Presidents Behaving Goodly: Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society
Lyndon Johnson was a bully, and he treated his subordinates very poorly. He also badly mishandled Vietnam, something that likely was the biggest contributor to the end of his political career. But there are some things that he deserves a great deal of credit for, such as the advancements in civil rights that occurred on his watch. He was also the architect of a number of beneficial domestic social programs, which have been collectively referred to as "the Great Society."
The lofty goals of the Great Society were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. Johnson first used the term "Great Society" during a speech at Ohio University on May 7, 1964. He unveiled his program in greater detail later at an appearance at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He launched major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation in the period that followed. The program and its initiatives were subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress.
Johnson was speaking to students at Ohio University in Athens on May 7, 1964, and in the speech he told them: "And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a Society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled." Later that month, on May 22, Johnson formally presented his specific goals for the Great Society in another speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He said:
"We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find these answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society."
After the Ann Arbor speech, 14 separate task forces were created to study many of the sections of the proposed great society. Presidential assistants Bill Moyers and Richard N. Goodwin were placed in charge of the project. One of the task forces addressed the topic of foreign affairs and foreign economic policy. The others dealt with domestic policy: agriculture, anti-recession policy, civil rights, education, efficiency and economy, health, income maintenance policy, intergovernmental fiscal cooperation, natural resources, pollution of the environment, preservation of natural beauty, transportation, and urban problems. The task force reports were submitted to the White House, and Moyers began a second round of review. Their recommendations were circulated among the agencies concerned. Experts on relations with Congress were brought in to advise on how to persuade Congress to pass the required legislation. In late 1964 Johnson reviewed these Great Society proposals at his ranch with Moyers and Budget Director Kermit Gordon. Many of these proposals were included in Johnson’s State of the Union Address delivered on January 4, 1965.
The Great Society agenda was not a widely discussed issue during the 1964 presidential election campaign. Johnson won the election with 61% of the vote and he carried forty-four states. Democrats gained enough seats to control more than two-thirds of each chamber in the Eighty-ninth Congress with a 68-32 margin in the Senate and a 295-140 margin in the House of Representatives. The new congressional makeup allowed House leaders to change the rules that had allowed Southern Democrats to kill civil rights legislation in committee, which helped efforts to pass Great Society legislation.
In 1965, during the first session of the Eighty-ninth Congress, long-stalled legislation such as Medicare and federal aid to education and was passed. This led to legislation about high-speed mass transit, rental supplements, truth in packaging, environmental safety legislation, new provisions for mental health facilities, a teachers’ corps, manpower training, Operation Headstart, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities program, a housing act that included rental subsidies, and an act for higher education. The Johnson Administration submitted eighty-seven bills to Congress, and Johnson signed eighty-four, the most successful legislative agenda in U.S. Congressional history.
Perhaps the most important domestic achievement of the Great Society was in the passage of civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 promoted minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.
The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. Johnson, who, had once been a teacher, had observed extreme poverty in Texas among Mexican-Americans. He declared an "unconditional war on poverty" in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger, illiteracy, and unemployment from American life. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created an Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs. Federal funds were provided for special education schemes in low income areas, including assistance in paying for books and transportation. It also provided financial aid was also provided for slum clearances and rebuilding city areas.
The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and another $2 billion in the following two years. It created dozens of programs, including the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; and the Food Stamp Act of 1964 (which expanded the federal food stamp program).
The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965. It provided significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. During its first year of operation, the Act authorized a $1.1 billion program of grants to states, for allocations to school districts with large numbers of children of low income families, funds to use community facilities for education within the entire community, funds to improve educational research and to strengthen state departments of education, and grants for purchase of books and library materials.
The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a national Teacher Corps to provide teachers to poverty-stricken areas of the United States. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability.
The Social Security Act of 1965 authorized Medicare and provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans. The legislation was met with bitter resistance, particularly from the American Medical Association, who opposed "socialized medicine", by making its benefits available to everyone over sixty-five. In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. Medicaid was created on July 30, 1965 under the Social Security Act of 1965. Each state was given the responsibility to administer its own Medicaid program.
The Social Security Amendments of 1967 included a 13% increase in old-age, survivors, and disability insurance benefits, with a minimum monthly benefit of $55 for a person retiring at or after age 65, an increase from $35 to $40 in the special age 72 payments, and other benefits. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 made the program permanent. By 1967, the federal government began requiring state health departments to make contraceptives available to all adults who were poor. Meal programs for low-income senior citizens began in 1965. The Child Nutrition Act, passed in 1966, made improvements to nutritional assistance to children such as in the introduction of the School Breakfast Program.
