Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society
by President Lyndon Johnson was the main advocate of the Great Society programme that got its name from a speech made during May 1964 to describe the hoped for affects of his administration’s civil rights and welfare reform policies.
Lyndon Johnson had started ‘the war on poverty’ after realising the state of deprivation that existed in many inner cities. Johnson hoped to eliminate poverty through acts such as the Economic Opportunity Act. However the economic impact of the Great Society was to be limited by an increasing weakness in the Keynesian economics pursued by the administration. Johnson aimed for a greater provision of education to produce equality of opportunity for African Americans and the poor in the inner cities. Increased public spending as advocated by Keynes and Roosevelt’s New Deal could counter economic downturns. Low wages or unemployment even during the relatively prosperous 1960s caused poverty. The number of families relying on benefit increased from 745,000 to 1,545,000 households. After 1968 the economic position started to worsen especially in terms of inflation. Unemployment that had fallen during the mid-1960s due to increased military spending, the sending of millions of young men to Vietnam and tax cuts started to rise again. Rising inflation and unemployment were the economic legacy Johnson passed on to Nixon, not a Great Society with greatly reduced levels of poverty. The recession that resulted from the oil crisis of 1973 hit the poorest people the hardest.
Although the Johnson administration regarded the war in Vietnam as politically and strategically vital to the United States, the issue split liberal elements within the country and provoked unrest and mass demonstrations.
In 1973 following his defeat by Nixon in the presidential election of 1972, Senator George McGoven commented that “The Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indo-China.” The mass anti-war movement and their protests certainly affected Johnson and his decision not to stand again in 1968. Hobsbawm for one contends that the demonstrations of American students unseated President Johnson.
Not only was the war highly unpopular it was very expensive and badly dented the federal budget reducing the scope for spending on the war on poverty. Even the United States could not pay for a pro-longed war and the policies needed to achieve the Great Society. Johnson had not taken the opportunity to withdrawal from Vietnam but instead escalated American involvement to around 300,000 men by 1966. Despite vastly superior firepower the Vietcong and North Vietnamese remained undefeated. Too many Americans would have regarded talk of a Great Society hollow when they could watch the savage war in Vietnam on their televisions with heavy bombings of civilians and thousands of dead American troops. By 1968 the unpopularity of the war persuaded Johnson not to run for re-election, whilst around a thousand troops were killed every month.
To conclude, the Great Society was an ambitious programme intended to carry on the economic and welfare reforms of the New Deal. It was intended to combine these reforms with a war on poverty and the granting of civil rights to African Americans that had unconstitutionally denied them. The Johnson administration with the advantage of a strong position in Congress after 1964 did manage an impressive range of reforms such as doubling the amount of welfare provision, Civil Rights Acts that were actually enforced and the introduction of Medicare. However the Great Society proved unobtainable due to the cost and unpopularity of the Vietnam War, deteriorating economic conditions and political unrest and protests. Although segregation and other forms of discrimination were ended or reduced discontent among young African Americans was reflected in riots such as Newark in 1967 and the Black Panther movement.
Bibliography
Caro, R.A. the Years of Lyndon Johnson: volume 3 Master of the Senate 2002 Jonathan Cape, London.
Carroll, P.N. & Noble D.W. The Free and the Unfree Second Edition – A New History of the United States 1988 Penguin Books Ltd London.
Comfort, N. Brewer’s Politics A Phase and Fable Dictionary 1993 Cassell Publishers, London.
Cook, C. & Waller, D. The Longman Handbook of American History 1763-1996 (1998) Longman, Harlow.
Hobsbawm, E. Age of Extremes the Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, (1994) Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex.
Murphy D, Cooper K. & Waldron M. United States 1776-1992 (2001) Collins Educational, London.
Watson, J. Success in World History since 1945, (1989) John Murray Publishers, London.
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