Chapter 20
The Sixties:
(Insight: Compare to Revolutionary Virginia’s generational conflict leading to the American Revolution
Having lived through this era, and remembering some of it, it can be reasonably said there has been no other time in the twentieth century that citizen activism flourished. From riots, civil disobedience, mere protests and rallies, draft-dodging, picketing, joining organizations, marching—you name it—all forms of citizen activism beyond simple voting did not merely characterize these years—they dominated them. In my mind they announced the arrival of a new generation[1], the early baby-boomers, into policy-making.
In the same decade, did battle with the likes of Robert Kennedy (1925), Martin Luther King Jr., (1929), Huey Newton (1942), Gloria Steinem (1934) Jane Fonda (1937), Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan, 1941), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927), Malcolm X (1925), Stokely Carmichael (1941), Angela Davis (1944), (Shirley Chisolm (1924), Bella Abzug (1920), or Jane Jacobs (1916), Dustin Hoffman (1937), Joan Baez (1941), Richard Cloward (1926), Francis Fox Piven (1932), Edward Banfield (1916) and Bennett Harrison (1942), Andrew Young (1932), Cesar Chavez (1927), James Q Wilson (1931), and Robert Moses (1888), Edward Logue (1921), Melnea Cass (1896), Thurgood Marshall (1908), Lloyd Ohlin (1918), Gorge Brager (1923), Cesar Perales 1940), Bill Moyers (1934), JFK (1917), SDS, Eldridge Cleaver, Bull O’Connor, George Wallace, Richard Dryfuss, Pete Seeger, Herbert Gans
The confluence of a two vastly different generations, debuting in the same decade, creates an unusual policy environment. The Greatest Generation was late in debuting into politics and the economy (the postwar period), and with exceptions was unable to penetrate the glass ceiling to take over the chief institutions of American life. Kennedy’s 1961 election was their symbolic, if not actual generational policy-making debut. Within a decade, however, these new elites had to deal with their bratty-ass, drug-infested children, not in smoke-filled rooms, but in the streets, sit-ins, anti-war demonstrations, civil rights protests/marchers—and in 1968, the polling booth. And so, we have Paul Ylvisaker (born in 1922) in the same decade be director of the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas, impactful contributor to the War on Poverty and Great Society, helped defused riots in Newark (?) and as New Jersey’s Commissioner of Community Affairs commenced the Meadowland sports and commercial Project, worked with and
As revealed in the previous section, key high-level political and cabinet secretaries were open to new, bolder ideas to introduce from the top down change to address not only structural deficiencies, but poverty, racial discrimination and depressed (but no longer blighted slum) neighborhoods. They were not alone, however, residents of these neighborhoods had their own ideas, their own leadership, and strategies. To Gild or Assimilate, Black Power/Mayors or Individual Achievement were fought out in the Ghetto. In the give and take that followed several Community Development “movements”[2] forged in the fire of the Sixties urban riots..
Restating we are not attempting to write the definitive and exhaustive scholarly tome on the War on Poverty, Great Society and its effects on economic development.
In 1964 Sargent Shriver who first headed LBJ’s War on Poverty Task Force and then headed up the Office of Economic Opportunity which ran the War on Poverty, invited Michael Harrington to serve as a DOL consultant for a month on a team constructing the war on poverty approach. At DOL, Harrington joined with a radical writer Paul Jacobs and an old Harrington drinking buddy, now a DOL analyst, Daniel Patrick Moynihan produced a report which focused on public works to end unemployment (a new Works Progress Administration). This proved to be too expensive and was rejected.
It’s one thing for academics to define end of national poverty as a goal for neighborhood-level community development, it is quite a different proposition of the President of the United States to embrace it in his revolutionary set of initiatives that together constitute the Great Society. But Johnson did do just that. How the former could lead to the latter was never explained. But as Robert Halpern suggests “neighborhood initiative in the 1960’s was pulled into larger national events in a way that had never happened before. It was asked to bear the weight of a President’s public commitment to eradicating poverty”.[3]
Perhaps this explosive enhancement of neighborhood strategy goals is the natural, if not inevitable consequence of “swimming with sharks”—relying so heavily on the federal government invites their need to insert a national objective into neighborhood-level revitalization—but ending poverty, ending discrimination, and as I write, terminating inequality (poverty by another name in my book) is a task likely to remain unchecked on community development’s bucket list. But linking neighborhood level change to a national-macro-level goal such as poverty could logically be accomplished through a community mobilization strategy that transformed each local campaign into a larger action, infused in with national change, and included it into a movement for social, economic and political change. Sub-state community development could be a vehicle to achieve national change. It is perhaps no accident that at the tail end of this decade (actually in early 1970) Acorn for formed.
