Great Society: By Lyndon B. Johnson, on May 22, 1964

자료: http://www.answers.com/topic/great-society

US Government Guide: Great Society

The Great Society was the phrase that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave to his domestic programs. Johnson spelled out his vision of the Great Society in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964. He called on the nation to move not only toward “the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society,” one that would “end poverty and racial injustice.” The term came from the English socialist Graham Wallas, who wrote a book of that name in 1914; the term was also used by the English socialist Harold Laski in his 1931 book introduction to Politics.

Johnson believed that low-income communities could be aided by providing a variety of social services to their residents. These services would enable them to obtain the education and training necessary to obtain jobs that would lift them from poverty. Programs for the poor included the following: Head Start, which provided preschool educational and health programs; the Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth Corps, along with the Vocational Education Act, which gave job training to inner-city teenagers; the Higher Education Act, which provided loans and scholarships to college students from low-income families; the Teachers Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), VISTA Lawyers and Legal Services Program, which sent teachers, community organizers, and lawyers into poor neighborhoods; the Model Cities Program of 1966, which coordinated slum renewal and economic development; the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which barred racial discrimination in housing, provided more low-income housing, and experimented with rent-supplement payments to the poor; Medicaid and Neighborhood Health Services, which provided funding to hospitals and doctors serving the poor; and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which provided federal funding to schools and targeted the aid to low-income school districts.

Johnson created the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964 in order to coordinate social programs in poor neighborhoods. It did so through community action programs that provided for participation by residents in the communities served, usually through the creation of public corporations with elected boards of directors to administer services. These community action programs came under fire at the local level from conservatives opposed to government services for the poor as well as from mayors who wanted local governments to administer such programs. By 1968 most of these programs had been reorganized to place them under the control of city officials.

Richard Nixon's administration attempted to abolish the Office of Economic Opportunity and gave departments such as Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) the responsibility to administer its programs. Ronald Reagan was an unabashed foe of these programs, campaigning in 1980 with the slogan “In the 1960s we fought a war against poverty and poverty won.” During Reagan's Presidency many of these programs were abolished and others, including job training, housing, and community development programs, suffered significant cutbacks.

Democrats pointed out that the Great Society programs had significantly reduced the poverty rates in the 1960s, down from 19 percent to 12 percent of the population between 1964 and 1969. In the 1980s, by contrast, poverty rates increased to about 15 percent when conservative Republican administrations phased out Great Society programs. In the 1960s the income of young black families had risen more than 60 percent. In 1992 families with children headed by people younger than 30 had one-third less income, and young black families had half the income of their predecessors in 1972.

Democrats also noted that many Great Society programs benefited middle-class families. These included the College Work Study and Higher Education Act, which provided loans and work-study employment for college students, and the Medicare program, which provided health insurance for the elderly.

See also Johnson, Lyndon B.

Sources

• Peter Marris and Martin Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform (London: Routledge, 1967).
• Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984)