In his significantly titled “The Affluent Society” (1958) Professor J. K. Galbraith states that poverty in this country is no longer “a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought.” Dr. Galbraith is a humane critic of the American capitalist system, and he is generously indignant about the continued existence of even this nonmassive and afterthoughtish poverty. But the interesting thing about his pronouncement, aside from the fact that it is inaccurate, is that it was generally accepted as obvious. For a long time now, almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and—more important—the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.
Dr. Galbraith states that our poor have dwindled to two hard-core categories. One is the “insular poverty” of those who live in the rural South or in depressed areas like West Virginia. The other category is “case poverty,” which he says is “commonly and properly related to [such] characteristics of the individuals so afflicted [as] mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of modern economic life, excessive procreation, alcohol, insufficient education.” He reasons that such poverty must be due to individual defects, since “nearly everyone else has mastered his environment; this proves that it is not intractable.” Without pressing the similarity of this concept to the “Social Darwinism” whose fallacies Dr. Galbraith easily disposes of elsewhere in his book, one may observe that most of these characteristics are as much the result of poverty as its cause.
Dr. Galbraith’s error is understandable, and common. Last April the newspapers reported some exhilarating statistics in a Department of Commerce study: the average family income increased from $2,340 in 1929 to $7,020 in 1961. (These figures are calculated in current dollars, as are all the others I shall cite.) But the papers did not report the fine type, so to speak, which showed that almost all the recent gain was made by families with incomes of over $7,500, and that the rate at which poverty is being eliminated has slowed down alarmingly since 1953. Only the specialists and the statisticians read the fine type, which is why illusions continue to exist about American poverty.
Now Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker and the Fund for the Republic who is at present a contributing editor of Dissent and the chief editor of the Socialist Party biweekly, New America, has written “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” (Macmillan). In the admirably short space of under two hundred pages, he outlines the problem, describes in imaginative detail what it means to be poor in this country today, summarizes the findings of recent studies by economists and sociologists, and analyzes the reasons for the persistence of mass poverty in the midst of general prosperity. It is an excellent book—and a most important one.
My only serious criticism is that Mr. Harrington has popularized the treatment a bit too much. Not in the writing, which is on a decent level, but in a certain vagueness. There are no index, no bibliography, no reference footnotes. In our overspecialized culture, books like this tend to fall into two categories: Popular (no scholarly “apparatus”) and Academic (too much). I favor something intermediate—why should the academics have all the footnotes? The lack of references means that the book is of limited use to future researchers and writers. A pity, since the author has brought together a great range of material.
I must also object that Mr. Harrington’s treatment of statistics is more than a little impressionistic. His appendix, which he calls a coming to grips with the professional material, doesn’t live up to its billing. “If my interpretation is bleak and grim,” he writes, “and even if it overstates the case slightly, that is intentional. My moral point of departure is a sense of outrage. . . . .In such a discussion it is inevitable that one gets mixed up with dry, graceless, technical matters. That should not conceal the crucial fact that these numbers represent people and that any tendency toward understatement is an intellectual way of acquiescing in suffering.” But a fact is a fact, and Mr. Harrington confuses the issue when he writes that “these numbers represent people.” They do—and one virtue of his book is that he never forgets it—but in dealing with statistics, this truism must be firmly repressed lest one begin to think from the heart rather than from the head, as he seems to do when he charges those statisticians who “understate” the numbers of the poor with having found “an intellectual way of acquiescing in suffering.” This is moral bullying, and it reminds me, toutes proportions gardées, of the habitual confusion in Communist thinking between facts and political inferences from them. “A sense of outrage” is proper for a “moral point of departure,” but statistics are the appropriate factual point of departure, as in the writings of Marx and Engels on the agony of the nineteenth-century English working class—writings that are by no means lacking in a sense of moral outrage, either.
These objections, however, do not affect Mr. Harrington’s two main contentions: that mass poverty still exists in the United States, and that it is disappearing more slowly than is commonly thought. Two recent dry, graceless, and technical reports bear him out. One is that Commerce Department study, already mentioned. More important is “Poverty and Deprivation in the U.S.,” a bulky pamphlet issued by the Conference on Economic Progress, in Washington, whose national committee includes Thurman Arnold, Leon H. Keyserling (said to be the principal author of the pamphlet), and Walter P. Reuther.
In the last year we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip van Winkle, to the fact that mass poverty persists, and that it is one of our two gravest social problems. (The other is related: While only eleven per cent of our population is non-white, twenty-five per cent of our poor are.) Two other current books confirm Mr. Harrington’s thesis: “Wealth and Power in America” (Praeger), by Dr. Gabriel Kolko, a social historian who has recently been at Harvard and the University of Melbourne, Australia, and “Income and Welfare in the United States” (McGraw-Hill), compiled by an imposing battery of four socio-economists headed by Dr. James N. Morgan, who rejoices in the title of Program Director of the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Kolko’s book resembles Mr. Harrington’s in several ways: It is short, it is based on earlier studies, and it is liberally inclined. It is less readable, because it is written in an academic jargon that is merely a vehicle for the clinching Statistic. Although it is impossible to write seriously about poverty without a copious use of statistics—as this review will demonstrate—it is possible to bring thought and feeling to bear on such raw material. Mr. Harrington does this more successfully than Dr. Kolko, whose prose is afflicted not only with academic blight but also with creeping ideology. Dr. Kolko leans so far to the socialist side that he sometimes falls on his nose, as when he clinches the inequality of wealth in the United States with a statistic: “In 1959, 23% of those earning less than $1,000 [a year] owned a car, compared to 95% of those earning more than $10,000.” The real point is just the opposite, as any citizen of Iran, Ghana, Yemen, or the U.S.S.R. would appreciate—not that the rich have cars but that almost a quarter of the extremely poor do. Similarly, although Dr. Kolko has two chapters on poverty that confirm Mr. Harrington’s argument, his main point is a different and more vulnerable one: “The basic distribution of income and wealth in the United States is essentially the same now as it was in 1939, or even 1910.” This is a half fact. The rich are almost as rich as ever and the poor are even poorer, in the percentage of the national income they receive. Yet, as will become apparent later, there have been major changes in the distribution of wealth, and there has been a general improvement in living standards, so that the poor are much fewer today than they were in 1939. “Most low-income groups live substantially better today,” Dr. Kolko admits. “But even though their real wages have mounted, their percentage of the national income has not changed.” That in the last half century the rich have kept their riches and the poor their poverty is indeed a scandal. But it is theoretically possible, assuming enough general increase in wealth, that the relatively poor might by now have achieved a decent standard of living, no matter how inferior to that of the rich. As the books under consideration show, however, this theoretical possibility has not been realized. Inequality of wealth is not necessarily a major social problem per se. Poverty is. The late French philosopher Charles Pguy remarks, in his classic essay on poverty, “The duty of tearing the destitute from their destitution and the duty of distributing goods equitably are not of the same order. The first is an urgent duty, the second is a duty of convenience. . . . When all men are provided with the necessities what do we care about the distribution of luxury?” What indeed? Envy and emulation are the motives—and not very good ones—for the equalization of wealth. The problem of poverty goes much deeper.
