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<\/a>State of the Union Address
January 8, 1964<\/p><\/div>\n
Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s (LBJ) War on Poverty was announced in his very first State of the Union Address on January 8, 1964, a little over a month after JFK\u2019s assassination. It was a time of relative peace and Lyndon B. Johnson, being born into poverty himself, believed that spending U.S. dollars to feed and bring proper medicine, education (see also Misrepresentations in Information Graphics: the American Educational Experience<\/a>) and utilities to the poorest Americans was an appropriate way to use U.S. resources and be true to the socially progressive mission promised by JFK\u2019s Civil Rights Bill.<\/p>\n Photo taken by Walter Bennet for Time Magazine 4\/24\/1964<\/p><\/div>\n Lyndon Johnson created programs like Head Start,\u00a0provides early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families and Food Stamps program, which provides food purchasing assistance to low-income or no-income families living in the U.S., in his quest to create a \u201cGreat Moral Society.\u201d It curbed malnutrition, brought electricity, and clean water to the most destitute places in America.<\/p>\n To inform and muster sympathy for his cause, Johnson traveled to Appalachia in Eastern Kentucky, a place of extreme poverty on April 24, 1964.<\/p>\n A few weeks after his stirring State of the Union Address a photo essay shot by John Dominis appeared in LIFE<\/em>, the most widely circulated domestic weekly periodical in 1964 (See also Larry Burrows: Shooting Soldiers in Vietnam<\/a>).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Photos like this one, of a toddler with Measles whose mother cannot afford to take her to the doctor, stirred the hearts of Americans.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Consider the two photographs below.<\/p>\n While the picture on top is painfully sad; five unwashed children in a poorly lit, filthy room, their mother a caricature of miserable anxiety, perhaps the one below is more stirring. The mother below has taken every resource and stretched it to make life as comfortable and \u201cnormal\u201d as possible for her family. She papered the walls with what was available to her–newspaper. She and her family are clean, their clothing neat, tidy, and fit properly…yet the mothers above and below display the same posture, exuding the same panic and desperation.<\/p>\n Again we can look at two unpublished photographs of these two families.<\/p>\n The photo on the bottom seems to support the claim of LBJ and social progressives that the poor, if given opportunity and resources, will become productive members of the \u201cGreat Society\u201d of America.<\/p>\n LBJ and his supporters had great hopes for his social reforms, and the community still sees the effects of it today (e.g. welfare). But his was a peace time plan, and as the Vietnam War escalated, the War on Poverty was largely forgotten. See more on Johnson’s “Great Society.”<\/a><\/p>\n Lyndon B Johnson’s Hope Still Stands<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n