Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures 20240703

Americas story. Funding for cspan 2 comes from these Television Companies and more, including charter communications. Chter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers. We are just getting started. We are building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. Charter communications, along with these Television Companies supports cspan 2 as a public service. This course, as you know, examines the development of the u. S. Welfare state, the way americans have gone about making social provisions for themselves. Social provisions include programs that aim at reducing risk and enhancing quality of life. Our focus has been on the relief of poverty. Im going to depart from our usual format here. Im going to do a fair amount of reading this afternoon because im concerned about covering all the material that we have to cover. Over the course of our exploration of the construction of the american welfare state, we have encountered several different persistent themes. Among these are the idea that in the United States, social provision is divided between public and private institutions. The public provides welfare programming. The public shaped welfare programming through the texts tax system. Private entities provide charity and philanthropy. American employers provide the bulk of social welfare benefits. Another thing is the experimentation with the institutional form. We have worked our way through outdoor relief, the idea that impoverished families remain in their own homes. Indoor relief, the poor houses and the like. The american system has accommodated both forms simultaneously, arguing back and forth about which one is preferable, or least harmful. The third consideration for the american system is the Important Role of the system as mechanisms for managing the workforce. I think normally we think of it being aimed at relieving poverty. At the level of policy, it is about making sure that employers have access to a stable workforce. A fourth theme is the tension between these iterations, between american commitment to compassion, the idea that we are responsible for one another, and that communities will take care of Vulnerable People within them. That commitment is constantly at war with a commitment to instilling discipline. A commitment to work, to creating citizens who are capable of being selfsufficient and establishing independence. Those two pieces, they seem to be at war with one another. A corollary of that, because we operate these programs with warring values underlining them, it is also true that we cannot completely make up our minds about what our goal for any of these programs is. Are we attempting to facilitate a stable workforce and come look at it . Are we trying to rid ourselves of poverty . What are we trying to do . Last week, we left off with an examination of the Social Security act of 1935. The new deal legislation that laid the foundation for American Social provisions and created the framework in which social provision operates to this day. In todays session, we will look at the development of poor relief and policy. It was launched by the Johnson Administration in 1954. Lyndon johnsons ambitions or were to make American Life more expansive. We are interested in a core element of this Great Society program, which is the war on poverty. It operated on multiple fronts. During his tenure, Congress Passed important landmark legislation, providing support for public education, for expanded job training, for renewed access to healthcare this includes the creation of the medicare and medicaid programs. A commitment to publicly subsidized housing, including the creation of the the prompt of housing and urban development, and new approaches to urban development, including the Community Action programs that were part of the war on Program Policy legislation. Each of these elements was upfront in the war on poverty. Within this comprehensive attack on poverty, but we are going to be scrutinizing today, what you are reading about in this material, is the Economic Opportunity act of 1964. This is the act that created the war on poverty. We will go through a little bit of the operation, but we will lay out the structure, so you know, it is comprised of five titles. Each of them attacking poverty on a different front. We have job training and Work Experience entitles one and five. We have the business and economic assistance in titles three and four. That includes rural communities. Poverty is not strictly an urban phenomenon in the United States. We learned that in looking at the new deal research, they went to north dakota. A key piece of the Economic Opportunity act was the program created by title ii. Community action took the view that poverty could only be addressed effectively through comprehensive strategies that included the elements that are touched on in the other title. They had to think about job training, education, housing, as well as where people were getting income from. The Community Action title also took the position that the only way that that kind of planning could get done effectively is if the people who are going to be subject to the plan were involved in the planning. The Community Action program set up a system where the federal government would make direct funding to grassroots groups around the country. To plan, and then to monitor implementation of communitywide antipoverty plans. This proved to be dynamic, productive, and highly controversial, as youll see. Note that the Economic Opportunity act did not address poor relief directly. It did not provide income assistance. On thursday, we will be talking about the afdc, aides to family with disabled children. In brief, afdc payments were significantly raised under johnson. Other programs were instituted. For example, in 1964, formalization of the food stamp program. So that is the layout. We are working through this. We are digging through the archaeology and the evolution of the american system, starting in the cellar and working our way up. We laid the groundfloor foundation with the new deal. We are working on the Great Society material. Within the Great Society, we are dealing with the Economic Opportunity act. On thursday, we will deal with the afdc in greater depth. So why, in general, or for our project, does this topic matter . What we are trying to do here is identify the contributions the Great Society policymaking made to the development of the american system of social provision. And the significance of the Great Society effort is a window into the dynamic of the american struggle with poverty, and how poverty should be addressed. As with all phases of the development of American Social welfare policy, the Great Society built on the institutional architecture directed by past attempts. The Great Society builds on the new deal. The new deal builds on mothers pensions. The mothers pensions builds on the war pensions, and on and on. The Great Society grappled with american ambivalence concerning it. We hope to build up compassionate society. We pride ourselves on independence and self sufficiency. The question, again, is, how is policy to be designed to meet that first objective, compassion, while also the second, discipline and independence. In addressing these challenges, the Great Societys war on poverty was unique in several ways. It had innovation with regard to goals and approaches and relations and social movements. What am i speaking about here . With regards to goals. The war on poverty expressed significantly larger aspirations concerning poverty and enhancement of american qualityoflife than any previously formed program. It expanded the role of government in achieving those goals. Johnson asked americans to imagine a nation where poverty is ended by and through the efforts of the