“Income and Welfare in the United States” differs from the other works reviewed here in length (531 big pages) and in being the result of original research; 2,800 families were interviewed “in depth.” I must confess that, aside from a few interesting bits of data, I got almost nothing out of it. I assume the authors think poverty is still an important social problem, else why would they have gone to all this labor, but I’m not at all sure what their general conclusions are; maybe there aren’t supposed to be any, in the best tradition of American scholarship. Their book is one of those behemoths of collective research financed by a foundation (in this case, largely by Ford) that daunt the stoutest-hearted lay reader (in this case, me). Based on “a multi-stage area probability sample that gives equal chance of selection to all non-institutional dwelling units in the conterminous United States [and that] was clustered geographically at each stage and stratified with interlaced controls,” it is a specimen of what Charles Lamb called biblia abiblia—things that have the outward appearance of books but are not books, since they cannot be read. Methodologically, it employs something called the “multivariate analysis,” which is explained in Appendix E. Typographically, Appendix E looks like language, but it turns out to be strewn with booby traps, all doubtless well known in the trade, like “dummy variables,” “F ratios,” “regression coefficients,” “beta coefficients” (and “partial beta coefficients”), and two kinds of “standard deviations”—“of explanatory variable A” and “of the dependent variable.”
My experience with such works may be summarized as follows: (alpha) the coefficient of comprehensibility decreases in direct ratio to the increase in length, or the longer the incomprehensibler, a notion that is illustrated here by the fact that Dr. Kolko’s short work is more understandable than Dr. Morgan et al.’s long one; (beta) the standard deviation from truism is inversely related to the magnitude of the generalization, or the bigger the statement the more obvious. (Beta) is illustrated by the authors’ five general proposals for action (“Implications for Public Policy”). The second of these is: “Fuller employment and the elimination of discrimination based on prejudice would contribute greatly to the independence of non-white persons, women, teenagers, and some of the aged.” That is, if Negroes and the rest had jobs and were not discriminated against, they would be better off—a point that doesn’t need to be argued or, for that matter, stated. The authors have achieved such a mastery of truism that they sometimes achieve the same monumental effect even in non-magnitudinous statements, as: “Table 28-1 shows that the proportion of parents who indicated that their children will attend private colleges is approximately twice as large for those with incomes over $10,000 as for those with incomes under $3,000.” Could be.
What is “poverty”? It is a historically relative concept, first of all. “There are new definitions [in America] of what man can achieve, of what a human standard of life should be,” Mr. Harrington writes. “Those who suffer levels of life well below those that are possible, even though they live better than medieval knights or Asian peasants, are poor. . . . Poverty should be defined in terms of those who are denied the minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifics as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States.” His dividing line follows that proposed in recent studies by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics: $4,000 a year for a family of four and $2,000 for an individual living alone. (All kinds of income are included, such as food grown and consumed on farms.) This is the cutoff line generally drawn today.
Mr. Harrington estimates that between forty and fifty million Americans, or about a fourth of the population, are now living in poverty. Not just below the level of comfortable living, but real poverty, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—that they are hard put to it to get the mere necessities, beginning with enough to eat. This is difficult to believe in the United States of 1963, but one has to make the effort, and it is now being made. The extent of our poverty has suddenly become visible. The same thing has happened in England, where working-class gains as a result of the Labour Party’s post-1945 welfare state blinded almost everybody to the continued existence of mass poverty. It was not until Professor Richard M. Titmuss, of the London School of Economics, published a series of articles in the New Statesman last fall, based on his new book, “Income Distribution and Social Change” (Allen & Unwin), that even the liberal public in England became aware that the problem still persists on a scale that is “statistically significant,” as the economists put it.
Statistics on poverty are even trickier than most. For example, age and geography make a difference. There is a distinction, which cannot be rendered arithmetically, between poverty and low income. A childless young couple with $3,000 a year is not poor in the way an elderly couple might be with the same income. The young couple’s statistical poverty may be a temporary inconvenience; if the husband is a graduate student or a skilled worker, there are prospects of later affluence or at least comfort. But the old couple can look forward only to diminishing earnings and increasing medical expenses. So also geographically: A family of four in a small town with $4,000 a year may be better off than a like family in a city—lower rent, no bus fares to get to work, fewer occasions (or temptations) to spend money. Even more so with a rural family. Although allowance is made for the value of the vegetables they may raise to feed themselves, it is impossible to calculate how much money they don’t spend on clothes, say, or furniture, because they don’t have to keep up with the Joneses. Lurking in the crevices of a city, like piranha fish in a Brazilian stream, are numerous tempting opportunities for expenditure, small but voracious, which can strip a budget to its bones in a surprisingly short time. The subtlety and complexity of poverty statistics may be discovered by a look at Dr. Kolko’s statement that in 1959 “23% of those earning less than $1,000 owned a car.” Does this include college students, or are they included in their families’ statistics? If the first is true, then Dr. Kolko’s figure loses much of its meaning. If the second is, then it is almost too meaningful, since it says that one-fourth of those earning less than twenty dollars a week are able to afford a car. Which it is, deponent sayeth not.
It is not, therefore, surprising to find that there is some disagreement about just how many millions of Americans are poor. The point is that all these recent studies agree that American poverty is still a mass phenomenon. One of the lowest estimates appears in the University of Michigan’s “Income and Welfare,” which states, “Poor families comprise one-fifth of the nation’s families.” The authors do not develop this large and crucial statement, or even give sources for it, despite their meticulous pedantry in all unimportant matters. So one can only murmur that the other experts put the number of poor much higher. (Though even a fifth is still over 35,000,000 people.) The lowness of the Michigan estimate is especially puzzling since its cutoff figure for poverty is $4,330, which is slightly higher than the commonly accepted one. The tendentious Dr. Kolko is also unconvincing, in the opposite direction. “Since 1947,” he writes, “one-half of the nation’s families and unattached individuals have had an income too small to provide them with a maintenance standard of living,” which he sets at $4,500 a year for a family. He does give a table, with a long supporting footnote that failed to make clear to me how he could have possibly decided that 90,000,000 Americans are now living on less than $4,500 a year; I suspect some confusion between a “maintenance” and a “minimum-comfort” budget.