The Great Society was first mentioned by LBJ in a May 7th, 1964 speech at Ohio University and on May 22 LBJ at a University of Michigan speech announced that a series of task forces on a wide variety of topics–the output of which would be used to formulate legislation to pursue a “Great Society”. The task forces and working groups were assembled, in secret, composed chiefly of academics and government experts, and their recommendations were subsequently reviewed by the White House and affected bureaucracies. The policy process was characterized as “elitist” and certainly was “top-down” in its approach. Many of the recommendations that were carried over into legislative proposals were announced in Johnson’s 1965 State of the Union Address. The extensive overlap of the Great Society programs with the previously approved War on Poverty is quite apparent. Conceptually, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two in that for many Great Society initiatives a common theme was the elimination of poverty and civil rights.
In this history, we have confined the War on Poverty to OEO-led initiatives, initiatives which, as we have said, focused on distressed, usually black central city neighborhoods-communities had through individual and community empowerment (federal funding and setting up an organizational network governed by residents) that could change institutions and institutional policy in ways proposed by the community to break the cycle of poverty and the poverty culture.
The Great Society, in our perspective, was a larger, almost smorgasbord-like set of policy initiatives across a very wide variety of public policy areas: education (very central to the Great Society), health care (Medicare and Medicaid), Arts, Humanities and Public Broadcasting, Transportation, consumer protection, the environment (Solid Waste disposal, NEPA, motor vehicle air pollution), historic preservation, natural resources and wilderness areas. Using a loopy kind of logic, the Curmudgeon sees the Great Society as a literal attempt to remake significant elements of the then current American society through government legislation. In much the same way as the War on Poverty tried to remake individuals enduring the culture of poverty, the Great Society attempted much of the same on a grander, more societal-national scale.
It is reasonable that the role and scope of government, the federal government, right or wrong, necessary or not, increased dramatically. The scope of change envisioned by the wide-ranging legislation suggests to us that the Great Society (including War on Poverty and Model Cities) was a Progressive revolution. While in several ways, we can rightfully suggest the Great Society is a logical evolution and culmination of New Deal Progressivism, in many ways (remaking individuals and its conscious effort to promote social change and institution reform through government) the Great Society departed from FDR’s concept of Progressivism, a Progressivism which retained strong business and Privatist values and goals, and which maintained a robust role for states and private enterprise. The New Deal focus principally on the economic system and employment sought less to remake society than to reform its economic and finance systems.
Other than remarking about this great Progressive leap forward, we have no intentions or desire to put our arms around the entire Great Society. Rather, appropriate to our task of describing the evolution of economic development, we will cull out several aspects of the Great Society which did affect economic development and the profession.
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A second reason for the fuzziness between economic development and community development was that “community development” also became associated with a distinctive approach to a comprehensive linking of housing and community economic development to achieve individual empowerment-improvement and neighborhood revitalization. This approach draws from its own historical heritage reflecting the values and priorities associated how and for whom these goals should be achieved. OEO’s Office of Community Services (OCS) managed community development administrative and grant issuance through 1975 when the Headstart, Economic Opportunity and Community Partnership Act (1975) restructured OCS as an independent agency–an independence it enjoyed through 1981 when the agency was abolished and what remained of its functions were transferred to the Health and Human Services Department. During its existence, OCS spawned a number of “CDCs” or Community Development Corporations across the nation–some of which remain in existence to this day.
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Fragile and newly-created HUD feared that unless its constituent base extended beyond the ghettos and large urban cities, it would suffer and eventually be unable to promote its urban mission to its satisfaction. There was no better way to develop a non-urban constituency than to advocate, embrace and fund activities in these new development districts. In this fashion, economic development in many states and counties of the south became linked to HUD’s community development programs. In these states, Community Development departments and regional agencies tied to HUD’s financial picket fence became a dominant component of the state SSS. [4].
Arguably, the linkage of A-95, HUD, EDA and the network of state regional planning and development Quasi EDOs with the programs and priorities of the TVA and ARC have created a more durable set of Quasi EDOs than found in most other non-TVA-ARC states. The impact of this period on many of the Southern states is considerable and enduring. Also in southern states, the state SSS was reshaped structurally in ways not commonly thought of as reflecting traditional southern practice and values. This is not to say, however, that while the structures clearly remain to this day, what is done within these structures is a carbon copy of the Progressive agenda. The mid-1960’s planning and development agencies survive to this day in Mississippi, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Alabama[5]. In a very real sense, these entities have largely remained true to the programmatic roots dominant at the birth: planning, infrastructure development and, because of HUD’s early involvement, community development.
