";s:4:"text";s:7235:" Not, that is, the issue of persons who are out of work, but rather of persons who, typically, are not in the work force. The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. “We have an obligation in our society … to support a principle of public policy which will permit every citizen not only to live at a certain minimum standard but to be able to live at a rising standard by his own effort and his own training and ability.”Desegregation was not a solitary building block of the Great Society; it was a central theme that ran throughout most of its key initiatives, from health care and education to voting rights and urban renewal. Still, predicated as it was on qualitative measures conceived to unlock individual opportunity, since the 1970s the Great Society has drawnGeorge Reedy, who served as Johnson’s White House press secretary and special assistant, later surmised that the sweeping promises associated with the Great Society “may have had a negative impact on the willingness of Americans to trust such efforts.” When those measures did not meet the great expectations that liberals established in the heady days of 1964, many Americans came to agree with LBJ’s conservative critics that government itself was the cancer, not the cure.
The presidential aides who conceived and implemented its component parts rejected policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth or condition. America raised, supplied and deployed a military force of 16 million men, defeated fascism in Europe and the Pacific, and led the establishment of postwar economic order around the globe.
LBJ, who was tall enough to stand in the deep end, jabbed repeatedly at the shoulders of his young aide, who was paddling furiously in an effort to stay afloat. It was an era when increasing numbers of middle-class and working-class employees enjoyed previously unimaginable benefits, like annual cost-of-living adjustments to their wages and salaries, employer-based health insurance, paid vacations and private pensions. It all came back to the common understanding that if government managed economic growth and unlocked opportunity, poverty would recede. Indeed, there is no more a dogged advocate of overhauling the Great Society’s antipoverty programs than House Speaker Yet for all Johnson’s grandiose rhetoric, the Great Society was more centrist—and is more critical to the nation’s social and economic fabric—than has been commonly understood. Defining Terms: What Is the Great Society and the War on Poverty?
Close to 7,000 facilities swiftly acquiesced; another 5,500 fell into line after inspection. Each facility’s “rooms, wards, floors, sections, and buildings” must be integrated; officials were not to ask patients whether they wished to share quarters with someone of a particular race. In those same years, the portion of white southern students attending deeply segregated public schools dropped from 68.8 percent to 26 percent.It didn’t stop with schools. In 1962 the socialist activist and writer Michael The scale of the problem was so huge that the federal government had to lead—but Johnson’s advisers rejected many of the left-wing solutions in vogue at the time.Such was the thinking behind one of the administration’s most popular programs, Head Start, which in its first years provided early education, medical and dental care and meals to poor children. To be eligible for Medicare reimbursements, a hospital or nursing home had to admit all people for inpatient and outpatient services without regard to color, race or national origin. “I think it is a liberal view, rather than a conservative view, that there are too many Americans forced to live on our welfare rolls,” Horace Busby, Johnson’s cabinet secretary, told the president.
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