Community Action as Coordination

LBJ formed the Task Force on the War Against Poverty in February of 1964, although he had been working on the poverty program with the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), led by Walter Heller, and the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) the previous two months.^{Footnote 14} Sargent Shriver chaired the task force, which included academic economists and individuals from federal agencies including the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, Labor, and Health, Education, and Welfare.^{Footnote 15} Task force members believed that a federal antipoverty program should coordinate and reorganize existing resources. They argued that poverty was a complex issue, which required a multifaceted solution. “The scope of the poverty problem is broader than is commonly recognized, and its nature is more varied. . . . The causes and sources of poverty are strongly interdependent, and so are the programs required to deal with them.”^{Footnote 16}

The CEA suggested that existing institutions needed to be reorganized and better coordinated to combat poverty. A CEA memo outlined the features of a new “Coordinated Community Action Program,” stating, “We believe that the key element in any realistic attack on poverty would be a proposal which is aimed at specific local areas of poverty; relies on well-organized local initiative, action, and self-help under Federally-approved plans and with Federal support; establishes action programs to evaluate and coordinate existing Federal, State, local and private programs and to test and demonstrate new ones.”^{Footnote 17} The CEA wanted to ensure that “community resources are focussed in a coordinated manner.”^{Footnote 18} The program should “provide a coordinated and flexible approach to the development of the rationale on poverty and to the development of a program which takes into account the varieties of poverty.” Heller viewed existing efforts as “diffuse in their impact.” Community action should be “designed to develop techniques for giving focus, consistency, and continuity into all the programs which bear on a given individual or group living in poverty.”^{Footnote 19} Policymakers argued that a federal program was necessary to better coordinate disparate and disorganized local services.

A February BOB memo clarified the coordination approach. The new program would “initiate in local communities a coordinated ‘package’ or ‘packages’ of existing and newly authorized activities directed against poverty in an extensive way. . . . This approach will make it possible to accomplish major objectives which require bringing together several different programs and sources of funds in a way in which no existing agency could provide.”^{Footnote 20} New CAAs were to cooperate and coordinate with existing institutions—local governments, service organizations, and business and civic groups—to reorient and streamline service delivery. The BOB felt that a federal program would allow localities to borrow successful ideas from one another and diffuse effective strategies for poverty relief. The goal was “not only to help the community immediately concerned, but also to help all communities having similar problems by obtaining valuable information about the causes and remedies of poverty and about the adequacy of existing Federal, State, and local efforts, and by developing, in a careful and planned approach, promising new ideas for attacking poverty, and for bringing together the Federal, State, and local governments in a common effort.”^{Footnote 21} Community action would create a network of social provision, with multiple institutions working cooperatively to address poverty. Since poverty resulted from interdependent forces, its eradication would require a coordinated attack from several fronts.

CAAs adopting the coordination approach would identify gaps in the provision of services and help reorganize social provision. Poor individuals would play an important role on CAA boards and work with local institutions to develop concise diagnoses of poverty problems and sketch out potential solutions for social service organizations. The focus was to be on planning, organization, and management. According to this approach, CAAs would not need to dramatically change or alter existing institutions, but rather to link disparate services to one another and synchronize resources available for poor citizens.

Community Action as Collaboration

Others involved in the CAP’s design envisioned a program that allowed local governments to use insight and knowledge from low-income residents to craft new antipoverty programs and bring new voices into the political process. Although LBJ was not intimately involved in drafting the EOA—he delegated significant authority to the task force—his experiences with the New Deal, particularly the National Youth Administration (NYA) informed this vision of community action. The NYA granted state administrators extensive control, and Johnson’s idea of community action similarly gave significant authority to state and local political elites.^{Footnote 22} As LBJ recalled in his memoirs, community action “was based on one of the oldest ideas of our democracy, as old as the New England town meeting—self-determination at the local level.”^{Footnote 23}

