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That became the stated purpose of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Under the Office of Economic Opportunity, manpower-training programs and encouragement of the poor to organize on their own behalf were designed to help adults. A big investment in education generally, with emphasis on remedial and preventive programs like Head Start, was designed to help their children. Finally, programs like VISTA aimed at enlisting other Americans in the war. Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America did much to focus affluent America's attention on its underclass, charges that federal statistics claiming advances amount to no more than the celebration of "paper triumphs." The evidence is with Harrington. While innovative, a number of the programs were excessively costly, poorly administered and subject to failure because of the inability of federal, state and local officials to unite effectively. Even the better experiments made little headway because of the problem's enormity. The current crisis is evidence enough that Lyndon Johnson's domestic war did not end in victory or even a draw.
But even if Head Start has not raised average urban reading levels, who can evaluate the enhancement of life for those children who did, in fact, enter a new world of words and ideas? Moreover, at least one functioning arm of the OEO clearly has a continuing effect: lawyers for the agency have helped organize the poor in their demands for help. Above all, however ineptly, the War on Poverty pointed to the problem of pride: the fact that a measure of self-respect, as well as respect from society, has to go with welfare.
View from the Right
Though conservatives often lament the welfare mess in the harshest terms, they have offered few realistic and workable alternatives. Senator Barry Goldwater, in The Conscience of a Conservative, advocates turning all welfare over to private institutions—an 18th century solution for a 20th century problem. His onetime adviser, Economist Milton Friedman, and the Senate's newest prominent conservative, James Buckley of New York, both favor a modern concept, the negative income tax. But Friedman shackles the idea to what he calls, without being specific, a "modest" level of aid. Under the NIT, the tax scales would be continued downward past the zero-tax line; those with inadequate income would be given money through the internal revenue apparatus. The amount would be based on need and designed to encourage privately earned income. Friedman also would use NIT to replace all present welfare aid. (Ironically, Organizer Wiley also favors the NIT, but not at a modest level: N.W.R.O. seeks $5,500 a year for a family of four.)
Urban Affairs Expert Edward C. Banfield, author of The Unheavenly City, is reduced to musing on what he concedes are steps available only to an American dictator. Among other things, he would: repeal the minimum-wage laws; encourage "or perhaps even require" teen-agers who do not go to college either to take jobs that are low-paid and unattractive if they are the only ones available, or do military or volunteer service; encourage or even require institutionalization of the highly incompetent poor; and place lower-class "problem families" in closely supervised housing projects.
President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan thus