Barely two months after assuming office, President Lyndon B. Johnson made his 1964 State of the Union address to a still-stunned nation mourning the loss of its young president. With his declaration of a "war on poverty," Johnson tried to revive the shaken hopes of a people who, through the energetic appeals of John F. Kennedy '40, had felt themselves on the frontier of a new society.

In August of that year Johnson instituted the first offensive in that war when, in a ceremony on the steps overlooking the White House garden, he signed into law the $950-million anti-poverty bill. In a bright Washington sun that seemed to embody his belief in the possibility of a more just American society, Johnson said that a "new day of opportunity is dawning" for the nation's poor. "The days of the dole in our country are numbered," he promised, and observers seemed to agree. The New York Times reported that the program "would help the poor to lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty and join the majority of Americans in sharing in prosperity."

Some aspects of the anti-poverty program were intended to do just that: by infusing money into self-help projects, the government would enable the impoverished to climb out of the rut and, through hard work, to leave it behind. Included in the attack on poverty was a job-training program for the unemployed, the provision of part-time jobs for teenagers, community anti-poverty projects, loans to low-income farmers and businessmen and a domestic peace corps. An Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was established to coordinate these programs.

But one aspect of OEO's program went further, affording the potential for eliminating the rut altogether. The Legal Services Program, begun in 1965 with offices in only 14 communities, developed over the next decade into a broad-based force for social change, operating out of 900 neighborhood offices and employing over 2500 lawyers. When established groups like the American Bar Association gave their early approval to the program, they were unaware of the implications legal aid for the poor had for the American legal system. They supported a limited program whereby the impoverished would receive free counsel for individual problems such as disputes with landlords, consumer fraud cases and divorce suits.

Only slowly, as the program expanded and its original budget of $24 million tripled by 1974 to $72 million, did conservatives and moderates become aware of the changes being effected as the poor became armed with the legal ammunition necessary to attack the inequities of American society. While legal services lawyers continued to devote most of their time to individual clients' problems, they accelerated the movement of class-action suits argued on behalf of broad groups of citizens. Decisions in favor of these wronged classes, such as racial minorities petitioning for school desegregation, have had a profound impact on members of all classes--many of whom, of course, have not reacted at all positively to these decisions.

In the years when urban ghettos were exploding and the nation's campuses were shaken by student demonstrations, government officials and members of the legal profession came to see storefront lawyers as contributors to social unrest. In 1966 the president of the Tennessee Bar Association was widely applauded at a conference of state bar leaders when he charged that the Legal Service Program "relates to the fomenting of social unrest in this country. They propose to go out and tell people how to carry out rent and consumer strikes and demonstrate against lending institutions. I do not think this is consistent with the principles upon which this country was founded."

With the advent of the Nixon administration, attacks on OEO-funded attorneys took on more threatening forms. In 1970 Assistant Atty. Gen. William Ruckelshaus accused legal services lawyers of filing "politically motivated" lawsuits aimed at embarrassing the Nixon administration. He charged that some of the agencies were using the courts "as a method for confrontation" with the establishment.

In 1972 then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew berated the head of the Legal Service Program over a suit brought by a local agency against the city of Camden, N.J., to halt construction work on a number of urban renewal projects. Agnew criticized the right of poor people to use OEO-paid lawyers to sue elected officials.

As President Nixon announced plans in 1973 for the dismantling of OEO, the consensus in Congress was that the Legal Services Program should be made an independent corporation insulated from political pressures. Amendments were passed to prevent lawyers from legislative lobbying and from litigating in favor of either abortion or school desegration. One measure even prohibited lawyers from rioting or engaging in any civil disturbances.

The real question in the minds of most government officials was just how much independence the corporation's lawyers should have to participate in political activities and to litigate on behalf of controversial social issues. With the termination of OEO set for mid-1974, Congress began discussion in June 1973 on what form the independent corporation should take.

The most strident criticism, however, was directed not at the neighborhood attorneys themselves but at the eighteen legal services back-up centers located throughout the nation. These centers, most of which were established through OEO grants made to selected law schools, were set up to provide specialized research services to aid local units on complex suits. A neighborhood lawyer with a tenant-landlord problem might turn to the National Housing and Economic Development Law Project in Berkeley, Cal.; an attorney working on a welfare case might call up the Center of Social Welfare Policy and Law in New York; an agency serving a migrant worker might look to the Migrant Legal Action Program in Washington, D.C.

Often these research centers merely supply legal material relevant to a particular problem. Just as often, however, the centers become directly involved in class-action suits and provide the crucial legal background for suits as well as the attorneys to argue them in court, frequently taking cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And it is just such activity, resulting in sweeping decisions, that officials in Washington objected to when considering the legal services bill.

One of the more outspoken opponents of the centers was Rep. Edith Green (D-Ore.), a frequent contributor to last year's eleven-hour debate on the bill in the House of Representatives. "When we pass a bill to provide legal aid for the poor," she asked her fellow representatives, "does it mean that we should also finance, using millions of dollars, research centers aimed solely at changing social policy? The Harvard research center actually had attorneys, who were paid with OEO funds, doing the research which led to their joining as co-sponsors with the NAACP in the Detroit segregation case... Meanwhile, Congress is overwhelmingly opposed to busing." Then, finishing with a flourish, Green declared that "these offices have become the cutting edge for social change in this country."

And so, after more than a year of action, when Congress last Friday finally passed a bill creating an independent legal services corporation, an amendment stipulated that none of its budget was to fund back-up centers, thus perhaps eliminating any changes broader than helping a poor person to receive a welfare payment or to obtain a divorce.

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