What is the significance of war on poverty

While some child development experts thought the program should begin with a small experiment - 2, children or so - Shriver knew that to make an impact the program had to reach as many children as possible with its launch. The paper was exactly the kind of perspective Shriver had been seeking in designing the War on Poverty.

The law is more than a control; it is an instrument for social change. The role of [the] OEO program is to provide the means within the democratic process for the law and lawyers to release the bonds which imprison people in poverty, to marshal the forces of law to combat the causes and effects of poverty.

Each day, I ask myself, how will lawyers representing poor people defeat the cycle of poverty? VISTA Volunteers In Service To American pairs volunteers with domestic anti-poverty organizations, giving the volunteers work experience in the public service sector while providing organizations with vital energy and labor. Youth Corps pairs teenagers and young adults with community services opportunities while also providing them with mentorship and transitional services.

In addition to education and job training, participants receive housing, meals, medical care, a living stipend, and other necessary resources in order to successfully enter the workforce. Upward Bound provides resources to prepare students for college such as mentorship, tutoring, test prep, and summer programming.

Foster Grandparents matches volunteers 55 and older and children with exceptional needs to provide mentorship and friendship. Work-Study provides federal funding to institutions to provide part-time work opportunities to low-income undergraduate and graduate students, helping them pay for higher education. Speaking on The War on Poverty, he said,. And that lesson says that democracy doesn't just stop with a vote!

Democracy has to go all the way through our society -- from the way that we plan our programs to, the way we staff and run them -- that goes for education, for job training, for job placement, for legal services, for consumer education, for pre-school education. That principle is sinking deeper and deeper, broader and broader.

And it will continue to spread and spread. Though the Office of Equal Opportunity itself no longer exists, the values, lessons and programs of The War On Poverty have spread, continuing to serve millions of Americans and provide inspiration for future generations to rise to the task of creating equal access and opportunity for all.

LSC's support for this website is limited to those activities that are consistent with LSC restrictions. Skip to main content. Topics Public Benefits. Below is a brief history of the War on Poverty. But what is there more irresponsible than playing with the fire of an imagined civil war in the France of today? Cold War fears could be manipulated through misleading art to attract readers to daunting material.

Kennedy: "Mankind must put an end to war — or war will put an end to mankind. He distinguished himself in several campaigns, especially in the Peninsular war, and was raised to the rank of field marshal.

His 6, native auxiliaries as it proved later on could not be relied upon in a civil war. Among the possibilities discussed was a focus on poverty. This had a number of attractions. For one, it offered a broad, unifying theme that transcended the very limited, piecemeal domestic policy accomplishments that the administration had so far achieved.

For another, it balanced the middle-class focus of the tax cut which would not actually pass until with an emphasis on those left behind by American prosperity. Heller and the CEA recognized that even the most successful macroeconomic policies would not reach all Americans: some would remain unemployable, some would remain stuck in low-wage jobs, some would still face skill deficits, family hardships, or other problems that left them outside the economic mainstream.

Rather than requiring a focus on the problems of the economy as a whole, it allowed policymakers to emphasize the inadequate resources of poor individuals and communities. CEA economists working for Heller soon documented the severity and some of the intractability of the problem.

They highlighted especially the disturbing possibility that during the previous decade macroeconomic growth had become less effective in lifting people out of poverty. Just days before the assassination, Kennedy gave Heller the go-ahead to devote additional staff resources to developing the project as a priority for the next year.

There was, of course, another context to the emergence of poverty as a national policy priority. The August March on Washington had captured this dynamic relationship, as its formal title was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr. This occurred in the North as well as the South, casting doubt on the traditional narrative that has seen discrimination as a problem confined to one exceptional region.

Although northern activists marched in support of their southern brothers and sisters, they also increasingly challenged discrimination in their own communities. Boycott movements against discriminatory employers had taken place in northern cities since the s, and they flared again in the late s and early s. Northerners had struggled throughout the postwar years for the creation of city and state Fair Employment Practices commissions, and then, once such bodies were established, they fought to make them even marginally effective as tools to combat employment discrimination.

