A New Look at the Great Society

Lyndon Johnson's slogan has virtually faded from public consciousness, but there really is a Great Society--or at least a moderately good one. Despite growing criticism of the Kennedy-Johnson years, and widespread disillusionment with the highly touted social programs of the 1960s, despite the Nixon Administration's retreat from social experimentation and innovation, more was accomplished in the last decade than most people realize, and much of that accomplishment endures. Such is the thesis of the current issue of the Public Interest, one of America's foremost journals of social and political commentary.

In attempting to set the record straight, Editors Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer turned the quarterly's winter number over to a group of analysts who have little identification with the battles of the '60s; nor did they serve in any important political offices during the decade. With cool rationality and no rancor, the analysts accommodate positions ranging from Philosopher John Rawls, who has constructed an awesome rationale for greater equality, to Urbanologist Edward Banfield, who believes largely in leaving well enough alone.

Panic Response. The thesis linking the twelve articles is that promise outran performance in the Great Society and obscured the real progress that was being made. The poor were receiving more public help than ever before; yet as their incomes were rising, so were the goals set by the Great Society's engineers. The poor were given money or in-kind benefits like food stamps, but that was not good enough. They were expected to show rapid improvement in school, in their health, in their ability to find jobs. It was a nearly Utopian prescription, and when the programs fell short of the ambitious goals, their advocates despaired and their critics attacked them as unworkable. Writes Robert J. Lampman, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin: "The best became the enemy of the good."

Yet under the Johnson Administration, it often seemed as if the best was barely good enough. Policies were regularly oversold. Part of the reason, notes Lance Liebman, assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School, lay in the "grandiloquent personality" of the President. His hubris found a parallel in the "national mood among the educated, professional, managerial classes," writes Liebman. They were persuaded that "technology had infinite capacity to produce the good life, at low cost."

From this mood, suggest several of the authors, there arose a crisis mentality that gave everything a life or death urgency. There was scant tolerance for moderate success or partial failure. Charles V. Hamilton, professor of government at Columbia University, argues that the crises of the '60s invariably passed through the same phases. First there was mild protest from a part of the public, then a mild response from the Government. This was followed by escalated protest, then a panic response. Once the panic had passed, there was a revulsion against whatever concessions had been made or promised. As Hamilton sees it, this pattern of behavior contributed to the polarization of the '60s and discouraged conciliation.

No program foundered more than welfare reform. Every effort at change seemed only to add more people to the relief rolls. Increasing the number of social workers did not help, nor did the Work Incentive Program. Welfare mothers, who make up the bulk of recipients, often lacked the education and the basic skills to find suitable employment. Throughout, writes Gilbert Y. Steiner, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, well-meaning planners "overestimated the potential of the welfare population," which numbered 14.8 million, or 7.1% of the U.S. population in 1972.

But all was hardly lost. Despite the planners' frustrations, the lot of the poor actually did improve. Simply put, many more destitute people were receiving money and such benefits as food stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid and other health services. Initially, at least, the programs were continued or expanded by the Nixon Administration. From 1960 to 1972, social welfare expenditures in the nation shot up nearly fourfold: from $52 billion to $193 billion. Beneath the bluster and the controversy, a significant redistribution of income had taken place. Steiner passes too quickly over some of the deficiencies of welfare, particularly its tendency to break up families by giving assistance only to fatherless homes. Yet it is hard to quarrel with Steiner's summation of the decade: "In relief, there is no substitute for money."

Another partial success of the '60s was overshadowed by unforeseen consequences, what Daniel P. Moynihan has called the "hidden policies" that inevitably accompany the intended ones. In 1968, the last year of the Johnson Administration, Congress passed a massive housing bill that contributed to the biggest residential building boom in U.S. history: 3 million housing starts in 1970, compared with the previous record of 2 million in 1950.

But brick and mortar alone turned out to be insufficient. The housing program got off to such a fast start that it caught the Nixon Administration unprepared. Taking advantage of the administrative chaos, unscrupulous speculators put up ramshackle homes and bilked thousands of poor buyers. Much of the housing, moreover, was overconcentrated on the edge of the metropolitan areas. Upwardly mobile blacks and whites were thus encouraged to leave the inner city, leaving behind the more helpless and criminally inclined groups. Because of the social decay that ensued, structurally sound housing was abandoned, contributing to the ghetto housing shortage. But the fact that housing policies led to undesirable results does not totally discredit them. Anthony Downs, chairman of the Real Estate Research Corp., argues that a solution lies in a broader social policy that would transfer some of the ghetto poor to the suburbs and provide those who remain with more jobs and better protection against crime.

Key Lesson. The plight of the black poor in the '60s seemed to be irrefutable proof that federal programs were not working. Poverty, frustration, resentment and crime increased in the ghettos; despite the declining unemployment rate for the rest of the population, there were 55,000 more black youths out of work in 1969 than in 1960. But the picture was brighter for blacks almost everywhere else. Andrew F. Brimmer, a member of the Federal Reserve Board and a black, feels that increased education resulting in large part from federal aid, was decisive for black progress. At least partly because of these educational gains, blacks were able to get better jobs. Black income rose from $19.7 billion, or 6.2% of the national total, in 1959 to $38.7 billion, or 6.4%, ten years later. The increase was 96%, compared with an 89% jump in white income during the same period.

In judging the Great Society as a whole, the Public Interest analysts have not despaired of the usefulness of federal intervention to improve the quality of American life. What distinguishes them from the hell-for-leather planners of the Johnson era is that they would intervene more cautiously and more experimentally. The writers are skeptical of revenue sharing as presented by the Nixon Administration, fearing that without adequate federal guidelines, state and local governments simply will not direct their programs at those who need them most.

Perhaps the key lesson, argue the same authors, is that the public and the Government alike must learn to live with programs that do not always deliver as much as expected. "A democracy really has no option but to act while it learns. It is better to have tried and failed (and learned something) than never to have tried at all." The Great Society's record, they conclude, "is one of successes mixed with failures, of experiments that proved themselves at least partially successful and experiments whose returns do not appear to have justified the effort. In other words, it turned out about as any sensible person should have expected."

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