BEYOND THE COLD WAR
Lyndon Johnson and the New Global
Challenges of the 1960s
EDITED BY
Francis J. Gavin
and Mark Atwood Lawrence
1
Gavin_Book.indd iii
11/6/2013 7:51:33 PM
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
© Oxford University Press 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law,
by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beyond the Cold War : Lyndon Johnson and the new global challenges of the 1960s / edited
by Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence.
pages cm. — (Reinterpreting history)
ISBN 978–0–19–979069–2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–979070–8 (alk. paper)
1. United States—Foreign relations—1963–1969. 2. United States—Foreign economic
relations. 3. World politics—1955–1965. 4. World politics—1965–1975. 5. World
health—Government policy—United States. 6. Economic assistance, American.
7. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908–1973—Political and social views. I. Gavin,
Francis J., editor of compilation. II. Lawrence, Mark Atwood, editor of compilation.
E846.B49 2014
327.73009’046—dc23
2013023263
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Gavin_Book.indd iv
11/6/2013 7:51:33 PM
4
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
The Johnson Administration Fights Poverty at
Home and Abroad, 1964–1968
SHEYDA JAHANBANI
From the flashing lights of a Live Aid concert in Hyde Park to the august
Council chambers of the United Nations building in New York, few issues
have garnered as much attention in the past decade as the problem of
global poverty. Despite the cultural excesses of the “Naughties,” serious
books about global poverty, from Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty to
Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, captured the attention of hundreds of
thousands of readers in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Indeed,
amidst the din of reality television, viral videos, and social networking, jeremiads like these rocketed up bestseller lists in the United States and Western
Europe, heralding yet another discovery of poverty amidst plenty. While
historians can surely trace the rise of transnational activism around the
problem of global poverty back to the spasm of globalization in the 1990s,
the definition of poverty as a global social problem that demands explicitly
global solutions emerged in public discourse much earlier. Although recent
debate about global poverty is often described as a product of the post‒Cold
War world, our present-day conception of global poverty—and many of the
solutions that have been proposed to eradicate it—grew out of the United
States’ imperative to “develop” the Third World during that fifty-year long
confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Before the end of World War II, most people would have been
hard-pressed to make sense of the meaning of the term “global poverty.”
In the early twentieth century, the notion that a social problem could transcend the borders of the nation-state—let alone the rigid distinctions that
97
Gavin_Book.indd 97
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
98
Internationalizing the Great Society
many “Anglo-Saxon” elites believed separated whole races—would have
seemed quite unintelligible to educated observers. Indeed, the contention
that the benighted “primitives” of what Theodore Roosevelt famously
called the “world’s waste spaces” could be described as suffering from an
essentially economic condition called “poverty” rather than “barbarism”
or “savagery” would have been nonsensical.1 For notable Progressives like
Roosevelt, Jacob Riis, and even Henry George, poverty was a condition that
befell workers and their widows, unfortunates who were caught up, literally
and figuratively, in the machinery of industrial capitalism; it was one of the
few ills from which “primitive” man was exempted by his very primitiveness.2 But, as historians have shown, by the end of World War II, humanistic
social science had largely undermined the ideology of racial determinism
that had rationalized this schema.3 The turn from biology to culture made
what anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls the “discovery” of mass poverty
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America intellectually possible for a new generation of American and European liberals.4
Undergirded by this intellectual and ideological shift, the political conditions of the early 1950s put the fight against poverty in the Third World at
the center of the global struggle between the United States and the Soviet
Union. By the middle of the twentieth century, the causal link between
poverty and revolution had become conventional wisdom. Observers from
Alexis de Tocqueville to Karl Marx had identified pervasive inequality as
a powerful catalyst for political upheaval in their analyses of the French
Revolution. Mid-twentieth-century social scientists refined these early
efforts to understand revolution and “mob” behavior, culminating in a
psychosocial theory of the relationship between “frustration” and “aggression.”5 Fearing that the frustration of the hopes and aspirations of poor men
and women would produce fertile soil for the seeds of communist revolution in the Third World, American and Western European policymakers set
about the task of awakening their fellow citizens to the threat mass poverty
posed to the “free world.” President Harry Truman and the leadership of the
Labour Party in Great Britain both made the “war on want” in the Global
South a major element of their party platforms during the early years of
the Cold War.6 The US government committed significant technical and
financial resources to this project, founding Point Four, the first technical
assistance program of its kind. Over the next three decades, this imperative
to fight global poverty would gain momentum, making the “development”
of the newly independent nations of the Third World an American mission.
Beyond a mere policy program, however, development became a worldview that allowed intellectuals, policymakers, and a concerned citizenry to
Gavin_Book.indd 98
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
99
see the despair of the poor with new eyes.7 According to the logic of development, born of an ascendant moment for American social science, poor
people were not merely suffering from an economic condition; rather, they
were beset by a complex syndrome that Truman and others called “underdevelopment.” As defined by social scientists and policymakers, “underdeveloped” regions, nations, and, eventually, people were pre-industrial,
pre-scientific, and substantively pre-modern. Throughout the late 1940s and
1950s, a veritable cottage industry of development expertise—at a moment
of unparalleled authority for American social science—refined the term’s
meaning. More important than the hunger, illiteracy, and disease that befell
them, “underdeveloped” regions, nations, and people came to be seen by
experts and policymakers as sharing one common ailment: they existed outside of the scope of modernity and their predicament could only be solved
by the balm of “modernization.”8
The blossoming vocabulary of “underdevelopment” gave reformers
new tools with which to define and describe poverty around the world.
Specifically, the process of seeing and making sense of deprivation in the
context of the development project in the Third World during the Cold War
fundamentally altered the way in which American reformers came to understand poverty as a social problem at home.9 Depicted in spatial as well as
temporal terms, the poor at home and abroad became one global community of “underdeveloped” people who were fundamentally different from
their modern, middle-class counterparts. The poor occupied spaces seemingly untouched by the abundance of postwar life, and they inhabited a time
somehow separate from the forward-looking present. More than temporary
misfortune or systemic inequality, poverty became a condition that implied
an inherent inability to navigate the modern world. While few claimed that
the poor everywhere were identical, the mainstream of social science, public policy, and popular concern understood the underlying cause of poverty
to be universal—people were poor because they were “underdeveloped.”
