The Hard Times Never Left

Since Johnson launched the War on Poverty, poor families have benefited from programs started during his presidency, such as Head Start for preschool children and grants for college students, and from later programs that grew out of the initiative, such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children and the earned-income tax credit.

Johnson's initiatives have helped bring about a dramatic reduction of the poverty rate among the elderly. The childhood poverty rate also has declined but has proved more intractable. Since the 1970s, the number of poor families with at least one person working full time has doubled.

For Johnson to win the war, real earnings needed to double from generation to generation, and the economy needed to remain healthy, his planners said. Instead, the nation entered a period of high inflation, followed by industrial restructuring and soaring unemployment, says Sheldon Danziger, a poverty researcher at the University of Michigan.

Today, average wages for production workers are lower in real dollars than they were 40 years ago, Danziger's research shows.

"The War on Poverty hasn't let people down so much as the economy," Danziger says.

Brenda Teets was a year old when Johnson visited Cumberland. Her mother didn't bring her to City Hall to hear the president speak of improving poor schools and retraining workers whose skills were obsolete. Wanda Binnix already knew the kind of wearying poverty he described, the kind Johnson's planners had just begun tomeasure.

Binnix was raised in the western part of Allegany County, one of a coal miner's 14 children. When she was growing up, the mines that had driven the railroads, which in turn had transformed Cumberland into a commercial hub, were closing.

When she was 6, her mother died. Then the Midlothian mine where her father, Edgar Skidmore, worked shut down. Her father had to adapt. "He drove a school bus," she says. "He raised us.

"If you have had a hard raising-up, it sticks in your craw, in your mind," Binnix says. Her grandchildren, she says, have had it easy.

They will never know the feeling of crawling two miles into the ground to work the mine. They haven't had to sleep six to a bed like she and her siblings did. They don't know the taste of groundhog or squirrel.

Binnix found a measure of prosperity during her marriage to Brenda's father, Irvin Morgan. In the 1960s, he worked full time at Celanese, the big synthetic-fiber mill south of the city. He came home with holes burned in his clothes from the vats of chemicals he tended. He also came home with benefits and enough money to support her and their three children.

In Cumberland, many people look back at the '60s, at Johnson's visit, as a time of prosperity.

"This was a wealthy town back then," says the Rev. Daniel G. Taylor Jr., who was among the thousand who greeted Johnson. The factories were running, and unions were strong. Cumberland's Kelly-Springfield Tire Co. plant made tires, and the local Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. plant manufactured windshield glass. More than one-third of the working-age men in the county had manufacturing jobs, and many brought in more than $4,000 a year. Some blue-collar workers -- railroad and paper mill employees, for instance -- were making the county's median income: $5,100.

Then there were the poor: One-fourth of the county's families were living on less than $3,000 a year, which in 1964, became the definition of poverty for a family of four. Nationwide, one-fifth of Americans were living below that line -- the "forgotten fifth," Johnson called them.