“EDUCATION’S WAR ON POVERTY IN THE 1960s” in “THE EDUCATION MYTH”
EDUCATION’S WAR ON POVERTY IN THE 1960s
In 1964, Gary Becker published the first edition of his seminal work Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education. Becker began his work on the book in 1957, right in the middle of an era in which American policymakers were dramatically expanding access to public education at every level.1 As Becker noted, the very notion of human capital, though more widely accepted than a decade before, was still controversial because many thinkers still connected the concept to chattel slavery. Slaveowners in the US South, for example, had functionally treated human property—enslaved African Americans—as capital to be used for everything from the production of goods to collateral for loans, dramatically enriching themselves in the process.2
Nevertheless, Becker and other economists, especially from the University of Chicago, persevered, arguing that wages should best be thought of as the profit from workers’ “human capital.” Though Becker would go on to become the most prominent economist associated with the concept, in its formative period Becker’s colleague Theodore Schultz represented its most important advocate, and he was the thinker who most influenced American policymakers during the period of reform called the Great Society in the 1960s. Schultz and Becker were both part of the University of Chicago economics department, the site of a movement after World War II in which academics like Becker studied the microeconomic decisions of individual, supposedly rational, actors in order to understand society and chart policy. While both economists advocated for investment in human capital, there were key differences in their thought, particularly around who should finance the investment. Schultz, a neo-Keynesian rather than a libertarian like Becker, believed public education and other investments in human capital could make the entire society more prosperous and even maximize everyone’s noneconomic happiness. He advocated for the government to pay for it, even if the benefits accrued to individuals. In contrast, Becker believed individuals should finance as much of their own education as possible, either with help from their family or through loans, preferably in the private marketplace.3
Both Schultz and Becker agreed, however, that after World War II, economists had misunderstood the huge productivity growth in the United States. By focusing only on physical capital, corporate investment, and labor, most economists, they argued, had failed to understand that advances in human capital—including healthcare, migration in pursuit of better employment, and most prominently, education and job training—were instrumental in the broad postwar economic affluence of the United States. Schultz argued, for example, in his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association in 1960, “that such investment in human capital accounts for most of the impressive rise in the real earnings of the worker.”4
More and more working people, even before World War II, consciously viewed education and job training as an investment in economic opportunity, a trend that certainly continued after the war. The GI Bill’s focus on providing individual opportunity through education also helped to illustrate the growth of this idea. Given this context, it is unsurprising that a focus on education as human capital began to make inroads in the field of economics. As early as the 1960s, as Becker argued, the field had shown a “tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence testifying to the economic importance of human capital, especially of education. Probably the most impressive piece of evidence is that more highly educated and skilled persons almost always tend to earn more than others. . . . Inequality in the distribution of earnings and income” he concluded, “is generally positively related to inequality in education and other training.”5 Schultz, even more sanguinely, gushed that, in 1960, “laborers have become capitalists not for a diffusion of the ownership of corporation stocks, as folklore would have it, but from the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value.”6
In one sense, Schultz and Becker were correct. Americans were attaining greater levels of education and workers were more productive. But denying the greater context of racism, the geography of jobs, and the sexism of the breadwinner model of the American workplace in crafting a monocausal explanation for how to reduce income inequality was deeply problematic. Furthermore, considering human capital as equivalent to other kinds of capital represented a major contradiction. In the 1989 edition of the book, Becker pointed out that human capital was different from “physical or financial” capital because “you cannot separate a person from his or her knowledge, skills, health, or values the way it is possible to move financial and physical assets while the owner stays put.”7 But the distinction between these different kinds of “capital,” both at the time and now, is even more basic, and equating human capital to physical and financial capital represented a monumental sleight of hand. In reality, increased skills for workers, as had always been the case, didn’t allow them to profit in the same way capitalists profited: by reaping rewards from the labor of others. Rather, human capital merely increased the uniqueness of the labor workers would be selling.
Empirically, more education or training could certainly increase one’s earning power. But there are a number of assumptions embedded in this notion. First, it assumes that workers figure out how to acquire a skill that will allow them to add value to a product or service that can be either sold in the marketplace or that a government would pay for. Second, it assumes the worker has acquired skills than can’t easily be acquired elsewhere. Third, it assumes groups of employers don’t engage in anticompetitive practices to keep wages down. And finally, it assumes that racism or sexism (what Becker referred to as “tastes”) won’t allow employers to arbitrarily refuse to pay a premium for more skilled work. If all these conditions are met, employers are likely to recognize those skills with higher wages or risk losing them to higher-paying employers. Even in this case, however, employers would not reduce their profits by sharing with the more productive worker; rather they would either extract more value from other less skilled workers or raise the price of their products to meet the cost of skilled labor. But by analyzing the increase in education as human capital, Schultz and Becker elided the broader power dynamics that existed in society and fantasized that every worker was not working on someone else’s terms but was an entrepreneur who invested in him- or herself. Workers, no matter how great their skills, could never act as “capital” as long as all they had to sell was their labor.
