The Liberal Tradition as Boundary Condition

The ideological boundary condition on Great Society employment policy is characterized by two ideological currents that derive from American liberalism, with roots dating back to the founding of the American republic. The first current is the link between paid, private employment and social citizenship. Judith Shklar contends that “citizenship in America has never been just a matter of agency or empowerment, but also of social standing,” and that in America the exclusion of some groups, such as slaves and women, was an important part of what defined membership for the rest.^{Footnote 16} That framework has clear liberal precepts. John Locke proclaimed individuals’ labor as the mechanism that defines property ownership and independence, both of which he identified as important prerequisites for the formation of a political community.^{Footnote 17} Not coincidentally, early on in America, property ownership signaled the independence necessary for obtaining the right to vote in most states.^{Footnote 18} With America’s rejection of a landed, hereditary aristocracy alongside its endorsement of slavery, paid labor—not just property—came to designate independence.^{Footnote 19}

During the nineteenth century, as many states dispensed with the property requirement for voting, two competing ideas about work—the producer ethic and self-ownership—helped solidify the connection between labor and independence.^{Footnote 20} Notwithstanding the important differences between these models of work,^{Footnote 21} both linked work, measured either through production or wages, with independence. Eric Foner documents the efforts that President Abraham Lincoln, among others, made to unify producers and wage laborers by casting American social mobility as the means for laborers to acquire the means of production. Crucially, this theory of social and economic advancement through work identified individuals, not the economic system or labor market, as responsible for the outcome of their labor.^{Footnote 22} By the time employment and unemployment became issues at the national level in America in the 1920s and 1930s, wage labor had become the dominant model for work, complete with a connotation of independence grounded in workers’ personal responsibility for their level of prosperity.^{Footnote 23}

Casting employment as an individual responsibility is neither trivial nor accidental; it originates in work’s association with independence and the valorization of independence within American notions of citizenship. Although the importance of work as an expression of citizenship could serve as a justification for the constitution of work as a social right, this potential has not been fulfilled in America. Work provided or guaranteed by the government is not adequately “free” and so, like forced labor, cannot convey standing.^{Footnote 24} The crucial link to independently obtained work would be compromised if work was constituted as a social right, or if general access to income was uncoupled from employment through something like a government income guarantee. Likewise, the insistence on workers’ independence suggests that differences in income are due to variation in individual effort, rather than the economic system or labor market. Thus, workers with greater labor-force attachment (those with long-term employment, particularly in skilled occupations) are accorded greater social standing as individuals and, as a group, are seen as more integral to maintaining America’s economic prosperity than less skilled, more transient workers. My shorthand for this current of American liberalism is work-as-citizenship.

The second American liberal current relevant to employment policy is closely related to work-as-citizenship and the valorization of independently obtained work. What I call labor-market antistatism refers to the long-held conviction that the government must intervene as little as possible in the market. The particular application of antistatism vis-à-vis employment and the labor market sets it apart from broader attempts to limit state power, but like antistatism more generally, it has roots in the early republic. Political leaders, including Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists, linked Lockean antistatism with Adam Smith’s argument that the best prospects for economic growth—which would benefit individuals as well as society at large—required keeping the state at the margins of the market.^{Footnote 25}

Both work-as-citizenship and labor-market antistatism are part of a paradigm in which it is an individual, not governmental, responsibility that adults obtain work. Conforming to this framework, American policymakers have historically linked work to status but backed away from policies that would ensure sufficient employment for all able-bodied adults, such as public jobs programs or a right to work.

The inadequacy of American employment policy, as measured by persistent unemployment and underemployment, is not just an economic issue at either the individual or the national level. It also has deep implications for social and political inclusion. Since work has historically served as a marker of standing, those who earn are seen as worthy, independent citizens and their value has long been recognized through political inclusion and public policy provision. Those who do not work, or who perform unpaid labor, such as domestic or familial caretaking work, have been accorded less esteem and fewer public policy benefits.^{Footnote 26}

Constructing Great Society Employment Policy Within Liberal Limits

The labor market in the 1960s was not superficially in a dire state. The national unemployment rate during the decade was fairly low, usually between 4 percent and 6 percent.^{Footnote 27} However, many individuals were economically insecure during that period. For example, at the close of 1963, while overall unemployment was a bit higher than economists would have liked at 5.9 percent, the unemployment rate for blacks was nearly double that at 10.7 percent, the unemployment rate for 14–19-year-olds was even higher at 17.2 percent, and thirty-seven major labor market areas had unemployment rates over 6 percent. Moreover, much of this unemployment was not simply short-term turnover as workers shifted from one job to another. Instead, 35 percent of the unemployed had been without work for fifteen weeks or more, and another 17 percent had been without work for twenty-seven weeks or more.^{Footnote 28}

In addition, changes in the types of jobs, wages, and benefits available meant that underemployment (when workers who wanted full-time work could only secure part-time work) was a persistent problem not reflected in the unemployment rate.^{Footnote 29} The Secretary of Labor estimated that more than a million workers were underemployed in late 1963. This, combined with nearly another million people who would try to enter the labor market “if the job prospects improved,” meant that there were at least six million Americans without stable footing in the labor market at the close of 1963. Since the DOL expected that the labor force would continue to grow by more than a million people a year, economic insecurity was likely to increase unless there was a substantial uptick in stable, full-time jobs.^{Footnote 30}

President Johnson was aware of these issues, but he sought to pursue a national campaign to reduce entrenched economic insecurity, particularly among historically disadvantaged populations, while maintaining the privileged position of private-sector work. This led him to support policies that reinforced the labor market’s existing processes while quashing proposals that would have supplemented the private labor market’s supply of jobs. As a result, the Great Society’s employment policies included demand-side macroeconomic policies (like the 1964 Tax Cut, a policy designed to boost economic growth and promote labor market expansion),^{Footnote 31} manpower training programs,^{Footnote 32} and self-help services directed at the poor, but no permanent public jobs programs.^{Footnote 33} This absence is especially striking since the OEO repeatedly proposed creating a permanent public employment program. Johnson consistently rejected or ignored their proposals.

