The Great Society in Central Florida:
The Struggle Over Orange County’s Community Action Program, 1966-1969
Michael Hoover
Seminole Community College
Introduction
On 8 January, 1964, Lyndon Johnson, in his first State of the Union address since assuming the presidency following John Kennedy’s assassination, declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America.” What followed Johnson’s clarion call was a shift to an activist-oriented social welfare policy agenda that included, among its many programs, educational opportunities, food assistance, and health care. Encapsulated as the “Great Society”, the outcome of this ambitious federal government effort is still fervently debated forty years hence, with critics claiming that anti-poverty programs created a permanently dependent class of poor people and defenders seeing such projects as having reduced privation.[1] In this essay, I examine a small piece of the political battle that took place in the latter half of the 1960s, a clash that occurred throughout the country over conceptions of the legitimate role of the national government in delivering social services and encouraging community development. In this instance, the setting was Orange County, Florida.
Orange County Economic Opportunity, Inc. (OCEO) was chartered in 1966 under the auspices of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in Washington, DC. Created to coordinate the Johnson Administration’s (1964-1968) poverty policies, OEO owed its existence to the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, an omnibus package stressing education and training through such programs as the Job Corps, Work-Study, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). Community action agencies (CAAs) were encouraged under the Act to stimulate local efforts to meet the needs of low-income people. Title II of the EOA allocated federal funds to programs and called for the "maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the group served," in other words, the poor themselves.[2] As such, the Federal government contracted with independent, non-governmental groups rather than municipal and county governments or traditional charitable and aid organizations. Not surprisingly, Community Action Program (CAP) efforts aimed at "empowering the poor" became the most controversial pieces in a complex puzzle of federal programs aimed at overcoming poverty.[3]
Obstinacy and Opposition
The Orange County community action program was among those experiencing a stormy early existence. Operating responsibilities alone were daunting for a local agency; it had to, among other things, get organized, prepare budget applications, hire personnel, establish operating procedures, and set up accounting controls. In OCEO’s case, neither the Orlando City Council nor the Orange County Commission offered much support; the latter indicating that it would never appropriate any funds even as it agreed to make “in-kind” contributions towards the EOA requirement that a portion of CAP funding had to come from local sources. Meanwhile, three of five county commissioners stated that they actually wanted nothing to do with the program.[4] The OCEO's board of directors exacerbated an already-difficult public relations situation by barring reporters from the area's conservative newspaper, The Orlando Sentinel, from one of its meetings. Meanwhile, internal squabbling among board members, several of whom were antagonistic to the underlying purposes of the War on Poverty, prevented OCEO from receiving many project grants in its initial year. With the agency literally bordering on dissolution, the board of directors was reorganized in January, 1967.
Reorganization of the OCEO board of directors occurred coincident with an OEO announcement from Washington that, henceforth, all community action agencies would be required to reserve 33% of the seats on their governing boards for the poor. This policy would later be codified in the Quie Amendment which was named for its congressional sponsor, Rep. Al Quie (R-MN). OCEO by-laws provided for a fifteen member board, one-third of whom were to be low-income persons from among the fourteen OEO-designated "poverty pockets" in Orange County.[5] Five other seats included no low-income stipulation. Each of these ten positions was determined by the vote of approximately 1,100 eligible registered program participants.[6] The final one-third of the OCEO board was appointed by the county commission, from local municipal governments, dental, legal, and medical societies in the area authorized to work with OEO. The new board selected former state legislator and two-time gubernatorial candidate Brailey Odham as its chairperson. No stranger to political controversy, the progressive-populist Odham, who also waged an unsuccessful 1964 campaign for US Senate as a pro-civil rights candidate, was entering the familiar territory of a contentious political arena.[7] He said, “I was a compromise chair. I had said that I wanted to see the program stay intact and that I would be glad to serve if the board found itself without a majority candidate. So I was nominated and chosen by consensus.”[8]
A reported 10,000 families with incomes of less than $60 a week lived in Orange County in 1967.[9] Using a base-line income of $3,000, OEO identified just under one-third (31.8%) of county residents as “poverty-stricken” compared to a national average of just over one-fifth (21.3%).[10] About 70% of those in the county living in poverty were black, compared to a national average of 30%. On one hand, intersecting race and class factors were impossible to avoid in discussion and implementation of OCEO programs. On the other, race-identified politics served to further weaken what support poverty programs had. As political scientist Ira Katznelson notes, southern politicians had opposed economic opportunity legislation because they feared that it would hasten racial integration.[11] But if local CAAs strengthened African-American demands for self-determination and institutional control of communities in which they lived, localities were reluctant to reject federal funds outright and few in the South did so.
