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Poverty: The War Within the War

24 minute read
TIME

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“This program,” said Minnesota’s Republican Congressman Albert Quie, “could become not just a national disgrace, but a national catastrophe.” The House G.O.P. leadership has described it as “a churning Disneyland of administrative chaos.” “The war on poverty,” Richard Nixon said recently, “has been first in promises, first in politics, first in press releases—and last in performance.”

The outcry over the Johnson Administration’s much-ballyhooed poverty program is by no means limited to Republicans. In city after city, outraged Democratic mayors have protested that Washington is subsidizing wars of civic subversion by insisting that the poor be given a voice in dispensing the manna that has traditionally been a city hall prerogative.

Among the most vociferous critics are the poor and the leaders of the poor. Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin has condemned the campaign as “a bag of tricks.” Professional Organizer Saul Alinsky has blistered it as “a prize piece of political pornography.” There have been countless charges of nepotism, malfeasance and administrative fiddledeedee, of demeaning interagency squabbles in the capital and squalid scandals in the boondocks.

This cataract of criticism is aimed at an idealistic program without precedent in hope or scope. In less than two years the assault on poverty has cost $2.3 billion, directly reached 3,000,000 of the poor, and generated a spectrum of social-welfare commitments unmatched by any previous Administration in U.S. history. It was first envisioned by John F. Kennedy, who set the crusade in motion six months before his assassination, convinced by a spate of studies that the U.S., for all its easy affluence, still harbored stubborn depths of deprivation and despair.

The condition that so aroused a President’s concern has become the concern of an entire nation. Since his succession to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson has repeatedly limned the plight of those he has called, paraphrasing Disraeli, “that other nation within a nation—the poor—whose distress has not captured the conscience of America.” Enthusiastically embracing the assault on poverty as “my kind of program,” Johnson in his first State of the Union message pledged allegiance to those who “live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both.” Vowed the President: “This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditioned war on poverty in America.”

Noisy, Visible, Dirty. The war is grandiose in scope and often extravagant in its claims, and it has inevitably invited a massive crossfire of criticism. In the face of its palpable failures to date and the formidable problems it faces in the future, detractors of the war on poverty have every reason to ask: Can it be won?

To R. Sargent Shriver Jr., 50, who as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity has been generalissimo of the war from its start, the answer is simple: It must be won. Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who had previously nursed the Peace Corps from dubious birth to wide acclaim, admits that the anti-poverty campaign has been and will continue to be “noisy, visible, dirty, uncomfortable and sometimes politically unpopular.” He argues, nonetheless, that if it should fail, the loss would be crucially damaging to the U.S.

Troughmanship. Starting at scratch, Shriver’s OEO has launched a dozen complex programs, recruited quite a few able people to run them, and in most instances moved swiftly to excise abuses. By contrast with the Peace Corps, which got one twenty-fifth as much funds in its first two years and operated mostly in areas remote from domestic scrutiny, the war on poverty has probably suffered most from President Johnson’s hankering for Instant Utopia. “It’s like we went down to Cape Kennedy,” says Shriver, “and launched a half-dozen rockets at once.”

Enough have left the pad to convince members of the House Education and Labor Committee that the program should be granted $250 million more than the $1.75 billion that the President requested for the anti-poverty budget in 1967. The committee chairman, Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell, is all for the increase—though not long ago he was a bitter critic of the program, complaining that big-city mayors were turning it into “giant fiestas of political patronage” and, mixing metaphors, that they were feeding “political hacks at the trough.”

