History of the United States II / Unit 14 USH2 2008 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Whether the Great Society Succeeded
The idea
Whether the Great Society succeeded is the question its critics and defenders still argue, and the sources support a qualified answer. The anchor records that the proportion of Americans in poverty had fallen by nearly half by the time Johnson left office. Medicare and Medicaid, larger Social Security benefits and welfare payments improved many lives, the anchor says, and federal money for education opened college to more Americans than ever. The Yawp adds that later presidents and Congresses left the bulk of it intact: Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start and federal spending on the arts and literature. Johnson's own charge, in the Yawp's account, had been an end to poverty and racial injustice, and the Economic Opportunity Act's Job Corps and Head Start were its first instruments.
In practice
The three billion dollars of War on Poverty spending that dominated public debate, the Yawp says, and Community Action's maximum feasible participation.
Where people slip
The critics' case is in the sources too. The Yawp calls Community Action the most controversial programme, fraught during its few short years of activity. Digital History records that Richard Nixon campaigned in nineteen sixty-eight on eliminating wasteful federal antipoverty programmes, and that his administration urged Congress not to extend the Voting Rights Act. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first calls the Great Society a failure; the anchor's poverty figure and the survival of its programmes contradict it. The second calls it a completed triumph; the Yawp says that for most Americans the movement's long goal of economic justice proved as elusive as ever. The course's position follows the sources: the Great Society cut poverty and built programmes that lasted, and it did not end poverty.
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