Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty PDF Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Much political debate in the 1990s has revolved around the War on Poverty launched in the 1960s. Liberals argue that the war is over, and the poor lost; conservatives feel the war should never have been waged in the first place. Michael Gillette has interviewed many of the participants in the War on Poverty to form a portrait of the hectic days when the anti-poverty programs began, from the perspectives of the bureaucrats, political appointees, and activists who shaped the initiatives. Launching the War on Poverty details the origins and passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, as well as the resistance to the program and criticism from local political forces and social groups. Gillette effectively recreates the atmosphere of the turbulent days surrounding the implementation of this controversial social reform.-- Examination of the beginnings of the War on Poverty agencies when recent political debate has focused on dismantling them.-- Analyses of the different programs, from popular agencies like the Job Corps and Head Start, to programs like Community Action, which were the target of much criticism.-- A must-read during an election year.

Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty PDF Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much political debate in the 1990s has revolved around the War on Poverty launched in the 1960s. Liberals argue that the war is over, and the poor lost; conservatives feel the war should never have been waged in the first place. Michael Gillette has interviewed many of the participants in the War on Poverty to form a portrait of the hectic days when the anti-poverty programs began, from the perspectives of the bureaucrats, political appointees, and activists who shaped the initiatives. Launching the War on Poverty details the origins and passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, as well as the resistance to the program and criticism from local political forces and social groups. Gillette effectively recreates the atmosphere of the turbulent days surrounding the implementation of this controversial social reform.-- Examination of the beginnings of the War on Poverty agencies when recent political debate has focused on dismantling them.-- Analyses of the different programs, from popular agencies like the Job Corps and Head Start, to programs like Community Action, which were the target of much criticism.-- A must-read during an election year.

The War on Poverty Revisited

The War on Poverty Revisited PDF Author: Michael Givel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Focuses on the new Community Services Block Grant program-which was administered under a centralized categorical format by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity from 1964 to 1973 and the U.S. Community Services Administration from 1974 to 1980. The actual impact of this switch from a centralized to a more decentralized federal funding system is analyzed by comparing fiscal, written rulemaking, and informal behind-the-scenes federal administrative and political actions under the old categorical format. These trends are then incorporated into an updated administrative and political overview of the 1960s war on poverty effort, to provide a clearer picture on how the U.S. government's war on poverty was faring in the 1980s.

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.

The War on Poverty

The War on Poverty PDF Author: Kyle Farmbry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739190784
Category : Economic assistance, Domestic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The War on Poverty: A Retrospective examines the strategies and programs launched since 1964 through the eyes of academics and practitioners engaged in education, health care, social services provision, and community economic development.

Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty PDF Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN: 9780805792430
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson launched an unprecedented political crusade to eradicate poverty in America - an unconditional "War on Poverty" that transcended Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. Set into motion with the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), a federal agency established after the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, this bold crusade aimed to break the cycle of a culture of poverty by attacking its causes in urban ghettos and depressed rural areas. The War on Poverty formulated and administered an array of novel programs, including the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Project Head Start, and the Legal Services Program. Despite criticism by political opponents, despite budgetary restraints, and despite the failure to achieve the lofty goal of ridding the nation of poverty, most of the social programs established under OEO still exist today. Launching the War on Poverty - the first single-volume oral history of this momentous federal plan to help society's least fortunate - brings the antipoverty crusade to life through the testimony of its creators. The author, Michael Gillette, has compiled interviews with forty-eight "poverty warriors" from the 1,700 oral history interviews in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. These brave planners were an assorted lot of borrowed government officials, business professionals, academics, experts on poverty, and freelance kibitzers, from the nation's top law schools and graduate programs. Their narratives focus on federal policies and the political climate of the 1960s, and document how policymakers perceived the problem of poverty and its possible solutions.Today, the welfare programs of the Great Society are criticized as a failure of liberal idealism; but these firsthand testimonies demonstrate that the strategies of the original poverty warriors were rooted in the American work ethic and were designed to encourage self-help instead of dependence.

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.

Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty PDF Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199750688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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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.

The Dream Revisited

The Dream Revisited PDF Author: Ingrid Ellen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 643

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Book Description
A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated? The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.

Appalachia Revisited

Appalachia Revisited PDF Author: William Schumann
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813166985
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Known for its dramatic beauty and valuable natural resources, Appalachia has undergone significant technological, economic, political, and environmental changes in recent decades. Home to distinctive traditions and a rich cultural heritage, the area is also plagued by poverty, insufficient healthcare and education, drug addiction, and ecological devastation. This complex and controversial region has been examined by generations of scholars, activists, and civil servants -- all offering an array of perspectives on Appalachia and its people. In this innovative volume, editors William Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher assemble both scholars and nonprofit practitioners to examine how Appalachia is perceived both within and beyond its borders. Together, they investigate the region's transformation and analyze how it is currently approached as a topic of academic inquiry. Arguing that interdisciplinary and comparative place-based studies increasingly matter, the contributors investigate numerous topics, including race and gender, environmental transformation, university-community collaborations, cyber identities, fracking, contemporary activist strategies, and analyze Appalachia in the context of local-to-global change. A pathbreaking study analyzing continuity and change in the region through a global framework, Appalachia Revisited is essential reading for scholars and students as well as for policymakers, community and charitable organizers, and those involved in community development.

Dollar a Day Revisited

Dollar a Day Revisited PDF Author: Martin Ravallion
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Absolute poverty
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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Book Description
The article presents the first major update of the international $1 a day poverty line, proposed in World Development Report 1990: Poverty for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new and more representative data set of national poverty lines, a marked economic gradient emerges only when consumption per person is above about $2.00 a day at 2005 purchasing power parity. Below this, the average poverty line is $1.25, which is proposed as the new international poverty line. The article tests the robustness of this line to alternative estimation methods and explains how it differs from the old $1 a day line.