In 1967, OCEO’s first full year of operation, the agency received federal monies of about $750,000, most of which ($631,291) went to a Head Start program serving 600 disadvantaged children.[12] Head Start, designed to provide educational, health, and nutritional services to pre-school children, tended to provoke less controversy than other Great Society initiatives and the program has, in fact, generally enjoyed bipartisan support from its inception. However, the OCEO Head Start program came under fire from the Orange County Dental Society (OCDS). Dr. Lewis S. Earle, a conservative Republican and OCEO board member, opposed to its existence and defended the Society's refusal to participate in the dental portion of Head Start (for which it was the only locally OEO-authorized organization). OCEO’s charter could have been revoked for failing to provide pre-school dental care, which was the goal of its opponents from the beginning.[13]
Citing an already-existing OCDS clinic for indigent children, complaining about wasted federal spending, and alleging political corruption, Earle argued that OCEO was primarily used to provide patronage jobs.[14] Odham, defying anyone to show evidence of such manipulation, stated that the agency only had five full-time employees.[15] He recalls, “I got so aggravated with them [Dental Society] because it was unthinkable that they would refuse care to children. And, they were going to be paid for their services.”[16] His aggravation eventually led him to propose that board membership should be restricted to those who “subscribe to the purpose of this [OCEO] organization.”[17]
The all-white dental society did not want to care for black children. By refusing to participate, dentists were not subject to civil rights suits for practicing racial discrimination in a program involving the use of Federal dollars. Plus, their inaction left the agency with a surplus of almost $85,000 for the fiscal year which led Earle and other adversaries to question the judgment of those submitting grant requests. A petition asking that record books be impounded and a court-directed audit be carried out was denied by a circuit judge.[18] Several antagonists eventually resigned from the OCEO board. One hostile member who stayed on was Professor Paul Douglass of Rollins College (Winter Park) who was also on the advisory board of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a conservative 1960s student group with origins in the John Birch Society.[19]
Despite praise for Brailey Odham's leadership from both supporters and opponents of the anti-poverty program, the agency continued to be plagued with problems. Name-calling and personality clashes that had characterized the original board carried over into the organization’s second year. Odham recalls that
there was little public attendance and it was hard to keep anyone involved to do battle with an irritating group that attended every public meeting to disrupt things. One guy, a radical rightist named Jake Braswell, would take over the floor and no one held him in check. He would incense the black members. We fought one battle after another. Following one meeting, a fellow board member [African-American funeral director Willie Bruton] told me that no white man was ever again going to make him sit on the back of the bus. I was struck by the intensity of his feeling.[20]
Braswell, a self-appointed “watchdog” of the organization, fought unsuccessfully to have the Orange County Commission pass a resolution “disowning” OCEO. The lawyer and one-time candidate for the Florida legislature wanted commissioners to “tell Washington to take their program out of the county.”[21] He repeatedly charged that the program was rife with nepotism and that the public did not have access to the organization’s records, an allegation to which Odham responded, saying “every time I’m aware of that he’s requested information he’s been given it.”[22] Constantly at loggerheads with Odham, Braswell called for his resignation as “head of the supposedly non-political OCEO” upon learning that he [Odham] was scheduled to emcee a local Democratic Women’s Club BBQ.[23]
Ongoing disputes ranged from criticism of the amount of money earmarked for employee salaries and questions about rental agreements for Head Start centers to arguments about why some Federal funds were withheld. There were debates over the legality of board transactions following an Odham ruling suspending several members for missing meetings. Verbal fights erupted over the availability of meeting minutes and access to information for board members. Disagreement also arose among members with respect to the dismissal of two employees, one of whom had been mistakenly hired for a job that was unfunded and non-existent. In fact, personnel issues abounded: 1) charges of “Negro” racism were leveled following the dismissal of eight white teachers, despite the fact that they were all replaced by white teachers; 2) a physician with whom OCEO contracted to serve as “medical director” resigned on grounds that he had understood that he was to develop medical histories of children, not give medical exams to them; 3) a white applicant for the assistant director’s position alleged discrimination after an African-American was hired for the job; 4) the agency’s director defaulted on a personal loan and was arrested for attempting to cash a worthless check.[24]