people working through their government. How about policy approaches . Again, im referring here to the Community Action program. The war on poverty thus recognized the systemic nature of poverty, something that we have been waiting for policymakers to do. Here, we are finally seeing americans saying, yes, poverty is not always about individual fillings. Maybe theres Something Else going on. Recognizing the systemic nature of poverty, the war on poverty sought to address it. Thus, the Community Action program created by the when race trumps merit drew together multiple antipoverty initiatives addressing Workforce Development and urban planning, that previously operated in separate silos. The strategy was to attack poverty in communities where it predominated. It folded antipoverty initiatives into one conference of attack and engaged residents of impoverished communities in planning and implementing. One aspect that you want to know here is that for the war on poverty program, poverty was linked to the place. It was linked to city neighborhoods and communities where it occurred. Strategies on attacking poverty dealt with particular places in particular groups. The impact of social movements. You may see in the reading that rather differently from the phases of policy development we have looked at those four, in the case of the great societies war on poverty , it was influenced by grassroots pressure. It was launched amidst the amount of the 60s. It contributed to highlighting that. Those of africanamerican, women, and poor people themselves. There was a volatile atmosphere in the 60s. Aussie makers heard and responded to these voices. Ultimately, to me, the war on poverty is interesting because it so directly tested american values. In the war on poverty , we see a confrontation between the values of compassion and discipline that i have been presenting to you. The war on poverty tested the potency of the American Dream. The American Dream being the idea of america as a place of opportunity for all. The war on poverty tested that by testing whether enlightened policy could extend that opportunity to all americans. The war on poverty was confronted with, and grappled directly with the possibility that modern americas capitalist economy could not be restructured to provide for all and that jerryrigged fixes would be necessary to lift the poor from poverty. War on poverty policymakers had doubt that a dole or any forced redistribution would help. Act attempt and bear with me. Im going to go through some background pieces just to get those pieces lets lay out the background of the Economic Opportunity acts attempt. Bear with me. Im going to go through some background pieces to get them laid out. Then well get to the act itself. So the background. War on poverty wants intervention into american poverty built on existing structures for positions of relief and operated within a framework of values related to compassion, community, and work. With regard to institutional structures, again, as you saw in particular in the new deal materials, and issue for welfare provision at the National Level was for programs to be structured as insurance or structured as a system. Insurance programs like Social Security were those in which benefits were based in part on contributions paid in by beneficiaries. These programs were more respected than assisted programs, programs like afdc. It operated as a public grant. A second set of distinctions are national or state. These two tend to attract one another. Social security as a national program, administered by the federal government provided a more stable stream of benefits and one that was consistent across regions. It is more stable than state administered programs like Unemployment Compensation or aid to families with dependent children. There is a hierarchy here. You are always safer on the insurance side of the equation. Insurance and National Mean what we known as know as Social Security. It is weaker. It leaves people more vulnerable. This is the institutional set of structures that the war on poverty was going to have to figure out how to build on. Again, the war on poverty has to engage these values that we have been talking about. I guess what i am arguing here is that the Johnson Program felt that just maybe, it had solved this problem. Maybe it had come up with a way to melt our commitment to compassion the american commitment to compassion for those that are in need of with the american commitment to independence and self sufficiency. The way this was going to operate was by creating a program that relied on the health of the American Economy and had faith that the economy could provide for everybody, if only access could be opened up. The program took as its task, opening this up. They recognized that the economy was not open to all. It took as its task, opening up the economy. If that could work, then maybe americans could demonstrate compassion while sticking to their commitment to economic independence. So i want to look with you at a couple of background pieces that fed into shaping the program. I think as we have gone through these programs, we have been trying to establish in each phase of american development, what the Historical Context has been, what kinds of values and kinds of social thinking each phase of the program drew on. Lets try to do that here for the war on poverty. I want to raise issues about contemporary experiments going on in the realm of poverty policy prior to the Economic Opportunity act. And then we need to mention a couple of things about lyndon johnson, who was without a doubt factor in this development. So i have three notable public and intellectual or criers in the wilderness take your pick to present to you. John galbraith. He was a witty and gracious public intellectual who published often. In the case of the affluent society, he was indicting americans. We are moving to the end of the 50s. We are mired in eisenhower stability. We are feeling our wealth as a society. We are on top of the world diplomatically. We view ourselves as a nation that won the second world war. We havent discussed that yet with the russians. Galbraith says, look around. What is it that you are actually getting . He makes this charge. He says, take a typical american family. They are out for a weekend outing. The family has an automobile out for a tour. It passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, billboards, and posts with wires that shouldve been put underground. They pass into a countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. They picnic on packaged food from a portable icebox by polluted stream and spend the night at a park which is a menace to Public Health and morals, just before dozing off on an air mattress, omitted the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect on the curious unevenness of their blessing. Is this, indeed, the american genius . Galbraiths point was that in the postwar era, what americans had been doing at an accelerated rate is feathering their private nest, and feeling their private affluence. All well and good, but he says, look around. We are serving the public sector. What you have left . What you have left is an expensive car. When you venture out, its a society in ruins. He called this private opulence and public squalor. He challenged americans to think more systematically about how their wealth might better be used. Great. There is airconditioning in the home. Is there something more you would like to achieve a society . The second indictment did get e they were exploring the land of appalachia. His book, night comes to the cumberlands, it got public notice. It was promoted by a columnist in the new york times. It lays claim to having spurred the kennedy effort which johnson picked up and expanded for appalachian redevelopment. Night comes to the cumberlands