This marks the birth of a conception of global poverty.10
The emergence of this new conception of global poverty and its role in
the charged political climate of the Cold War can be seen most clearly in
the global war on poverty that the American government commenced in
the 1960s. The wave of decolonization that washed over Africa and Asia
produced momentum in Washington for a novel foreign aid strategy, one
not merely focused on large-scale development projects as Truman’s Point
Four had been, but a policy program that used “human models” to spread
“modern” values and know-how to underdeveloped regions of the world.11
The Peace Corps, proposed most famously by John F. Kennedy in the 1960
Gavin_Book.indd 99
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
100
Internationalizing the Great Society
presidential campaign, was the marquee program of this new development
ethos. Fresh-faced young men and women from American towns and cities
fanned out across the Third World to share their goodwill and ingenuity
with “underdeveloped” people in an effort that harkened back to both the
subduing of the Western frontier by fearless pioneers and the building of
proverbial cities upon the hills by stout-hearted New England villagers.12
The Peace Corps model did not, however, remain confined to the Third
World. Providing poor people with middle-class human models became
central to the domestic anti-poverty program that President Lyndon Johnson
proposed in 1964 as well.13 That strategy was institutionalized in Johnson’s
domestic peace corps—Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). By the
mid-1960s, young Americans were being deployed to “pockets” of poverty
around the entire world to fight the same enemy using the same weapons.
Built upon the fundamental assumption that all poor people shared a culture of despair and apathy, as well as an overarching belief in the mantra
of development as a strategy for building modern, democratic societies, the
global war on poverty was a product of a particular strain of American liberalism in the Cold War era.14 This strain of liberalism was infused with tenets
of cultural pluralism, a boundless optimism about the nature of “Progress”
guided by objective experts, and a belief in the dangerous relationship
between poverty and violence. Although their political project may have
been eclipsed by the conservative turn of the 1970s and 1980s, these liberal
policymakers and activists diagnosed a social problem that today’s activists
and policymakers still work to cure: the problem of global poverty.
Drafting Warriors for the Poor
Arriving in Washington on a frigid night in late January 1964, all that the usually indefatigable Sargent Shriver could think about was some time off from
work. Shriver, the primary architect and director of the Peace Corps, had just
completed a whirlwind tour of program sites in Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan,
Jordan, Nepal, and Thailand. Sprinkled in among the meet-and-greets with
earnest volunteers and enthusiastic locals in myriad towns and villages,
Shriver met with kings, presidents, and even the Pope, who was in Turkey
on a mission of ecumenical goodwill. A hands-on administrator, Shriver
had spent the months since his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy’s assassination working nearly around the clock. As a reward for this exhausting
month-long sojourn to shore up support for the Peace Corps from foreign
governments, Shriver had promised himself—and, more importantly, his
Gavin_Book.indd 100
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
101
indomitable wife, Eunice—a long vacation. The White House car waiting
at the bottom of the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base made that promise
impossible to keep.
Indeed, far from the vacation he had hoped to enjoy, “Sarge,” as he was
known to most, spent the next two and a half years commuting between his
desk at the Peace Corps headquarters—where he spent Tuesdays, Thursdays,
and Saturdays—and his other desk at the Office of Economic Opportunity—
where he was to be found on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and, despite
his devout Catholicism and unswerving belief that even the Lord took
Sundays off, the Seventh Day of every week. He could not have predicted
any of this on the night he returned to Washington. Instead of settling in for
a peaceful slumber in his room at his suburban Washington estate, he found
himself on the phone with the President, being given a hard sell.
During Shriver’s absence, Johnson had decided to appoint him as the
commanding general of the administration’s newly announced War on
Poverty. Though flattered, Shriver demurred, declaring his loyalty to the
Peace Corps and the important work still left unfinished at the agency.
Shriver’s hesitance flummoxed his boss. Johnson wanted Shriver to stay at
the Peace Corps, a program for which he had shown considerable support
as Vice President. The War on Poverty, LBJ explained, was going to be a
second job. Deploying the persuasive “treatment” for which the Texan was
famous, Johnson assured Shriver that the two jobs were complementary.
“I’m going to make it clear that you’re Mr. Poverty, at home and abroad,”
Johnson said. Shriver tried valiantly to refuse the offer but made no headway. Ramping up the pressure, the president abruptly ended the discussion,
“I want you to get rid of poverty [and] the Sunday papers are going to say
that you’re Mr. Poverty, unless you got a real compelling reason which
I haven’t heard.”15 Despite his sincere efforts, Shriver could convey no reason compelling enough for the president.
Sargent Shriver’s first day on the job as “Mr. Poverty” calmed many of
his own fears about taking on such a momentous task. Surrounded by a
roomful of experts, as well as some stalwarts from his Peace Corps staff,
Shriver heard ideas that were more familiar than he might have expected.
The most provocative suggestion that had been thrown onto the table was
the proposal to base the poverty program on the principle of “community
action.” Shriver, much to the surprise of many in the room, seemed very
familiar with the idea. As he later recalled, “community action—which
the people in community action thought was so revolutionary—was something that we had been running in the Peace Corps for four years before
it ever got into the War on Poverty. So I thought community action was
Gavin_Book.indd 101
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
102
Internationalizing the Great Society
absolutely sort of normal. To me it was routine; to them it was a giant
revolution.”16 To Shriver, the principles of community action seemed like
standard operating procedure. Community action, Shriver clarified, “was
the approach which we in the Peace Corps called ‘community development’.”17 He continued, “Community development in Ecuador is, philosophically and substantially, no different than doing the same thing in some
West Virginia hollow.” Offering an example, he added, “I’m not trying to
say West Virginia hollows are like Ecuador, but the concept of going into
Ecuador to try to help people decide their own problems, and to energize
them, motivate them, assist them to be able to handle their own problems
themselves is no different than the psychology you take into West Virginia
or to the South Bronx.”18
More than any other anti-poverty program, the initiative that eventually came to be called Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) followed
the community development strategy that US policymakers had already
exported to the Third World through the Peace Corps. In both programs,
community development focused on the individual as the primary instrument of change. By embedding caring, committed volunteers in the
“pockets” of poverty at home and abroad, “CD” (as its supporters called
it) promised to awaken poor people to their potential for self-help by providing them with “human models” in the form of literate, democratically
minded, middle-class guides who could show them how to navigate the
difficult path to a productive, “modern” way of life.19 Building this “human
capital” would add to the ranks of productive citizens and contribute to the
economic growth that was necessary for true modernization—both in developing countries throughout the Third World and in depressed areas at home.
