If you think this president makes unprecedented claims about what government can do for people, you’re forgetting Lyndon Johnson.
Fifty years ago today, LBJ was sworn in as president after an assassin’s bullet took the life of John Kennedy. Within five months, the new president had launched a well-publicized presidential tour of Appalachia. On the way he stopped by the home of unemployed coal miner Tommy Fletcher in the hills of East Kentucky — transforming the Fletcher front porch into an iconic image of the War on Poverty.
As with the war in Vietnam, LBJ got the escalation he wanted for his War on Poverty. And the federal dollars started flowing in. From 1965 to 2010, more than $23 billion in federal aid was pumped into Appalachia for highway construction, water lines, public buildings and so forth.
Hundreds of billions more in aid came via welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, economic-development incentives, affordable housing, worker training, Head Start and so on. On top of this, private charities still send volunteers each summer to build or repair homes.
What never came were the results LBJ promised when he launched this war: a victory that would “conquer poverty” and “chart an entirely new course of hope for our people.”
It hasn’t turned out that way in Kentucky. A former elementary-school principal says that even the children in this area find themselves sucked in by the culture of dependency. “Instead of talking about a future of work, or a profession, they talk about getting a check,” he says. “That’s what they’ve heard all their lives.”
The quotation and the facts and figures all come from an extraordinary dispatch published a few days ago in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. In it, John Cheves describes the devastations of 50 years of federal aid on people who’ve traded one form of impoverishment for another.
“The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.”
Today Appalachia doesn’t figure much in the national debate about poverty. Cheves reminds us that wasn’t always the case. LBJ chose Tom Fletcher’s house to promote his War on Poverty for good reason: The year before, the father of eight had earned only $400 — one-fourteenth of what an average American family earned. In Martin County as a whole, 70 percent of the population lived in poverty.
What happened next makes for compelling reading. To start with, unlike discussions about our inner cities, discussions about poverty and dependency here are not gummed up by race. Martin County is 91.8 percent white.
Even more interesting, notwithstanding Mitt Romney’s crack that 47 percent of the population would vote for President Obama because they knew he’d keep sending them government checks, it didn’t work that way here. In Martin County, Cheves tells us, Romney beat Obama six to one.
Which brings us to the real lesson of Appalachia: You can’t raise people up absent the wealth-creation that only the market brings. As the Herald-Leader story shows, notwithstanding all the government aid and government attention, the communities the federal government tried to get going “can’t stand on their own.”
Have there been improvements? Of course. You can’t pour that much outside money into an area without some gains. But something is profoundly disturbing when the Martin County Economic Development Authority spends $6.9 million in public dollars for a new building meant to attract business — only to see it rented out by state welfare agents and the county board of education.
The human price is higher still. For in the culture of dependency you get just enough to get by — a roof over your head, food to eat, medical care — but not enough to move up the economic ladder, realize a dream or build a better future for your family.
There’s a lesson here for members of both parties. For Democrats, it’s the need to measure government programs by their achievements and not simply their intentions.
There’s a lesson for Republicans as well. The men, women and children of Martin County are Americans have been betrayed by liberal Democratic do-goodism. But what has the GOP offered in its place these past 50 years? Where are the reforms that would help the people of this area reclaim their lives, their hopes and their dignity?
In many parts of China, people who started out under Communism have seen more opportunity for upward mobility than our fellow Americans in Martin County. By contrast, what comes across in John Cheves’ reporting is that many of the people the five-decade War on Poverty was meant to help have simply given up.
And the most terrible cost is not the billions in misspent monies but the broken lives and blighted potential these programs leave in their wake.