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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2014
This article argues that the imagery that American policymakers deployed to represent poverty as a social problem in the United States in the 1960s was rooted in the conceptual vocabulary that had emerged to describe “underdevelopment” in Third World in the years after 1945. Relying upon a close reading of still and moving images produced and distributed under the auspices of the American state in the mid-1960s – including the Academy Award®-winning documentary, A Year Towards Tomorrow – this article explores the ways influential American liberals represented poverty as an explicitly global social problem demanding the intervention of middle-class “agents of change.” This moment in the history of poverty fighting marks the origins of the concept of “global poverty.”
1 Leonard, John, “Dim VISTA,” New York Times, 12 Feb. 1969, 37Google Scholar.
2 Crook, William H. and Thomas, Ross, Warriors for the Poor: The Story of VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1969)Google Scholar. Although published in a variety of outlets cited throughout the text, all photographs reprinted in this piece were obtained from the Still Pictures Division of the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland.
3 Ibid., 8.
4 Surprisingly few works of US history have explored the conceptual origins of poverty as a social problem per se. For an examination of the ways in which poverty was perceived in British social thought and culture, see Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Knopf, 1984)Google Scholar; and her follow-up, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage, 1992). The constitution of poverty as a social problem in nineteenth-century European culture is explored in Gouda, Frances, Poverty and Political Culture: The Rhetoric of Social Welfare in the Netherlands and France, 1815–1854 (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995)Google Scholar. Influenced by the work of Michael Foucault on governmentality and modern liberalism, literary scholar Mary Poovey has written persuasively about the origins of the idea of the social body, which has been important to my thinking in this essay. See Poovey, Mary, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Sociologist Dean, Mitchell, also deploying the theory of governmentality, poses provocative questions about the relationship between liberalism and poverty in The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar. Communications scholar Asen, Robert has come closest to capturing the process of “imagining” social problems in American public policy that I am interested in here in Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Finally, Alyosha Goldstein has produced an innovative piece of scholarship that explores the construction of poverty across borders in the context of the postwar American empire. Goldstein, Alyosha, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
5 Beyond Alyosha Goldstein's excellent work, there is a growing literature on the relationship between poverty-fighting at home and international development initiatives abroad that takes both elite and grassroots perspectives into account. For more on the development of a broad liberal consensus about the connections between poverty-fighting at home and development abroad, see O'Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheyda F. A. Jahanbani, “A Different Kind of People: Rediscovering Poverty at Home and Abroad, 1935–1970” (PhD dissertation, Brown University, 2009); Daniel Immerwahr, “Quests for Community: The United States, Community Development, and the World, 1935–1965” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011); and Amy C. Offner, “Anti-poverty Programs, Social Conflict, and Economic Thought in Colombia and the United States, 1948–1980” (PhD dissertation: Columbia University, 2012). Katz, Michael B. explores ideas about poverty shared by black radicals in the US and anticolonial activists in the Third World during the 1960s and 1970s in The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990)Google Scholar.
6 To suggest that influential liberal policymakers in the 1960s began to conceive of poverty as a global social problem is, of course, not to claim that all thinkers and activists on the left did so. There were figures for whom the global framework, which elided “underdevelopment” in the postcolonial world and rural and urban poverty in the US, made little sense. But even critics of this conceptual fusion recognized that it had become central to the state's approach to the problem of poverty. Saul Alinsky, for example, remarked that he did not understand why the US government was treating the American poor like foreigners. “Our slums are not foreign nations to be worked with in such a manner as never to constitute a challenge to the status quo,” he told Harper's magazine a year after the War on Poverty began: “The Peace Corps mentality does not apply to America's dispossessed.” See Alinsky, Saul, “The Professional Radical: Conversation with Saul Alinsky,” Harper's, 231, 1382 (June 1965), 37–46, 37Google Scholar. For more on the multiplicity of views of poverty and, yet, how conceptual slippages between poverty at home and abroad permeated the larger political discourse of the 1960s, see Goldstein.
