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Well, maybe some of it is written up in obscure academic research books in public policy, social science and government studies. Who knows.
Anyway, it is a very difficult question to answer. It's an iceberg question. First answer, I don't know. The next most immediate answer is that the people who write histories don't know this particular kind of history. Established historians are academics, mostly and they have not been on the ground where this sort of history is made. How many war historians have been to war?
I also think that the US public mind, even the progressive public mind has no idea just how systemically radical this period was. And of course since reactionary and rigthwing governments followed the era, they re-wrote and they re-inscribed popular perceptions that in turn became the popular histories. Hippies, free love, students throwing rocks, ghettos burning, southern black churches on the march, etc.
Just to start with, below is a brief description of what was in The War on Poverty:
``War on Poverty
Begun officially in 1964, the War on Poverty was an ambitious governmental effort to address the problem of persistent poverty in the United States. Over the next decade, the federal government in conjunction with state and local governments, non- profit organizations, and grassroots groups created a new institutional base for antipoverty and civil rights action and, in the process, highlighted growing racial and ideological tensions in American politics and society. Marked by moments of controversy and consensus, the War on Poverty defined a new era for American liberalism and added new layers to the American welfare state. Legislatively, the first two years were the most active. Between President Lyndon Johnson's State of the Union address in 1964 and the liberal setbacks suffered in the congressional elections of 1966, the Johnson administration pushed through an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation. The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) provided the basis for the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Upward Bound, Head Start, Legal Services, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Community Action Program (CAP), the college Work-Study program, Neighborhood Development Centers, small business loan programs, rural programs, migrant worker programs, remedial education projects, local health care centers, and others. The antipoverty effort, however, did not stop there. It encompassed a range of Great Society legislation far broader than the Economic Opportunity Act alone. Other important measures with antipoverty functions included an $11 billion tax cut (Revenue Act of 1964), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Food Stamp Act (1964), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), the Higher Education Act (1965), the Social Security amendments creating 2 Medicare/Medicaid (1965), the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (1965), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Model Cities Act (1966), the Fair Housing Act (1968), several job-training programs, and various Urban Renewal-related projects...''
For the record, the program I worked in was part of the Head Start, Upward Bound, Special Services (TRIO programs) under the Special Services division in Dept of Education---implemented as part of the 1965 Higher Education Act. I am certain the Higher Education Act had no idea that they had just funded free wheelchair repair and van transportation. We called it our mobility services component. After all if you can't get to class, you can't go to class, and if you don't go to class you get kicked out of school, right?
When you read the above quote it sounds like a lot of heart warming stuff for the poor, several broad social service acts, and of course the civil rights and fair housing acts.
What you don't see in this list are the people who actually advocated, designed, wrote and then ran the programs implemented by the legislation in the various agencies in the government. Where do you suppose most of those people came from? Do you think how to run this shit is in some GSA manual? (General Services Administration).
The vast majority of the people were drawn from inside and out of government. They were part of the civil rights movements for the previous twenty to thirty year long drive for social justice. They composed a professional cadre who learned their skills from the ground up. Many were NAACP, CORE and other organization lawyers and professional organizers. Our division head (white) was originally a lawyer for the DC chapter of the NACCP during the late 50s deeply involved in school desegregation cases. I think he joined OE sometime in the Kennedy administration.
So what made these programs radical? The people who ran them. In their previous lives they had already crafted policy methods that linked up, on ground, mostly inner city needs (also rural), with specific ways to meet those needs.
I am going to quote the next paragraph of this paper:
``The Republican administration of President Nixon continued the broadly defined War on Poverty. Although President Nixon expressed dislike for much of the War on Poverty, his administration responded to public pressure by maintaining most programs and by expanding the welfare state through the liberalization of the Food Stamp program, the indexing of Social Security to inflation, and the passage of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for disabled Americans. Beyond such escalations of specific programs, the Nixon administration's most noticeable contributions to the War on Poverty consisted of replacing the OEO with the Community Services Administration, redistributing control over many antipoverty programs to more traditional federal bureaucracies, and proposing a Family Assistance Plan that failed to gain congressional approval. The Nixon administration also endorsed a `New Federalism' in which the federal government shifted more authority over social welfare enterprises to state and local governments. This new vision for federalism was most fully realized during the administration of President Ronald W. Reagan, which replaced the Community Services Administration with the Community Services Block Grant system, redesigned job training, cut back the Food Stamp program, and initiated what some scholars have called a War on Welfare...''
