The Great Society
by Alan Brinkley
This reading is excerpted from Chapter 31 of Brinkley’s American History: A Survey (12th ed.). I
wrote the footnotes. If you use the questions below to guide your note taking (which is a good idea),
please be aware that several of the questions have multiple answers.
Study Questions
1. Do you have any questions?
2. Why was Johnson able to get most of his ambitious program through the Congress?
3. In what ways was the election of 1964, on the surface an enormous landslide for Democrats, in fact a sign of
ominous developments for the party?
4. What were the key Great Society programs, and why did Johnson feel each would help alleviate poverty and
build a better United States?
5. The Immigration Act of 1965 is of especial importance to the present-day US. Why?
6. Why did some Americans oppose Johnson’s program?
7. On balance, was the “Great Society” a great idea? Why or why not?
Lyndon Johnson
The Kennedy assassination was a national trauma—a defining event for almost everyone old
enough to be aware of it.1 At the time, however, much of the nation took comfort in the
personality and performance of Kennedy’s successor in the White House, Lyndon Baines
Johnson.2 Johnson was a native of the poor “hill country” of west Texas and had risen by dint of
extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition. Having failed to win the Democratic
nomination for president in 1960, he surprised many who knew him by agreeing to accept the
second position on the ticket with Kennedy. The events in Dallas [where Kennedy was
murdered] thrust him into the White House.
Johnson’s rough-edged, even crude personality could hardly have been more different from
Kennedy’s. But like Kennedy, Johnson was a man who believed in the active use of power.
Between 1963 and 1966, he compiled the most impressive legislative record of any president
since Franklin Roosevelt. He was aided by the tidal wave of emotion that followed the death of
President Kennedy, which helped win support for many New Frontier proposals.3 But Johnson
also constructed a remarkable reform program of his own, one that he ultimately labeled the
“Great Society.” And he won approval of much of it through the same sort of skillful lobbying
in Congress that had made him an effective majority leader.4
Johnson envisioned himself as a great “coalition builder.” He wanted the support of
everyone, and for a time he very nearly got it. His first year in office was, by necessity,
1
Ask anyone who was born in 1958 or earlier where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot and they
will be able to tell you. The only recent parallel of this would be the 11 September 2001 attacks.
2 In 2012 Robert Caro published the fourth volume, The Passage of Power, in his multi-volume biography of
Lyndon Johnson. The vast majority of the book is about the three months between Kennedy’s death and LBJ’s first
State of the Union speech. Caro argues convincingly that these months were crucial in transforming LBJ from a
person much feared by liberals and underestimated by Kennedy’s men into a popular national leader.
3 The “New Frontier” was the name Kennedy had given to his legislative agenda. Kennedy was unable to get most
of these measures through Congress; Johnson would have no such difficulties.
4 LBJ had served as majority leader of the Senate from 1955 to 1960.
The Great Society
dominated by the campaign for reelection. There was little doubt that he would win—
particularly after the Republican Party fell under the sway of its right wing and nominated the
conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. In the November 1964 election, the president
received a larger plurality, over 61 percent, than any candidate before or since. Goldwater
managed to carry only his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South [see map
below]. Record Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, many of whose members had
been swept into office only because of the margins of Johnson’s victory, ensured that the
president would be able to fulfill many of his goals.
1964 Presidential Election
A huge win for LBJ—but with a bad omen for future Democratic candidates. For the first time, a
number of states of the “Solid South,” which had provided reliable votes for Democratic presidential
candidates since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, voted for the Republican. This switch, prompted
in large part by LBJ’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would be completed by 1972, when
Richard Nixon would win all of the South’s electoral votes. Since 1972 the states of the former
Confederacy (with the exception of Florida, a classic “swing” state) have overwhelmingly cast their
votes for Republican candidates. It is possible, however, that demographic changes in the South may
be creating additional opportunities for Democrats in the region as we move towards the 2020s.
The Assault on Poverty
For the first time since the 1930s, the federal government took steps in the 1960s to create
important new social welfare programs. The most important of these, perhaps, was Medicare: a
program to provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses. Its enactment in 1965 came
at the end of a bitter, twenty-year debate between those who believed in the concept of national
health assistance and those who denounced it as “socialized medicine.” But the program as it
went into effect pacified many critics. For one thing, it avoided the stigma of “welfare” by
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The Great Society
making Medicare benefits available to all elderly Americans, regardless of need (just as Social
Security had done with pensions). That created a large middle-class constituency for the
program.5 The program also defused the opposition of the medical community by allowing
doctors serving Medicare patients to practice privately and to charge their normal fees; Medicare
simply shifted responsibility for paying those fees from the patient to the government. In 1966,
Johnson steered to passage the Medicaid program, which extended federal medical assistance to
welfare recipients and other indigent people of all ages.6
Medicare and Medicaid were early steps in a much larger assault on poverty—one that
Kennedy had been planning in the last months of his life and that Johnson launched only weeks
after taking office. The centerpiece of this “war on poverty,” as Johnson called it, was the Office
of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which created an array of new educational, employment,
housing, and health-care programs. But the OEO was controversial from the start, in part
because of its commitment to the idea of “Community Action.”