Low-income citizens, with support from Washington, would propose new ideas and voice their concerns to policymakers who possessed the political experience and bureaucratic knowledge to turn ideas into programmatic outcomes. Norbert Schlei, a lawyer from the Kennedy administration who was involved with the task force in 1964, recognized the benefits of citizen knowledge, but understood the necessity for administrative acumen: “I thought the administration of many of these programs required great intelligence and the ability to harmonize a lot of very complex things to administer the efforts of a lot of people and resources. I felt that, whereas maybe a bunch of poor people would have a better insight into where they hurt, they would never be able to successfully administer a large, complex program.”^{Footnote 24} Poor citizens would give policymakers reports from the ground to help them craft new and more appropriate programs. This approach would provide the poor with new training, education, and employment opportunities to “allow the poor to engineer their own paths to affluence.”^{Footnote 25} Schlei viewed collaboration between the poor and local governments as imperative. He recalled, “I ultimately . . . came to accept the view that you really were never going to do anything effective and lasting unless you involved and brought along with you the local governments . . . they would keep undoing it or uprooting unless they were brought in.”^{Footnote 26} In many ways, the collaboration approach sought to incorporate low-income citizens into the political process through institutionalized means.

A group of community organization professionals advocated a similar approach. In 1965, the National Association for Community Development (NACD), an umbrella group of CAAs and antipoverty workers, prepared and distributed a memo to the CAP office in Washington. The paper argued that CAAs worked best when they collaborated with local governments. The NACD contended that CAAs were not the appropriate vehicles to launch direct protest efforts to challenge or overthrow local political establishments. The memo noted, “There is no point in promoting unachievable methods. Protest and direct political action fall within this category. They are certainly needed in all communities, but it is not realistic to expect a community action agency to be the vehicle through which they are achieved.”^{Footnote 27} The NACD argued that CAAs should use institutionalized methods to work with the local political establishment, not mobilize against it.^{Footnote 28}

Even in cases where the relationship between low-income citizens and local government was somewhat contentious or strained, nearly every CAA worked to some extent with local officials. Although the CAP’s funding structure bypassed state and local governments, setting the stage for conflicts over the boundaries of federalism,^{Footnote 29} local governments nonetheless played an important role in the CAP’s administration. Both scholarly analysis and criticism from the political left eventually viewed this close collaboration between local governments and the CAP as a form of cooptation, but the historical evidence shows that it was a central tenet of the program from the outset.

The Mobilization Model of Community Action

In March 1964, Shriver established the Urban Areas Task Force to plan the CAP’s implementation. Some members of this task force developed and specified the idea of “maximum feasible participation” as a means of poverty relief. Jack Conway, Richard Boone, Sanford Kravitz, and Frederick O’R. Hayes became involved during this period, and they brought new ideas about community organization and empowerment into the process.^{Footnote 30} These individuals recognized that local governments could be important allies in the War on Poverty.

Hayes noted that the three met with several mayors and governors prior to the program’s enactment to work on program planning and organization.^{Footnote 31} Conway often referred to the CAP as a “three-legged stool” that would join public officials, private agencies, and low-income citizens together to address poverty.^{Footnote 32} However, this approach recognized the limits of the coordination and collaboration models. Conway and Hayes understood that in some areas, political and economic institutions were entirely unresponsive to the needs of low-income citizens. In those places, the poor needed to dramatically restructure and democratize local institutions to escape poverty. CAAs would allow them to do so.

Conway, a former union organizer who understood the importance of indigenous control and engagement,^{Footnote 33} wrote that “a vital feature of every community action program is the involvement of the poor themselves—the residents of the areas and the members of the groups to be served—in planning, policymaking, and operation of the program.”^{Footnote 34} Participation was to be “meaningful” and “effective” and achieved through “democratic approaches and techniques such as group forums and discussions, nominations, and balloting.”^{Footnote 35} CAAs should provide a venue for low-income citizens to harness their civic power and push back against unresponsive institutions when necessary.