was published in 1962. Michael harrington, the other american, also published in 1962. Harrington was one of dorothy days catholic workers. He was a catholic. He became a socialist. He was a journalist. He was an activist. His book, the other america, was published in 1962. It asserted that as many as a quarter of americans were living in poverty. An aspect of the affluent Society Problem that galbraith was pointing out was not the degradation of the infirmity and landscape, but also the degradation of the people. Harrington used the book to show how American Society was structured in ways that effectively hit hid the poor from more affluent people. This book was reviewed in the new yorker by the public intellectual named dwight mcdonald. It caught the attention of the Kennedy Administration and kennedy. Just as night comes to the cumberlands, it is a basis for the creation of the appellation redevelopment authority. This book, the other america, was a spur to creating the program that became the war on poverty. How about experiments . You have ideology. These are authors that, maybe they are not creating the issue, but these people caught public attention. Thre hitting on something that americople were apparently worried about and receptive to. The other thing we want to look at is contemporary exnts. I wanted go througthree of these with you. The question of juvenile delinquency. The question of urban development, and actually, little more juvenile delinquency there. Starting with the problem of juvenile delinquency. , which in the 50s and 60s, is what americans that was a term that was new to use for a new development that people were perceiving, which is that the youth were getting out of hand. There was a lot of new music which was disturbing. There was a lot of new running around town. Disrespect for elders. And at times, out and out petty crime. Gang delinquency. So this goals goes under the moniker, juvenile delinquency. If youre familiar with west side story, they comment on that. This has to do with mobilization of the youth. I think i have mentioned this to you before. Oland and croward helped found an Organization Called mobilization for youth. They wanted to work with these young people youngman who were being classified as juvenile delinquents. The charge with now delinquency is that they are petty criminals. Olands insight was that these boys are not different from any other american boy. They are doing what we encourage all american boys to do, to be ambitious and look for a way out, to enlarge your scope. The difference is, the boys on the Lower East Side dont have access to any kind of opportunities that society approves on point they are not going to go to a four year college. They dont have access to job training. The solution is maybe not to try to fix the kids. The kid is fun. The solution is opportunity letters. These boys are climbing opportunity letters, but the wrong opportunity letters. If we want to change this, then we have to provide different ladders. The boy who joins a gang isnt in a rut. He has aspirations but has nowhere to go with them. This set of insights became an important chunk of the theory around which the war on poverty was built. What we need to do here we are not about fixing individual people. We are about creating opportunities. A second example is what the Ford Foundation was up to. The gray area program. If you want to address poverty, you cant go person by person or program by program. You have to look at poverty as something that occurs within a community. Figure out how to address various aspects of that poverty within that community. It is good to provide job training. Job training is not going to get you there if everyone is in impoverished housing. If people dont have schools that they can send their kids to. The Gray Areas Program targeted social infrastructure. It was an approach that had previously been scattershot. What the gray areas did was combine it into an area wide attempt. It was something that was picked up by the Community Action program. It involved residents in creating these programs. Thats instead of marching in and telling people, we have a plan. It is good for you. They tried with some success to move into communities and asked people what needs to be done here. It was a new approach. The third effort which i mentioned both because it involves us here in dc, but because it was particularly close to kennedy d the Johnson Administration was president kennedys committee on juvenile delinquency. This was headed by robert kennedy, at that time, the attorney general of the United States. It involved an effective attempt to start a project similar to a Gray Areas Program here in dc. Robert kennedy spearheaded that. This is important in particular because it meant that kennedy troubled himself to get some firsthand view of both conditions in impoverished neighborhoods and in what it took to address conditions in the neighborhood. We have a set of new ideological insights, so to say, with harrington. We have experimental feelers out. The other piece that i want to put on the table here is johnson himself. Lyndon johnsons character was, to say the least, complex. It encompassed both ferocious ambition and compassion, traits that sometimes worked in tandem, and at times, not. His chief interest was domestic reform. His concept of what reform required was shaped by his texan upbringing. Johnson was built born in hill country. It is farmland to the west of boston. He tended to traumatize the extent of his childhood poverty. He worked that angle pretty hard. In truth, he did come up with the family where his father, sam, was never able to establish himself in a secure way. The family was constantly rocked by financial crisis. His mother, rebecca, was the pillar in all of this. I expect that she was rather annoyed, but she had higher aspirations than her husband for her family, especially for her oldest son, lyndon. Bottom line, johnson, from an early age, new about economic struggle. If not flatout poverty, then what about it meant meant to be dismissed as an economic failure. To be looked downon. An important piece of johnsons background is his time at could to love. Cotulla. It became a touchdown of his later career. His students were impoverished, young mexican americans. Johnson did all he could for them. And now, im going to try to read this quote. Let me see if i can get through it. Years later, standing at the well of the house, introducing the war on poverty plans, johnson referred to this experience of his. This was the address of march 15th, 1965, in which son laid out the program. He said, my first job after college was as teacher in cotulla, texas, a small, mexicanamerican school. Few of themcoulspeak english, and they often came hungry. Thw, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never knew why people dislike them, but they knew it was so. I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home, wishing there was more that i could do. You never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that i would be standing here in 1965. That i might have the chance to help sons and daughters of those students, and people like them, all over the country. But now i do have that chance. And i will let you in on a secret. I mean to use it. The biographer reports that the next day, johnson was in his office, and a friend complimented him on his speech and asked, who wrote it. The reporter said that johnson pulled a picture from his desk and said, they did. A third factor in the upbringing that is perhapimmediately relevant is johnsons time as the head of the new Deal National youth administration, the texas branch. The National Youth administration was charged with the new al program. The idea was to try to find employment for american young people particularly withthe object of keeping