The Age of Optimism: Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society

Lyndon Johnson at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964

For most of my life, I have been optimistic about America. Born at the end of the Eisenhower administration, I grew up in the prosperous 1960s, when American abundance seemed unlimited. American ingenuity and achievement since the end of World War II had made us the world’s most successful economy and superpower, and from my privileged, middle class vantage point it seemed there was nothing we could not do in science, medicine, education, engineering, and technology if we set our minds to it. I watched Americans walk on the moon in 1969 and shared the confidence of most Americans in our ability to solve whatever problems lay before us.

During the 1970s and 1980s, as I became more interested in politics and American history, attended college and law school, and pursued a career as a young prosecutor in Washington, D.C., I was inspired by the idealism of John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier. In high school and college, I read and re-read Robert Kennedy and His Times (Ballantine Books, 1978), Arthur Schlesinger’s brilliant biography of JFK’s younger brother who fought organized crime and corrupt union bosses as Attorney General and became a passionate advocate for the poor and disenfranchised during the final years of his life. To me, the Kennedys represented public service at its best, full of lofty ideals and an aspirational vision of America. Back then, I paid little tribute to Lyndon Johnson, who was less eloquent, more brash than intellect, and responsible for expanding America’s unforgiveable incursion into Vietnam in a war I believed then (and continue to believe) was immoral and wrong.

As I have grown older and had the opportunity to study, read, and reflect more deeply on twentieth century American history, I have come to appreciate the extent to which Johnson’s presidency contributed to my deeply engrained optimism in the American spirit. His foreign policy blunders notwithstanding, LBJ transformed American society for the better.

For as long as I can remember, I have believed in government as a force for good. It was a view reinforced by my father’s social justice leanings as a Lutheran pastor in New Jersey, and from reading about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. At a low point in American history, when the world was in a Great Depression and one in four Americans were out of work, the newspapers filled with stories about bread lines and bank failures, FDR and his administration provided jobs and public support to millions of Americans who had lost hope. From public works programs that put people to work building roads, bridges, schools, and parks throughout the United States, to Social Security Insurance that provided economic security to elderly Americans, the New Deal showed that American society was not at heart cruel and compassionless.

The federal government under Roosevelt established disability and unemployment insurance, the minimum wage and 40-hour work week, the federal school lunch program, fair employment practices, improved child labor laws, labor union rights, soil conservation programs, rural electrification, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which alleviated economic hardship and poverty in the rural south. The New Deal brought integrity to Wall Street through the Securities and Exchange Commission and eliminated the risk of another great depression and more bank failures through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. When I was born, all these things were firmly entrenched in American life.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was an acolyte of FDR, a fervent believer in the New Deal and the power of the federal government to aid ordinary citizens in ways that strengthened the American economy and served the good of the people. But Johnson understood that, although the New Deal benefitted huge segments of American society, it did not address the injustices of Jim Crow or the racism and discrimination that deprived millions of Black Americans and other minorities equal rights under the law, the right to vote, and the opportunity to pursue work and education, buy or rent a home, or to participate in most aspects of American life free from discrimination. Although hardly a champion of civil rights as a senator from Texas, soon after becoming president in November 1963, Johnson sought to extend the New Deal to include all segments of American society.

Johnson as president did what the more erudite and sophisticated John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts failed to do – pass the two greatest civil rights laws in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations, authorized the Justice Department to file lawsuits to enforce desegregation of public schools, prohibited state and local governments from denying access to public facilities on account of someone’s race, and outlawed employment discrimination on account of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and other measures designed to prevent racial minorities from voting, and it instituted strong enforcement measures and extensive federal oversight to ensure that all Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Although there was much work to be done, these two laws overnight made the United States a more democratic and racially just society. As a matter of law, the foundations of Southern apartheid were abolished, along with legal segregation, Jim Crow, and America’s shameful legacy of legalized bigotry and prejudice. I have previously written about Johnson’s political skills in getting those bills through Congress (see “Lyndon Johnson and the American Promise”), but it also took many dedicated and intelligent public servants, lawyers, and judges to leverage the authority of the federal government to successfully desegregate public accommodations and institutions and overcome resistance to voting rights throughout the American south.

Equally remarkable was Johnson’s success in enacting all the other components of the Great Society and War on Poverty—Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to elementary and secondary education, college work study programs, highway beautification and wilderness preservation, environmental measures to protect air and water quality, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, Head Start, community health centers, legal services for the poor, fair housing legislation, food security for tens of millions of impoverished children and adults, special education for children with disabilities, federally-funded medical research, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to name only a few programs.

As noted by former Johnson speechwriter Richard Goodwin in Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Harper & Row, 1988), Johnson’s legislative achievements attested “to the possibility of devising a practical, tangible response to the most intractable difficulties of our society, when the turbulent energies of a whole nation seemed bursting with possibilities – conquer poverty, walk on the moon, build a Great Society.” Within a period of five years, Johnson’s Great Society, of which the War on Poverty was only a small part, transformed the federal government’s relationship to ordinary citizens on a scale that matched or exceeded Roosevelt and the New Deal.