SSI was definitely a break through. The supplement was a large increase benefit targeted to disability that enabled many disabled people to get out of institutions or protected living conditions. SSI also included provisions for paying for attendants and other aids necessary for independent living, house keeping, cooking, etc. But the key drawback was that SSI had to be matched with state funding, so poor states or less progressive states naturally were less interested in participation---and their populations suffered accordingly.
Let's go to this, ``the Nixon administration's most noticeable contributions to the War on Poverty consisted of replacing the OEO with the Community Services Administration, redistributing control over many antipoverty programs to more traditional federal bureaucracies...The Nixon administration also endorsed a `New Federalism' in which federal government shifted more authority over social welfare... to state and local governments...''
If you don't read this carefully, you won't see it. Nixon made no contributions. He tried to kill the whole concept. The SSI legislation was an extension of the Social Security Act and was run through the traditional minded Social Security Administration system. In some sense SSI was a cost cutting provision, since it was cheaper to subsidize independent living than it was to pay for county and private nursing home care---by several hundred dollars a month.
Disbanning OEO and re-organizing its programs was a cribbling blow to the entire sweep of War on Poverty programs. And just guess who was in charge of that first hatchet job? Donald Rumsfeld. (We escaped the iceman because special services was transfered from OEO to OE)
For another thing, Nixon didn't endorse a New Federalism, he imposed it, cramming it down the throat of every program lead under every federal agency involved. Our division stalled the OE Secretary's henchmen for an entire year arguing budget cycles, lead time to move the program officers and staff to SF, etc, etc.
The shift back to the states, was a states rights move, straight out of the George Wallace playbook. It was guaranteed to kill the most radical aspect of these programs---direct federal control from agency heads and federal bureaucracy down to the street level storefronts where many of these programs were running. The core radical nature of OEO and other administrative agencies was their ability to coordinate and drive reform from both top and bottom at the same time. The progressive nature of these programs issued from the join between federal level expertise and power together with committed experienced personnel on the ground.
For example, if you needed to get a legislative guideline changed in order to do want needed to be done, here is how it worked. You meet with your DC program officer, outline the need. He takes it to his boss, the division head for these programs. The head gets permission from the undersecretary to go meet with the standing House or Senate committee staff in charge of writing guidelines. When guideline review comes up, as it did every year, you could go to the committee hearing and explain the reason for the needed change. If you did you're homework with the committee staff, and the committee chair agreed, the public hearing was often show. The guideline changes had already been vetted, as they say now, by the agency, the division, and the program officers. Program participant testimony was just icing on the cake. (And since there were travel budgets back then, you could get you favorite, articulate community activists, aka program participant on a plane and in a hotel in DC overnight, if need be.)
The above sketch of the process was actually how disability got to be included under the Higher Education Act that read, ``...or otherwise disadvantaged...'' Disabled, became a population that was otherwise, disadvantaged, along with the poor, racial and ethnic minorities and otherwise disadvantaged.
If you follow that, you see there were only a few steps between you running a program in the urban storefront (along with community organization activists now turned into staff) and the federal level changes needed to make it work.
When Nixon shifted control to the states, he essentially killed deep change and reform all at once by cutting that linkage. From then on, most programs languished or burned out fighting their own state and county level bureaucracies. Imagine for example what this move to the state level meant to War on Poverty programs in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or the vastly unsympathetic corridors of Los Angeles City Hall under Mayor Sam Yorty, and state Governor Ronald Reagan.
We lucked out twice in a row. First the transfer from OEO to OE was almost entirely benign. We lost our official ability to coordinate with community service programs because we were now officially part of the education department. The UCB administration interpreted this to mean services for students only---I was often working on chairs for community activists and others in the process of creating the Berkeley CIL. The Second time we lucked out under the New Federalism (aka states rights axe) was because Region Nine HQ was in San Francisco, and most of the program officers for these programs moved to the regional office just across the bridge. Even so, we at UCB had Governor Reagan and Regent Reagan to contend with---butt hole sin equal. But we had Dellums in the House, Cranston in the Senate, Widner as Mayor... a solid line up of liberal to progressive elected officials to call on if need be.
I found the above quoted paper from here:
http://faculty.virginia.edu/sixties/readings.html
and I assume it was written or put up by a standard liberal professor interested in the history of civil rights, race, gender, etc.
CG