The War on Poverty was in many ways a political slogan rather than a concrete set of policy initiatives. Often invoked interchangeably with the “Great Society,” it included anti-poverty programs that contributed to America’s patchwork safety net and other initiatives intended to maximize the individual citizen’s ability to realize his or her fullest potential. Conservatives then and later derided the War on Poverty as a failed attempt at economic redistribution that led millions of Americans into a state of permanent dependency on the government, but in truth, LBJ and his aides never seriously contemplated policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth, or condition. They did not broadly support quantitative measures like a guaranteed minimum income or employment. Instead, they believed that qualitative measures like education, workforce training, and access to health care and food security would level the playing field and help poor people realize their share of a growing economy. When economic growth sputtered in the early 1970s, the limitations of these policy decisions became immediately evident. But, considered on its own terms, the War on Poverty proved a lasting and important component of the nation’s response to poverty.

Despite the war on poverty declared in different ways by various politicians in different countries since World War II, the rich–poor divide continues as it has been more or less the same for the last ten thousand years or so. Also, the rich–poor divide continues across revolutions and across societies that describe themselves using different labels, such as communist, capitalist, socialist, liberal-democratic, and Islamic. For example, the number of billionaires in communist China rivals that in the capitalist United States, and the rich–poor divide in Islamic Iran is even great than in most European countries. Various legitimizing ideologies are used to justify the rich–poor divide, with the rich using their power and resources to shape education, the media, religious ideology, and the various other avenues for socialization and communication. The tendency for both the rich and the poor to believe in a just world and to blame the victim is discussed in this chapter, in relation to false consciousness and legitimizing ideologies, to explain the continuity of societies with enormous rich–poor divides.

As the Republican Party narrowed and weakened in the late 20t century, it became home to a succession of conservative movements which largely defeated the party’s moderate wing, lent it a more ideological coloration, and initiated the sharp polarization in American politics that lasted into the early 21st century.

This chapter explores the intended and unintended actions of rural people and their allies during the War on Poverty who significantly pushed an alternative image of family farm environmental politics onto the urban table of public concern by the 1980s. Farmworker co-ops and consumer-focused activism in the mid-1960s prefigured these consumer-based and child-focused strategies of food activism of the 1980s. War on Poverty organizing in the West and the farmworker movement previewed the powerful potential combination of producer and consumer politics that helped to remake the image of the family farm in the minds of consumers. The emerging image linked everyday choices about food to the broader social and environmental contexts in which children’s health was always paramount. This chapter emphasizes the parallel and connected story of counterculture or alternative agriculture activism of the 1970s and 1980s as well, a movement that emerged to fill the vacuum of trust in industrial agriculture and that saw great successes in bridging the gap between urban consumers and rural producers around concerns for small-scale, local, and pesticide-free foods. But the question was always, Whose children?

This chapter explores the relationship between growing concerns about youth delinquency in American cities at midcentury and the development of War on Poverty programs that helped to lay the groundwork for the subsequent War on Crime and the evolution of the carceral state. Emerging postwar patterns of uneven development and environmental inequality affected poor urban and African American youth in particular. The growing popular ecology movement would only underline these truths as toxins and environmental risks to youth came to the center of public concern in new forms and at different scales. This chapter explains how the War on Poverty’s assumptions further entwined youth and environment at this pivotal moment in the construction of gendered and racialized conceptions of juvenile delinquency in the postwar West. Older conceptions of environment and youth – often held by the planners of youth-related government programs – would face new challenges as youth began to resist the ecological conditions they faced in cities and youth camps alike, helping to challenge the meanings of environment in public discourse about race and poverty.

Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty explores the relationship between antipoverty programs and federalism. The introduction provides a foundation for the rest of the book through an overview of the extent and nature of poverty in the United States as well as a brief history of how welfare programs have changed over time. We are at a moment in which the basic structure of the safety net is uncertain and up for grabs. Proposals to replace existing programs with block grants or to allow states to impose tougher restrictions on welfare recipients abound, often justified using the language of federalism. This chapter introduces these challenges and then provides a roadmap of the rest of the book.