I recently finished reading two books focused on Johnson’s achievements during the Great Society, both of which reinforced the authenticity and genuineness of Johnson’s commitment to expanding civil rights and improving the quality of life for all Americans. In Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House (Viking, 2018), writer and historian Joshua Zeitz provides a well-balanced account of LBJ’s inner circle, which included Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Joseph Califano, Harry McPherson, Horace Busby, and many other talented policymakers who designed laws and programs that applied practical solutions to long-neglected problems in American society. And in Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2016), Randall B. Woods, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, provides a comprehensive history of the Great Society, including a nuanced examination of its breathtaking achievements and visionary politics, as well as its social and political limitations.  

Woods notes that Johnson’s brain trust included “a collection of men whose pragmatic liberalism was tinged with the theological realism of Reinhold Niebuhr,” a theologian who “attacked the materialism, complacency, and conformity that seemed to permeate postwar America.” Niebuhr believed that human beings were called to love the world and assume responsibility for its problems. Some of Johnson’s closest advisors were contemporaries of Niebuhr and “very much aware of the pervasive influence of evil in the world—racial prejudice, economic exploitation, political oppression, hunger, disease.”

They also were men influenced by the Social Gospel movement, which sought to apply liberal Christian ethics to issues of social justice, especially poverty and inequality, environmental degradation, inadequate housing, poor schools, and other injustices. Bill Moyers, who developed a father-son bond with Johnson until he departed the administration in 1966, had as a young man attended the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he studied under the liberal theologian Thomas Buford Matson, a Yale scholar, disciple of Reinhold Niebuhr, and “outspoken advocate of racial justice and a champion of labor unions.” Johnson’s long-time aide Horace Busby shared a commitment to reform and believed that government should be “committed to the welfare of the common man rather than special interests.” LBJ’s close confidant and friend, Walter Jenkins, a devout Catholic, believed “that to whom much was given, much was expected” and that it was “incumbent upon America, a land blessed with genius and abundance, to help those who could not help themselves and to provide for the average hard-working person a degree of physical comfort and security and the means to provide food, shelter, health care, and education for his or her child.” And Johnson’s press secretary, George Reedy, combined social gospel influences with political reality.

Johnson’s personal religious sensibilities, Woods notes, were influenced by his mother, Rebecca Baines Johnson, a Christian social activist who believed that if everyone acted and lived as God intended, “it would be impossible for millions to walk the streets in search of food and for thousands of children to die each year from lack of adequate health care.” As a young congressman, Johnson was deeply moved by John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about a poor, industrious Dust Bowl family overwhelmed by environmental and socioeconomic forces beyond their control. In a speech before the Southern Baptist Leadership Seminar in 1964, Johnson said, “I am not a theologian. But in more than three decades of public life, I have seen first-hand how basic spiritual beliefs and deeds can shatter barriers of politics and bigotry. Great questions of war and peace, of civil rights and education, the elimination of poverty at home and abroad, are the concern of millions who see no difference in this regard between their beliefs and social obligations.” In a later speech, Johnson said that what “really makes a great nation is compassion. We are going to have strength and solvency and compassion, love for thy neighbor, compassion and understanding for those who are less fortunate.”

It was based in part on Johnson's appreciation of liberal Christian ethics and social justice, and his belief that Americans were fundamentally decent, that he would declare an “unconditional war on poverty.” Johnson believed that his anti-poverty programs were the key to social justice, to quelling urban unrest, and to proving to the world that capitalism was superior to communism. He established Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, a series of after-school programs and extracurricular activities, and the Office of Economic Opportunity, which provided job training and adult education, among other programs.

Another important item on Johnson’s agenda was fair housing. In 1966, when posthumously awarding the Medal of Honor to Private First Class Milton Olive II, the first Black Medal of Honor winner to have served in Vietnam, Johnson pleaded: “If Negroes can give their lives for their country, surely a grateful nation will accord them opportunity to live in any neighborhood they can afford, and to send their children to any school of their choice to be educated and developed to their fullest capacity.” Although by the end of his presidency he was facing growing resistance to his agenda and white backlash to civil rights and affirmative action programs, Johnson finally succeeded in passing the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed racial discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing and remains a crucial law that ensures equal housing opportunities across the United States.

The Great Society was the most comprehensive effort in history by the federal government to permanently improve the social and economic landscape of the United States. It sought to make kindergarten-through-college education available to all, eradicate poverty in urban ghettos and rural Appalachia, clean the environment, provide medical care for the nation’s elderly, outlaw discrimination in employment, housing, and the nation’s immigration system, expand opportunities for all Americans, and publicly support the nation’s arts and humanities. In the richest and most affluent country on earth, Johnson envisioned the federal government caring for those who could not care for themselves, providing education and training opportunities for the disadvantaged, and ensuring social justice for everyone without taking from one group of citizens and giving to another.

