Lyndon Johnson, Community Action, and Management of the Administrative State

"The people I want to help," President Johnson told White House aide Joseph Califano, "are the ones who've never held real jobs and aren't equipped to handle them. They have no motivation to reach for something better because the sum total of their life is losing" (Califano 1991, 75). To the end of helping America's chronically poor, the president initiated the War on Poverty in 1964. At the center of this effort was a new initiative, the Community Action Program (CAP), lodged within a new agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), both created under the Economic Opportunity Act signed into law in August 1964. In poor locales across the nation, federal dollars established Community Action Agencies (CAAs) as clearinghouses to administer and coordinate social service, education, job training, and legal service programs. CAP had two central goals. The first was to deliver federal aid to the poor and give them the skills to upgrade their economic status and enter into the working and middle classes. A second, less discussed goal was to revitalize the federal bureaucracy's capacity to deliver social services and contend with the complex problem of poverty through an institutional reorganization that emphasized decentralization and local control. CAP scored successes. The educational and leadership venue that CAP provided helped develop a generation of minority-group civic and political leaders. Many of the programs that CAP administered, like the Head Start program for poor prekindergartners, endure. But all did not go as well as the Johnson administration had originally intended. CAAs sparked controversy when some of their poor clientele attempted to disrupt the placidity of local politics through political action. Many CAAs were also accused of administrative mismanagement. In Washington, the oversight agency, OEO, was never able to coordinate well with other federal departments to target resources effectively. By 1966, the administration's support for the initiative cooled. Congress tightened control over OEO and CAAs and cut appropriations for the initiative. CAP failed to fulfill its early billing as one of Johnson's crowning achievements. The focus of this article is on the important yet forgotten administrative dimension of community action. The Johnson administration adopted community action as an administrative strategy to reorder the delivery of social service programs while avoiding direct conflict with the federal bureaucracy and Congress. Neo-Marxist and pluralist analysts have paid insufficient attention to the contours of the U.S. constitutional system and institutional structure to account for the early development of CAP. An institutionalist perspective that focuses on the presidency's attempts to meet objectives in a system of diffuse authority and significant rivalry will be offered here as an alternative analysis. The article will conclude with a discussion of the presidency's role in managing the administrative state as well as Johnson's leadership strategy in shepherding CAP to passage. Explanations for the Origin and Early Development of CAP Why did CAP assume the form and structure that it did, and why did the initiative not deliver the political and policy successes that the Johnson administration hoped for? Most analysts turn to a mix of social, economic, and political forces for explanation. Adopting a neo-Marxist perspective, Francis Fox Piven (1974) focused on the injection of race into prevailing electoral alignments. She argued that CAAs were patronage organizations formed by the Johnson administration to mobilize urban African-American voters and offset the loss of white Southerners who opposed Johnson's civil rights initiatives. The unique administrative structuring of CAP allowed Johnson to bypass white ethnic political machines that suppressed the black vote in urban wards. The elimination of poverty was a secondary goal to the political imperative of adding and solidifying blacks as part of the Democratic coalition. …