Shriver’s OEO is a direct spiritual heir of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, which was organized in a period of national convulsion, when 15 million Americans were out of work and distress was the norm. Shriver’s war, though conducted in an era of less obvious urgency, is actually more complex, more challenging and more ambitious. For, unlike Depression-era make-work programs, it aims not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but also to cure its causes as well. “It will be impossible to end completely the culture of poverty until opportunity is equal for all,” says Shriver. “The programs of this agency are designed to alleviate permanently the conditions that have so long kept the poor ‘in their place.’ ”

Seldom articulate and usually all but invisible, America’s poor are the losers in what Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff calls “the lotteries of parenthood, skin pigmentation and birthplace.” In a society and an age that demand ever higher skills and more sophisticated minds, the poor, simply by standing still, are caught up in a kind of geometric regression. For the most part, they are those whom the welfare state never brushed, a residual minority tucked away in rural backwaters and urban ghettos: the Cumberland’s dirt farmer, the Mississippi cotton chopper, the migrant farm worker in California’s Imperial Valley, the illiterate Harlem dishwasher. They exist, as Michael Harrington wrote in The Other America, “beyond history, beyond progress, sunk in a paralyzing, maiming routine.”

700 a Day. Their privations nowhere approach those of Asia’s (or even some of Europe’s) submerged millions—yet the wretchedness of America’s poor is accentuated by the opulence of the society that surrounds them. More than 7,500,000 Americans live in rat-infested tenements or tumbledown shacks that are officially—and euphemistically—classified as “dilapidated”; 1,500 U.S. citizens still die yearly from diseases caused by malnutrition; 6,000,000 subsist on free Government surpluses. In today’s society, the nation’s 11 million functional illiterates are relegated for life to the precarious ranks of the poor.

Paradoxically, it is the neediest who are helped least by the welfare state. The majority of the poor reap no benefits from social security, unemployment insurance, or the right to unionize. Farm subsidies mostly enrich the prosperous; the poorest farmers, with 40% of the working spreads in the U.S., account for a scant 7% of farm income.

Public housing has brought the poor more eviction notices than new apartments, and slum dwellers scornfully refer to urban renewal as “urban removal.” While Washington lavishes $18 billion a year on a galaxy of welfare programs—to which state and local governments and private philanthropies add another $15 billion—only the crumbs reach the bottom of the heap.

By official Government standards, a single city dweller is poor if he earns less than $1,540 a year—a level that exceeds West Germany’s average per capita income of $1,358, and seems opulent beside Spain’s $342. To determine the precise borders of poverty, the U.S. reckons that a man could have three adequate meals a day for 700 if he bought nothing but Government surplus foods. The minimum also includes a sparse allowance for rent, clothing and other necessities; in the case of a single farmer, who can obtain cheap food, the minimum is $1,080. The poverty line is $3,130 for an urban family of four, $2,200 for a farm family. Only 30% of America’s 32 million poor are nonwhite—but that 30%, mostly Negro, represents half of the entire non-white population of 20.9 million. Some 13.9 million children under 15 live in needy families. One-quarter of the aged, and half of all families headed by women, are poor.

Acronyms Aweigh. As far as Congress was concerned, the most compelling argument for the anti-poverty program was that it could ultimately transform chronic “tax eaters,” in Johnson’s phrase, to new taxpayers. Even before it received congressional approval, Shriver had started gathering staffers and ideas. “How in the hell do you fight a war on poverty?” he asked everyone within earshot. “What do you do?” Laboring up to 16 hours a day, the anti-poverty warriors were shunted all over the capital, found themselves at one point in the basement morgue of an ancient hospital, at another in what had once been a hotel of shady reputation. Finally, they moved into a new eight-story office building off Connecticut Avenue that was immediately dubbed “the Poor House.”

The first problem was what to call the new agency. “War on Poverty” had to be dropped because it formed an acronym offensive to Italians; the pallid OEO was adopted instead. To avoid a recurrence of New Dealish alphabet-soup titles, programs were given catchy names rather than initials. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) was an exception, and so was CAP (Community Action Program). At the local level, though, it was acronyms aweigh. Detroit opened TAP (Total Action Against Poverty). New York insisted on BEST (Basic Essential Skills Training) and QUEST (Queens Educational and Social Team). There was PROP (Portland Regional Opportunities Program) and DWOP, which sounds like a mispronunciation but represents Denver War on Poverty. A less felicitous coinage was the name given a privately financed program at Haverford College: Broadening Opportunities.