7 The term ‘global poverty’ did not become widely used in practical or theoretical contexts until the late 1960s. However, the synonym “world poverty” can be found in print beginning in the early 1950s, especially in relationship to the activities of the British Labour Party. See Acland, Sir Richard, Tanks into Tractors (London: Association for World Peace, 1951)Google Scholar, and Wilson, Harold, The War on World Poverty: An Appeal to the Conscience of Mankind (London: Victor Gollancz, 1953)Google Scholar. See also Gray, J. C., Problems of World Poverty: A Study Outline (London: Council for War on Want, 1954)Google Scholar. My research indicates that the term acquired its present-day meaning when fighting “world poverty” explicitly appeared in American political rhetoric in the 1960 presidential campaign. Democratic Party platforms: “Democratic Party Platform of 1960,” 11 July 1960, available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29602. For more on the emergence of the postwar development project as an American imperative see Ekbladh, David, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See Iriye, Akire, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. A useful treatment of the idea of “the global” in 1970s American foreign relations can be found in Ferguson, Niall, Maier, Charles S., Manela, Erez, and Sargent, Daniel J., eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See Escobar, Arturo, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, reprint)Google Scholar, and Li, Tania Murray, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Michael Latham, Nils Gilman, Michael Adas are among historians whose recent work most clearly engages with the relationship between normative concepts of progress and civilization and modernization and development. See Latham, Michael E., Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation-Building” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000)Google Scholar; Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For a concise intellectual history of “progress” and “civilization” see Nisbet, Robert, The History of the Idea of Progress, 2nd edn (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar; Nisbet, , Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; and Rist, Gilbert, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (New York: Zed Books, 2002)Google Scholar. Finally, see Jahanbani, Sheyda F. A., The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015)Google Scholar for a fuller discussion of the evolution of thinking about poverty and “backwardness.”
10 Jahanbani, The Poverty of the World, chapter 3.
11 Memorandum from Harris Wofford, associate director, Peace Corps, to Hayes Redmon, special assistant to the President, 11 June 1965, Aides Files, Bill Moyers, Box 15, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJL).
12 Jahanbani, Sheyda F. A., “One Global War on Poverty: Fighting ‘Underdevelopment’ at Home and Abroad, 1964–1968,” in Lawrence, Mark and Gavin, Francis, eds., Beyond the Cold War: The United States and the Global Challenges of the 1960s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.
13 For an introduction to the history of volunteerism in American history, see Ellis, Susan J. and Noyes, Katherine H., By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1990)Google Scholar.
14 See Russell, Judith, Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
15 See Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rice, Gerald, The Bold Experiment: JFK's Peace Corps (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
16 Chauncy Harris to Joseph Califano, 25 July 1966, folder: WE 9 8/2/66, WE 9 (3/12/66–8/31/66), Box 27, White House Central Files, LBJL.
17 Still unrivaled on this subject is Bremner, Robert H., From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956)Google Scholar. Literary critics have influenced my analysis here, particularly Jones, Gavin, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Greaney, Patrick, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Godden, Richard and Crawford, Martin, eds., Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Betensky, Carolyn, Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Cook, Sylvia Jenkins, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Frank, Judith, Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Sherman, Sandra, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. The relationship between documentary photography and poverty in the US is treated most convincingly by Finnegan, Cara A., Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003)Google Scholar. The standard work on the documentary style of the 1930s is Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, rev. edn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar. An inventive revision of Stott's work can be found in Entin, Joseph B., Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
18 Historian Michael Denning explores the “globalization” of images of labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an article that heavily influenced my analytical framework here. See Denning, Michael, “Representing Global Labor,” Social Text, 92 (Fall 2007), 125–45Google Scholar.
19 Crook and Thomas, Warriors for the Poor, 8.
20 Cullather, Nick, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 134–59Google Scholar.
21 Harry S. Truman: “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine,” 12 March 1947, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12846.
22 Harry S. Truman: “Inaugural Address,” 20 Jan. 1949, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13282.
23 See Ekbladh, The Great American Mission.
24 See Lancaster, Carol, Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
25 John F. Kennedy: “Address in New York City before the General Assembly of the United Nations,” 25 Sept. 1961, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8352.
26 John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Foreign Aid,” 22 March 1961, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8545.
27 On “Cold War” civil rights see Dudziak, Mary L., Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Borstelmann, Thomas, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Although there is an abundant historiography charting the linkages between the impetus for civil rights reform at home and confrontation with communism abroad during the Cold War, little work has been done on what we might call “Cold War poverty fighting.” See Jahanbani, The Poverty of the World.
28 See O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge; and Patterson, James T., America's Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
29 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Address in Detroit at the National Automobile Show Industry Dinner,” 17 Oct. 1960, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11982.
30 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Statement by the President Following House Action on the Economic Opportunity Bill,” 8 Aug. 1964, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26427.
31 See Gilman, Mandarins of the Future.
32 Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.
33 Gilman, 24–73.
34 For an overview of the evolution of ideas about capitalism on the left see Rossinow, Doug, Visions of Progress: The Left–Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
35 Recent scholarship on the history of foreign aid has complicated our understandings of the Point Four program and its place in a longer history of domestic “modernization” programs. See Phillips, Sarah T., This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Ekbladh, The Great American Mission.