them in school. Johnson was, from the very first, from his election in november of 1932, johnson was a fan of fdr. This picture here of Young Johnson meeting fdr when the campaign went through texas captures some of that. It is also notable because you can find other versions of this photo that johnson used in Campaign Literature in which the guy in the middle, who i think is the governor of texas, has been airbrushed out. This is the original shot. Johnsons war on poverty for experience was noteworthy. Years later. , weaver was approved by the senate, making weaver the first africanamerican member of the cabinet in 1965. During his confirmation hearing, someone asked him, what draws you to work for this guy, johnson. He is a southerner. We understood he was a pretty conservative southerner. We heard that a guy from texas was shocking people on the hill because he thought that National Youth administration benefit ought to go to poor folk, and to make matters worse, he was giving a lot of this money to mexican americans and negros. So the war on poverty for experience , it brought relief in the democratic process. He was an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and a supporter of the new deal. He learned from his nya experience that American Government could intervene effectively to improve american lives. Okay, so we have ideology. We have experimentation. We have the personality. We have the explosive and dynamic personality of the president. Lets try to figure out this development here. So political context. The november 22nd 1963 assassination of john kennedy martyred the hopes of a generation of americans. It was a performance. Performance gives the wrong impression. Johnson, in that moment of Great National trauma, handled himself with great skill. It is hard to reproduce how dramatic the loss of kennedy under those circumstances was for the nation. Kennedy had been the bright hope. Nixon cultured it best. It is a good comment on kennedy. And it reveals something true about nixon. Nixon says, americans look at kennedy and they see what they want to be. They look at me, and they see what they are. Many hopes were attached to kennedy, and johnson found a way to pick up the mantle. The Kennedy Administration had an Antipoverty Program they were planning in the months prior to the president s death. Kennedy was determined to pass the tax cut to fulfill his campaign promise. He wanted to balance this gift to the nations affluent classes with something for the poor. Johnson immediately seized on the programs development. In his first Union Address to congress, and there we go. Johnson understood that he could ask the American Public to think about what kennedy had meant to them and then ask them to honor kennedy and the kennedy legacy by moving rapidly on the kennedy program, which up until that time, during the three years of the Kennedy Administration, had been stalled in congress. The magic here is that, as we know, johnson he is called the master of the senate is key skill set was in legislation. He was determined based on his own background to promote a policy of reform. He has been in office for seven weeks. He says the congress, laying out his Program Going forward, unfortunately, Many Americans live on the outskirts of hope. Some because of poverty. Some because of their color. Our task is to replace their despair with opportunity. Here we go. This administration declares war on poverty in america. I urge this congress and all americans to join with me on that effort. Our chief weapons will be better schools, better health, and better home, and better training, and better Job Opportunities to help americans, especially younger americans, escape from the squalor and misery and unemployment, when other citizens help to carry them. A couple of warning lights go off. Is it wise to declare unconditional war on Something Like poverty . Will you know when you have one . Have you set up a metric for that . Is it conceivable that you will have won . Are you overpromising . Of course, you see this characteristic, and this is something that is folded into the Economic Opportunity act. We are not just going to worry about the children. We are going to worry about education and job training and housing and health, and on and on it goes. So the gauntlet has been laid down. It has been laid down in january of 1964. Americans say yes, yes, we can still do this. We can honor the memory of our lost leader in this way. It is right that we should do this. So several things had to happen first. The first order of business in the winter of 1963 was to create a budget that could accommodate the tax cut that lbj intended to make while staying below the 100 million mark. Kennedy, remember, had the war on poverty, thinking it had gotten going. Kennedy wanted to get the economy going again. He thought that would be necessary. So the mostly southern and conservative democrats who control the Congress Said that we will go along with you on this, only if you show some budget discipline and keep this under the sum of 100 billion. Johnson was able to pull that off. Having achieved an acceptable budget, he was able to pass the tax cut. This 11 billion tax cut with the revenue act of 1964, in fact, played largely, although in the background, of our story. It is arguably responsible for the great spurt in Economic Growth and the feeling of prosperity that americans enjoyed during the 1960s, cut short by the increasing pressure of the vietnam war. Having passed those two measures, johnson sent his Economic Opportunity act to congress. He described it. Instead of the act, every man has a chance to advance his will for to the limit of his capacity. Notice what is being stressed here. This is not relief. This is not a dole. It is opportunity. We have faith in the American Economy, and our strategy is to restructure that economy to let everyone in. Johnson, in sending the bill to congress, challenged congress. Today, for the first time in our history, we have the power to strictly barriers to full participation in our society. Having the power we have to do this. So, again, the gauntlet is laid down. Agn, a reminder, the economic opportity act is part of the rger greasociety program. Is is important fothe Economic Opportunity act because you nt to remember title ii, the Community Action program. What was the Community Action prram going to do . The idea was that the people on the ground were going to be able to look out into this vast array of federal programs, and from their position on the ground, knowing what their communities needed, were going to be able to pick and choose from among these programs to assemble a plan that would address and be tailored to the particular needs of their community. This list here should give you, i hope, some idea of the title wave of new policy and legislation that the johnson team was pushing through congress. This was particularly in 1964. This was riding on the kennedy legacy. By the time you get to 1965, it is writing on the majority that johnson was able to rank up. He has 2 to 1 majorities in both house and senate. The Community Action planners were going to address poverty by pulling from among the opportunities that were offered by this roster of new legislation. So what happened . In thinking about the Economic Opportunity act, the useful thing is to think about, in what ways, if any, is this innovation different from the way that americans have always done poverty . Does this contribute something new to our mix . Something that we should discard rapidly or something that we should pick up and integrate, moving forward . Starting with, what were the innovations . The first was a compreheiv assault. Again, nothing in the roster of programs that we just looked at there is nothing here that is radically new in and of itself. Job improvements, housing