Fred Hayes contended that the poor had become suspicious and resentful of middle-class domination, and “this situation cannot be corrected without extensive participation of the poor in the process of program development and administration.”^{Footnote 36} Hayes outlined an approach that encouraged the poor to take part in the political and decision-making processes of local CAAs.

He envisioned that “individual projects or parts of the program may be carried out by organizations on which the poor are strongly represented,” or that “neighborhood programs and individual projects can be administered by, under the policy direction of, or with the advice of indigenous neighborhood organizations which represent the poor and on which the poor are represented.”^{Footnote 37} Hayes viewed the CAP as a means by which the poor could build the skills necessary to design, lobby for, and implement public programs and become active participants in the political process. John Baker, assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture and task force member, recognized some of the benefits of this approach. “Maximum feasible participation,” he argued, “meant starting with the most downtrodden. It meant that women ought to have an equal say-so with men. It meant that poor black folks ought to have equal say-so with upwardly mobile, upper-middle-class [people]. . . . At the community level, everybody that perceived themselves to have a unique concern or contribution should be geared into the decision-making mechanism.”^{Footnote 38} According to this view, community action would do more than synchronize existing services or provide low-income citizens with a seat at the political table; CAAs instead would dramatically democratize local power structures.

Proponents of the mobilization approach argued that the program should address not only economic poverty, but also political inequality. To restructure economic and political relations, the poor needed to develop their own base of support that would allow them to express their discontent and challenge unresponsive local elites. This approach viewed “conflict between groups as the main battleground” in a war against poverty.^{Footnote 39} Data presented below shows that although relatively few communities adopted this approach, it nonetheless had an outsized influence on the CAP’s development.^{Footnote 40}

To give a better sense of how these models were implemented, it is useful to provide some heuristic examples of CAAs that adopted each approach. My objective here is not to develop a theory that explains the determinants of CAAs’ implementation approaches, but rather to provide a more accurate historical description of how local communities drew upon these different visions as they tackled poverty. The brief histories that follow are what Andrew Bennett and Alexander George refer to as “configurative idiographic” case studies. They provide good descriptions of each implementation strategy, but do not directly cumulate in a generalizable theory of how localities carried out the CAP’s diverse antipoverty objectives.^{Footnote 41}

Coordination in the Arkansas River Valley

The disorganization of social welfare services led ARVAC, which served eight counties in west-central Arkansas along the banks of the Arkansas River, to adopt the coordination approach. The agency was primarily concerned with the “failure of social institutions to provide the services in sufficient quantity and quality to respond to the needs of the poor.”^{Footnote 42} ARVAC wanted to bring the entire community’s resources together in a synchronized attack on poverty: “The ARVAC staff states that a new philosophy is emerging which is that they are getting away from the individual aspect of service to new directions in a group type situation. This has involved ARVAC in more of a coordinating role as well as a role to mobilize other resources.”^{Footnote 43} ARVAC’s primary objective was to build up and streamline social welfare institutions with insights from the local community to better serve the needs of the region’s poor residents.

ARVAC’s leadership recognized that residents would be skeptical of “outsiders” and were unlikely to accept help from federal antipoverty workers. To break down barriers between the CAA and residents, Jo Ann Braddy, a local schoolteacher, launched a pilot project to hire low-income residents—primarily women—as caseworkers. Dora Couch, one of ARVAC’s caseworkers, helped several members of one family locate critical services. She helped Frances Whitworth enroll in adult education classes, where she soon earned her G.E.D. Whitworth then signed up for an OEO-funded practical-nurse training program. With Couch’s help, Whitworth’s two sons were both accepted into the Job Corps. Couch also taught one of Whitworth’s daughters to sew during her weekly in-home visits. The CAA thus served as an effective clearinghouse and referral service for existing and new antipoverty programs. Braddy’s pilot program eventually became an integral component of ARVAC’s approach to attack poverty.^{Footnote 44}