Nevertheless, this general economic perspective, which was that investment in human capital would make working people more prosperous, made major inroads in the 1960s. The rise of this thought, both in academia and in politics, signified an important aspect of the Great Society: that helping workers to overcome their own supposed deficiencies was at least as important as expanding access to a broader set of economic rights. Schultz’s version, indeed, which envisioned that investment in public education at all levels could “reduce the unequal distribution of personal income among individuals and families” found a welcome audience in the Johnson administration.8
In contrast to our highly partisan political times, not only did Johnson and other Democrats support investment in human capital as a primary antipoverty solution, but so too did a number of moderate and liberal Republicans. The suite of policies that made up the Great Society package—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and Higher Education Act (HEA), in particular—not only put the federal government squarely into the realm of public education, but also put education at the center of the argument that facilitating economic opportunity could provide the mobility necessary to eliminate poverty.
The Great Society thus signified the foundational moment in the rise of the education myth in American politics. The rise of the myth did not go uncontested, however. Social democrats, particularly civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, fought for the kind of bold plan that could have actually achieved political equality and economic security for all. Their “freedom budget” was not enacted into law, but its premise represented the core of an important alternative in competition with the education myth over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Great Society
On November 22, 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the presidential oath of office, hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A New Dealer who saw his work as continuing the legacy of Roosevelt, Johnson leveraged his mastery of the legislative process to usher through an era of social democratic expansion unrivaled by any other in American history except the New Deal. Johnson also had important social winds propelling him: the growing realization of widespread poverty in the midst of American prosperity made clear by popular political works like Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), and, more important, the civil rights movement at its peak influence. Just months before Kennedy’s assassination, for instance, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom highlighted both the power of the movement as well as the extensiveness of its economic and social demands.
In his January 1964 State of the Union address, the new president declared an “unconditional war on poverty.” The Johnson administration debated how to fight such a war, and some voices, such as Labor Secretary William Wirtz, argued for public-sector jobs and income redistribution. Others, like CEA chair Walter Heller, believed the less politically controversial tactic of increasing “opportunity” would be more successful.9 Heller, Melinda Cooper has shown, was an “enthusiastic” acolyte of Schultz’s human capital arguments, and successfully pushed the administration to implement them in Johnson’s “war” mobilization.10
Therefore, Johnson’s vision for political action did not focus very much on jobs, instead offering a strategy predicated on strengthening the capacity of the poor.11 One can easily see how Schultz’s ideas were translated into the administration’s vision. As Schultz argued in 1960, “No small part of the low earnings of many Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican nationals, indigenous migratory workers, poor farm people, and some of our older workers, reflects the failure to have invested in their health and education.”12 Four years later, in his State of the Union address, President Johnson argued, “Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.”13 While Johnson mentioned medical care and housing in his diagnosis of the problem, it was evident that by focusing on skill acquisition rather than more broadly on the economic structure, there would be clear limits to what the so-called War on Poverty could do.14
Just a few months later, Johnson outlined a sweeping vision for developing Americans’ capabilities in his call for a “Great Society,” a vision that started with “an abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.” But that was just the beginning. Among other things, it was “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.” Thus, the Great Society would be developed in three places: in the city, in the countryside, and “in our classrooms.” “Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination,” asserted Johnson. The president highlighted the fact that 25 percent of Americans did not complete high school, and 100,000 high school graduates did not go to college because they couldn’t afford it. Overcrowded classrooms, outdated curricula, and underpaid teachers plagued the school system. Importantly, though Johnson did not reduce education to job training, he went on to argue that “poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.”15
In a little over a year (sandwiched around Johnson’s reelection campaign), the administration worked with Congress to pass a series of laws driven by a vision of social democracy, civil rights, and opportunity through education: the Civil Rights Act (July 1964), the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA, August 1964), the Food Stamp Act (August 1964), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (April 1965), amendments to the Social Security Act establishing Medicare and Medicaid (July 1965), the Voting Rights Act (August 1965), and the Higher Education Act (November 1965). It is clear from the wide-ranging nature of the legislation that Johnson and other social democrats sought to expand enabling freedoms in a holistic effort to eradicate poverty and ensure everyone a basic degree of economic security. Still, in comparison with the New Deal, the notion of assisting Americans through education to overcome supposed individual insufficiencies played a much larger role in the Great Society. Created by the EOA, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) piloted Head Start and funded job-training programs in the inner cities, for instance. And, ESEA and HEA were explicitly premised on the notion that expanding access to education would reduce poverty by helping individuals acquire the right skills to meet the needs of the job market rather than ensuring jobs existed with sufficient wages and guarantees of long-term security.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act
With the possible exception of the GI Bill, no single federal policy has altered the position of education more in the United States than the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. With one piece of legislation, the federal government began a sustained presence in funding K-12 education, and the assumptions embedded in the law were instrumental in how Americans thought about the purpose of education moving forward. Much like the dramatic shift around race and education brought on by Brown v. Board, however, ESEA was both a turning point and the culmination of a decades-long push for more federal funding for public education. The Smith-Hughes Act (1917), for instance, had provided funding earmarked for vocational education. In addition, the NEA and other groups had lobbied for increased federal funding for education—in addition to a cabinet-level department—since the 1920s.16
Further, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958, had played an important role in establishing a sizable federal presence in local education. Before that, opponents of federal support for education in the 1950s believed it threatened the autonomy of state and local governments, and Catholics fought to fund private schools in any federally supported programs. Resistance from conservatives and Catholics limited the scope of NDEA, but the law nonetheless provided an important precursor to ESEA.
