"The purpose of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 is to offer
opportunity, not an opiate. . . . We are not content to accept the
endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls."--President Lyndon
B. Johnson
"I would just provide that every person in this country is given
a certain minimum income. If he wants to work in addition to that,
he keeps what he earns."--Senator George S. McGovern
Between LBJ's statement in 1964 and McGovern's in 1972, American
liberals radically transformed their welfare philosophy from one
founded on opportunity and hard work to one advocating automatic
entitlements. Gareth Davies' book shows us just how far-reaching
that transformation was and how much it has to teach anyone engaged
in the latest round of debates over welfare reform in America.
When Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty," he took great
care to align his ambitious program with national attitudes toward
work, worthiness, and dependency. Eight years later, however,
American liberals were dominated by those who believed that all
citizens enjoyed an unqualified right to income support with no
strings or obligations attached. That shift, Davies argues, was
part of a broader transformation in political values that had
devastating consequences for the Democratic Party in particular and
for the cause of liberalism generally.
Davies shows how policy failure, the war in Vietnam, domestic
violence, and the struggle for black equality combined to create a
crisis in national politics that destroyed the promise of the Great
Society. He reevaluates LBJ's role, demonstrating that while
detractors such as McGovern and Robert Kennedy embraced the "new
politics of dissent," LBJ remained true throughout his career to
the values that had sustained the New Deal coalition and that
continued to retain their mass appeal.
Davies also explains in rich detail how the dominant strain of
American liberalism came to abandon individualism, one of the
nation's dogmas, thus shattering the New Deal liberal hegemony with
consequences still affecting American politics in the mid 1990s.
Placing today's welfare debates within this historical context,
Davies shows that the current emphasis on work and personal
responsibility is neither a liberal innovation nor distinctively
conservative.
Based on a wide range of previously untapped archival sources
and presented in a very accessible style, From Opportunity to
Entitlement will be especially useful for courses concerned with
the 1960s, the decline of the New Deal political order, the history
of social welfare, the American reform tradition, and the influence
of race upon American politics.
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