Manpower training programs and the 1964 Tax Cut are usually cast as policy rivals, since the former was based on a theory of structural unemployment,^{Footnote 34} while the latter was a variant of the Keynesian theory that government spending could spur aggregate demand.^{Footnote 35} However, these two approaches had more in common than is generally recognized. Both the structuralists and the commercial Keynesians relied on inadequate definitions of employment and unemployment, and glossed over the potential for economic security to remain a serious problem even amid economic growth and with retraining programs offsetting technological displacement of workers.^{Footnote 36} The Tax Cut and manpower training together reinforced the conviction that, with some government support, the labor market could be trusted to create the right sorts of jobs at sufficiently high wages.

Macroeconomic policy and manpower training at least signaled policymakers’ implicit recognition of labor market deficiencies; in the case of the Tax Cut, a failure to promote sufficient economic growth on its own, and in the case of the manpower programs a failure to provide sufficient opportunities for education and training. By contrast, the self-help programs were prompted by the cultural diagnosis of poverty, a fundamentally noneconomic explanation for poverty.^{Footnote 37} The self-help approach did share key features with manpower training, since they both targeted individuals rather than altering the basic structures of the labor market.

The Ideological Basis for Community Action and the “Culture of Poverty”

The Johnson administration’s acceptance of work-as-citizenship and labor-market antistatism primed policymakers to fault the poor for entrenched poverty and joblessness while ignoring systematic economic or labor market issues. In the early 1960s, executive-branch policymakers were concerned about the concentration of unemployment, poverty, and participation in government aid programs in some urban and rural communities.^{Footnote 38} These pockets of extreme poverty amid general economic prosperity presented an apparent contradiction. Some analysts, including policymakers at the Bureau of the Budget (BOB), the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and to a great extent, the DOL, concluded that populations of “hard-core” unemployed were disconnected from general macroeconomic trends, and that their poverty was the result of social or cultural phenomena.^{Footnote 39}

Others, though, including some in organized labor and leaders of the civil rights movement, argued that the problem lay in the labor market rather than with poor individuals or their communities. The AFL-CIO’s Executive Council identified income inequality and lack of jobs as the factors largely responsible for poverty. They argued for “National policies to sharply increase employment—for the jobless and the under-employed,” including “a vast increase in federal outlays for job-creating public works.”^{Footnote 40} Similarly, in the 1963 March on Washington, civil rights leaders cited an insufficiency of employment, inadequate wages, and racial discrimination in the private market as the main drivers of urban poverty. They called for public works, an increase in the minimum wage, and government intervention to prevent labor market discrimination as correctives.^{Footnote 41} Implicit in this push to improve employment prospects for blacks was a challenge to work-as-citizenship’s basic precepts. Routine, ingrained racial discrimination had historically prevented many in the black community from securing the sorts of stable jobs that provided sufficient income and access to social-welfare benefits. How could work serve as a basic route to social and political inclusion if some people were prevented from full and free participation in the labor market? The Johnson administration did not provide a satisfying answer to that question, though it did make some efforts to remedy outright discrimination in the labor market and to increase the number of jobs in the labor market.^{Footnote 42}

The Johnson administration’s refusal to adequately recognize economic and labor market causes of poverty is striking. Particularly since, during the planning stages of the War on Poverty, policymakers at the CEA and BOB compiled evidence that poverty among able-bodied adults was largely caused by a dearth of good jobs, coupled with an abundance of low-quality jobs at inadequate wages. However, rather than addressing these issues, policymakers in those departments instead promoted policy solutions that sought to make individuals more prepared for a supposedly seamless labor market based on reasoning that conformed to the liberal currents.

The Johnson administration’s economists knew in late 1963 that a majority of poor families, more than 5.3 million, participated in the labor market but were still unable to earn enough to rise out of poverty.^{Footnote 43} Though they did not classify the working poor as occupying a secondary tier of a dual labor market, their data made it clear that for most of the poor the problem was not simply the aggregate employment level but job and wage quality. This had not changed by the middle of 1965 when BOB Director Charles L. Schultze reported that “more than half of poor families were headed by an employed person, whose earnings were so low that he (or she) couldn’t get above the poverty line.”^{Footnote 44}

In addition, the CEA had data that showed correlations between poverty and one or more of the following: discrimination in the labor market, inadequate education and training, loss of a breadwinner, caretaking responsibilities, retirement, and concentrations of unemployment in urban ghettos.^{Footnote 45} Crucially, the Johnson administration’s policies treated all of these factors as causes, not effects, of unemployment and poverty.^{Footnote 46} Thus, the persistence of poverty in some urban and rural areas was cast as the result of a cycle or culture of poverty.