These EDOs are involved in economic development-related activities, particularly transportation, community development/housing and infrastructure. These planning and development Quasi EDOs also house other federal programs, including programs such as SBA 504. In their early years, these districts were a major channel, funding source and programmatic inspiration for the state EDOs and the municipal departments, particularly in the region’s more populated cities. North Carolina, for instance, to this day is stocked with a considerable number or municipal Planning and Development departments, within which are housed not only planning but community development and economic development. West Virginia is another excellent example.
Still, “the Johnson administration, despite the efforts of the OEO and the rhetorical commitment on an all-out war on poverty, hardly challenged the political economy of the emerging Sunbelt South. Throughout the 1960’s … Washington never forced southern states to reorder priorities from business development to poverty fighting. Nor did the federal government abandon its own emphasis on economic growth for a truly redistributive economic policy.[6]
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The community development approach did not define the urban crisis as coping with suburban population and job loss, but with breaking the cycle and culture of poverty in the slums and distressed neighborhoods of the central cities and major urban areas. In its early years at least, community development was a mixed bag, described and summarized by Karen Mossberger…
Collectively, the Gray Areas and War on Poverty programs introduced innovations such as early childhood education and multi-service centers, and furthered the idea of comprehensive planning to address neighborhood distress. Residents established their right to democratic participation in neighborhood policy, even though at times that participation had only symbolic effects. The programs also demonstrated the limitations of an internally-focused neighborhood approach. On their own, such initiatives could not stop racial discrimination, the restructuring of the economy, and the relocation of jobs to the suburban periphery.[7]
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The Neo-Conservative Critique
The Neo Conservative Perspective: The Unheavenly City and Beyond the Melting Pot, Nathan Glaser and Daniel P Moynihan, Harvard-MIT Joint Center, 1963 and 1970 (2nd Ed);
****McDonald, p.208 Political-Social Culture,
The passage of the Great Society legislation drove a deep wedge into southern politics and economic development. During this period, in most southern states and big cities contradictory forces and trends were fighting it out. The New South and the Old South struggled against each other and against external threats, such as the Great Society people-poverty programs. The anti-poverty programs in particular, generated a strong reaction-pushback in many communities in the South. In contrast other Great Society programs, such as the Appalachian Regional Commission, were embraced by deeply conservative southern states and communities. In the South a distinction between place-based economic development and people-based economic development [8] was a serious dividing line in southern economic development practice and philosophy–exposing yet again the salience of regional and local political cultures on economic development.
Yet, this distinction seems contradicted, at least to some degree, by many the southern states pioneering of community colleges, customized worker training, and the critical role of reforming southern educational systems (not to mention the Research Triangle Park) as key elements in a strategy of regional economic development and revitalization[9]. But in our opinion, the contradiction is more surface apparent than real. The economic development workforce-education strategy embraced in many southern states recast people-based approaches into components of a place-based overall economic development strategy. The dividing line was that workforce development and education as a necessary economic development infrastructure was not only acceptable but desirable. Welfare (especially galling, no doubt for blacks, but undesirable for all races) was not!
[1] William Straus and Neil Howe, Generations: History of America’s Future, 1584-2069-Greatest Generation 1901-1924, the Silent: 1925-1942, the Baby-Boomers (1943-1960), Generation X (1961-1981), the Millennial Generation Y (1982-2004).
[2] Our “policy movement” is for others a sub-policy area, populated by real life people, large doses of irrationality, ideology, if not partisanship, and revolving about unique structures (EDOs), strategies, tools and programs.
[3] Robert Halpern, Rebuilding the Inner City, op. cit., p. 85.
[4] Aelred, op. cit. pp. 66-67.
[5] Some of these entities are not included in our data base for this monograph because they offer no discernible formal economic development programs and are not staffed with economic developers. But many of these entities are classified as EDOs and are in our database. Those mid-sixties planning and development EDOs in our database more commonly could be viewed as economic development planners (CEDs being their core program), and several toss in an RLF or two as well. They are seldom the lead, front line economic development vehicle in their geography.
[6] Schulman, op. cit. pp. 197-198.
[7] Mossberger, Lessons and Issues from Comprehensive Neighborhood Initiatives, op. cit.
[8] Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980 (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1994), p. 181.
[9] This will be even more apparent in the middle 1970’s when in the eruption of the Second War Between the States, the Southern Growth Policy Board will aggressively advocate for education and skills enhancement as fundamental southern economic development strategies.
Ron W. Coan 