According to the logic of CD, the “vicious cycle” of poverty would finally
be broken as the poor became more fluent in the ways of modern life and
began, as a consequence of that transformation, to participate more fully in
democratic—or democratizing—societies.
In addition to common ideologies about how to provoke change among
the very poor, the Peace Corps and VISTA were rooted in the same institutional soil and grew without any barriers between planning, implementation, and programming. Much as the Peace Corps sent young, idealistic
Americans to towns and villages throughout the Third World to produce
modernization, VISTA’s planners deployed caring, committed volunteers
into “pockets of poverty” at home to “bridge the widening gulf between
the haves and the have-nots in America.” The program’s architects believed
that, without the help of these emissaries from modern America, “the poor”
at home could not “reach across this gulf.”20
Gavin_Book.indd 102
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
103
Like its overseas sibling, VISTA attracted middle-class, mostly white
volunteers.21 In the first years of the program’s existence, 75 percent of the
VISTA volunteers were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and
three-quarters of them had either completed or attended college. Nearly
one-quarter of all volunteers in the first two years of the program had training in the social sciences at the university level. Although special expertise
was not a requirement for admittance into the program, VISTA did manage
to recruit lawyers, doctors, and registered nurses as well as volunteers with
at least limited experience in agriculture and construction. As they did in
the Peace Corps, psychologists played a significant role in helping select
ideal VISTA volunteers. In addition to psychological tests that were given
to applicants after they had expressed interest in the program, the selection
process relied heavily on the evaluations of clinical psychologists throughout the training and fieldwork.22 This careful process of selection and evaluation aimed to ensure that VISTA only sent the most committed and able
volunteers into the field.
Finding volunteers with the right personalities for the job was critical
because the most vital aspect of the volunteer’s mission was to achieve a
level of trust and friendship with the members of the community to which
they were sent. Planners did not simply see this as a means to an end but as
an end in itself. The very act of developing bonds of trust and amity with
modern, middle-class volunteers was the first step toward self-help for those
who lived in the “culture of poverty.” As VISTA’s administrative history
explains, “One case upon another illustrated that it was the ability of the
Volunteer—through his or her living-working relationship with the people
served—that had been the link between the poor and their newfound ability to solve their own problems.”23 This emphasis on social integration was
a cornerstone of the community development model that undergirded the
Peace Corps and VISTA.
The 3,500 men and women—young and old, black and white—who
served as VISTAs by the end of 1965 worked on projects that were designed
to prepare poor people for entrance into mainstream society. For example,
VISTAs demonstrated techniques of “modern homemaking, nutrition,
child-care, health, budgeting, and planning” to mothers. VISTAs taught
the poor how to navigate the machinery of modern consumer capitalism
more effectively by teaching them how to comparison shop, clip coupons,
and monitor store promotions. In Baltimore, VISTA volunteers proposed
the creation of a cooperative buying club to counteract the overcharging of
poor residents by local stores. VISTAs also encouraged poor people to think
about their long-term social mobility, to plan and save for the future.24
Gavin_Book.indd 103
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
104
Internationalizing the Great Society
While pursuing these activities, VISTAs were encouraged to look for
ways in which cultural differences that did not jeopardize modernization
could be celebrated to provide poor people with a sense of self-esteem and
personal worth. In one example, rich with irony, planners directed VISTAs
to teach Indian arts and crafts to Native Americans on reservations in the
Midwest to promote a sense of dignity and history among indigenous
peoples. 25 In an Appalachian town, VISTAs facilitated the promotion and
commodification of the region’s folk arts traditions. “Quilting is one of the
hidden resources of Appalachia and until recently it has proved about as
profitable as the ability to tell a good tale or whistle through your teeth,”
an article in the VISTA Volunteer newsletter explained.26 VISTA planners
and the promotional literature they produced often described the modern
entrepreneurial spirit of VISTA volunteers as a missing link between the
poor and the outside world. Connecting poor people to that world without
requiring them to give up their “culture” was one of the primary goals of the
VISTA program, as it had been in the Peace Corps.
In their service on Indian reservations in particular, VISTAs were charged
with the task of making the difficult transition to “modern” American life
easier for people who had suffered under government management that had
been inadequate at best and cruel at worst. Of the 13 percent of VISTAs
who served on reservations in the program’s early years, VISTA’s second
director, William Crook, wrote: “They are not going to solve the ‘Indian
problem’. They are not going to come up with the magic needed to provide the Indians with the knowledge and skills necessary to earn a living in
contemporary America.” Nor, he continued, “can they arrive on the reservations, bearing a quick cure for the poverty, dependence, apathy, and aimlessness that seems to engulf the majority of reservation-bound Indians.” But,
volunteers could give locals encouragement and guidance from which they
might benefit. As a balm for the mental and emotional toll of modernization,
Crook concluded, these young, mostly middle-class men and women could
“make the transition a little less excruciating” for reservation Indians.27
In addition to their service as liaisons between the “modern” world and
the world of the poor, VISTAs also served as human models for the “culturally deprived.”28 VISTAs were only given a subsistence wage, and they
were required to live in the same circumstances as the other members of the
communities to which they were sent. As Peace Corps volunteers had done
in the Third World, VISTAs could demonstrate the ways in which “modern” people with “modern” attitudes navigated the challenges of a meager
income. By emphasizing the equality of material circumstance between
themselves and the members of the communities in which they served,
Gavin_Book.indd 104
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
105
volunteers could provide tangible lessons in how ingenuity and hope could
help alleviate the bitter conditions of poverty.