More persuasive estimates appear in the Conference on Economic Progress pamphlet, “Poverty and Deprivation.” Using the $4,000 cutoff, the authors conclude that 38,000,000 persons are now living in poverty, which is slightly less than Mr. Harrington’s lowest estimate. One reason may be that the pamphlet discriminates, as most studies don’t, between “multiple-person families” and “unattached individuals,” rating the latter as poor only if they have less than $2,000 a year. But there is more to it than that, including a few things I don’t feel competent to judge. Income statistics are never compiled on exactly the same bases and there are all kinds of refinements, which vary from one study to another. Thus the Commerce Department’s April report estimates there are 17,500,000 families and “unattached individuals” with incomes of less than $4,000. How many of the latter are there? “Poverty and Deprivation” puts the number of single persons with under $2,000 at 4,000,000. Let us say that in the 17,500,000 under $4,000 there are 6,500,000 single persons the proportion of unattached individuals tends to go down as income rises. This homemade estimate gives us 11,000,000 families with incomes of under $4,000. Figuring the average American family at three and a half persons—which it is—this makes 38,500,000 individuals in families, or a grand total, if we add in the 4,000,000 “unattached individuals” with under $2,000 a year, of 42,500,000 Americans now living in poverty, which is close to a fourth of the total population.
The reason Dr. Galbraith was able to see poverty as no longer “a massive affliction” is that he used a cutoff of $1,000, which even in 1949, when it was adopted in a Congressional study, was probably too low (the C.I.O. argued for $2,000) and in 1958, when “The Affluent Society” appeared, was simply fantastic.
The model postwar budgets drawn up in 1951 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to “maintain a level of adequate living” give a concrete idea of what poverty means in this country—or would mean if poor families lived within their income and spent it wisely, which they don’t. Dr. Kolko summarizes the kind of living these budgets provide:
One other item is included in the B.L.S. “maintenance” budget: a new car every twelve to eighteen years.
This is an ideal picture, drawn up by social workers, of how a poor family should spend its money. But the poor are much less provident—installment debts take tip a lot of their cash, and only a statistician could expect an actual live woman, however poor, to buy new clothes at intervals of five or ten years. Also, one suspects that a lot more movies are seen and ice-cream cones and bottles of beer are consumed than in the Spartan ideal. But these necessary luxuries are had only at the cost of displacing other items—necessary necessities, so to speak—in the B.L.S. budget.
The Conference on Economic Progress’s “Poverty and Deprivation” deals not only with the poor but also with another large section of the “underprivileged,” which is an American euphemism almost as good as “senior citizen;” namely, the 37,000,000 persons whose family income is between $4,000 and $5,999 and the 2,000,000 singles who have from $2,000 to $2,999. The authors define “deprivation” as “above poverty but short of minimum requirements for a modestly comfortable level of living.” They claim that 77,000,000 Americans, or almost half the population, live in poverty or deprivation. One recalls the furor Roosevelt aroused with his “one-third of a nation—ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” But the political climate was different then.
The distinction between a family income of $3,500 (“poverty”) and $4,500 (“deprivation”) is not vivid to those who run things—the 31 per cent whose incomes are between $7,500 and $14,999 and the 7 per cent of the topmost top dogs, who get $15,000 or more. These two minorities, sizable enough to feel they are the nation, have been as unaware of the continued existence of mass poverty as this reviewer was until he read Mr. Harrington’s book. They are businessmen, congressmen, judges, government officials, politicians, lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, editors, journalists, and administrators in colleges, churches, and foundations. Since their education, income, and social status are superior, they, if anybody, might be expected to accept responsibility for what the Constitution calls “the general welfare.” They have not done so in the case of the poor. And they have a good excuse. It is becoming harder and harder simply to see the one-fourth of our fellow-citizens who live below the poverty line.
These invisible people fall mostly into the following categories, some of them overlapping: poor farmers, who operate 40 per cent of the farms and get 7 per cent of the farm cash income; migratory farm workers; unskilled, unorganized workers in offices, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, laundries, and other service jobs; inhabitants of areas where poverty is either endemic (“peculiar to a people or district”), as in the rural South, or epidemic (“prevalent among a community at a special time and produced by some special causes”), as in West Virginia, where the special cause was the closing of coal mines and steel plants; Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who are a fourth of the total poor; the alcoholic derelicts in the big-city skid rows; the hillbillies from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Oklahoma who have migrated to Midwestern cities in search of better jobs. And, finally, almost half our “senior citizens.”
The only pages in “Poverty, and Deprivation” that can be read are the statistical tables. The rest is a jungle of inchoate data that seems deliberately to eschew, like other collective research projects, such human qualities as reason (the reader has to do most of the work of ordering the material) and feeling (if Mr. Harrington sometimes has too much, it is a venial sin compared to the bleakness of this prose). My hypothesis is that “Poverty and Deprivation” was composed on that TX-0 “electronic brain” at M.I.T. This would account both for the vitality of the tables and for the deadness of the text.
And what shall one say about the University of Michigan’s “Income and Welfare in the United States”? Even its tables are not readable. And its text makes “Poverty and Deprivation” look like the Federalist Papers. On the first page, the authors unloose a generalization of stupefying generality: “The United States has arrived at the point where poverty could be abolished easily and simply by a stroke of the pen. [Where have we heard that before?] To raise every individual and family in the nation now below a subsistence income to the subsistence level would cost about $10 billion a year. This is less than 2 per cent of the gross national product. It is less than 10 per cent of tax revenues. [They mean, but forgot to say so, federal taxes, since if state and local taxes were added, the total would be much higher than $100 billion.] It is about one-fifth of the cost of national defense.” (They might have added that it is slightly more than three times the $3 billion Americans spend on their dogs and cats and canaries every year.) This got big headlines in the press, as must have been expected: “ ‘stroke of pen’ could eliminate poverty in u.s., 4 scientists say.” But the authors, having dropped the $10 billion figure on the first page, never explain its meaning—is it a seedbed operation or a permanent dole? They are not clear even on how they arrived at it. At their own estimate of 35,000,000 poor, $10 billion would work out to slightly less than $300 per person. This seems too little to abolish poverty “easily and simply by a stroke of the pen.”
There are other vaguenesses: “A careful analysis of the characteristics of families whose incomes are inadequate reveals that they should earn considerably more than they do on the basis of their education and other characteristics. The multivariate analysis . . . indicates that heads of poor families should average $2,204 in earnings. In fact heads of poor families earned an average of only $932 in 1959.” I have already confessed my inability to understand the multivariate analysis, but the compilers seem to be saying that according to the variables in their study (race, age, sex, education, physical disabilities, and locale), heads of poor families should now be making twice as much as they are. And why don’t they? “The discrepancy may arise from psychological dependency, lack of motivation, lack of intelligence, and a variety of other factors that were not studied.” One wonders why they were not studied—and what those “other factors” were, exactly. Also, whether such a discrepancy—the earnings the researchers expected to find were actually less than half those they did find—may not indicate some ghastly flaw in that “multivariate analysis.” There is, of course, no suggestion in the book that Dr. Morgan and his team are in any way worried.
