Progress, Protest & Politics

"I would guess," says Anti-Poverty Director Sargent Shriver of his nine-month-old Office of Economic Opportunity, "that no Federal Government program in peacetime has ever gone so far so fast, or ever zeroed in so well." With $793 million allocated and another $1.5 billion requested, the anti-poverty program has indeed gone a long way in a short time; now, by Shriver's count, it directly affects 1,735,000 people.* How well it has zeroed in is a question that is being debated throughout much of the U.S.

Local incidents have aroused storms of protest. Citizens of Columbus, Ind., were understandably upset last month when eight Job Corpsmen were charged with sodomy after an attack on a 17-year-old fellow corpsman. In Oklahoma City, after an investment of almost $100,000, a Neighborhood Youth Corps was dissolved when local officials failed to receive word from Washington assuring them of financing through the summer; only after the project's 300 boys had been laid off did the Oklahoma City directors learn that a telegram giving them the green light had been sent, through bureaucratic bungling, to Las Vegas, Nev. In St. Petersburg, Fla., the city council last week voted 6 to 1 to request the Job Corps to move its girls' center out of town. The center, planned for 284 girls, had been set in the heart of the city's most genteel hotel district. There were complaints, stoutly denied by Shriver's office, that around the center the girls made too much noise and that some had taken to necking with boys. Also under protest was the $225,000 rent for 18 months paid by the OEO for the Huntington Hotel, which houses the center--$20,000 more than the hotel's estimated sales value.

Much more complicated than such incidents is the furious political fighting in city after city over control of anti-poverty money--and the votes it can influence. Items:

> In Los Angeles, Democratic Mayor Sam Yorty has turned down OEO demands that he accept representatives of minority groups, private welfare agencies and "the poor" on his anti-poverty board, which administers the program. To do so, says Yorty, would be to give nonelected private citizens the power to determine public policy and spend public money. Anti-poverty officials in Washington, who under the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act are authorized to channel federal funds to private groups, are withholding $22 million in funds from Los Angeles.

>In San Francisco, a similar snarl exists between poverty groups and Democratic Mayor John F. Shelley, who asked, regarding demands that he accept representatives of "the poor": "What if they elect a Communist or a criminal?" Last week the OEO announced the approval of $1,800,000 for the Bay City, but the federal funds will not be handed over until there is greater representation of minorities on Shelley's anti-poverty council.

>In Chicago, dissidents charge that the anti-poverty program is but fresh pasture for Mayor Richard Daley's Democratic ward heelers. And Daley indeed keeps an iron hand on his 54-member Committee on Urban Opportunity, channeling most of the $19 million in federal funds committed so far to such "safe" organizations as SHARE (for "Student Help with Adult-Related Enrichment"). As for letting the poor help run the program, Daley bluntly differs with program policy. Says he: "It would be like telling the fellow who cleans up to be the city editor of a newspaper."

>In New York, Harlem's Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell has long ached to get control of the city's $25 million in federal anti-poverty funds, charged this spring that the anti-poverty program was being used to finance "giant fiestas of political patronage." In reply Mayor Robert Wagner, who dominates the program, offered to "expand" its leadership by setting up a 17-member supervising corporation. Two weeks ago, Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller vetoed the corporation on grounds that its charter was so far-reaching that it could "supersede" any state law. New York City officials rushed around desperately trying to devise a solution before the end of the fiscal year, after which the city would have had to win new approval of its allocation. Twenty minutes before the deadline, they announced the creation of a "committee" made up of the same members as the corporation, but requiring no state approval.

>In Austin and in Helena, Texas, conservative Democratic Governor John Connally and Montana's conservative Republican Governor Tim Babcock have rejected Youth Corps projects, which as proposed would have channeled nearly $1,000,000 through the liberal, politically activist National Farmers Union.

With so much money--and potential power--at stake, it is perhaps inevitable that Sargent Shriver's anti-poverty program should experience birth pains. However, the pains seem to be increasing as the delivery proceeds--and if this continues, it seems more than possible that the long-range effectiveness of the program will suffer.

*Key components of the many-faceted program: Project Head Start, which provides pre-school education and medical checkups for poor children; the Job Corps, which offers youths remedial education and job training in camps away from home; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, giving youngsters such training in centers near their homes; the College Work Study Program, which finances part-time jobs for needy students; the Work Experience Program, which creates make-work projects and provides vocational training for unemployed adults; the Adult Basic Education Program, designed to overcome educational deficiencies among adults; VISTA (for Volunteers in Service to America), the domestic peace corps; the Community Action Program, which finances local anti-poverty projects; the Rural Loans Program, which makes available financing and technical advice to low-income farm families.

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