The Soviet Union’s launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957 helped overcome some of the objections about the federal role of education as more policymakers, hoping to win the Cold War, supported greater federal investment. As the law’s introduction put it: “The Congress hereby finds and declares that the security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women. . . . It is therefore the purpose of this Act to . . . insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.”17
Here the trajectory of federal education policy built on efforts by college administrators, led by Harvard University’s president James Conant, to win the Cold War by making the nation’s system of higher education more meritocratic. Before World War II, the nation’s elite universities mostly catered to the sons of wealthy and powerful families. Conant argued that ensuring the nation’s best universities instead served its most capable students was necessary for the United States to build the most intellectually capable new generations of leaders. Though this version of meritocracy had broader national goals in mind, it did set in motion an important ideal: that the education system, particularly higher education, should represent a competition in which the winners deserved the reward of a degree from an elite institution.18
The Space Race further stimulated the impulse to use public education to maximize the talents of the nation’s best and brightest students in the competition. Thus, the aid in NDEA was categorical. Earmarked to support math, science, and foreign language instruction through laboratory equipment purchases and professional development, the federal funding for education was much more limited than it would be under ESEA, and disproportionately helped students in affluent districts.19 The NDEA also included federal loans for higher education, based on need and with preference for math, science, and foreign language, establishing a funding model that served substantially more Americans when Congress passed the Higher Education Act seven years later.
Both the stated goals of the legislation and the remarks of representatives in congressional hearings made clear the intent of the law was to develop a more internationally competitive stock of human capital. In contrast to future efforts to use education to make the nation more competitive, however, such as Goals 2000 (1994), NDEA did not frame the need for funding public education in terms of individual economic opportunity. Further, some of the bill’s critics in Congress—such as Representative George McGovern (D-SD)—pushed for even more extensive investment in education so the education system would do more than develop technical skills. “Accepting the Soviet challenge in education,” he argued, “we must never forget the basic principles of democracy that we are seeking to defend. . . . There is a desperate need for scientific and technical training, but we seek above all the well-balanced, educated citizen, who is aware also of his cultural, social, and moral responsibilities in a democratic society.”20
Less than a decade later, however, the Johnson administration justified the expansion of federal aid for education by arguing it would increase the economic opportunity of individuals. Much of the Great Society agenda, indeed, revolved around the notion that job training and the acquisition of new skills and habits would allow Americans living in poverty to find jobs, even if economic structures such as the geography of jobs, racism, and lack of childcare, particularly for single women without a place in an economy built on the centrality of male breadwinners, provided significant impediments.
Further, a growing consensus of experts believed that economic inequality, especially for African Americans, was entwined with a “culture of poverty” or “cultural deprivation,” and they buttressed this narrative in the late 1950s and 1960s. These arguments included works such as psychologist Frank Riessman’s The Culturally Deprived Child (1962), and more infamously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family, which asserted that matrilineal African American families, stemming from slavery, had left Black men unable to compete in the labor market.21 In short, the War on Poverty included a clear pedagogy designed to help the poor (with a disproportionate focus on African Americans) overcome their supposed individual inadequacy.22 This pedagogy stood in contrast to other alternatives such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s proposal for a Freedom Budget, which sought to make the structure of American society much more equal and working Americans’ lives more broadly secure.
Indeed, the EOA, which emphasized the necessity of the state in altering the behavior of the poor, represented the centerpiece of the Johnson agenda, asserting “it is the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening, to everyone, the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.” The narrowing of the aspirations of the New Deal vision in this language was important, implying that those willing to work should only have the “opportunity”—not the right—to “live in decency and dignity.” It is true the Johnson administration’s shift toward “opportunity” was intended to be more than economic and, at least on some level, defined by the aspiration of empowering the poor. Influenced by the opportunity theory of sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, the EOA funded the Community Action Program, which created over a thousand local agencies designed to provide the impoverished the “opportunity” to better their communities while ostensibly pulling themselves out of poverty.23 Nevertheless, the limits of opportunity theory were clear, as no one in the Johnson administration seems to have ever seriously asked whether the poor could actually find jobs or where exactly they should find them.24
Following similar assumptions about opportunity, political efforts to win enormous investment for public education in the Great Society culminated with the ESEA in 1965. Though President Kennedy had proposed a major federal aid package for teacher salaries and school construction, the proposal got hung up on calls from Catholics to include parochial schools and the perception that federal funding would threaten state and local control of public education. Wrapping ESEA in the cloak of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty allowed Johnson to finally overcome these objections.25 Further, to circumvent the thorny problem of funding private schools, Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel proposed that federal support for education be distributed as “categorical aid” (the part of the law we now know as Title I) so that schools would receive funds in proportion to the number of poor families they served. Doing so stifled opposition from proponents of parochial schools, which could also get funding under the bill’s provisions.26 Finally, by providing funds that were meant to help all poor students, virtually every congressional district in the nation would see federal funding.27
Drafted and sent to Congress in January 1965, the bill made its way through both houses nearly unamended. Though the vast majority of support for the bill’s 263–153 margin in the House came from Democrats, 35 Republicans also supported it, and 57 Democrats, mostly from the South, joined 96 Republicans in opposition. In the Senate, the bill passed with a commanding majority of 73–18; only 4 Democrats and 14 Republicans opposed it. The bill invested in public education in several ways, the most important of which was Title I, which increased federal education funding from under 5 percent of total national spending in 1964 to almost 9 percent by 1968.28 Titles II and III provided funding for libraries, textbooks and other instructional materials, science, music, and physical education, while Title IV included appropriations for educational research and training and Title V funded grants to strengthen state departments of education.
