On its surface, the United States appeared to be a land of prosperity in the early 1960s. The postwar manufacturing boom had lifted millions into unionized jobs — their ticket into the middle class — and industrial agriculture and new technologies had made food cheaper and more accessible. But as journalist Michael Harrington chronicled at the time in his book The Other America, all was not well.

Coal miners, factory workers, farmers and meatpackers from Appalachia to Chicago were losing their jobs to machines and to the country’s shift toward a service-based economy. These displaced laborers were among the nearly 1 in 5 Americans living in poverty in 1960.

Poverty was worst in “chronically depressed areas and industries” and among “blue-collar workers” and the “long-term jobless,” Harrington wrote. “Between 1958 and 1963, the unemployment rate averaged about 6 percent — low by today’s standards but high enough back then to shake the confidence of midcentury America. And most of those “out of work for better than half a year… were family men with dependent children,“ putting entire families at risk of destitution.

In an era of civil rights protests and social upheaval at home and abroad, Harrington’s book became an unexpected best-seller and helped incite a national debate about inequality and race. President John F. Kennedy, after witnessing extreme penury on a campaign trip to West Virginia, made poverty a key issue for his administration. Then, 50 years ago today, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to declare an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment.”

As he explained in a corresponding plan submitted to Congress in January 1964: