five-year plan envisaged a massive, nationwide community-action strategy with programs in both urban slums and rural depressed areas and a total budget of $3.5 billion. In the new climate, the Administration asked for just half of that figure, or $1.75 billion, and Congress finally appropriated even less: $1.625 billion.The money that was intended to go to these social programs was diverted to the war in Vietnam. According to Hodgson, "In the whole of the fiscal year that had just ended, the fighting of the war in Southeast Asia had cost $100 million. In May, (of 1965) the Administration had asked for $700 million more. The August and January requests between them came to more than $14 billion."With the removal of funding for social programs that garnished support for the liberal consensus, fragmentation began.The second issue that stems from the Vietnam War is that it diverted attention from the problems of civil rights in the United States. These are questions that were important in the minds of Americans. Hodgson writes, "How is it', John Doar was asked from the floor of at the orientation session in Ohio, that the government can protect the Vietnamese from the Viet Cong, and the same government will not accept the moral responsibility of protecting the people in Mississippi?" This lack of attention fueled the fragmentation of the civil rights movement into more radical and aggressive forms. One of its most visible and important aspects of the fracturing of the civil rights movement took form in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, otherwise known as the Black Panther Party. Stokely Carmichael marks the feelings of part of America in reaction to the rise of fragmented civil rights groups such as the Black Panthers when he writes, "as for white America, perhaps it can stop crying out against black supremacy,' black nationalism,' racism in reverse,' and begin facing reality."While we now have an understanding of how the fr...
