In many respects it was. Lyndon Johnson's program picked up where John Kennedy's New Frontier had ended. Among the many programs which he instituted were the War on Poverty to end suffering of Americans. Among its more successful programs was the Job Corps to help unemployed inner city young people find work, Project Head Start for disadvantaged pre-schoolers, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, and the Community Action Program, which helped direct aid to poor neighborhoods. Although technically not part of the Great Society Program, Lyndon Johnson was also instrumental in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination in places of public accommodation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended literacy tests in areas where less than half the eligible voters had actually voted. Other programs were Medicare and Medicaid, and creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
All this of course had a cost. Johnson's policy, like many other Democratic presidents, was a Keynesian policy of massive government spending. His expenditures were so massive, however that the country experienced high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. This was a situation which economists had never seen before, so they were forced to develop a new name for it: stagflation.
