The volume also examines the significant consequences of income support, housing, and health care programs. Jane Waldfogel shows that without the era’s expansion of food stamps and other nutrition programs, the child poverty rate in 2010 would have been three percentage points higher. Kathleen McGarry examines the policies that contributed to a great success of the War on Poverty: the rapid decline in elderly poverty, which fell from 35 percent in 1959 to below 10 percent in 2010. Barbara Wolfe concludes that Medicaid and Community Health Centers contributed to large reductions in infant mortality and increased life expectancy. Katherine Swartz finds that Medicare and Medicaid increased access to health care among the elderly and reduced the risk that they could not afford care or that obtaining it would bankrupt them and their families. Legacies of the War on Poverty demonstrates that well-designed government programs can reduce poverty, racial discrimination, and material hardships. This insightful volume refutes pessimism about the effects of social policies and provides new lessons about what more can be done to improve the lives of the poor.

The War on Poverty

The War on Poverty PDF Author: Annelise Orleck
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820341843
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of "poverty pimps," and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal. The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural whites in Appalachia, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers, and Chinese immigrants from New York to California built social programs based on Johnson's vision of a greater, more just society. Contributors to this volume chronicle these vibrant and largely unknown histories while not shying away from the flaws and failings of the movement--including inadequate funding, co-optation by local political elites, and blindness to the reality that mothers and their children made up most of the poor. In the twenty-first century, when one in seven Americans receives food stamps and community health centers are the largest primary care system in the nation, the War on Poverty is as relevant as ever. This book helps us to understand the turbulent era out of which it emerged and why it remains so controversial to this day.

A People's War on Poverty

A People's War on Poverty PDF Author: Wesley G. Phelps
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820346713
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s and argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy.

Battle for Bed-Stuy

Battle for Bed-Stuy PDF Author: Michael Woodsworth
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545060
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
In the 1960s Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was labeled America’s largest ghetto. But its brownstones housed a coterie of black professionals intent on bringing order and hope to the community. In telling their story Michael Woodsworth reinterprets the War on Poverty by revealing its roots in local activism and policy experiments.

Everybody's Problem

Everybody's Problem PDF Author: Karen M. Hawkins
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
“Offers a new interpretation of the war on poverty by demonstrating the centrality of moderate local leadership (both white and black) in launching and operating antipoverty programs.”—Marisa Chappell, author of The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America “Hawkins has done a remarkable job of mining the sources and reconstructing the reality of what was going on in eastern North Carolina.”—Frank Stricker, author of Why America Lost the War on Poverty—And How to Win It While many scholars have argued that confrontation and protest were the most effective ways for the poor to empower themselves during the social change of the 1960s, Karen Hawkins demonstrates that moderate leadership and biracial cooperation were sometimes just as forceful. Everybody’s Problem shows these values at play in the nation’s first rural-based Community Action Agency to receive federal funding as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Hawkins describes the founding of Craven Operation Progress in one of the poorest regions of North Carolina. She discusses the philosophies and tactics of its directors and outlines the tensions that arose between local leadership and federal control. Using previously untapped primary sources, including oral interviews with antipoverty workers and local citizens, records from the U.S. Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, and documents from the North Carolina Fund, Hawkins adds to the story of the factors that helped lower poverty rates and advance economic development during the 1960s and beyond. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

The Other America

The Other America PDF Author: Michael Harrington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068482678X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Examines the economic underworld of migrant farm workers, the aged, minority groups, and other economically underprivileged groups.

Programs in Aid of the Poor

Programs in Aid of the Poor PDF Author: Sar A. Levitan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801871221
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty," launching a variety of new antipoverty programs and enhancing existing ones. This war is still being fought. But with what success? And at what cost? Incorporating new data from the 2000 census, the eighth edition of Programs in Aid of the Poor provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of current federal programs aimed at alleviating poverty in the United States. The authors focus on programs that offer cash support, provide goods and services to poor people, address the well-being of children and youth, prepare young people to earn above-poverty incomes, and offer adults a second chance to earn their way out of poverty. They also discuss the definition of poverty, identify who the poor are, and generalize the causes of poverty. "To an extent," the authors find, "we have prosecuted our war against poverty the way Senator George Aiken of Vermont advised that we do in Vietnam: 'Declare victory and go home.' Yet the war against poverty has not been abandoned. Skirmishes continue, with widely fluctuating commitment." Co-authors Garth and Stephen Mangum and Andrew Sum have also prepared a companion volume, The Persistence of Poverty in the United States, analyzing the underlying causes of poverty and its persistence in America.

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime PDF Author: Elizabeth Hinton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. 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 originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era. “An extraordinary and important new book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker “Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation...There are moments that will make your skin crawl...This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.” —Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review

Appalachian Legacy

Appalachian Legacy PDF Author: James Patrick Ziliak
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815722141
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Kentucky's Martin County to declare war on poverty. The following year he signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act,creating a state-federal partnership to improve the region's economic prospects through better job opportunities, improved human capital, and enhanced transportation. As the focal point of domestic antipoverty efforts, Appalachia took on special symbolic as well as economic importance. Nearly half a century later, what are the results? Appalachian Legacy provides the answers. Led by James P. Ziliak, prominent economists and demographers map out the region's current status. They explore important questions, including how has Appalachia fared since the signing of ARDA in 1965? How does it now compare to the nation as a whole in key categories such as education, employment, and health? Was ARDA an effective place-based policy for ameliorating hardship in a troubled region, or is Appalachia stillmired in a poverty trap? And what lessons can we draw from the Appalachian experience? In addition to providing the reports of important research to help analysts, policymakers, scholars, and regional experts discern what works in fighting poverty, Appalachian Legacy is an important contribution to the economic history of the eastern United States.