In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies.
Transportation initiatives during President Johnson's term included the consolidation of transportation agencies into a cabinet-level position under the Department of Transportation, authorized by Congress on October 15, 1966 and began operations on April 1, 1967. Congress passed a variety of legislation to support improvements in transportation including The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 which provided $375 million for large-scale urban public or private rail projects in the form of matching funds to cities and states and created the Urban Mass Transit Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration), High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 which resulted in the creation of high-speed rail between New York and Washington.
The Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales.
The Great Society also addressed environmental concerns. In a message to Congress on February 8, 1965, Johnson said:
"The air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry. The society that receives the rewards of technology, must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for their control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection against development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation."
The Great Society included several new environmental laws to protect air and water. Environmental legislation enacted included the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, the National Trails System Act of 1968, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 included important elements such as rent subsidies for low-income families, rehabilitation grants to enable low-income homeowners in urban renewal areas to improve their homes instead of relocating elsewhere, and improved and extended benefits for relocation payments.
Despite losses in Congress in the 1966 midterm elections, due to mounting anger and frustration over the Vietnam War, Johnson was still able to secure the passage of additional programs during his last two years in office. Laws were passed to extend the Food Stamp Program, to expand consumer protection, to improve safety standards, to train health professionals, to assist handicapped Americans, and to further urban programs. In 1968, a new Fair Housing Act was passed, which banned racial discrimination in housing and subsidized the construction or rehabilitation of low-income housing units. That same year, a new program for federally funded job retraining for the unemployed in fifty cities was introduced, together with the strongest federal gun control bill. It included laws concerning the transportation of guns across State lines.
By the end of the Johnson Administration, 226 of 252 major legislative requests were met. Federal aid to the poor had risen from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion by 1968.
According to Joseph A. Califano, Jr., one of Johnson's aides, "from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century." Califano claims that the percentage of African Americans below the poverty line dropped from 55 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1968. From 1964 through 1967, federal expenditures on education tripled from $4 billion to $12 billion, while spending on health rose from $5 billion to $16 billion.
Johnson's legacy suffered due to the Vietnam War and the mounting casualties. Soon people forgot about all that Johnson had done to combat poverty, as protestors' cries of "hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" led off the news. But Johnson deserves credit for the fact that his War on Poverty helped millions of Americans rise above the poverty line during his presidency.
The lofty goals of the Great Society were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. Johnson first used the term "Great Society" during a speech at Ohio University on May 7, 1964. He unveiled his program in greater detail later at an appearance at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He launched major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation in the period that followed. The program and its initiatives were subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress.
Johnson was speaking to students at Ohio University in Athens on May 7, 1964, and in the speech he told them: "And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a Society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled." Later that month, on May 22, Johnson formally presented his specific goals for the Great Society in another speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He said:
"We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find these answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society."
After the Ann Arbor speech, 14 separate task forces were created to study many of the sections of the proposed great society. Presidential assistants Bill Moyers and Richard N. Goodwin were placed in charge of the project. One of the task forces addressed the topic of foreign affairs and foreign economic policy. The others dealt with domestic policy: agriculture, anti-recession policy, civil rights, education, efficiency and economy, health, income maintenance policy, intergovernmental fiscal cooperation, natural resources, pollution of the environment, preservation of natural beauty, transportation, and urban problems. The task force reports were submitted to the White House, and Moyers began a second round of review. Their recommendations were circulated among the agencies concerned. Experts on relations with Congress were brought in to advise on how to persuade Congress to pass the required legislation. In late 1964 Johnson reviewed these Great Society proposals at his ranch with Moyers and Budget Director Kermit Gordon. Many of these proposals were included in Johnson’s State of the Union Address delivered on January 4, 1965.
The Great Society agenda was not a widely discussed issue during the 1964 presidential election campaign. Johnson won the election with 61% of the vote and he carried forty-four states. Democrats gained enough seats to control more than two-thirds of each chamber in the Eighty-ninth Congress with a 68-32 margin in the Senate and a 295-140 margin in the House of Representatives. The new congressional makeup allowed House leaders to change the rules that had allowed Southern Democrats to kill civil rights legislation in committee, which helped efforts to pass Great Society legislation.