The culture-of-poverty model did not address the role of labor market inadequacies that disproportionately affected black workers. Ongoing discrimination and segmented labor markets helped preserve inequalities in labor market inclusion. During the 1950s and 1960s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had collected evidence showing there was significant discrimination against skilled black workers, which negatively impacted their ability to carry out the mandate to work.^{Footnote 47} Furthermore, the administration’s records indicate that the CEA was well aware of such racial discrimination in the labor market.^{Footnote 48}

Largely disregarding this evidence in his January 1964 State of the Union address, President Johnson asserted that “very often, a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom.”^{Footnote 49} A few months later in a message to Congress, Johnson argued that work was the appropriate path out of poverty, and that increasing government relief would cause greater harm to the poor.^{Footnote 50} In early 1964, the BOB was also actively warning that the upcoming poverty bill needed to avoid creating expectations or policy precedents for public job creation.^{Footnote 51} Johnson’s official antipoverty message on March 16, 1964, made it clear that the new program’s aim was to “create new opportunities” and not to provide public service employment or to guarantee jobs.^{Footnote 52}

Johnson’s statements showcased the work-as-citizenship and labor-market anti-statist perspective that respectable citizens should work, that an inconsistent work history demonstrated personal failings, and that receipt of relief indicated a shameful lack of American self-reliance. In this framework, the Johnson administration saw the rise in relief rates among the long-term poor as proof of a cultural component to poverty.^{Footnote 53} Had the Johnson administration more fully acknowledged the complexities of the causal relationship between work, unemployment, and poverty, it might well have prompted a discussion about whether there were enough jobs for those seeking them, and, just as important, whether those jobs offered enough hours and wages for workers to support themselves and their families. Instead, Johnson’s anti-poverty team drew on an essentially noneconomic view of poverty. Its signature antipoverty bill, the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), focused on community action and youth-oriented training and work experience.^{Footnote 54}

Employment policy scholars largely agree that policymakers’ embrace of the culture-of-poverty narrative was an expedient action that helped them meet already-set budgetary targets, thereby limiting the Johnson administration’s employment policy agenda.^{Footnote 55} Certainly the culture-of-poverty explanation helped justify the community-action approach that the Johnson administration preferred for budgetary reasons.^{Footnote 56} However, there is also evidence that the culture-of-poverty narrative appealed to Johnson and key members of his antipoverty team because it fit within their preexisting work-as-citizenship and labor-market antistatism framework.

According to CEA Senior Staffer Burton Weisbrod “The essence of the Republican position [on the proposed anti-poverty programs] is probably contained in the following statement: ‘One of the most difficult problems in finding new approaches is that they should help to cure poverty and mediate its penalties without undermining incentives to effort and success’”—i.e., work.^{Footnote 57} However, there was no clear partisan divide. Democratic administration policymakers themselves offered justifications for community action grounded in comparable sentiments. In particular, administration economists expressed worry that non-work-based categorical aid programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children would extend the cycle of poverty to a new generation, and sought to supplant such aid with programs that promoted employment. William Capron, senior economist at the CEA, reported that the community action approach was “innovative,” inexpensive, and sidestepped the existing, entitlement-based approach to combatting poverty.^{Footnote 58} Espousing a similar work-as-citizenship-based perspective, CEA Chairman Walter E. Heller noted that in addition to keeping costs down, self-help was desirable because it “[minimized] passive acceptance of ‘handouts’ ” in order to “[maximize] the pride that individuals and communities can take in their own efforts to eradicate poverty.”^{Footnote 59} Charles Schultze, then BOB Assistant Director, also referenced the ideological basis for self-help, arguing that “organized local action to help the individual help himself” was a “time-tested American method.”^{Footnote 60} In one fell swoop, the culture-of-poverty narrative reinforced work-as-citizenship’s individual-level focus and conformed to labor-market antistatism by conveniently absolving the labor market of blame for entrenched poverty.

The culture-of-poverty diagnosis also undermined the Civil Rights Movement’s argument that ingrained unemployment and poverty in black communities was a labor market problem. The concurrent dissemination of the rhetorically weighty, but factually incorrect, characterization of black unemployment as deriving from “matriarchal, welfare-dependent families,” popularized the notion that economic insecurity for blacks was not economic in origin.^{Footnote 61}

Despite its neglect of economic causes of economic insecurity, the community-action approach did have several positive effects. First, it created significant opportunities for institutional reform that increased the inclusion of poor and black unemployed in federal employment policy. With locally run Community Action Agencies (CAAs) overseeing Community Action Programs (CAPs), Johnson circumvented the locally administered United States Employment Service (USES), which had historically helped middle-class and white unemployed preferentially to poor and black unemployed.^{Footnote 62} The CAPs put pressure on the USES to “disperse its operation into target poverty areas, in [out-stationing] staff in CAP neighborhood centers, and in providing increased services to the poor where they reside.”^{Footnote 63}

Second, there is a sense in which even the CAPs and training programs were de facto public jobs programs, if only temporarily. Wilbur J. Cohen, Johnson’s Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) secretary, argued that despite programmatic failings, CAPs and manpower programs “gave many people for a number of years relatively stable employment—because they were also in effect employment programs, and you can’t discount that.”^{Footnote 64} Yet, Johnson and his advisers specifically avoided associations with public employment, and as I will show in my discussion of the OEO, Johnson repeatedly rejected proposals to use the CAPs as a foundation for public works programs.^{Footnote 65} In addition, like the New Deal’s public employment programs, the public jobs that came out of the War on Poverty’s programs were underfunded, fell well short of including the majority of the unemployed, and were ultimately short-lived.^{Footnote 66}

