Fighting to Preserve a Nation's Soul: America's Ecumenical War on Poverty

By Robert Bauman

Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul examines the relationship between religion, race, and the War on Poverty that President Lyndon Johnson initiated in 1964 and that continues into the present. It studies the efforts by churches, synagogues, and ecumenical religious organizations to join and fight the war on poverty as begun in 1964 by the Office of Economic Opportunity. The book also explores the evolving role of religion in relation to the power balance between church and state and how this dynamic resonates in today’s political situation.

Robert Bauman surveys all aspects of religion’s role in this struggle and substantially discusses the Roman Catholic Church, mainline Protestant churches, Jewish groups, and ecumenical organizations such as the National Council of Churches. In addition, he pays particular attention to race, showing how activist priests and other religious leaders connected religion with the antipoverty efforts of the civil rights movement. For example, he shows how the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) exemplifies the move toward ecumenism among American religious organizations and the significance of black power to the evolving War on Poverty. Indeed, the Black Manifesto, issued by civil rights and black power activist James Forman in 1969, challenged American churches and synagogues to donate resources to the IFCO as reparations for those institutions’ participation in slavery and racial segregation. Bauman, then, explores the intricate and fundamental connection between religious organizations, social movements, and community antipoverty agencies and expands the argument for a long War on Poverty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780820354866

Robert Bauman

ROBERT BAUMAN is an associate professor of history at Washington State University and the author of Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A.

Book preview

Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul

Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul

America’s Ecumenical War on Poverty

ROBERT BAUMAN

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

© 2019 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Set in 9.5/13 Miller Text Roman

by Graphic Composition, Inc.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are

available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bauman, Robert, 1964– author.

Title: Fighting to preserve a nation’s soul : America’s ecumenical

war on poverty / Robert Bauman.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2019] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036558 | ISBN 9780820354866 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Economic assistance, Domestic—United States—

History—20th century. | Economic assistance, Domestic—

Moral and ethical aspects—United States. | Shriver, Sargent, 1915–2011.

Classification: LCC HC110.P63 B38 2019 | DDC 362.5/575097309046—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036558

For Stephanie

The War on Poverty is fundamentally

a nation fighting to preserve its soul.

—R. SARGENT SHRIVER, May 25, 1965

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Organizational Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

Setting the Context for the Struggle Religion and the War on Poverty

CHAPTER 1

Kind of a Secular Sacrament The Catholic War on Poverty

CHAPTER 2

The Conscience of the Church The National Council of Churches and the War on Poverty

CHAPTER 3

Creating an Ecumenical Antipoverty Coalition IFCO, Black Power, and the War on Poverty

CHAPTER 4

The Black Manifesto Challenging the Ecumenical Antipoverty Coalition

CHAPTER 5

Fracturing the Antipoverty Coalition The Aftermath of the Black Manifesto

CONCLUSION

To Become as Radical as Christ Faith-Based Activism and the Long War on Poverty in the Twenty-First Century

Manuscript Repositories and Collections

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Sargent Shriver with children and President Lyndon Johnson at swearing-in ceremony

  2. Mathew Ahmann at the Conference on Religion and Race

  3. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, and members of the Holy Child Jesus Mission in Canton, Mississippi

  4. Father Jack Egan

  5. Sister Audrey Kopp and the black power insignia

  6. Sargent Shriver at Methodist Board of Missions meeting

  7. James Forman presents the Black Manifesto to the NCC

  8. James Forman burns a restraining order

  9. Obed Lopez, Eliezer Risco, and James Forman

10. James Forman addresses the American Baptist Convention

11. James Forman speaks to the United Methodist Church Board of Missions

12. Cain Felder speaks to the United Methodist Church Board of Missions

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The History Department at Washington State University has provided me with support, both financial and moral. Department chairs Ray Sun and Steve Kale both approved research funds for my travel to archives across the country. In addition to Ray and Steve, a number of faculty members in the department have supported my work in one way or another. In particular, I would like to thank Jeff Sanders, Matt Sutton, Rob McCoy, and Peter Boag on the Pullman campus; Sue Peabody and Laurie Mercier on the Vancouver campus; and especially Brigit Farley on my home campus in the Tri-Cities. Administrators in the Tri-Cities, in particular Michele Acker-Hocevar, Michael Mays, and Allan Felsot, supported my research endeavors, and some administrative staff on the Tri-Cities campus were especially helpful to me over the years. Joanne Baker made my job so much easier when I took on interim administrative duties in the early part of this process. She helped make the beginnings of this project possible. Maggie Sisseck provided invaluable technical and administrative support near the end of this long journey. Library staff Steve Bisch, Cheryl Farrabee, and Harvey Gover located and processed innumerable books and journal articles for my research, always with professionalism and a smile.

