Not a 1967 Initiative
The title of this article suggests that the War on Poverty was launched in 1967. It was not. President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his State of the Union address in January 1964, and Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act that August. What happened in 1967 was a stage in its life: the programmes were operating, under growing political and budgetary pressure, and the summer’s urban unrest sharpened the argument about whether they were working.
What the Programmes Were
The Economic Opportunity Act created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), headed by Sargent Shriver, to coordinate a collection of programmes. The best known included:
- Head Start, a preschool programme for low-income children, begun as a summer programme in 1965.
- The Job Corps, offering residential training to young people.
- VISTA, a domestic volunteer service sometimes described as a domestic Peace Corps.
- Legal Services, which funded lawyers for people who could not pay.
- Community Action Programs, which funded local agencies to plan and run anti-poverty efforts.
The wider Great Society legislation of 1965, including Medicare and Medicaid, aid to schools and expansions of food assistance, is often grouped with the War on Poverty, though it was formally separate. The Great Society is covered elsewhere; here the focus is on the anti-poverty effort itself.
The Philosophy
Johnson’s advisers generally framed the approach as a “hand up” rather than a handout, offering education, training and local participation in the hope that people would be able to leave poverty through work. That emphasis shaped the programmes’ design but also their limits. They had no large-scale jobs programme or guaranteed income, and critics on the left said the budget was too small for the task, while critics on the right questioned federal involvement at all.
Community action was especially contentious. The law called for the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in the planning of local programmes. In practice, this sometimes put OEO-funded groups at odds with city governments and mayors, who objected to federally funded organisations that challenged local officials. By 1967, local politicians were pressing Congress to restore control.
1967: Pressure on Several Fronts
Congress renewed the Economic Opportunity Act in late 1967, but with changes. An amendment sponsored by Representative Edith Green of Oregon shifted more control of community action agencies toward state and local governments, a change that reduced the independence of some groups. Funding levels were a further source of tension. The cost of the Vietnam War was rising, and the administration, worried about the budget and inflation, was reluctant to push for large increases in domestic spending. The phrase “guns and butter” was often used to describe the choice, and the wider financial picture is covered in the article on the American economy.
The urban unrest of the summer added a political dimension. Johnson’s critics argued that the riots in Newark and Detroit showed the programmes had failed, while supporters argued that the disorder showed they were too small. The Kerner Commission, appointed in July, would later call for far larger efforts on jobs, housing and welfare. Johnson did not embrace many of its proposals.
Martin Luther King Jr. was making a related case. In his book Chaos or Community, he argued for a much stronger commitment to employment and income, and his planned Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 was in part a response to the limits of the existing programmes. The minimum wage rise of 1967 and the extension of its coverage were part of the same broader effort to raise incomes at the bottom.
Did It Work?
The question has been argued for decades, and the answer depends on what is measured. The official poverty rate, which began to be calculated in the mid-1960s and applied back to earlier years, was roughly 19 percent in 1964 and had fallen to around 12 percent by 1969, as commonly reported. Economic growth, a tight labour market and expanded Social Security benefits are generally credited with a large share of that decline, while the extent to which OEO programmes alone were responsible is hard to separate out.
Some programmes appear to have been durable and well regarded. Head Start still exists, and research on its effects has produced mixed but often positive findings over the long term, though results vary by study. Medicare and Medicaid, though they sit beside the War on Poverty, are now central to American social policy. Community action had a mixed record: it helped train a generation of local Black and Latino leaders, but sometimes produced conflict and uneven results.
The Aftermath
Under Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon, the OEO was gradually dismantled in the early 1970s, with some functions moved to other departments. Later conservative critics, including Ronald Reagan, argued that the effort showed the limits of government action, while defenders pointed to lower poverty among the elderly and improved access to health care and food. The truth is probably mixed, and economists still disagree about it.
What is clear is that the argument of 1967 has not gone away. The tension between federal anti-poverty spending, local control and the costs of war ran through the Johnson years and continued in American politics long afterward.