Ironically in the world’s richest country, poverty remained a problem . Although the economy was on the whole a spectacular success story , with industry flourishing and exports booming, there was constant unemployment, which crept steadily up to 5.5 million (about 7 per cent of the labour force) in 1960. In spite of all the New Deal improvements, social welfare and pensions were still limited, and there was no national health system. It was calculated that in 1966 some 30 million Americans were living below the poverty line, and many of them were aged over 65.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower had no programme for dealing with poverty, though he did not try to reverse the New Deal and the Fair Deal. Some improvements were made:
Farmers faced problems in the 1950s because increased production kept prices and incomes low . The government spent massive sums paying farmers to take land out of cultivation, but this was not a success: farm incomes did not rise rapidly and poorer farmers hardly benefited at all. Many of them sold up and moved into the cities.
Much remained to be done, but the Republicans were totally against national schemes such as Truman’ s health service, because they thought they were too much like socialism.
However, some progress was made towards fairer treatment of the black population (see the next section).
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By the time John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, the problems were more serious, with over 4.5 million unemployed. He won the election partly because the Republicans were blamed for inflation and unemployment, and because he ran a brilliant campaign , accusing them of neglecting education and social services. He came over as elegant, articulate, witty and dynamic, and his election seemed to many people to be the beginning of a new era. He had a detailed programme which included medical payments for the poor and aged, more federal aid for education and housing, and increased unemployment and social security benefits. ‘We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier’ , he said, and implied that only when these reforms were introduced would the frontier be crossed and poverty eliminated.
Unfortunately for Kennedy, he had to face strong opposition from Congress, where many right-wing Democrats as well as Republicans viewed his proposals as ‘creeping socialism’ . Hardly a single one was passed without some watering down, and many were rejected completely . Congress would allow no extra federal cash for education and rejected his scheme to pay hospital bills for elderly people. His successes were:
Kennedy’ s overall achievement was limited: unemployment benefit was only enough for subsistence, and even that was only for a limited period. Unemployment still stood at 4.5 million in 1962, and soup kitchens had to be set up to feed poor families.
Kennedy 's vice- president, Lyndon B. Johnson, became president when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 ( see Illus. 23.1 ). Coming from a humble background in Texas, he was just as committed as Kennedy to social reform, and achieved enough in his first year to enable him to win a landslide victory in the 1964 election. In 1964 Johnson 's economic advisers fixed an annual income of $3000 for a family of two or more as the poverty line, and they estimated that over 9 million families ( 30 million people, nearly 20 per cent of the population ) were on or below the line. Many of them were African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans ( American Indians ) and Mexicans.
Johnson announced that he wanted to move America towards the Great Society, where there would be an end to poverty and racial injustice and ‘abundance and liberty for all' .
Many of his measures became law , partly because after the 1964 elections the Democrats had a huge majority in Congress, and partly because Johnson was more skilful and persuasive in handling Congress than Kennedy had been .
This is an impressive list, and yet the overall results were not as successful as Johnson would have hoped, for a number of reasons. His major problem from early 1965 was that he was faced by the escalating war in Vietnam. Johnson’ s great dilemma was how to fund both the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty . It has been suggested that the entire Great Society programme was under-financed because of the enormous expenditure on the war in Vietnam . The Republicans criticized Johnson for wanting to spend money on the poor instead of concentrating on Vietnam ; they were supporters of the strong American tradition of self -help: it was up to the poor to help themselves and wrong to use taxpayers’ money on schemes which, it was thought, would only make the poor more lazy.
Thus many state governments failed to take advantage of federal offers of help.
And the unfortunate president, trying to fight both wars at the same time, ended up losing in Vietnam , winning only a limited victory in the war against poverty, and damaging the US economy as well.
In the mid- 1960s violence increased and seemed to be getting out of hand: there were riots in black ghettos, where the sense of injustice was strongest; there were student riots in the universities in protest against the Vietnam War. There were a number of political assassinations - President Kennedy in 1963, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. Between 1960 and 1967 the number of violent crimes rose by 90 per cent. Johnson could only hope that his ‘war on poverty’ would gradually remove the causes of discontent; beyond that he had no answer to the prob ¬ lem . The general discontent and especially the student protests about Vietnam (‘LBJ , LBJ , how many kids have you burnt today ?’ ) caused Johnson not to stand for re-elec ¬ tion in November 1968, and it helps to explain why the Republicans won, on a platform of restoring law and order.
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Poverty and Social policies
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