Lessons from the poverty front; OEO didn't solve our urban problems, but it did some things right. Things we should be doing now.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Office of Economic Opportunity

OEO didn't solve our urban problems, but it did some things right. Things we should be doing now.

Twenty-five years ago this month, in a faraway liberal country, a government agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was established by an act of Congress. It survived under that name for one stormy decade, and a remnant of it limped along under a different name (the Community Services Administration) until the first year of the Reagan Administration. The OEO was created to fight the "War on Poverty" that President Lyndon Johnson declared in his 1964 State of the Union address.

For a small and short-lived government agency, the OEO had a tremendous impact on the collective unconscious of American politics, and to some extent it still does. Most people believe that it failed, in an extremely expensive and destructive way; the War on Poverty is thought to have been a cause of the current disastrous conditions in black ghettos and to have nearly bankrupted the country. The "lesson" of the OEO that seems to prevail at the moment is that poverty programs don't work, can't work, and, if they have any effect at all, it's probably to increase poverty.

Yet there is a relatively tiny minority that remembers the OEO fondly, as a kind of high water mark of noble purpose in domestic government. As you read this, hundreds of teary OEO reunions are going on all over the country. Most of those in attendance believe that the OEO did very little wrong, and that the reason the War on Poverty failed was that it was never really fought, mainly because the escalation in Vietnam came along only a few months later and drained away its resources.

You'd have to go back to the days of the Bank of the United States to find so dense a cloud of mythology surrounding a federal agency. The reason it's so difficult to see the OEO clearly is that it directly touched what are probably the two most sensitive nerve endings in the American mind: race relations and the creed of self-reliance. Though it wasn't intended to be, the OEO became the government's principal point of contact with the black ghettos and the black power movement. And it spent tax money to help the able-bodied (or "undeserving") poor. it is extremely difficult to do these things and survive.

But the OEO could have done a better job"specially a better job of surviving. While Johnson was right to declare War on Poverty in his mind, he was wrong to declare it publicly in his first State of the Union...