By Edwin Cooney
I know, you thought that January 8th was only
significant as the late great Elvis Presley’s birthday. However, that date in January 1964 was -- in
addition to the day Elvis turned 29 -- the day 55-year-old President Lyndon
Baines Johnson declared war on poverty in America.
As Americans listened to LBJ’s first State of the Union Address
after less than two months in office, a considerable portion of them dismissed
his “war on poverty” objective as a mere extension of what they derisively
called the Democratic Party’s cynical strategy to “tax and tax, spend and
spend, elect and elect.” After all, 1964
was an election year!
Men of sufficient intellectual, educational, social, and
political means named Nixon, Goldwater, Dirksen, Ford, Reagan, and Thurmond (all
of whom were born with adequate resources to escape any deprivation they may
have individually been born into) openly predicted that LBJ’s war on poverty was
all politics and therefore was bound to fail.
Even more, they were determined that it should fail. I know that’s what
they felt and hoped for because back then I was one of them. In countless meetings and especially in
private conversations, they made it plain that if people were poor in America,
it was absolutely their fault. The poor,
they insisted, were largely socially, intellectually and spiritually inferior
people, otherwise they would have “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps”
long ago. Sympathy for the plight of the less fortunate was the way of the “bleeding
heart liberals” like Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Martin Luther King,
Jr. who owed their allegiance to alien social doctrines which were distinctly Marxist
and therefore both immoral and un-American.
The primary reason this wasn’t the overwhelmingly prevailing
public reaction in January1964 was due to two realities. First, there was the struggle for civil rights
which was not only LBJ’s fight, but also the unfinished work of our recently
martyred president John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The second and perhaps just as compelling reason was because
too many Americans vividly remembered the United States government’s frank
indifference to the economic and social plight of the average citizen from the
days of George Washington to those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New
Deal.
Some Americans vividly recalled how local sheriffs and even
state police were routinely at the beck and call of well-to-do industrialists
when poorly paid workers sought to form unions to improve their working and
living environments. In other words, the
same Americans who professed to hate government were perfectly prepared to use
government to protect their interests. Hubert
Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson might be “bleeding hearts” and perhaps Lyndon
Baines Johnson was a political power monger but the plight of the poor was real
and needed to be addressed even if 1964 was an election year.
During the past couple of weeks, conservative and liberal
talk show hosts, commentators and politicians have lined up on both sides of
this question: how truly effective was Johnson’s war on poverty? As you can be sure, there are plenty of
statistics supporting its failure and its success. The reality is that the idea that government
should be the primary force to overcome poverty has men and women of good
intentions on both sides.
Still, there’s a deeper and, I believe, essentially moral
question that neither conservatism nor liberalism is capable of adequately
addressing. Is poverty in America our individual responsibility? Are we all, to the extent that we can be, our
brother’s and sister’s keeper? Should we
marshal every resource at our command to conquer it? Of course we should!
Reasonable people debate whether Theodore Roosevelt’s Square
Deal, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, FDR’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal,
JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society were the best paths to follow. However, the belittling of that goal,
especially since 1981, has been paramount to scuttling the “American dream”
which, as I see it, is un-American.
Here’s where we’re stuck.
We’ve substituted constructive strategies to conquer poverty for the
sake of slick ideological bromides sufficient to ease our moral sense of
responsibility for the economic and socially deprived among us. We complain on the one hand that God has been
taken from our schools, our courts and our public priorities and yet we insist
that our selfishness is nobody’s business.
Charity may be a priority for Jesus Christ, but any government that deigns
to require charity on the part of its people becomes, in Ronald Reagan’s words,
“the problem.” If it is immoral for a
single mother to abort a child she can’t afford to feed, what is moral about
the political priority to deny food stamps to poor children?
Let’s stop putting fake values on political ideologies that
serve merely to justify our insistence on the right to maximize our personal
profit. We have the resources here in America to do so much more for those who
could do more for themselves if they were energized by our love rather than
being stultified by our own self-righteous arrogance!
Here’s a piece of advice I’ve just discovered that might
energize the well-off who feel oppressed by taxes and regulations designed to
assist the rest of us: “Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!”
Now, how much did that just inspire you?
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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