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Salvaging Marginalized Men: How the Department of Defense Waged the War on Poverty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

JOHN WORSENCROFT
JOHN WORSENCROFT*
Affiliation:
Louisiana Tech University, USA
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Abstract

Architects of social welfare policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the military as a site for strengthening the male breadwinner as the head of the “traditional family.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert McNamara—men not often mentioned in the same conversations—both spoke of “salvaging” young men through military service. The Department of Defense created Project Transition, a vocational jobs-training program for GIs getting ready to leave the military, and Project 100,000, which lowered draft requirements in order to put men who were previously unqualified into the military. The Department of Defense also made significant moves to end housing discrimination in communities surrounding military installations. Policymakers were convinced that any extension of social welfare demanded reciprocal responsibility from its male citizens. During the longest peacetime draft in American history, policymakers viewed programs to expand civil rights and social welfare as also expanding the umbrella of the obligations of citizenship.

Keywords

Project 100,000Military PolicyGenderWar on Poverty
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 373 - 400
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

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References

Notes

1. Robert McNamara, Speech to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (Denver, November 1967), Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University.

2. On Cold War masculinity and political culture, see K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York, 2005); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, 2001).

3. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood; John Worsencroft, Salvageable Manhood: Project 100,000 and the Gendered Politics of the Vietnam War, M.A. thesis (Salt Lake City, 2011).

4. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC, 1965).

5. On Civil Rights during the Cold War, the classic text is Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000). Also see Steven Estes, I AM A MAN: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2005) or Part 1 (“This is a Man’s World”) in Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York, 2012), 17–103.

6. Amy J. Rutenberg, “Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Ithaca, 2019).

7. Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, 1993), 32.

8. Kathleen Frydl, The GI Bill (New York, 2009); Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, 1995).

9. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 14.

10. Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2010), 5. On welfare policy, gender, and war prior to World War II, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). For the postwar era, see Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill, 2005). Mittelstadt also argues that gender and the maintenance of family roles shaped military welfare policy in The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).

11. Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York, 1971), 160 (emphasis his).

12. President’s Task Force on Manpower Conservation, One-Third of a Nation: A Report on Young Men Found Unqualified for Military Service (Washington, DC, 1964).

13. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2009), 64–65.

14. One-Third of a Nation, 15.

15. One-Third of a Nation, 35.

16. One-Third of a Nation, 15. On the cult of expertise in the postwar era, see Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era (Chapel Hill, 2010), 7–10; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Revised (New York, 1999), 167–71.

17. One-Third of a Nation, 15.

18. One-Third of a Nation, 15. The report noted that the rejectees had a 28 percent unemployment rate, or four times greater than the national average for 1963, and four out of five were high school dropouts, with only 75 percent ever completing grade school. For more on Cold War narratives of American exceptionalism, see John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2000).

19. One-Third of a Nation, 35.

20. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1989).

21. Transcript, Alfred B. Fitt Oral History Interview by Dorothy Pierce, Interview 1 (25 October 1968), LBJ Library, 18.

22. One-Third of a Nation, 29.

23. A copy of Kennedy’s statement establishing the Taskforce on Manpower Conservation, dated 30 September 1963, can be found in the appendix to the report, in One-Third of a Nation.

24. One-Third of a Nation, 35.

25. On breadwinner liberalism, see Self, All in the Family.

26. Fitt Interview.

27. Quoted in John Rogers, “From Skilled Soldiers to Skilled Civilians,” Boston Globe, 17 November 1968, B25.

28. “U.S. Offers Discharged Soldiers Job Training,” Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1969, B4.

29. “U.S. Offers Discharged Soldiers Job Training,” B4.

30. “LAPD Pilots a Worthy Job Project,” Los Angeles Times, 17 October 1967), A4.

31. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 1970: Hearings before the subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, Ninety-first Congress, first session, on H.R. 15090, an act making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970, and for other purposes, 306.

32. See Kathleen Frydl, The GI Bill (New York, 2009).

33. One-Third of a Nation, 15.

34. One-Third of a Nation, A-2.

35. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC, 1965).

36. Moynihan, The Negro Family.

37. Laurence, Janice H. and Ramsberger, Peter F., Low-Aptitude Men in the Military: Who Profits, Who Pays? (New York, 1991), 16 Google Scholar.

38. McNamara Interview, 46.

39. Congressional Record, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 25 August 1965, Senate 21719-20.

40. Fitt Interview.

41. Baskir, Lawrence M. and Strauss, William A., Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, The War, and The Vietnam Generation (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Laurence and Ramsberger, Low-Aptitude Men in the Military; Fitt Interview, 11–12.