improvements, but what is new here is the idea that if we are going to make this work, we have to be serious about it. We have to look at it as an effort not to solve this one off problem over here and this oneoff problem over there, but to put together a package that will be a restructuring of the Economic Conditions in which American Communities are struggling. It has citizen engagement. Do you really mean to tell me that you are going to call my neighbor mrs. Williams up and invite her to the Community Center and asked her to plan new programs . Is that really what mrs. Williams is best that . What do we want from mrs. Williams . That is an issue that is going to dock this Program Throughout its tenure. Nonetheless, it is arguably a step forward. Nothing we have done has worked well so far. Maybe you would be good to ask people who are experiencing these conditions how they think things ought to be altered. The third innovation is the outspokenness of the commitment to opportunity. This commitment to opportunity was reflected in the robustness of the American Economy. It has the ability to make room for all. L opportunity. This. L opportunity. This commitment to opportunity helped sell the program. Most americans weve come across this problem in earlier phases and effective welfare reform has got to be acceptable to the majority of americans, meaning its going to have to find a way of sitting into generally effective welfare reform has to be acceptable to the majority of americans, meaning, it will find a way of fitting into generally accepted social values. This commitment to opportunity helped sell the program and most americans resisted the idea of socalled handouts and a thought it was Citizens Rights and the responsibility to be independent and provide for ones own sustenance and assert that it may be impossible for some to achieve independence except in a few specific categories of age or disability and it was to cast doubt on the American Dream itself and a dream that in america all persons could attain self sufficiency and independence. So those are the innovations and what are the challenges for this program . First, federal system friction. This at the time was kind of fun and imagine how, if you know anything about mayor daley in chicago, imagine how mayor daley felt when he got the news that the federal government was taking money that in past years probably would have come to the City Government of chicago and was instead sending it to some Grassroots Organization on the south side out of mayor daleys control, depriving the city of this money in order to fund this, in his view, radical scrappy group on the south side that was only going to make trouble for him. Across the country, the eoa created friction within the federal system because it did just that. It went around state and local governments and provided funding directly to Grassroots Organizations. Worse, as the 60s heated up and devils of violence in the cities increased, the Community Action programs were often sometimes rightly and often wrongly associated with support for increased militancy and even at times for support for violence. Is this a success or failure . The purpose of the eoa was to shake up the existing system. It did do that, but perhaps it was so successful on that frontc that it made it in sustainable and a second challenge coming from a different direction was failure and expense. Okay, president johnson, we have pastor policy and you declared unconditional war and we put money into this and we have been working on this for 18 months and we look around and we noticed there is still poverty everywhere. Not only is there still poverty everywhere, but it is getting more expensive to write checks for it and in this period the Johnson Administration is experiencing this and also through Social Security amendments increasing benefits to recipients. There is a rising price tag and you havent accomplished what you told us you were going to an illogical impression is who thinks you will fall poverty and 18 months . Ve but the 60s are a tense time. Perhaps it wasnt illegitimate for people who had supported the act to say to the administration, look. We have to give this some concrete sign of progress we cant continue to sell this to the folks back home. What you see here is the opening wedge that will undermine support for this approach in the congress. The third piece is social Movement Demands and impacts. As i said, at the top, one of the unique aspects of this phase of the American Social policy development is the degree to which social movements were prominent. And i think it is fair to say influential in shaping poverty outcomes. Lets look at those. We will look in particular at the Civil Rights Movement and the black Power Movement and welfare rights and women and their rights and their contributions here. The Civil Rights Movement is evolving rapidly in this moment. What is useful for us to notice is that the Civil Rights Movement starts out where most americans are very much in advocacy of Opportunity Solutions to the problem of poverty but ultimately militancy, particularly in the black power phase will take the movement all the way to the mans for guaranteed income. So it is kind of tracing the trajectory that the larger policy landscape will go through. Our contemporary picture of the Civil Rights Movement in 1955 to 1965 deemphasizes its demands for economic integration. But in its origins, the movement was a demand for African American access to American Opportunity and this envisioned a restructuring of American Society and economy to enable that access and it was both more ambitious and more realistic goal than that of material equality obtained through income and distributione policies and you can start with the march on washington. It was a march for jobs. That was what the demand was and the key organizers of the march are mr. Rustin and mr. Randolph here the labor organizer. They were pushing for full economic assimilation highway of effective expansions of opportunity and at this time they were working to develop a freedom budget that would capture their ideas for restructuring the American Economy and the freedom budget was first proposed by them in late 1965. It was submitted to the Johnson Administration and to the public in october 1966. The aim of the budget was to rework the federal government funding to create equity through economic participation and it envisioned a federal budget restructured to guarantee a job for everyone ready and willing to work at minimum wage which lifted all workers out of poverty. So this is something of a starting position in the african American Social movement that was putting pressure on policy deliberations in washington. A corollary in this moment was the student nonviolent coordinating committee. And this was the use branch of the Civil Rights Movement. It is within this branch of the Civil Rights Movement that this shift i am talking about, away from the lobbying for opportunity toward the more militant claim for guaranteed income, it is easier to see or easy to see within the changes. And the picture here, this is julian bond an early chairman with the logo and it is founded in 1960 and founded as an integrated Movement Integrated Youth Organization focused on tackling nationwide the problem of discrimination, antiblack discrimination. By 1966, this movement, like the rest of america is experiencing a transition. First of all, black leadership within sncc reached the conclusion that from here on out this effort had to be led and largely implemented by African American people and it in effect asked white people in the movement to leave the organization and the counsel to those people was, if you are as you say you are committed to this movement the place that you can be of most help is working in White Communities that enforce