1. Johnson, Lyndon, Remarks Upon Signing the Economic Opportunity Act, 20 August 1964, Public Papers of the President (Washington, D.C.).Google Scholar

2. President’s Inaugural Address, 20 January 1965, Public Papers of the President.

3. On 25 December (the day after President Johnson signed the reauthorization), the New York Times ran the following front-page headline: “How Poverty Bill was Saved in House.” New York Times, 25 December 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

4. Time, “The War Within the War,” 13 May 1966, Time online archive.

5. Time, “Six-Star Sargent,” 18 March 1966, Time online archive.

6. This was the version of Community Action that the Bureau of the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and President Johnson developed at the end of 1963 and early 1964. See D. P. Torstensson, “The Politics of Failure, Community Action, and the Meaning of Great Society Liberalism” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2009), chap. 2.

7. There did exist cases where the federal government gave money directly to individuals, bypassing state and local authorities. Examples of this were direct aid under the Office of Education, grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, programs administered by the Welfare Administration and Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, and the Federal Aviation Agency. For fiscal 1965, new obligations of these funds were $1.462 billion. See War on Poverty Microfilm, Part 1, WH Central Files, reel 1, microfilm shot 389.

8. Sargent Shriver, draft document, “Charge to the Economic Opportunity Council,” 7 December 1964, War on Poverty Microfilm, WH Central Files, Reel 1, microfilm shots 452–55.

9. Albert Quie, 30 April 1969, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center, University of Virginia.

10. Gillette, Michael, Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History (New York, 1996), 125Google Scholar. Other congressmen, such as Phil Landrum (D-Ga.), supported the EOA in 1964 and while Landrum became an outspoken critic of the OEO and Community Action, he nevertheless supported the reauthorization of the EOA in 1967 with the insertion of the Green Amendment. See Torstensson, “The Politics of Poverty,” 231.

11. Only months after the first grants had been approved, Community Action was making the newspaper headlines for all the wrong reasons. In March 1965, the Washington Post ran a front-page story entitled “Poverty-War Conflict Erupts over Local Control.” This report detailed how the poverty program was generating conflict over the participation of the poor, particularly in the “most sensitive battle-ground” of Community Action. This was described as taking place all over the country, with the problem being particularly acute in Louisiana and Alabama, where there was the added issue of racial discrimination. On cue, a few days after this article, national columnists and D.C. insiders Rowland Evans and Robert Novak published an Inside Report, “George Wallace vs. the Poor,” detailing the local and national politics of Community Action. In this piece, the duo argued that the “reliance on local leadership is the Achilles heel of the community action program” and the cause of so much of the trouble both in North and South: “In the big cities, patronage-hungry political bosses are muscling in . . . [and] . . . Wallace-style segregationists are applying their deadening touch in the Deep South.” By the end of March, a mere seven months after the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Washington Post declared that “Civil War Goes On In Poverty Plans.” See Washington Post, 6, 11, and 22 March 1965, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

12. See “Review of Economic Opportunity Programs by the Comptroller General of the United States made Pursuant to Title II of the 1967 Amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Report to the Congress of the United States Along with Related Agency Comments by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior,” March 1969, NARA College Park, Library, microfiche, Senate Committee Prints, S1406; “Joint Management Survey of the Office of Economic Opportunity,” draft, June 1966, Joint Management Survey Team, OEO, BOB, Civil Services Commission, LBJ Library, Papers of Bertrand Harding, box 57; NACD position paper, attached to, memorandum, Edgar Cahn to Ted Berry, Fred Hayes, and Jules Sugarman, 28 September 1965, NARA College Park, CSA RG 381, OEO, CAP Office, Records of the Director, box 2; and memorandum, Bruce Rohrbacher to Ted Berry, 29 September 1967, NARA College Park, CSA 381, OEO, CAP Office, Records of the Director, box 40.

13. Community Action as an academic idea had a long history dating back to the University of Chicago’s school of sociology and social scientific experiments in Chicago communities during the 1930s. For a discussion of these sociological and academic origins of Community Action, see O’Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion on the debates and divisions of the CAP concept, see Torstensson, “The Politics of Failure,” chaps. 1–3.

14. As master historian Gareth Davies has put it, this was a time when American liberalism moved away from “opportunity to entitlement.” Davies, Gareth, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kans., 1996).Google Scholar

15. NACD position paper, NARA.

16. Ibid.

17. This view has been expressed by, for example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.

18. Ronald Reagan, Remarks at a White House briefing for members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, 1 May 1987, Public Papers of the President http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/search/speeches/speech_srch.html.

