The Great Society and Its Legacy: Twenty Years of U.S. Social Policy,
Book by Peggy L. Cuciti, Marshall Kaplan; Duke University Press, 1986

Introduction

The early sixties were a time of affluence, idealism, optimism, and belief in the problem-solving abilities of government. While President Kennedy embraced all of these themes in his New Frontier, it was President Johnson who in challenging the nation to create a Great Society left a rich legislative legacy. The eighty-ninth Congress, which responded to the Johnson initiatives, was described as one of "accomplished hopes... realized dreams," having "brought to a harvest a generation's backlog of ideas and social legislation." <11969540>Some of the initiatives, such as Medicare, were first conceived during Roosevelt's New Deal; others, such as the War on Poverty, were truly Great Society creations.

Almost twenty years later another activist (albeit conservative) president was elected who led Congress to another burst of legislative activity. The changes enacted during the first administration of Ronald Reagan are perceived by many to be as fundamental as those of the Great Society. Unlike President Johnson who was concerned about "private affluence and public squalor," President Reagan worries about public confiscation of resources from the private sector. 2 <11969540>While Johnson saw government as the preeminent problem solver, Reagan sees government as a large part of the problem. Interestingly, however, both presidents wrought their changes after a period characterized by deadlock and malaise.

With the perspective of hindsight, it now appears that the interim administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter offered continuity. While not characterized by the moral fervor of the Great Society period, they essentially accepted the premises set forth during the Kennedy-Johnson years. The federal government continued to grow; new programs were enacted and resources were committed in the hope of finding solutions to the domestic problems of the day. Certainly there were quibbles with the design of some Great Society programs and the priorities they repre-

1 Themes and Premises

The Great Society in 1984: Relic or Reality?

ROBERT WOOD

Ventures in retrospection can be perilous, especially when you are looking back on events in which you were directly involved. Twenty years is a long enough time to provide reasonable detachment in perspective. It is, however, also long enough for memories to become unreliable, for facts to be embellished, for contributions to be magnified, and for errors to be ignored. It is important, then, to forswear remembrance in any romantic sense and to make sure reflection has as solid an empirical base as one can muster. Nevertheless, the utility of the participant-observer in the evolving field of public analysis, where properly constrained, is generally acknowledged. When combined with observations derived from more sophisticated techniques of external research, the effects can be reinforcing and one Hand washes another.

The conventional judgment about the programs launched twenty years ago, advanced by academic commentators and popular columnists alike throughout the seventies down to today, runs something like this. A suddenly powerful, politically seasoned president, megalomanical in his ambitions, driven by personal insecurities, ineffective with the media, and haunted by the Kennedy legacy, deviously first co-opted and then manipulated experts and scholars. These guileful, irresponsible individuals, drawn like moths to the candle flame of power, reached into their bags of half-formulated unverified hypotheses and theories and seized the opportunity to translate preposterous notions into law. A series of unpropitious events and a recalcitrant bureaucracy at all levels of the federal system doomed their ill-considered, unproven schemes to failure.

2 The Macroeconomic Context

The Evolution of Economic Policy

BARRY P. BOSWORTH

The public perspective on the economic history of the last two decades might be entitled "The Rise and Fall of Macroeconomic Policy." The 1960s are often viewed as a period of growing optimism about the ability of fiscal and monetary policies to achieve sustained economic expansion free of business-cycle recessions. Economic growth was something we came to take for granted and attention in the early 1970s shifted to a greater concern for the distributional implications of that growth.

That optimism was destroyed by the events of the 1970s. The rate of inflation accelerated to double-digit levels by the end of the decade. At the peak of the expansion of 1979, the unemployment rate was 6 percent compared to 3.5 a decade earlier; and today we speak of an unemployment rate of 6.5 to 7 percent as the minimum rate consistent with nonaccelerating inflation. Average real hourly earnings (adjusted for inflation) of production workers rose by 17 percent in the 1960s. Today real earnings are slightly below the levels of 1970. Most recently, fiscal policy itself has become caught up in an ideological debate over the size of government that seems to have eliminated government as an effective tool of stabilization policy for the foreseeable future.

