Lyndon Johnson Declares an “Unconditional War on Poverty” (1964)

physically handicapped. This budget and this year's legislative program are designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes. His hopes for a fair chance to make good. His hopes for fair play from the law. His hopes for a full time job on full time pay. His hopes for a decent home for his family in a decent community. His hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers. And his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age. Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope, some because of their poverty and some because of their color, and all too many because of both.

Their task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. And this administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America. And I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle. No single weapon or strategy will suffice. But we shall not rest until that war is won.

The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. $1,000 invested in salvaging and unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. Poverty is a national problem requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack to be affected must also be organized at the state and the local level and must be supported and directed by state and local efforts. For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington.

It must be won in the field in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House. The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs. Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools and better health and better homes and better training and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment roles where other citizens help to carry them.

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint federal local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper, shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites, as well as Negro, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas. Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it and above all to prevent.