8
as a stalwart New Dealer, who saw welfare as the antithesis of Roosevelt liberalism because it
was a handout, not a hand-up.
10
Charles Schultze, the President’s Director of the Bureau of the
Budget in late 1965, wrote in a memo to the president that “a larger ‘dole’ is not the answer ---
the poor must become producing members of the American society.” President Johnson wrote in
the margins of the memo: “O.K., I agree.”
11
More importantly, this rejection of a strong welfare component in the War on Poverty
was part of Johnson’s strategy of overcoming the racial divisions that had been unleashed in the
Democratic party as a result of his major advances in Civil Rights. In his memoirs, Johnson
disputed the common perception that his War on Poverty was aimed at assisting blacks in
particular: “Uninformed people believed that the poverty program was entirely Negro-oriented,
despite the fact that about 4 out of every 5 families then living in poverty where white.”
(Sundquist 1968, pp. 146-147) Johnson was interested in pursuing his War on Poverty without
antagonizing the South or northern white ethnic urban leaders, such as Mayor Daley of Chicago.
At a 1973 Brandeis University Conference on the War on Poverty, David Hackett, one of the
architects of the War on Poverty, responded to a question by Francis Fox Piven on the
importance of race in shaping the administration’s anti-poverty programs:
We would have run it completely differently if we had
followed your thesis…if it had
been a political program and if the administration wanted to cater to the black votes, we
would have done it completely different. We didn’t do it that way. We were going
initially with the mayors and the establishment.
12
As both Brauer (1982) and Davies (1996) point out, Johnson had already proposed the most
significant Civil Rights legislation in a century, and would have no need to do anything more to
10
See the oral history transcripts of James Gaither, Special Assistant to the President; Elizabeth Wickendon,
informal advisor to LBJ; and Adam Yarmolinksy, Special Assistant to the President, in the Lyndon Baines Johnson
Presidential Library (LBJPL).
11
Schultze, Charles, memorandum to President Johnson, September 18, 1965, in Welfare (Ex We9 4/1/65 – 3/11/66)
Box 26, file: We9 5/1/65 – 9/21/65, LBJPL.
12
David Hackett was one of the “urban guerillas” that began to plan the anti-poverty program under Kennedy:
Blumenthal 1969. Quoted from the Brandeis 1973 conference, in Brauer 1982, p. 111.
Convention