The history of the bill illustrates the widespread political calculus—even from the most liberal American policymakers—that broadening opportunity through education and altering the behavior of the poor represented the essential path to greater economic security. In his State of the Union address in January 1965, for example, President Johnson outlined the goals of this tremendous investment in public education in the program he called the Great Society. Though providing skills for workers would assist with a growing economy, significantly, Johnson believed federal support for education would primarily serve the function of “improving the quality of American life.” Specifically linking Thomas Jefferson’s call for education’s role in facilitating democracy, Johnson called for an investment of $1.5 billion to “help at every stage along the road to learning.”29
The rationale for ESEA, then, was not reducible to economic opportunity, but in the congressional trajectory that followed, the growing connection between individual economic opportunity and education was evident. In a message to Congress a week later to accompany the education proposal, the president elaborated on the need for federal investment. After pointing to the high school dropout rate—about one in three—Johnson immediately pivoted to the impact of education on economic opportunities. “Unemployment of young people with an eighth-grade education or less is four times the national average. Jobs filled by high school graduates rose by 40 percent in the last 10 years. Jobs for those with less schooling decreased by nearly 10 percent.”30
When Johnson got into the details of aid for K-12 schools, he connected lack of education directly to poverty, because he believed poor people lacked both skills and character. “Today, lack of formal education is likely to mean low wages, frequent unemployment, and a home in an urban or rural slum. Poverty has many roots, but the taproot is ignorance.” Just as Horace Mann’s survey of business owners in his fifth annual report had ignored the role the economic success of a family surely played in accessing education, Johnson ignored the possibility that an economic infrastructure in which the poor lacked access to jobs might make success in education more difficult. “Just as ignorance breeds poverty,” he concluded,” “poverty all too often breeds ignorance in the next generation.”31
House hearings, held in January and February 1965, also began with the premise that the economy was strong enough that Americans in both urban and rural areas (disproportionately African American) simply needed to be made ready for jobs. The House Committee on Education and Labor Report was submitted on March 8, 1965, by Representative Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), who had fought for years to prevent federal funding for segregated schooling. The report began by unequivocally connecting education to jobs, highlighting the unemployment rate of young adults and pointing out that high school dropout rates were inversely related to income levels. The implication was clear: more education would reduce poverty, and more funding was needed to provide more education for the poor. “The Federal concern with poverty as a national problem,” Powell’s report concluded, “is evidenced in recent major legislation passed by the Congress. Title I can be considered as another very potent instrument to be used in the eradication of poverty and its effects.”32
In the Senate hearings, Commissioner Keppel also pointed to the connection between education and poverty: “The Nation’s job market relentlessly discards those with a poor education. . . . If we fail to spend enough for good education today—and spend where it counts most, we will . . . spend many times more in social services tomorrow. We cannot tolerate the drag of unemployment, nor should we content ourselves by covering it with welfare funds.”33 Here was a significant departure indeed from the debates of 1945 around guaranteeing jobs. Keppel may not have argued against a safety net, but he clearly concluded there would only be jobs for those with the right education.
The arguments from dissidents in the Senate are illuminating because they spoke to the support for investing in human capital even by many prominent members of the Republican caucus. In fact, the minority report of the Labor and Public Welfare committee, while voting to report out the bill, pointed to the long history of GOP support for education—from the Morrill Act to NDEA—and asserted the bill didn’t do enough to actually help poor students. Republicans Peter Dominick (CO), George Murphy (CT), and Paul Fannin (AZ) pointed out that the Title I formula, which rewarded school districts for what they already paid for education, meant the ten wealthiest counties in the United States would receive twice as much funding as the ten poorest. “In other words, the majority says that we should help the children of these poorer counties—but not too much.”34 The bipartisan nature of ESEA, passed without any debate over whether education could dramatically shape economic opportunity but over how to do it, underscored the fact that education’s role in developing individual human capital was becoming a key premise of how American policymakers viewed the scope of social democracy.35
New Opportunities in Higher Education
After Johnson signed ESEA into law, the nation’s colleges and universities, bursting with students by the mid-1960s, represented the final piece of the Great Society education agenda. GI Bill funds, NDEA, and state appropriations combined to dramatically expand access to higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly in states with strong economies, large public investment in K-12 education, and a substantial portion of prosperous union workers, the demand for expanding higher education was profound.
