THE OTHER WAR: A FRONTLINE REPORT
Johnson, Haynes
The Other War: A Frontline Report by HAYNES JOHNSON "Poverty, as the army of experts likes ·*· to remind us, is a phenomenon of many dimensions. It is also one truth: poverty is always personal....
...The attack then was viewed as only a beginning, and an experimental one at that...
...The two wars, the domestic and the foreign, both dependent on the Federal Treasury, are unfortunately tied together with Vietnam threatening to eclipse, at least partially, the fight against poverty at home...
...There are no steps of hope here...
...The press bears part of the responsibility for this distortion...
...It will happen until something basic is done to remove the underlying cause—the hard core of unemployment...
...In this situation, the poverty program held out a promise of reducing the tension—if it were administered swiftly, energetically, and with conviction...
...When the women were through the grimy windows of their tenement had been transformed...
...Other aspects are not so hopeful, or favorable...
...In reality, the war on poverty has been forgotten in few communities, large or small, throughout the nation...
...Since I visited there, a new flare-up of violence has occurred...
...the specific accomplishments that can be singled out depressingly small...
...It contains the brightest potential for genuine grassroots reform...
...Turner is a director...
...Taking the most conservative count, there are more than thirty million Americans living in poverty...
...They read about millions and millions of dollars in the paper, and they can't believe that money is for them...
...Yet while politics on occasion has impeded progress, it has not killed it—and in those cases where the poor have organized and demanded action through the political process, it has speeded up change...
...The poverty program stood at the center of the disputes...
...they are learning some of the lessons of achieving change through organized action, although not in sufficient numbers to bring about dramatic results...
...they are speaking out...
...He heads the committee as chairman...
...The Chicago plan operates in the slums through a number of urban centers which are open around the clock to provide services that have never been brought so directly into the community before...
...If it wasn't for that, the whole program might as well be out of Breathitt...
...That is about the same amount as the profits, after taxes, recorded last year by only one corporation, General Motors...
...The people in the hollow, however, were feeling the impact of the poverty program...
...To some extent, it still is...
...In Breathitt County, Kentucky, the poverty program is controlled by the Turner family...
...The most basic one involves control of the program...
...funds...
...When the Mayor says we're threatening his administration, we say we have the power, the power of the people...
...Most significant of all, it has aroused expectations among that most abused, and most used, group, the poor themselves...
...They can advance ideas and programs, and isn't this desirable...
...The greatest emphasis is placed on programs dealing with children, teen-agers, and women—for example, Head Start and the Neighborhood Youth Corps...
...the general public apathetic and critical...
...One point is quite clear: If the war on poverty is ever going to be won, it will require the expenditure of billions of dollars over five, ten, or twenty years...
...He was particularly bitter, for he did not want to be living only on the dole...
...For them, today at least there is a glimmer of hope, whereas yesterday, as a Negro in Watts said to me, there were "only gaps of nothingness...
...Such a climate of distrust threatens the very heart of the program...
...Johnson has just been awarded the Puiilzer Prize for his distinguished news reporting from Mississippi last year...
...Yet, it is working...
...The response, while not overwhelming, is gratifying...
...All the bright philosophical trappings of the war on poverty, the promises of community action and genuine involvement of the poor, were hollow words in Breathitt County...
...The poverty program there has fortified the one political dynasty...
...In those regions, three areas were particularly instructive...
...The Negroes of Watts wanted to run their own programs their own ways...
...It is now accepted as a public commitment...
...These were in Appalachia, Watts in Los Angeles, and Woodlawn in Chicago...
...It is one of the ironies of the poverty program that perhaps the most successful program in the country—at least in my view—is also the most political...
...Their questions only raise more questions...
...It is a cruel hoax—or, as a Negro in Watts expressed it, "a scam...
...Tough, pragmatic, lusty Chicago, the lair of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the last of the big city bosses, is operating a poverty program characterized by a strong sense of action and accomplishment...
...Go into any slum and you will see the same sight: large numbers of men walking the streets, idly or angrily passing their lives away...
...Previously, a missionary and his wife had lived there...
