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Scholarship on Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent times. Prior to the early 2000s, historians widely assessed Johnson’s vision as a failure that ran aground on the rocks of the Vietnam War, racial animus, and a host of other contentious issues that emerged during the Texan’s presidency. Writing in the 1980s and 1990s, such scholars were perhaps unduly influenced by the electoral ascendance of an increasingly conservative Republican Party that successful stoked public disillusionment with “big government” liberalism.1 Recent scholarship has, however, attempted to flip this narrative on its head. Instead of focusing on its failures, historians have become almost awestruck by the longevity and continued growth of the Great Society’s most notable socioeconomic policies—especially Medicare and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—during a time of Republican ascendance. Indeed, according to Gareth Davies, the Great Society “bequeathed an era” in federal government expansion.2 Similarly, writing in 2015, Julian Zelizer observed, “One of the most remarkable aspects of the Great Society is how much still lives with us today, fifty years later, so much so that most Americans regard its programs as essential manifestations of the national government’s responsibility to its citizens.3 To such historians, Republican success in dismantling Great Society liberalism has been grossly exaggerated.
While fresh acknowledgment of the Great Society’s substantial legacy is welcome, there is a danger of scholars pushing this countervailing narrative too far. The Republican Party, while it has acquiesced to education and health care programs, has not shown such a willingness to go along with other aspects of the Great Society’s legacy. Most notably, the War on Poverty—a central pillar of Johnson’s Great Society vision when it was passed in 1964—was dismantled when Republicans seized the levers of government in 1981. Just seventeen years after its creation, it was cast aside by President Ronald Reagan and unceremoniously ended. Reagan, delivering a simple obituary for a program that had remained controversial and often unloved during its short history, pithily declared: “poverty won.4 Given its rapid fall from grace, one historian justifiably deems the War on Poverty “one of the greatest failures of twentieth-century liberalism.”5 Such a failure cannot be brushed under the carpet by those arguing for...