In the 1960s, state spending on higher education continued the increase that began in the 1940s and 1950s. In California the 1960 Donahoe Act, more popularly known as the “master plan,” provided highly affordable access to college for everyone in the state, with the University of California at the top of a hierarchy based, at least in theory, on merit: the top 12.5 percent of the state’s high school students were guaranteed entry at the flagship, while the next tier of students were guaranteed a spot at one of the state universities, and everyone else could go to the numerous community colleges.36 University of California president Clark Kerr, an advocate for Schultz’s version of human capital investment, enthusiastically endorsed the plan, seeking to ensure broad access to higher education in the state.37 State spending and broader access to higher education occurred elsewhere too. In Wisconsin, for instance, state support for higher education rose from $4.32 per $1,000 of personal income in fiscal year 1961 to $11.39 by 1968. Ohio increased spending from $2.02 to $5.02 over the same time, and spending in Michigan jumped from $5.42 to $8.76. New York and Pennsylvania, two states that had traditionally not spent as much on higher ed, increased from $1.60 to $6.65, and from $1.79 to $6.89, respectively.38
The increased demand for access to higher education came both from students and from community leaders and reached every corner of the country. There are numerous ways to demonstrate the demand, but looking at the history of my home institution, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, provides a paradigmatic case study. In Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin had long meant the institution in Madison. The legislature also chartered the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (previously a state college that merged with the UW’s Milwaukee extension) in 1956. State universities, many of which had begun as teachers’ colleges, provided other alternatives. Following the trends in other states, university attendance in Wisconsin more than doubled from just under 50,000 in 1955 to about 110,000 less than a decade later.39 By the end of the 1950s, the University of Wisconsin had opened regional centers run by the university’s extension program. Demand for higher education in Green Bay, a small city known for the NFL Packers and paper mills, had begun to grow dramatically. By 1961, the downtown campus was the second largest of the two-year extension centers and growing faster than any other.40
In 1963, the Green Bay Area Chamber of Commerce and community leaders from other cities in the region established the Northeastern Wisconsin Education Committee to lobby the state’s Coordinating Committee for Higher Education (CCHE) for a university. Ultimately, the CCHE concluded there should be an additional four-year university, recommending it be built by 1969. Indeed, the CCHE, constituted in 1956 to coordinate and expand higher education in Wisconsin, in 1964 sought its own “master plan” to meet citizens’ demand to bring higher education within commuting distance of virtually every part of the state by the early 1970s.41 The UW Board of Regents not only supported a campus in northeastern Wisconsin, but also an additional university south of Milwaukee, which would end up becoming present-day UW-Parkside in Kenosha. In January 1965, the CCHE published a “Comprehensive Plan for Higher Education in Wisconsin.” Explicitly connecting to Johnson’s War on Poverty, the report called for greater state expansion of quality higher education in order to combat poverty and unemployment: “Automation, the computers, chemicals and the new methods and machinery they have made possible have diminished the nation’s employment opportunities at the untrained level, and have increased them heavily at the technical and professional levels. Recent national studies have indicated that ‘pockets of poverty’ actually are ‘pockets of the untrained,’ not only the high school dropout but the graduate who hasn’t the skills the employment market requires.”42
The plan pointed to California, whose investment of “unprecedented sums” in “universal opportunity for higher education for its people” had yielded substantial “economic and social benefits.” Not only, the plan argued, did investing in higher education give individuals higher salaries (and the state more tax revenues), it gave them more spending power, and more importantly, provided “an atmosphere that attracts research-oriented business and industry, and enables these private enterprises to attract and hold employees of the highest caliber.” Still, the report’s recommendations heavily emphasized the point that higher education could not be simply vocational, asserting that “liberal arts work is central to collegiate education.” Echoing the call of Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, the Coordinating Committee also sought a higher education system that would allow workers to meet the demand for “trained and skilled specialists” but also gave them the broader skills to adapt to “changing world conditions and the growing complexity of national and international affairs.” The latter required “competent judgment of economic, civic, and political problems and a broadened citizen interest in and understanding of foreign peoples.” In addition to recommending the campuses that would eventually become Green Bay and Parkside, the committee also proposed a system of two-year colleges out of the remaining extension centers, which would eventually become a thirteen-campus UW college system.43
By 1964, there were many other Green Bays in the country, as community and student demand had pushed for much greater access to higher education. Johnson wanted to expand access to even more students, expanding federal support beyond the loans established through NDEA.44 Stemming from the recommendations of a 1964 Presidential Task Force on Education chaired by future Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) secretary John W. Gardner, Johnson on January 12, 1965, called on Congress to expand funding for higher education through direct means-tested support:
Each year an estimated 100,000 young people of demonstrated ability fail to go on to college because of lack of money. . . . Only one of three young people from low-income families attend college compared with four out of five from high-income families. For many young people from poor families loans are not enough to open the way to higher education. Under this program, a special effort will be made to identify needy students of promise early in their high school careers. The scholarship will serve as a building block, to be augmented by work-study and other support, so that the needy student can chart his own course in higher studies.45
