War on Poverty Faced ‘Massive Resistance to Use of Funds for Genuine Empowerment’

The March 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with historian Alice O’Connor on the War on Poverty, originally broadcast as part of the September 30, 2016, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Princeton University Press (2001)

Janine Jackson: In September of 2016, CounterSpin spoke with historian Alice O’Connor, who brought a story of the War on Poverty that had little to do with elite media’s Heritage Foundation–inflected version of it as a paternalistic campaign to throw cash at poor people—obviously unsuccessful, since people are still poor.

It seems very relevant to current media debates, in which the idea of rechanneling resources currently going to law enforcement, or community budgetary control more broadly, is treated as an idea from Mars, which requires that media evade, or ignore, or erase some relevant, recent history.

Alice O’Connor is professor of history at the University of California/Santa Barbara, director of UCSB’s Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality and Democracy, and author of, among other titles, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History.

I asked her first to take us back to 1964, and what the War on Poverty looked like in real time.

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Alice O’Connor: In real time, the War on Poverty was associated with a very specific set of programs that surrounded what was most widely known as the Community Action Program. The core idea of the Community Action Program was that federal government funding should go, for a whole variety of social services, to local communities, who would have a say on how those resources were to be distributed, and were distributed in such a way that they would work to the benefit of that community, and that those funds would be planned and used with the so-called “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. And that was the most widely known of the War on Poverty programs at the time. We can talk a little bit later about why that was very controversial.

The reality, though, is that the War on Poverty as a broader initiative was a whole series of interlinked and really embedded programs, that started with the administration’s commitment to bringing the economy much closer to what they considered to be full employment, and that they would generate jobs that paid a decent wage.  At that time, the minimum wage was higher in real terms than it has been until fairly recently—in some states, that is to say; I mean, right now, the federal minimum wage is pathetic, but it was closer then to what people are striving toward now in the $15 minimum wage.

Janine Jackson: Uh-huh.

The Watts Labor Community Action Committee, set up as part of the Community Action Program.

AOC: So the idea was the No. 1 weapon in the War on Poverty—and I have to underscore, this is the language that was being used at the time—the No. 1 weapon was a faster-growing, full-employment, decent-paying, good job–creating economy. And the commitment of the administration, more broadly speaking, was to make that happen.

Second was a whole other related series of programs, that were related to the Great Society, that were basically about expanding the welfare state. And I’m not just talking about the welfare state targeted at low-income people and people below the poverty line. Because this was an era and a period in which we got Medicare, Medicaid, as just two examples of really massive expansion in the provision of healthcare that reached a much broader array of people than people who were below the poverty line, but also created the Medicaid program, which was and continues to be targeted at people below the poverty line.

So the other programs that were related specifically to the War on Poverty were programs like Head Start, which is still around today, and is considered to be one of the most successful social policy programs ever, but a perpetually underfunded program, so a program that has never reached all of the children and families that are actually eligible for it. As well as programs like Job Corps and all sorts of other jobs-in-training programs, community-based health centers.

So the idea was that we’re going to really have a comprehensive array of initiatives. The other one, I should add, which was very, very important at the time, and which continues to be very important, but it was subsequently eviscerated, essentially, by the Reagan administration, was legal assistance for the poor. Not just narrowly construed Legal Aid, but the kind of legal assistance that would help low-income people get not only the representation, but the legal rights, that they deserved. So that’s just a way of kind of trying to get across the comprehensive nature of the idea behind the War on Poverty.

JJ: It was actually the fact that it wasn’t just handouts of cash, so-called, but that it was actually about social change. That was why it was attacked at the time.

Alice O’Connor: “The idea of putting resources of any kind in the hands of low-income people, in particular low-income minority people, low-income women…was going to be a threat to local power structures.”

AOC: That’s a big part of why it was attacked. Two things one can say about this is that when we go back and look at the comprehensive array of initiatives, we can see how there was a huge amount of potential at the time for a structural reform vision, but what happened in actuality was that a lot of that potential was not met. In part because the idea of really growing the economy and creating jobs in such a way that people would have access to them, well, frankly never panned out, because there was not strong enough a commitment to it.

But on the community action front, which was really where the War on Poverty came under immediate fire, and the most controversial part of it, that continues to feed into this completely distorted narrative of failure, was about the fact that the initial plan for the community action, especially coming from Washington, from Washington bureaucrats, was, OK, this is going to be a really good way to coordinate services in a more rational and holistic way, and so that we don’t have all sorts of narrow programs competing with one another. If we really coordinate things at the local level, we can have truly comprehensive intervention, and then we should let local people have a say in how this happens.

What a lot of those architects, at least some of them, didn’t adequately anticipate was that the idea of putting resources of any kind in the hands of low-income people, in particular low-income minority people, low-income women—and low-income people of any race, but especially low-income African Americans—was going to be a threat to local power structures, segregationist local power structures, and it was going to be an avenue of political empowerment for poor people, and poor people’s movements and organizations, that they were going to use to the hilt.

And when those dynamics started playing out, which was very quickly, you got massive resistance to the use of those funds for genuine empowerment, on the one hand, and then you also, very quickly, began to get attacks on the program, not just from arch-conservative segregationists, which you certainly did, but also from liberal party establishment figures at the local level who said, wait a minute, we don’t want other people in control of these resources; we want to direct where they’re going to go.

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Janine Jackson: That was historian Alice O’Connor, professor at UC Santa Barbara, speaking with CounterSpin in 2016.