Poverty: 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.