Lessons from the Poverty Front

...There were many things the OEO did that worked...

...The "lesson" of the OEO that seems to prevail at the moment is that poverty programs don't work, can't work, and, if they have any effect at all, it's probably to increase poverty...

...You'd have to go back to the days of the Bank of Nicholas Lemann, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...But this is an uncomfortable truth too, because it bears out the verboten cultureof-poverty thesis...

...Even if there had been no Vietnam, the OEO would have been in political trouble...

...In 1970, during the sunset period of the Great Society, 57 percent of black male college graduates and 72 percent of black female college graduates worked for government...

...Job-training programs like the Job Corps and the Neighborhood Youth Corps, while expensive, did raise their trainees' subsequent earnings...

...But as an administrative tactic, community action was uninspired, to say the least...

...By 1965, the culture-of-poverty thesis was on its way to becoming anathema to intellectuals because it seemed patronizing and socialworkerish...

...The concept was new, vague, and open to wildly different interpretations— there was never a simple answer to the question, "What is community action, anyway...

...The reason it's so difficult to see the OEO clearly is that it directly touched what are probably the two most sensitive nerve endings in the American mind: race relations and the creed of self-reliance...

...A lack of intellectual honesty about the OEO is one of the main roadblocks...

...The irony here is that the planners of the War on Poverty explicitly rejected the idea of fighting poverty through a big job-creation program...

...In 1964, when the war was planned, most liberals (except economists) believed that the crucial task was to break the hold of the "culture of poverty" by offering poor people a lot of special education and training...

...the War on Poverty is thought to have been a cause of the current disastrous conditions in black ghettos and to have nearly bankrupted the country...

...the United States to find so dense a cloud of mythology surrounding a federal agency...

...While Johnson was right to declare War on Poverty in his mind, he was wrong to declare it publicly in his first State of the Union address...

...The OEO was created to fight the "War on Poverty" that President Lyndon Johnson declared in his 1964 State of the Union address...

...Most people believe that it failed, in an extremely expensive and destructive way...

...Actually, we know quite a bit about what the War on Poverty did and didn't do well...

...The OEO put many thousands of blacks on the road to becoming middle class by putting them on the government payroll...

...is a national correspondent for The Atlantic...

...And it spent tax money to help the able-bodied (or "undeserving") poor...

...When the community action agency in Newark helped stage a play by LeRoi Jones that portrayed Rochester from the Jack Benny Show righteously killing white people, the stock of the entire community action program went down...

...Instead, poverty should be fought either by giving poor people cash or through economic-development and political-empowerment schemes in poor areas...

...Many of them did a good job, and hundreds still exist as a force for good in their towns, preparing toddlers for school, teaching adults to read, starting credit unions that make loans to new businesses, and rehabilitating housing...

...Johnson himself soon turned against it, feeling (not inaccurately) that it was a nest of admirers of his archenemy, Robert Kennedy...

...There are some problems that the War on Poverty and its ripple effects did alleviate, most notably elderly poverty...

...It won't do to cut off the debate about social programs by saying that the OED's failure proves that no program can work...

...The OEO, a smallish federal agency, didn't create the underclass...

...Even the leaders of the poverty program did not spend their main energies selling ideas like Head Start...

...OEO scoreboard The War on Poverty also suffered because, about a year into its existence, its intellectual rationale became pass...

...But the OEO could have done a better job—especially a better job of surviving...

...Once war had been declared, the next mistake was deciding to wage it primarily through quasi-independent local "community action agencies...

...The second overall success of the OEO was in what might be called acculturation: efforts designed to impart the mores of mainstream American society (good prenatal care, literacy, work skills, and habits) to the poor...

...Everybody wasn't, though, and as a result the successes of this extremely high-profile agency were curiously obscure...

...In retrospect, it seems obvious that everybody should have been focusing on the question of whether or not the OED's programs were helping poor people...

...Because there were so many horror stories, the OEO was extremely vulnerable to them...

...The impact of VISTA and the Foster Grandparents program (which was created by the OEO, not Nancy Reagan) is probably impossible to measure, but both helped create some sense of common cause between the poor and the not-poor...

...Though it wasn't intended to be, the OEO became the government's principal point of contact with the black ghettos and the black power movement...

...Many of the local community action agencies were brand-new and therefore lacked any institutional memory about how to run something...

...There is a demonstrable difference in early development between poor children in Head Start and poor children not in Head Start...

...Head Start is an example...

...But the problem of ghetto poverty is even more urgent now than it was then...

...Discussions about helping the underclass today concentrate too much on the idea of community development, and not enough on assisting this natural process of up and out...

...It survived under that name for one stormy decade, and a remnant of it limped along under a different name (the Community Services Administration) until the first year of the Reagan Administration...

...Yet there is a relatively tiny minority that remembers the OEO fondly, as a kind of high water mark of noble purpose in domestic government...

...by Nicholas Lemann Twenty-five years ago this month, in a faraway liberal country, a government agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was established by an act of Congress...

...It is extremely difficult to do these things and survive...

...The main reason for this is the heavy outmigration from very poor neighborhoods...

...Community action was created in a spirit of mistrust of the established political order, especially in the South, and it was designed to distribute its monies outside the usual political channels...

...It's important to demythologize the War on Poverty...

...The percentage of poor Americans went way down during the sixties, but Johnson had set the rhetorical stakes so high that as long as any visible poverty remained, he would look like a defeated commander...

...We need to solve it, and we can solve it...

...Probably the greatest success of the War on Poverty was as a jobs program...

...Broadly speaking, what poverty programs haven't been able to do well is to turn very poor neighborhoods into stable working-class environments with safe streets, good schools, and plentiful jobs...

...For a small and short-lived government agency, the OEO had a tremendous impact on the collective unconscious of American politics, and to some extent it still does...

...As a result, the primary political battles over the OEO were about form (who ran the community action agencies) not function (what the community action agencies actually did to fight poverty...

...As you read this, hundreds of teary OEO reunions are going on all over the country...

...This meant, however, that it started life with an extraordinarily powerful set of enemies, including the established federal domestic departments, such as Labor, Agriculture, and Health, Education, and Welfare, and those governors, mayors, and members of Congress who were unable to control the antipoverty funds going into their districts...

...Most of those in attendance believe that the OEO did very little wrong, and that the reason the War on Poverty failed was that it was never really fought, mainly because the escalation in Vietnam came along only a few months later and drained away its resources...

...By raising the nation's consciousness about social-welfare issues, the OEO helped create a climate that made later antipoverty advances, such as food stamps and Social Security disability payments, possible...