In addition to librarians on my home campus, archivists and librarians on university campuses and at repositories across the country provided vital assistance. In particular, Cassie Brand and Frances Bristol at the United Methodist Archives at Drew University; Dana Bronson at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; Philip Runkel at the Marquette University Archives; Kathleen DeMerritte and staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; and archivists and staff at the University of Notre Dame Archives, the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at the Catholic University of America, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture all contributed to making this volume possible through their efforts and professionalism. Thanks to all of you!

This book was made possible by generous research grants and funding from several institutions. I was fortunate to receive a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, which made research trips to the National Archives, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and the United Methodist Archives possible. Institutional grants from the Presbyterian Historical Society and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a Dorothy Mohler Research Grant from the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at the Catholic University of America helped fund critical and fruitful research visits to those archives and repositories. A faculty travel grant from the Washington State University College of Liberal Arts helped fund a research trip to the Marquette University Archives. An Ashby-Armitage Grant from my home history department made the completion of this manuscript possible. The generosity of all of these institutions is much appreciated.

I would like to thank Mick Gusinde-Duffy, Thomas Roche, and Beth Snead at the University of Georgia Press. Mick was an enthusiastic supporter of this project from early on. Beth and Tom helped make the manuscript better and guided it to completion. Merryl Sloane’s expert copyediting greatly improved this work. Many thanks to all of you!

A number of colleagues and fellow War on Poverty scholars have provided inspiration, constructive critiques, and innumerable productive conversations in the time that I have been working on this book. The research of Annelise Orleck, Wes Phelps, Rhonda Williams, Julia Rabig, Tamar Carroll, Susan Ashmore, Daniel Cobb, Bill Clayson, Martin Meeker, Marisa Chappell, Gordon Mantler, and Emma Folwell has inspired and influenced my own, and discussions during and after conference panels with each of these scholars over the years have greatly informed my work. I would like to especially thank Tom Kiffmeyer and Marc Rodriguez for their extensive conversations about the War on Poverty, community activists, and countless other topics, some scholarly and some not, over the years at conferences and at restaurants and pubs in various cities. Their scholarship and friendship have been vital to this project.

My family, both nuclear and extended, has been tremendously supportive. My parents-in-law, Ben and Rosie San Miguel, provided a place to stay when I had research to conduct in southern California and have been excited about this project from the beginning. My mother, Betty Enserink, and sisters, Beth Nishida and Betsy Bauman, have offered support and encouragement along the way. My wife, Stephanie San Miguel Bauman, and our children, Robert and Rachel, have provided inspiration and encouragement, as well as muchneeded distractions from research and writing. In the years since I began this project, Robert has grown from a high school freshman to a college graduate and VISTA participant, working for AmeriCorps. He is among the newest generation of those continuing the fight against poverty. Rachel has grown from a fifth-grader to a college freshman and has developed into an amazing, intelligent, talented human being. I am incredibly proud of Robert and Rachel and the people they have become. Their examples give me hope for America’s future.

This book is dedicated to Stephanie, without whom I would have accomplished very little. She has inspired me and listened to my ideas about theology, activism, poverty, and related topics with thoughtfulness and considered conversation. Her love and support over this long process, including challenges both professional and personal, have been vital to the completion of this book. The thirty-four years I have known her have been the best years of my life.

ORGANIZATIONAL ABBREVIATIONS

Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul

INTRODUCTION

Setting the Context for the Struggle

Religion and the War on Poverty

In May 1965, the charismatic, energetic Sargent Shriver spoke to the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, one of the key members in the National Council of Churches (NCC). From the beginning of his appointment to head the War on Poverty, Shriver had thrown himself fully into the fight against poverty, not only as the director of the government program but as a man of faith. Shriver believed that the powerful and influential NCC and its member churches, as well as other religious agencies and organizations, were important allies in this fight. His speech to the General Assembly of Presbyterians reflected both his Christian faith and his deep-seated belief in the importance of churches and synagogues to the War on Poverty. Echoing his essential argument that the War on Poverty was at heart a moral issue, Shriver opened his speech by quoting from the Presbyterian Standing Committee report on the War on Poverty: When a nation fights for its soul, who but the Church should set the context for that struggle? For Shriver, the church had a central and integral role to play in the War on Poverty.¹