For its part, the Orange County Commission passed a resolution, which it sent to OEO director Sergeant Shriver, decrying the Federal survey used to identify fifteen “poverty pockets” in the county (one neighborhood that complained about being on the list was eventually withdrawn as a target area). The VISTA program came under attack when the board proposed bringing in additional volunteers; persistent critic Braswell attempted, again without success, to get the Orange County Commission to adopt a "VISTA go-home" resolution.[25] Even the presence of reporters at board meetings became an issue, although Odham's position of openness on this matter apparently held sway after he asserted that a "greater service" would be done by providing the press with information instead of "suppressing it."[26] Meanwhile, Braswell accused OCEO of padding its budget with local “in-kind” contributions in order to obtain federal funds for the following year.[27]
In addition to the aforementioned political wrangling, Great Society programs in Orange County faced several legal battles. An attorney filed suit alleging that OEO legal services lawyers “strongly identified with the civil rights movement” were engaged in "unfair competition with private attorneys."[28] The lawyer’s action, which was dismissed, was an attempted “pre-emptive strike” in that no local legal services office existed at the time he went to court. Additionally, agency critic Braswell provided pro bono legal representation for a former OCEO worker in an “unfair termination” complaint that a circuit judge denied.[29] The local agency was subjected to three local audits, an OEO audit, and a General Accounting Office (GAO) audit. Further, an Orange County grand jury spitefully recommended a second GAO audit on the heels of a report indicating that OCEO had sufficient local operating control and an adequate accounting system. In the midst of all this controversy, OEO director Shriver awarded the organization Florida’s only national service award for the 1300 volunteers it relied upon to carry out its work.[30]
Elected for a two-year term, Brailey Odham resigned as OCEO chair after twelve months. Citing business commitments as the principal reason for leaving, he also acknowledged that the opposition’s effectiveness in limiting the organization’s ability to function was a factor in his decision.[31] Opponents even blocked job counseling for the unemployed. More significantly, however, community development opportunities, for which the Federal government would have contributed up to 75% of the cost, were missed during his tenure. Thus, between $750,000 and one million Dollars available to erect a neighborhood center in Orlando’s African-American Washington Shores community, construct a public health clinic for the needy, and build both day care and recreation facilities were lost. Speaking about these matters almost three decades later, Odham said,
someone in municipal and county government had to cooperate locally. But, the political officials didn't subscribe to the beliefs of the OEO program. Now, I had made it clear that as long as I was on the board, this guy Braswell was not going to control the program. We had managed to replace a weak white administrator with a stronger black administrator and a fairly active black group developed. Once those things were done, there wasn't much reason to stay on. The only program we had with any money was Head Start and it had been set up before I became involved. The amount of money spent for things such as housing was so small it couldn't begin to solve the problem. People like to say that the poverty programs were a great waste of money but, really, they were never given a chance to work[32]
Odham's comments affirm the view of analysts who suggest that the Great Society’s CAP floundered on its decentralized administrative foundations, as well as that of liberal and left-wing critics who claim that Johnson's poverty war was never seriously funded.[33] At the very least, the effort was waylaid by a combination of the "conservative coalition" of congressional Republicans and southern Democrats and the growing costs of the Vietnam War.