Racial Discrimination and go back to those communities where they came from and make change there because we need to run them ourselves. In this moment, new leadership is elected at sncc and you can see him here with dr. King. Carmichael was a deeply invested supporter of martin king, but as a young man about 15 years younger than him, was beginning to feel strongly that the kinds of nonviolent tactics he was willing to support were inadequate to new challenges and this was underscored by failures of kings initiatives. For example, in 1966, the Chicago Freedom program, king and the southern christian Leadership Conference folks went to chicago and was determined open up housing in chicago and was squashed flat by mayor daley and king had no real understanding of what he was coming up against in challenging a northern urban machine. He also didnt understand the depth of antiblack feeling in chicagos ethnic neighborhoods and he was part of that same that people in the south should go to chicago to learn how to hate. In that environment, car medical carmichael takes over it sncc. And also in 1966, it first puts forward the slogan black power during the march against fear and mississippi in june 1966. King and carmichael are both at that march and king is struggling to try to keep the march peaceful and continue on on a nonviolent path and carmichael is increasingly saying we have been taxed beyond her limit and one evening he is thrown in jail for like the 30th time and he comes out of jail that evening. He tries out on the crowd, the marchers the next day, what do we want . Black power. He and king arent sure how the participants will respond but the plant chant is echoed back, black power. This is carmichael on that trip. And this is unrsred and the anxiety of americans and outside the black immunity is eased by this series of long hot summers which is playing along with this. The long hot summer put on display the increasetancy in the black ity and in American Society at large and these were summers of uprising and violence in each of the years 1964 through 1968 they started with violence in new york city directly prior to the 1964 conventit nominated johnson for his full term in the wake of a july Police Killing in new york city and included the august 1965 explosion in neighborhood which occurred days after the passage of that act of 1965 which left people despairing and people felt they had moved mountains to get their Voting Rights act passed in the payoffo was further destruction in los angeles. And it continued through uprising in newark and detroit in july 1967 to the violence and destruction across the nation following kings assassination in april 1968. And some americans and legislators responded to this increasing militancy and rise in violence by challenging the s movement legitimacy and others responded with increased urgency. In either case this phase succeeded in capturing the attention of medical leaders and policymakers who listened when the spokesman began to make the case for poor people or at least for black peoples claim for guaranteed income. I want to quickly look at how this rising recognition of race as an issue was beginning to reshape the policy discourse around poverty policy. Again, i have a few particular speakers i want to present. The first is oscar lewis. Oscar lewis was a new yorker and the son of a rabbi. He started out in his history and got bored and became an anthropologist. He made a significant set of statements with his work on latin American Families and puerto rican families in this e case in the United States. Lewiss thesis was that poor people were trapped in a culture of poverty that was both an adaptation and a reaction to their marginal ac position in a class stratified highly materialistic society and it is a culture of poverty and lewis wrote a series of books in which he attempted to trace the impacts of this culture of poverty in American People living in poverty and you can see where this is headed and it retains the idea that poverty may be systemic but perhaps it is now putting this beyond the reach of policy interventions saying this isnt a problem with opportunity structures but a deeper issue. It goes to the enculturation of people. In a similar vein and even more controversially was this report. Moynan was an assistant secretary in the department of labor and he prepared a report, an internal report in a case for National Action and it became public in 1965 and raised a furor and it was challenged that the then conventional wisdom that Economic Conditions were the prime element shaping the lives of the poor and argued instead kind of parallel to lewis that the conditions in black were an important part of the function of failed Family Structure and specifically the fatherless matriarchal family the causes of which that Family Structure traced back to slavery and jim crow and ongoing race discrimination. As moynahan interpreted this data, they showed that the gap between the negro and most other groups in society is widening and as evidence, for example with the out of wedlock birth rate which in 1965 with 25 in the African American community and 3. 1 among white families and from this and other data he concluded that the cause of troubling conditions laid not so much in Economic Conditions as in family life which in black communities constituted and there is the famous controversial statement and it was a tangle of pathology capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro Society is the deterioration of the negro family and its the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro Community at the time. This raised an outcry and contemporary critics accused him of blaming the victim and of failing to delve into the sources of dysfunction that he identified. This report influenced war on poverty planning and it cast doubt on the efficacy of existing welfare programs and he in fact found that increasing and welfare spending tract with increases in African American community this integration and he argued to johnson that without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, but the report raised doubts as to whether, given the embeddedness of the dysfunction that he asserted, efforts to create new access to opportunity would be sufficient. It is recognizing that we have a systemic problem and sticking with an opportunity response but it is beginning to say that we may be dealing with something bigger here than we had envisioned and we may not have the tools to deal with it. And les look at the womens end of this. This was womens rights and the growing activism among women that would ultimately that we know as second wave feminism that is rising at this time. And it became another stream of social activism feeding into the poverty policy. Women were in fact the stepchildren of this family and legislators on the house floor gladly stepped up to vote in favor of provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discrimination on the basis of udrace but they though out loud that when they were asked to do the same for discrimination based on sex, the provision passed and it was inserted by the sky, judge smith of virginia and judge smith was a famous and it is unclear if he inserted the clause about discrimination on the basis of sex because as a poison pill hoping it would think the bill if he inserted it or he included it because he was in fact and had a record of a supporter of womens rights and in any case the provision did pass, but only by a hair. This treatment of women and womens concerns continued and the equal Opportunity Commission created by the 1964 act, that simply declined in its early years to pursue claims of discrimination based on sex and wouldnt pursue n that. And less importantly than those based on race, this dereliction of duty led directly to the automation of the National