Reconsidering the Great Society
VLADECK, BRUCE C.
Reconsidering the Great Society "They'll Cut Off Your Project": A Mingo County Chronicle By Hugh Perry Praeger. 256 pp. $7.95. The Star Spangled Hustle By Robert Lee Grant with Carl Gardner...
...In the great scheme of the universe, these victories may be small indeed, but it is difficult to simply ignore them...
...At the end of Perry's tenure in Mingo County, hundreds of children were enrolled in Headstart programs staffed largely by welfare mothers...
...He was right there and he never faltered on civil rights...
...One can only hope that we have not all grown old before the Perrys and the Grants are back in government...
...The best way to insure that a social problem, once brought to attention, is not quickly forgotten, is to build a bureaucracy around it, a bureaucracy that will keep going on its own inertia, even when public interest has turned elsewhere...
...This kind of argument was clearly the rationale behind the original McGovern welfare proposal and all similar negative income tax plans, and there is much truth to it...
...Grant is sufficiently engaging and impressive to get away with it...
...240 pp...
...In evaluating the War on Poverty two further points must be made...
...While that is hardly news, in the post-mortems over the Great Society it is a fact worth remembering...
...their older brothers and sisters were receiving free hot lunches each day at school...
...Perry is a Democrat of dubious sorts...
...Above all, the war brought us Richard Nixon, whose politics represent the very antithesis of what the Great Society was trying to do...
...Reviewed by Bruce C. Vladeck Lyndon Johnson apparently believed that his life and works received a bad press after roughly 1966 or '67...
...The tragedy of the Johnson years is that every act of his Administration, however well-intentioned, got caught in the quagmire of Southeast Asia...
...Perry is white, rural and a former schoolteacher...
...In Mingo County, less genteel than Washington, guns were drawn...
...Grant a Republican of even more dubious sorts...
...On the domestic front, LBJ's perception that he was surrounded by enemies who would stop at nothing may not have been very far off the mark...
...Johnson's social reforms have acquired a negative image not only in the media but, more significantly, within the academic world...
...This is acknowledged explicitly by Grant, a black who understands full well that the politics of poverty is inseparable from the politics of race...
...In this view the poor are just like you and me, only they have less money, and establishing a cumbersome and ultimately paternalistic bureaucracy to provide them with services does more damage than good...
...Students of public policy, led by former government officials like Charles Schultze, the ex-President's Budget Director, have turned from the ideas that produced the innovations of the '60s to notions such as "incentive systems," often concluding en passant that money in itself is not really that crucial to solving the problems of the poor...
...Both Perry's and Grant's narratives are dominated by the most rancorous kinds of political conflict...
...Unfortunately, a significant number of people in this country are strongly opposed to giving anything money, power or simple self-respect-to the poor...
...The Star Spangled Hustle By Robert Lee Grant with Carl Gardner J.P...
...Grant, who spent two and a half years at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud), has had his book ghostwritten in the kind of breezy, slangy style that would be more appropriate to something entitled The Sensuous Bureaucrat...
...a co-op grocery, run by the poor, was selling food at prices 10 per cent lower than other stores in the area...
...And Lyndon Johnson supplied the money...
...Though money may not be the answer to everything, there isn't very much that can be done without it...
...In this way, much of the academic community has become an unconscious ally of Richard Nixon and his minions who, for political reasons, have sought to discredit the Johnson programs as part of their attempt to dismantle them...
...Even his memoirs seem to have been written primarily as a response to his critics...
...formerly unemployed or underemployed welfare recipients were working as carpenters, repairing substandard housing on government salaries...
...Grant's accomplishments were more modest...
...Undoubtedly the most serious of these is the contention that the entire idea was fundamentally misconceived, that it sought to deal with the symptoms of poverty, not the causes...
...That revolution occupies most of Perry's book, as it obviously occupied most of his time on the job...
...Grant is black, urbane and an admitted hustler...
...On top, or at root, of all this, a minor political revolution swept through Mingo County...
...The proper interpretation of the Great Society and its War on Poverty is a vitally important matter for us all...
...Johnson's programs may have fallen short of expectations, not from inherent flaws of design, but because they were bitterly fought at local levels from the moment of their inception, and emasculated as soon as the Gold-water-produced Democratic majorities in Congress were swept away by the normal tides of American politics...
...Even if feeding hungry children does not abolish poverty or solve what some call the "social question," it is certainly preferable to letting them starve...
...In this sense, Lyndon Johnson himself was personally responsible for the failure of his programs...
...Ultimately, it was not faulty social theories nor even the political opposition it aroused that killed the Great Society, but the war...
...Lippincott...
...To defend the Great Society, however, is not to discount every objection raised against it...
...That is no small achievement...
...First, Johnson's record on civil rights is outstanding, making that of every other President look insignificant...
...Naturally one is tempted, especially in light of the Pentagon papers and other disclosures concerning the Vietnam War, to dismiss Johnson's complaints as the defense mechanisms of a particularly gargantuan ego...
...He minces no words when he says: "The memory is still fresh that [Johnson] was the first President to say, 'We shall overcome,' with his Southern drawl...
...He joined the Model Cities program after Nixon took office, in a period when the Johnsonian reforms were being slowly but thoroughly gutted...
...Second, if the abortive efforts to build a Great Society accomplished nothing else, they at least produced an entire generation of "hustlers" like Perry and Grant, committed to the cause of the poor, experienced in the difficult problem of combatting poverty and the Federal bureaucracy, and now sitting on the sidelines doing what they can until the time comes to return to the battle...
...Perry was, for about four years, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) director in Mingo County, West Virginia, one of the poorest and most violent areas in that poor and violent state...
...Yet he was able to produce considerable concrete benefits for minority-group banks, contractors and public officials...
...These two rather dissimilar books suggest who is actually being hurt in the process...
...Still, their books are in strong agreement about the impact of Great Society programs on the poor and disfranchised, and on themselves...
...Yet it ignores a decisive historical fact: When the '60s began the poor were largely invisible, as Michael Harrington pointed out, and easily neglected...
...The graphs on government expenditures, beginning with the New Deal, rise at ever-so-gentle slopes until 1965 or '66, at which point they seem to take off almost vertically, only to level off again And really drop, if one considers funds that have been impounded with the start of the Nixon Administration...
...His book is a narrative account of OEO activities during his tenure, written with a discursive detachment that seems almost willfully disingenuous...
...Yet with regard to his domestic policies, much more than one person's reputation is at stake...
...Although the volume is less a political history than an exercise in self-advertisement...
...One can examine any conceivable category relating to the public welfare, be it early childhood education, college scholarships, prenatal care, or services for the elderly, and see the same thing...
...7.50...
...He became distracted, leaving the snipers free to take pot shots at his domestic reforms...
Vol. 56 • February 1973 • No. 3