Wirtz and the DOL Conform to the Liberal Currents

Existing employment policy analyses provide an incomplete, and in some cases inaccurate, account of why public employment proposals failed during Johnson’s Great Society. The accepted narrative is that Willard Wirtz and the DOL repeatedly tried and failed to convince President Johnson to enact a public employment program because the CEA and BOB, both of which opposed public employment, had institutional advantages that enabled them to outmaneuver Wirtz.^{Footnote 67} However, evidence from the archival record shows that Wirtz only initially supported public employment and that later in the War on Poverty he actually opposed proposals for public employment. Moreover, the economists at CEA and BOB generally supported expanding DOL programs and even advocated for temporary public service employment.^{Footnote 68} Thus, neither institutional rivalry nor disagreements over structural versus aggregate demand approaches to unemployment fully explain Johnson’s rejection of direct job creation. Policymakers’ adherence to the ideological boundary condition fills in this gap. Wirtz’s arguments to Johnson in favor of policies like training and community work experience, as well as his arguments against permanent public service employment and increased income redistribution, were grounded in the liberal tradition’s framework.

Wirtz’s position on government intervention in the labor market was mixed. On the one hand, Wirtz was deeply concerned about the supply of jobs, and early on in the poverty policy discussions Wirtz argued in favor of public works as an unemployment measure.^{Footnote 69} In addition, he and others at the DOL worked to enlarge understandings of unemployment.^{Footnote 70} On the other hand, from the beginning, Wirtz accepted a cultural diagnosis of “hard-core unemployment,” which weighed against a permanent public employment program, and over time Wirtz expressed increasing opposition to direct government job creation.^{Footnote 71}

In a January 23, 1964, poverty planning memorandum, Wirtz made several statements that characterized poverty as primarily the result of insufficient employment: the “Poverty Program must start out with immediate, priority emphasis on employment,” and “the essential characteristic of the poor is unemployment or underemployment.”^{Footnote 72} Other scholars have argued that Wirtz was a strong proponent of direct government job creation based on statements such as this.^{Footnote 73} However, a close examination of his overall conception of employment for the poor, as well as his later proposals, indicates that his position was much more equivocal.

Wirtz’s emphasis on getting the poor working implied at least a soft critique of the labor market’s insufficient production of jobs. Yet, later in that 1964 planning memorandum, Wirtz stated that it was an individual responsibility to obtain work. He invoked classic blame-the-poor arguments about the corruptible influence of public assistance and “the intransigence of the poverty culture,” especially in the absence of a male breadwinner.^{Footnote 74} Wirtz’s apparently sincere desire to connect the heads of poor families with work implicitly acknowledged that the poverty culture was affected by the availability of employment. However, even in early 1964, Wirtz stopped short of complicating the causal relationship between culture and unemployment among the poor. Doing so would have conflicted with his blatant affirmation of the culture-of-poverty narrative that “a major characteristic of poverty is the property of self-perpetuation. The rich get rich and the poor get children.”^{Footnote 75}

In this same memorandum, after channeling Malthus, Wirtz did call for a supplemental program that would “create useful jobs” for “those presently (or about to be) unemployed.” However, not only did he fail to lay out any specific plans for such a program, but any recognition this made of the labor market’s failure to provide sufficient jobs was then undercut with Wirtz’s proclamation that “Training is employment.”^{Footnote 76}

Equating job training with employment effectively blamed the jobless individuals themselves rather than labor market conditions, and assumed that, once they were trained, there would be long-term employment available to them. While this might have been a reasonable expectation under the Manpower Development Training Act (MDTA)’s original design, it was questionable at best after it was redesigned to target the “disadvantaged” poor.

As enacted in 1962, the MDTA provided training for workers displaced by advances in automation and initially required participants to be male heads of families with three years of work experience.^{Footnote 77} Aggregate unemployment was fairly low at the end of 1963, but administration economists recognized that it was much higher for black men, and redirected the MDTA to target that population. With that shift in focus, the MDTA’s emphasis on training participants for stable, high-quality jobs was also dropped, and evidence indicated that training often did not lead to stable employment. MDTA participants and policymakers alike were concerned about the difficulty of placing trainees in stable private-sector employment, due both to racism among employers and to the program’s practice of training its new target population for low-wage and insecure entry-level jobs.^{Footnote 78} Employer discrimination against blacks was such an obstacle that in late 1963, a DOL staff member reported that the House Rules Committee requested jettisoning the “requirements that there be job prospects in sight before an individual can be trained, obviously a barrier to training of Negroes.”^{Footnote 79}

Given such evidence, the available training and employment data cannot explain Wirtz’s insistence on equating training with employment. Fiscal concerns cannot account for Wirtz’s preference for training either. The adult job-training programs he sought would have increased overall government spending and, like public jobs proposals, required greater funds than the budget compromise over the Tax Cut had left available.^{Footnote 80} However, Wirtz’s push for training, like his other proposals, was in line with the liberal tradition’s focus on reforming individuals rather than attempting to alter systematic deficiencies in the labor market’s production of quality jobs.

