23 - Titmuss and President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’

Summary

Introduction

By the time of Titmuss's first American visit, the momentum generated by President Roosevelt's ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s had stalled under unsympathetic Republican administrations. Americans on the liberal left seeking to build on Roosevelt's legacy, then, looked to a rather different reform trajectory, that of post-war Britain, and to an individual, Titmuss, who was advancing, and reformulating, the field of Social Administration. In American academic life, meanwhile, there were no real equivalents of the department Titmuss was developing at the LSE. Proponents of social reform were often to be found in schools of social work, and in parts of the federal bureaucracy. America's highlevel public officials, though, were generally political appointments, which had implications for policy formation and implementation. America's ‘weakness’ in the academic field of Social Policy, at least in an institutional sense, explains why Titmuss was to be (unsuccessfully) head-hunted by American universities. Nonetheless, he did engage with American welfare issues, and this chapter focuses on his contribution to the ‘War on Poverty’ in the 1960s, with particular attention to his visits of 1962, 1964, and 1966.

Social welfare in 1960s America

In 1960 John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, won the presidential election. He was committed, half-heartedly, to measures of social reform. His assassination in November 1963 led to Lyndon Johnson taking over in the White House. Usually remembered for miring America in the Vietnam War, here what is important about Johnson was his other ‘war’, the ‘War on Poverty’, announced in messages to Congress in early 1964, and the associated attempt to build ‘The Great Society’. This was, historically, the high point of federal government activism. Johnson had come to political maturity during the 1930s, telling an advisor that he was a ‘Roosevelt New Dealer’. A range of reform programmes were undertaken during Johnson's presidency, including the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act. Medicare effectively expanded social security provision to create health insurance for the elderly. Medicaid, funded out of general taxation, provided healthcare for the needy poor.