“Puerto Rico Can Teach So Much”: The Hemispheric and Imperial Origins of the Educational War on Poverty

Through a focus on liberal academic and policy networks, this article considers how ideas and practices central to an educational “war on poverty” grew through connections between postwar Puerto Rico, Latin America, and New York. In particular, it analyzes how social scientific ideas about education's role in economic development found ample ground in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as the island assumed the role of “laboratory” of democracy and development after the Second World War. The narrative then considers how this Cold War programming came to influence education initiatives in both U.S. foreign aid programs in Latin America and New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as the number of Puerto Rican students grew amid the Puerto Rican Great Migration. Ultimately, the article suggests a broader hemispheric and imperial framework in narrating the evolution of postwar education policy in the nation's largest city.

Salvaging Marginalized Men: How the Department of Defense Waged the War on Poverty

Architects of social welfare policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the military as a site for strengthening the male breadwinner as the head of the “traditional family.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert McNamara—men not often mentioned in the same conversations—both spoke of “salvaging” young men through military service. The Department of Defense created Project Transition, a vocational jobs-training program for GIs getting ready to leave the military, and Project 100,000, which lowered draft requirements in order to put men who were previously unqualified into the military. The Department of Defense also made significant moves to end housing discrimination in communities surrounding military installations. Policymakers were convinced that any extension of social welfare demanded reciprocal responsibility from its male citizens. During the longest peacetime draft in American history, policymakers viewed programs to expand civil rights and social welfare as also expanding the umbrella of the obligations of citizenship.

Mass Incarceration Retards Racial Integration

President Nixon replaced President Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs in 1971. This new drug war was expanded by President Reagan and others to create mass incarceration. The United States currently has a higher percentage of its citizens incarcerated than any other industrial country. Although Blacks are only 13 percent of the population, they are 40 percent of the incarcerated. The literatures on the causes and effects of mass incarceration are largely distinct, and I combine them to show the effects of mass incarceration on racial integration. Racial prejudice produced mass incarceration, and mass incarceration now retards racial integration.

Poverty Is Preventable

Chapter 9 addresses the myth that poverty is inevitable. This idea goes back to Biblical times and is often expressed by conservatives. In contrast, this chapter argues that poverty is preventable. Three examples are given in which poverty has been substantially reduced: (1) the War on Poverty during the 1960s and early 1970s; (2) the elderly poverty rate from 1959 to 2019; and (3) single-parent families in Denmark. In each case, poverty has been reduced through social policies. The chapter concludes that the problem is not a lack of solutions. There is considerable evidence demonstrating what strategies are effective in reducing poverty. The problem lies in a lack of political will to implement these strategies. Politicians have used the myth of poverty’s inevitability to reinforce their agenda of a smaller federal government footprint.

Stirring up lessons for food activists [Book review]

The book Stirrings examines the anti-hunger efforts of the food movement in the latter part of the 20th century for lessons in their suc­cesses and failures, as well as relevance to the modern food movement in America. Its six chap­ters examine four food nonprofits’ responses to hunger and its causes in urban New York City (NYC). The diversity of these case studies allowed for multidimensional analyses and insights of how groups of people can work to challenge policy pri­ori­ties and change social values that cause hunger. The context of the case studies is established in the introduction by recounting the history and politics of the awareness of hunger and poverty in Amer­ica, the “land of plenty and wealth” during the 1960s, and the subsequent federal government anti-hunger and welfare programs (e.g., War on Poverty and food stamps programs). This context also includes the drastic reductions of these pro­grams, first by the austerity budget measures of the mid-1970s and then by the rise of neoliberal gov­ernment policies starting in the 1980s. This infor­mation is intended to inform the reader of the raison d’etre for the rise and diversity of food activism movement described in this book. . . .