In , protests against segregation in the well-paying construction industry quickly spread from Philadelphia to New York, Cleveland, and other cities, forcing President Kennedy to issue an executive order banning discrimination on federally funded construction projects it proved ineffe ctual, leading to the establishment of the first affirmative action programs in This was the long-term strand of policy development behind the War on Poverty.

It created the broad context into which the new initiative fit. The day after the assassination of President Kennedy, Johnson received a briefing from Walter Heller, who mentioned the still incipient concept of the poverty program.

Roosevelt and as a New Deal loyalist. That planning process had only recently come into focus. Early efforts to generate ideas for specific components of a federal anti-poverty effort had produced little more than a rehash of existing departmental programs and old proposals. Little fresh thinking seemed to be occurring.

This was the idea of community action. It was based, in turn, on the concept of opportunity theory, which had been developed by Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. Opportunity theory had originated as a strategy for addressing the problem of youth gangs in low-income urban neighborhoods—an issue that had been a prominent concern in major cities during the s and early s.

Like most Americans, they sought social status, personal security, material comfort, even wealth, but they lacked access to the normal range of opportunities for achieving such goals. As a result, such young people turned to the gang as an alternative social structure that would meet these basic needs.

The solution to gangs and juvenile delinquency thus lay in opening the blocked avenues of opportunity in such communities, thereby reducing the allure of the gang. The best way to do this, Ohlin and Cloward argued, was to involve both gang members and others in their communities in planning social services and educational and vocational programs that responded to the needs of the individuals involved. Beginning in , Ohlin and Cloward attempted to implement the opportunity theory idea in an experimental program in New York City known as Mobilization for Youth.

Additional experiments funded by the Ford Foundation and a presidential committee on juvenile delinquency headed by Attorney General Robert F.

Kennedy expanded the opportunity theory concept into a strategy for attacking the problem of poor communities more generally. With that effort floundering, they suggested the community mobilization approach of opportunity theory as a specific strategy for fighting poverty.

Renamed community action, the concept provided the thematic and st rategic coherence that the anti-poverty task force had sought for much of the fall. Lyndon Johnson, however, had little interest in pilot projects. He wanted action, and he wanted to make bold strides in attacking a social evil. Upon being briefed on the community action concept during a Christmas meeting at his Texas ranch, Johnson initially rejected the idea—and possibly the entire anti-poverty effort itself—before accepting it on the condition that it be vastly expanded.

This meant that an academic concept that had barely been tested in a real-worl d setting would suddenly form the core of a major federal social policy endeavor.

With the decision made, Johnson and his closest advisers prepared to unveil the new program to the nation. Launching a War on Poverty presented immediate advantages in dramatizing the issue and pushing the legislation through Congress. For the same reasons, future presidents would deploy the military metaphor against foes ranging from cancer, to drugs, to terrorism. The first consisted of equipping the poor to take advantage of opportunity, while demanding that they then help themselves.

Anderson that. The NYA was a New Deal program that provided work-study jobs for high school and college students and work experience jobs for unemployed young people. Johnson first came to national notice through his innovative projects and efficient implementation of the Texas program.

He envisioned the War on Poverty as a revived NYA, both in actual programmatic content and in administrative style. I put a little steel in some statewide roadside parks. But I got 4, of them down there now. And I got a dollar to show for every dollar I spent. First, it suggested that the best approach to fighting poverty lay in equipping young people, and specifically young men, to take on responsible and productive positions in the economy and in national life. Second, it suggested that such efforts could be facilitated by relying on innovative local and state administrators of the type he had worked with in the Texas NYA.

On 20 January , he told Chicago mayor Richard J. By the end of the month, he had concluded that the planners needed a more coherent approach and more guidance from a firm administrative hand.