It is reasonable to ask, "What went wrong?" Was the optimism and faith in the ability of government to control the course of the economy misplaced? While stabilization policy failed to live up to the expectations it engendered during the 1960s, was the deteriorating economic performance the fault of poor policy decisions, or was it a case of making the best of a bad situation? In the effort to draw some lessons for future policy, it is useful to examine what went wrong.

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1 The Discovery of Poverty

Poverty in the United States

PAUL N. YLVISAKER

My purpose here is to trace the long journey this country has taken in its dealing with poverty, from 1964 when the War on Poverty became a high presidential priority to the present when it seems to have no significant place on the White House agenda. My mood is that of an unrepentant poverty warrior, still persuaded that what was launched in the sixties was essentially noble and successful and that a continuing commitment to develop this nation's wasting human resources is a pragmatic and moral imperative.

The journey has been a long one: from the euphoria of that early period when decimal points in budgetary proposals could be moved blithely to the right, to the melancholy of retrenchment with decimal points moving inexorably to the left; from the rather quaint conviction in the sixties that we were mopping up the last vestiges of poverty within an affluent nation, to the chastening awareness that we are today coping with a global flood.

Despite those shifts in environment and perception, I still view both past and future with optimism. The War on Poverty was essentially a success: it helped convert the powerful social forces breaking suddenly upon the United States during the sixties -- surging energies of the young and the minorities -- into constructive elements; it built bridges between ghettos and the establishment over which an extraordinary percentage of contemporary leaders have passed; it released the creative potential of indigenous populations through the novel vehicle of community action; and it left a remarkable residue of innovative techniques (early childhood education, advocacy and legal services, employment training, fos-

2 The Programmatic Legacy

Did the Great Society and Subsequent Initiatives Work?

SAR A. LEVITAN AND CLIFFORD M. JOHNSON

Two decades ago, on May 22, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson urged the nation to strive toward the establishment of a Great Society. "We have the opportunity," he stated in the memorable commencement address at the University of Michigan, "to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but also toward the Great Society [that] demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time."

Nineteen years later President Ronald Reagan urged the nation to abandon Johnson's faith in the potential of collective action and the benefits of government intervention. "It's time to bury the myth that bigger government brings more opportunity and compassion," he argued in August 1983.

Is President Reagan's harsh and negative assessment justified? How much truth is there to the currently prevailing view that the Great Society simply threw money at problems? Did the Johnson initiatives to build a better society indeed fail?

What is obvious is that our welfare system has expanded dramatically over the past two decades, with the cost of our efforts rising accordingly. Federal outlays for social welfare legislation, broadly defined, totaled $393 billion in 1984 compared with $164 billion (adjusted for inflation)

Creating Jobs for Americans: From MDTA to Industrial Policy

PETER B. EDELMAN

Twenty years after the Great Society it appears that the revisionism of the last decade is beginning to thaw, and perhaps before long the Great Society will begin to receive the credit it deserves. That is critically important for the future of social policy, as well as for purposes of putting the record of the past in proper order.

This essay evaluates efforts during the sixties and seventies to help people move into the labor market, improve their position, or make a transition, in circumstances where an imperfection or barrier in the labor market impedes their mobility. Job "creation" is also discussed. But full exposition of policies to promote a healthy economy is beyond the scope of the essay.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

Perhaps a Great Society issue exists that is now only a matter of historical concern, but employment is not such a one. Efforts to fight chronic joblessness among the historically disadvantaged have not caused the problem to disappear, and in the last four years that problem has been not only exacerbated but also joined by another: the plight of people displaced by the flight of jobs abroad and by automation. The former group -- the "old" poor -- tends to be concentrated by race or ethnic identification, while the latter group is associated with particular regions in the country. <11969546>

The combined numbers are large. The overall unemployment rate, hardly satisfactory in itself as it continues at well over 7 percent, tells only part of the story. Despite all the news about recovery and the number of jobs created by it, about 15 million people are still either unemployed, "discouraged" and no longer seeking work, or working part-time only because they cannot find a full-time job. 2 <11969547>A million and a half people have been unemployed more than half a year. 3 <11969547>