In addition to training, Wirtz proposed expanding free public education to fourteen years; creating a new “job vacancy survey system directed primarily at discovering work opportunities which may lack status but which will meet the needs of the poverty stricken”; a voluntary “spread-the-work program”; and various task forces to investigate the potential to create more private-sector jobs. No new public jobs programs made the list.^{Footnote 81} The education plan echoed the New Deal strategy of shrinking the pool of unemployed by providing alternatives to private-sector work. While acknowledging that there was an aggregate job shortage, this still targeted the jobless rather than the labor market itself. Furthermore, Wirtz’s focus on matching the poor with low-status employment opportunities conformed to the liberal boundary condition. That is, he cast low-wage jobs with little or no prospect for income security as satisfactory employment for the poor who had significantly less standing (i.e., work-based citizenship) than those with more stable work histories.

Wirtz’s subsequent public and private statements about public works were increasingly grounded in political arguments about how to achieve the administration’s established legislative goals. In February 1964, Wirtz strongly recommended referencing the Area Redevelopment Association’s Appalachian program in the president’s forthcoming “Message on Poverty,” since without it, the message “will contain no public works provisions, will be very weak on employment-creating measures, and the war on poverty will simply not appear as big as it can and should be.”^{Footnote 82} Then, in March 1964, Wirtz advised Johnson to delay publication of a Draft Report from the Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Manpower. Wirtz argued that since the Draft Report recommended an Accelerated Public Works program, potential tax increases, free public higher education, and an increase in Social Security benefits, “It will invite comparison and will be used to make the Poverty proposals look inadequate.”^{Footnote 83}

In his congressional testimony on the administration’s poverty bill, Wirtz stressed the importance of creating jobs as a way to reduce poverty, but he did not suggest that the government take on that task directly. Furthermore, he referred to the 1964 Tax Cut as “a ‘hit in the solar plexus of poverty.’”^{Footnote 84} Concerned near the end of 1964 that the Tax Cut might not prompt as much private job creation as initially expected, Wirtz wanted to meet with Johnson to discuss a new “Full Opportunity Program” that a Labor Department task force had developed. Though the full details of this proposal are not clear, the meeting request record indicates that it was designed to promote full education and full employment, but notably did not include public works.^{Footnote 85} Based on that description, Wirtz still saw education and training, not public employment, as the way to reduce unemployment.

Between 1965 and 1967, as the War on Poverty progressed, Wirtz continued to propose policies that fit within the liberal currents’ boundary condition. He routinely sought increased funding for job-training programs and pursued amendments to training programs that signaled implicit awareness of the labor market deficiencies facing the urban poor, without ever proposing policies that would rectify those labor market problems.^{Footnote 86} For example, Wirtz expressed concern that the new federal Work Experience Program (WEP)—which provided education and training for welfare recipients—and the MDTA were not reaching enough of the hard-core unemployed. Wirtz also worried that such training without a clear “work opportunity” at its conclusion was not sufficient motivation for many of the target population to participate or complete the program.^{Footnote 87} Yet, Wirtz’s solution did not include a mechanism for creating permanent or stable jobs in the public or private sectors. Instead, he wanted to provide unemployed adults with temporary community work experience, which would serve as a bridge between training and work in the private sector.^{Footnote 88}

The WEP, as “a work experience and skill training services” provider, was in some sense a direct job creation program.^{Footnote 89} However, since it offered only very temporary, entry-level employment, the WEP was effectively a training program. Moreover, the program made assumptions that were not based on evidence. The work experience approach inaccurately presumed that the poor’s problem was a lack of work history and expected that the private labor market could and would supply the needed permanent jobs. In fact, what the urban poor lacked was access to stable, decently paying jobs, and the private labor market showed no signs of creating these on its own. The WEP conformed to the liberal boundary condition, though, by continuing to focus on directing services at the poor, rather than proposing major labor market interventions. In 1965, the DOL also started working with the president’s office on a “Job Development Program,” in which the government would serve as catalyst for creating low-wage private-sector jobs.^{Footnote 90} As with the WEP, this proposal did not provide a mechanism to help the urban poor bridge the gap between the secondary and primary labor markets.

Wirtz and the DOL showed a somewhat paradoxical combination of genuine concern about aggregate unemployment and underemployment, alongside complacence about dead-end jobs for the disadvantaged poor that was grounded in the cultural explanation for poverty. For example, Wirtz and the DOL made significant efforts to expand accepted understandings of employment and unemployment. Wirtz sought to augment the government’s unemployment count by distinguishing between the employed and the underemployed; differentiating between the long- and short-term unemployed; including the assets of the unemployed and not just their “employability”;^{Footnote 91} incorporating a category of “discouraged workers”; and recognizing the rapid turnover in short-term unemployment.^{Footnote 92} Arguing for these changes implicitly referenced a much more complicated model of labor market dynamics than the one on which the culture of poverty was based.

Nonetheless, staff at the DOL also seemed to embrace the cultural explanation for poverty. The DOL increasingly cast poverty and the labor market as fundamentally separate realms. For example, administrators were interested “in attacking not just ‘unemployment’ (thought of primarily as an economic fact) but ‘poverty’ (which is human), and in striking (even if only for one generation) the phrase ‘labor market’ from the Department lexicon.”^{Footnote 93} This statement is remarkable considering that the DOL had ample data showing labor market inadequacies that were directly linked to entrenched poverty, including insufficient aggregate employment and a shortage of good jobs in urban centers, where poverty was concentrated.^{Footnote 94} While ignoring such evidence, this framing conformed to the liberal currents, supporting the culture-of-poverty perspective that poverty could not be solved primarily through economic and labor-market interventions.