The new agency’s enthusiasm—”the beautiful hysteria of it all,” as one aide put it—only honed outsiders’ skepticism. Hadn’t the nation heard this sort of talk before? Hadn’t Herbert Hoover, just a year before the great collapse of 1929, proclaimed: “We shall soon, with the help of God, be within sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation”? In Louisville and Manhattan, bumper stickers and lapel buttons proclaimed: I’M FIGHTING POVERTY. I WORK. Louisiana Congressman Otto Passman complained that the ballyhoo was damaging the U.S. image abroad, averring solemnly that a family in his district had even received a CARE package from worried relatives in Europe. On Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night television show a comic announced: “I joined the war on poverty—I threw a hand grenade at a beggar.”

Whipcracking Impatience. Ignoring the guffaws, Shriver brought to the task of shaping programs the same idealism and frenetic urgency with which he infused the Peace Corps. At the suggestion of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime friend of the President’s who was then a Washington lawyer, OEO was set up as a separate executive office with direct administrative control over three of the war’s eight major programs (Community Action, the Job Corps and VISTA) and supervisory responsibility for others at the federal, state and local levels.

It proved a mighty mandate. The U.S. welfare system is an all but impenetrable labyrinth of overlapping, interlocking, and often competing programs. Some 200 federal projects administered by 21 federal agencies are involved in the poverty war. In the area of manpower and development alone, seven federal departments have their own programs. When it wrote the poverty bill, Congress had a chance to streamline the machinery and thereby spare Shriver some of the interdepartmental bickering that has plagued him. But Congress muffed the opportunity—in part because of Lyndon Johnson’s whipcracking impatience to get on with the Great Society.

Among the major OEO programs that were created:

-JOB CORPS. Set up to provide remedial education and job training for unemployed, out-of-school youths from 16 to 21, the Job Corps has 25,609 trainees (about 50% Negro) at 100 centers. The cost through June 30: $493 million. In many ways it is the bad boy—and occasionally the bad girl —of the poverty program, since its wards, as Shriver notes, are “dropouts from society before we get them. If we save three out of four, or two out of three, that’s a miracle right there.” Many arrive as complete illiterates; 79% have never seen a doctor, 85% a dentist. One in six has been rejected as unfit for military service. The camps have indeed had their problems—sodomy, knifings, thefts, riots and vandalism in neighboring towns—and they are likely to continue.

Among other charges of inefficiency and influence, G.O.P. critics pointed out that the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston, W. Va., which the Job Corps converted into a women’s center for $187,400, plus $90,000 a year in rent, has chiefly benefited a prominent local Democrat named Angus Peyton, who held a sizable interest in the property. To the girls, the hotel became “Peyton’s Place,” and before long there were charges that some of them were living down to the name by running a prostitution racket. The charges were never proved and were eventually dropped—and so were several girls for “indiscreet” behavior.

Skeptics dubbed the centers “country clubs for juvenile delinquents,” noted that the cost of training the men and women in several dozen occupations, from automobile repairs and underwater welding to cosmetology and nursing, came to $9,945 a year—more than the cost of sending a student to college. On the other hand, notes Shriver, it costs taxpayers some $100,000 to keep a man on relief for a lifetime. Since 1,500 Job Corps graduates have found jobs, and cooperating firms have a “stockpile” of 10,000 jobs awaiting future grads, he figures that the investment is worthwhile.

-NEIGHBORHOOD YOUTH CORPS. Where the Job Corps considers itself “curative,” the Neighborhood Youth Corps is “preventive.” Officially, it is designed to occupy needy teen-agers before or just after they drop out of school with $1.25-an-hour jobs in local libraries, parks and other institutions. Unofficially, by keeping the boys busy during the hot summer months, it has also proved

a handy device for defusing tense urban ghettos. By the end of June, it will have employed 603,000 boys and girls at a cost of $391 million. It has worked so well that some House Democrats would like to give it more than $550 million for the year beginning July 1. Much of the money would be spent to ease racial unrest in the 21 “high-tension” U.S. cities.