As a result, in a series of four lengthy telephone calls on 1 February, the President cajoled and even bullied Peace Corps director R. Sargent Shriver into accepting a second position heading the task force that would write the anti-poverty legislation. As the husband of Eunice Kennedy, the sister of John and Robert Kennedy, Shriver provided a link to the Kennedy clan and their supporters, many of whom were deeply alienated from the new President and posed a potential political threat.

Second, as the director of the successful and popular Peace Corps, Shriver had great credibility with Congress, the media, and, to a lesser extent, the public. He would be a valuable ally in securing passage of the bill. Despite his initial hesitance, Shriver threw himself into the planning work and quickly became the public face of the War on Poverty. After an initial briefing from the task force on the existing plans, Shriver and his top deputy, Adam Yarmolinsky borrowed from the Department of Defense , quickly concluded that community action alone would not provide a sufficient programmatic base for what Johnson had already promised.

We had independently reached agreement that the program they were presenting to us made no political sense. Over the following six weeks, an expanded task force engaged in a frenzied flurry of legislative drafting and program development, conducted in a series of makeshift offices around Washington. By mid-March, the legislation had been drafted and a presidential message to Congress had been prepared. Now known as the proposed Economic Opportunity Act of , the legislation included a range of training, educational, and service programs, along with community action.

The newly added programs included the Job Corps, which would provide educational and vocational training for poor young people in residential camps; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, which would offer work-training and work-study programs for high school and college students; programs of loans for low-income farm families and for small businesses; the Volunteers in Service to America VISTA program, which would recruit volunteer anti-poverty workers as a kind of domestic parallel to the Peace Corps; and new or expanded programs for adult basic education, job training for unemployed fathers, and aid to migrant workers and dependent children.

In his imagination, they would provide the skills and the work ethic necessary to connect young men to the opportunities of the wider society, building on but also transcending the legacy of the New Deal. Unlike the New Deal, however, the bill made no provision for the direct creation of jobs for the poor.

Willard Wirtz had proposed the inclusion of a public jobs component. It simply took for granted that the Keynesian macroeconomic management strategies heralded by the tax cut would create sufficient opportunities for the newly empowered poor, and that they would do so in or near the communities wh ere the poor actually lived. Such assumptions would soon prove highly problematic.

Community action supporters such as Richard Boone had included this language to insure that African Americans would not be cut out of the program, especially in the still-segregated South. This view was anathema to mayors like Richard Daley, and as later tapes show to the President himself. Maximum feasible participation would cause significant controversy and pose dangerous political dilemmas for the Johnson administration, especially in the first 18 months of the program.

Yet it also represented the most transformative, radical dimension of the War on Poverty. At its best, it led to the transfer of power and resources to low-income people, many of them minorities and women, who had never had access to them before. Without a political commitment to the concept, though, and without a deeper engagement with the underlying economic problems and needs of poor communities, this transformation would too often prove fleeting, vulnerable to the recriminations of those threatened by such change, and susceptible to the cutoff of the very resources and authority that made them possible.

Shriver, however, wanted a separate agency, vested with presidential authority, and he received the backing of a number of Cabinet members and, eventually, the President, too. OEO managed the remaining programs and had overall oversight of the War on Poverty. However, it also increased the risk to Johnson because it linked any failures to the President himself. On 16 March, Johnson delivered his message on poverty to Congress, and with it he officially submitted the anti-poverty bill.

Landrum of Georgia as the floor leader for the bill in the House. This had earned him the enmity of union leaders—key parts of the Democratic coalition—and many northern liberals. In the midst of the civil rights struggle, however, Johnson believed that he needed a southern floor leader who could reassure his regional colleagues that the bill was not simply an extension of the Civil Rights Act.

As many of the conversations show, Landrum proved to be an adept tactician who managed to hold an often-fractious coalition together. Over the period preceding the start of the first War on Poverty volume, the recorded conversations about the War on Poverty capture questions of legislative strategy, struggles regarding jurisdiction over the bill, and occasional controversies over its implications.

Even more challenging was the conservative segregationist who chaired the House Rules Committee, Representative Howard W.