AP® United States History · Unit 8 · Topic 8.9
The Great Society
The Great Society was Lyndon Johnson's sweeping set of laws, passed after his 1964 landslide, meant to end poverty and racial injustice through government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and federal education aid.
Johnson won the 1964 election by one of the largest margins in history, and he knew that kind of mandate does not last. Congress moves when a president has momentum, so Johnson pushed hard and fast: Medicare, Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, Head Start, food stamps, and more, nearly all within a two-year burst from 1964 to 1966. The underlying idea, building on Johnson's declared War on Poverty, was that government could engineer opportunity directly, not just regulate the economy as the New Deal had.
Sort the programs by who they targeted and the design becomes clear. Medicare covers the elderly, regardless of income, because old age itself was treated as the risk worth insuring against. Medicaid covers the poor, regardless of age, financed jointly by federal and state governments and means-tested rather than universal. Head Start targeted poor children before school. Federal education funding targeted poor school districts. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 targeted Black Americans locked out of the ballot by Southern suppression. Each program answered a different question: who is vulnerable, and why?
The results were real but partial. The poverty rate fell from about 19 percent in 1964 to about 12 percent by 1969, a decline of roughly a third, helped by both these programs and a strongly growing economy. But the Great Society differs from the New Deal in scope and target: the New Deal rescued an economy in collapse for nearly everyone, while the Great Society tried to lift specific groups out of poverty and exclusion during prosperity, and it ran headlong into the costs of the Vietnam War by the late 1960s.
Key terms
- Great Society
- Lyndon Johnson's program of laws from the mid-1960s aimed at ending poverty and racial injustice through federal action.
- War on Poverty
- Johnson's set of anti-poverty initiatives, including Head Start and food stamps, launched as part of the Great Society.
- Medicare
- Federal health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older, regardless of income.
- Medicaid
- Joint federal-state health insurance program for low-income Americans of any age.
- Mandate
- The political authority a leader claims from a decisive election win to pursue an ambitious agenda.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through the Great Society programs sorted by who each one was meant to reach.
- Worked exampleShow me the poverty rate falling from about 19 percent in 1964 to about 12 percent by 1969.
- How it worksHow do Medicare and Medicaid divide the same problem between two different populations?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the Great Society a simple continuation of the New Deal?
Check yourself
End of topic.