Although they sometimes suffered from impatience with the pace of
change, volunteers were trained to serve as “agents of change” in indirect as well as direct ways. Judy Lewis, a graduate of the University of
Michigan with a degree in American Studies, was sent to East Harlem after
she completed her VISTA training. Lewis had worked as a secretary in the
Washington offices of the Peace Corps before joining up. Responsible for
encouraging community development among the residents of a city block,
Judy described her job as that of “changing attitudes.” She shared her definition of that process. “I don’t tell people what to do or how to do it, because
they don’t seem to realize that things can be changed,” she explained, referring to the hopelessness of poor people. “Instead, I ask them, ‘Why can’t
you change this?’ Or ‘Have you ever seen anything changed before?’ It’s
sort of indirect therapy.”29 Following the Peace Corps strategy of community development, VISTA planners sent volunteers like Judy Lewis into
poor neighborhoods not just to teach but also to model.
Amidst urban slums, migrant farm communities, the hollows of Appalachia, and the nation’s Indian reservations, VISTAs spanned out to produce
community development among America’s poor just as their international
counterparts had done in the Third World. Some of the more radical proponents of community action resented the similarities of the programs.
Recognizing the extent to which the Peace Corps model was being used
in the War on Poverty, Saul Alinsky—one of the architects of community
action as a strategy for social revolution—complained in an interview with
Harper’s that “our slums are not foreign nations to be worked with in such
a manner as never to constitute a challenge to the status quo. The Peace
Corps mentality does not apply to America’s dispossessed.”30 While some
individual VISTA volunteers may have worked to break down the “status
quo” of disfranchisement and structural inequality, the program’s planners
hewed close to the line that the only meaningful revolution was that of
transforming the attitudes of the poor.
In fact, instead of pulling the Peace Corps and VISTA apart from one
another as Alinsky advocated, the program’s planners forged even stronger
links between the two organizations. The Peace Corps and VISTA conducted
their first “coordinated effort” in the summer of 1967 with the establishment of the VISTA Associates program. The initiative brought five hundred
Peace Corps applicants into ongoing VISTA projects throughout the country. Three hundred of these first VISTA Associates were sent to Appalachia
and the remaining two hundred were dispatched to Indian reservations in the
Gavin_Book.indd 105
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
106
Internationalizing the Great Society
Southwest. Planned in late 1966, the program also offered an opportunity for
summer volunteering in VISTA projects for college juniors who could only
devote a few months to public service. In these programs, VISTA officials
gave the Peace Corps trainees a chance to demonstrate their skills in community development projects. At the end of the summer, those whose service
was approved were invited to join the overseas Peace Corps.31
In the eyes of War on Poverty planners, returned Peace Corps volunteers
possessed a unique authority on the problems of poor people back home. In
one specific case, Shriver cheerily reported that “three former Peace Corps
volunteers, now technical assistance aides in the Alaska Office of Economic
Opportunity, have been credited . . . with ‘the most constructive impact upon
poverty in Alaska in its 100 years under the American flag’.” Shriver went
on to describe the volunteers: “The three, who worked as rural community
development volunteers in Latin America, are working in Indian, Aleut, and
Eskimo villages throughout Alaska.” Shriver continued, comparing the rates
of hunger and disease in communities in Alaska to those in the Third World.
“Only in areas of Africa and India” is the death rate from tuberculosis “paralleled.” The Peace Corps/War on Poverty model, however, had brought
light to a place suffering from little hope. Quoting a local official, Shriver
added, “ ‘Not until now, with the Peace Corps concept of self-help through
community action—the heart of our poverty program—has it seemed possible that real inroads could be made to halt this cycle of premature death
and routine hunger in isolated Eskimo villages’.” Shriver shrewdly concluded with the words of a former colleague of President Johnson’s in the
Senate. “Alaska’s Democratic senator said, ‘The real fruits of this overseas
organization are being harvested in Alaska, although the seeds were planted
in the slums of Latin America’.”32 With programs like those that aimed to
recruit returned Peace Corps volunteers for service in the War on Poverty,
planners believed that they had finally launched a truly global assault on
every front of the scourge of underdevelopment.
Having identified the causes of poverty as fundamentally universal,
Shriver and the Peace Corps/War on Poverty planners believed that they
could effectively apply the same weapon against it around the world. In the
first few months of his tenure at the helm of the War on Poverty, Shriver
clearly stated the premise that undergirded the philosophy of both organizations. “The remaining poverty in this country is every bit as urgent as the
remaining poverty in the underdeveloped world,” Shriver explained in an
address to the Catholic Press Association. “In the Peace Corps, and now, in
President Johnson’s War on Poverty, I have been concerned with . . . these
problems. And they can be solved in my judgment, only by adopting the
Gavin_Book.indd 106
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
107
same procedures, the same theories, the same psychological attitudes we
have used abroad.” Shriver unequivocally reiterated the core assumption
of the anti-poverty programs and the community development programs
undertaken abroad that poverty was first and foremost a psychological condition. “The poor are the same everywhere—and they need the same things
everywhere. They need help—but before they need help, they need hope.
And before they can have hope, they need self-respect. And before they
can have self-respect, they must enjoy the same opportunities the rest of
us have had.” Shriver candidly admitted, “This is why helping is not easy.