OEO programs were caught between two objectives from their beginning– reduction of poverty and creation of more equal opportunities. Towards these goals, the total federal CAP allocation for years 1965-1969 was just under $3.5 billion, distributed among more than 1,000 community action agencies covering about two-thirds of the nation’s counties.[34] Put another way, less than two cents of each federal tax dollar went to finance economic opportunity programs.[35] Thus, most CAAs resembled OCEO, small-staff operations largely confined to Head Start. Even there, CAP monies were too thinly spread; in Orange County, this meant about 3,000 children were on a waiting list when there was funding for only 20% of that number.[36] By this time, Congress had limited local flexibility and initiative in favor of “national emphasis” programs, legislators directing 40% of all OEO funds to Head Start alone.[37] Then, late in 1967, Congress potentially reined-in local CAP programs even more by enacting the so-called Green Amendment─named for Rep. Edith Green (D-OR)─which granted local elected officials the authority to designate the community action agency in their area.
OCEO’s internal bickering, employee difficulties, and public relations trouble continued into 1968 even as the agency’s funding peaked at almost $900,000. Dispute ensued over whether missing organizational records had been stolen or had disappeared in the face of yet another audit. The assistant director, a former AFL-CIO organizer rumored to be affiliated with the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) was arrested for “procuring a prostitute” and found guilty of the misdemeanor offense.[38] Odham’s successor, an African-American Episcopal minister, was characterized as a “black power” advocate and subjected to red-baiting tactics. The ever-present Jake Braswell produced a 1961 Florida legislature report placing him at a meeting where “known communists” were in attendance.[39] Stung by the litany of negative press coverage, the board voted to bar reporters from its meetings. Finally, in 1969, as a nation-wide backlash against the War on Poverty was emerging in the aftermath of urban rebellion, the Orange County Commission exercised its authority under the Green Amendment and assumed control of OCEO.[40]
[1]For the seminal work arguing that the welfare state has left the poor worse off, see Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (NY: Basic Books, 1984). For a similar view, see George Gilder, Wealth & Poverty (NY: Basic Books, 1981). In contrast, John Schwarz documents Great Society successes in America’s Hidden Success: A Reassessment of Twenty Years of Public Policy (NY: Norton, 1983) and Theodore R. Marmor, Jerry L. Mashaw, and Philip Harvey argue, in America’s Misunderstood Welfare State: Persistent Myths, Enduring Realities (NY: Basic Books, 1992), that attacks on the welfare state are based on false ideas about what social programs are and how they work. Among historians, John Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974 (NY: Norton, 1992) and Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996) offer sympathetic accounts of the Johnson-era that, nevertheless, come to somewhat negative conclusions about its success. Robert Dallek’s Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and his Times, 1961-1973 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998) makes the quite conventional argument that Johnson’s domestic agenda was waylaid by the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Allen Matusow’s scathing critique of the Great Society’s feebleness and incompetence, in The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (NY: Harper & Row, 1984) remains, after two decades, the harshest assessment by an academic historian.
[2]Quoted passage is from section 202(a) of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. As cited in Dennis Judd, The Politics of American Cities: Private Power and Public Policy (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1988), 317. In separate articles, Roger H. Davidson and Sar A. Levitan discuss how the concept of “maximum feasible participation” meant different things to different people. Both authors also point out that CAP grants initially failed to specify criteria for including low-income citizens in decision-making. See Davidson, “The War on Poverty: Experiment in Federalism,” 1-13 and Levitan, “The Community Action Program: A Strategy to Fight Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 385 (September, 1969), 63-75.
