<P> Conservative Research Fellow at the Independent Institute James L. Payne followed this line of thinking when he wrote that "the war on poverty was a costly, tragic mistake (because)... abolishing poverty did not seem far - fetched to the activists...(and) it was a perspective that led to intolerance...The simple economic theory of poverty led to a single underlying principle for welfare programs...In adopting the handout approach for their programs, the war - on - poverty activists failed to notice--or failed to care--that they were ignoring over a century of theory and experience in the social welfare field...The war - on - poverty activists not only ignored the lessons of the past on the subject of handouts; they also ignored their own experience with the poor ." </P> <P> Thomas Sowell also criticized the War on Poverty's programs, writing "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life ." </P> <P> Others took a different tack . In 1967, in his book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King "criticized Johnson's War on Poverty for being too piecemeal", saying that programs created under the "war on poverty" such as "housing programs, job training and family counseling" all had "a fatal disadvantage (because) the programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis...(and noted that) at no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived ." In his speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New City, King connected the war in Vietnam with the "war on poverty": </P> <P> There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America . A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle . It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor--both black and white--through the poverty program . There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings . Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube . So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such . Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home . </P>

By 1967 the reaction against the war on poverty resulted in