36 On the impact of the behavioral sciences on thinking about poverty see O'Connor, 98–122.
37 Gilman, 95–100.
38 Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: The Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar.
39 Lewis, Oscar, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepotzlan Restudied (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951), 447–48Google Scholar. Lewis's contribution has only recently been incorporated into the historiography on modernization and development. See O'Connor, 117–22; Jahanbani, Sheyda F. A., “A Different Kind of People”; and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Other Americans: Transnationalism, Scholarship, and the Culture of Poverty in Mexico and the United States,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 89, 4 (Nov. 2009), 603–41Google Scholar.
40 Jahanbani, The Poverty of the World.
41 Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958), 323–25Google Scholar; Harrington, Michael, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 167Google Scholar; Heilbroner, Robert L., “Who Are the American Poor?” Harper's, 200, 1201 (June 1950), 30Google Scholar.
42 See Ekbladh, The Great American Mission; Latham, Modernization as Ideology; and Taffet, Jeffrey F., Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar for more on the place of foreign aid in Kennedy's foreign policy.
43 On the narrative history of the US Agency for International Development see Ruttan, Vernon W., United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
44 Cobbs-Hoffman, All You Need Is Love, 117–18; Coffin, Frank M., head of JFK's task force on foreign aid, coined the term “development diplomats” in Coffin, Frank M., Witness for AID (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964)Google Scholar. On community development in the Peace Corps see Latham, Modernization as Ideology, chapter 4; and Fischer, Fritz, Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 138–49Google Scholar.
45 See Schmitt, Edward R., President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
46 For more on Kennedy's hesitation see Eunice Kennedy Shriver, recorded interview by John Steward, 7 May 1968, Oral History Project, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA (hereafter JFKL).
47 OEO assistant general counsel Stephen J. Pollack quoted in Gillette, Michael L., Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 282–83Google Scholar.
48 Each of the component programs of the War on Poverty has received substantial scholarly attention, though historians have not yet fully explored the creation and early years of VISTA. For an overview of the War on Poverty programs see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor. For more detailed treatments of the VISTA program see Michael P. Balzano Jr., “The Political and Social Ramifications of the VISTA Program: A Question of Ends and Means” (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 1971); and David J. Pass, “The Politics of VISTA in the War on Poverty: A Study of Ideological Conflict” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1976). Historians of the “grassroots” or local War on Poverty have documented specific communities of VISTA volunteers. See Schwartz, Marvin, In Service to America: A History of VISTA in Arkansas, 1965–1985 (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Kiffmeyer, Thomas, Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008)Google Scholar. A rich collection of oral histories of early VISTA volunteers serves as another important window into the program. See O'Connor, Maureen, Knocking on Doors: VISTA Volunteers Remember, 1965–1971 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Book Store, 2010)Google Scholar. For a more explicit comparison of VISTA and the Peace Corps see Reeves, T. Zane, The Politics of the Peace Corps and VISTA (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
49 Community development and community action were far more theoretically complex than many of the policymakers within the War on Poverty and Peace Corps comprehended. Yet Sargent Shriver, among others administering the programs, considered them to be synonymous. In an oral-history interview conducted the 1980s, he was asked if his Peace Corps experience was applicable in formulating community action. He responded that “there were many, many things in the Peace Corps which were applicable to the War on Poverty, and you put your finger right on one of them right away … In the Peace Corps, one called this … ‘community development’; in the war against poverty, we called it ‘community action.’” Shriver quoted in Gillette, Launching the War on Poverty, pp. 81–82.
50 An in-depth exploration of the conceptual linkages between community action and community development can be found in Goldstein, Poverty in Common.
51 See Guy, Josephine M., The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the most influential book on this subject for me is Betensky, Feeling for the Poor. Although most treatments of the social-problem novel (including Guy's and Betensky's) give liberalism pride of place in their analyses, it is also worth noting two more expansive studies of the ways in which liberals “imagined” the industrial city. See Otter, Chris, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City,” Social History, 27, 1 (Jan. 2002), 1–15Google Scholar; and Joyce, Patrick, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London and New York: Verso, 2003)Google Scholar.
52 Betensky.
53 Bender, Daniel E., American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
54 Betensky.
55 Yochelson, Bonnie and Czitrom, Daniel, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (New York: New Press and W. W. Norton, 2007)Google Scholar.