...People are coming, voluntarily, off the streets into the centers to try and get action on basic needs, including employment...
...The central fight was over control of the rapidly expanding multi-million-dollar program...
...If these exist, they are not apparent...
...The men were participants in what they sardonically called the "happy pappy" program...
...It is only a fraction of the cost of the war in Vietnam or the sum needed to land a man on the moon...
...It was a new form of waving the bloody shirt...
...There, on Chicago's south side, community representatives hired by an independent management consulting firm from the ranks of the poor are working to motivate the people in the slums...
...the complexity of the problems staggering...
...The programs bearing new names brought little hope for basic change...
...The neighborhood people have tremendous strength...
...soon, Lyndon B. Johnson made it his own personal war...
...ly, for the formal part of their instruction to begin...
...They've organized the social workers, why not the poor people...
...These crucial facts are seldom raised when one travels around the country...
...There was also something ugly and threatening in the atmosphere...
...With a great deal of ballyhoo, it is holding up to public view some of the uglier aspects of American life...
...There is an even greater threat: the ever-widening shadow of Vietnam...
...Well," he said, in explaining what he did as a "happy pappy," "we're busting rocks and digging ditches and cutting trees and that's about it...
...They in turn appoint the advisory committee members who are the representatives of the local communities, and who pass on all program proposals...
...If they're going to spend all this money, why don't they spend it on something that will help us...
...Living conditions in Chicago's slums are as appalling as ever...
...What appears here, too, is personal, based on first-hand observations during a two-month trip around the United States examining our "other war," the one on poverty...
...It is not going to be won by short-term programs which, to gain new approval and life, each year must run the Congressional-bureaucratic gauntlet...
...To them, a program which promises only to help them help themselves is meaningless...
...That incident in the Chicago tenement underscores probably the greatest misconception concerning the war on poverty...
...An in-law heads the Work Experience and Training Program (the happy pappies) for the seven-county area and administers $457,707 a month in U.S...
...That the poor should be involved, that they should believe something is being done for them, that they should feel motivated to work together—these premises are not debatable here...
...This frustration can make 'em burn the place down," said Ocie Pastard, a Negro who is a poverty program community action director working in the center of Watts...
...They say we're organizing the poor people, but isn't that the purpose of the poverty program...
...It would be foolhardy to say it won't happen again, and again...
...Everywhere, I encountered a strong sense of bitterness, friction, and agitation...
...Chicago's attempt at change is therefore significant, offering a sign that community action can work, given a chance...
...Still, by any standard, the figures are small...
...As a result, it is, in part, a captive of its own promises...
...You know, we are the threat...
...it rests solidly in the hands of the firmly entrenched power structure...
...The women waited, rather nervousHAYNES JOHNSON is rational affairs reporter for The Washington Star, He is the author of two books: "The Bay of Pigs" and "Dusk at the Mountain," a study of Negroes in Washington, D.C, Mr...
...In one of the cabins a young, lean father of three threw another piece of coal into the iron stove, watched it flare up, and went on talking about his view of the war on poverty...
...He appoints the committee director who in turn appoints the program center directors...
...The program is enmeshed in politics, the Daley brand of politics...
...They are not yet being reached in a significant way by the war on poverty...
...For its poverty outlays the government can cite specific figures of those served by the program: 440,000 in the Neighborhood Youth Corps, more than 100,000 participating in work experience programs, more than 550,000 children who have been helped through Head Start pre-school training, and a total of nearly five million poor persons who have been assisted, in one way or another, by the program...
...and, second, the disservice that has been done to the program by all the talk about "maximum feasible participation of the poor," as the OEO Act so ambiguously phrased that aspect of the legislation...
...Always, politics is at the heart of the disputes...
...In city slums and mountain hollows, the poor are being made aware of the larger, more promising American society...
...Many Negroes were disenchanted, though, if indeed they ever believed in it at all...
...Are they going to be housed adequately...
...Then, for the next thirty minutes, they worked at their assigned project for the day: how to wash windows, a course which included even such elemental instruction as washing in a circular motion and using vinegar as a cleanser...
...three showed up...
