PROGRESS ON POVERTY

...Critics have also pointed to the very brief training period allowed between the President's mid-May announcement of the Head-Start grants and the July 1 opening date of the pre-school centers...

...At the same time, Shriver has insisted that the poor must be genuinely involved in the direction of the program, and his aides have given at least tacit support to projects that can only make City Hall uncomfortable...

...5 million would be lent to a thousand small businesses, and $25.7 million to farmers and agricultural cooperatives...

...The controversy erupted nationally in April when Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York charged that "in far too many communities, giant fiestas of political patronage have been encouraged...

...Community Action—the largest and most controversial component, providing Federal financial support for a broad spectrum of local anti-poverty activities in urban and rural areas, on Indian reservations, and among migrant workers...

...These disputes are part of the bitter nationwide conflict over control of local community action efforts and "maximum feasible participation" of the poor...

...Certainly," he concedes, "the Mayor is a politician, but in this case he is exerting his leadership as the city's number one civic leader—and this is all to the good...

...But it was President Johnson who embraced the idea, took it to the people, and made it a major component of what he was later to call the Great Society...

...that the Economic Opportunity Act "may well be regarded as history's greatest relief program for the benefit of the welfare industry...

...Each day brings rounds of hurried conferences and consultations, mail sacks full of queries and grant applications, Congressional complaints, and reports of trouble in the field...

...There is confusion over who is friend and who is foe...

...In Alabama, Governor George C. Wallace, exercising a gubernatorial veto provision in the Economic Opportunity Act, blocked a $66,349 Federal grant to the biracial Birmingham Area Committee for Development...

...Before a Washington audience of Congressmen and their aides, Alinsky recently assailed the War on Poverty in characteristically provocative terms...

...I don't believe by any stretch of the imagination that this is Mr...

...Our slums are not foreign nations to be worked with in such a manner as never to constitute a challenge to the status quo...

...In the communities, all of these points continue to be in dispute...

...Nonetheless, the OEO staff has worked at a hectic pace in recent months to spend as much as possible of the fiscal 1965 appropriation...

...150,000 young people would be enrolled in Neighborhood Youth Corps projects in 275 communities...

...They are: The Job Corps—an adaptation of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps camps, which provides residential centers for young men and women aged sixteen through twenty-one who lack the schooling and skills essential for employment...

...But Powell's accusations of political patronage, payroll padding, and bypassing of the poor have been echoed in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and other cities...

...Congressional criticism has been at least partially muted by Shriver's assurances that city-wide "umbrella organizations"—which are responsible for coordinating anti-poverty programs.—will be required to show "substantial and effective participation...

...Shriver has promised, too, that private anti-poverty agencies will not be shut out of the program...

...Alinsky charged that the War on Poverty "is emerging as a huge political pork barrel...

...Stevenson and other critics contend that Chicago's umbrella agency, the Committee on Urban Opportunity, is packed with political appointees and businessmen...

...But the criticism that rankles most at OEO comes from those who look at the War on Poverty and ask: Why not victory...

...poor liaison with state and local anti-poverty agencies...

...Federal financing of the project has prompted local authorities to protest to the White House against "agitation" and "Marxist tactics," but OEO has shown no disposition to retreat...

...35,000 trainees in all fifty states and four territories would be enrolled in adult basic education courses...

...OEO officials contend big business has demonstrated its competence in job training, and they argue that the 4.7 per cent profit ceiling in Job Corps contracts is well below industry's normal return...

...In testimony before Powell's committee in the House, the Reverend Lynward Stevenson, who heads a powerful community organization in the poverty-stricken Woodlawn area, charged that "the poor are being kept out of planning poverty programs by men who drive Cadillacs, eat three-inch steaks, and sip champagne at their luncheon meetings...

...Work Experience—a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare program designed to help unemployed heads of families gain on-the-job experience...

...more than 45,000 college students would participate in work-study programs at 800 institutions...

