How to wage war.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: History of the War on Poverty - Column

Gee, I wish Newt Gingrich had taught me history when I was in college. Then I wouldn't feel so bad about Verdun or Gallipoli. Those guys, little piglets that they were, loved trench warfare. Who cares if millions were needlessly slaughtered? Hey, they got to play in the mud. (Girls didn't get to 'cause the mud gave them scabies or something.)

This is the status of history today, my friends. And we're not talking Beavis and Butthead do World War I. This disquisition comes from a man employed by one of our country's institutions of higher learning. But since Newt, in this surprise rhetorical move, brought up the importance of history, wars, and the role of gender in both, I'd like to follow suit, but from a slightly different tack.

Oh, don't worry, there will be pigs in my story, too.

In the classic debate about why socialism failed in America--remember that by 1912, more than a thousand socialists held elective office in thirty-three states and 160 cities--the question is whether: (a) socialism remained too poorly organized and ideologically unattractive to the masses to succeed, or (b) the forces of capital were economically and militarily too powerful.

Today we have an updated version of this question, which asks why the War on Poverty failed, leaving the country with a welfare "crisis." In the mainstream media, however, there is only one answer, which closely follows the revisionism of Professor Newt. The Great Society programs of the 1960s failed because they were naive, overly permissive, and created a "culture of dependency."

They failed, we are told, because it is impossible for the federal government, no matter how much it spends, to get people to improve their lot in life. (It is essential to ignore the effects of the GI Bill, one of the largest social-welfare programs in U.S. history, to sustain this argument.)

We hear over and over how programs designed to end poverty had their chance and have unequivocally demonstrated their futility. The War on Poverty as misguided and unmitigated failure--this is a characterization so pervasive, so taken for granted, that it is always the starting point of any news story on welfare and any punditry on the topic. The news media have done nothing to question this version of history, which is being used to justify the further emiseration of poor women and their children.

This is why every American--with the possible exception of the erudite Professor Gingrich--should be required to watch the PBS...