As he gained firsthand experience administering programs to the urban poor, Wirtz’s sentiments about the poor hardened, reinforcing his conviction that the culture-of-poverty explanation was correct. In a December 1966 report, Wirtz characterized long-term unemployment and “subemployment” in urban slums as fundamentally noneconomic in origin and also nonresponsive to economic growth. After noting the overlap between unemployment in urban ghettos and factors such as “race or ethnic origin” and “sex,” Wirtz did not cite racism, sexism, or lack of available work as responsible. He instead attributed the situation to the deficient character of the residents, arguing that “subemployment” was caused by “personal circumstance, more than any general economic condition,” and that most “jobless there won’t get jobs even if the economic growth rate goes on up. They don’t have . . . what today’s jobs take.” Somewhat confusingly, since he consistently maintained that “slum” unemployment was disconnected from economic growth, Wirtz warned that any “worsening in the economy—so that even people able and willing to work are denied the opportunity—would turn slum riots into revolutions.” Even in the face of such potentially dire conditions, Wirtz still proposed intensive training and services such as counseling as the remedy. He also explicitly dismissed fighting poverty by increasing income redistribution to the poor through “a ‘negative income tax,’ or ‘family allowances’ or ‘guaranteed incomes,’” since this would perpetuate “indolence.” Concluding the report, Wirtz criticized America for neglecting its poor, necessitating a poverty program “cheap enough that history’s richest nation will buy it.” But then, he also referred to the urban poor as “human cess pools that have collected the cruel waste of a hundred years of racial bigotry.”^{Footnote 95}

Wirtz was either unable or unwilling to break out of the confines of the liberal framework that blamed the poor for their poverty, even when casting them as victims of racial injustice. Given this attitude, it is small wonder that Wirtz, like many in the Johnson administration, identified individual failings rather than labor-market failings as the root cause of poverty.

The OEO Advocates for Public Employment

Unlike the DOL, the OEO and its director, Sargent Shriver, consistently advocated for direct government job creation through public employment. Early in the poverty program planning process, Shriver and Wirtz together proposed a public employment program.^{Footnote 96} Then, diverging from the DOL, between 1965 and 1967 the OEO repeatedly lobbied for a public service employment program. This stance was grounded in arguments that identified systematic deficiencies in private-sector job creation, rather than casting blame on the poor. Johnson invariably rejected the OEO’s public employment and public works proposals, demonstrating his firm opposition to public service employment as either an economic measure or a means of reducing unemployment.

While the components of the Economic Opportunity Act were being hammered out, Shriver and Wirtz put forward a $1.25 billion government employment program, to be funded by a new tax on cigarettes. Johnson flatly rejected the idea, refusing to consider imposing any new taxes while pushing for Congress to pass the proposed Tax Cut.^{Footnote 97} Gary Mucciaroni pinpoints this failed public employment proposal as a decisive event for the War on Poverty’s employment policy approach.^{Footnote 98} Mucciaroni’s conclusion is based on Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s argument that had this funding been secured and the employment program included in the EOA, “‘the energies and attention of the administration would have been turned to the vital task of reforming and restructuring the job market.’”^{Footnote 99} Moynihan and Mucciaroni overstate the importance and singularity of this proposal. Furthermore, they cast the budgetary shortfall as the only argument against a more involved labor market intervention, without fully considering the ideological hurdles that public employment proposals faced.

In 1963 the federal government’s annual transfer payments through social programs totaled more than $33 billion, with $14 billion of that going to the main work-based social insurance program: Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance.^{Footnote 100} In addition, Mucciaroni himself cites estimates that between $15 billion and $40 billion was needed to mount an effective poverty program.^{Footnote 101} This suggests that with only $1.25 billion, the rejected proposal would have been largely symbolic. It was not alone as a symbol either. The Accelerated Public Works Project was enacted in 1963 with $450 million in funding,^{Footnote 102} but like other isolated public works projects, it did not lead to a substantive change in labor market policy.

Equally important, the proposed job creation component, like the 1963 Accelerated Public Works Project, showed no clear shift away from work-as-citizenship and labor-market antistatism. In other words, it did not include plans to reform and restructure the job market, or to provide the poor with anything other than entry-level jobs. This was a telling omission. The impetus for the MDTA was to help workers with established work histories retrain in order to secure stable employment after automation had displaced them from their jobs.^{Footnote 103} However, similar consideration was not accorded to the working and nonworking poor after the MDTA was redirected at the disadvantaged or in other training programs for the poor.^{Footnote 104}

This raises a fundamental question about what it means to provide training, if the training is merely getting participants into jobs for which they were already qualified.^{Footnote 105} A really groundbreaking employment policy would have had to provide mechanisms for matching unemployed and underemployed poor with stable, long-term employment, in either the private sector or through a new type of public jobs program. Barring access to that type of employment, no “jobs component” of an employment or training policy was substantively different from the New Deal’s temporary work-relief programs. This incident did demonstrate Johnson’s preference for boosting economic growth through a tax cut rather than increasing government spending, which implicitly endorsed labor-market antistatism.^{Footnote 106} In fact, Johnson was so committed to reducing the federal role in the economy that in his 1964 State of the Union address he announced that he would lead efforts to dramatically shrink federal employment.^{Footnote 107}

In addition to the War on Poverty’s total funding allocation, it is important to look at the types of antipoverty programs Johnson endorsed alongside the ones he rejected. Johnson’s fiscal conservatism was in part grounded in his desire to appease private business interests, which he thought would promote economic growth.^{Footnote 108} However, Johnson’s rationale for controlling government spending on social policies including welfare and employment policy also demonstrated his acceptance of the liberal currents. Like Roosevelt in the 1930s, Johnson preferred programs designed to get the poor working to ones that provided them with relief. Also like his predecessor, Johnson frequently espoused an ethic at the nexus of labor-market antistatism and work-as-citizenship: that such work should be in the private sphere, not the public. For example, Johnson emphasized the importance of education rather than direct job creation as an unemployment solution.^{Footnote 109}

A few days later, Johnson argued to the Committee for Economic Development that while full employment was not realistic, “full employment opportunity” was a worthy goal that depended on “full educational opportunity.” He also stated that work belonged in the private sphere, declaring: “I do not want to see several generations come and go, never having known private employment.”^{Footnote 110} This did not acknowledge the income and race inequalities extant in labor market, let alone provide interventions to ameliorate them. That Johnson did not shift course on spending is significant, since by December 1964 his economic advisers were suggesting a $3 billion spending program in the 1966 budget to “maintain progress toward the goal of full employment” and promote economic growth. The administration’s economists did not expect to see much additional economic stimulus from the Tax Cut and argued that increased spending was needed to continue progress toward “full employment.”^{Footnote 111} Johnson did not support this spending proposal. A February 1965 speech reaffirmed his perspective that government spending and government jobs would simply engender dependency: “The Great Society is not a welfare state—nor is it a spending state. Its object is to give the individual identity and purpose and self-esteem—not to impose upon him an oppressive paternalism.”^{Footnote 112}

Shriver and others at the OEO continued to advocate unsuccessfully for public jobs programs between 1965 and 1968. An August 1965 OEO plan for creating jobs in the “ghetto” explicitly faulted the private labor market’s dearth of jobs: “To the degree that the private market is not performing needed tasks, we seek to perform them through public employment.” The contemplated program also explicitly called for participants to have “channels for upward mobility,” and included jobs ranging from “unskilled to sub-professional,” as well as “linkages to facilities for further training and breaking down institutional [barriers] that such people will face.” In this cost-sharing public jobs plan, “[CAPs], public bodies, non-profit organizations” and possibly a select group of private firms would be the employers. Yet, the proposal also showed deference to the ideological boundary condition, stipulating that jobs would be “at or slightly above the poverty level,” and “deliberately [avoided] guaranteeing a job for anyone who needs or wishes a job.”^{Footnote 113} Notwithstanding these concessions, the plan challenged both work-as-citizenship and labor-market antistatism by explicitly recognizing inadequate jobs in the labor market as the problem, and proposing public employment as the necessary solution. Formally submitted to the administration as part of the OEO’s 1965 National Anti-Poverty Plan, the president flatly rejected the proposal and cut OEO’s 1967 fiscal year budget request of $4 billion to $1.75 billion.^{Footnote 114}

With its largely entry-level, low-wage jobs, this OEO plan superficially resembled the WEP’s limited work opportunities. However, two things set it apart. First, it identified the labor market’s lack of jobs rather than the disadvantaged poor themselves as the problem, and second, it focused on participants’ long-term work prospects by offering a range of permanent jobs as well as training for more skilled jobs. By contrast, the DOL’s job-training and work experience programs focused on short-term outcomes, despite evidence of problems in that approach. In October 1965, OEO Assistant Director Joseph A. Kershaw sent Johnson a proposal for a public employment program that would create permanent “subprofessional” jobs in the health field.^{Footnote 115} Johnson did not pursue this proposal either, despite the fact that his economic advisers continued to advocate increased spending on Great Society programs in 1965.^{Footnote 116}

In 1966, the OEO put forward several more public jobs proposals. After the new BOB Director Charles Schultze lobbied for a tax increase in the summer of 1966, Shriver argued that any tax increase should provide some funding for public service employment. Shriver contended that the $1–1.5 billion cost of a program creating three hundred thousand jobs was negligible in the context of the revenue gained from a tax increase.^{Footnote 117} He included the plan in his National Anti-Poverty Plan submitted to the BOB and later argued for “activation of this program should unemployment be increased through deliberate federal fiscal policy.”^{Footnote 118} Johnson did not support Shriver’s proposals and instead continued to work to restrict spending.^{Footnote 119}

Absent administration support, public service employment made little progress. Congress authorized two small public employment programs as part of its 1966 Economic Opportunity Amendments. Both structured as demonstration projects, the 1967 fiscal year appropriation included $73 million for subprofessional jobs in the health fields program and $75 million for temporary job creation projects for the hard-core unemployed. These programs were much smaller and less permanent than what the OEO had proposed, and their funding came out of the existing Economic Opportunity Act appropriation, thereby reducing the OEO’s other program funding.^{Footnote 120}

