Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Dream of a Great Society
Texas has produced some notable people throughout its rich history, and perhaps the most influential is Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson rose in the political arena to become the Vice President and eventual President of the United States after Kennedy’s assassination. LBJ’s presidency is defined by his aspiration for a Great Society through measures like the Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty. However, Johnson’s Great Society fail because Johnson had no clear direction for Vietnam and he intertwine the War with his Society, dooming both monumental pieces of history.
However, Johnson did have one chief success in his Great Society and that is passing the greatest Civil Rights Act in American history, but he was a part of two significant Civil Rights Acts. In their article, Presidential Leadership of Congressional Civil Rights Voting: The Cases of Eisenhower and Johnson, James D. King and James W. Riddlespger Jr …show more content…
Therefore, Johnson sought to combine many of his antipoverty and anticrime proposals to achieve peace and prosperity through control. Assistant professor of History at Harvard, Elizabeth Hinton, accurately points out in her article, A War within Our Own Boundaries": Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State, when she puts forth, “Born from one of the most idealistic enterprises in the nation’s history, the punitive transformation of domestic urban policy that now overshadows much of the Great Society’s social promise has left as its legacy more crime, more prisons, and more inequality.” (Hinton 13 of 13) The killing of a fifteen-year-old African American boy by officers was the spark which set off the July, 1964 race riot in Harlem, but it was one of only 250 incidents of urban civil
Texas has produced some notable people throughout its rich history, and perhaps the most influential is Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson rose in the political arena to become the Vice President and eventual President of the United States after Kennedy’s assassination. LBJ’s presidency is defined by his aspiration for a Great Society through measures like the Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty. However, Johnson’s Great Society fail because Johnson had no clear direction for Vietnam and he intertwine the War with his Society, dooming both monumental pieces of history.
However, Johnson did have one chief success in his Great Society and that is passing the greatest Civil Rights Act in American history, but he was a part of two significant Civil Rights Acts. In their article, Presidential Leadership of Congressional Civil Rights Voting: The Cases of Eisenhower and Johnson, James D. King and James W. Riddlespger Jr …show more content…
Therefore, Johnson sought to combine many of his antipoverty and anticrime proposals to achieve peace and prosperity through control. Assistant professor of History at Harvard, Elizabeth Hinton, accurately points out in her article, A War within Our Own Boundaries": Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State, when she puts forth, “Born from one of the most idealistic enterprises in the nation’s history, the punitive transformation of domestic urban policy that now overshadows much of the Great Society’s social promise has left as its legacy more crime, more prisons, and more inequality.” (Hinton 13 of 13) The killing of a fifteen-year-old African American boy by officers was the spark which set off the July, 1964 race riot in Harlem, but it was one of only 250 incidents of urban civil