Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield was not alone in concluding that Lyndon Johnson “has done more than FDR ever did, or ever thought of doing.” Building on initiatives from John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, the Great Society expanded the New Deal’s focus on economic security, refashioning liberalism to embrace individual rights and to extend material well-being to groups left out of or discriminated against in New Deal programs. Yet opposition to Johnson’s leadership grew so strong that by 1968 his liberal vision lay in ruins. “How,” he asked, “was it possible that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I have given them so much?”

Fannie Lou Hamer could have responded by pointing out how slowly the government acted when efforts to win African Americans’ rights met with violence. In addition, Hamer’s failed attempts to use Johnson’s antipoverty programs to help poor blacks in Mississippi reflected, in part, some of the more general shortcomings of the War on Poverty. Hastily planned and inadequately funded, antipoverty programs focused more on remediating individual shortcomings than on structural reforms that would ensure adequately paying jobs for all. Because Johnson launched an all-out war in Vietnam and refused to ask for sacrifices from prosperous Americans, the Great Society never commanded the resources necessary for victory over poverty.

Furthermore, black aspirations exceeded white Americans’ commitment to genuine equality. Most whites supported overturning the crude and blatant forms of racism in the South, but when the civil rights movement attacked racial barriers long entrenched throughout the nation and sought equality in fact as well as in law, it faced a powerful backlash. By the end of the 1960s, the revolution in the legal status of African Americans was complete, but the black freedom struggle had lost momentum, and African Americans remained, with Native Americans and Chicanos, at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Johnson’s critics overlooked the Great Society’s more successful and lasting elements. Medicare and Medicaid continue to provide access to health care for the elderly and the poor. Federal aid for education and housing became permanent elements of national policy. Moreover, Richard Nixon’s otherwise conservative administration implemented school desegregation in the South and affirmative action, initiated environmental reforms, and secured new rights for Native Americans and women. Women benefited from the decline of discrimination, and significant numbers of African Americans and other minority groups began to enter the middle class.

Yet the perceived shortcomings of government programs contributed to social turmoil and fueled the resurgence of conservative politics. Young radicals launched direct confrontations with the government and universities that together with racial conflict, escalated into political discord and social disorder. The Vietnam War polarized American society as much as did domestic change; it devoured resources that might have been used for social reform and undermined faith in government.

See the Selected Bibliography for this chapter in the Appendix.