President Reagan also tried out this sound bite in 1986 and 1988.

19. See Chafe, William, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Trattner, Walter, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Irving, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Margaret Weir’s and Theda Skocpol’s essays in Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988); and Russell, Judith, Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty (New York, 2004).Google Scholar

20. Clark, Kenneth and Hopkins, Jeannette, A Relevant War Against Poverty (New York, 1969), 12and 62–63Google Scholar; and Greenstone, David and Peterson, Paul E., Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Participation and the War on Poverty (Chicago, 1976), 1Google Scholar. Although the first has a total sample of sixty-six CAAs, it is a detailed case study of only twelve, of which none are in a rural or nonurban area. And the second is only a study of Community Action in America’s five largest cities: Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City.

21. The most influential of these older works include: Fox Piven, Francis and Cloward, Richard, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Donovan, J. C., The Politics of Poverty (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; and Moynihan, Daniel P., Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

22. See Germany, Kent, New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens, 2007)Google Scholar; Bauman, Robert, “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History 33 (January 2007): 277–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cazenave, Noel A., Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs (Albany, N.Y., 2007)Google Scholar; Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972 (Athens, 2008)Google Scholar; and McKee, Guian, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (London, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. See Korstad, Robert and Leloudis, James, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty (Durham, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kiffmeyer, Thomas, Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (Lexington, Ky., 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jong, Greta de, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar; Clayson, William, The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas (Austin, 2010)Google Scholar; Hamlin, Francoise, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II (Chapel Hill, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Orleck, Annelise and Gayle Hazirjian, Lisa, eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 (Athens, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. For a detailed account of how federal benefits were often denied black farmers in the South as well as the disconnect between USDA policymakers in Washington, D.C., and those on the ground, see Pete Daniel, “African American Farmers and Civil Rights (Pigford v. Glickman),” Journal of Southern History (February, 2007).

25. In 1967, the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty investigated the poverty program in Mississippi and encountered stark evidence of child malnutrition and hunger. This scandal erupted over the course of the spring and summer of 1967 and narrowed the national debate on rural poverty onto the specific issues of hunger and malnutrition. By the middle of July, the Senate subcommittee was holding hearings in Washington on the matter. These heated hearings saw USDA Secretary Freeman involved in a shouting match with Senator Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) over the latter’s accusations that the USDA was not doing enough, quickly enough, to help the poor.

26. New York Times, 25 April 1964, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

27. Ibid.

28. Woods, Randall, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York, 2006), 793.Google Scholar

29. See Washington Report, published by the United Auto Workers (UAW) on Shriver’s congressional testimony (date not specified), From War on Poverty Microfilm, WH Aides A-M, Reel 3, microfilm shots 229. For example, in Newark the local CAP, the United Community Corporation, refused to fire one of its board members, who during the riots had allegedly urged members of a crowd to arm themselves. In response to the OEO request that he be dismissed, the man in question released a statement saying that it was his “firm conviction that complete chaos will have to prevail in the streets of American cities and blood will have to flow like water before the black man will become an accepted citizen of this society.” See New York Times, “Newark Agency Won’t Oust Aide,” 4 August 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

30. This link, between the proposed antipoverty programs and rioting, was already in the mind of the president and can be seen in his response to the Rochester and Harlem riots during the summer of 1964. In a taped conversation from 30 July 1964 with Francis Smith (chairman of Philadelphia’s Democratic City Committee), Smith claims that the only thing that worries him—and consequently the only thing that can jeopardize LBJ’s presidential campaign—is the possibility of “racial disturbances” and a potential “white backlash.” At the end of the conversation, Johnson, when requesting that Smith try and apply some pressure on Pennsylvania’s congressional Republicans to support and vote for the pending War on Poverty legislation, LBJ claims that “you gonna get some people out of these riots, and out of these pool halls, and out of these bars and put ‘em to work and help everybody.” Clearly, at least in the president’s mind, there was a link between the antipoverty legislation and alleviating future racial disturbances. Conversation 4418, 30 July 1964, LBJ tapes, Miller Center.

31. Although the poverty programs’ political difficulties and poor public standing during 1966 was in itself a call for fundamental reform, the chaos of the ghettoes meant that cuts and a root-and-branch reorganization of the OEO risked feeding even more violence. Indeed, in a phone conversation with Budget Director Charles Schultze from June 1966, both Johnson and Schultze expressed their concern that cuts in poverty funds would actually result in more urban rioting:

Conversation 10268, 28 June 1966, LBJ tapes, Miller Center. For a discussion of the effect of the riots on federal programs, see James Button, Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960s Riots (Princeton, 1978).

