Although it would take some months more to bring to fruition, the public unveiling of the Great Society—which turned 60 this year—is usually taken to be Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 commencement address at the University of Michigan. Just six months since he had been sworn in as JFK’s successor, and with election in his own right not yet under his belt, Johnson’s vision was as much a campaign promise as a policy document. Nonetheless, the basic argument of the speech foreshadowed the coming revolution in domestic policy.
America, Johnson told the assembled class of 1964, was on the threshold of transformation. “For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people,” Johnson said. “The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.”
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The work of using America’s great wealth to ‘advance the quality of our American civilization” very quickly became the work of bureaucracy. From Medicare and Medicaid to the Office of Economic Opportunity, new agencies sprang up, dedicated to directing American wealth towards the elevation of national life. The leaders of these agencies, drawn from the highest reaches of academia and business, were expected to bring about a profound improvement in the American situation.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Fusion
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Elizabeth Fernandez/Getty Images