...It is difficult to find talented replacements, and to maintain the momentum and enthusiasm which Sargent Shriver had been able to generate with such success...
...A great deal of sentimental nonsense has been uttered and written about how this part of the act should be implemented...
...Impressive as the effort is, the needs are so great, the problems so immense, that only the most sanguine optimist would feel encouraged about the future...
...It is, from what I could see, more subtle and more successful...
...There has been a great deal of irresponsible criticism leveled at the program...
...They provided the best gauge of the poverty program in action...
...Bill D. Moyers, the White House Press Secretary, gave an immediate—and predictable—reply...
...There, the poor were in turmoil...
...Each day brings new crises...
...The system of dynastic control is so strongly embedded that the "representatives" of the poor who are appointed are indebted to the Turners and say frankly, but privately, that they feel they have no voice...
...Even more serious, however, in terms of the future, are the problems outside the administrative structure...
...It had been two years since I had traveled in Appalachia...
...I climbed the narrow stairway of one all-too-typical apartment house and waited for a group of women to gather in a third-floor room...
...Much of it is partisan politics (the Republican Congressional leaders, Senator Everett Dirksen and Representative Gerald Ford, have gone on record as saying the American people "have gotten a very shabby product" for the money spent on the program to date) and can be discounted as such...
...Their son is a state senator, their daughter is a member of the powerful State Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committee which regulates all Federal farm programs in the state...
...The war then was being fought as much by words as by deeds...
...The largest of the cabins offered something new...
...it has forced an awareness that America has a considerable problem within...
...Ervine Turner, seventy-five, the circuit judge, and his wife Marie, sixty-five, the county superintendent of schools, have controlled Breathitt for nearly thirty years...
...Far from the lethargy so evident in Eastern Kentucky, the atmosphere of Watts was explosive...
...In Watts, the flourishing of that seed is, at this writing, uncertain...
...But that does not mean politics has sullied the program...
...Yet everywhere people talk about the great sums being spent on the poverty program...
...His criticism is only one of many that can be leveled against the operation of the poverty program in that corner of Appalachia...
...It's going to be just like the Post Office...
...One scene, out of so many, remains the most vivid, and has, for me, the most meaning...
...Actually, they were still fulfilling basic missionary work, ministering to the sick, teaching the children, planning recreational projects...
...That is the only bright spot...
...A first cousin is county judge...
...at this point it is not...
...For through community action the poor, if organized, can seek change through political or economic pressure...
...In his first trip as President he went into the hamlets and villages of Appalachia, pledging, as he put it, to drive poverty underground...
...When I was there, the poverty office closed at 3:30 p.m...
...But the basic reason for the misconception about the scope of the poverty program stems from those days more than two years ago when it was being planned in Washington...
...The director of the county poverty program married a niece of the judge...
...I returned from my trip with one dominant impression : Up to this point the war on poverty has not brought about any profound improvement in the lives of those millions of Americans who exist in poverty...
...Are they going to be given a job...
...They were opposed to "downtown"—City Hall and Mayor Samuel Yorty...
...It is the most dynamic aspect of the poverty program and, as a natural corollary, the most controversial...
...The chairman of the committee is a member of the family and also the cashier of the family bank, of which Judge Turner is president and Mrs...
...In those early sessions, no one involved claimed to be charting the final assault on the problems of poverty in the United States...
...They had washed the windows only to be able to see the slums more clearly...
...The poverty program is now coming under sharp attack from large segments of the poor...
...It has cut through the initial opposition from the collected Establishments in union halls, in executive suites, in campus offices, and in city halls to become a part of the American scene...
...every day, and was never open on Saturday, the one day most country people come to town...
...Other criticism cannot be dismissed so easily...
...The war on poverty grew out of that initial burst of activity...
...The Washington Post has been calling it the "better war," as if the distinction between the bloody business in Vietnam and the first truly national attempt to alleviate some of the more flagrant problems of the poor in our midst needed emphasizing...
...The concern was visible everywhere in Watts...
...They are becoming involved...
...It does not.follow, though, that being poor per se gives one a special gift or competence in administration and planning...
...In two years the Federal government has spent about $2.2 billion on the war on poverty...