The growing importance of the notion of human capital was just as important for expanding access to postsecondary education in the 1960s as it was for elementary and secondary. As Becker argued in Human Capital, expanding affordable access to higher education was a major part of the way Americans thought about how to reduce inequality:
Currently, many persons in the United States argue that most persons are intrinsically equally capable of benefiting from a college education: only poverty, ignorance, and prejudice prevent some from acquiring one. Generally the most important causes of differences in opportunities is differences in the availability of funds. . . . For a variety of reasons cheaper funds are more accessible to some persons than to others, and the former then have more favorable supply conditions. Some may live in areas providing liberal government and other subsidies to investment in human capital, or receive special scholarships because of luck or political contacts. Others may be born into wealthy families, have generous parents, borrow on favorable terms, or willingly forego consumption while investing.46
Sponsored by Representative Edith Green (D-OR) in the House and by Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR), the bill that was introduced into Congress in early 1965 (Senate hearings began in March) would put into practice several policies designed to eliminate what Becker had called “supply curve” inequality by expanding inexpensive access to higher education. In addition to funding university extension and continuing education programs, libraries, and books, HEA created a student aid system including grants (which later would be expanded and named for Senator Claiborne Pell), an expansion of the EOA’s funds for work-study programs, and an expansion of federal backing for loans begun by NDEA to means-tested students.47
Hearings on the bill followed a path similar to that of ESEA, as there was little disagreement about whether higher education could help eliminate poverty and increase individual economic opportunity. The Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, for example, held twelve days of hearings, and heard from dozens of witnesses, including university faculty and administrators and other supportive organizations like the AFL-CIO and the ACLU. The committee also received hundreds of letters of support. Arguments for the bill stressed the importance of higher education both for the good of the nation (echoing the arguments made all the way back in the nineteenth century’s Morrill Act) and for individual opportunity. Put in historical context, however, it was clear legislators now connected individual opportunity much more closely to education. Vermont senator Winston Prouty (R)—who had been a key voice in ushering ESEA through the same committee—summed up this line of thinking: “A new program to strengthen our colleges and universities to expand individual opportunities for higher education should be given high priority on the list of necessary legislation. The primary center of American life, no longer either agrarian or industrial, is shifting to learning. . . . Today, higher education is becoming essential in helping individuals and societies realize even their most fundamental aspirations.”48
Without much controversy, the bill passed with huge bipartisan majorities in the Senate (79–3) and the House (368–22), highlighting the consensus around the significance of expanding education for the purpose of broadening individual economic opportunity, a key foundation for the construction of the education myth. There were some important limits to the promise of higher education in HEA, however. While the intent of ESEA was to give all children access to a quality education through twelfth grade, HEA was set up in a way that acceded to rationing access to higher education. The contrast with the GI Bill’s promise is striking. Though in practice, many eligible African Americans and women were not able to access the GI Bill’s full benefits, funds were available, at least in theory, to all veterans. Further, the funds would cover tuition and expenses, thus making college a virtually expenseless endeavor beyond the opportunity cost of not working. The provisions of the HEA, however, would provide colleges and universities a limited number of grants ($70 million worth in total, distributed based on need) and students who did not get scholarships would need loans. Though the creation of Pell grants in the 1972 Higher Education Amendments enhanced access for more students (and the elimination of admission discrimination against women did so along gender lines), by making some students pay back loans rather than simply funding all tuition as the GI Bill had, the HEA contributed to the notion that education was an investment in one’s own human capital and not a right.
The Freedom Budget: Path Not Taken
By the end of 1966, transformative legislation tapered off as the American escalation of Vietnam began to torpedo Johnson’s presidency. By then, however, the Great Society had firmly implanted the notion that education would play a major, perhaps the primary, role in providing economic opportunity moving forward. Before moving on, however, it is useful to examine a path not taken. After the monumental legislative achievements of 1964–65, civil rights and labor activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin revisited the idea of guaranteeing the right to a sustainable livelihood through jobs. Following the clear limits of the War on Poverty, their program for guaranteeing economic security centered on full employment seemed particularly necessary. Randolph and Rustin, who had, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, been arguing for years that mere formal equality under the law could not ensure economic security for African Americans, advanced a bold vision for a “Freedom Budget” that would have done what the Employment Act of 1946 failed to do.
Asa Philip Randolph was one of the most important labor leaders in US history. As president of the all-Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph led the dramatic growth of that union in the 1930s. A fierce organizer for both civil rights and labor rights, Randolph formed the Negro American Labor Council in 1959 to fight the discrimination African Americans faced within the labor movement.49 Bayard Rustin was a socialist, peace activist, and labor activist who played an instrumental role in helping King and in the fight against segregation in the South (indeed, it was Rustin who seems to have convinced King of the tactical importance of nonviolent resistance).50 Randolph, who first proposed a March on Washington in 1941, conceived of the more famous march twenty-two years later, while Rustin was the architect of the immense undertaking.