In 1965, during the first session of the Eighty-ninth Congress, long-stalled legislation such as Medicare and federal aid to education and was passed. This led to legislation about high-speed mass transit, rental supplements, truth in packaging, environmental safety legislation, new provisions for mental health facilities, a teachers’ corps, manpower training, Operation Headstart, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities program, a housing act that included rental subsidies, and an act for higher education. The Johnson Administration submitted eighty-seven bills to Congress, and Johnson signed eighty-four, the most successful legislative agenda in U.S. Congressional history.
Perhaps the most important domestic achievement of the Great Society was in the passage of civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 promoted minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.
The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. Johnson, who, had once been a teacher, had observed extreme poverty in Texas among Mexican-Americans. He declared an "unconditional war on poverty" in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger, illiteracy, and unemployment from American life. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created an Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs. Federal funds were provided for special education schemes in low income areas, including assistance in paying for books and transportation. It also provided financial aid was also provided for slum clearances and rebuilding city areas.
The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and another $2 billion in the following two years. It created dozens of programs, including the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; and the Food Stamp Act of 1964 (which expanded the federal food stamp program).
The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965. It provided significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. During its first year of operation, the Act authorized a $1.1 billion program of grants to states, for allocations to school districts with large numbers of children of low income families, funds to use community facilities for education within the entire community, funds to improve educational research and to strengthen state departments of education, and grants for purchase of books and library materials.
The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a national Teacher Corps to provide teachers to poverty-stricken areas of the United States. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability.
The Social Security Act of 1965 authorized Medicare and provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans. The legislation was met with bitter resistance, particularly from the American Medical Association, who opposed "socialized medicine", by making its benefits available to everyone over sixty-five. In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. Medicaid was created on July 30, 1965 under the Social Security Act of 1965. Each state was given the responsibility to administer its own Medicaid program.
The Social Security Amendments of 1967 included a 13% increase in old-age, survivors, and disability insurance benefits, with a minimum monthly benefit of $55 for a person retiring at or after age 65, an increase from $35 to $40 in the special age 72 payments, and other benefits. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 made the program permanent. By 1967, the federal government began requiring state health departments to make contraceptives available to all adults who were poor. Meal programs for low-income senior citizens began in 1965. The Child Nutrition Act, passed in 1966, made improvements to nutritional assistance to children such as in the introduction of the School Breakfast Program.
In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies.
Transportation initiatives during President Johnson's term included the consolidation of transportation agencies into a cabinet-level position under the Department of Transportation, authorized by Congress on October 15, 1966 and began operations on April 1, 1967. Congress passed a variety of legislation to support improvements in transportation including The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 which provided $375 million for large-scale urban public or private rail projects in the form of matching funds to cities and states and created the Urban Mass Transit Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration), High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 which resulted in the creation of high-speed rail between New York and Washington.
The Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales.
The Great Society also addressed environmental concerns. In a message to Congress on February 8, 1965, Johnson said:
"The air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry. The society that receives the rewards of technology, must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for their control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection against development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation."
The Great Society included several new environmental laws to protect air and water. Environmental legislation enacted included the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, the National Trails System Act of 1968, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 included important elements such as rent subsidies for low-income families, rehabilitation grants to enable low-income homeowners in urban renewal areas to improve their homes instead of relocating elsewhere, and improved and extended benefits for relocation payments.
Despite losses in Congress in the 1966 midterm elections, due to mounting anger and frustration over the Vietnam War, Johnson was still able to secure the passage of additional programs during his last two years in office. Laws were passed to extend the Food Stamp Program, to expand consumer protection, to improve safety standards, to train health professionals, to assist handicapped Americans, and to further urban programs. In 1968, a new Fair Housing Act was passed, which banned racial discrimination in housing and subsidized the construction or rehabilitation of low-income housing units. That same year, a new program for federally funded job retraining for the unemployed in fifty cities was introduced, together with the strongest federal gun control bill. It included laws concerning the transportation of guns across State lines.
By the end of the Johnson Administration, 226 of 252 major legislative requests were met. Federal aid to the poor had risen from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion by 1968.
According to Joseph A. Califano, Jr., one of Johnson's aides, "from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century." Califano claims that the percentage of African Americans below the poverty line dropped from 55 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1968. From 1964 through 1967, federal expenditures on education tripled from $4 billion to $12 billion, while spending on health rose from $5 billion to $16 billion.
Johnson's legacy suffered due to the Vietnam War and the mounting casualties. Soon people forgot about all that Johnson had done to combat poverty, as protestors' cries of "hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" led off the news. But Johnson deserves credit for the fact that his War on Poverty helped millions of Americans rise above the poverty line during his presidency.