...One thing is clear to me: Today the poverty program is in trouble...
...Instead, the people in charge of the programs locally and regionally seem usually engaged in one or both of two areas—defending themselves against their critics, from within and without, or trying to convince their local communities that the programs are successful...
...The emphasis is always on the dollar...
...But it is not altering them...
...As unemployed fathers they were receiving up to $250 a month, tax free, under that Federally-sponsored program...
...First of all, it is not a "war" at all...
...Yet this is what one hears so often...
...They are getting action on unsanitary conditions, rat controls, health problems, and against unscrupulous landlords who fail to provide even the most minimum facilities...
...That is probably its greatest achievement to date...
...Daley, the supreme realist, seems bent on running a good program— perhaps on the correct assumption that a good program bears its own political fruit...
...The poor are learning, through community action, that the old method of redressing grievances by the weight of petition and the threat of boycott is as effective a tool as ever in American society...
...And, quite obviously, it can never be won by money alone...
...In the course of a long talk with one Negro, a poverty program employe but one who was highly critical of his downtown superiors, he said: "We've frightened City Hall...
...What I'd like to see is some kind of training work—heavy equipment, welding, auto mechanics...
...This early effort led to the Congressional approval of the money —and to the expectations...
...Watts points up a fundamental fact about the poverty program and its present role...
...It has dramatized needs...
...Now, two years later, the programs had been drafted and approved, the money had been appropriated...
...Oh, and building a few swinging bridges...
...others suggest it is becoming the forgotten war...
...The public seems to believe the war on poverty is a massive, expensive Federal attack on the problems of poverty in the United States, The picture of a free-spending program is badly out of focus...
...They had brought with them no great change, only an extension of the old system...
...What they want to know is how they are going to be helped...
...The Chicago program is not bogged down in the old blatant pork-barrel ward politics of the past...
...The poverty program operates out of the basement of the county courthouse, directly across the street from the Turner bank, where the program funds are deposited...
...In Breathitt County, the OEO requirement that the poor be represented on the overall poverty committee is a farce...
...he said...
...The distance, therefore, between promise and fulfillment remains great, for at this stage the poverty program is too small to accomplish more than initial, and limited, goals...
...The most recent incident illustrating this development came this spring when national director Sargent Shriver was hooted, shoved, and jeered by some of the representatives of the poor who had gathered for a planning convention in Washington...
...Another relative is the sheriff...
...For the poor of this country, those limits are even now all too painfully real...
...That was not entirely the case in Watts...
...Pastard was scornful of what he called "povertyticians"—those who were "using the program for their political purposes...
...Generally speaking, newspaper accounts have been superficial...
...They were there to help the people of the hollow, some one hundred in all, take advantage of the war on poverty...
...The representatives, all of whom live in the area in which they work, are tackling some of the basic problems—and achieving results...
...There is no question that Daley controls the program...
...It's hard to make them believe the poverty program's for them...
...You can look far and wide in the Chicago poverty program for evidence of outright patronage appointments, or political hiring and firing...
...There is little time to take a broader look...
...They could see, over the tops of the grubby buildings and the elevated tracks, beUveen the sooty chimneys and stained water tanks, all the way to the ancient and obsolete stockyards...
...Community action programs have been slowed and stalled in countless communities by bickering, controversy, and power plays...
...They are truisms...
...The program director was then on vacation in Florida...
...only new elements had been grafted onto the old system...
...Their effort had been terribly earnest-—but basically futile...
...Now, I'm not talking about the adult education...
...The work load is immense...
...The issue is clearly joined...
...It has been taken, by many, as a mandate for the poor to exercise total control over their own programs—the planning, administrating, and executing...
...And now more and more the self-styled leaders of the poor are charging that the war on poverty is actually a "war against the poor...
...It was late in the afternoon when I parked my car on a narrow dirt road in front of the north branch of the Kentucky River and began to make my way on foot, first over a wooden, or swinging, bridge, as they are called there, then back into John Little's Hollow, along the banks of Little Creek, in Breathitt County, Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia...
...These are the problems common to every city and every slum...
...He wanted to be trained for something better...
