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of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson's logical extension of the New Deal (which from the time it was first proposed by FDR was denounced by the Republicans as "Communism").
A low-income person myself, I finished college only because LBJ resurrected the GI Bill for Vietnam-era vets. My supplements were Work-Study Grants (remember those and the jobs they provided?) and NDEA (National Defense Education Act) student loans. Even so, money was always a problem, and over the years I attended several schools; where I finally got my degree -- Washington state -- the grants you describe were called simply "Basic Grants" or BGs (if I remember correctly) and (this I am absolutely certain about) were reserved exclusively for racial/ethnic minorities and women. State policy -- not federal -- was that no Caucasian males however impoverished need apply: feminists in the years I finished college (1970s) and well into the 1980s demanded the elimination of all social services to white males, arguing that such expenditures merely intensified economic discrimination against women and minorities -- a classic example of a socioeconomic argument that is theoretically sound but (entirely because of the bourgeoisie's vindictive refusal to acknowledge the reality of class warfare) became infinitely vicious in its application.
As soon as Nixon took office, he began slashing educational aid in general (and particularly aid to military veterans), and by 1973, people like myself were being forced out of college willy-nilly.
Apropos LBJ, in the realm of domestic policy he was by far the most radically progressive president in U.S. history. I have always believed -- and as more of the evidence leaks out, there is increasing evidence to support this conclusion -- that the ever-fascist capitalist oligarchy retaliated for this radicalism by forcing Johnson to escalate in Vietnam: falsifying the threat and threatening, at the very least, to denounce him as a "Communist sympathizer" and "fellow traveler" (common slanders of the era) if he did not respond as they wanted. No doubt further goaded by the example of President Kennedy's assassination -- JFK had begun to withdraw from Vietnam -- LBJ complied with the oligarchy's demands. The rest is history.
The Republican Party -- the mouthpiece of the corporate oligarchy since the 19th Century -- was of course at the center of all of this. Fiercely pro-Nazi and pro-fascist during the years before World War II, it had fanatically supported Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, just as from World War II onward it supported rabid "anti-Communism" (which included vicious attacks on the Democratic Party, the New Deal, the Great Society and the concept of government social services in any form). In short, you're absolutely right about the Republican stance on these issues: unchanged throughout most of its history. The Bush Administration and its policies -- outsourcing, downsizing, forcible reduction of wages, pension-looting, further methodical destruction of the social safety net, deliberate conversion of the few remaining social services into profit-centers for the corporate oligarchy -- all this is the fulfillment of a long-time corporate/Republican dream: its restoration of capitalism's tyrannosauric savagery the ultimate achievement of U.S. Big Business.
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