In 1962 Michael Harrington published The Other America, arguing that one-fifth of Americans lived in substandard housing, suffered from malnutrition and received inadequate medical care. Harrington’s shocking revelations influenced many in America, including Lyndon Johnson, a man of humble beginnings with whom the problem of poverty resonated deeply The sudden death of President John Kennedy in 1963 moved many in the government, first among them the new President Johnson, to fulfill the goals Kennedy had targeted, one of which was the creation of a War on Poverty.

The War on Poverty had its roots in the New Deal of the 1930s. In terms of enlarging the powers of the federal government, the two reform movements were equally ambitious. But unlike the 1930s, the early 1960s was an era of unprecedented prosperity in America, which emboldened Johnson and others all the more to believe that poverty could be erased from the American landscape.

At the same time, many researchers began to talk about a “culture of poverty” in America, arguing that poverty tended to strike certain groups more than others, and to be handed down through generations. That is, nonwhites, the elderly those with less education, and female-headed households were much more likely to be affected by poverty and to pass down this condition to future generations. How to break this cycle was a much more difficult question.

The ambitions of the War on Poverty included Medicare, a national health-insurance program initially created in 1964 for the elderly and then expanded to include recipients of welfare. In addition, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave aid to underfunded public schools, while the Higher Education Act of the same year allocated funds for needy college and university students. Johnson’s administration also created the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But the War on Poverty involved individuals at the grassroots level as well as the highest levels of the government. In this regard, Johnson’s vision was premised on the belief that the poor needed to be involved in the programs that were to affect them if those programs were to succeed. In this spirit, the Johnson administration created the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. First headed by R. Sargent Shriver, John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the OEO administered a budget of $800 million to a variety of programs geared to community development and job training.

Some of the more notable programs of the War on Poverty included: legal services for the poor; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a form of domestic Peace Corps, training the young as teachers to be sent to underprivileged school districts; the Job Corps, which attempted to train those who had dropped out of formal education; and Project Head Start, initiated to provide preschool education for poor children. Some of these programs, such as Head Start and Food Stamps, are still current, but for the most part the War on Poverty had a minimal impact. Many have argued that the programs fell victim to the Vietnam War’s voracious appetite for funding, while others have charged that the entire enterprise was little more than a superficial attempt to mend a system with deep structural problems.