...In fact, some members of the staff say privately that Alinsky's tactics may come to play an increasingly important role in the War on PovertyThese sympathies have not gone undetected...

...When Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act last August— President Johnson's first major piece of domestic legislation—it authorized a $947.5 million program...

...The Neighborhood Youth Corps —a Department of Labor effort to provide full-time or part-time training and experience for young people in local hospitals, settlement houses, schools, libraries, courts, parks, and playgrounds...

...If the poor knew the answers to the problems of poverty, Brooks suggests, they would not be poor...

...But some of those young men down there are just catching up...

...But Shriver's point of view has not been fully outlined...

...In Chicago, Dr...

...The energetic lieutenants of the Office of Economic Opportunity take the martial metaphor seriously...

...Ten months after passage of the Economic Opportunity Act and seven months after announcement of the first $35 million in grants, it is clear that the War on Poverty was aptly named...

...The VISTA program, he said, would have 2,000 volunteers in training or at work in one hundred communities...

...By June 30, Shriver told a Congressional delegation this spring, 139 Job Corps centers would enroll 10,000 young men and women—considerably fewer than the 40,000 enrollees originally projected for the first fiscal year...

...The National Association of Manufacturers, in an "editorial" distributed to newspapers by a public relations service, called the program "an untidy alliance between study groups, political hacks, and publicists" which "will gobble up a hundred billion dollars in a decade...

...Litton Industries, IBM, IT&T, Ford Motor Company, and General Electric are among the anti-poverty contractors, and financial page writers have noted the profit potential of "the ever-expanding social legislation market...

...Prompted by growing concern over persistent poverty in an era of unprecedented prosperity, the first White House suggestions for a concerted Federal attack on economic deprivation were raised during the last months of the Kennedy Administration...

...VISTA—the Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic Peace Corps providing a modest living allowance for volunteers who enlist, as aides in the War on Poverty, to work with migrant laborers, on Indian reservations, and in urban and rural community action programs, slum areas, hospitals, schools, and institutions for the mentally ill or retarded...

...Office of Education and offering part-time employment, on or off campus, to college students from low-income families...

...Ten major activities—some old, some new, some borrowed from existing Federal programs—were authorized by Congress as components of the War on Poverty...

...Its executive director, Dr...

...College Work-Study—a program administered by the U.S...

...Assistance for Migrant Workers— Federal grants, loans, and loan guarantees to help states and localities meet the special needs of migrant workers and their families for housing, sanitation, education, and child care...

...Shriver said some 500 community action programs would be under way by June 30 in 350 localities, at a total cost of $235 million...

...Some education authorities have misgivings about the hasty mobilization of Project Head-Start...

...Rural Loans—a Department of Agriculture program of loans and technical assistance to help low-income farm families increase their earnings, and to start or strengthen cooperatives serving these families...

...They decorate their walls with war maps...

...What they portend for the outcome of the War on Poverty— and for the nation's thirty-five million hard-core poor—is not yet clear...

...Martin Deutsch, director of the Institute for Developmental Studies in New York, warns that "the best pre-school program can do more harm than good if the children don't have appropriate kindergarten programs into which they can step —and if the early grade years are not designed to carry through what was begun in the pre-school program...

...Other appraisals of the War on Poverty range from predictable praise— President Johnson says no other national peacetime program "has reached so many people so fast and so effectively"—to equally predictable condemnation...

...Alinsky is a lecturer and consultant for the program, which is training organizers to mobilize the city's poor into pressure groups...

...delays in disbursement of funds...

...the original first-year estimate called for 5,000 volunteers...

...Shriver's point of view...

...Its first headquarters, a converted hotel which once commanded the close scrutiny of the Washington police department's vice squad, has been replaced by new, though austere, permanent offices...

...His strategy —progress through conflict—has made him a feared and hated figure in dozens of city halls...

...that anti-poverty funds are being used "to suffocate militant independent leadership and action organizations which have been arising to arm the poor with their share of power...

...That things are happening is beyond dispute...

...Nobody would be yelling if nothing was happening," he says...