In this book I explore efforts by churches, synagogues, and ecumenical religious organizations and agencies to join the nation’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. I examine the theological and moral underpinnings of antipoverty efforts by religious agencies and individuals, how those ideas and theories were implemented in governmental antipoverty programs and religious antipoverty efforts, and how the relationship between religious and government agencies in the War on Poverty evolved over time. I detail the creation, development, and fracturing of an ecumenical antipoverty coalition. In addition, I demonstrate that the long War on Poverty has continued into the twenty-first century.

In 2014, the Council of Economic Advisers and the House of Representatives Budget Committee issued dueling interpretations of the War on Poverty fifty years after its creation. That they did so reflects two important developments. First, it indicates that both major political parties view the War on Poverty as significant, although Democrats view it much more positively than Republicans do. Why commemorate or discuss a fifty-year anniversary of something you see as insignificant? It should be noted that the GOP followed up its House Budget Committee report with a second report on poverty, opportunity, and upward mobility as part of House Budget Committee chair (and later, Speaker) Paul Ryan’s A Better Way initiative. Second, both the congressional Republican and the Democratic presidential administration reports viewed the War on Poverty as ongoing. Beyond those two similarities, though, there was not much agreement in the reports.

The Council of Economic Advisers argued that the War on Poverty has had significant success in reducing poverty over the past fifty years and made a convincing case for a continuation and expansion of antipoverty programs, while the Republican report argued that federal policies for the most part (other than the earned income tax credit and tax cuts, which they claim encourage work) have contributed to ongoing poverty. Ryan’s Budget Committee report cited Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family, published in 1965 and popularly known as the Moynihan Report. Ryan argued that The Negro Family, written by Moynihan in part to convince President Lyndon Johnson to adopt stronger antipoverty measures, supported the House report’s contention that the single most important determinant of poverty is family structure. Ryan and House Republicans used the Moynihan Report as support for their claim that antipoverty policies cause poverty, while liberals have tended to argue that the key legacy of the Moynihan Report is its focus on the underlying problem of black male unemployment. The two major political parties differ both in their perspectives on the War on Poverty and on the Moynihan Report. Indeed, both the Moynihan Report and the War on Poverty remain contested terrain for debating and understanding the continued racial and economic inequality in the United States. In addition, the two parties used two different poverty measures in their reports—the Republicans incorporated the official poverty measure and the Democrats the supplemental poverty measure, which utilizes a post-tax, post-transfer metric that includes all cash transfers and in-kind transfers (SNAP, housing vouchers, etc.) and deducts expenditures for child care and medical out-ofpocket and other expenses. As a result, the supplemental poverty measure shows a much more significant drop in poverty (26 to 16 percent) than does the official poverty measure (17 to 15 percent), and it attributes that drop, rightly I believe, to antipoverty programs.²

While my definition of the War on Poverty differs somewhat from that of both the Republicans and Democrats (I view the War on Poverty as the programs, policies, and agencies initiated and/or initially funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity and/or its successors), I agree with both parties that the War on Poverty, whether defined narrowly or broadly, has been fundamentally significant and is still being fought. I argue, though, that it is being fought by an antipoverty coalition of government agencies, community groups, and ecumenical religious organizations that formed initially in the 1960s but carries on in an evolved form in the twenty-first century. I believe that recent scholarship on the War on Poverty has been moving in directions that demonstrate those developments. For the best and most thorough review of the scholarship on the War on Poverty, I recommend Tom Kiffmeyer’s article in the June 2015 issue of Reviews in American History.³ Here, I briefly highlight some of the exciting avenues of War on Poverty scholarship that have developed in recent years. This book builds on that dynamic and evolving work.

