The Presidents and the Poor

In January 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national War on Poverty, promising to mobilize the resources of the federal government toward a concerted effort to eradicate want and privation from American society. Throughout the remainder of his presidency, Johnson sought to use programs such as Job Corps, Head Start, and the controversial Community Action Program to fight poverty across the nation. Since Johnson left office in 1969, historians and other commentators have offered a variety of judgments and evaluations of the War on Poverty, ranging from open celebration to outright condemnation. For some, Johnson's War on Poverty was a noble attempt that produced several concrete achievements; for others, it was an ill-conceived overreach based on a flawed liberal premise and was destined to fail. In Lawrence J. McAndrews's The Presidents and the Poor, Johnson's role in the federal effort to eradicate poverty is just the beginning of the story. In a sweeping narrative encompassing the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, McAndrews traces the roots of the federal antipoverty effort in the Kennedy administration and extends his analysis through the two presidential terms of Barack Obama. McAndrews argues that a strikingly similar set of challenges confronted each administration, frustrating each president's attempts to address the dilemma. The most significant obstacles to eradicating poverty included federalism, the fluctuating nature of the U.S. economy, party rivalry between Democrats and Republicans, foreign policy distractions, the slow pace of legislative change, and the electoral system itself. Because of these challenges, according to McAndrews, none of the nine presidents included in the book were successful in ending the problem of American poverty. The result, according to the author, is that the mere mention of the problems of poverty “has too often provoked resignation—from presidents, that nothing seems to work, and from the poor, that nobody seems to care” (p. 262

Administration (probate law · Basic needs · Culture of poverty · Development economics · Economics · Government (linguistics · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Presidency · Presidential system · Sociology · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration