Calvin Coolidge once advised his commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, that “if you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine of them will run into a ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.” It neatly summarized Coolidge’s idea that the federal government should not be the first to act when a problem arises. Usually, some other person, organization, or local government understands the situation more completely and is better equipped to do whatever must be done. Only when those options fail must Washington act.
Hoover would find this advice difficult to follow when he became president. His successors tended to ignore it altogether. But the concept likely rung in the ears of Amity Shlaes, the chairwoman of the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Foundation, as she wrote Great Society: A New History. Shlaes explains the history of good intentions, soaring hubris, and frenetic action that characterized President Lyndon Johnson’s domestic policy. The mistakes made in those years still resound in the form of a massive welfare state and spiraling entitlement spending that confounded congresses and presidents ever since.
Johnson began his political career as a New Dealer who straddled the difficult divide faced by many Southern Democrats: endorsing Franklin Roosevelt’s liberal economic programs while remaining conservative on social issues. A master of obfuscation, Johnson rode this platform to the House, the Senate, the vice presidency, and after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the White House.
Having achieved his lifelong goal, the new president didn’t think small. Perhaps in imitation of his slain predecessor, Johnson launched a series of domestic policy proposals focused on eradicating poverty and inequality, which remains second only to the New Deal in scope and ambition. As the 1964 election approached, he and his people came up with a name for this platform: the Great Society.
The first piece of the agenda was the most desperately needed: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Civil Rights Acts had been passed five times before, most recently in 1960, but southern state governments had always found ways to water them down in the Senate or avoid enforcing them once passed. The 1964 act was different, and Johnson used all of his experience at political jawboning and logrolling to get it passed over the opposition of his fellow Southern Democrats.
The law, which prohibited employment discrimination and segregation in public accommodations (including certain private businesses), was the culmination of a growing civil rights movement. It had bipartisan support, and Johnson’s leadership on the issue showed doubtful liberals that he was not a Southern Democrat of the Lost Cause school. His success on civil rights, combined with the country’s relative peace and prosperity, led Johnson to a landslide election victory in 1964.
Voters in that year also elected overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, which included many liberals who supported Johnson’s Great Society ambitions. The idea of being a second FDR appealed to Johnson, but the two men’s situations were very different. The New Deal had been a radical departure from American norms in response to the worst economic crisis since the nation’s founding. Americans were generally disinclined to accept massive government, but the desperate conditions of the Great Depression convinced many that something had to be done. That era’s massive unemployment, which peaked at 25% in 1933, was the one trouble in 10 that did not fall into Coolidge’s ditch.
In 1964, by contrast, unemployment was at 5%, the lowest it had been in eight years. The nation’s economy was the envy of the world, growing at a rate of close to 6% annually. Inflation was minuscule. Poverty was decreasing each year. More people were working, more jobs were being created, and thanks to the new Civil Rights Act, more people were guaranteed access to that growing prosperity. Johnson would have been justified in resting on his laurels for the next four years.
But Johnson saw himself as a man of action, and LBJ and his experts thought they could do better. In January 1964, they launched Johnson’s famous War on Poverty. Although grounded in a genuine sympathy for the poor, the War on Poverty was an impossible vision, born of shocking pride and ambition. It launched a thousand agencies and programs, each promising federal tax dollars as the solution to America’s ills. With the country’s wealth burning a hole in Johnson’s pocket, he began to spend freely on projects conceived by the brightest minds in the establishment.
With money came control, by design. Shales details the rapid expansion of programs — Head Start, VISTA, expanded federal housing, expanded welfare, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid — that purported to work with local governments and organizations but which all came with federal rules and regulations attached. Mayors and governors sensed the trap, but the money was too much for any of them to refuse.
Poverty had been steadily declining since World War II, from about 30% in 1950 to about half of that in 1964. After the launch of the Great Society, the rate continued to drop, coming near to 10%. It has hovered between 10% and 15% ever since, seemingly impervious to government policy. Meanwhile, the Great Society programs, which took up less than 1% of the federal budget when they were launched, now represent 6% of federal spending, more than the New Deal programs that remain in force. Combined with the cost of the Vietnam War, this massive spending drove inflation and finally put an end to the expansion of government. The human costs of that war put an end to Johnson’s presidency too.
Shlaes’s book is a thorough examination of the hubris behind the Great Society. She has a point of view, as all historians do, but she has written a history, not a polemic. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, Great Society gives readers a look at LBJ’s domestic legacy that runs counter to the prevailing narrative of the past 50 years, one that acknowledges Johnson’s good intentions but emphasizes the lack of results and loss of local control that followed. It offers a thoughtful analysis of the limits of ambition, central planning, and money in fixing the problems inherent to all human societies, whether or not we dub them “great.”
Kyle Sammin is a lawyer and writer from Pennsylvania and the co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleSammin.
