Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner:

In 1960, 22 percent of the American public, some 40 million people, earned an income below the poverty line.1 Fifteen years later, the rate had been reduced to 12 percent as spending on poverty assistance increased from 3 to about 8 percent of U.S. government spending.2 The War on Poverty had a dramatic impact. Poverty, espe- cially among the elderly, was indeed reduced, and substantially so (for a thorough discussion of how various demographics fared during the decades after the War on Poverty, see Danziger & Weinberg, 1994). The poor were seen as victims of an economic system that had no place for them, trapped in dysfunctional schools, plagued by racial barriers to progress, and a potential threat to social stability and peace if their needs were not addressed. Poor Americans were “people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress,” wrote Michael Harrington in The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which provided an important intellectual framework for the War on Poverty (Harrington, 1962). Government response was urgent, and it came in dramatic fashion.