...There is a war on, and no one is sure who is winning...

...When it appropriated the funds three months later, Congress trimmed the allocation to $784.4 million...

...The total OEO staff now numbers close to one thousand...

...Chief among these critics is Chicago sociologist Saul D. Alinsky, who for more than a quarter of a century has been leading his own guerrilla attacks on poverty...

...Paradoxically, Alinsky's radical approach has strong supporters in the Office of Economic Opportunity...

...Basic education, job training, and "constructive work experience"—much of it in conservation projects—are combined in a two-year program...

...Under the law, local authorities must take the initiative in developing programs, and must provide for "maximum feasible participation" of the poor themselves in planning and execution...

...Chicago's $12 million community action program, the largest in the country, has been embroiled in a searing— but not atypical—controversy...

...Some thirty-five million Americans—nearly one fifth of the nation—are in these dismal income brackets which allow, according to Department of Agriculture calculations, an average individual food expenditure of less than twenty-three cents a meal for three meals a day...

...The Administration's request for $1.5 billion in the new fiscal year amounts, therefore, to almost a doubling of the program...

...It was announced in February as an attempt to provide pre-school summer training for about 100,000 children of the poor, but the quota was doubled and then redoubled...

...Starting in the late 1930's with the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago, Alinsky has worked in more than fifty cities, organizing the poor into aggressive power blocs capable of formulating and pressing their own demands for redress of grievances...

...In Louisiana, it held up grants when Shelby Jackson, the segregationist former superintendent of the state school system, was appointed to a key anti-poverty post by Governor John J. McKeith-in...

...The President announced on May 19 that $112 million in anti-poverty funds would finance pre-school centers for about 530,000 children this summer...

...Wallace said racial factors were not involved in his decision...

...Inevitably, the Federal anti-poverty agency has been caught in the crossfire of Southern segregation skirmishes...

...When Congress appropriated funds for the War on Poverty last fall, the borrowed staff of Sargent Shriver's interim Presidential Task Force on Poverty became the nucleus of the Office of Economic Opportunity...

...But the air of frantic improvisation remains...

...This effort received a substantial boost from Project Head-Start, a late addition to the arsenal of the War on Poverty...

...They look for ways to get more bang for the buck and hope their schemes will not run afoul of the Inspector General of OEO, William Hod-dad...

...It must be a program which contends that poverty involves poverty of power as well as poverty of economy^ We have seen this in the struggle for civil rights as well as for jobs...

...Conventional warfare—reliance on the tried and true traditional welfare techniques—has its ardent advocates, and so does guerrilla combat—mobilization of the poor themselves into aggressive forces ready to fight and win...

...Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapters have accused community action groups of excluding Negroes in Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and other cities...

...An all-out War on Poverty will be fought, Alinsky said, only when the poor are "possessed of sufficient power to threaten the status quo with disturbing alternatives, so that it will induce the status quo to come through with a genuine, decent, meaningful poverty program...

...Buttressed by President Johnson's "great confidence," Shriver shrugs off the controversy that surrounds his agency as it enters its second year...

...Some of these fellows down in OEO have never seen a real poor person—the fellows who buy the Saul Alinsky bit down there...

...he claimed that residents of Jefferson County, in which Birmingham is situated, were not adequately represented on the Committee...

...OEO has also had its share of internal difficulties: vague and conflicting criteria for evaluating grant applications...

...The Peace Corps mentality does not apply to America's dispossessed . . . This is not the program for a silky smooth Madison Avenue approach with a major talent for the avoidance of controversy . . . which fails to understand that dissonance is the music of democracy...

...There are patriots and profiteers...

...Suffused with the energetic optimism that has been Shriver's trademark at the Peace Corps, the OEO set high goals for its first year of operation...

...to try for a first-year expenditure of $1 billion...

...It is, he asserted, "the first war ever launched in history on a balanced budget," and it may become "the worst political blunder and boomerang of the present Administration...

...they still have not been fully resolved...