The problems of the "old" poor have become measurably worse over the past four years. Black teenage unemployment is regularly over 40 percent, compared to around 18 percent for all teens, and that again is not the whole story. Employment of black teenagers has deteriorated to

The Great Society: Lessons for the Future,
Book by Eli Ginzberg, Robert M. Solow; Basic Books, 1974

1 Social intervention in a democracy

LANCE LIEBMAN

BORN in the Enlightenment, the great age of making men good through the structure of social institutions, America has always sought justice and happiness through collective agreements. A proper constitution, John Adams wrote, "causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general . . . and makes the common people brave and enterprising." Thus it is wrong to say, as Charles Schultze and his Brookings associates do, that only recently has the American government sought "to change fundamental behavior patterns of individuals and institutions." Although some of the national crusades in the 1960's were different from most bread-and-butter New Deal programs, seen as a whole the 1960's were merely the latest phase of a two-century-old series of American obsessions and efforts. Nevertheless, they were a phase that revealed new aspects of the old ideas.

During the 10 years since Lyndon Johnson proposed a war on poverty, two main themes have dominated domestic politics. One is the question of man's ability to master his world. The moon trip--delivered as promised, almost like Babe Ruth pointing to the bleachers before a home run--was man's most dramatic feat in taming nature. Unlike Lindbergh's trip, it required thousands of participants, in a vast collection of orchestrated bureaucratic

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2 Economic policy and unemployment in the 1960's

EDMUND S. PHELPS

CERTAINLY it would be a mistake to interpret the experiments in governmental economic intervention made in the 1960's as a quantum change in the country's theory of the role of government or its attitudes toward inequality and redistribution. From the times of Bentham and Bismarck to the New Deal and Fair Deal there has been increasing government intervention on behalf of various groups, including those that are poor or disadvantaged. The policies and programs begun in the past decade, mainly during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, are another important episode in that history. My own guess is that, to the extent that the 1960's differ significantly from other periods of social change and experiment, they will be characterized by the widened assertion of various natural rights ahead of the public convenience, and even above equalitarian notions of fairness or "equity" in the distribution of economic benefits.

Whatever the 1960's were, the Great Society programs that were an important feature of them have since become the object of sweeping criticisms. Many of them are viewed as failures. There seems to be a diminished confidence in the effectiveness of the government generally to achieve its announced objectives and a heightened sense of the fallibility of the social knowledge, if any, that serves as the

3 Reform follows reality: the growth of welfare

GILBERT Y. STEINER

THE Administration that came to power in 1961 and looked forward to being in power for eight years did not dare nor wish to deal with public assistance as its predecessor had during its last years--by holding on to the status quo and hoping for the best. A policy fashioned in the 1930's and 1940's particularly for the aged simply would not self-adjust in the 1960's to cope with the needs of unmarried and deserted mothers and their children. The changing shape of the welfare population presaged high costs without political benefits, the worst of all situations. Accordingly, formulating plans to cope with the needs of dependent families constituted a built-in, unavoidable challenge to the new Kennedy Administration just as it would have to a new Nixon Administration then, and as it did to a new Nixon Administration eight years thereafter, and a Johnson Administration in the interim.

In the key aspect of the first Presidential message exclusively devoted to public welfare ever sent to Congress, Kennedy unfortunately depended on the experts. He proposed an emphasis on psycho-social services, to be offered with a gentle touch by skilled professionals. After a full five-year run, Congressional skeptics and Johnson's systematic thinkers evaluated that emphasis, found it wanting, and displaced soft social work therapy with a tougher

4 What does it do for the poor? --a new test for national policy

ROBERT J. LAMPMAN

JOHN F. Kennedy's slogan was, "Let's get the country moving again." He sought to reduce unemployment and increase the rate of economic growth without causing inflation or a deficit in the balance of payments. His emphasis was on efficiency and, although he did press for such New Deal-Fair Deal measures as civil rights, health insurance, and aid to education, his Administration placed higher priority on an investment tax credit, research and development outlays, and, above all, a Keynesian tax cut designed to spur economic recovery.

