by Alan Brinkley This reading is excerpted from Chapter 31 of Brinkley s American History: A Survey (12th ed.). I wrote the footnotes. If you use the questions below to guide your note taking (which is a good idea), please be aware that several of the questions have multiple answers. Study Questions 1. Do you have any questions? 2. Why was Johnson able to get most of his ambitious program through the Congress? 3. In what ways was the election of 1964, on the surface an enormous landslide for Democrats, in fact a sign of ominous developments for the party? 4. What were the key Great Society programs, and why did Johnson feel each would help alleviate poverty and build a better United States? 5. The Immigration Act of 1965 is of especial importance to the present-day US. Why? 6. Why did some Americans oppose Johnson s program? 7. On balance, was the Great Society a great idea? Why or why not? Lyndon Johnson The Kennedy assassination was a national trauma a defining event for almost everyone old enough to be aware of it. 1 At the time, however, much of the nation took comfort in the personality and performance of Kennedy s successor in the White House, Lyndon Baines Johnson. 2 Johnson was a native of the poor hill country of west Texas and had risen by dint of extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition. Having failed to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1960, he surprised many who knew him by agreeing to accept the second position on the ticket with Kennedy. The events in Dallas [where Kennedy was murdered] thrust him into the White House. Johnson s rough-edged, even crude personality could hardly have been more different from Kennedy s. But like Kennedy, Johnson was a man who believed in the active use of power. Between 1963 and 1966, he compiled the most impressive legislative record of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. He was aided by the tidal wave of emotion that followed the death of President Kennedy, which helped win support for many New Frontier proposals. 3 But Johnson also constructed a remarkable reform program of his own, one that he ultimately labeled the Great Society. And he won approval of much of it through the same sort of skillful lobbying in Congress that had made him an effective majority leader. 4 Johnson envisioned himself as a great coalition builder. He wanted the support of everyone, and for a time he very nearly got it. His first year in office was, by necessity, 1 Ask anyone who was born in 1958 or earlier where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot and they will be able to tell you. The only recent parallel of this would be the 11 September 2001 attacks. 2 In 2012 Robert Caro published the fourth volume, The Passage of Power, in his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. The vast majority of the book is about the three months between Kennedy s death and LBJ s first State of the Union speech. Caro argues convincingly that these months were crucial in transforming LBJ from a person much feared by liberals and underestimated by Kennedy s men into a popular national leader. 3 The New Frontier was the name Kennedy had given to his legislative agenda. Kennedy was unable to get most of these measures through Congress; Johnson would have no such difficulties. 4 LBJ had served as majority leader of the Senate from 1955 to 1960.
dominated by the campaign for reelection. There was little doubt that he would win particularly after the Republican Party fell under the sway of its right wing and nominated the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. In the November 1964 election, the president received a larger plurality, over 61 percent, than any candidate before or since. Goldwater managed to carry only his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South [see map below]. Record Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, many of whose members had been swept into office only because of the margins of Johnson s victory, ensured that the president would be able to fulfill many of his goals. 1964 Presidential Election A huge win for LBJ but with a bad omen for future Democratic candidates. For the first time, a number of states of the Solid South, which had provided reliable votes for Democratic presidential candidates since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, voted for the Republican. This switch, prompted in large part by LBJ s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would be completed by 1972, when Richard Nixon would win all of the South s electoral votes. Since 1972 the states of the former Confederacy (with the exception of Florida, a classic swing state) have overwhelmingly cast their votes for Republican candidates. It is possible, however, that demographic changes in the South may be creating additional opportunities for Democrats in the region as we move towards the 2020s. The Assault on Poverty For the first time since the 1930s, the federal government took steps in the 1960s to create important new social welfare programs. The most important of these, perhaps, was Medicare: a program to provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses. Its enactment in 1965 came at the end of a bitter, twenty-year debate between those who believed in the concept of national health assistance and those who denounced it as socialized medicine. But the program as it went into effect pacified many critics. For one thing, it avoided the stigma of welfare by Page 2