The program had scarcely started when investigators claimed that fully one-fourth of the youths drawing salaries came from families well above the poverty line. One indiscreet Youth Corps girl tooled to work in a 1965 Thunderbird, was asked to resign. In Macoupin County, Ill., Democratic officials turned the program into a patronage pie for their children until OEO found out and ordered 83 youngsters dropped. Protested one $9,000-a-year Democrat jobholder whose stepson was bounced: “He comes from a broken home, don’t he? Anyway, to the victors goes the spoils. You know what I mean?”

-VISTA. The “domestic Peace Corps” has volunteers aged 18 to 80, and if anything, they are even more idealistic than the ones who went abroad. “There’s probably a little less glory this way, at home, but it’s more important than going overseas,” said New Yorker Barbara Dunlap, a 22-year-old Skidmore graduate who lives in a Pima Indian settlement near Phoenix. “You have to solve your problems at home first.” Paid $50 a month plus a subsistence allowance that varies from kregion to region, living at roughly the same level as the people they are helping, some 3,500 VISTAS are deployed from the Everglades to the Yukon, one-third working on Indian reservations and in migrant labor camps, the rest scattered from Harlem to the hollows of Appalachia.

-HEAD START. Launched with a modest budget of $17 million and a target of 100,000 needy preschool children, the venture has proved the poverty program’s best success. The response was nearly six times greater than anticipated, with 560,000 pupils in 2,400 communities attending classes for two months last summer. On the average, the children added eight to ten points to their IQs and 14 months to their intellectual performances. Not least of Head Start’s achievements has been to nip budding health problems by giving its children complete medical exams—their first in most cases. In Boston, one-third were found to have major physical ailments or mental problems requiring clinical care, or both. Four out of five had advanced tooth decay. Of all the children enrolled nationwide, 100,000 needed glasses.

Lyndon Johnson has requested $310 million to train 700,000 students in fiscal 1967, but Powell’s committee would like to give him $400 million to train 845,000. Exhilarated by the program’s success last summer, the President announced plans to turn Head Start into a year-round program for 350,000 needy children, only to discover that it would have cost three times as much money as was available. The upshot was an administrative nightmare. Communities deluged Washington with applications, and OEO had to reject or pigeonhole scores of them.

-COMMUNITY ACTION. Shriver has called this organization “the boldest of OEO’s inventions” and “the business corporation of the new social revolution.” As Congress framed the Community Action Program, it was to run local projects “with maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served.” Generally, that has worked out to mean that residents of poor neighborhoods occupy 30% of the seats on city anti-poverty boards. Initially, these representatives were supposed to be elected, but after fewer than 1% of the eligible voters turned out in Los Angeles, 2.7% in Philadelphia, 4% in Cleveland, Shriver abandoned the idea.

Its fundamental concept nonetheless is that the poor can effectively help themselves only by mobilizing their potential political strength. In practice, this theory has stirred the loudest and most lasting controversy of the entire poverty program. City governments, bitterly resentful of any encroachment on their own powers, object that the poor are hardly qualified to dispense millions in anti-poverty funds. “Asking the poor how to win the war on poverty,” cracked Columnist Art Buchwald, “is like asking the Japs how to win World War II.”

Boston Tea Parties. The poor responded quickly to Community Action —too quickly, as far as many mayors were concerned. In Cleveland, slum dwellers organized, marched on city hall and left dead rats on the steps to dramatize their demand for better housing. In Washington’s Lafayette Square across from the White House, 90 Mississippi Negroes pitched tents to publicize their own pitiable housing situation. In Syracuse, an OEO-financed group sent jeering squads to heckle Republican Mayor William Walsh during his 1964 re-election campaign, used poverty funds to bail out demonstrators. When their funds ran out, they sent a 25-man delegation to besiege Shriver for more, and when he turned them down, they went to the White House in a vain attempt to see Lyndon Johnson. Some of the same people were in the audience last month when Shriver, addressing a convention of an independent group called the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty, was shouted down by hecklers.

