In a speech at the University of Michigan in May 1964, Lyndon Johnson laid out a sweeping vision for a package of domestic reforms known as the Great Society. Speaking before that year’s graduates of the University of Michigan, Johnson called for “an end to poverty and racial injustice” and challenged both the graduates and American people to “enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.” At its heart, he promised, the Great Society would uplift racially and economically disfranchised Americans, too long denied access to federal guarantees of equal democratic and economic opportunity, while simultaneously raising all Americans’ standards and quality of life.

Figure 1. In a speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on May 22, 1964 (a), President Johnson announced some of his goals for the Great Society. These included rebuilding cities, preserving the natural environment, and improving education. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, alongside his childhood schoolteacher, Kate Deadrich Loney (b). (credit a: modification of work by Cecil Stoughton)

Great Society Programs

While the programs of the New Deal thirty years earlier responded to the dire economic context of the Great Depression, the Great Society was a response to unequal opportunity in the midst of prosperity. The Great Society took on a range of quality-of-life concerns that seemed suddenly solvable in a society of such affluence. It established the first federal food stamp program. Medicare and Medicaid would ensure access to quality medical care for the aged and poor. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, an outgrowth of Johnson’s experience as a former teacher, was the first sustained and significant federal investment in public education, totaling more than $1 billion. Significant funds were poured into colleges and universities through the Higher Education Act, passed the same year. The Great Society also established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both federal investments in arts and letters that fund American cultural expression to this day.

In addition to funding for education and the arts, Great Society programs established consumer protection laws for the meat, tobacco, and automobile industries and required “truth in lending” by creditors. Other initiatives included funding for public transportation and high-speed mass transit as well as environmental protections. In 1965, Congress also passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, legislation that overturned quota-based laws from the 1920s that favored immigrants from western and northern Europe over those from eastern and southern Europe. The new law lifted severe restrictions on immigration from Asia and gave preference to immigrants with family ties in the United States and immigrants with desirable skills. Importantly, the Immigration and Nationality Act facilitated the formation of Asian and Latin American immigrant communities in the following decades.

Addressing Poverty

While these laws touched on important aspects of the Great Society, the centerpiece of Johnson’s plan was the eradication of poverty in the United States. Using the bellicose language common to the Cold War era, he declared a war on poverty that he hoped would eliminate basic material wants in a prosperous society. The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 established and provided $3 billion in funding for a variety of programs to promote employment, development, and education in impoverished communities. The EOA fought rural poverty by providing low-interest loans to those wishing to improve their farms or start businesses. EOA funds were also used to provide housing and education for migrant farmworkers.

Figure 2. President Johnson visits a poor family in Appalachia in 1964. Government initiatives designed to combat poverty helped rural communities like this one by providing low-interest loans and housing. (credit: Cecil Stoughton)

Other legislation created jobs in Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in the United States, and brought programs to Indigenous reservations. One of EOA’s successes was the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the Navajo Reservation, which worked to respect Navajo traditions and culture while also training people for careers and jobs outside the reservation.

No EOA program was more controversial than Community Action, considered the fulcrum of the antipoverty program. Johnson’s antipoverty planners felt that the key to uplifting disfranchised and impoverished Americans was involving poor and marginalized citizens in the actual administration of poverty programs, what they called “maximum feasible participation.”

Community Action Programs would give disfranchised Americans a seat at the table in planning and executing federally funded programs that were meant to benefit them—a significant seat change in the nation’s efforts to confront poverty, which had historically relied on local political and business elites, experts in academia, or charitable organizations for administration. In fact, Johnson himself had never conceived of poor Americans running their own poverty programs. While the president’s rhetoric offered a stirring vision of the future, this vision was essentially a second New Deal in which local elite-run public works camps would instill masculine virtues in unemployed young men. Community Action, however, almost entirely bypassed local administrations and sought to build grassroots civil rights and community advocacy organizations, many of which had originated in the broader civil rights movement.

Despite widespread support for most Great Society programs, the War on Poverty increasingly became the focal point of domestic criticisms from the left and right. On the left, frustrated Americans recognized the president’s resistance to further empowering poor disenfranchised communities and also assailed the growing war in Vietnam, the cost of which undercut domestic poverty spending. As racial unrest and violence swept across urban centers, most notably during the race riots during the summers of 1965 and 1967, critics from the right lambasted federal spending for “unworthy” citizens.