Uneven Ground (17 page)

These two strains of postwar thought—economic growth theory and human capital theory—would come together in the design of the War on Poverty and provide a conceptual framework for government intervention strategies toward Appalachia. Although none of the major crafters of the War on Poverty were from the region or had any extensive knowledge of it, popular images of Appalachia rooted deep in the nation's consciousness predisposed Great Society policy makers to identify Appalachia as “deviant” and thus as a prime target in the antipoverty campaign. Though the region had long been perceived as an economic and cultural backwater, “a land where time stood still,” its otherness could now be eliminated, they assumed, through development and assimilation into the mainstream.

Once defined as part of the “other America,” Appalachia became a pawn in a great national experiment that sought to eradicate poverty without confronting the specific institutional and economic structures that abused the region in the first place. The catalyst for that experiment was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), and although it was short lived and conceived to fight national perceptions of poverty and its causes, the OEO brought hope and empowerment to millions in Appalachia, fueling a nascent regional identity and stirring the waters of resistance in ways its designers did not envision.

When President Johnson announced the antipoverty initiative in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, the War on Poverty was a proclamation without a plan. The president's Council of Economic Advisors, under Walter Heller, had drafted a limited proposal for “widening participation in prosperity” through a series of demonstration projects in selected American cities, but Johnson had rejected the plan as being too timid for his vision. The new president wanted something that could define his presidency and make his mark before the approaching 1964 elections, something, he told Heller, that would be “big and bold and hit the nation with real impact.”
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He wasn't interested
in demonstration programs; he wanted a poverty project in every community, and he wanted to make the initiative the centerpiece of his Great Society.

The task of designing a strategy for the poverty campaign fell to Kennedy brother-in-law and head of the Peace Corps Sargent Shriver. By tapping Shriver to head the initiative, Johnson not only tied the crusade to the memory of the slain president but gained the support of the Kennedy faithful and the northeastern intellectuals who had been calling for government action on behalf of the poor. Shriver had turned the Peace Corps into one of the most successful programs of the Kennedy era, and he had a longtime personal interest in volunteerism, youth, and juvenile delinquency, issues that the president initially saw as the core of the antipoverty program.
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Like President Johnson, Shriver had an enthusiasm for challenges and an indefatigable commitment to work, and after his appointment on February 1, he immediately convened a task force to build on the recommendations already made by the Council of Economic Advisors. Working quickly, he organized a series of seminars and informal discussions that brought together a variety of idealistic young bureaucrats and leading academic experts on poverty. The task force completed its work within six weeks and sent the omnibus EOA to Congress on March 16, 1964.

The hastily designed proposal called for the annual expenditure of almost a billion dollars on a package of ten disparate and mostly untested programs. The initiative combined an assortment of strategies that reflected both the political heritage of the New Deal and the new social science theories of the postwar period. Much of the act focused government resources on workforce development and on helping poor youth to break the “cycle of poverty.” Title I of the legislation, for example, established the Job Corps, modeled after the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, which was designed to provide education and vocational training in rural conservation camps for disadvantaged urban youth. More than just a federal job program, however, the Job Corps, headed by university administrator Otis Singletary, was also an educational program aimed at teaching underprivileged youth the behaviors needed to get jobs in the new economy. The act also created the Neighborhood Youth Corps to offer community-based training and work experience for young people living at home and established
a work-study program to help low-income college students remain in school. Similarly, the bill made funds available to the states to set up programs for unemployed fathers of needy children to gain work experience and job training. Favoring education over federal job creation, the EOA sought to change the behavior of the poor rather than to provide direct transfer payments that would leave them permanently dependent on the government for survival. It offered a “hand up” rather than a “hand out,” as Johnson put it.

To develop the capacity of the poor to help themselves and to coordinate community services to combat poverty, the act called for the establishment of community action agencies (CAAs) run by local people, including the poor themselves. The idea of community action was at the core of the earlier Council of Economic Advisors' recommendations and consumed more than half of the new antipoverty budget. CAAs were intended to serve as the vehicles for quickly and directly channeling federal funds into local neighborhoods across the country. These nonprofit agencies would prioritize community needs and receive grants for a wide range of education and cultural enrichment projects, including adult literacy, health services, legal aid for the poor, and child development programs such as Head Start. To assist in organizing antipoverty projects and to provide direct training services, the act created a domestic volunteer service corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), patterned after Shriver's Peace Corps. Finally, the bill established the OEO to administer grants and to direct the effort.
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Although the EOA included a number of manpower development components long favored by liberal Democrats to retrain unemployed workers for jobs in a growing economy, the heart of the act lay in the process of community action. Not surprisingly, however, there was little agreement about what “community action” meant, and in the rush to formulate a plan, the idea came to represent different things to politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals. Almost everyone believed that the antipoverty campaign should be waged at the local level by local people rather than administered from Washington, but there was little understanding of how that strategy would work in practice. Johnson initially believed that the attack on poverty would concentrate on education and vocational training for inner-city and rural youths, and he saw community action as connecting parents, teachers, and other
professionals in the task of educating children, after the pattern of FDR's National Youth Administration. Officials in the Bureau of the Budget and in other cabinet agencies thought of community action simply as an efficient mechanism to coordinate the delivery of antipoverty services, synchronizing a multitude of state and federal programs. Most academics saw the concept as an opportunity to reorganize the poor community around modern, middle-class values and structures.
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The idea of community action blended a number of theories of government planning and social engineering that had been evolving throughout the twentieth century, but it owed much to the intellectual changes taking place in the social sciences in the postwar era. The application of social science theories of community development to the problems of the inner cities, for example, provided a model for fighting poverty on a national scale (rather than case by case) that appealed to the drafters of the antipoverty program. Sociologists at the University of Chicago had long utilized their city as a microcosm of the larger society, and in the 1920s and 1930s they developed a theory of community disorganization to explain the persistence of poverty in the Chicago slums. The problems of the inner city, they argued, were environmental, the results of the dislocation of workers and weak community organizations that in turn produced alienation and hopelessness. Rather than concentrating eleemosynary resources on individual uplift, as had been the practice in traditional settlement house casework, the Chicago scholars urged social workers to focus their energies on building organizational connections that would improve the opportunities of the poor as a group. Low-income people, they suggested, lacked the organizational skills of the middle class to exert pressure on politicians, coordinate community services, and discipline themselves. The way to assimilate these poor, often immigrant populations into the mainstream was to assist them in developing the appropriate behaviors and institutions that made for successful communities.