ARVAC established “planning process and coordination procedures which link[ed] services to one another.”^{Footnote 45} The CAA built a network of program advisory committees that included representatives from the poor community. They identified specific problems and developed targeted programs to address them. By drawing upon low-income citizens’ knowledge of poverty, ARVAC increased political and economic leaders’ recognition of poverty’s causes and consequences. The agency developed effective lines of communication among a wide range of community institutions to improve programming and services.^{Footnote 46}

ARVAC operated harmoniously with the community. Public officials were said to participate actively in board discussions alongside poor residents. The CAA’s relations with its affiliate counties were said to be excellent. Agency staff learned valuable skills through its participation in the organization’s administrative structure. The poor were clearly viewed as equals by government officials in the region, and the various factions focused their efforts on programmatic details rather than politics.^{Footnote 47}

Community action generated racial hostility in some communities, particularly when CAAs challenged entrenched structures of inequality and segregation. But this was not the case at ARVAC, even when the agency integrated its programming. As one report pointed out, the agency “integrated its staff and programs, in an area with a strong segregation tradition, without major hostility.”^{Footnote 48} It is unclear from the existing records specifically how the agency successfully navigated the politics of race in the region, but the available evidence indicates that the agency did not generate intense discord.

ARVAC’s programming and its approach to institution-building are prime examples of the coordination approach developed by policymakers in Johnson’s CEA and BOB. The goal of coordinating agencies was to organize, streamline, and deliver services. ARVAC eschewed mobilization in favor of this service-oriented approach.^{Footnote 49}

Collaboration in Philadelphia

The collaboration model sought to provide low-income citizens with an opportunity to use institutionalized modes of engagement to gain a seat at the political table. In Philadelphia, the War on Poverty intersected with ongoing debates about racial inequality and community control. The city’s first attempt to establish a CAA was unsuccessful, as mayor James Tate failed to provide a mechanism for adequate resident participation. With assistance from Sam Evans, an adviser on poverty and racial issues, the city proposed creating a series of neighborhood-based poverty councils that would elect representatives to the Human Services Committee.^{Footnote 50} The revised proposal would establish a new Philadelphia Antipoverty Action Commission (PAAC) that would subsume the duties of several existing poverty and economic development committees and become the primary antipoverty agency. Charles Bowser, an attorney who had worked with the NAACP, would serve as PAAC’s executive director. The plan would create Community Action Councils (CACs) to choose delegates to the PAAC. Community activists charged that the new CACs did not provide sufficient opportunities for citizen involvement, so Tate doubled the number of CACs and allowed the poor to select their own representatives in special poverty elections.^{Footnote 51} Eligible candidates had to be adults living in Philadelphia with incomes below the $3,000 federal poverty line.^{Footnote 52} This represented a bold innovation, as no other city in the country provided low-income citizens with an opportunity to select their own representatives in a direct electoral process.^{Footnote 53}

While the CAC elections in 1965, 1966, and 1967 generated dismal participation rates—turnout was only 2.6, 5.4, and 3.5 percent of eligible voters, respectively—they did help low- income residents, particularly African Americans and women, develop political and civic skills.^{Footnote 54} In the first CAC elections, women made up 61 percent of the candidate and were elected to 73 percent of the seats on the CACs. While men dominated the chairperson positions on the CACS, two-thirds of the representatives elected to the PAAC board, which provided the greatest opportunity to influence local politics, were women.^{Footnote 55}

Despite the low rates of participation, OEO was enthusiastic about the city’s model, and in 1965 disbursed nearly $6 million of funding to support new initiatives, including a Board of Education sponsored preschool program and Leon Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC), an innovative employment program. OIC became one of the most successful and transformative employment programs in Philadelphia. In his analysis of postwar economic development in Philadelphia, Guian McKee argues:

However, community action’s accomplishments in Philadelphia were limited by the city’s traditional political structure and deeply entrenched patronage system.