By 1963, Randolph was making the prescient argument that just as African Americans had begun to get access to decent jobs in manufacturing, automation was threating to eliminate the entry level positions that would allow Blacks to gain economic security. Though King’s speech at the March on Washington is typically what Americans remember about August 28, 1963, Randolph’s speech more fully captured the challenges facing African Americans. While supporting the demand of desegregation, the core of Randolph’s speech centered on economic security: “It falls to [African Americans],” he argued, “to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits—for we are the worst victims of unemployment.”51
In 1965, the AFL-CIO honored the union leader’s career by creating the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which Rustin headed. Rustin got to work putting Randolph’s call for guaranteeing employment into action. In a powerful essay in Commentary in February 1965, Rustin had reflected on the next phase of the civil rights movement following the Civil Rights Act and Johnson’s electoral landslide the previous November. Though the economy was booming in the mid-1960s, Rustin pointed out that “more Negroes are unemployed today than in 1954, and the unemployment gap between the races is wider. . . . A higher percentage of Negro workers is now concentrated in jobs vulnerable to automation than was the case ten years ago.” Though Rustin might have added that Blacks in urban areas faced such inequities because employers had begun to move jobs either to suburbs (to pay lower property taxes) or, seeking cheaper labor, to areas in which unions were weaker, he pointed to a serious deficiency with the War on Poverty policies.52 They did very little to ensure there were jobs for African Americans, no matter how much money the OEO poured into job training or ESEA and HEA into education.
Rustin pointed out that while the Civil Rights Act had removed legal barriers to good jobs, in contrast to other times in American history when other ethnic groups had been able to build economic security, “we are moving into an era in which the natural functioning of the market does not by itself ensure every man with will and ambition a place in the production process.” Presciently, Rustin argued that “this means that an individual will no longer be able to start at the bottom and work his way up; he will have to start in the middle or on top, and hold on tight. It will not even be enough to have certain specific skills, for many skilled jobs are also vulnerable to automation. A broad educational background, permitting vocational adaptability and flexibility, seems more imperative than ever.” But simply providing education and job training would not be enough. Rustin concluded that the civil rights movement must fight for a “great expansion of the public sector of the economy. . . . as it looks at the number of jobs being generated by the private economy.”53
That is exactly what Rustin, working with Randolph, called for with the Freedom Budget. Originally discussed in a White House conference on civil rights chaired by Randolph in June 1966, the full proposal came out in October. Resurrecting FDR’s social democratic promise during World War II, the Freedom Budget proposed massive spending to provide all Americans access to a job and a living wage and good education, housing, and healthcare at the cost of $185 billion over ten years.54 In Rustin’s definition of true freedom in the United States, “for the first time, everyone in America who is fit and able to work will have a job. For the first time, everyone who can’t work, or shouldn’t be working, will have an income adequate to live in comfort and dignity. And that is freedom. For freedom from want is the basic freedom from which all others flow.”55
Indeed, the Freedom Budget represents an important alternative to the American human capital trajectory since it rejected the notion that job training and education would be enough to overcome the impediments many Americans faced in attaining economic security. As Rustin argued for the proposal in December 1966, the move to integrate and enhance public education had failed to overcome the structural inequalities evidenced by recent urban uprisings: “One sees that 12 years after the Supreme Court decision of 1954, Negro people are almost twice as crippled with unemployment as whites, that Negro teenagers have an unemployment rate three times that of whites . . . that there are now more Negro youngsters in segregated schools than there were in 1954, and that the ghettos have remained the same size but with more people, more rats, more roaches, and therefore more despair.”56
The Freedom Budget received support from the social democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Michael Harrington and the League for Industrial Democracy promoted it. So did the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO (effectively run by Walther Reuther, who through the UAW had been a prominent supporter of the March on Washington), and United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez. King, who began working on the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967, continued to support the Freedom Budget into 1968. The bill met predictable responses from conservatives, however, and despite support from some quarters of the left, it was not enough to overcome the opposition, as the supporters failed to galvanize the kind of mass movement that would have been necessary to force Congress to act on it. Further, the plan’s accommodation with military spending as the Vietnam War had become increasingly unpopular limited its allies on the left. The Freedom Budget was never taken up by the Johnson administration or in Congress.57
Kerner Commission: The Limits of the Great Society
The failures of the Great Society to eradicate poverty were glaringly evident following a series of urban insurrections in American cities in the mid-1960s. Indeed, the situation had become so severe—particularly after the brutal police suppression of Black communities led to urban insurrections in Detroit and Newark in 1967—that President Johnson chartered a national commission, led by Illinois governor Otto Kerner (D), to study the problem.58
The commission, reporting its findings only a month before the murder of King in 1968, concluded that the United States was quickly “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”59 Johnson disavowed the commission’s findings, which went well beyond his assumptions about what was responsible for poverty. The findings of the Kerner Commission spoke not just to the impoverishing conditions in American cities, but to the failure of national policy—even after several years of federal investment in compensatory education—to create the conditions for fulfilling lives for the next generation of African Americans. Indeed, the commission noted that the “typical rioter was a teenager or young adult . . . somewhat better educated than his nonrioting Negro neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job.” In fact, one could conclude from the commission report, as Bayard Rustin did, that the Great Society’s efforts to raise expectations were in large part responsible for the simmering resentment in American cities when the programs proved insufficient.60 The report argued, in fact, that the rioters sought “fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.”61
The commission pointed to the grievances of African Americans, who, two years into the Great Society, still sought stable employment and good housing. Instead of pushing to double down on repressive police tactics, however, the report argued that finally making good on the American promise of social democracy represented the only way to stanch the gross inequalities that had led to the violence. While the report concluded with a number of options for police reforms—more Black police officers, new training and other programs to develop community support for police, for instance—the most significant recommendations hinged on facilitating economic democracy.