It is not just a matter of handing out things like money, jobs, or materials. Helping the poor is a sequence of things.” Shriver had learned this in
his first Washington job. “This is the lesson our Volunteers have learned
in the Peace Corps,” Shriver explained. “They have learned that the real
problem was how to help people without alienating them, without seeming
to tell them, ‘We want to elevate you poor, backward people to our own
superior level!’ Such an approach only inspires resentment, bitterness, mistrust—as so many foreign aid programs have learned!”33 Instead of serving
as bureaucrats hired to offer insufficient public assistance to a permanently
poor population, Shriver’s poverty-warriors would bring their empathy,
their ingenuity, and their persistence to the task of eliminating what one
VISTA official called the “enclaves of despair.”34
Reflecting the extent to which the imperatives of the war against poverty blurred boundaries between domestic and international, the search for
foot soldiers could not stop at America’s borders. While the rhetoric of the
Peace Corps and War on Poverty’s boosters articulated liberal humanitarianism and the “the volunteer spirit” as part of a uniquely American tradition, Americans were not the only people who possessed the mentality that
volunteers needed to change the attitudes of the poor. With LBJ’s enthusiastic imprimatur, Shriver proposed a Reverse Peace Corps in which educated,
elite volunteers from the Third World would come to the United States to
work alongside anti-poverty workers in the United States. In March 1966,
President Johnson asked Congress to authorize the Reverse Peace Corps
and approve an initial recruitment goal of one thousand volunteers.
Although they harbored some concerns that Third World countries would
be hesitant to send their best young talent to volunteer in the United States,
and that people in poor communities in the United States might resent the
appearance of outsiders coming to help them, Harris Wofford and Shriver
were excited by the possibilities of the Exchange Corps.35 Congress was,
initially, much less excited. Congressmen were wary, one White House
staffer guessed, “to welcome foreign volunteers into our slums, mental
Gavin_Book.indd 107
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
108
Internationalizing the Great Society
hospitals, and Indian reservations.” He continued, “Some of those who did
understand the proposal are not yet resigned to having American volunteers
enter their districts or states.”36 Indeed, many in Congress during those long,
hot summers of increasing urban unrest and political confrontation over the
war in Vietnam and civil and economic rights at home were growing fearful of “mobilizing” the poor altogether. Undeterred, the program’s boosters
managed to obtain funding for a pilot project initiated jointly by the State
Department and Office of Education.
Much as they picked volunteers for the Peace Corps and VISTA who
possessed the kind of personality and values that enabled them to serve
as agents of change among the poor, the proponents of the Reverse Peace
Corps consistently emphasized the extent to which they were bringing
the cream of the crop of foreign reformers to work with the poor in the
United States. A report in the National Observer in January 1967 quoted
Harris Wofford as describing the foreign volunteers as “young leaders from
developing nations.”37 A TIME magazine article profiled the first batch of
volunteers, making a significant point out of one volunteer’s privileged
upbringing lest any readers mistake these men and women as “backward.”
Estele Devoto, the article noted, was the twenty-two year old daughter of a
“wealthy Buenos Aires architect, who has worked as a welfare volunteer and
is eager to fight poverty in the rural U.S.” Devoto’s only personal experience
with poverty, TIME took pains to report, had been among the ranch hands
“on her father’s eight-thousand acre estancia . . . where she rides a caballo
criollo—an Argentine equivalent of the American cow pony.”38 Reverse
Peace Corps volunteers were also chosen for their expertise in community
development. In June 1968, the New York Times introduced its readers to
a Filipino volunteer serving as a block worker in East Harlem, noting his
eight years of experience in community development at home. In words that
echoed Sargent Shriver’s, the volunteer explained to the Times reporter, that
“the poverty, the apathy and the attitudes are the same” in Harlem as they
had been in the Philippines.39 The same methods he had used as a community development worker at home were useful to him on West 111th Street.
Throughout the summer of 1967, nearly seventy more foreign volunteers, representing some twelve countries, began training at sites in Boston,
Brattleboro, Vermont, and Los Angeles, preparing for a year of community
work with America’s poor. “First reports from training programs,” a presidential aide wrote in August, “indicate that these young volunteers, average
age twenty-three, are adapting quite well and show great promise for a year
in service in urban and rural poverty centers.”40 Human models, as it turned
out, could come from any corner of the globe.
Gavin_Book.indd 108
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
109
Although the Reverse Peace Corps never moved beyond the confines
of a pilot project, it reveals the distilled logic of the Johnson administration’s global war on poverty. The development discourse had permeated
the minds of the men and women of the New Frontier and Great Society
so deeply that instead of seeing poverty as an economic condition, they
understood it primarily as a function of culture and attitudes. The antidote
was not just an injection of “Americanism,” as some critics of the Peace
Corps carped, but was instead the introduction of “agents of change”—no
matter from their national origin—who could offer active encouragement
and provide personal examples to the “underdeveloped” poor. Forced to
live under the same material circumstances, these caring volunteers were
living proof that with modern attitudes and the personal expectations of
middle-class people, the harsh realities of life in the ghetto, the migrant
worker camp, and the Indian reservation could be overcome. Invitations
to foreign elites who could learn from and help the “backward” poor were
an affirmation of the universalism that underpinned the philosophy of the
Great Society. Developing the poor at home and abroad was the contribution that American liberals asked thousands of volunteers from the modern
world to make in the struggle for a better future for all.