42. “Text of President Johnson’s Message to Congress on the Selective Service System,” New York Times, 7 March 1967, 32.

43. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 324.

44. Rutenberg, Rough Draft, 150.

45. Congressional Record, 90th Cong, 2nd sess., 30 January 1968, House 1409.

46. Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

47. Congressional Record, 90th Cong, 1st sess., 4 May 1967, Senate 11854–55.

48. Congressional Record, 90th Cong, 1st sess., 4 May 1967, Senate 11854–55.

49. McNamara believed that protecting the identity of New Standards Men was the key to Project 100,000’s success. However, many in each recruit’s chain of command had access to personnel files, which made deducing who was a New Standards Man relatively easy. Also, in the early stages of Project 100,000, New Standards Men were assigned a service number beginning with “67.” Although the DoD quickly fixed this problem, New Standards Men were referred to derisively as “sixes and sevens,” which ironically is an old English idiom, meaning a state of confusion and disarray. Worsencroft, Salvageable Manhood, 36.

50. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood.

51. New York Times, 7 March 1967, 32.

52. McNamara, Denver Speech.

53. Quoted in “Rights Leaders Deplore Plan to ‘Salvage’ Military Rejects,” New York Times, 26 August 1966, 3.

54. “Rights Leaders Deplore Plan,” 3. See also Sol Stern, “When the Black G.I. Comes Back from Vietnam,” New York Times, 24 March 1968), 27. While African Americans in the military were proportionally represented, their share of combat deaths was often disproportionate, reaching a height of 20 percent in 1967. On the whole, however, black casualties during the war averaged 12.5 percent, and the precipitous decline can be attributed to the backlash from those in the Civil Rights community. Appy, Working-Class War, 20–22.

55. “Mac’s Sense of Ministry,” The Baltimore Afro-American, 18 November 1967, 4. For more on The Baltimore Afro-American’s editorial stance on Vietnam, see Lawrence Allen Eldridge, Chronicles of a Two-Front War: Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American Press (Columbia, Mo., 2011), 142 and passim.

56. Quoted in Estes, I Am A Man!, 166.

57. Worsencroft, Salvageable Manhood, 38–39.

58. Family Housing and the Negro Serviceman, 13.

59. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), 10.

60. Thomas Sugrue, “All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Twentieth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, 2003), 310. See also Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2005).

61. Family Housing and the Negro Serviceman, 13.

62. Family Housing and the Negro Serviceman, 13.

63. Family Housing and the Negro Serviceman, 13.

64. Family Housing and the Negro Serviceman, appendix B.

65. McNamara, Denver Speech.

66. McNamara, Denver Speech.

67. Quoted in Michael Drosnin, “Laurel Raps Housing Rule by Pentagon,” Washington Post, 7 July 1967, B1.

68. McNamara, Denver Speech.

69. “Hess Exemption Undone; He Integrates for Military,” Washington Post, 13 July 1967, B1.

70. McNamara, Denver Speech; James MacNees, “Open Housing Gains Listed By Pentagon,” Baltimore Sun, 31 December 1967, 16.

71. “Pentagon Reports New Housing for Negro GIs,” Los Angeles Times, 31 December 1967, D5.

72. McNamara Interview.

73. John B. Willman, “Military Notes Housing Gains,” Washington Post, 12 November 1967, D2.

74. McNamara, Denver Speech; Howard Kennedy, “Bias in Housing Near Military Bases Noted,” Los Angeles Times, 23 September 1967, 14; Julian Hartt, “Acceptance of Negroes Cited: Pendleton Area Praised for Open Housing Policy,” Los Angeles Times, 3 July 1967, A6.

75. “Pentagon Reports New Housing for Negro GIs,” D5; Macnees, “Open Housing Gains Listed by Pentagon,” 16.

76. “Effective Lobbying Put Open Housing Bill Across,” in CQ Almanac 1968, 24th ed., 14-166–14-168 (Washington, DC, 1969), http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal68-1283472.

77. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 178.

78. Lyndon B. Johnson: “Letter to the Speaker of the House Urging Prompt Action on the Civil Rights Bill,” 12 March 1968. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28729; Johnson, The Vantage Point, 178.

79. Lyndon B. Johnson: “Letter to the Speaker of the House Urging Enactment of the Fair Housing Bill,” 5 April 1968. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28785; McNamara, Denver Speech.

80. Robert K. Griffith Jr., The U.S. Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968–1974, Army Historical Series (Washington, DC, 1997), 11; Robert T. Stanton et al., How to End the Draft: The Case for an All-Volunteer Army (Washington, DC, 1967); National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve? (Washington, DC, 1967).