The report clearly stated that “pervasive unemployment and underemployment are the most persistent and serious grievances in minority areas. They are inextricably linked to the problem of civil disorder.” Even so, the commission still exhibited the human capital assumptions that were crowding out other alternatives in American politics. Though it did call for the direct creation of jobs (as many as two million over the three years to come), the Kerner Commission’s recommendations for economic security largely revolved around the idea that young (male) African Americans were ill-equipped for employment and needed to be made ready for the labor market. Comparing Blacks to earlier waves of immigrants to the United States, the report asserted that the economy had changed to one in which it was more difficult to acquire good jobs in unskilled positions. “When the European immigrants arrived, they gained an economic foothold by providing the unskilled labor needed by industry. Unlike the immigrant, the Negro migrant found little opportunity in the city. The economy, by then matured, had little use for the unskilled labor he had to offer.”62
While the economy was certainly more complex than in the early twentieth century, the lack of historical context is glaring. The masses of “unskilled” immigrant workers who came to the United States in the early twentieth century hardly gained a “foothold” in the American economy. The examples of immigrant workers toiling in dangerous, degrading, and deadly working conditions, with virtually limitless working hours and low wages that were cut whenever there was an economic downturn has been well documented by both historians and observers at the time.63 Indeed, it was the support for workers to unionize, which in turn allowed them the power to bargain for healthcare and retirement, and other economic supports like social security and subsidies for housing through the FHA and GI Bill that truly gave immigrant workers and their progeny their permanent “foothold” in American society.
The bigger problem, then, in the 1960s, was that the partial social democracy as it had been built by the United States had disproportionately excluded African Americans. The report, however, proceeded from the premise that education and job training would ultimately allow Blacks to achieve economic prosperity in the US: “The 500,000 ‘hard-core’ unemployed in the central cities who lack a basic education and are unable to hold a steady job arc made up in large part of Negro males between the ages of 18 and 25. In the riot cities which we surveyed, Negroes were three times as likely as whites to hold unskilled jobs, which are often part time, seasonal, low paying and ‘dead end.’” The commission recommended, in addition to eliminating outright discrimination, the federal government should “provide on-the-job training by both public and private employers with reimbursement to private employers for the extra costs of training the hard-core unemployed, by contract or by tax credits.”64
Education was also crucial. The Kerner report did not reduce education to job training, pointing out that “education in a democratic society must equip children to develop their potential and to participate fully in American life.” Nevertheless, unequal education, according to the commission, played a major role in the lack of economic security for African Americans: “In the critical skills—verbal and reading ability—Negro students are falling further behind whites with each year of school completed. The high unemployment and under-employment rate for Negro youth is evidence, in part, of the growing educational crisis.” To improve education in the urban areas, the report called for the investment of “substantial federal aid to schools” to assist with desegregation (including a call, rightly, for efforts among suburban school systems to cooperate in this effort) and doubling down on the Great Society investment in compensatory spending.65
In sum, the Kerner Commission report, which addressed some of the structural limitations of the labor market, still focused too much on education and job training, downplaying the extent of the investment in economic democracy necessary to fully end racial inequality in America. As Rustin assessed it, the plan was too slow and too limited, and “the Report failed to declare unequivocally that the government must be the employer of first and last resort for the hard-core poor.”66 Even with its much more limited version of Randolph and Rustin’s Freedom Budget, however, the Kerner Commission recommendations were largely a nonstarter. As it had for the Freedom Budget, the growing conflict over Vietnam sucked up oxygen that could have gone into a fuller discussion about the course of American social democracy. Further, characterizing jobs policy as an African American problem during the 1960s (in contrast with, say, the debate on full employment in 1945–46), racialized interventions like a jobs guarantee that would have actually helped all poor Americans.67 Considering the association of these efforts with the uprisings in American cities, which many whites connected to the breakdown of “law and order,” one can understand the difficulties in building political momentum by the end of the Johnson administration.68 In fact, Johnson himself by that point had little appetite for a program on the scale of the Freedom Budget or even the more limited actions suggested by the Kerner Commission, arguing that do so meant “rewarding riots.”69
In spite of both the tactical failures of Randolph and Rustin and their allies as well as the poor timing of the plan, the failure for the Freedom Budget, or even the recommendations of Kerner to be seriously considered highlights the narrowing of American social democracy and the rising education myth. But, in the 1970s, there would be one last chance for a big, bold alternative.
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