On January 8, 1964, less than two months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in the streets of Dallas, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. With a rousing call to action, he declared an all-out war on human poverty, asserting that this session of Congress would do more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined. Using language generally reserved for Americas resolve to defeat foreign enemies, President Johnson dedicated the nation to combating the internal enemy of poverty: This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join me in that effort. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a mentor of Johnson, had created the New Deal. For a man of Johnsons imagination and ambition, that goal, lofty as it was, was still not aimed high enough. Johnson proposed more than a new deal, he proposed a great society, one that would bring the opportunity for peace, health, and economic security to all Americans, regardless of age, sex, or race.
Nearly a quarter century later, in January 1988, President Ronald Reagan delivered a State of the Union address in which he declared that the War on Poverty had failed: My friends, some years ago, the Federal Government declared war on poverty, and poverty won. The remark brought laughter from the joint session of Congress that Reagan addressed. Yet President Reagan meant what he said that night:
Today the Federal Government has 59 major welfare programs and spends more than $100 billion a year on them. What has all this money done? Well, too often it has only made poverty harder to escape. Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem. With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty: the family. Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families.
That night President Reagan issued a direct conservative challenge to the heart of the liberal political agenda that had dominated the American Left since the 1930s. The government had failed to devise a program that could eradicate poverty in America. After spending trillions of dollars and creating a massive federal bureaucracy, Reagan returned to a simple but critically important theme: without strong families, the poor would never emerge from poverty. Even more damaging, Reagan directly stated that federal antipoverty programs actually functioned to destroy poor families, thereby perpetuating the culture of poverty they were trying to eliminate. Federal antipoverty programs, in Reagans analysis, had become part of the problem, not the solution.