The most obvious citizens of the Other America are those whose skins are the wrong color. The folk slogans are realistic: “Last to be hired, first to be fired” and “If you’re black, stay back.” There has been some progress. In 1939, the non-white worker’s wage averaged 41.4 per cent of the white worker’s; by 1958 it had climbed to 58 per cent. A famous victory, but the non-whites still average only slightly more than half as much as the whites. Even this modest gain was due not to any Rooseveltian or Trumanian social reform but merely to the fact that for some years there was a war on and workers were in demand, whether black, white, or violet. By 1947, the non-whites had achieved most of their advance—to 54 per cent of white earnings, which means they have gained, in the last fifteen years, just 4 per cent.
The least obvious poverty affects our “senior citizens”—those over sixty-five. Mr. Harrington estimates that half of them—8,000,000—live in poverty, and he thinks they are even more atomized and politically helpless than the rest of the Other America. He estimates that one-fourth of the “unrelated individuals” among them, or a million persons, have less than $580 a year, which is about what is allotted for food alone in the Department of Agriculture’s minimum-subsistence budget. (The average American family now spends only 20 per cent of its income for food—an indication of the remarkable prosperity we are all enjoying, except for one-quarter of us.) One can imagine, or perhaps one can’t, what it would be like to live on $580 a year, or $11 a week. It is only fair to note that most of our senior citizens do better: The average per-capita income of those over sixty-five is now estimated to be slightly over $20 a week. That is, about $1,000 a year.
The aged poor have two sources of income besides their earnings or savings. One is contributions by relatives. A 1961 White House Conference Report put this at 10 per cent of income, which works out to $8 a week for an income of $4,000—and the 8,000,000 aged poor all have less than that. The other is Social Security, whose benefits in 1959 averaged $18 a week. Even this modest sum is more than any of the under-$4,000 got, since payments are proportionate to earnings and the poor, of course, earned less than the rest. A quarter of them, and those in general the neediest, are not covered by Social Security. The last resort is relief, and Mr. Harrington describes most vividly the humiliations the poor often have to put up with to get that.
The problem of the aged poor is aggravated by the fact that, unlike the Italians or the English, we seem to have little respect for or interest in our “senior citizens,” beyond giving them that honorific title, and we don’t include them in family life. If we can afford it, we are likely, to send them to nursing homes—“a storage-bin philosophy,” a Senate report calls it—and if we can’t, which is the case with the poor, they must make do with the resources noted above. The Michigan study has a depressing chapter on “The Economics of Living with Relatives.” Nearly two-thirds of the heads of families queried were opposed to having their aged parents live with their children. “The old do not understand the young, and the young do not understand the old or the young,” observed one respondent, who must have had a sense of humor. Other replies were “Old people are pretty hard to get along with” and “The parents and the children try to boss each other and when they live with you there’s always fighting.” The minority in favor gave practical reasons, like “It’s a good thing to have them with you so you can see after them” and “The old folks might get a pension or something, so they could help you out.” Hardly anyone expressed any particular respect for the old, or a feeling that their experience might enrich family life. The most depressing finding was “People most able to provide support for relatives are most opposed to it. Older people with some college education are eleven to one against it.” The most favorable toward including older people in the home were Negroes, and even they were mostly against it.
The whole problem of poverty and the aged is especially serious today because Americans are living longer. In the first half of this century, life expectancy increased 17.6 years for men and 20.3 years for women. And between 1950 and 1960 the over-sixty-five group increased twice as fast as the population as a whole.
The worst part of being old and poor in this country is the loneliness. Mr. Harrington notes that we have not only racial ghettos but geriatric ones, in the cheap rooming-house districts of large cities. He gives one peculiarly disturbing statistic: “One-third of the aged in the United States, some 5,000,000 or more human beings, have no phone in their place of residence. They are literally cut off from the rest of America.”
Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated deflation of Scott Fitzgerald’s romantic notion that the rich are “different” somehow—“Yes, they have money”—doesn’t apply to the poor. They are different in more important ways than their lack of money, as Mr. Harrington demonstrates:
The poor are also different in a physical sense: they are much less healthy. According to “Poverty and Deprivation,” the proportion of those “disabled or limited in their major activity by chronic ill health” rises sharply as income sinks. In reasonably well-off families ($7,000 and up), 4.3 per cent are so disabled; in reasonably poor families ($2,000 to $3,999), the proportion doubles, to 8 per cent; and in unreasonably pour families (under $2,000), it doubles again, to 16.5 per cent. An obvious cause, among others, for the very poor being four times as much disabled by “chronic ill health” as the well-to-do is that they have much less money to spend for medical care—in fact, almost nothing. This weighs with special heaviness on the aged poor. During the fifties, Mr. Harrington notes, “all costs on the Consumer Price Index went up by 12 per cent. But medical costs, that terrible staple of the aged, went up by 36 per cent, hospitalization rose by 65 per cent, and group hospitalization costs (Blue Cross premiums) were up by 83 per cent.”
This last figure is particularly interesting, since Blue Cross and such plans are the A.M.A.’s alternative to socialized medicine, or, rather, to the timid fumblings toward it that even our most liberal politicians have dared to propose. Such figures throw an unpleasant light on the Senate’s rejection of Medicare. The defeat was all the more bitter because, in the usual effort to appease the conservatives (with the usual lack of success—only five Republicans and only four Southern Democrats voted pro), the bill was watered down in advance. Not until he had spent $90 of his own money—which is 10 per cent of the annual income of some 3,000,000 aged poor—would a patient have been eligible. And the original program included only people already covered by Social Security or Railroad Retirement pensions and excluded the neediest of all the 2,500,000 aged poor who are left out of both these systems. These untouchables were finally included in order to placate five liberal Republican senators, led by Javits of New York. They did vote for Medicare, but they were the only Republicans who did.
Mental as well as physical illness is much greater among the poor, even though our complacent cliché is that nervous breakdowns are a prerogative of the rich because the poor “can’t afford” them. (They can’t, but they have them anyway.) This bit of middle-class folklore should be laid to rest by a study made in New Haven: “Social Class and Mental Illness,” by August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich (Wiley). They found that the rate of “treated psychiatric illness” is about the same from the rich down through decently paid workers—an average of 573 Per 100,000. But in the bottom fifth it shoots up to 1,659 per 100,000. There is an even more striking difference in the kind of mental illness. Of those in the four top income groups who had undergone psychiatric treatment, 65 per cent had been treated for neurotic problems and 35 per cent for psychotic disturbances. In the bottom fifth, the treated illnesses were almost all psychotic (90 per cent). This shows there is something to the notion that the poor “can’t afford” nervous breakdowns—the milder kind, that is—since the reason the proportion of treated neuroses among the poor is only 10 per cent is that a neurotic can keep going, after a fashion. But the argument cuts deeper the other way. The poor go to a psychiatrist (or, more commonly, are committed to a mental institution) only when they are completely unable to function because of psychotic symptoms. Therefore, even that nearly threefold increase in mental disorders among the poor is probably an underestimate.