32. OEO Publication, Dimensions of Poverty in 1964, October 1965, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4278.

33. This was the official absolute poverty-line figure adopted by the OEO in 1965 and based on the work of Social Security Administration (SSA) economist Mollie Orshansky. The computation is based on the annual cost of food and is known as the “Orshansky Poverty Thresholds.” It is still used by the federal government.

34. Out of these 19.5 million nonrural inhabitants, only 13.3 million (or about 38.8 percent of the total poverty population) lived in metropolitan areas and major cities such as Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, New York City, Los Angeles, Newark, or San Francisco.

35. Memorandum, Ellen Wormer to Jim Gaither, 10 February 1967, War on Poverty Microfilm, WH Aides A-M, Reel 11, shots 79-80. By 1967, CAP covered 223 out of 300 of the poorest rural counties.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. From the outset, there were a number of conflicts between the OEO and other departments. For instance, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz consistently opposed the OEO within the Cabinet. Wirtz reasoned that if there was to be a new antipoverty budget, then that money, and those War on Poverty programs, should be going into Labor, not a new unproven agency. Both at the time, and in later interviews, the labor secretary emphasized his preference for a wide-scale jobs program run through the Labor instead of Community Action and its coordinative approach. When this did not materialize, the secretary and the Department of Labor were, according to the BOB’s Bill Cannon, “left standing at the post largely because Community Action offered a much cheaper, coherent program as opposed to a very expensive job program as the centre-piece of the War on Poverty.” Similarly, Wilbur Cohen, undersecretary with HEW and architect of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was also unimpressed with the antipoverty programs, and especially Shriver’s push for OEO’s role as a federal coordinator. In subsequent interviews, Cohen described Shriver as having “lots of charisma, people flocked to him like the Pied Piper attracted children” but not the management skills or a conceptual framework to successfully execute a War on Poverty. See Russell, Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race, 42; William Cannon, 21 May 1982, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center; and Edward Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen (Lawrence, Kans., 1995) 201.

42. Ronald Goldfarb, 24 October 1980, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

43. John Baker, 11 December 1980, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

44. James Sundquist, 7 April 1969, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

45. Memorandum, Jim Sundquist to Members of Cooperative Advisory Committee, 7 April 1964, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4162.

46. Baker, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center. As director of the Ford Foundation’s Public Affairs Program, Ylvisaker was heavily involved in the planning and funding of the Ford Foundation’s gray-area programs. He also took part in the War on Poverty task force. Adam Yarmolinksy, a former Department of Defense official, acted as Shriver’s deputy on the War on Poverty task force and was widely anticipated as continuing in that role in what would become the OEO. Instead, Yarmolinsky was eventually forced out of the task force and never served in the OEO. In an ugly incident with anti-Semitic overtones, the North Carolina congressional delegation, in exchange for its support and votes for the EOA in August 1964, demanded of President Johnson personally a guarantee that Yarmolinsky not be part of the new antipoverty agency.

47. Memorandum, Harold R. Lewis to Joseph Robertson, 28 July 1964, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4162.

48. Memorandum, Lloyd Davies to Richard Boone, 7 July 1964, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4162.

49. Letter, Orville Freeman to Dr. O. M. Wilson, 31 August 1964 (identical letters sent to all presidents of land-grant colleges), NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4162.

50. Letter, Freeman to Shriver, 12 December 1964, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4162.

51. The Job Corps camps early on were riddled by negative publicity and administrative chaos contributing to the poor political image of the War on Poverty. Indeed, running in parallel with the debates over the participation and politicking of the poor in local CAAs during the spring and summer of 1965, scandals erupted over violence in Job Corps camps and the cost of enrolling and training youngsters in the program. For example, at Camp Breckenridge in Morganfield, Kentucky, full-scale rioting broke out with FBI agents and U.S. marshals having to be called out to quell the violence. At around the same time, Newsweek claimed that the dropout rate for the Job Corps was as high as 18 percent. Stories of Corpsmen involved in violence, rape, arson, and shootings kept hitting the newspaper headlines with a steady stream throughout 1965. Media reports of enrolees costing twice as much as a Harvard education were quickly picked up on by congressmen and have remained one of the most quoted statistics by subsequent commentators to illustrate the folly of the War on Poverty. See Scott Stossel, Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver (Washington, D.C., 2004), 397–98.

52. Wall Street Journal, “The Rural Poor Depressed Farm Areas Trail Cities in Winning Poverty War Benefits, Communities Lag in Forming Groups to Ask for Funds; Freeman Calls for Action, Urban Bias in Washington?” 20 April 1965, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4279.