Tate, Evans, and Bowser retained tight control over PAAC and used it to secure political support. Rather than acquiesce to the CACs, who proposed new programs, the majority of OEO funds went to traditional social service programs. The agency did not fully restructure the city’s social welfare system, though it did improve relations among different agencies and produce tangible results.^{Footnote 57} The city’s machine-oriented political system moderated the activism of social movement groups, who often cooperated with city officials to secure patronage positions.^{Footnote 58}

Low-income Philadelphians were not entirely content with the city’s incremental and service-based approach to poverty relief. Some members of the black community urged a boycott of the 1966 poverty elections and white liberal groups such as Americans for Democratic Action and the Maximum Participation Movement pushed a slate of reform candidates in that year’s poverty elections to give low-income citizens a greater voice. But these efforts could not dislodge the patronage network that Tate, Evans, and Bowser had secured. Greenstone and Peterson contend that the city’s conservative, reform-oriented nature precluded a “participatory political settlement.”^{Footnote 59} Tensions in Philadelphia never erupted into the type of widespread social protest or urban uprisings that would plague cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark.

The way community action unfolded in Philadelphia suggests that the collaboration strategy could provide poor individuals with valuable skills. Despite such gains, the agency could not fully dismantle extant structures of inequality and economic immobility. Judged against the high bar that the War on Poverty’s rhetoric set, Philadelphia’s program was largely considered a failure. It generated only incremental improvements in the city’s social welfare infrastructure through limited education and employment programs. Poor residents’ participation in the agency’s administration, while innovative, was deemed insufficient when political elites co-opted the program and used it a vehicle to deliver political favors. But the collaboration approach to community action did not envision a dramatic restructuring of local economic or political institutions. Instead, this model sought to help low-income citizens develop their civic skills and become more familiar with the political process, in the hopes of bringing marginalized communities into the pluralist fray. Judged against this bar, the program generated positive results. Specific PAAC programs, such as OIC and the agency’s preschool provided critical services. In addition, Philadelphia’s experience with community action provided women and African Americans with valuable political experience, and many of these citizens would later go on to participate in various levels of city politics.^{Footnote 60}

Mobilization in Newark

CAP brought latent social tensions to the fore in some communities. Reflecting upon the small number of locales where CAP ignited tension, OEO Director Sargent Shriver noted:

Jill Quadagno, noting the distinct approach that Newark, New Jersey’s CAA, United Community Corporation (UCC), adopted, wrote, “In a few cities community action went beyond increasing the political participation of the poor to incorporating [a] more radical vision of social change. One such city was Newark, New Jersey.”^{Footnote 62}

Newark elected Hugh Addonizio as mayor in 1962. Following his election, he proclaimed that city hall was open to Newark’s black residents. However, his offer only extended to those willing to abstain from direct action in exchange for patronage positions. While he integrated the police department, the bulk of the city’s political establishment—the City Council and the Board of Education—had only two black members.^{Footnote 63} As low-income citizens sought more from government than petty patronage, they became increasingly frustrated with Addonizio’s administration. As one OEO evaluation noted, the mayor’s administration had “lost sight of the growing needs of the lower income residents in the ghettos.”^{Footnote 64}

The relationship between UCC and Newark’s political establishment was perhaps the most hostile in the nation.^{Footnote 65} Addonizio hoped to use the program to “buy off all political insurgency.”^{Footnote 66} The agency would not use funds to solve problems, but instead “to get people to shut up about them.”^{Footnote 67} The city’s poor community, in conjunction with civil rights groups, viewed Newark’s patronage system as an obstruction to economic and racial equality and believed that UCC should democratize and reform the city’s political structure. UCC engaged in “an all-out attempt to force institutions to change their current practices.”^{Footnote 68} The CAP’s call for “maximum feasible participation” served as a rallying cry for anxious and energetic reformers. Recent work by Kevin Mumford, Julia Rabig, and Mark Krasovic thoroughly documents the clashes between Newark’s low-income citizens and members of the political establishment. Cyril Tyson, who led Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), Harlem’s experiment in community action, came to Newark in 1964 to lead UCC. Tyson developed an area board structure that would elect members to the agency’s board, craft programs, and provide citizens with a venue to develop their political capabilities. Unlike the CACs in Philadelphia, which increasingly came under the control of the political establishment, Tyson ensured that UCC’s area boards were autonomous and controlled by residents.^{Footnote 69} The boards launched marginalized citizens, particularly black women, into political and social activism. These individuals understood neighborhood needs and helped secure funding for education and recreation programs.^{Footnote 70}

