Poverty in Cold War America: A Problem That Has No Name? The Invisible Network of Poverty Experts in the 1950s and 1960s

Romain Huret

History of Political Economy, 2010, vol. 42, issue 5, 53-76

Abstract: This essay analyzes the network of social experts who launched the War on Poverty in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations from 1963 to 1968. If they are often neglected in historical accounts, which are focused on public intellectuals and presidential advisers, these experts played a major role in the process of defining poverty in the affluent society. From World War II to the 1960s, their work remained largely invisible since it was made in bureaucratic and academic circles. If experts had free rein to carry out research on income distribution and the establishment of a poverty line, they proved to be less powerful when poverty gained national and political attention. Paradoxically, the War on Poverty was a pyrrhic victory for this generation of experts, who tried to reinvigorate the liberal social contract of the postwar years in the United States.

Keywords: Cold War; War on Poverty; John F. Kennedy; Lyndon B. Johnson (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/42/Suppl_1/53.full.pdf+html link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:42:y:2010:i:5:p:53-76

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().