Much of the field research of the Chicago school sociologists focused on the link between poverty and juvenile delinquency, since the latter seemed to represent a perfect example of the failure of community organizations to provide opportunities and discipline for young people. As national concern about urban crime and delinquency began
to mount after World War II, social science research increasingly linked poverty and delinquency with community disorganization and urged public and private programs to expand community improvement efforts, aimed now at a new group of immigrants—Hispanics, southern blacks, and Appalachian migrants. In the late 1950s, the Ford Foundation launched an experimental project based on the Chicago model to revitalize slum areas and to increase employment opportunities for youth in four major cities and in rural areas of North Carolina. Under the leadership of Paul Ylvisaker, the Gray Areas Program helped to sponsor community development projects planned and implemented by local neighborhood organizations. Ylvisaker believed that these projects could demonstrate effective strategies of organizing poor people and poor communities to help themselves. Ford also sponsored a series of workshops, coordinated by the CSM, to educate law enforcement and social service agencies about the particular problems of Appalachian migrants in Chicago and other midwestern cities.

After the 1960 presidential election, many of the young activist intellectuals associated with the Gray Areas Program followed John Kennedy to Washington, and they carried the idea of community action with them to new positions in the federal government, especially on the staff of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In 1961, at the request of the attorney general, John Kennedy created the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, headed by Robert Kennedy's college roommate David Hackett. Hackett and his staff quickly turned to the Ford Foundation for help in establishing demonstration projects to reduce delinquency. The committee launched a number of projects that applied the principles of the Gray Areas Program to the coordination of services for youth. At least two committee grants went to projects started by the Ford Foundation, in New York and New Haven, but the initiative suffered from limited funding, and Hackett was continuously frustrated by the absence of cooperation from other federal agencies. Several of these projects proved to be politically controversial because of their practice of “indigenous” participation, but Hackett believed that the idea of community action itself offered promise for attacking not only juvenile delinquency but also the larger problem of poverty itself. When Heller invited Hackett
and other members of his team to participate in his antipoverty discussions in 1963, Justice Department staffers seized the opportunity to expand the lessons of community action onto a larger stage.

In the absence of any other comprehensive strategy to attack poverty and with the apparent endorsement of the new social science community, “Hackett's guerrillas,” as the Justice staff came to be called, aggressively projected community action to the center of Heller's antipoverty proposal. Although few of the economists and bureaucrats on the poverty working group understood the implications of the strategy, the process of attacking poverty by coordinating local agencies and organizing local people appeared to be cost effective and politically sound. Most of Johnson's advisors, including the director of the Bureau of the Budget, Kermit Gordon—another former employee of the Ford Foundation—believed that community action would be administered through agencies of local government.
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Even Shriver, who initially had reservations about the concept, saw the local CAAs as being “composed of distinguished people” who could “speak out on behalf of the poor” to elected officials.
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In reality, the concept of community action encompassed a range of strategies designed to assimilate the poor into the mainstream of American society. Some proponents saw the process as one of institutional change, helping to reorganize government services to open new opportunities for individuals to succeed within the existing system. Other, more radical strategists saw community action as a way to bypass conservative local governments and empower the poor to take charge of their own communities through political organizing. While some saw community action in terms of cultural rehabilitation, resident involvement, and top-down change, others advocated bottom-up strategies of resident control and empowerment. Most proponents of bottom-up change, especially those in the Justice Department, believed that CAAs controlled by the poor themselves were the only way to circumvent segregationist attempts in the South to set up all-white poverty programs.

One of the most ardent voices for empowering the poor was that of Richard Boone, who had worked for the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Program before becoming an aide to Hackett's committee on juvenile delinquency and a member of Shriver's antipoverty task force.
Boone so persistently repeated the phrase “maximum feasible participation” of the poor at task force meetings that it was eventually included in the language of the bill. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Boone held degrees from the University of Chicago and had worked as a Cook County, Illinois, police officer before joining Paul Ylvisaker at Ford. Steeped in the Chicago school of community organizing, he was a protégé of Chicago social activist and labor advocate Saul Alinsky, who had been organizing stockyard workers on the South Side of Chicago since the 1930s. Unlike most of his university colleagues, who saw community organizing as a means of educating and assimilating the poor, Alinsky believed that the problems of the poor were essentially political and began organizing workers to pressure authorities for better municipal services. In the early 1960s, Alinsky took his grassroots style of political organizing into the black community of Woodlawn, where his model of resident participation challenged official control of welfare policies and programs to serve the poor.
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