56 Stange, Maren, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
57 Finnegan, Picturing Poverty.
58 Gandal, Keith, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
59 Particularly good examples are Garver, Thomas, ed., Just before the War: Urban America from 1935–1941 as Seen by Photographers of the Farm Security Administration (The Newport Harbor Museum, 1968)Google Scholar; Lee, Russell, Collier, John Jr., and Delano, Jack, Far from Main Street: Three Photographers in Depression-Era New Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Vachon, John, John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
60 Finnegan. See also Gordon, Linda, Dorothea Lange: A Life (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009)Google Scholar; Mora, Gilles and Brannan, Beverly W., FSA: The American Vision (New York: Abrams, 2006)Google Scholar; and Peeler, David P., Hope among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
61 Historical studies of Cold War propaganda include Ninkovich, Frank, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Hixson, Walter F., Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Lucas, Scott, Freedom's War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Osgood, Kenneth, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
62 By way of example, these offices published their own in-house monthly newsletters (both called Volunteer), which were circulated (in numbers exceeding 100,000) to current and returned volunteers, as well as at recruiting events. Active and former volunteers, as well as Public Affairs staff members, wrote articles for the newsletters, which were formatted by and distributed from headquarters in Washington. See Carey, Robert G., The Peace Corps (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar, 56; and Erwin Knoll and Jules Witcover, “Maximum Feasible Publicity,” Columbia Journalism Review, 5, 3 (Fall 1966), 2. Volunteer experiences were also turned into “monographs” that could be circulated on college campuses. Some of these were published for wide distribution in The Peace Corps Reader (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1968).
63 While the two terms have been used interchangeably by historical actors, scholars have increasingly distinguished public information (education campaigns meant to encourage viewers to change their personal behavior, for example) from propaganda, described by Clayton Lurie as “any organized attempt by an individual, group, or government verbally, visually, or symbolically to persuade the population to adopt its views and repudiate the views of an opposing group.” See Laurie, Clayton D., The Propaganda Warriors: America's Crusade against Nazi Germany (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 6. I do believe that the Great Society's planners wanted Americans to accept their definition of poverty as a remediable condition of underdevelopment and reject a more politically radical argument about structural inequalities inherent to American capitalism. Yet without a fuller sense of just how widely understood those alternative definitions of poverty – and alternative solutions – were, there is little reason to think that War on Poverty and Peace Corps planners would have felt the imperative to inoculate Americans against it. Thus I am hesitant to call this overt propaganda. A recent body of scholarship on the welfare rights movement, as well as Alyosha Goldstein's work on radical alternatives to the War on Poverty, promises to illuminate these questions. See Goldstein, Poverty in Common. On the welfare rights movement see Kornbluh, Felicia, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Orleck, Annelise, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (New York: Beacon Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
64 Surprisingly little historical scholarship has been written about the Advertising Council and its role in US propaganda efforts in the Second World War and the Cold War. One of the few such studies covers the period up until 1960 but incorporates neither the Peace Corps nor the OEO campaigns. See Lykins, Daniel L., From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003)Google Scholar. An industry magazine profiled the organization in celebration of its sixtieth year. See Young, James Webb, “The Story of the Ad Council,” ADWEEK, 43, 24 (10 June 2002)Google Scholar, S4.
65 Who's Who in the Peace Corps Washington, 1963, 66–67, Peace Corps Library, Washington, DC. Moyers's visibility became something of a liability when he was recalled by the President to serve as the White House press secretary, a request that forced him to reluctantly abandon his post at the Peace Corps. After Moyers's transfer, Shriver relied on a string of high-level staff to direct public affairs. See Carey, 55–56.
66 Herbert J. Kramer Oral History, 10 March 1969, 11, Oral History Collection, LBJL.
67 See Cull, Nicholas, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Beyond this impressive narrative, Cull has also explored the role of the film industry in USIA activities in “Auteurs of Ideology: USIA Documentary Film Propaganda in the Kennedy Era as seen in Bruce Herschensohn's The Five Cities of June (1963) and James Blue's The March (1964),” Film History, 10 (1998), 295–310.
68 Carey, 184.
69 See MacCann, Richard Dyer, The People's Films: A Political History of US Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1973), 220–28Google Scholar.
70 Ezickson, Aaron J., ed., The Peace Corps: A Pictorial History (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965)Google Scholar.
71 Office of Economic Opportunity Annual Report, A Nation Aroused (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965); and Office of Economic Opportunity Annual Report, The Quiet Revolution (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967).