The apotheosis of the Johnson administration’s global war on poverty came in the form of an administrative proposal to merge all federal anti-poverty programs, international as well as domestic, into one
Cabinet-level “Department of Development.” In June 1965, a discussion
about the wisdom of combining the Peace Corps and War on Poverty activities into one such agency had reached the level of senior staff in the White
House. In a memorandum to Johnson aide Hayes Redmon, Harris Wofford,
who had been one of Shriver’s most influential advisors during the creation of the Peace Corps, enumerated the reasons why the Peace Corps,
the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Food for Peace Program, and all
technical assistance aspects of the Agency for International Development’s
programming would be better organized under one agency. “It was not by
accident,” Wofford explained, “that the Director of the Peace Corps was
asked to organize the War on Poverty. The Peace Corps was a successful
war on poverty. Its operating principles were what a successful domestic
war on poverty required: the tapping of the volunteer spirit, the mobilization of human resources, the provision of technical change, the introduction
of outside agents of change.” Wofford continued, “As the domestic poverty
programs have developed, it is clear that they and AID and the Peace Corps
are following and should continue to follow similar lines. The problems
and policies of VISTA and the Peace Corps are strikingly parallel. Urban
Gavin_Book.indd 109
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
110
Internationalizing the Great Society
and rural community action or development, whether in Appalachia or the
Peruvian mountains, in Harlem or Calcutta, is becoming an art.” Wofford
added one more reason to consider the merger. “By bringing all these programs together into one global war on poverty—one department for human
technical assistance and development—the President would bring them all
into better focus for people here and abroad. Doing this . . . would tie the
President’s well-established concern for people at home with a clear new
manifestation of concern for people everywhere.” “The idea is in the air,”
Wofford concluded, “Maybe this is the time to bring it down to earth.”41
The proposal that Wofford hoped to make terrestrial was obscured by
the clouds of Agent Orange rising from the jungles of Southeast Asia. Just
a few months before Wofford made his proposal, Johnson had ordered US
ground troops into Vietnam, significantly escalating the war. By the end of
the year, some 185,000 American troops were on the ground there. Liberal
allies in Congress were beginning to question the president’s priorities, privately and publicly. Also in 1965, the first teach-ins began to take place on
college greens throughout the country. Young people, growing more and
more agitated with “Johnson’s war” in Vietnam had become suspicious of
his “concern for people everywhere.” And, they were not the only ones. The
social scientists that had been such enthusiastic allies in the War on Poverty
were losing heart as well. As one of them, economist Robert Eisner, wrote,
“The war has contributed to a profound alienation from this Administration
of intellectuals and social scientists whose efforts would be essential to the
domestic revolution required.” He continued, “Many of us who were most
enthusiastic in our support of the New Frontier and the Great Society now
see the words of progress being drowned in the deeds of war.”42
Although the ambitious proposal floated by Harris Wofford about a
new American commitment to fighting poverty on a global scale did not
come to pass, his ideas resonated at the highest levels. For instance, Sargent
Shriver’s successor as Peace Corps Director, Jack Vaughn, proposed that at
least VISTA and the Peace Corps be merged into one organization. In late
1966, Vaughn wrote to the president that “several strong arguments have
been made for the amalgamation of Peace Corps and VISTA.” Chief among
them, Vaughn noted, “The concept of the Great Society would in effect be
internationalized.” He continued on a gloomy note, “with the future alignment of Office of Economic Opportunity agencies in doubt, I feel now is
an opportune time to look again at the foregoing possibility. I believe that
a merger would strengthen both agencies . . . I think now would be the right
time to bring it off.” Johnson’s interest was piqued, “This appeals to me
some,” he scrawled at the bottom of the page. “Let’s discuss it.”43 Johnson
Gavin_Book.indd 110
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
111
did not get the chance. Due in no small part to the deepening commitment in
Vietnam and the civil unrest that exploded as a result of it, Johnson’s belief
in the possibilities of the War on Poverty, his belief in the Great Society writ
large, faltered.44 He had other wars to fight, although victory in both would
remain elusive.
Another War Without End?
While the strategic imperatives of the Cold War undermined Lyndon
Johnson’s global war on poverty, the story of that endeavor reveals two
profoundly important legacies for poverty fighting in the post‒Cold War
era. First, the belief that poverty and violence are intrinsically linked has
become a piece of conventional wisdom among centrist foreign policymakers, particularly in relation to how they understand the spread of terrorism.
Just a few months after Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York in the autumn of 2001, policymakers in the United States and
Western Europe identified poverty and “hopelessness” as root causes of
the kind of social and political instability that gives rise to terrorism. They
vowed to put the campaign to end global poverty front and center in the
so-called “War on Terror.” Although dominant factions within the administration in which he served may have paid little more than lip service to the
idea, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell told the World Economic Forum
in February 2002, “Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair,
and hopelessness.”45 In 2005, Powell declared that the “war on terror is
bound up in the war against poverty.”46 First as senator and then as president, Barack Obama made similar arguments, identifying the achievement
of the UN’s Millennium Development goals as a key element in protecting
US national security and in ensuring victory against global terrorism. More
recently, Obama’s chief terrorism expert, John Brennan, has identified poverty as an “upstream factor” in the spread of Islamic radicalism.47
Second, the institutionalization of the development discourse in Johnson’s
global war on poverty marked a shift in how policymakers understood why
people were poor, a shift from political and economic explanations to psychological and cultural ones that has far outlasted the heyday of Cold War
liberalism. To be certain, Progressive Era thinkers considered character and
individual morality when they wrote about poverty. They celebrated the virtues of hard work and industriousness, and condemned the vices of dependency and idleness.48 But, for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
few would deny that industrial capitalism was the force driving the massive
Gavin_Book.indd 111
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
112
Internationalizing the Great Society
social changes that gave rise to widespread deprivation. As Henry George
argued most forcibly among his contemporaries, poverty was the product of
“Progress.”49 The Great Depression seemed to many liberal elites to prove
George’s argument. By the 1930s, a broad consensus had developed among
liberals that industrial capitalism—its excesses, failures, and inequalities—
was the most significant source of poverty.50
But, postwar abundance and the arrival of the Keynesian consensus
altered this view. The combination of tight labor markets, empowered
labor unions, and a strengthened social safety net led most observers of
the American economy to conclude that industrial capitalism had become a
domesticated beast. Contrary to his New Deal predecessors, then, Lyndon
Johnson and his “poverty warriors” increasingly defined what poverty
remained, both at home and abroad, as evidence of an absence of the culture
that fueled capitalist development—an absence of “modern personalities,”
of the problem-solving, entrepreneurial “spirit” that animated middle-class
American life. By assuming their triumph over the excesses of industrial capitalism and imperialism, Johnson’s generation of liberals came to
believe that what poverty remained must be a product of “backwardness”
rather than a byproduct of Progress.