The poor are different, then, both physically and psychologically. During the fifties, a team of psychiatrists from Cornell studied “Midtown,” a residential area in this city that contained 170,000 people, of all social classes. The area was 99 per cent white, so the findings may be presumed to understate the problem of poverty. The description of the poor—the “low social economic status individual”—is blunt: “[They are rigid, suspicious, and have a fatalistic outlook on life. They do not plan ahead. . . . They are prone to depression, have feelings of futility, lack of belongingness, friendliness, and a lack of trust in others.” Only a Dr. Pangloss would expect anything else. As Mr. Harrington points out, such characteristics are “a realistic adaptation to a socially perverse situation.”
As for the isolation that is the lot of the American poor, that is a point on which Mr. Harrington is very good:
One reason our society is a comparatively violent one is that the French and Italian and British poor have a communal life and culture that the American poor lack. As one reads “The Other America,” one wonders why there is not even more violence than there is.
The richest city of all, New York, has been steadily growing poorer, if one looks beyond Park Avenue and Wall Street. Of its 2,080,000 families, just under half (49 per cent) had incomes in 1959 of less than $6,000; for the city’s non-white families, the percentage was 71. And a fourth of all New York families in 1959 were below the poverty line of $4,000. These percentages are at present slightly higher than the national average—an ominous reversal of the city’s earlier position. In 1932, the average national weekly wage was only 67 per cent of the New York City average. In 1960, it was 108 per cent. The city’s manufacturing workers in 1946 earned $11 more a week than the national average; in 1960 they earned $6.55 a week less. The two chief reasons are probably the postwar influx of Puerto Ricans and the exodus to the suburbs of the well-to-do. But whatever the reasons, the city seems to be turning into an economically backward area, like Arkansas or New Hampshire. Even the bankers—the “non-supervisory” ones, that is—are modestly paid: 54 per cent of the males and 78 per cent of the females make less than $80 a week. All these statistics come from John O’Rourke, president of joint Council 16, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has 168,000 members in the area. Mr. O’Rourke has been campaigning to persuade Mayor Wagner to raise the city’s minimum hourly wage to $1.50. (The Mayor has gone as far as $1.25.) The New York teamsters are motivated by enlightened self-interest: the more other wages stagnate, the harder it will be to maintain their own comparatively high level of pay. They complain especially about the low wages in the highly organized garment trade, to which Mr. Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union replies that if it presses for higher wages the manufacturers will simply move to low-wage, non-Union areas, mostly in the South, as the New England textile manufacturers did many years ago—a riposte that is as realistic as it is uncheering. However, Mr. O’Rourke has an enterprising research staff, plenty of persistence, and a sharp tongue. “New Yorkers,” he says, “are accustomed to thinking of themselves as pacesetters in an allegedly affluent society [but] at the rate we are going, we will soon qualify for the title ‘Sweatshop Capital of the Nation.’ ”
The main reason the American poor have become invisible is that since 1936 their numbers have been reduced by two-thirds. Astounding as it may seem, the fact is that President Roosevelt’s “one-third of a nation” was a considerable understatement; over two-thirds of us then lived below the poverty line, as is shown by the tables that follow. But today the poor are a minority, and minorities can be ignored if they are so heterogeneous that they cannot be organized. When the poor were a majority, they simply could not be overlooked. Poverty is also hard to see today because the middle class ($6,000 to $14,999) has vastly increased—from 13 per cent of all families in 1936 to a near-majority (47 per cent) today. That mass poverty can persist despite this rise to affluence is hard to believe, or see, especially if one is among those who have risen.
Two tables in “Poverty and Deprivation” summarize what has been happening in the last thirty years. They cover only multiple-person families; all figures are converted to 1960 dollars; and the income is before taxes. I have omitted, for clarity, all fractions.
The first table is the percentage of families with a given income:
The second table is the share each group had in the family income of the nation:
Several interesting conclusions can be drawn from these tables:
(1) The New Deal didn’t do anything about poverty: The under-$4,000 families in 1936 were 68 per cent of the total population, which was slightly more than the 1929 figure of 65 per cent.
(2) The war economy (hot and cold) did do something about poverty; Between 1936 and 1960 the proportion of all families who were poor was reduced from 68 per cent to 23 per cent.
(3) If the percentage of under-$4,000 families decreased by two-thirds between 1936 and 1960, their share of the national income dropped a great deal more—from 35 per cent to 7 per cent.
(4) The well-to-do ($7,500 to $14,999) have enormously increased, from 7 per cent of all families in 1936 to 31 per cent today. The rich ($15,000 and over) have also multiplied-from 2 to 7 per cent. But it should be noted that the very rich, according to another new study, “The Share of Top Wealth-Holders in National Wealth, 1922-1956,” by Robert J. Lampman (Princeton), have experienced a decline. He finds that the top 1 per cent of wealth-holders owned 38 per cent of the national wealth in 1929 and own only 28 per cent today. (Though let’s not get sentimental over that “only.”) Thus, pace Dr. Kolko, there has in fact been a redistribution of wealth—in favor of the well-to-do and the rich at the expense of the poor and the very rich.
(5) The reduction of poverty has slowed down. In the six years 1947-53, the number of poor families declined 9 per cent, but in the following seven years only 5 per cent. The economic stasis that set in with Eisenhower and that still persists under Kennedy was responsible. (This stagnation, however, did not affect the over-$7,500 families, who increased from 28 per cent to 38 per cent between 1953 and 1960.) In the New York Times Magazine for last November 11th, Herman P. Miller, of the Bureau of the Census, wrote, “During the forties, the lower-paid occupations made the greatest relative gains in average income. Laborers and service workers . . . had increases of about 180% . . . and professional and managerial workers, the highest paid workers of all, had the lowest relative gains—96%.” But in the last decade the trend has been reversed; laborers and service workers have gained 39% while professional-managerial workers have gained 68%. This is because in the wartime forties the unskilled were in great demand, while now they are being replaced by machines. Automation is today the same kind of menace to the unskilled—that is, the poor—that the enclosure movement was to the British agricultural population centuries ago. “The facts show that our ‘social revolution’ ended nearly twenty years ago,” Mr. Miller concludes, “yet important segments of the American public, many of them highly placed Government officials and prominent educators, think and act as though it were a continuing process.”