...He has given strong support to the coordination of anti-poverty efforts through city-wide umbrella agencies—the agencies scorned by Alinsky as creatures of City Hall...

...There is no disposition to brook delays...

...13.5 million would be spent in behalf of migrant workers...

...He has denied that salaries paid to local anti-poverty executives are excessive...

...But the funds were appropriated late, and the problems of coordinating programs with other agencies which jealously guarded their bureaucratic prerogatives proved formidable...

...Victory, it is safe to say, is not just around the corner...

...The anti-poverty agency, Shriver assured Congress, would engage in "no race to obligate against a June 30 deadline...

...He added: "If ever a program demanded an aggressive, partisan, unafraid-of-contro-versy administration, it is the anti-poverty program...

...Johnson was enlisted as honorary chairman, a huge publicity campaign was mounted, and local officials were pressed to give top priority to Project Head-Start applications...

...Government economists estimated it would take an outlay of $10 billion to wipe out hardcore poverty, but the Administration decided ERWIN KNOtL is a Washington correspondent for the Newhouse National News Service...

...Racial controversy has dogged the program in the North as well...

...Mayor Richard J. Daley is chairman of the committee...

...Deton J. Brooks, says the attacks are "scurrilous...

...The poor were defined as those families with total earnings of less than $3,000 a year, or individuals earning less than $1,500...

...Brooks recently commented: "In any organization the size of OEO, you're bound to get people who think they're buying new social change...

...that OEO has created "a vast network of sergeants drawing generals' pay...

...88,000 heads of families would take part in work-experience programs...

...They issue communiques to celebrate victories and advances, and try to keep the retreats—all temporary and strategic—to themselves...

...There are strategists of containment and those who press for poverty's unconditional surrender...

...As in most of the small wars of our time—and the War on Poverty is tiny compared to the war on the Vietcong or even the war on the Dominican rebels—the lines of combat are but vaguely defined...

...OEO has also brushed aside criticism of multi-million dollar contracts awarded to blue-chip corporations for the operation of Job Corps camps...

...In Syracuse, New York, a Community Action Training Center, sponsored by three divisions of the University of Syracuse, is applying Alinsky's theories under a $314,000 Federal anti-poverty grant...

...Chicago's poor, Brooks adds, will be involved in anti-poverty planning "just as much as possible," but before selecting their representatives he must be satisfied that they are "the kind of persons who can sit down with the Mayor of the city and with its business leaders...

...Powell, whose chairmanship of the Education and Labor Committee gives him jurisdiction over the anti-poverty program in the House, is hardly a disinterested observer: Harlem's Haryou-Act anti-poverty project is run by his political-proteges—a fact which undoubtedly figured in his attack on City Hall "monopolies" in the War on Poverty...

...Appointments are made and canceled, proposals are revised and approved, office duplicating machines work around the clock...

...Other programs are on target, or closer to it...

...They talk of targets, weapons, and delivery systems...

...He has contributed articles to Commentary, The Reporter, Esquire, and other magazines...

...that community umbrella organizations are "stacked at least two to one with payrollers or the party faithful...

...But the Office of Economic Opportunity regards its youth programs as the most promising aspects of the War on Poverty, and Project Head-Start as perhaps the most significant in the long run...

...Small Business Loans—provided by the Small Business Administration to retail and service enterprises—luncheonettes, filling stations, drug stores, dry cleaners, and the like—which would not otherwise be eligible for assistance...

...In scores of cities, contested "ownership" of the poor—often a three-way contest between public officials, private welfare agencies, and new neighborhood groups aligned with the Herblock in The Washington Post "He's Also Turned On Some Lights" civil rights movement—is overshadowing the War on Poverty...

...The civil rights militants have been denounced, in turn, for trying to "take over" anti-poverty programs to further their own political ends...

...Adult Basic Education—an Office of Education program of assistance to the states for special literacy training projects...

...What is the shooting all about...

...he specializes in coverage of education and welfare and civil rights...