Although scholars are right to claim that modernization theory officially “died” in the 1970s, they miss the extent to which the implications
of that theory for the definition and amelioration of poverty have been
anything but moribund.51 The notion that capitalism is the solution to
poverty rather than its proximate cause served as the ideological cornerstone of the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1980s, albeit with a decidedly anti-statist cast. Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” argued
that learning to compete in a global free market produced not just prosperity but democracy too. In this iteration, capitalism—and the cultural
values inherent to capitalism as an economic system—became a catalyst
for equality rather than an impediment to it. Even Grameen Bank founder
Muhammad Yunus’s innovative micro-lending approach—which in
large measure epitomizes the rejection of the modernization model of
the 1960s—works off of the same fundamental logic. What poor people
need is more capitalism, not less.52 The ideology that undergirded the
global war on poverty has thrived, even if the notion that democratic
accountability has a primary role to play in “making poverty history”—a
notion that was at least partly embedded in the Johnson administration’s
approach—has been neatly discarded. Very little links Lyndon Johnson,
Milton Friedman, and Mohammed Yunus, yet their assumptions about
how to solve the problem of poverty seem strikingly similar.
Gavin_Book.indd 112
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
113
While this paradigm has persisted for several decades, cracks may be
appearing in its foundation. Slow economic growth in the early 2000s,
the global financial panic of 2008, and the deep recessions Europe and the
United States have experienced since, have spurred significant re-evaluation
of the postwar period’s conventional wisdom about poverty. The chronic
economic insecurity that has marked industrial and postindustrial economies for the last generation has swamped many middle-class families in
suburbs from Dublin to Dallas. The relentless rise in economic inequality
across the developed world over the last thirty-odd years—only highlighted
by egalitarian outliers like the Nordic countries—confirm that the Age of
Abundance has long since past. At the same time, though, several inescapable realities indicate that the time for a grand strategy to fight global
poverty has passed as well. Domestic budget cuts jeopardized American
and European commitments to foreign aid. Humanitarian crises pushed
the comparatively quotidian challenge of “sustainable development” to the
international community’s backburner. Famine and other man-made disasters in arid parts of Africa—as well as political upheaval throughout the
Middle East—have put NGOs in the position of providing triage rather than
preventative medicine for many of the world’s poorest. The persistence of
the Great Recession has served to catalyze reactionary demands for “austerity” and generate general frustration with politics.
And yet, concern about poverty continues to trouble millions of people
around the world. A BBC Poll conducted in January 2010 in twenty-three
countries (including all major industrial and postindustrial economies)
found that among the twenty-five thousand people polled, 71 percent
believed poverty to be the world’s biggest problem.53 Even more surprisingly, in June 2013, Oxfam America released a poll in which more than 8
out 10 Americans said that helping the poor should be “top” or “important”
priority of the U.S. government. 65% of the 1081 people surveyed favored
a federal law establishing a living wage.54 The Johnson administration’s
global war on poverty was rooted in complicated and problematic ideas
about what made people poor, but it did represent a massive public effort
to devote money and energy to the cause of battling deprivation around the
world. While another war on poverty might not be in the offing, anxiety and
discussion about persistent inequality has been rising. We are left to wonder
then, if, armed with a renewed skepticism about the curative properties of
global capitalism, a new generation of activists and concerned citizens will
look beyond the war on poverty that a Cold War produced, and fight a battle
against the systemic inequality wrought by the depredations of what may
more appropriately be called another Gilded Age.
Gavin_Book.indd 113
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
114
Internationalizing the Great Society
NOTES
1. Theodore Roosevelt, History as Literature (New York: Scribner’s, 1913),
37. It is worth noting here that Roosevelt, among others, did make explicit connections between “primitives” abroad and immigrants at home. See Matthew Frye
Jacobsen, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at
Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), and Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United
States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
2. On the history of the idea of poverty and its evolution throughout the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and
Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Knopf,
1981). For a useful introduction to Progressive Era attitudes toward poverty, see
Robert Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States
(New York: New York University Press, 1956).
3. On the rise and fall of Social Darwinism in the United States, see Carl Degler,
In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American
Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). On the Boasian “revolution” and its broader impact on American social thought and politics, see George
W. Stocking, Jr., The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of
Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and Lee D. Baker,
From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
4. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of
the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
5. There is a vast scholarship on theories of revolution. For a fine summary,
see Lawrence Stone, “Theories of Revolution,” World Politics 18, no. 2 (January
1966): 159–176; for more on “frustration and aggression,” see John Dollard,
Leonard C. Doob, Neal E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears, Frustration
and Aggression (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1939).
6. Harry S. Truman announced the Point Four technical assistance program
in his inaugural address of 1949. Harry S Truman, Inaugural Address, January 20,
1949, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.
htm; Harold Wilson announced the Labour Party’s “War on Want” in 1952. See
War on Want: A Plan for World Development (London: The Association for World
Peace, 1952).
7. Scholars have variously described development as an ideology, a discourse,
and a worldview. The distinctions between these terms are, at day’s end, nebulous.
I have chosen to use the term “worldview” here because the concept of weltanschauung seems to me to convey the epistemological and philosophical aspects of what
I understand as a lens through which policymakers and intellectuals understood not
just poverty but the entire process of human change on social and individual levels.
This worldview encompassed explicit theories of modernization as well as countless
Gavin_Book.indd 114
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
115
implicit assumptions that undergirded popular visions of history, social criticism,
and even art and literature. For explorations of development as a discourse, see
Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power
(London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1992), and Escobar, Encountering Development: The
Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
8. There is an excellent body of historical scholarship that charts the rise and
fall of development and modernization theory. For an overview, see Nick Cullather,
“Development: It’s History?” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (fall 2000): 641–653.
9. In chapter 5 of this book, Nick Cullather also reveals provocative connections between the identification of global social problems by Cold War policymakers
and domestic political concerns.
10. I give much fuller treatment to this phenomenon in “The Poverty of the World:”
Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941–1973 (New York: Oxford
University Press, forthcoming 2014)
11. Recent scholarship on the history of foreign aid has complicated our understandings of the Point Four program and its place in a longer history of domestic “modernization” programs. See Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation,
Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), and David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the
Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
12. Several historians have drawn fascinating connections between the Peace
Corps and powerful tropes of American nationalism. See Michael Latham,
Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation-Building” in
the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Fritz
Fischer, Making them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian, 2000); and Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love: The
Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
13. See chapter 2 in this volume for a fuller exploration of the ways in which
Johnson’s foreign and domestic policy were ideologically linked.
