How the relationship between government and economy has changed since “The Great Society”
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How the relationship between government and economy has changed since “The Great Society”
On May 22, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a crowd of more than 80,000 at the University of Michigan’s football stadium in Ann Arbor. Having taken the oath of office just six months earlier after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Johnson used this moment to explain a policy agenda for the country that he called the Great Society.
“I was actually reading over his shoulder on the teleprompter,” said Roger Lowenstein, a former civil rights attorney, TV writer and charter school founder. As U of M’s undergraduate class president in 1964, Lowenstein was seated just behind Johnson as he spoke and said he could see the phrase “Great Society” underlined and in all caps on the teleprompter scroll.
Lowenstein said he and another student, Ron Wilton, snickered at it together. “The phrase ‘the Great Society’ seemed to Ron and me to be, you know, cornball beyond belief,” he said. “We were totally unaware that this was history in the making.”
The thing about history is that you don’t always recognize it in the moment it’s being made. But now, 60 years later, we can look back at that moment and better understand its significance: a major turning point for the relationship between the U.S. government and the economy.
Today, Medicare, a Great Society program, is the second biggest line item on the federal budget — about 14% of total federal spending. The Civil Rights, the Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act changed the face of America and who could achieve within it. About a third of U.S. undergraduate college students receive Pell Grants, another Great Society creation.
The modern Department of Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation and many other federal agencies and programs can trace their origins to the Great Society.
“It was transformative for the entire country,” said Melody Barnes, an expert on Johnson’s presidency and executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. “[Johnson] decided to use the power that he had amassed over 20-plus years in Washington to accomplish something that many people thought was unimaginable.”
Over the past year, in a series called “Breaking Ground,” “Marketplace” has explored how the Biden administration — through industrial policy efforts such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Chips Act — has worked to change the relationship between the government and the economy once again.
“Joe Biden, like Lyndon Johnson, understood government. He understood power. He understood the way that legislation gets passed,” said Mark Updegrove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. “But Joe Biden has more many more limitations.”
To wrap up our series on Biden-era industrial policy, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal looks back on Johnson’s presidency and what it can teach us about the economic moment we’re living through now.
Click the audio player above to hear the full episode.
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