72 Office of Economic Opportunity, The Quiet Revolution, 22.
73 Paul Conklin, “Columbia Trainees in Taos,” Prints: Training: Binder Vol. II, Still Pictures, Record Group 490: Records of the Peace Corps, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
74 Crook and Thomas, Warriors for the Poor, 100–01.
75 “VISTA Jerry Hausman – Round Rock, Ariz,” n.d., Box 4, Folder 4A Indians Navajo, Photographs of Vista Volunteers and Programs, 1964–1979, Record Group 362: Records of Agencies for Voluntary Action Programs, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD; Paul Conklin, “Wheat in the school's field is ready for harvesting. Willie Douglas explains the techniques of examining the ripe grain to test its quality,” Ezickson, 97; “Below, in a broomcorn field in San Jon, New Mexico, VISTA Richard Helgeland discusses the problems faced by Navajo Indian laborers,” Crook and Thomas, 99; Folder A-Alaska, Box 1, Photographs of Vista Volunteers and Programs, 1964–1979, Record Group 362: Records of Agencies for Voluntary Action Programs, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA).
76 Paul Conklin, Dominican Republic, in Ezickson, 60.
77 Ezickson, 118.
78 Ezickson, 149.
79 Peace Corps Trainee Handbook, Draft, 22 June 1963, 36–37. Subject files of the Office of the Director of the Peace Corps, Box 2, Folder: Handbook – Draft, Record Group 490: Records of the Peace Corps, NARA.
80 See Gillette, Launching the War on Poverty, 289.
81 A Year towards Tomorrow, dir. Edmond Levy (Sun Dial Films, 1966), Record Group 381: Records of the Community Services Administration, 1963–1981, Moving Images Relating to Anti-Poverty Programs, NARA.
82 The average feature film cost upwards of a million dollars to produce in 1966, but still, for a promotional short, A Year towards Tomorrow's budget was noteworthy. “Taxpayers Finance Costly Films to Help Fight War on Poverty,” Pittsburgh Press, 1 Feb. 1967, 12.
83 “Producer of TV and Movies Dies,” Washington Post, 17 Dec.1981, C18; “Edmond Levy, 69, Documentary Filmmaker,” New York Times, 21 Oct. 1998, C27.
84 The film was advertised as an “extra featurette” with showing times before each of these films. See “Display Ad 155,” Washington Times Herald, 13 June 1967, p. C5; “Display Ad 191,” New York Times, 19 June 1967, 43; advertisement, Yale Daily News, 27 (17 Oct. 1967), 5.
85 A Year Towards Tomorrow.
86 A Year Towards Tomorrow.
87 Spivack, Robert G., “A Touch of Tenderness Shines through,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 10 June 1967, A10Google Scholar.
88 On VISTA training, see Autor, Kent, Report on the Training of the First VISTA Volunteers (North Carolina Fund, 1965)Google Scholar. Peace Corps recruitment and training was very similar and has been well-documented. See Hoffman, Cobbs, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
89 A Year Towards Tomorrow.
90 We do not see any commercial transactions in the film, but it deserves to be noted that the task of organizing buying clubs was one of the many activities that VISTA volunteers spearheaded in the course of urban assignments. Office of Public Affairs, Office of Economic Opportunity, “VISTA Volunteers,” released 18 Jan. 1965, RG 381, Entry 1006, Box 2: CAP Basic Info, NARA.
91 Several news reports of VISTA recruiting events mentioned the screening of A Year towards Tomorrow. See, for example, “VISTA Will Recruit Volunteers Here,” Daytona Beach Morning Herald, 22 Oct. 1967, 12B; “Vista Officials Plan Three Day Drive in Ventura,” Press-Courier (Ventura County, CA), 12 Aug. 1967, 11; “VISTA Volunteers to Come to Atlanta for 6-Day Drive,” Atlanta Daily World, 14 Feb. 1968, 1; and “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, 11 July 1967, 8. The last example advertised an event held at the University of Illinois campus.
92 “VISTA Eye to Eye,” Georgetown University Hoya, 11 May 1967, 6.
93 Spivack, 6.
94 Indeed, Charles Rosner, the advertising executive who came up with the VISTA slogan, became the subject of some punditry in the 2012 US presidential campaign, when Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan used the slogan in his announcement speech. Goodheart, Adam, Manseau, Peter, and Widmer, Ted, “Paul Ryan, Black Panther?” Campaign Stops blog, New York Times, 12 Aug. 2012Google Scholar, available at http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/paul-ryan-black-panther/?_r=0.
95 See Searles, P. David, The Peace Corps Experience: Challenge & Change, 1969–1976 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
