John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society were to of the most comprehensive social policy agendas since the New Deal. They sought to solve a number of the problems from poverty and unemployment to discrimination and the Space Race. While they varied in their approaches to these and other issues and the amount success they had at dealing with those issues, both programs played an important role in shaping American public policy. The United States is what it is today in part thanks to these two programs.
The New Frontier was a term used by President Kennedy in his 1960 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention where he was chosen the Democratic Presidential nominee. The term has come to refer to policies of the Kennedy administration at home and abroad. Probably the most memorable domestic accomplishment to come out of the New Frontier was Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon in the decade of the 1960s. Although he did not live to see it, he made the space program a national priority and set the policy in place that his successors carried out.
One of the economic accomplishments of the New Frontier was the passing of a series of amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1961. Among other things, these amendments raised the minimum wage from $1/hour to $1.25/hour and gave the government more power to regulate wages and labor standards for larger businesses. Other economic accomplishments included the reduction of tariffs in trade with foreign countries and the ratification of legislation designed to create more affordable housing and reduce unemployment.
Other attempts at reform were not as successful. Although Kennedy proposed legislation that would have dealt with the need for affordable medical care and other legislation that would have granted equal rights to minorities, these pieces of legislation were never ratified by Congress during his administration. Johnson’s Great Society, however, was successful in passing legislation that dealt with these important issues.
The Great Society accomplished many of the things that the New Frontier had tried to do and successfully passed many important pieces of legislation that created new social programs and agencies to administer them. These include many that will familiar to Americans today like Medicare, Medicaid, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and The Department of Transportation. The Great Society also saw the passing of the numerous environmental regulations and the Civil Rights Act & Voting Rights Act that ensured that minorities were afforded the same rights as everyone else in American society.
Although the Great Society failed miserably in its goal of eliminating poverty, it did create many of the programs and services that Americans take for granted today. That is why it was probably the more successful of the two programs. No doubt Kennedy would have accomplished most if not all of the same things if he had lived longer, but he did not. It was therefore left to Johnson to bring many of Kennedy’s ideas to fruition while implementing some reforms of his own.