With support from Tyson, Newark’s poor residents took up the CAP’s call for “maximum feasible participation,” only to confront a recalcitrant and antagonistic political establishment.

Newark’s urban core was crumbling and the city’s antipoverty programs were underfunded and disorganized. A summer camp for low-income youth received inadequate equipment and funded field trips that were so disorganized and resource-starved that “no refreshments or food was furnished and usually the youths returned from the trips hungry, disappointed, and at times in tears.”^{Footnote 71} In what seems like an attempt to force poor black residents out of Newark, the city tried to use Model Cities funds to demolish 150 acres of low-income housing to build a medical and dental college. This was directly antagonistic to the program’s goal, which provided federal assistance to improve physical environments, increase the housing supply for poor residents, and establish social and educational services.^{Footnote 72} The mayor’s decision pushed the city’s poor residents further toward mobilization and demonstration.

Addonizio, along with some members of Newark’s city council, particularly Lee Bernstein from the Weequahic neighborhood, depicted community action as a disjointed mess of frustrated poor residents. Using coded racial language, “they encouraged white constituents to equate area boards with slums, slums with the influx of black residents into formerly white neighborhoods, and all of it with plummeting housing values.”^{Footnote 73} City hall’s resistance to black progress led residents to become more involved in radical forms of activism, particularly black nationalism. A constellation of factors, including Newark’s location between two major cities with large black nationalist movements and its reputation for volatility, spurred the development of the city’s radical activist groups.^{Footnote 74} Such groups aimed to organize a black governing coalition to control the city’s political machinery without interference from white political elites. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) forged a coalition with the city’s civil rights groups. In response to the city’s attempt to raze poor neighborhoods, a coalition of social-action groups seized control of UCC.^{Footnote 75}

Tension in the city reached a boiling point and protests erupted on July 12, 1967, when police arrested John Smith, a black cab driver for a traffic violation.^{Footnote 76} Residents in a nearby housing project witnessed police drag Smith into the local police station. Fellow taxi drivers began broadcasting that Smith had been arrested and was being beaten by police. Quadagno notes that a UCC board meeting was interrupted by a phone call alerting UCC members of the situation. CAA leaders immediately headed to the police station as Smith was taken from the precinct to a nearby hospital.^{Footnote 77}

Within an hour of the incident, a crowd of 150 had descended upon the precinct. Local civil rights leaders urged citizens to remain calm and orderly, and began organizing a march toward city hall. Nonetheless, disorder erupted when a rock was hurled from the crowd and a young man threw a fire bomb.^{Footnote 78} Within minutes, a full-scale riot had broken out. Over the next five days, Newark experienced looting, arson, and murder. By the time the chaos ended, twenty-five people had died and the city experienced over $10 million in damages.^{Footnote 79} Police charged that UCC used sound trucks to agitate protestors and printed and distributed flyers that promoted protest activities and increased tensions. Official evaluations suggest that UCC’s role in the protests was unclear, but OEO nonetheless charged that the CAA’s central planning and administrative activities were disorganized or nonexistent. OEO then placed UCC under direct supervision.^{Footnote 80}

In the aftermath of the unrest, the Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder highlighted UCC’s positive role in the city’s antipoverty infrastructure. The report noted that the agency provided a stabilizing force in the city and its affiliated programs employed approximately one thousand people and provided job training for nearly one-third of the city’s unemployed residents.^{Footnote 81} Residents felt that UCC, despite its somewhat limited programmatic results, nonetheless hastened a dramatic shift in the city’s political and economic structures.^{Footnote 82}

Potential Biases and Shortcomings of Dataset

While this is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive compilation of CAA implementation approaches from this period, there are still shortcomings that should be addressed. First, the nearly one hundred CAAs in this dataset represent less than 10 percent of all CAAs in existence at the time. It is thus possible that the conclusions drawn from such a small sample are not wholly representative.