“A reduction of about 19% [in the under-$6,000 families] in more than thirty years, or at a rate of about 0.7% per year, is no ground for complacency,” the authors of “Poverty and Deprivation” justly observe. There is even less ground for complacency in the recent figures on extreme poverty. The authors estimate the number of families in 1929 with incomes of under $2,000 (in current dollars) at 7,500,000. By 1947 there were less than 4,000,000, not because of any philanthropic effort by their more prosperous fellow-citizens but entirely because of those first glorious years of a war economy. Six years later, in 1953, when the economy had begun to slow down, there were still 3,300,000 of these families with incomes of less than $2,000, and seven years later, in 1960, “there had been no further reduction.” Thus in the last fifteen years the bottom dogs have remained on the bottom, sharing hardly at all in the advances that the income groups above them have made in an ascending scale that is exquisitely adjusted, by the automatic workings of capitalism, so that it is inversely proportionate to need.
There are, finally, the bottomest bottom dogs; i.e., families with incomes of under $1,000. I apologize for the italics, but some facts insist on them. According to “Poverty and Deprivation,” the numbers of these families “appear to have risen slightly” of late (1953-60), from 800,000 to about 1,000,000. It is only fair, and patriotic, to add that according to the Commerce Department study, about 10,000,000 of our families and unattached individuals now enjoy incomes of $10,000 a year and up. So while some 3,500,000 Americans are in under-$1,000 families, ten times as many are in over-$10,000 families. Not bad at all—in a way.
The post-1940 decrease in poverty was not due to the policies or actions of those who are not poor, those in positions of power and responsibility. The war economy needed workers, wages went up, and the poor became less poor. When economic stasis set in, the rate of decrease in poverty slowed down proportionately, and it is still slow. Kennedy’s efforts to “get the country moving again” have been unsuccessful, possibly because he has, despite the suggestions of many of his economic advisers, not yet advocated the one big step that might push the economy off dead center: a massive increase in government spending. This would be politically courageous, perhaps even dangerous, because of the superstitious fear of “deficit spending” and an “unbalanced” federal budget. American folklore insists that a government’s budget must be arranged like a private family’s. Walter Lippmann wrote, after the collapse of the stock market last spring:
One shouldn’t be hard on the President. Franklin Roosevelt, a more daring and experimental politician, at least in his domestic policy, listened to the American disciples of J. M. Keynes in the early New Deal years and unbalanced his budgets, with splendid results. But by 1936 he had lost his nerve. He cut back government spending and there ensued the 1937 recession, from which the economy recovered only when war orders began to make up for the deficiency in domestic buying power. “Poverty and Deprivation” estimates that between 1953 and 1961 the annual growth rate of our economy was “only 2.5 per cent per annum contrasted with an estimated 4.2 per cent required to maintain utilization of manpower and other productive resources.” The poor, who always experience the worst the first, understand quite personally the meaning of that dry statistic, as they understand Kipling’s “The toad beneath the harrow knows / Exactly where each tooth-point goes.” They are also most intimately acquainted with another set of statistics: the steady postwar rise in the unemployment rate, from 3.1 per cent in 1949 to 4.3 per cent in 1954 to 5.1 per cent in 1958 to over 7 per cent in 1961. (The Tory Government is worried because British unemployment is now at its highest point for the last three years. This point is 2.1 per cent, which is less than our lowest rate in the last fifteen rears.)
Some of the post-1940 gains of the poor have been their own doing. “Moonlighting”—or holding two or more jobs at once—was practiced by about 3 per cent of the employed in 1950; today this percentage has almost doubled. Far more important is what might be called “wife-flitting”: Between 1940 and 1957, the percentage of wives with jobs outside the home doubled, from 15 per cent to 30 per cent. The head of the United States Children’s Bureau, Mrs. Katherine B. Oettinger, announced last summer, not at all triumphantly, that there are now two-thirds more working mothers than there were ten years ago and that these mothers have about 15,000,000 children under eighteen—of whom 4,000,000 are under six. This kind of economic enterprise ought to impress Senator Goldwater and the ideologues of the National Review, whose reaction to the poor, when they think about such an uninspiring subject, is “Why don’t they do something about it?” The poor have done something about it and the family pay check is bigger and the statistics on poverty look better. But the effects on family life and on those 4,000,000 pre-school children is something else. Mrs. Oettinger quoted a roadside sign, “ironing, day care and worms for fishing bait,” and mentioned a baby-sitter who pacified her charge with sleeping pills and another who met the problem of a cold apartment by putting the baby in the oven. “The situation has become a ‘national disgrace,’ with many unfortunate conditions that do not come to public attention until a crisis arises,” the Times summed up her conclusion. This crisis has finally penetrated to public attention. The President recently signed a law that might be called Daycare. It provides $5,000,000 for such facilities this fiscal year, which works out to $1.25 for each of the 4,000,000 under-six children with working mothers. Next year, the program will provide all of $2.50 per child. This is a free, democratic society’s notion of an adequate response. Almost a century ago, Bismarck instituted in Germany state-financed social benefits far beyond anything we have yet ventured. Granted that he did it merely to take the play away from the Social Democratic Party founded by Marx and Engels. Still, one imagines that Count Bismarck must be amused—in the circle of Hell reserved for reactionaries—by that $2.50 a child.
It’s not that Public Opinion doesn’t become Aroused every now and then. But the arousement never leads to much. It was aroused twenty-four years ago when John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” but Mr. Harrington reports that things in the Imperial Valley are still much the same: low wages, bad housing, no effective union. Public Opinion is too public—that is, too general; of its very nature, it can have no sustained interest in California agriculture. The only groups with such a continuing interest are the workers and the farmers who hire them. Once Public Opinion ceased to be Aroused, the battle was again between the two antagonists with a real, personal stake in the outcome, and there was no question about which was stronger. So with the rural poor in general. In the late fifties, the average annual wage for white male American farm workers was slightly over $1,000; women, children, Negroes, and Mexicans got less. One recalls Edward R. Murrow’s celebrated television program about these people, “Harvest of Shame.” Once more everybody was shocked, but the harvest is still shameful. One also recalls that Mr. Murrow, after President Kennedy had appointed him head of the United States Information Agency, tried to persuade the B.B.C. not to show “Harvest of Shame.” His argument was that it would give an undesirable “image” of America to foreign audiences.
There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them. Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It’s just boring.
Public housing turns out not to be for them. The 1949 Housing Act authorized 810,000 new units of low-cost housing in the following four years. Twelve years later, in 1961, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. proposed 400,000 units to complete the lagging 1949 program. The Kennedy administration ventured to recommend 100,000 to Congress. Thus, instead of 810,000 low-cost units by 1953, the poor will get, if they are lucky, 500,000 by 1963. And they are more likely to be injured than helped by slum clearance, since the new projects usually have higher rents than the displaced slum-dwellers can afford. (There has been no dearth of government-financed middle-income housing since 1949.) These refugees from the bulldozers for the most part simply emigrate to other slums. They also become invisible; Mr. Harrington notes that half of them are recorded as “address unknown.” Several years ago, Charles Abrams, who was New York State Rent Administrator under Harriman and who is now president of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, summed up what he had learned in two decades in public housing: “Once social reforms have won tonal appeal in the public mind, their slogans and goal-symbols may degenerate into tools of the dominant class for beleaguering the minority and often for defeating the very aims which the original sponsors had intended for their reforms.” Mr. Abrams was probably thinking, in part, of the Title I adventures of Robert Moses in dealing with New York housing. There is a Moses or two in every American city, determined to lead us away from the promised land.
