398 ChaPter^8
receive benefits for which they were eligible. Such efforts soon faded as the
local police “red squad” harassed the tenants’ unions as subversive, and the
aims of the welfare mothers were not wholly compatible with those of stu-
dents trying to apply intellectual theories to poor people on the West side of
Cleveland. Although the Cleveland project would last 2-and a half years, and
others would work on the Newark, New Jersey program for 3 years, SDS
folded its efforts in 1965, in principal measure because it was devoting itself
to ending the war in Vietnam. But just as importantly, the liberal elite saw
participatory democracy as “a problem if not a danger.” For those who had
power, citizens were supposed to vote and then step aside, so SDS’s program
of empowerment might lead to people demanding more changes and account-
ability, and the elite would never accept that. Eventually, SDS imploded too,
with a few more radical members, like Ayers, leaving the group to form a
more militant wing, The Weathermen, which called for armed resistance,
bombed buildings, and never really made an impact on U.S. politics.Making a Great Society
The power elite, however, did realize that changes were necessary to address
the problems in American life so that more “radical” alternatives like the par-
ticipatory democracy that SDS promoted could be prevented. Thus Presidents
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson undertook a major project to create
a Great Society, a nation in which poverty, racial inequality, and other injus-
tices would be fixed. This was corporate liberalism in action–identifying a
problem similar to the way that young activists [like SDS] did, but seeking
solutions that would maintain stability and their power status and avoid more
democracy. One of the most pressing problems identified by Kennedy, and
then Johnson, was economic distress, and this would lead to a war on poverty
by the government. For the most part, Americans lived quite well and were
still prospering from the post- World War II economic success. The American
economy grew strongly throughout the 1960s and corporate profits soared by
88 percent; unemployment remained low and family incomes went up nearly
25 percent, while inflation remained very low. The U.S. maintained its global
economic power, and controlled over 25 percent of the world’s trade. Yet these
numbers only told part of the story of American life, for about one- quarter
of the country, 40 million or so–did not have adequate food, housing, or