O n November 27, 1963, Lyndon Johnson delivered his first address to Congress as president. In one of the greatest speeches of his career, he invoked the legacy of the recently slain John F. Kennedy in calling for a new era of social improvement led by a progressive federal government. Kennedy, he noted, had stood at the same podium only a few years earlier and "told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‛in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But,’ he said, ‛let us begin.’ Today in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue."

And so began the most active period of federal policy-making since the New Deal. The Great Society, in which hundreds of pieces of legislation, from the Civil Rights Act to the National Endowment for the Arts to the National Water Commission, passed from Congress to the president’s pen in just five years. Much of the best-known legislation, particularly that which applied to social policy, was grouped under the umbrella designation of "The War on Poverty," in which millions went to education, housing, job training, and health care. Johnson’s intention was in some ways a conservative one: Like his hero Franklin Roosevelt, he built his social vision around giving a "hand up," not a "hand out." In a 1964 special address to Congress, he explained that his anti-poverty efforts would "help [recipients] support their families in dignity while preparing themselves for new work." Out of the initial legislation’s six titles, the vast majority of the funding went to just two of them, one for job-training and one to establish community action programs, through which educational, legal, and child-health care resources would be funneled.

But within five years, the optimism of that era was gone. By the summer of 1968, Johnson had withdrawn from his reelection campaign, and Republicans were gleefully attacking liberal activism for the rising crime rates and urban unrest of the 1960s. In the stagflation-plagued decade that followed, conservatives blamed the War on Poverty for a raft of society’s ills–unemployment, crime, drug-dealing–that were primarily the result of changes in the American economy, Republican monetary policy, and long-entrenched welfare programs that had nothing to do with LBJ’s efforts. Nevertheless, "Blame the Great Society" quickly became a key part of the GOP’s rhetorical arsenal; recall Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that "the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won."

In time, this became not just a Republican talking point, but the conventional wisdom. By 1978, Jimmy Carter was declaring that "government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Not all liberals believe this today, but it’s a fair bet that many lean closer to Carter than to LBJ. As columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. wrote recently, "Democrats have lost enormous ground by allowing a myth to take hold that Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society was a failure."

Nevertheless, received wisdom is not always wisdom itself. In fact, by many metrics, the Great Society was a ringing success. Environmental regulations such as the Clean Water Restoration Act caused a steady decline in pollution levels still going on today. Head Start and other education programs gave millions of poor children a leg up in school, while Medicare, Medicaid, and increased Social Security benefits reduced poverty rates among the elderly from 28 percent in 1965 to 11 percent in 1996.

Looking back from 2007, these all seem like so many debating points. And yet how we act today–as individuals and as a society–is largely determined by how we understand the lessons of yesterday. Too many Americans still shrink at the thought of national health insurance, for example, because they have been raised to see such efforts as hubristic retreads of government overreach. But given the challenges America faces at home and abroad, rarely has the case for concerted, activist government efforts been stronger. The decay of public infrastructure, the growing wealth gap, and the collapsing health care system are all examples of the market’s failure to respond to its own externalities. If liberal policymakers are to succeed in preparing the country for these challenges, they must be able to see Johnson’s November 1963 speech not as the onset of a misadventure but as an inspiration.

The first step in unraveling the enigma of the Great Society is to ask what, precisely, we mean by the term. To many contemporary pundits, it is a graveyard of unsuccessful antipoverty programs. But, to adapt the terminology of one of those critics, they are defining the Great Society down; it was so much more than that. It included the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which expanded college loan programs), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as moral triumphs like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. The list of Great Society targets included product safety, the arts, water pollution, and truth in packaging, among literally hundreds of others. Few would call these efforts failures, and yet they are a direct result of Johnson’s activist vision.