And this is not the end of tribulation. The poor, who can least afford to lose pay because of ill health, lose the must. A National Health Survey, made a few years ago, found that workers earning under $2,000 a year had twice as many “restricted-activity days” as those earning over $4,000.
The poor are even fatter than the rich. (The cartoonists will have to revise their clichés.) “Obesity is seven times more frequent among women of the lowest socio-economic level than it is among those of the highest level,” state Drs. Moore, Stunkard, and Srole in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. (The proportion is almost the same for men.) They also found that overweight associated with poverty is related to mental disease. Fatness used to be a sign of wealth, as it still is in some parts of Africa, but in more advanced societies it is now a stigma of poverty, since it means too many cheap carbohydrates and too little exercise—which has changed from a necessity for the poor into a luxury for the rich, as may be confirmed by a glance at the models in any fashion magazine.
Although they are the most in need of hospital insurance, the poor have the least, since they can’t afford the premiums; only 40 per cent of poor families have it, as against 63 per cent of all families. (It should be noted, however, that the poor who are war veterans can get free treatment, at government expense, in Veterans Administration Hospitals.)
The poor actually pay more taxes, in proportion to their income, than the rich. A recent study by the Tax Foundation estimates that 28 per cent of incomes under $2,000 goes for taxes, as against 24 per cent of the incomes of families earning five to seven times as much. Sales and other excise taxes are largely responsible for this curious statistic. It is true that such taxes fall impartially on all, like the blessed rain from heaven, but it is a form of egalitarianism that perhaps only Senator Goldwater can fully appreciate.
The final irony is that the Welfare State, which Roosevelt erected and which Eisenhower, no matter how strongly he felt about it, didn’t attempt to pull down, is not for the poor, either. Agricultural workers are not covered by Social Security, nor are many of the desperately poor among the aged, such as “unrelated individuals” with incomes of less than $1,000, of whom only 37 per cent are covered, which is just half the percentage of coverage among the aged in general. Of the Welfare State, Mr. Harrington says, “Its creation had been stimulated by mass impoverishment and misery, yet it helped the poor least of all. Laws like unemployment compensation, the Wagner Act, the various farm programs, all these were designed for the middle third in the cities, for the organized workers, and for the . . . big market farmers.
[It] benefits those least who need help most.” The industrial workers, led by John L. Lewis, mobilized enough political force to put through Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which, with the Wagner Act, made the C.I.O. possible. The big farmers put enough pressure on Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s first Secretary of Agriculture-—who talked a good fight for liberal principles but was a Hamlet when it came to action—to establish the two basic propositions of Welfare State agriculture: subsidies that now cost $3 billion a year and that chiefly benefit the big farmers; and the exclusion of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migratory workers from the protection of minimum-wage and Social Security laws.
No doubt the Kennedy administration would like to do more for the poor than it has, but it is hampered by the cabal of Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress. The 1961 revision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which raised the national minimum wage to the not exorbitant figure of $1.15 an hour, was a slight improvement over the previous act. For instance, it increased coverage of retail-trade workers from 3 per cent to 33 per cent. (But one-fourth of the retail workers still excluded earn less than $1 an hour.) There was also a considerable amount of shadowboxing involved: Of the 3,600,000 workers newly covered, only 663,000 were making less than $1 an hour. And there was the exclusion of a particularly ill-paid group of workers. Nobody had anything against the laundry workers personally. It was just that they were weak, unorganized, and politically expendable. To appease the conservatives in Congress, whose votes were needed to get the revision through, they were therefore expended. The result is that of the 500,000 workers in the laundry, dry-cleaning, and dyeing industries, just 17,000 are now protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In short, one reaches the unstartling conclusion that rewards in class societies, including Communist ones, are according to power rather than need. A recent illustration is the campaign of an obscure organization called Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. to get a bill through Congress for pensions of about $25 a week. It was formed by older men who think other veterans’ organizations (such as the American Legion, which claims 2,500,000 members to their 200,000) are dominated by the relatively young. It asks for pensions for veterans of the First World War with incomes of under $2,400 (if single) or $3,600 (if married)—that is, only for poor veterans. The editorials have been violent: “stop this veterans’ grab,” implored the Herald Tribune; “world war i pension grab,” echoed the Saturday Evening Post. Their objection was, in part, that many of the beneficiaries would not be bona-fide poor, since pensions, annuities, and Social Security benefits were excluded from the maximum income needed to qualify. Considering that the average Social Security payment is about $1,000 a year, this would not put any potential beneficiary into the rich or even the comfortably-off class, even if one assumes another $1,000, which is surely too high, from annuities and pensions. It’s all very confusing. The one clear aspect is that the minuscule Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. came very near to bringing it off. Although their bill was opposed by both the White House and by the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, two hundred and one members of the House signed a petition to bring the measure to a vote, only eighteen less than needed “to accomplish this unusual parliamentary strategy,” as the Times put it. These congressmen were motivated by politics rather than charity, one may assume. Many were up for reëlection last November, and the two hundred thousand Veterans of World War I had two advantages over the fifty million poor: They were organized, and they had a patriotic appeal only a wink away from the demagogic. Their “unusual parliamentary strategy” failed by eighteen votes in the Congress. But there will be another Congress.
It seems likely that mass poverty will continue in this country for a long time. The more it is reduced, the harder it is to keep on reducing it. The poor, having dwindled from two-thirds of the population in 1936 to one-quarter today, no longer are a significant political force, as is shown by the Senate’s rejection of Medicare and by the Democrats’ dropping it as an issue in the elections last year. Also, as poverty decreases, those left behind tend more and more to be the ones who have for so long accepted poverty as their destiny that they need outside help to climb out of it. This new minority mass poverty, so much more isolated and hopeless than the old majority poverty, shows signs of becoming chronic. “The permanence of low incomes is inferred from a variety of findings,” write the authors of the Michigan survey. “In many poor families the head has never earned enough to cover the family’s present needs.” They give a vignette of what the statistics meal) in human terms:
Children born into poor families today have less chance of “improving themselves” than the children of the pre-1940 poor. Rags to riches is now more likely to be rags to rags. “Indeed,” the Michigan surveyors conclude, “it appears that a number of the heads of poor families have moved into less skilled jobs than their fathers had.” Over a third of the children of the poor, according to the survey, don’t go beyond the eighth grade and “will probably perpetuate the poverty of their parents.” There area great many of these children. In an important study of poverty, made for a Congressional committee in 1959, Dr. Robert J. Lampman estimated that eleven million of the poor were under eighteen. “A considerable number of younger persons are starting life in a condition of ‘inherited poverty,’ ” he observed. To which Mr. Harrington adds, “The character of poverty has changed, and it has become more deadly for the young. It is no longer associated with immigrant groups with high aspirations; it is now identified with those whose social existence makes it more and more difficult to break out into the larger society.” Even when children from poor families show intellectual promise, there is nothing in the values of their friends or families to encourage them to make use of it. Dr. Kolko, citing impressive sources, states that of the top 16 per cent of high-school students—those scoring 120 and over in I.Q. tests—only half go on to college. The explanation for this amazing—and alarming—situation is as much cultural as economic. The children of the poor now tend to lack what the sociologists call “motivation.” At least one foundation is working on the problem of why so many bright children from poor families don’t ever try to go beyond high school.
