'Want in the Midst of Plenty': Social Science, Poverty, and the Limits of Liberalism

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional "War on Poverty." An integral part of this war, the federal programs known as Community Action, were intended by policy makers to integrate the poor into American society through increasing their participation in local organizations and networks of political influence. The agency which conducted the War on Poverty, the Office of Economic Opportunity, modeled Community Action on programs pioneered in the preceding years by philanthropic organizations. In both the federal and private community action programs, social scientists played a crucial role by providing the theoretical justification for community action. Indeed, social scientists not only advised the private and federal programs, but shaped the broader public's conception and understanding of poverty---where it came from, and how it could be cured. This social science, moreover, reflected and contributed to the foundations and limitations of post-war liberalism. In particular, two bodies of social scientific thought grew from, and in turn influenced, liberalism in the post-war period---participation theory, and the theory of a culture of poverty.;By examining the genesis of this social scientific work on poverty, this dissertation connects the social policy of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty to the broader intellectual context of post-war America at the height of the liberal consensus. I argue that participation theory, as it assumed the essential similarity of poor people to the rest of Americans, had more potential than the culture of poverty to challenge traditional assumptions about political economy and race, but that by the close of the decade it lost out to the culture of poverty, which otherized poor people and relied on deeply conservative assumptions. Even participation theory, however, never really posed a serious threat to liberal hegemony in the post-war period---and both participation theory and the theory of a culture of poverty argued that poverty came from psychological or cultural sources more than economic inequality, and that in order to cure it, the poor need only be fixed and integrated into the market. Therefore, I argue that liberalism itself needs to be re-examined by historians of the American Right as a primary site, and integral part of, conservatism in American political culture.