AMERICA'S WAR ON POVERTY: IN THIS AFFLUENT SOCIETY
(TV)
Summary
This special documents the fight against poverty as it
was waged in the United States, beginning in the years
following World War II and going well into the 1960s.
The narration explains that the United States emerged
from World War II as the richest and most powerful
country in the world. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin
remarks on what she sees as a "sense of an unending
future" in the U.S. after the war. Nevertheless,
40,000,000 Americans were still living at or below the
poverty level. Anndrena Belcher, an Appalachian writer
who was born in Kentucky, recalls details of the
coal-mining industry in her childhood. Coal miners
started losing their jobs to automated machinery, and
times became desperate, she explains. Many southerners
relied on government food aid and could hardly support
their families. Then John F. Kennedy was elected
president and signed a bill funding job creation and
retraining. Meanwhile, people moved north to find work,
many of them to Chicago. Throughout the 1950s the
number of unskilled-worker jobs declined, and times
continued to get harder for many. A turning point came
in Michael Harrington's book "The Other America," which
caught President Kennedy's eye with its portrayal of
need in the midst of affluence. Hyman Bookbinder, the
executive officer of Kennedy's task force on poverty,
recalls Kennedy's powerful response to the book and the
president's subsequent requests for more information on
the circumstances of the nation's poor. In Kentucky,
the struggle between the unions and the mines had grown
violent, viewers learn. When Kennedy was assassinated,
many of the nation's poor lost hope, the narration
explains; they had little confidence in new President
Lyndon Johnson's commitment to the poor. Nevertheless,
Johnson defied expectations, proposing the first major
anti-poverty legislation since the Great Depression.
Sargent Shriver, Johnson's director of the war against
poverty, developed the Economic Opportunity Program,
which was passed into law. Unfortunately, the
filmmakers argue, the law's programs were conservative
in many ways, and success in the war on poverty was
still to be achieved.
(This program contains minor technical problems. This
represents the best copy of this program currently
available to the Museum.)
Cataloging of this program was made possible by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2000.
Details
- NETWORK: PBS
- DATE: November 30, 1994
- RUNNING TIME: 0:56:34
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:45557
- GENRE: Public affairs/Documentaries
- SUBJECT HEADING: Poverty; U S - Economic conditions
- SERIES RUN: PBS - TV, 1995
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Henry Hampton … Executive Producer
- Susan Bellows … Producer, Director
- W. Noland Walker … Associate Producer
- Terry Kay Rockefeller … Writer
- Nik Bariluk … Music by
- Brian Keane … Theme Music by
- Rena C. Kosersky … Music (Misc. credits), Music Supervisor
- Anndrena Belcher
- Hyman Bookbinder
- Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Michael Harrington
- Lyndon B. Johnson
- John F. Kennedy
- Sargent Shriver