Bringing Development Back Home: The United States and the Global War on Poverty

Venus Bivar’s paper considers French postwar “growth” and asks why it is categorized differently than similar undertakings in the global South. This paper discusses a slightly later moment—the U.S. War on Poverty in the 1960s—and asks how policymakers came to regard fighting poverty at home and encouraging “development” abroad as fundamentally similar endeavors. Rather than describing the erection of a semantic partition, then, it describes the dismantling of one. What were the preconditions and what were the consequences of the merging together of two previously separate categories: domestic poverty and overseas underdevelopment? This paper will argue for the significance of both race and material aspects of U.S. global hegemony in explaining how two separate categories joined each other. In short, it mattered that U.S. Cold War imperatives had created a significant cadre of experts dedicated to the contemplation of poverty abroad at precisely the moment when unprecedented growth within the United States shrunk the pool of experts capable of addressing domestic poverty. And it mattered that poverty, when it re-emerged as a domestic issue in the United States, acquired newly racial overtones, which encouraged the easy translation of thought and policy from the peoples of the global South to those of segregated U.S. cities.