In city after city, groups of the poor began demanding outright control of anti-poverty programs. Concluded one congressional aide: “We’ve funded a monster in community action. The programs are a bunch of Boston Tea Parties all around the country. They’re creating a third force.”

At their national convention last June, the mayors even gave serious consideration to a resolution condemning the OEO for “trying to wreck local government by setting the poor against city hall.” Though it was rejected, Washington got the message. “We never said that the poor need to control the programs,” said Shriver. “But neither should city hall nor the welfare agencies. No group should have complete control. It must be shared.” Indeed, Shriver has held up funds from Los Angeles and Chicago because the poor were poorly represented on the boards, and has threatened to cut off others unless they give the poor a voice.

Ice, Mrs. Astor? Though Shriver knew from the first that the poverty campaign would be controversial, he did not realize how implacable his critics would be. On occasion, he says wryly, “it makes me feel like Mrs. Astor on the Titanic. As the iceberg crashed through the ship’s walls, she said, ‘I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.’ ”

Descendant of a well-to-do colonial Maryland family, Shriver does not consider himself wealthy, though he hardly has to scrimp. He rents a 30-acre estate in Rockville, Md., called “Timberlawn,” just bought a house near the Kennedy summer compound in Hyannis Port for something under $200,000. As OEO director he earns $30,000, insists on better-than-average salaries for his staff— 23 top aides make more than $20,000, 40 others earn $15,000 or more. Though this has led to cracks about the “sweet smell of poverty,” Shriver reasons that it takes good money to get good men, particularly for such sensitive and exposed jobs.

Despite his boosterish manner, Shriver is a shrewd politician. In 1957 his reputation as a businessman, tireless fund raiser and efficient president of the Chicago Board of Education resulted in a brief Sargent-for-Governor boomlet. It subsided quickly, but his friends expect another to develop—say, two years from now. “I don’t have any current plan to run for office,” he says, “but who knows what will happen in 1968 in Illinois?” He notes nonetheless that Governor Otto Kerner is finishing his second term, and only one man has ever run successfully for three terms in Illinois (Republican Richard J. Oglesby, whose last term ended in 1889). Shriver would have no residency problem; he maintains an apartment in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. And thanks to his five-year task of making the Peace Corps the huge success it is today, he would be a popular candidate.

Gutter Language. Whether the poverty program burnishes or tarnishes Shriver’s reputation remains to be seen. A recent poll commissioned by the G.O.P. National Committee shows that supporters of the program increased from 34% to 48% in the past year, while the skeptics held steady at 36%. Thus, barring a major scandal, it seems unlikely that Republicans at the national level will question the continuation of the poverty program in the fall campaign. They are certain to criticize its failures and question its administration.

Shriver concedes his mistakes. “Maybe we started too much, too fast, getting too many people excited,” he says. “Maybe we should have started one program at a time. But there was great need.” Among other blunders for which he was blamed was a $40,000 grant last summer to Playwright LeRoi Jones’s Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem to produce, as Shriver later admitted, “vile racist plays in language of the gutter.”

Indeed, the entire Harlem program has been a tragic fiasco. Conceived in the hope that it could improve life in the prototypical Negro ghetto, the program has stumbled and stagnated under the leadership of HARYOU-ACT. The agency, directed by Powell Henchman Livingston Wingate, originally hoped to get $118 million in federal, city and private funds for an immense three-year program. So far, it has received barely $10 million—including $3,456,096 in OEO money—and even that turned out to be more than it could account for. Close to $400,000 could not be traced, and Shriver’s OEO turned off the federal spigot for five weeks while HARYOU launched an audit under the supervision—naturally—of Livingston Wingate. As a result, North America’s most crowded Negro slum has been largely deprived of the benefits it now desperately needs.