...As such, the poverty program is merely an extension of the rule from the county courthouse—the system that has plagued Appalachia ever since the Civil War and which has enabled a few families to gather the spoils and dispense the largesse...
...Why don't they concentrate on education and let the weeds go to hell...
...The nation had discovered poverty among the craggy peaks and narrow valleys (it had been there for generations, of course) and was going to do something about it...
...The ghost of the August riots still hovered overhead, and I kept encountering bellicose remarks, threats of more violence...
...It was mid-afternoon of a sparkling, clear day on the south side of Chicago, one of those days when the wind came fresh and hard off the lake and the sunlight cast the lattice-work shadow patterns of the elevated train tracks across the storefronts and tenements...
...They were part of a basic adjustment-to-urban-living project, one of many poverty programs across the country which attempt to help people change the pattern of their lives...
...The same old array of problems continues to afflict the neighborhoods: apathy, anger, squalor, disease, exploitation, crime, ignorance...
...These are the positive aspects of our other war...
...Their barrier of isolation is being penetrated...
...We are the only part of the poverty program that involves people and they're getting worried...
...A great deal of time and energy had to be expended in selling the program to Congress and to the people...
...While it meant, particularly in the bleak winter months, more warmth and less hunger, it brought no great upsurge of hope...
...The heavy hand of the past was still on that part of Appalachia...
...He went on: "This is a very unhealthy community...
...Still, from the beginning the program was sold as if it were the remedy...
...It was an ugly episode and it pointed up two things: first, the underlying frustrations of the poor and their genuine anger at failing to see the promises match their expectations...
...now, two young VISTA volunteers, both coeds fresh from the campus, had taken their place...
...The Woodlawn area provided that evidence...
...It is, at best, a small skirmish...
...We are in a revolution and this poverty program has planted a seed...
...It faces serious problems from within and without...
...On the surface, nothing had changed...
...From inside, the rate of turnover of top administrative personnel has been high...
...Then, the spirit of change was in the air...
...Until a better technique is developed, the community action concept of mobilizing the poor to take concerted action themselves offers the surest method of enabling the poor to better their lives...
...That general situation was the same everywhere I went, from the Deep South to the West Coast, from the Southwest to the Midwest, and back to the Eastern Seaboard...
...The wooden cabins, the smoke curling up into the hills, the litter of stripped automobile parts in the creek, the barking dogs, the staring people—these were the unchanging marks of life in Appalachia...
...Ten were expected...
...But it does not mean that the poverty program, at this stage of its development, is doing more than scratching the surface of needs...
...Consequently, they show the most tangible gains...
...One friend, who was leaving the program, spoke for many inside the poverty headquarters in Washington when he said: "The idea guys are all going, and the administrators are taking over...
...Such a conception meets with general favor anyway, for the suspicion of government clearly still runs deep in this country—even among those who are receiving the most benefits from that government...
...Another Negro said, "The die has been cast...
...To speak out is to speak out against the Turners: Few dare do so...
...On the face of it, such a structure hardly commands confidence...
...I've been in it a year and I haven't learned a thing...
...It is now an established—and, more important, an accepted—fact of life...
...They have emphasized salaries and grants, and left an impression that the poverty program is a gigantic boondoggle...
...The riots left behind what appeared to be a new syndrome: an attitude which says, in effect, give us what we want or the Watts riots will be a candle beside our next conflagration...
...There is another dimension to that problem: From its birth, the poverty program has been trapped by the facts of legislative life...
...It is the threat to all the power structures at every level...
...President Johnson, he said, is trying to do more for the nation's poor within "the limits of realism...
...The poverty program could be that vehicle...
...The August riots had left in their wake new tension and discord...
...When Senator Robert F. Kennedy criticized the Johnson Administration recently for cutting domestic programs because of the increased cost of Vietnam, he correctly remarked that "time after time the cuts will be felt by those least able to afford them—the disadvantaged...
...In some ways, the war on poverty is like that effort...
...But this emphasis means that the greatest problem, so typical of Watts and other slum areas, is largely untouched—the unemployed man of marginal skills, particularly the Negro...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
