scholarly journals A High-Wire Crusade: Republicans and the War on Poverty, 1966

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-405
Author(s):  
Mark McLay
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Elementary And Secondary Education ◽  
Education Act ◽  
Economic Opportunity Act ◽  
Antipoverty Programs ◽  
The New Deal

Abstract:During 1966, the Republican Party launched a largely successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Republican candidates pursued an anti–War on Poverty midterm strategy, which made antipoverty programs the symbol of Great Society liberalism, rather than its more popular programs, such as Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Moreover, in Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans offered well-crafted alternatives—such as their “Opportunity Crusade”—to offset charges of negativism and elitism that had dogged the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Significantly, while the War on Poverty survived the year, the Republican minority was unexpectedly successful in making important changes to the Economic Opportunity Act during the antipoverty legislation’s renewal. Overall, the Republican challenge to the War on Poverty in 1966, boded ill for the program’s longevity when the GOP finally secured the levers of power.

scholarly journals How Johnson Fought the War on Poverty: The Economics and Politics of Funding at the Office of Economic Opportunity

2014 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha J. Bailey ◽  
Nicolas J. Duquette
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Office Of Economic Opportunity ◽  
Economic Opportunity Act ◽  
Political Variables ◽  
Economics And Politics

This article presents a quantitative analysis of the geographic distribution of spending through the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). Using newly assembled state- and county-level data, the results show that the Johnson administration directed funding in ways consistent with the War on Poverty's rhetoric of fighting poverty and racial discrimination: poorer areas and those with a greater share of nonwhite residents received systematically more funding. In contrast to New Deal spending, political variables explain very little of the variation in EOA funding. The smaller role of politics may help explain the strong backlash against the War on Poverty's programs.

Mississippi Republicans and the Politics of Poverty

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-175
Author(s):  
Emma J. Folwell
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Color Blindness ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Office Of Economic Opportunity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Chapter six explores the impact of the election of Richard Nixon on the war on poverty. It uncovers the conversations in the new Republican administration regarding the fate of the war on poverty, from questions over whether to rename the Office of Economic Opportunity to the appointment of Don Rumsfeld as OEO director. The chapter then moves on to discuss the way in which the evolution of massive resistance after 1965 and white opposition to the war on poverty shaped and contributed to emerging strands of conservative Republicanism in Mississippi. It places Mississippi’s “conservative color-blindness” in the broader context of the rise of the sunbelt South. Finally, the chapter illustrates the ways in which grassroots conservative groups—particularly women—were central to forging an ostensibly race neutral war against the war on poverty that was vital to the growing Mississippi Republican Party.

The House and the Federal Role: A Computer Simulation of Roll-Call Voting

1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 494-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
White House ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Post War ◽  
The New Deal

Much of the business of the U.S. Congress in the post war period has involved issues concerning the size and scope of activities of the federal government. The legislation in this area can be traced, for the most part, to measures which originated during the period of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and to measures enacted during World War II to meet the short-run exigencies attendant to rapid economic and social mobilization. From the point of view of the expansion of the federal role, the Eisenhower years are of some moment. While they marked a lull in the expansionist trend witnessed under the Democratic presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman, their significance lies in the fact that despite the change in adminsitrations, there was no reversal of the policies begun during the Roosevelt years. While most of the Republican legislators were on record in opposition to the expansion of the federal role, the failure of the Republican Party to introduce and enact legislation to reverse the trend of federal expansion resulted in a new plateau of federal activity from which the congressional dialogue was to proceed during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.While the 87th Congress, meeting during Kennedy's first two years in the White House, did not enact the quantity of legislation expanding the federal role that Kennedy had called for in his inaugural, In the 88th Congress both parties supported a larger federal role to a greater extent than they had previously. In fact the first sessions of the 88th Congress as it bears on the federal role has been summed up as follows: “At no time did the majority of both parties reject a larger federal role.” (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1963, p. 724) With two exceptions, the statement holds true for the second session in 1964.

The American Narrative: Is There One & What Is It?

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Chafe
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
New Deal ◽  
American History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Great Society ◽  
The Common ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
The New Deal

Nearly four centuries of American history have witnessed the evolving conflict between two competing sets of values: a belief that acting on behalf of the common good should guide social and political behavior, and a belief that unfettered individual freedom should dominate political and social life. Tracing this conflict from Puritanism through the American Revolution, the Civil War, the rise of industrialism, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the conservative revival of the Nixon/Reagan era, the essay reveals this clash of values as pivotal to understanding the narrative of American history, with contemporary political battles crystallizing just how basic this conflict has been.

State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Brown
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
National State ◽  
Alternative Models ◽  
The Third ◽  
State Economy ◽  
The New Deal

In what sense were the 1940s a turning point for the postwar development of the American state? This is an odd question since the decade is not usually considered a moment of lasting political transformation, as were the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, it is more characteristically rendered as a period of political stalemate, memorably captured by Samuel Lubell's description of Harry Truman as “The Man Who Bought Time.” Yet the choices of the 1940s have been recently characterized by Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski as far more significant than hitherto understood. Out of the conflict and debate over the New Deal emerge, they argue, a rather “crisp choice … about the character of the national state,” one that decided between alternative models of state-economy relationships.

Liberalism from the Fair Deal to the Great Society

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Great Society ◽  
The New Deal

In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union address set out what he termed an “economic Bill of Rights” that would act as a manifesto of liberal policies after World War Two. Politically, however, the United States was a different place than the country that had faced the ravages of the Great Depression of the 1930s and ushered in Roosevelt’s New Deal to transform the relationship between government and the people. Key legacies of the New Deal, such as Social Security, remained and were gradually expanded, but opponents of governmental regulation of the economy launched a bitter campaign after the war to roll back labor union rights and dismantle the New Deal state. Liberal heirs to FDR in the 1950s, represented by figures like two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, struggled to rework liberalism to tackle the realities of a more prosperous age. The long shadow of the U.S. Cold War with the Soviet Union also set up new challenges for liberal politicians trying to juggle domestic and international priorities in an era of superpower rivalry and American global dominance. The election of John F. Kennedy as president in November 1960 seemed to represent a narrow victory for Cold War liberalism, and his election coincided with the intensification of the struggle for racial equality in the United States that would do much to shape liberal politics in the 1960s. After his assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson launched his “Great Society,” a commitment to eradicate poverty and to provide greater economic security for Americans through policies such as Medicare. But his administration’s deepening involvement in the Vietnam War and its mixed record on alleviating poverty did much to taint the positive connotations of “liberalism” that had dominated politics during the New Deal era.

Congress, Minority Interests, and Federal Policymaking

Oversight ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Minta
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Minority Interests ◽  
Racial Ethnic ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Historical Examination

This chapter examines Congress' historical and contemporary role in overseeing the bureaucracy as it relates to enacting and implementing racial/ethnic and social welfare policies. Most of the congressional politics literature examines whether Congress as an institution pays attention to particular issues; rarely do studies examine to what extent individual legislators devote attention to these same issues by intervening in agency policymaking. The chapter offers a historical examination of the collective efforts of Congress and of individual legislators to advocate for the interests of racial and ethnic minorities during the eras of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society by way of providing context for the analysis in the chapters that follow.

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