53. Ibid.

54. Letter, Freeman to Humphrey, 26 April 1965, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4279.

55. Letter, Humphrey to Freeman, 30 April 1965, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4279. Highlighting the White House’s concern over rural poverty is a commission appointed in 1966. As part of the wider review of the OEO’s activities during that year, the president in September 1966 established a National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty (NACRP) to examine the work done by the OEO and USDA. This report, The People Left Behind, published in the fall of 1967, was quite positive about the Community Action effort, but wished to see a greater efficiency in CAPs, organizing more along the lines of multicounty agencies and a closer cooperation between the USDA and OEO. The president also appointed an internal White House task force to examine the work done by the commission, and it too stressed that the Community Action concept (particularly in a multicounty setting) and programs like Neighbourhood Service Centers had shown a great deal of potential in a rural setting, but that the OEO’s performance and administration of the programs needed to be drastically improved. Stressing that cooperation and coordination between the OEO and USDA also had to improve, this task-force report said that the OEO would need to cooperate more with the USDA’s local bodies, such as the TAPs. See LBJ Library, Task Force Reports, “Report on Rural Poverty,” box 25.

56. Internal memorandum, “Relationship between USDA and OEO,” sender and addressee unknown, not dated but most likely from September 1965. NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4278.

57. Ibid. Back of memo.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Letter, Freeman to Kaye, 6 July 1967, NARA College Park, CSA RG 381, OEO, CAP Records of the Director, CAP Organizational Subject Files, box 6.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Testimony, Freeman before House Committee on Education and Labor, 10 July 1967, War on Poverty Microfilm, WH Aides A-M, Reel 3, microfilm shot 287.

64. Baker, LBJ Oral History, Miller Center.

65. Memorandum, Freeman to Baker, Schnittke, Birkhead, and Lewis, 1 February 1966, NARA College Park, RG 16, box 4476. For details of these protests and sit-in, see Cobb, James, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford, 1992), 270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. Upper Peninsula Commission for Area Progress, Celebrating 50 Years of Service (Escanaba, 2011).

67. Various memos between USDA and OEO, OEO and BOB, and internal OEO memos from February 1967, with attached fact sheets describing multicounty rural agencies. NARA, College Park, CSA, RG 381, OEO, CAP Office, Records of the Director, CAP Organizational Subject Files, box 6.

68. See http://www.upcapservices.com/index.shtml.

69. Memorandum, Don Thomason to Shriver, 6 January 1966, CAP Office, Records of the Director, RG 381, box 31.

70. Memorandum, CAP Rural Task Force to Shriver, 18 February 1967, NARA College Park, CSA, RG 381, OEO, CAP Office, Records of the Director, CAP Organizational Subject Files, box 6.

71. See, for example, Ironwood Daily Globe, “Agency Holds Small Business Advisory Meet,” 16 June 1966; Holland Evening Sentinel, “Grants Get Romney Nod,” 25 March 1967; Holland Evening Sentinel, “Wirtz Announces Program to Aid Employment,” 8 July 1967; Daily Globe, “Asks Probe of U.P. Job Loss,” 26 June 1969; Daily Globe, “Crafts Exhibit, Conference Set Here Saturday,” 23 April 1968; Benton Harbour New Palladium, “U.P. Development,” 29 March 1966; Daily Globe, “Annual Meeting Held by UPCAP Delegate Body,” 10 June 1967; Daily Globe, “Women Hear about CAA and VISTA,” 16 November 1967; and Daily Globe, “Community Action Agencies Assist Thousands in U.P.,” 8 November 1967.

72. Ironwood Daily Globe, “R. Ray Resigns UPCAP Office,” 29 November 1965; and “Bowden Urges Counties to Back UPCAP,” 7 December 1965. NewspaperARCHIVE.com

73. Jonathan Mead, 27 July 2012, interview with author. Transcript available upon request.

74. Ibid.

75. Ironwood Daily Globe, “Community Action Agencies Assist Thousands in U.P.,” 8 November 1967.

76. Mead, interview with author.

77. Holland Evening Sentinel, “Grants Get Romney Nod,” 8 July 1967.

78. Ibid.

79. Tessa Systems, LLC, Social and Economic Assessment for Michigan’s State Forests APPENDIX (Prepared for: Michigan Department of Natural Resources Forest, Mineral, and Fire Management Division) (Lansing 2006), 8.

80. Mead, interview with author.

81. Ibid.

82. Upper Peninsula Commission, Celebrating 50 Years.

83. Ibid.

84. Mead, interview with author. The conflict and resignation cited above would appear to be an exception.