Presidential Biographies | Lyndon Johnson Administrations - Domestic Issues

Domestic Issues

The Johnson administration's domestic program benefited from the fact that the majority of the voters in the 1960s had grown up during the Depression and the New Deal. Not only did they remember the social dislocation of the 1930s, many of them had benefited from the social reform federal programs of the New Deal. This, plus the fact that the 1960s were years of economic expansion, made the U.S. voters during this decade more willing to go along with big government programs of social reform. Johnson promoted legislation known as the Great Society and the War on Poverty. These reform programs addressed some of the major problems in U.S. society: racial discrimination, the need for education reform and for more schools, the need for better medical care, and the recognition that poverty was a prominent feature of U.S. society.

Practically all of the problems that the War on Poverty attempted to address still haunt...