The Great Society

In an age of postwar affluence, poverty persisted in cities and rural areas, and Jim Crow still ruled the South. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Johnson asked Congress to honor Kennedy’s memory by passing his tax cut and civil rights bill — and then set out his own, larger agenda. He won election in his own right by a landslide in 1964.

Johnson, shaped by the New Deal and by his own family’s poverty in the Texas Hill Country, believed government could abolish poverty and racial injustice in an age of affluence. Speaking at the University of Michigan in May 1964, he challenged Americans to “enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.”

The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 launched the War on Poverty. Its most controversial program, Community Action, sought “maximum feasible participation” by the poor themselves in running antipoverty efforts. Congress went on to create Medicare and Medicaid to provide medical care for the elderly and the poor, the first federal food stamp program, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the first major federal investment in public schools. It established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 effectively ended legal Jim Crow, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the country to immigrants from around the world, reshaping its population.

The War on Poverty and Community Action provoked conservative resistance and helped fuel the rise of Republicans in the South and West. The escalating Vietnam War soon overshadowed Johnson’s domestic agenda, and by 1968 his presidency was consumed by the war.

Later presidents and Congresses left intact most of the Great Society — Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, federal arts funding, and Head Start. Historians continue to debate its record: its programs kept many Americans out of poverty and secured rights for minorities, while reaction against it contributed to a conservative political counterrevolution.