Historical scholarship of the War on Poverty has flowered in recent years after decades of neglect on the part of historians. Studies by several scholars have challenged the way historians have thought and written about the War on Poverty, particularly in terms of race, ethnic identity, gender, and sexual orientation. A number of those works have explored linkages between the War on Poverty and social movements, including the African American and Mexican American civil rights movements, the Chicano/a and black power movements, and feminism. In addition, some of that work has sought to expand scholars’ thinking about the time frame of the War on Poverty. Most early scholars of the War on Poverty discussed its beginnings in the early 1960s and its end in the mid- to late 1970s. More recent authors, though, have argued that the War on Poverty lasted much longer than that and, indeed, that it continues today. Adapting Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s term the long civil rights movement, a few scholars have used the long war on poverty to describe the antipoverty efforts that continued beyond the 1970s.⁴

Many of the early works on the War on Poverty, including those by Daniel Moynihan, Charles Murray, Allen Matusow, and others, argued that it was a dismal failure. The work of those scholars created a success/failure paradigm for interpreting the War on Poverty. One of the first books to challenge and begin to change that paradigm was Annelise Orleck’s Storming Caesars Palace. Orleck’s brilliant work argued for lengthening the War on Poverty; emphasizing the activism of people at the grassroots, particularly women of color; and linking that antipoverty activism to feminism and civil rights. Orleck’s book remains one of the seminal works on the War on Poverty, both for its exploration of the central role of black women in shaping the course of their local War on Poverty and for demonstrating that the War on Poverty lasted much longer than early scholars suggested. Others followed Orleck, demonstrating a long War on Poverty and unraveling intricate connections between antipoverty efforts and various social movements: civil rights, black power, the Chicano/a movement, feminism, and gay rights. Some of the key works in this wave of scholarship include Marc Rodriguez’s exploration of the antipoverty activism of Tejanos in Wisconsin; Crystal Sanders’s and Emma Folwell’s examinations of links between civil rights and African American antipoverty efforts in Mississippi; books by Bill Clayson and myself that explored relationships between African American and Chicano/a antipoverty activism in Texas and Los Angeles, respectively; Daniel Cobb’s work on Native American antipoverty activism; Christina Hanhardt’s exploration of gay activism and the War on Poverty; and Tamar Carroll’s work linking AIDS, antipoverty, and feminist activism. These works collectively demonstrate the ways that Native American, black, Chicano/a, and feminist activists shaped the direction of the War on Poverty in their communities and show that the War on Poverty lasted well past the 1970s and continues in many communities today.⁵

One aspect of the War on Poverty that has been little explored to this point, despite this flowering of historical scholarship, is the central role of religion. Some historians, like Bettye Collier-Thomas, Betty Livingston Adams, Nancy Robertson, and Judith Weisenfeld, have brought to light black women’s religion-based social activism primarily in the first half of the twentieth century. Other scholars, such as James Findlay, David Chappell, and Carol George, have deftly explored the fundamental role of religion in the civil rights movement.⁶ In his foundational work, Church People in the Struggle, Findlay brilliantly analyzes the involvement of the National Council of Churches in the civil rights movement, its response to the Black Manifesto, and its relationship with black power organizations—but he pays little attention to the War on Poverty.

Scholars like John McGreevy have examined the complex relationship between Catholicism and the black freedom movement.⁷ Catholics have often been left out of narratives of the War on Poverty and the 1960s. In addition to writing that one of the deafening silences in the scholarship on the 1960s . . . is the history of religion, noted historian Thomas Sugrue has argued that the lack of incorporation of Catholicism into broad national narratives of the period is primarily the result of the blindness that most nonreligious historians have to lived religion, spirituality, theology, and institutional history. Sugrue says that this is also a result of the largely internalist orientation of scholars of twentieth-century American Catholic history, much of which remains largely trapped in the Catholic ghetto.⁸ In this book, I include Catholic antipoverty activism alongside that of Protestant and Jewish individuals and organizations. The Catholic antipoverty activists in this story were central to economic and racial developments in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and worked closely with Protestant and Jewish groups in ecumenical organizations.

The vital, complex, and often conflicted role of religious organizations and agencies in the War on Poverty has for the most part remained unexamined. Some exceptions to this scholarly void are Kenneth Heineman’s 2003 article in the Historian on Catholic social activism in the War on Poverty in Pittsburgh; Susan Ashmore’s 2003 essay on Catholic antipoverty efforts in Mobile, Alabama; Ashmore’s 2008 book; Martin Meeker’s excellent 2012 Pacific Historical Review essay on the involvement of a coalition of ministers and gay activists in the War on Poverty in San Francisco’s central city; and Wesley Phelps’s book on the War on Poverty in Houston.⁹