Lyndon B. Johnson's vision of a "Great Society" emphasized equity. He foresaw a nation where no one would have to live in poverty and all would have sufficient money income, public services, and civil rights to enable them to participate with dignity as full citizens. It would be an affluent society, but also a compassionate one, one that called for sacrifice by the majority to bring out the talents and willing cooperation of previously submerged and disadvantaged minorities.

It is right to call the war on poverty--first enunciated in President Johnson's State of the Union message and promptly endorsed by Congress in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964--a logical extension of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Social Security Act and Harry S.

5 The uses and limits of manpower policy

LLOYD ULMAN

POLICIES that had been billed in the 1960's as specifics against inflation, unemployment, or poverty can hardly expect many enthusiastic endorsements today. Certainly, criticism of the so-called manpower policies, which had been touted for all three jobs at one time or another--and whose financial support from the federal government had increased tenfold over the decade --should come as no surprise. On the other hand, the criticism seems to have come most strongly and with equal fervor from the opposite ends of the political spectrum; and some readers may wonder whether any policy that has become the target of such wide-angle cross fire can--like the man who hates children and dogs--be all bad.

Public manpower policies have come to embrace a wide range of personnel activities, including (but by no means restricted to) counseling, training (in both educational institutions and on the job), the provision of better and cheaper information to employers and job seekers, and financial subvention of employers and trainees. Yet this broad range of activities constitutes only a subset of what a group of economists in the Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions (or LO), led by Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner in the early post-War period, termed "active labor market policies." By the end of the 1940's, Sweden, like other countries in Western Europe, began to experience

Major public initiatives in health care

HERBERT E. KLARMAN

To set the stage for discussing certain major public initiatives in the 1960's, a few selected figures are presented. Table 1 shows the amounts spent on health care in this country, the continuing increase in the ratio of health care expenditures to the Gross National Product, and the fraction of the total met by public funds, which had remained steady at one quarter for 15 years but increased in recent years, to three eighths.

Perhaps more striking is Table 2, which shows a sharp acceleration in the annual rate of change in expenditures after 1966. However, the rate of increase of eight per cent in the preceding intervals was not small.

Official figures for fiscal year 1973, ending June 30, are not yet available. Scattered evidence indicates that the amount spent will have exceeded $90 billion, despite the fact that the Economic Stablilization Program of the Nixon Administration singled out the health services industry for special attention.

It is fair to caution the reader that public programs in health are usually programs in health services, and that this should be kept in mind when reviewing the data. Excluded from the official scope of health care expenditures are such items as medical education outside the hospital, water supply, water pollution control, and solid waste

7 The successes and failures of federal housing policy ANTHONY DOWNSTO ASSESS the effectiveness of federal housing-related policies in the 1960's and early 1970's, it is necessary to make some arbitrary distinctions, heroic assumptions, and controversial judgments. The first arbitrary distinction is to divide all federal housing-related policies into the following four categories:

1.	Indirect influences: Actions influencing housing production through monetary, fiscal, and credit policies aimed primarily at maintaining prosperity or fighting inflation.
2.	Direct financial influences: Actions aimed at affecting the total supply of housing through credit and institutional arrangements rather than direct financial aid. An example is the creation of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation to help establish an effective secondary market in mortgages.
3.	Direct housing subsidies: Actions aimed at increasing the supply of housing directly available to low-income households. Examples are the Section 235 and 236 programs.
4.	Community-related programs: Actions that affect the structure of urban areas and therefore impact housing markets and the neighborhood conditions incorporated in the everyday meaning of the term "housing." Examples are the Interstate Highway Program, urban renewal, and the Model Cities Program.

8 Economic developments in the black community

ANDREW F. BRIMMER

ONLY a few of the economic and social programs launched during the 1960's were focused primarily on blacks. The most visible effort in this category, the "black capitalism" program of the Nixon Administration, came very late in the decade. However, blacks were prominent among the target populations aimed at by many of the New Frontier and Great Society programs.