Despite these setbacks, the OEO persisted with public employment plans. In the fall of 1966, Robert A. Levine, the OEO’s assistant director for Research, Planning, Programming, and Evaluation, wrote a memo assessing work-training proposals made by left-leaning congressmen and outlining an OEO plan. Levine pinned the future of the OEO and CAPs on their ability to mount a “significant manpower effort at the local level.” Building on the OEO’s previous plans, Levine wanted a “public employment program with permanent jobs,” which could be combined with existing training and work experience program to produce an efficient and flexible program for localities to adapt to their particular needs. Levine criticized the DOL’s proclivity to provide training and then just “push the people out into the labor market whatever the condition of that market,” and noted that while the DOL “wants only terminal programs,” the OEO “favors some permanent job creation.” Yet, he ultimately recommended that OEO support delegating the public employment program to DOL given their greater institutional capacity and sway with the administration and Congress, as long as the DOL agreed to coordinate the program through the Community Action Agencies.^{Footnote 121}

Shriver included the “new Work and Training program” in the OEO’s 1968 fiscal year budget request, and specified that the “public employment jobs will range along a continuum, from positions that will require only brief job orientation and training customary to almost any new employment, to new subprofessional positions that will have a much heavier training and orientation requirement.”^{Footnote 122} William B. Cannon, the chief of BOB’s Education, Manpower and Science Division, recommended following the OEO’s plan to administer the jobs program through the CAAs in order to ensure real local control.^{Footnote 123} In essence, the OEO envisioned a new paradigm for management of manpower programs with a strong public service employment component, which circumvented the MDTA and the DOL’s other manpower training efforts while striving to avoid an institutional turf battle with DOL. However, Johnson conformed to the established employment policy boundary condition and dismissed the OEO’s proposals in favor of continuing manpower training and other services for the poor, but not public jobs.^{Footnote 124}

The 1967 OEO authorization process highlighted the administration’s position against public jobs. The administration’s language made it clear that it supported funding for “training but not for jobs” in ghettos.^{Footnote 125} Senate Democrats sought to include a $1.5 billion emergency public employment program, and Senator Robert Kennedy proposed a tax-incentive program to promote private job creation in ghettos, both of which the administration strongly opposed.^{Footnote 126} BOB Director Schultze accused Kennedy’s program of “gilding the ghetto” by effectively “subsidizing sweatshops in the ghetto” and, echoing Johnson and Wirtz, argued that “the problem is not primarily the lack of jobs. It is the lack of motivation and training to take and keep the job.”^{Footnote 127} Neither job creation proposal was part of the final bill, which instead focused on existing programs and consolidating manpower training and job-placement services.^{Footnote 128}

The DOL continued to direct the Johnson administration’s employment policy trajectory, with policies directed at reforming the poor rather than providing jobs. In 1967, Wirtz persuaded Johnson to support a targeted job training, casework, and job placement program to get “hard-core cases ready for employment.”^{Footnote 129} Wirtz’s proposals—to provide government incentives for private industry to create training and jobs—suggested that the private sector would create the right sort of jobs, and in sufficient quantity to mitigate unemployment. In September 1967, Wirtz outlined a $1 billion public-private partnership work program for the president that was supposed to produce four hundred thousand private-sector jobs in areas with high concentrations of hard-core unemployment.^{Footnote 130} Launched soon thereafter, the Concentrated Employment Program (CEP) in conjunction with another similar program, Jobs in the Business Sector (JOBS), sought to centralize oversight of the War on Poverty’s various training and work experience programs and to induce business investment in rural areas and urban ghettos. That is, the DOL would subsidize their hiring and provision of on-the-job-training to the urban unemployed.^{Footnote 131}

Wirtz also actively argued against the OEO’s approach of supplying public employment jobs to the poor, stranded in urban ghettos. He rationalized both the ongoing racial unrest in U.S. cities and the unfilled training slots in DOL programs as cultural problems. Like Schultze, to Wirtz the real problem was not “lack of jobs, but . . . lack of willingness or ability or both to do the jobs that are available.” Though Wirtz conceded that wages in such areas were too low, he interpreted the “increasing evidence of rejection of the training programs” as proof that poor blacks were malingering, and stressed the necessity that “jobs be earned.”^{Footnote 132} Recognizing a legitimate economic explanation for the burgeoning social unrest among poor blacks, or the inadequacy of the DOL’s training programs, would have necessitated a reevaluation of the War on Poverty’s general assessment of the problem of poverty. Since policymakers were unwilling to admit that the labor market was fundamentally responsible for the concentration of poverty and unemployment in urban slums, responsibility shifted to the poor themselves.

Wirtz’s neoliberal training gambit did not pay off. By the end of 1967, the administration had proposals from some ninety-three businesses to produce close to twenty-one thousand jobs, but only around four thousand “firm commitments.”^{Footnote 133} The CEP and JOBS never garnered enough support from private employers to create employment for many of the “disadvantaged,” despite receiving $500 million in the 1969 federal budget. Moreover, according to a 1968 BOB review, the CEP had limited impact on its target population because the racial discrimination present in the private labor market was also pervasive in the CEP.^{Footnote 134}

Throughout the War on Poverty, Johnson consistently opposed proposals that the government directly provide jobs to the unemployed and underemployed poor, and only endorsed job creation measures that did not threaten to establish the foundation for a right to employment. Though there were undoubtedly fiscal considerations weighing against public service employment proposals, budgetary issues were not the only factor. For example, fiscal restraint did not prevent Johnson from increasing the funding for the manpower budget by 25 percent in 1968 in order to establish the “new private industry job program.”^{Footnote 135} However, unlike the OEO’s unsuccessful proposals, incentivizing private-sector job creation entailed minimal labor market intervention and preserved individuals’ responsibility for obtaining private-sector work.