Second, although the largest source of data is the Yankelovich study, which sampled CAAs in a systematic and representative manner, many studies did not choose CAAs randomly or intend to produce a representative picture of the universe of CAAs, which introduces the potential for bias in the data. For example, OEO’s local initiative study may have chosen agencies that it knew were successful. However, the CAAs included in OEO’s reports did sometimes cause conflict, which would suggest that these reports paint a realistic picture of how CAAs implemented their programs during this period. Conversely, as noted above, much of the early secondary literature was highly critical of the CAP, and given the focus in the secondary literature—both old and new—on high-profile mobilizing agencies, it is possible that the dataset over represents this model of implementation.

Despite these shortcomings, this dataset represents the most complete picture of the CAP’s implementation to date, and should be of wide interest to scholars of the War on Poverty. Subsequent research could augment this data with demographic, political, and economic information to generate additional insights about the determinants of implementation strategies. My hope is that this dataset will be open to expansion and revision by scholars interested in the CAP and the broader War on Poverty to produce systematic and rigorous analyses of the program’s history.

Coding CAA Implementation Strategies

Drawing on the multiple visions of community action, I identified a series of organizational characteristics for each implementation strategy, which are described in Table 1. I reviewed the available data to determine how closely each CAA’s operations matched the characteristics of each strategy, and coded each agency accordingly. The categorization scheme outlined above represents a set of ideal types. Unsurprisingly, when individual agencies carried out the War on Poverty’s broad objectives, they often borrowed strategies and tactics from each model of community action. Thus, many agencies appear in the dataset as hybrid agencies that do not fit neatly into one category.

Table 1.

CAA Organizational Characteristics by Implementation Strategy

Echoing the CAP’s call for experimentation, communities attacked entrenched poverty in diverse ways depending upon local conditions and circumstances. Table 2 shows the percentage of CAAs that adopted each of the implementation approaches, as well as agencies that borrowed from multiple strategies.

Table 2.

Percentage of CAAs Adopting Each Implementation Strategy

The data shows that implementation strategies varied widely, even within states. Shriver’s authority over how funds were distributed within states allowed CAAs in the same state to adopt different implementation tactics to match local circumstances. This buttresses Bailey and Duquette’s quantitative analysis by highlighting that conditions on the ground, not political considerations, influenced how administrators waged the War on Poverty.^{Footnote 95} Most CAAs adopted either the coordination, collaboration, or a hybrid approach, but no single approach constitutes a majority, which highlights the program’s flexible and experimental nature. Perhaps the most significant finding is the relatively low frequency of mobilizing CAAs, at just over 12 percent of the sample. This frequency does seem high for any American social program, as it is difficult to think of a comparable program that disbursed federal funds in support of political or social mobilization. However, given the focus in the scholarship on high profile, dramatic, and sometimes volatile agencies, the data suggests that such CAAs were a significant minority of all agencies, which points to an important bias in the extant literature on the CAP. A more comprehensive analysis of the CAP needs to pay closer attention to more typical organizations who utilized less confrontational approaches. Given their predominance across the institutional landscape, we must give such agencies more attention to more systematically map the contours of the War on Poverty.^{Footnote 96} Even though there were relatively few mobilization-oriented CAAs, critics nonetheless took advantage of the few areas where disorder did occur in the summer of 1967, which led to dramatic changes in the CAP’s administrative structure.