Great Society
[1] Major new federal programs addressing civil rights, education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation were launched.
Some projects were expanded under the administrations of Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford while others were dismantled, and funding for many were cut by Ronald Reagan.
In 1968, when John Kenneth Galbraith published a new edition of The Affluent Society, the average income of the American family stood at $8,000, double what it had been a decade earlier.
I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges.
[10]Almost immediately after the Ann Arbor speech, 14 separate task forces began studying nearly all major aspects of United States society under the guidance of presidential assistants Bill Moyers and Richard N.
It began by enacting long-stalled legislation such as Medicare and federal aid to education and then moved into other areas, including high-speed mass transit, rental supplements, truth in packaging, environmental safety legislation, new provisions for mental health facilities, the Teacher Corps, manpower training, the Head Start program, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities program, a housing act that included rental subsidies, and an act for higher education.
Ervin criticized Johnson's domestic agenda as invasive and claimed that the unfiltered database of consumers' information as a sign of presidential abuse of power.
[19] Historian Alan Brinkley has suggested that the most important domestic achievement of the Great Society may have been its success in translating some of the demands of the civil rights movement into law.
It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes.
[citation needed] The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 provided various methods through which young people from poor homes could receive job training and higher education.
[22] The OEO reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development.
[23] The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability until it expired in 2002.
[33] The legislation overcame the bitter resistance, particularly from the American Medical Association, to the idea of publicly funded health care or "socialized medicine" by making its benefits available to everyone over sixty-five, regardless of need, and by linking payments to the existing private insurance system.
[25] The Food Stamp Act of 1964 made the program permanent, while the Social Security Amendments of 1967 specified that at least 6% of monies for maternal and child health should be spent on family planning.
He typically emphasized qualitative and quantitative goals, especially the power of the arts to improve the quality of life of ordinary Americans and to reduce the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots.
Karen Patricia Heath observes that, "Johnson personally was not much interested in the acquisition of knowledge, cultural or otherwise, for its own sake, nor did he have time for art appreciation or meeting with artists.
In June 1964, the commission released a report that suggested that the emphasis placed on science endangered the study of the humanities from elementary schools through postgraduate programs.
[citation needed] The law initiated federal aid through the CPB for the operation, as opposed to the funding of capital facilities, of public broadcasting.
The CPB initially collaborated with the pre-existing National Educational Television system, but in 1969 decided to start the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
[citation needed] Two long-planned national cultural and arts facilities received federal funding that would allow for their completion through Great Society legislation.
[40] In the late 1930s the U.S. Congress mandated a Smithsonian Institution art museum for the National Mall, and a design by Eliel Saarinen was unveiled in 1939, but plans were shelved during World War II.
Congress passed a variety of legislation to support improvements in transportation including The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 which provided $375 million for large-scale urban public or private rail projects in the form of matching funds to cities and states and created the Urban Mass Transit Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration), High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 which resulted in the creation of high-speed rail between New York and Washington, and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966—a bill largely taken credit for by Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed he claims helped inspire the legislation.
The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales.
[citation needed] Joseph A. Califano Jr. has suggested that the Great Society's main contribution to the environment was an extension of protections beyond those aimed at the conservation of untouched resources.
[43] In a message he transmitted to Congress, President Johnson said: The air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry.
With the exception of the growth centers, EDD counties were ineligible for assistance unless they were RAs, but they were all expected to benefit from "coordinated districtwide development planning.
[59] A comprehensive minimum rate hike was also signed into law that extended the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 9.1 million additional workers.
[60] Urban white ethnics who had been an important part of the New Deal Coalition felt abandoned by the Democratic Party's concentration on racial minorities.
Furthermore, Republicans made an effort to avoid the stigma of negativism and elitism that had dogged them since the days of the New Deal, and instead proposed well-crafted alternatives—such as their "Opportunity Crusade.
[citation needed] Alan Brinkley has suggested that "the gap between the expansive intentions of the War on Poverty and its relatively modest achievements fueled later conservative arguments that government is not an appropriate vehicle for solving social problems.