Organization for women which, during the late 60s was prominent and saw to it that womens claims would be included in the public and policy conversations. So with that background, a large Womens Movement is in the offering but we are particularly interested in the welfare Rights Movement which also evolved at this time. Poverty policy battles often centered on women weather as the problematic matriarchs of the monahan report or as the recipient of the aid and again these costs were rising rapidly during these years and the National Welfare Rights Organization was formed in 1967 drawing together multiple grassroots groups that have proliferated in the cities around the naon to demand improvements to the american system and presentative of the system was johnny tillman. He was an activist and organizer and a welfare mother. As she described herself. I am a i am a black woman. I am a powoman. I am a fat woman. I am a middleaged woman, and i am on welfare. In this country, if you are of those things, poor, black, fat, female, middleaged and on welfare, you count less as a human being. If you are all of those things, you dont count at all except as a statistic and i am a statistic. I am 45 years old. T i have raised six children. She described the dilemma that women like her faced and nobody denies, least of all poor women that there is dignity and satisfaction in being able to support your kids through honest labor and we wish we could do it. The problem is that our countrys economic policies deny the dignity and satisfaction of self sufficiency to millions of people and the millions who suffer every day and underpaid dirty jobs and still dont have enough to survive. Tillman had a solution to the poverty problem to propose which was this. If i were president , i would solve this socalled welfare crisis in a minute and go a long way toward liberating everyone and i would issue a proclamation that womens work u is real work. In other words, i would start paying women a living wage for doing the work we are already doing and in child raising and housekeeping. And the welfare crisis would be over just like that. But recognizing the radicalism of that proposal in effect the overthrow patriarchy, tillman had a more practical proposal offer. We, meaning the National Welfare Rights Organization put together our own welfare plan called guaranteed adequate income which illuminates sexism from welfare and there would be no categories and men or women or children are single or kids or no kids but just poor people who need aid and you get paid according to need and family size only and 6500 payment for a family of four which is the department of labors estimate of what is adequate. So here is this voice and this very strong set of voices now coming out of both the black community and Womens Community and welfare Rights Community saying to policymakers that we cant wait on your opportunity and heres what we want you to do. They had backup and this is those who came forward with a strategy to make sure this happened. And just as tillman and the nwr overcoming forward with this guaranteed income proposal, Columbia University were developing an Action Strategy to force its implementation on the federal government and they presented their strategy in an essay in may 1966 issue of the nation and it was called the weight of the poor, strata deed and poverty and how can we use this to leverage policy change . The aim was to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income and how . At that time, they observed many people eligible to receive these benefits were not registered for the program and the plan was to organize to push registrations toward 100 of those eligible and doing so, they theorized would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal el disruption in local and state governments and the National Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution that would override welfare failures and local class and race conflicts and global revenue dilemmas andl they did recognize that such an aim would be questioned by some because the ideal of individual, social, and economic mobility has such deep roots, but even activists seem reluctant to call for National Programs to eliminate poverty by the outright distribution of income. There we have a framework created by the Administration Early in the 60s moment that looks toward creation of opportunity and restructure of the economy as the decade rolls forward, we have the emergence of these ever more effective and ever more militant social movements that are pushing just like legislators on the hill who have become impatient with what the administration is asking people to do and are ng pushing for a far more radical solution in the form of guaranteed income. We do move toward entitlement thinking. This ultimately undermines the program. In fact a series of factors come together to undermine the program. The continuation of the johnson plan requires continuing support from congress for expenses that necessarily were going to get larger Going Forward and it is one thing the pilot a program like the Community Action program, but as planning continued, each of the Community Action plans would be calling on greater and greater federal resources and it was essential to keep the Democratic Coalition together around support for this act and this began to fall apart. Number one, as was mentioned earlier, there was the problem of the weakness of initial results and welfare costs are not going down but getting higher and we dont see this in American Cities that we see in fact increased militants and corruption and chaos and it doesnt seem to be working and explain how we sell this to the folks back home. A second consideration and strictly a historically limiting factor was the fact of vietnam and this was problematic in more ways than one. There was budget pressure due to the war and it became clear by 1966 that although johnson had come out swinging, swearing in his you the American Economy was robust enough that it could provide for both guns and butter into it simultaneously and by 1966 it is clear it isnt the case and clear to prevent the risk of significant inflation, what he ought to be doing is imposing a new set of taxes and he just had this big success passing in 1964 the revenue act and he doesnt want to go back on that and he is not sure he has the support in congress to do that. What does this mean . It means he has to chisel down support for Great Society programming and the effect of that is to leave legislators who had supported him, particularly those further to the left and particularly those who have been committed to the Great Society feeling betrayed and we do have this program started and now your cutting us off at the knees and how do we talk to my people in my community about this . The result was those legislators were looking for a different approach. Social movements advocacy as discussed played a part and here said black power militants and welfare rights militants, here is another possibility. How about this, one that you are using isnt working and violence in the later 60s is reaching what contemporaries perceive as a crisis point and legislators are anxious to take steps that will immediately quiet situation and maybe guaranteed income isnt such a terrible idea and maybe, in fact, guaranteed income, given the complexity of the problem that we are recognizing, maybe guaranteed income is the only thing and this is exacerbated by pushback, particularly among the working class people, in particular expressed hostility to the idea of what they perceive to be handouts to people who werent pulling their own weight and it created political problems for people in congress and how do we balance this and a deciding factor is the role of race. This is because the claims of entitlement were telling in the case of the