At a time when it was still possible, Johnson was a consensus builder, a politician who sought (and mostly achieved) bipartisan support. He exploited a strong economy and a spirit of American optimism, believing we could grow a larger pie for everyone without redistributing any of it. And he mostly succeeded.

Medicare and Medicaid radically improved the lives of American families. The elderly no longer had to go without health care and middle-class families no longer had to choose between providing medical care for their grandparents and sending their children to college. In the first three years of Johnson’s presidency, the unemployment rate dropped from 5.7 percent to 3.7 percent, industrial production rose 25 percent, Gross National Product increased by 17 percent, and the average American’s real income rose by 14 percent. As explained by Woods, “While four million Americans moved above the poverty line, both profits and wages had increased. Medicare had helped three million elderly Americans to obtain access to health care, eight million new workers were covered by the minimum wage law, and Jim Crow was on the run in the South.”

But any credit Johnson deserved or received, and whatever bipartisan consensus he had pieced together, were short lived, ripped apart by liberal dissent on the Vietnam War and white backlash caused by racial resentments and urban rioting. The New Deal coalition that had held together the Democratic Party—labor unions, urban ethnics, liberal intellectuals, farmers, and the South—became a relic of the past. Long-standing conservative opposition to both the New Deal and Great Society grew stronger as the Republican Party began shifting in a radically rightward direction.

Johnson’s Great Society programs were challenged by the American ethic of individualism and self-reliance that tended to blame the poor for their problems and attacked government largesse as counterproductive and “creeping socialism.” On the left, the civil rights coalition fell into disarray with the rise of the Black Power movement and a crop of young militant activists. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and others became the voices of the dispossessed. They rejected the non-violence of Martin Luther King and the traditional civil rights establishment, questioned the value of integration, and condemned Johnson for not doing enough to address systemic racism and inequality. Following the Watts riots of 1965, King began focusing on the entrenched poverty, joblessness, family disintegration, and hopelessness within the ghettoes and slums of America’s major cities and began a more radical critique of American society, focused on economic justice and inequality.

As Joshua Zeitz explained in Building the Great Society, Johnson was concerned with “poverty and quality of life, not economic inequality.” The Great Society did not attempt to redistribute income but “sought to equip Americans with skills and resources to lift themselves above a certain income level—the poverty line—and enjoy the blessings of an affluent society.” The criticism Johnson and the Great Society faced from both the Right and the Left grossly understated “the central role that the Great Society programs have played—and continue to play—in reducing poverty, alleviating the suffering of those who live in it, diminishing systemic racial discrimination, enriching the nation’s cultural life, and enshrining consumer and environmental protections in the law.” While Great Society programs did not eradicate poverty in America, they sharply reduced it:

Food stamps, school breakfasts and lunches, and Head Start programs minimize food insecurity for millions of poor children and their parents each day. Medicaid and Medicare amount to the difference between life and death for 119 million Americans—or roughly 37 percent of the country’s population. . . . [T]oday, most people cannot fathom a world in which African Americans are denied service at hotels, restaurants, and hospitals, explicitly excluded from the workplace or the housing market, or barred from voting or holding office strictly on the basis of their race. It is equally difficult to envision a country without laws governing clean air and water, consumer labeling standards, federal aid to public schools, or public television and radio.

Zeitz’s book was published in 2018, so he can be excused for not fully anticipating what is happening in 2025. With Trump in the White House for a second time, Republicans are finally making good on their long-stated desire to undo the Great Society (and much of the New Deal) and denigrate the progress America has made over the past sixty years. Led by Russell Vought and his disciples within the Heritage Foundation, the administration is working to sharply restrict Medicaid, privatize Medicare, reverse advances in civil rights and voting rights, gut environmental and consumer protections, abolish federal aid for the arts, humanities, and public broadcasting, and eliminate food stamps and anti-poverty assistance. Trump and his team are intent on repealing any laws and programs founded on concepts of social justice and expanded opportunities for all.

The Great Society did not achieve all it set out to do. No government programs are perfect, and sometimes programs need to be revised and reformed. But to ignore the successes of the Great Society is to reject the idealism and optimism that enabled America to come close to achieving its promise that all men and women are created equal. Johnson’s War on Poverty sought not to console the poor but to give them the means—through job training, educational opportunities, and civil rights protections—to lift themselves out of poverty and enjoy the blessings of America to which all of us are entitled. The genius of the Great Society was that it put in place the tools to achieve a more just and equitable society. Whether we have the will and the wisdom to sustain that vision is up to us.

The Great Society sought to create a country in which all could share in the abundance of America. It was a time of hope and optimism when the government promised everyone not success or wealth or material goods, but the opportunity to achieve the limits of one’s potential. George Washington stated that the fate of democracy and liberty were “staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Today, we confront a turning point in the American experiment. For America to overcome the stormy present may depend on whether we can restore the spirit of optimism that has defined America for nearly 250 years, whether we can reawaken the strength of imagination and hope that was the Great Society, and whether we care enough, and truly believe in, the promise of justice and liberty for all.