making Medicare benefits available to all elderly Americans, regardless of need (just as Social Security had done with pensions). That created a large middle-class constituency for the program. 5 The program also defused the opposition of the medical community by allowing doctors serving Medicare patients to practice privately and to charge their normal fees; Medicare simply shifted responsibility for paying those fees from the patient to the government. In 1966, Johnson steered to passage the Medicaid program, which extended federal medical assistance to welfare recipients and other indigent people of all ages. 6 Medicare and Medicaid were early steps in a much larger assault on poverty one that Kennedy had been planning in the last months of his life and that Johnson launched only weeks after taking office. The centerpiece of this war on poverty, as Johnson called it, was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which created an array of new educational, employment, housing, and health-care programs. But the OEO was controversial from the start, in part because of its commitment to the idea of Community Action. Community Action was an effort to involve members of poor communities themselves in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them. The Community Action programs provided jobs for many poor people and gave them valuable experience in administrative and political work. Many men and women who went on to significant careers in politics or community organizing, including many black and Hispanic politicians, as well as many Indians, got their start in Community Action programs. But despite its achievements, the Community Action approach proved impossible to sustain, both because of administrative failures and because the apparent excesses of a few agencies damaged the popular image of the Community action programs, and indeed the war on poverty, as a whole. The OEO spent nearly $3 billion during its first two years of existence, and it helped reduce poverty in some areas. But it fell far short of eliminating poverty altogether. That was in part because of the weaknesses of the programs themselves and in part because funding for them, inadequate from the beginning, dwindled as the years passed and a costly war in Southeast Asia became the nation s first priority. Cities, Schools, and Immigration Closely tied to the antipoverty program were federal efforts to promote the revitalization of decaying cities and to strengthen the nation s schools. The Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cities for the preservation of open spaces, the development of masstransit systems, and the subsidization of middle-income housing. In 1966, Johnson established a new cabinet agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (whose first secretary, Robert Weaver, was the first African American ever to serve in the cabinet). Johnson also inaugurated the Model Cities program, which offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment pilot programs. Kennedy had long fought for federal aid to public education, but he had failed to overcome two important obstacles: Many Americans feared that aid to education was the first step toward federal control of the schools, and Catholics insisted that federal assistance must extend to 5 Polls consistently indicate that Medicare and Social Security are the two most popular US government programs. 6 If you don t know what it means, indigent would seem to be an important word to look up, don t you think? Page 3
The Great Society parochial as well as public schools. Johnson managed to circumvent both objections with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and a series of subsequent measures. The bills extended aid to both private and parochial schools and based the aid on the economic conditions of the students, not on the needs of the schools themselves. Total federal expenditures for education and technical training rose from $5 billion to $12 billion between 1964 and 1967. The Johnson administration also supported the Immigration Act of 1965, one of the most important pieces of legislation of the 1960s. The law maintained a strict limit on the number of newcomers admitted to the country each year (170,000), but it eliminated the national origins system established in the 1920s, which gave preference to immigrants from northern Europe over those from other parts of the world. It continued to restrict immigration from some parts of Latin America, but it allowed people from all parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa to enter the Untied States on an equal basis. By the early 1970s, the character of American immigration had changed, with members of new national groups and particularly large groups of Asians entering the United States and changing the character of the American population. Johnson gives The Treatment to his friend (and future Johnson appointee to the Supreme Court) Abe Fortas. Johnson s Treatment was often successful in convincing members of Congress to vote in support of LBJ s initiatives. Legacies of the Great Society Taken together, the Great Society reforms meant a significant increase in federal spending. For a time, rising tax revenues from the growing economy nearly compensated for the new expenditures. In 1964, Johnson managed to win passage of the $11.5 billion tax cut that Kennedy had first proposed in 1962. The cut increased the federal deficit, but substantial economic growth over the next several years made up for much of the revenue initially lost. As Great Society programs began to multiply, however, and particularly as they began to compete with the escalating costs of America s military ventures, the federal budget rapidly outpaced increases in revenues. In 1961, the federal government had spent $94.4 billion. By 1970, that sum had risen to $196.6 billion. The high costs of the Great Society programs, the deficiencies and failures of many of them, and the inability of the government to find revenues to pay for them contributed to a growing Page 4
disillusionment in later years with the idea of federal efforts to solve social problems. By the 1980s, many Americans had become convinced that the Great Society experiments had not worked and that, indeed, government programs to solve social problems could not work. But the Great Society, despite many failures, was also responsible for some significant achievements. It significantly reduced hunger in America. It made medical care available to millions of elderly and poor people who would otherwise have had great difficulty affording it. It contributed to the greatest reduction in poverty in American history. In 1959, according to the most widely Percentage of Americans in Poverty, 1960-2010 accepted estimates, 21 percent of the American people lived below the officially established poverty line. By 1969, only 12 percent remained below that line. The improvements affected blacks and whites in about the same proportion: 56 percent of the black population had lived in poverty in 1959, while only 32 percent did so 10 years later a 42 percent reduction; 18 percent of all whites had been poor in 1959, but only 10 percent were poor a decade later a 44 percent reduction. Much of that progress was a result of economic growth, but some of it was a result of Great Society programs. Page 5