Comedies of error have also plagued OEO. After North Tonawanda, N.Y., School Superintendent Maurice Friot requested funds for a year-round Head Start program, OEO officials demanded considerable additional information, including how many men in the area had been rejected by draft boards. Inasmuch as Head Start deals with four-and five-year-olds, Friot thought this an unreasonable demand, protested to Washington. OEO withdrew the question. A more pointed criticism was leveled recently by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, which reported that the OEO is now giving the 100 poorest counties in the U.S. less anti-poverty money than the 100 richest.

Fuddle Factory. “There are bound to be some casualties in any war,” says Shriver. His own war is still in its experimental stage, too young to be judged an overall failure or a probable success. In any case, Shriver has no doubts that it is worth fighting. Disturbed by the criticism that has plagued him from the first, Shriver confided during a recent audience with the Pope: “Some people are quoting the Bible against us in the poverty war, saying, The poor always ye have with you.’ ” Did His Holiness know an effective rejoinder to that? He did indeed. “Tell them,” enjoined Paul, “that they are also commanded by the Bible to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.”

Of course. But could the job be done differently and better? Many critics, mostly on the left, argue at least that it should be done more expensively. Labor Leader Walter Reuther complains that the Administration is doling out anti-poverty funds “with an eyedropper.” Liberal Economist Leon Keyserling maintains that the effort requires at least $15 billion a year, roughly ten times what Johnson has been spending. Not to be outdone, a group of New York civil rights leaders has demanded an appropriation of $41.6 billion a year —more than one-third of the entire national budget—to combat poverty over the next five years.

Offering their own substitute for the poverty program, the G.O.P. has introduced in the House a bill that would strip all programs but Community Action from Shriver’s “fuddle factory” and turn them back to departments already equipped to run them. A companion bill offers industry a 7% tax credit for initiating job-creating training programs. These measures, claim its cosponsors, Representatives Charles Goodell of New York and Minnesota’s Quie, would “completely restructure the popgun war on poverty” and replace “the mangled mishmash of overlapping, conflicting and wasteful programs” with more effective ones—all at a saving of $200 million.

The Rag in the Bag. A more radical proposal is the “negative income tax” theory of University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman, a former Goldwater braintruster. He proposes that the Federal Government set a $3,000 yearly income as the minimum for a family of four, and pay a man 50% of the difference if he falls below that figure; to give the man 100%, says Friedman, would deaden his initiative.

More radical yet is the guaranteed annual income, an idea that surfaced in Edward Bellamy’s 19th century novel, Looking Backward, and strikes many sociologists today as the wave of the future. Columbia Social Work Professor Richard Cloward proposes a strategy of crisis and disruption to achieve it. As Cloward sees it, welfare is a “savage and barbarous” system that strips recipients of all dignity. If millions of the poor could be shown how to claim all the benefits to which they are legally entitled, Cloward believes, they would so overload welfare rolls that Congress would have no choice but to enact a guaranteed minimum income.

The trouble with the guaranteed annual income as a solution to poverty, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers noted in a 1964 report, is not the $11 billion or $12 billion that it would cost Washington each year. The Government already spends more than that on welfare. “This ‘solution’ would leave untouched most of the roots of poverty,” said the Council. “Americans want to earn the American standard of living by their own efforts and contributions. It will be far better, even if more difficult, to equip and permit the poor of the nation to produce and to earn the additional $11 billion—and more.”

The Cutting Edge. It is this determination to reach poverty’s roots that makes the war against poverty so difficult an undertaking. Even so, the U.S. Government is officially committed to a long-term total effort that cuts across every federal department and involves every program that in any way relates to the environment that perpetuates poverty. Last week Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner created the new post of family-planning coordinator to give fresh impetus to birth-control programs—a field that the OEO has treated gingerly despite evidence that the poor have the most children, and grow poorer as a result.

Sargent Shriver sees his agency as the leader in the assault on poverty. “The programs of the OEO will cost the taxpayers only 1¢ out of every tax dollar,” he says, “but this 1¢ provides the cutting edge of all our efforts. Because our 1¢ is directed at selfhelp, self-motivation, education and local community action, all of our programs are designed ultimately to end poverty.”

If that seems a Utopian ideal, it is nonetheless very much in the American spirit.

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