Votes From Texas example essay topic

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born near Johnson City in southwestern Texas on August 27, 1908. He wasn t born to a rich family, so he attended public schools in Blanco Country, Texas, and graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924. For the first year after college, Johnson taught public speaking and debate in a Houston high school. In 1931, Johnson campaigned for Richard M. Kleberg and was rewarded with an appointment as the new congressman's secretary. During his four years as a congressional secretary, he met Claudia Alta Taylor, a young woman from Texas known to her family and friends as 'Lady Bird', who later became Johnson's wife in 1934.

In 1935, he spent one year at Georgetown Law School, and in August, and became Texas administrator of the National Youth Administration. He served in the navy as a lieutenant commander during World War II, and he had six terms in the House. Later he became a Senator gaining a nickname 'Landslide Lyndon' because he got tremendously many votes from Texas, which is his home state. He was asked to run for the Vice Presidency during John F. Kennedy's presidency. When JFK was assassinated LBJ took the oath of office aboard the presidential plane, Air Force One, at Dallas Love Field about 112 hours after Kennedy died. After he took the role of president, he promised he would keep the policies that Kennedy was promoting, and he made his own program called the 'Great Society'.

During his inauguration, he said, 'In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write. ' The Great Society became Johnson's agenda for Congress in January 1965: aid to education, attack on disease, Medicare, urban renewal, beautification, conservation, development of depressed regions, a wide-scale fight against poverty, control prevention of crime and delinquency, and removal of obstacles to the right to vote.

Because he felt the poverty while he was growing up in Texas, he focused on making a better world with money. The most important parts of the Great Society were Medicare and the War on Poverty and the right to vote. The Medicare program, which Congress approved in 1965, was a first step toward creating the system of national health insurance that liberals had been advocating since World War II. It provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans; and it overcame the bitter resistance tot he idea of 'socialized medicine' by making its benefits available to everyone over sixty-five, regardless of need, and by linking payments to the existing private insurance system.

The War on Poverty was the attempt of LBJ to break the cycle of poverty affecting nearly 35 million Americans. So many organizations helped the unemployed and blacks get new jobs escaping from the poverty, and also put youths into education. Besides, the 1964 Act forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed illiteracy tests which was the attempt to exclude black voters.

The Third Civil Rights Act in 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Indians on reservations. Johnson!