Poverty and Social policies | UPSC Mains: World History PDF Download

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.

Truman (1945-53)

• Harry S. Truman, a man of great courage and common sense, once compared by a reporter to a bantam -weight prize fighter, had to face the special problem of returning the country to normal after the war. This was achieved, though not without difficulties: removal of wartime price controls caused inflation and strikes, and the Republicans won control of Congress in 1946. In the fight against poverty he had put forward a programme known as the Fair Deal , which he hoped would continue Roosevelt’ s New Deal. It included a national health scheme, a higher minimum wage, slum clearance and full employment.
• However, the Republican majority in Congress threw out his proposals, and even passed, despite his veto, the Taft-Hartley Act ( 1947), which reduced trade -union powers.
• The attitude of Congress gained Truman working-class support and enabled him to win the 1948 presidential election, together with a Democrat majority in Congress. Some of the Fair Deal then became law (extension of social security benefits and an increase in the minimum wage), but Congress still refused to pass his national health and old -age pension schemes, which was a bitter disappointment for him . Many Southern Democrats voted against Truman because they disapproved of his support for black civil rights.

Eisenhower (1953-61)

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:

• insurance for the long-term disabled;
• financial help towards medical bills for people over 65;
• federal cash for housing;
• an extensive road-building programme, beginning in 1956, which over the next 14 years gave the USA a national network of first-class roads; this was to have important effects on people’ s everyday lives: cars, buses and trucks became the dominant form of transport, the motor industry received a massive boost, and this contributed towards the prosperity of the 1960s;
• more spending on education to encourage study in science and mathematics ( it was feared that the Americans were falling behind the Russians, who in 1957 launched the first space satellite - Sputnik ).

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).

Kennedy ( 1961-3)

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:

• an extension of social security benefits to each child whose father was unemployed;  
• raising of the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25 an hour;
• federal loans to enable people to buy houses;
• federal grants to the states enabling them to extend the period covered by unemployment benefit.

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.

Johnson ( 1963-9)

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 .

• The Economic Opportunity Act ( 1964 ) provided a number of schemes under which young people from poor homes could receive job training and higher education.
• Other measures were the provision of federal money for special education schemes in slum areas, including help in paying for books and transport ; financial aid lor clearing slums and rebuilding city areas; and the Appalachian Regional Development Act ( 1965 ) , which created new jobs in one of the poorest regions.
• Full voting and civil rights were extended to all Americans, regardless of their colour ( see the next section ).
• Perhaps his most important innovation was the Social Security Amendment Ai t ( 1965 ). also known as Medicare , this was a partial national health scheme, though it applied only to people over 65.

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.

Nixon ( 1969-74)

• Unemployment was soon rising again, with over 4 million out of work in 1971; their plight was worsened by rapidly rising prices. The Republicans were anxious to cut public expenditure; Nixon reduced spending on Johnson’ s poverty programme, and introduced a wages and prices freeze. However, social security benefits were increased, Medicare was extended to disabled people under 65, and a Council for Urban Affairs was set up to try to deal with the problems of slums and ghettos. Violence was less of a problem under Nixon, partly because protesters could now see the approaching end of America’s controversial involvement in Vietnam, and because students were allowed some say in running their colleges and universities.
• During the last quarter of the twentieth century, in spite of some economic success under Reagan, the underlying problem of poverty and deprivation was still there. In the world’ s richest country there was a permanent underclass of unemployed, poor and deprived people, the inner cities needed revitalizing, and yet federal spending on welfare, although it increased after 1981, remained well below the level of government welfare funding in western European states like Germany, France and Britain for later developments).