The work of Marisa Chappell and others in exploring the roots of opposition to the War on Poverty and social welfare programs in general has helped us better understand both the failures of liberalism and the growth of conservatism in the 1960s and beyond with more nuance. In many ways, that opposition to the War on Poverty and related programs played a fundamental role in galvanizing conservatives in the 1960s, helped lead to the election of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and remains central to conservatism today. Indeed, the report on the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty from Paul Ryan’s A Better Way uses the ubiquitous Ronald Reagan quote—We fought a War on Poverty in the 1960s and poverty won—to begin its contention that many government antipoverty programs create poverty, an argument first made by Charles Murray in Losing Ground in the 1980s. Importantly, A Better Way incorporates Murray’s language of poverty traps to argue that government antipoverty programs create poverty.¹⁰ Fifty years later, conservatives still rally around opposition to the War on Poverty. The Trump administration’s first budget proposal targeted many antipoverty programs initiated as part of the War on Poverty. The opposition to the War on Poverty and the influence and significance of that opposition remain fertile ground for additional scholarship.

This book addresses the important role religion played in the War on Poverty in terms of support and activism as well as division and opposition. While focused on religion, this project also explores themes of race by analyzing the creation and development of a primarily black antipoverty organization, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). IFCO highlights the move toward ecumenism among American religious organizations and the significance of black power to the evolving War on Poverty. The Black Manifesto, issued by civil rights and black power activist James Forman in 1969, plays a central role in this story. Forman’s manifesto challenged American churches and synagogues to donate resources to IFCO as reparations for those institutions’ participation in slavery and racial segregation. The manifesto linked black power and the War on Poverty and reshaped ecumenical antipoverty efforts. In this book, then, I explore the often intricate and fundamental connections between religious organizations, social movements, and community antipoverty agencies, and I expand the argument for a long War on Poverty.

America’s War on Poverty officially began when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) on August 20, 1964. The War on Poverty had emerged out of concerns over juvenile delinquency, which garnered significant national attention in the 1950s and early 1960s. Research into that subject had begun as early as the 1920s, when University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess used their theories about urban ecology to address the issue of juvenile delinquency and argued that delinquency was related to the failure of community organizations. To deal with juvenile delinquency, then, community institutions needed to be reorganized through community action. Their work influenced the research of Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, who in their opportunity theory argued that juvenile delinquency was caused, at least in part, by societal structures—unresponsive city governments, school systems, and welfare administrations—that blocked opportunities for inner-city youth. In response to these concerns, President John F. Kennedy created the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency to explore remedies to what some perceived to be a national crisis. When Kennedy ordered committee staffers to seek out ways to combat poverty, one of the options involved adapting Ohlin and Cloward’s opportunity theory for an antipoverty program. Kennedy also was influenced by his chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, who argued that the administration’s tax cut would not do enough to help the poor, and by Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962, and an article by Dwight MacDonald in the New Yorker, published in early 1963, both of which highlighted the persistence of poverty in America and both of which Kennedy read.¹¹

The effort to tackle poverty was still evolving when Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. When White House staffers informed Johnson about the idea, the new president reportedly replied, that’s my kind of program. Johnson established a new task force, which led to the EOA and the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The EOA incorporated a number of programs designed to address poverty—Head Start, Upward Bound, Legal Services, and so on—and also provided federal funds to community action agencies (CAAs) that fought poverty at the local level. Johnson chose R. Sargent Shriver, the director of the Peace Corps and a brother-in-law of John and Robert Kennedy, to head the War on Poverty. Shriver was a Catholic whose religious devotion would be important in his efforts to incorporate churches, synagogues, and religious organizations into the War on Poverty. Community action was the key strategy of the legislation; communities were to include the maximum feasible participation of the poor in their local antipoverty efforts. The inclusion and empowerment of poor people were two of the most controversial aspects of the War on Poverty and key elements for the involvement of religious social activists in antipoverty efforts.¹²

While many of the CAAs established, particularly early in the War on Poverty, were created and developed by city and county agencies, OEO officials specifically targeted nonprofit agencies and organizations created outside of traditional government entities as a way to avoid established bureaucracies, which antipoverty program planners saw as blocking opportunities for poor and minority individuals and communities. For instance, while the OEO funded a city-county government-led antipoverty organization in Los Angeles, the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency, following the uprising in Watts in 1965, it also provided funds to community-based agencies like the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) in South Central Los Angeles and the Chicana Service Action Center (CSAC) in East Los Angeles. As the War on Poverty evolved over time, funding community-based organizations, particularly in black and brown communities, became a more typical practice. That practice also led to increased OEO