black freedom struggle and as the demands of African American leadership grew strident legislators found it harder to pursue a program of opportunity which conditioned participation on demand that participants fulfill work and Family Responsibilities and if you do have a claim that we deem valid against society, if you say i suffer the costs of discrimination, then can we really make as a predicate of em aiding you a set of work requirements . Or we really obligated to write you a check. Policymakers turned instead to evaluation of the claims of entitlement to a guaranteed income and this included even lyndon johnson. In his june 1965 Howard University commencement address, johnson himself recognized the weight of African American claims recognizing the progress made during his administration toward disaggregation and National Freedom and he recognized freedom isnt enough and you dont wipe away the scars of centuries by saying you are now free to go where you want and do what you desire and choose leaders you please. You dont take a person who for years has been in change and liberate him and bring him up to the starting line of the race and say you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe you have been fair and thus johnson told Howard University graduates the struggle would now enter a new phase in which the nation must seek not just legal equity but g human ability and not just equality as a theory but as a fact and the quality as a result. In other words we are moving away from opportunity toward entitlement and toward outcome lets take a glimpse ahead and ask what this moment of policy experience under the Johnson Administration meant for policy Going Forward. This idea of guaranteed income is actually going to have its real moment in the sun under h the presidency of richard nixon. Nixon, in 1969 submitted to congress the family assistance plan and it in fact had been designed by patrick monahan, seen here and it would have provided a living wage to all American Families. And it would have done away and replaced afdc and by replacing that it would have done away with singling out welfare mothers and other of the unworthy poor. The family assistance plan was in fact defeated in 1972 by a democratic congress, something that ted kennedy among others rude ever after but the idea of a guaranteed income did fail and we will have more to say about that next week. The subsequent major policy developments of the 1980s and the cuts during the Reagan Administration to a range of social provisions and policies followed in 1969 by the act that created the temporary assistance for needy families and this is under president clinton who promised to end welfare as we know it and boast of these moves under reagan and clinton attacked the idea and moved further away from the idea of the possibility of a legitimate guaranteed income. So at the end of the 20th century folding in, johnson, nixon, reagan and clinton there were a number of paths of possible reform. I think as we have seen throughout our work in this material, all of these remain live options and the question for us is what is the balance among them . What are the new arguments to come forward to give better support to some beyond others . By the end of the 20th century, americans had considered and even experimented in several paths to the improved quality of life for all americans. Work relief, the idea that in a society that is so valued and i will find it. Thats in a society that is so valuable a job should be available for all who want to work and if need be in the last resort it should be provided by the national government. But as we have seen, roosevelts new deal program for Social Security lead with a plan for public works and for full employment and the idea was picked up by his successor, harry truman who made an effort to pass a full employment bill in 1945 and roosevelts initiative was averted by the war effort and trumans bill, which would have committed the federal government to providing work to all americans, was passed only in a watered down version and we have toyed with the idea of a government operation to provide work in a society dedicated to work and again as of last resort and we toyed with that and we havent followed through. The second possibility is the johnson possibility that we just explored of opportunity restructuring and this is an effort or a commitment to the American Economy and a faith in the robustness and capability of the American Economy and the commitment to retooling it so it does work for all and in that respect it is a tremendously hopeful approach to poverty policy. And a third possibility, one not adequately explored even though during the new deal is the i dia of attacking poverty by providing a Stronger Base line of public services. If housing is affordable and helpful or if Public Schools are good or if there is access to things like libraries and job training and healthcare, this changes what the need of each private household is and why not approach this that way . We also nibble on that and we do nibble on that approach but the problem is of course that it begins to sound like socialism which is a problem for americans. Finally, and in this list, the idea of the income guarantees. The plus of this approach is that it recognizes the justice of the claim of all members of a society to share to some reasonable degree in its resources and benefits. But by forestalling efforts to improve underlying economic and social systems to assist independent access to opportunity vice systems, this approach risks a degree of social stagnation and the creation of a permanent underclass of citizens. These are ablebodied but pensioned off. So what this means, all of these are policy approaches ic active on the table and policymakers will continue to shuffle among them and juggle among them and argue with one another about them as we the public will and my bottom line is we as americans are y permanently stuck in this struggle and it is a struggle for policy that will harmonize our self identity as a people committed both to work, self sufficiency, and independence and also to political equality among citizens. That is all i have to say at the present time. Here is a look at some significant moment moments in history. October 28 is remembered as black monday when the Dow Jones Industrial average continued falling in a stock market crash that eventually led to billions of dollars lost and the great depression. Verdicts in the nernberg trials of leading officials were handed out in 1946 on october 1 and the trials culminated with 19 being convicted of charges including crimes against humanity and 12 were seenced to death and three others acquitted. On october 16 of 1962, the cuban missile crisis began when the United States discovered Nuclear Missile sites under construction in cuba and for 13 days president kennedy and his administration navigated the confrontation with the soviet premier and the soviet military and after tense negotiations a diplomatic resolution was reached and the soviets agreed to dismantle the arsenal in cuba. The path we have chosen is full of hazards is all paths are but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitment around the world and the cost of freedom is always high, but americans have always paid it and one path we should never choose is the path of surrender or submission and our goal is not the victory of light the vindication of right and peace at the expense of freedom that both peace and freedom here in this hemisphere and we hope around the world. And god willing that goal will be achieved. Thank you and good night. That is a look at some significant moments in october. American history tv has programs available to watch online on all of these topics in our archives on a website. 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