Volume 20, Issue 1 (2004) The War on Poverty: Unfinished Business

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy evokes memories of a time when all things seemed possible in America and the elimination of poverty in all its guises was within the grasp of imaginative policy, committed government, and public consensus. In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed his War on Poverty “not as a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others [but] to give people a chance. It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities . . . so that they can share, as others share, in the promise of this nation.” He called for a war, “Not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it, and above all to eliminate it.”