Katznelson's point is well taken. However, in addition to purely segregationist opposition to OEO, northern and western big city mayors and other elected officials opposed maximum feasible participation because in their view this could lead to federally-funded local political activism over which they had no control or influence.
Hank Leland Service Employees International Union
Michael Hoover wrote:
> Carrol Cox sent me an off-list message recounting his Bloomington-
> Normal experience with commnunity action programs established under
> the auspices of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in the
> mid-60s. Created to coordinate the Johnson administration's
> poverty policies, OEO owed its existence to the 1964 Economic
> Opportunity Act. As I mentioned in a previous post, initially,
> Title II of the EOA called for 'maximum feasible participation'
> of those that federal funds & programs were intended to serve.
> Carrol mentioned that above local government refused to
> participate and very little money was ever forthcoming, save
> some for Head Start.
>
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Well, guys,
among my jobs in the long ago, I ended up working in a Special Services project at UCB for disabled students--which was one arm of the EOA (Educational Opportunity Act?--can't remember now) directed in HEW within the Office of Education.
But the important part is that the Project Director and I went back to DC on several mandated trips, just at the time that OEO and HEW were being dismandled by Nixon. One of the hapless jerks he had as Secretary of Education came to the PD's meeting and addressed the crowd with some very lame analogy to 'colored people's time' (he was late for the meeting--get it?). I'll never forget that. What a fool. The crowd, many from the Southern and Midwestern civil rights movements laughed at him and began boo-ing. Most of us just started clapping so we didn't have to hear him. The Office of Special Services undersecretary had to get up and enforce some quiet, scowling at us, as if to say--shut up you idiots, or we are all dead in the water. Well, everybody quieted down a little and just started talking to each other rudely, like high school kids do. It was very funny.
But Nixon couldn't get rid of this section of OE because there was enough Congressional support to keep it going, so what he did was to re-organize it. He couldn't just turn it over to the State's because that too required legislative changes. His method was to dis-band the central DC office and divide the field and administrative staff into the federal regional offices. This wasn't as sure a death blow as turning it over to the States, but it was close enough to cripple the Midwestern and Southern branches. The Western regional office was in SF so at least the surrounding projects (Head Start, Upward Bound, and Special Services in the Bay Area) survived well. Even so, the lack of having national level meetings, project evaluations, reviews, and assessments hurt the effectiveness of the local projects everywhere. We were learning a lot from each other and beginning to build up a sense of solidarity--shared stories, shared strategies, methods around the pigs and so on.
On maximum feasible participation--well see that is dangerous stuff. Among the things that were beginning to develop were critiques and assessments between projects as to how well or how poorly that mandate was being carried out. The projects varied considerably and those that were headed by obvious local bureaucratic slime were definitely doomed for the non-renewed grant pile. There were also networks of people linking up within states and regions to figure out how to deal with this on a national level so that project proposals that were really grassroots or on solid ground with the people they were supposed to serve, were in fact reviewed and credited for that. Even though there was a peer review of these grant proposals, the DC director had the final say (wish I could remember his name--very good guy--came up in the fifties civil rights movement as a white lawyer for NAACP). He considered it his primary mission to make sure maximum feasible participation was turned into concrete everyday business as usual. In other words, the people served, ran the projects.
It was pretty obvious which projects were solid and effective, because the DC office would have already received complaints and 'discrete' inquiries from Congressional staff offices of the districts being impacted. That was a sure sign, things were going well.
Jesus. Imagine the people as the government. It was pretty awesome.
It would be nice to read Carrol's recollections. Beyond, my own nostalgia, there are serious lessons to be learned from these sorts of tales and could be of help to people in the great out there who haven't been part of something like that, ...yet.
Chuck Grimes
God. Burning Johnson in effigy and working for him at the same time--maybe that's what he meant by guns and butter or maximum feasible participation?