[3]For what some consider a controversial discussion of the conflict surrounding CAP, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (NY: Vintage Books, 1971), 258-281. Piven and Cloward assert that such programs were intended to absorb and direct dissent and discontent by providing tangible, if limited, benefits. Other War on Poverty programs included: Neighbor Youth Corps, the Manpower Development and Training Act, Head Start, Upward Bound, the Teacher Corps, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, school lunch programs, food stamps, Medicaid, neighborhood health centers, Legal Services, and Model Cities. For a critical analysis of the myriad programs that Theodore Lowi calls a "grab bag" approach to the problems of poverty, see The End of Liberalism: Ideology: Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority (NY: Norton, 1969), 231-249. For a critique of what Daniel Moynihan calls the "professionalism of reform" inherent to Great Society programs, see Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (NY: Free Press, 1969), 22-35. Moynihan contends that the War on Poverty was declared by a technocratic-elite that assumed responsibility for social change. (It should be pointed out that of he was a part of this elite, having been an assistant secretary of labor and the principal drafter of the Task Force on Manpower Conservation's poverty report in late 1963.) At the time of his critique of the "war" that he helped initiate, Moynihan was an assistant to President Nixon for urban affairs. While in that capacity, he was the chief architect of an ill-fated Family Assistance Plan (FAP) that would have scrapped the existing welfare system and replaced it with a program of income maintenance for the poor. See Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (NY: Vintage Books, 1973).
[4]Orlando Sentinel, 25 April, 1967. The anti-OEO commissioners were Cliff Freeman, Sanford Padgett, and Paul Pickett. Pickett explicitly stated his opposition to "OEO philosophy."
[5]Orlando Evening Star, 18 January, 1967.
[6]Turnout in early CAP elections ranged from a low of 1% to a high of 5% of those eligible. Figures are from “Representation Election and Voter Participation in Community Action Programs under OEO,” American Arbitration Association, 15 June, 1996, 8-11. Cited in Davidson, “War on Poverty,” 10.
[7]For an examination of Brailey Odham’s political career, see my Brailey Odham: Florida’s Progressive Populist (Dissertation, Union Institute, 1995).
[8]Author's interview with Brailey Odham, 14 May, 1994.
[9]Orlando Sentinel, 25 July, 1967. Unless otherwise cited, economic figures are taken from this source.
[10]Corner Cupboard, 6 July, 1967. The Corner Cupboard was published weekly in the Orlando/Orange County area in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
[11]Ira Katznelson, "Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?" in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 203. Some “big city” officials outside the south also expressed concerns that CAP would upset traditional political arrangements. For a general discussion of the relationship between racial politics and welfare policy, see Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, amd Taxes on American Politics (NY: Norton, 1991).
[12]Orlando Evening Star, 18 January and 1 April, 1967. OCEO funds for this period compared unfavorably with community action programs in Florida counties such as Dade ($13M), Duval ($10M), Broward ($9M), and Pinellas ($7M) even when their larger populations are taken into account. Orlando Sentinel, 6 April, 1967.
[13]Charter revocation would have been discretionary. As Theodore Lowi points out, the language establishing community action programs was open-ended. It provided for a laundry list of activities that local programs would "likely" include such as..."establishing programs for the benefit of preschool children." Quoted phrases are from The War on Poverty, Senate Document 86, Committee on Labor and Welfare, 88th Congress. Cited in Lowi, End of Liberalism, 236-237.
[14]Orlando Sentinel, 24 May, 1967.
[15]Ibid., 25 July, 1967. While the newspaper account indicates no challenge to Odham’s number, he appears to have erred by two full-time employees. OCEO had a director, assistant director, program administrator, three field workers, and a secretary-book keeper. Part-time employees included teachers, teacher’s aides, nurses, cooks, janitors, and delivery drivers. Corner Cupboard, 2 February, 1967.
[16]Odham interview, 14 May, 1994.