The most fundamental economic goal of the early 1960's, of course, was the stimulation of an economy that had remained sluggish for nearly a decade. Consequently, any appraisal of economic changes among blacks during the period must begin with an assessment of the benefits they received from economic expansion. These benefits can be traced in the growth of black employment and the reduction in joblessness, as well as in rising black income, especially among the better educated. Unfortunately, however, this progress must be viewed against the background of a deepening schism in the black community between those enjoying expanding prosperity and those caught in a widening web of poverty.

The economic history of blacks in the United States during the last decade mirrors that of the country at large. However, blacks as a group did slightly better in the 1960's--and considerably worse in the last few years--than the nation as a whole. The principal changes in employment and income among blacks can be traced in Table 1. From 1961 through 1969, the black labor force rose in line with the total civilian labor force;...

9 The federal role in education

RALPH W. TYLER

DURING the 1960's the federal government's financial aid to schools and colleges surged upward from less than $2 billion to more than $10 billion and continued at this level into the 1970's. A large part of this increase was in funds for elementary and secondary education. In 1960 federal grants to elementary and secondary schools amounted to about a half-billion dollars. By 1970 this had risen to about $3.5 billion. Although scores of educational programs were initiated by federal action in the 1960's, the most important ones can be grouped according to four major objectives: educating the disadvantaged, broadening the access to higher education, improving education for the world of work, and desegregating schools and colleges. Before describing these efforts in more detail, however, some background is necessary.

Although the Constitution does not specify education as a federal responsibility, the national government has long encouraged and often contributed to the support of schools and colleges. In 1785 the Congress of the Confederation adopted an ordinance for the disposal of public lands in the Western Territory that reserved one section of every township for the endowment of schools within that township. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 the Congress declared that "religion, morality and knowledge being necessary for good govern-

10 Blacks and the crisis in political participation

CHARLES V. HAMILTON

IT is significant that the decade of the 1960's opened with a debate in the country and the Congress over various provisions of a proposed civil rights bill dealing with the right to vote in the South. Three years earlier, in 1957, Congress passed and the President signed the first civil rights law in 82 years. The main provisions of that legislation pertained to voting rights. But that law was relatively weak and many people knew it would have to be strengthened. In many ways, the 1960's can be seen as a decade devoted to achieving the goal of full right of access to political participation. This seems a bit strange in a country that was assumed to have solved, or at least nearly solved, the problem of participation long before the 1960's. This optimism was reflected in the following statement by Professor Samuel P. Huntington: "The United States . . . pioneered in popular participation in government not only in terms of the number of people who could vote for public officials but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the number of public officials who could be voted on by the people." ¹

Huntington was more precise when he connected the expansion

11 Some lessons of the 1960's

ELI GINZBERG & ROBERT M. SOLOW

IN this brief concluding essay, our intention is not so much to summarize as to distill. The individual articles in this symposium are, after all, themselves summaries. Each provides a sketch of a range of complicated policy problems, and of a tangled variety of half-coordinated attempts to solve them. We can hope to extract two kinds of lessons from this history. One has to do with the general process of social reform in a middle-class democracy, or at least in this middle-class democracy. A second has to do with the specific legislative programs that made up the Great Society. We do not have much to add to what our colleagues have said about the nature of particular problems and the successes and failures of individual programs in responding to them, so we will concentrate our attention on the more general implications of recent experience for social intervention and social reform.

It seems to us that no one who reads the evidence in the preceding essays can seriously subscribe to either of the extreme, simple, fashionable dogmas: that social legislation is merely a sham, aimed at camouflaging, not solving, problems; or that all major political intervention in social problems is a mistake, bound to fail, and better left to local government, private charity, or the free market. Contrary to these dogmas, the evidence seems to show that the problems are real, that the political pressure to do something about them is often irresistible, and that many partial, but genuine successes have been achieved.Often, though not always, the intended beneficiaries of social legislation do benefit. There are sometimes unintended and unwanted side...