P134 - Photo - Walter Bennett / Cecil Stoughton (LBJ Library) - 1964
LBJ Visits a Poor Family in Appalachia
Last bet, settled
Yesterday (the Marshall Plan): about 5% of the whole U.S. economy over four years — the same share today would be about $300 billion a year. No aid program since has come close.
From an earlier unit · say it, then write one line on your map
The Constitution was itself a reaction. Against what?
April 24, 1964, Inez, Kentucky. President Lyndon Johnson crouches on a weathered porch to talk with Tom Fletcher, an out-of-work sawmill hand and father of eight, in one of the poorest counties in Appalachia. The visit was staged for the cameras, and it worked: the image of the president listening to a jobless miner became the face of the War on Poverty Johnson had declared that winter. The Great Society aimed to attack poverty not with charity but with programs - job training, food aid, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid - built on the belief that a rich nation could engineer opportunity for those its economy had left behind. Appalachia, bypassed by postwar prosperity, was chosen to symbolize that forgotten America. The photograph matters because it made poverty visible and personal in a nation that preferred to think of itself as uniformly affluent, and because it captured a moment of extraordinary ambition - the idea that government could, and should, lift a whole class out of want.
Make your bet
Tom Fletcher, the jobless miner on this porch, became the face of the War on Poverty. Guess how his own life turned out in the decades after.
Your turn - work down the ladder
1. Check the reading. According to the reading, who was Tom Fletcher, and why did President Johnson visit his porch in April 1964?
2. Read the poverty-rate line from 1959 to 1973. The rate falls sharply across the 1960s. Does this chart alone prove the War on Poverty caused the drop, or only that poverty fell during those years?
3. Go deeper. What does it mean for a wealthy society to decide that persistent poverty is not a private misfortune but a public problem the government is responsible for solving?
On the form: enter the code, your bet, and your answers to 1, 2, and 3 in Questions 1–3. Skip the ACT boxes.