14. There is a growing body of literature on the linkages between the development project and American liberalism. See Latham, Modernization as Ideology, as
well as Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Nils Gilman, Mandarins of
the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2007), and Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics
of Community Action During the American Century (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2012).
15. Lyndon Johnson to Shriver, telephone conversation, February 1, 1964, Tape
6402.01, Citation #1804, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas
(LBJL).
Gavin_Book.indd 115
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
116
Internationalizing the Great Society
16. Transcript, Sargent Shriver Oral History, published in Michael Gillette,
Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History, (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1996), 35.
17. Ibid., 65.
18. Ibid., 65–66.
19. Office of Economic Opportunity Organizational Chart, RG381, box 2, entry
1006, National Archival and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
(NARA).
20. “Volunteers in Service to America: An Invitation to Serve,” promotional
pamphlet, February 1965, Indiana University Library, Bloomington, Indiana.
21. William H. Crook and Ross Thomas, Warriors for the Poor: The Story of
VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America (New York: William Morrow & Company,
1969), 61.
22. Ibid., 68.
23. “Volunteers in Service to America,” Office of Economic Opportunity
Administrative History, Vol. I, Part II, p. 427, Special Files 1927–1973, box 1, LBJL.
24. Office of Public Affairs, Office of Economic Opportunity, “VISTA
Volunteers,” released January 18, 1965, RG 381, entry 1006, box 2: CAP Basic
Info, NARA.
25. Ibid.
26. “A Tradition Pays Off,” VISTA Volunteer 3, no. 7 (July 1967): 25.
27. Crook and Thomas, Warriors for the Poor, 91.
28. This term, deployed most famously in 1962 by the social psychologist Frank
Reissman, was commonly used in the 1960s to describe poor people, especially children. See Frank Reissman, The Culturally Deprived Child (New York: Harper, 1962).
29. Crook and Thomas, Warriors for the Poor, 50.
30. Saul Alinksy, “The Professional Radical: Conversation with Saul Alinsky,”
Harper’s 231, no. 1382 (June 1965): 37.
31. “Peace Corps/VISTA Joint Statement,” undated, 1967, White House
Central Files, Agency Reports, box 129, folder: Peace Corps 1966–1968, undated,
1967, LBJL.
32. Weekly Memorandum from Sargent Shriver to the President, December
7, 1965, folder: Peace Corps 1965, CF Agency Reports, Office of Economic
Opportunity, box 12, WHCF, LBJL.
33. Sargent Shriver, Address to Catholic Press Association, Pittsburgh, May 28,
1964, Papers of Robert Sargent Shriver, Speeches, box 21, JFKL.
34. Crook and Thomas, Warriors for the Poor, 125.
35. Task Force Proposal, “Exchange Education Corps/Volunteers to America,”
June 15, 1966, WHCF PC 5, box 5, LBJL.
36. Memorandum for Bill Moyers and Douglass Cater, Assistants to the
President, from Tom Cronin, November 7, 1966, WHCF PC 5, box 5, LBJL.
37. Carole Shifrin, “What the U.S. Hopes to Achieve in a ‘Reverse Peace Corps’
Project,” National Observer, January 1, 1967, 9.
Gavin_Book.indd 116
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM
ONE GLOBAL WAR ON POVERTY
117
38. “Reverse Peace Corps,” TIME, June 16, 1967, 21.
39. “Filipino Striving to Help Harlem,” New York Times, June 2, 1968, 77.
40. Tom Cronin to Douglass Cater, August 7, 1967, folder: PC 5 8/27/66-9/30/67,
PC 5, box 8, WHCF, LBJL.
41. Harris Wofford, Associate Director, Peace Corps, to Hayes Redmon, Special
Assistant to the President, June 11, 1965, Aides Files, Bill Moyers, box 15, LBJL.
42. Robert Eisner to Joseph Califano, July 25, 1966, folder: WE 9 8/2/66, WE 9
(3/12/66-8/31/66), box 27, WHCF, LBJL.
43. Jack Vaughn, Director of the Peace Corps, to the President, November
12, 1966, folder: FG 105-6 Peace Corps, CF FG 105-4 (1963–1965), box 25,
WHCF, LBJL.
44. It deserves to be noted that Vaughn’s proposal was shelved until 1969 when
Donald Rumsfeld, a young Nixon staffer with an eye for efficiency, took the reins at
the Office of Economic Opportunity and merged the Peace Corps and VISTA into
one agency. Nick Cotz, “White House Orders OEO to Cut Next Budget by 50 percent,” The Washington Post, October 13, 1970, A1.
45. “2 Top Officials Offer Stern Talk on U.S. Policy,” Todd Purdum and David
Sanger, New York Times, February 2, 2002, A1.
46. See Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our
Time (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. xiv.
47. Spencer Ackerman, “Obama Aide Declares End to War on Terrorism,”
Washington Independent, August 6, 2009, http://washingtonindependent.
com/54152/obama-aide-declares-end-to-war-on-terrorism.
48. See Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age
of Industry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000).
49. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial
Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, Twenty-Fifth
Anniversary Edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1920).
50. Patterson, 43-45.
51. See Gilman, Mandarins in the Future.
52. For an explication of micro-lending, see Muhammad Yunus, Banker to
the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle against World Poverty (New York: Public
Affairs, 2007).
53. “Poverty World’s Most Serious Problem, Says Global Poll,” BBC World
Service Press Release, January 17, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/01_january/17/poll.shtml.
54. “Growing domestic poverty and inequality threaten America’s global
standing,” June 12, 2013, http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/pressreleases/
growing-domestic-poverty-and-inequality-threaten-america2019s-global-standing
Gavin_Book.indd 117
11/6/2013 7:51:38 PM