Community Action was an effort to involve members of poor communities themselves in the
planning and administration of the programs designed to help them. The Community Action
programs provided jobs for many poor people and gave them valuable experience in
administrative and political work. Many men and women who went on to significant careers in
politics or community organizing, including many black and Hispanic politicians, as well as
many Indians, got their start in Community Action programs. But despite its achievements, the
Community Action approach proved impossible to sustain, both because of administrative
failures and because the apparent excesses of a few agencies damaged the popular image of the
Community action programs, and indeed the war on poverty, as a whole.
The OEO spent nearly $3 billion during its first two years of existence, and it helped reduce
poverty in some areas. But it fell far short of eliminating poverty altogether. That was in part
because of the weaknesses of the programs themselves and in part because funding for them,
inadequate from the beginning, dwindled as the years passed and a costly war in Southeast Asia
became the nation’s first priority.
Cities, Schools, and Immigration
Closely tied to the antipoverty program were federal efforts to promote the revitalization of
decaying cities and to strengthen the nation’s schools. The Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9
billion in federal grants to cities for the preservation of open spaces, the development of masstransit systems, and the subsidization of middle-income housing. In 1966, Johnson established a
new cabinet agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (whose first secretary,
Robert Weaver, was the first African American ever to serve in the cabinet). Johnson also
inaugurated the Model Cities program, which offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment
pilot programs.
Kennedy had long fought for federal aid to public education, but he had failed to overcome
two important obstacles: Many Americans feared that aid to education was the first step toward
federal control of the schools, and Catholics insisted that federal assistance must extend to
5
6
Polls consistently indicate that Medicare and Social Security are the two most popular US government programs.
If you don’t know what it means, “indigent” would seem to be an important word to look up, don’t you think?
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The Great Society
parochial as well as public schools. Johnson
managed to circumvent both objections with the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965 and a series of subsequent measures. The
bills extended aid to both private and parochial
schools and based the aid on the economic
conditions of the students, not on the needs of
the schools themselves.
Total federal
expenditures for education and technical
training rose from $5 billion to $12 billion
between 1964 and 1967.
The Johnson administration also supported
the Immigration Act of 1965, one of the most
important pieces of legislation of the 1960s.
The law maintained a strict limit on the number
of newcomers admitted to the country each year
(170,000), but it eliminated the “national
origins” system established in the 1920s, which
gave preference to immigrants from northern
Europe over those from other parts of the world.
It continued to restrict immigration from some
parts of Latin America, but it allowed people
from all parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa to
enter the Untied States on an equal basis. By
the early 1970s, the character of American
immigration had changed, with members of new
national groups—and particularly large groups
of Asians—entering the United States and
changing the character of the American
population.
Johnson gives The Treatment to his friend (and
future Johnson appointee to the Supreme Court)
Abe Fortas. Johnson’s Treatment was often
successful in convincing members of Congress
to vote in support of LBJ’s initiatives.
Legacies of the Great Society
Taken together, the Great Society reforms meant a significant increase in federal spending. For a
time, rising tax revenues from the growing economy nearly compensated for the new
expenditures. In 1964, Johnson managed to win passage of the $11.5 billion tax cut that
Kennedy had first proposed in 1962. The cut increased the federal deficit, but substantial
economic growth over the next several years made up for much of the revenue initially lost. As
Great Society programs began to multiply, however, and particularly as they began to compete
with the escalating costs of America’s military ventures, the federal budget rapidly outpaced
increases in revenues. In 1961, the federal government had spent $94.4 billion. By 1970, that
sum had risen to $196.6 billion.
The high costs of the Great Society programs, the deficiencies and failures of many of them,
and the inability of the government to find revenues to pay for them contributed to a growing
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The Great Society
disillusionment in later years with the idea of federal efforts to solve social problems. By the
1980s, many Americans had become convinced that the Great Society experiments had not
worked and that, indeed, government programs to solve social problems could not work. But the
Great Society, despite many failures, was also responsible for some significant achievements. It
significantly reduced hunger in America. It made medical care available to millions of elderly
and poor people who would otherwise have had great difficulty affording it. It contributed to the
greatest reduction in poverty in American history. In 1959, according to the most widely
Percentage of Americans in Poverty, 1960-2010
accepted estimates, 21 percent of the American people lived below the officially established
poverty line. By 1969, only 12 percent remained below that line. The improvements affected
blacks and whites in about the same proportion: 56 percent of the black population had lived in
poverty in 1959, while only 32 percent did so 10 years later—a 42 percent reduction; 18 percent
of all whites had been poor in 1959, but only 10 percent were poor a decade later—a 44 percent
reduction. Much of that progress was a result of economic growth, but some of it was a result of
Great Society programs.
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