[17]Corner Cupboard, 28 September, 1967.
[18]Orlando Evening Star, 28 August, 1967
[19]Orlando Sentinel, 19 December, 1967. For an in-depth discussion of YAF, see John A. Andrews III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
[20]Odham interview, 14 May, 1994.
[21]Orlando Sentinel, 25 April, 1967.
[22]Ibid., 28 October, 1967.
[23]Ibid., 20 July, 1967.
[24]Corner Cupboard, 2 March, 1967; 11 May, 1967; 22 June, 1967; 31 August, 1967.
[25]Orlando Evening Star, 23 January, 1968.
[26]Orlando Sentinel, 17 May, 1967.
[27]Ibid., 16 October, 1967. Originally, the local contribution was set at 10%; Congress raised the figure to 20% in 1967. See Davidson, “War on Poverty,” 8.
[28]The attorney who brought the suit was Russell Troutman. Orlando Evening Star, 4 August, 1966.
[29]Orlando Sentinel, 7 May, 1967.
[30]Orlando Sentinel, 10 January, 1968.
[31]Odham did not mention that he considered himself lucky for an absence of Menieres attacks while serving in his capacity as OCEO chair. He had developed the ailment, an inner problem with symptoms of nausea and dizziness similar to vertigo, during his 1964 campaign for the US Senate. While the illness was not life-threatening, it was socially disabling because Odham never knew when symptoms might occur. On medication, Odham fretted about oncoming attacks; thus, it had been with some trepidation that he had answered the OCEO call. Odham interview, 14 May, 1994.
[32]Ibid. The view expressed by Odham has been crowded out in the general disillusionment with welfare programs, a sense that “big government” failed, and the rise of neo-liberal market-oriented ideas. Today, critics routinely claim $5 trillion in “wasted” federal welfare spending (although their time periods differ with some tracing such expenditures to the end of World War II and others to Johnson Administration policies in the mid-1960s). The conservative Heartland Institute (http://www.heartland.org/) think-tank appears to be a prime source of this widely-cited figure.
[33]For discussion of the ways in which the CAP’s decentralized features and local control detached it from the political control of the White House and exacerbated the political dimensions of administration, see Davidson, “War on Poverty”; James L. Sundquist, “Coordinating the War on Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 385 (September, 1969), 41-49; Richard M. Flanagan, “Lyndon Johnson, Community Action, and Management of the Administrative State,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 31:4 (December, 2001), 585-608. For assertions that the growth in expenditures for US welfare programs was in universal entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare─programs whose elderly recipients tend to be members of the working and middle classes. See James T. Patterson, America's Struggle against Poverty 1900-1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (NY: Pantheon, 1990); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (NY: Random House, 1997).
[34]Levitan, “Community Action Program,” 71.
[35]Orlando Sentinel, 28 August, 1967.
[36]Ibid., 21 April, 1967.
[37]Figure cited in Flanagan, “Lyndon Johnson,” 601.
[38]Corner Cupboard, 11 January, 1968.
[39]Orlando Sentinel, 31 January, 1968. Corner Cupboard, 21 March, 1968; 4 April, 1968.
[40]The Nixon Administration would eventually transfer a number of OEO programs either to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) or the Department of Labor. OEO was dismantled in 1974, and its successor, the Community Services Administration (CSA), was abolished in 1981. Local CAAs became eligible for Community Services Block Grants (CSBD) and many continue to exist to the present. As for the “backlash” against federal anti-poverty efforts, a series of “shock waves” in the 1970s ranging from post-Vietnam syndrome, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis to oil embargoes, “stagflation,” and the energy crisis undermined, American self-confidence. In this political climate, the conservative argument that government programs cause more damage than good, to the point of harming the poor the most of all social groups by relegating them to a permanently dependent underclass status, had resonance. This charge was even more appealing when coupled with one asserting that attempts to achieve greater social equity had come at the cost of declining economic efficiency.