Mr. Raymond M. Hilliard, at present director of the Cook County, (i.e., Chicago) Department of Public Aid and formerly Commissioner of Welfare for New York City, recently directed a “representative-sample” investigation, which showed that more than half of the 225,000 able-bodied Cook County residents who were on relief were “functionally illiterate.” One reason Cook County has to spend $16,500,000 a month on relief is “the lack of basic educational skills of relief recipients which are essential to compete in our modern society.” An interesting footnote, apropos of recent happenings at “Ole Miss,” is that the illiteracy rate of the relief recipients who were educated in Chicago is 33 per cent, while among those who were educated in Mississippi and later moved to Chicago it is 77 per cent.
The problem of educating the poor has changed since 1900. Then it was the language and cultural difficulties of immigrants from foreign countries; now it is the subtler but more intractable problems of internal migration from backward regions, mostly in the South. The old immigrants wanted to Better Themselves and to Get Ahead. The new migrants are less ambitious, and they come into a less ambitious atmosphere. “When they arrive in the city,” wrote Christopher Jencks in an excellent two-part survey, “Slums and Schools,” in the New Republic last fall, “they join others equally unprepared for urban life in the slums—a milieu which is in many ways utterly dissociated from the rest of America. Often this milieu is self-perpetuating. I have been unable to find any statistics on how many of these migrants’ children and grandchildren have become middle-class, but it is probably not too inaccurate to estimate that about 30,000,000 people live in urban slums, and that about half are second-generation residents.” The immigrants of 1890-1910 also arrived in a milieu that was “in many ways utterly dissociated from the rest of America,” yet they had a vision—a rather materialistic one, but still a vision—of what life in America could be if they worked hard enough; and they did work, and they did aspire to something more than they had; and they did get out of the slums. The disturbing thing about the poor today is that so many of them seem to lack any such vision. Mr. Jencks remarks:
“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime,” Aristotle wrote. This is now a half truth—the last half. Our poor are alienated; they don’t consider themselves part of society. But precisely because they don’t they are not politically dangerous. It is people with “a stake in the country” who make revolutions. The best—though by no means the only—reason for worrying about the Other America is that its existence should make us feel uncomfortable.
The federal government is the only purposeful force—I assume wars are not purposeful—that can reduce the numbers of the poor and make their lives more bearable. The authors of “Poverty and Deprivation” take a dim view of the Kennedy administration’s efforts to date:
The effect of government policy on poverty has two quite distinct aspects. One is the indirect effect of the stimulation of the economy by federal spending. Such stimulation—though by wartime demands rather than government policy—has in the past produced a prosperity that did cut down American poverty by almost two-thirds. But I am inclined to agree with Dr. Galbraith that it would not have a comparable effect on present-day poverty:
It is assumed that with increasing output poverty must disappear [he writes]. Increased output eliminated the general poverty of all who worked. Accordingly it must, sooner or later, eliminate the special poverty that still remains. . . . Yet just as the arithmetic of modern politics makes it tempting to overlook the very poor, so the supposition that increasing output will remedy their case has made it easy to do so too.
He underestimates the massiveness of American poverty, but he is right when he says there is now a hard core of the specially disadvantaged—because of age, race, environment, physical or mental defects, etc.—that would not be significantly reduced by general prosperity. (Although I think the majority of our present poor would benefit, if only by a reduction in the present high rate of unemployment.)
To do something about this hard core, a second line of government policy would be required; namely, direct intervention to help the poor. We have had this since the New Deal, but it has always been grudging and miserly, and we have never accepted the principle that every citizen should be provided, at state expense, with a reasonable minimum standard of living regardless of any other considerations. It should not depend on earnings, as does Social Security, which continues the inequalities and inequities and so tends to keep the poor forever poor. Nor should it exclude millions of our poorest citizens because they lack the political pressure to force their way into the Welfare State. The governmental obligation to provide, out of taxes, such a minimum living standard for all who need it should be taken as much for granted as free public schools have always been in our history.
It may be objected that the economy cannot bear the cost, and certainly costs must be calculated. But the point is not the calculation but the principle. Statistics—and especially statistical forecasts—can be pushed one way or the other. Who can determine in advance to what extent the extra expense of giving our 40,000,000 poor enough income to rise above the poverty line would be offset by the lift to the economy from their increased purchasing power? We really don’t know. Nor did we know what the budgetary effects would be when we established the principle of free public education. The rationale then was that all citizens should have an equal chance of competing for a better status. The rationale now is different: that every citizen has a right to become or remain part of our society because if this right is denied, as it is in the case of at least one-fourth of our citizens, it impoverishes its all. Since 1932, “the government”—local, state, and federal—has recognized a responsibility to provide its citizens with a subsistence living. Apples will never again be sold on the street by jobless accountants, it seems safe to predict, nor will any serious political leader ever again suggest that share-the-work and local charity can solve the problem of unemployment. “Nobody starves” in this country any more, but, like every social statistic, this is a tricky business. Nobody starves, but who can measure the starvation, not to be calculated by daily intake of proteins and calories, that reduces life for many of our poor to a long vestibule to death? Nobody starves, but every fourth citizen rubs along on a standard of living that is below what Mr. Harrington defines as “the minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifics as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States.” Nobody starves, but a fourth of us are excluded from the common social existence. Not to be able to afford a movie or a glass of beer is a kind of starvation—if everybody else can.
The problem is obvious: the persistence of mass poverty in a prosperous country. The solution is also obvious: to provide, out of taxes, the kind of subsidies that have always been given to the public schools (not to mention the police and fire departments and the post office)—subsidies that would raise incomes above the poverty level, so that every citizen could feel he is indeed such. “Civis Romanus sum!” cried St. Paul when he was threatened with flogging—and he was not flogged. Until our poor can be proud to say
“Civis Romanus sum!,” until the act of justice that would make this possible has been performed by the three-quarters of Americans who are not poor—until then the shame of the Other America will continue. ♦
