Essay: THE POOR AMIDST PROSPERITY

“EMPLOYMENT in the U.S. stands at a record 75 million, and unemployment is down to an eight-year low. A rising stock market attests to the seemingly invincible health of the economy; the nation shoulders the costs of foreign war and foreign aid without strain; the big metropolises revel in the autumnal excitement of the new movies, the fall fashions, the opera, the art galleries, a thousand assorted a go-gos. And amidst such affluence the U.S. Government plugs away at its War on Poverty; last week Congress passed a second-year appropriation of $1.78 billion, which is more than twice what it provided for the first year.

Poverty? Americans with bloated bellies? People living under bridges? Beggars in the street? Children dying for lack of doctoring? Of course not. Nonetheless, the U.S. has its angry, frustrated poor. People who do not suffer poverty tend to think of it in absolute, merely materialist terms of Dickensian squalor. In fact, poverty has to be measured relative to the rising standard of living, the tenderer social conscience, the national capacity for creating wealth. Poverty is the condition—and the awareness—of being left behind while, economically, everyone else is marching forward.

The reality of the new poverty lies in its contrast to U.S. affluence, and it is heightened by the constant, often self-congratulatory talk about that affluence. It is the poverty of the Harlem woman who says, “I’m tired of 49¢ meat; I want some 89¢ meat just once.” It is the poverty of people who have a refrigerator, assert their right to own a TV set, may genuinely need a car, should visit a dentist. Even if this poverty is not like any earlier poverty or the poverty of much of the rest of the world, it is worth declaring a war on.

The war is being conducted with the same passion that the U.S. brings to its successive crusades against disease and, on occasion, to its foreign policy. The bureaucratic warriors are joined (and sometimes fought) by a whole new group of ideologues of poverty, notably including Michael Harrington, who “discovered” the new poverty in his 1963 book, The Other America, and sociologist Saul Alinsky, a tireless agitator and polemicist who travels from city to city advising the poor on how to organize for uplift. Underlying the anti-poverty campaign is the uniquely American belief—surprisingly often correct—that evangelism, money and organization can lick just about anything, including conditions that the world has always considered inevitable.

“Paupers Are Everywhere”

Praising the Lord and passing the alms, man has fought poverty for more than 5,000 years—but until recently without any real expectation that the fight could ever be won. Hinduism and Buddhism encouraged almsgiving but reconciled themselves to poverty by suggesting that it is a requisite for man’s prime goal: the enrichment of spirit instead of body. The Hebrews equated poverty with suffering, extolled charity as one of the greatest virtues, and declared, in Proverbs, that “He who mocks the poor insults his Maker.” Christ’s most famous pronouncement on the problem—”For you always have the poor with you”—is usually quoted out of context and does not necessarily imply that poverty is inevitable. St. Thomas Aquinas concluded that natural law gives every man the right to enough of the world’s resources to lead a decent life. Nevertheless, the traditional Christian attitude equates poverty with saintliness, deeply distrusts money and proclaims, “Blessed are you poor.”

Going a step beyond charity, the 12th century Spanish-Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, urged the well to do to “assist the reduced fellow by teaching him a trade or putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood.” Queen Elizabeth I came to believe that care of the poor is not the duty of just the rich or the church but also of the state. “Paupers are everywhere!” she cried after a tour of England, and her Parliament sped up passage of its poor-relief acts. Just about then, Calvin declared that idleness was the real sin—which in the U.S. developed into the Puritan ethic that virtuous people are bound to prosper and the slothful will earn the bitter reward of poverty. Less than a century ago, Henry Ward Beecher thundered: “No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin!”

Such was the dominant belief until recently in the nation of free enterprise, rugged individualism and the Homestead Act. Only when the frontier was gone did city, state and eventually federal relief become a principal weapon against poverty. The force that most fundamentally changed the nature of poverty was the machine. In the short run, the industrial revolution only caused bigger and worse poverty by creating a new pauperized proletariat; in the long run, it lent reality to the Utopian dream of universal abundance by almost infinitely multiplying the once strictly limited productive capacity of human hands and brains. In the U.S. and in most of the contemporary West, the fruits of the industrial revolution brought about a momentous change: the poor turned from a majority into a minority.

Life on Bread, Rice, Beans & Peas

As a working definition of poverty, the U.S. Government sets a minimum income sufficient for an urban family of four, based on $2.80 a day for food, with an added factor for rent and services. It adds up to $3,100 a year, or $2,200 for farm families who grow their own food.

Thus arbitrarily defined, the U.S. poor number a depressing 34.1 million. They are mostly children (15 million) and old people (5.3 million). Half of the poor families are in the South. Poverty afflicts 40% of the nation’s nonwhites, 40% of its farmers, 50% of the families headed by divorced, widowed or abandoned women. The fifth of the nation at the bottom gets only 4.7% of the country’s personal income, while the fifth at the top gets 45.5%.

Compared with the 19th century poor so bitingly described in literature—Zola’s Gervaise “was quite willing to dispute with a dog for a bone”—the American poor are well off. They would be considered rich by most Red Chinese, whose per capita annual income averages $70. In southern Italy and Sicily, thousands of nullatenenti (havenots) live in caves or open trenches. Poverty is too soft a word to describe the puffed stomachs that are common sights in India, Africa and Brazil’s northeast. On the other hand, Scandinavia knows nothing like American slums, and Soviet Russia can claim to have abolished the crasser forms of poverty—but only by imposing on the whole nation a way of life that most Americans today would equate with privation.

As late as the Depression, Americans starved. “In the wet hay of leaking barns,” wrote John Steinbeck, “old people curled up in corners and died that way, so that the coroners could not straighten them.” About 2,000 Americans still die yearly from diseases of malnutrition, and many of the poor are poorly fed. The official U.S. poverty definition is based on the Department of Agriculture’s “economy” food plan (“essentially for emergency use”): large helpings of bread, rice, dried beans and peas, cereals, rare servings of meat, no out-of-season or convenience foods.

Hooverville shanties went out with the 1930s, and Government-subsidized apartments are climbing skyward in the slums, but most of the poor continue to suffer mean and overcrowded shelter. The 1960 census listed 15.6 million of the nation’s 58 million houses and apartments as substandard —including 3,000,000 shacks and tenements and 8,300,000 “deteriorating houses,” where the poor often pay a higher rental per square foot than the middle classes do. Health is also a poverty problem. The poor suffer mental illness at a sinister rate, triple that of the middle and upper classes, according to an investigation in New Haven, Conn. Mostly because of its poor, the U.S. has a lower life-expectancy rate than Holland, Sweden, Israel and Great Britain.

John Kennedy spoke of “patches of poverty”—and indeed, the poor tend to be concentrated. In Chicago the poor are the winos of skid row, the aged pensioners and beatniks of West Madison Street and the hillbillies of the “uptown area,” a middle-class neighborhood only a decade ago. Virtually every city has its Negro slums: Detroit’s Brewster, Chicago’s West Garfield Park, Las Vegas’ West Side and Los Angeles’ now notorious Watts. The rural poor cluster in the picturesque Appalachians and the Ozarks, on the Louisiana-Texas coastal plain, in the southern Piedmont and the Upper Great Lakes areas where the land is as beaten as the people.

Thus, stuck away in the country hollows, in old villages around which suburbs have grown, in city slums that look like grey blurs from expressways and fast commuter trains, the poor are scarcely visible. Society sees them mostly through the tabloid stories that reflect their roaring crime rate. For, as Henry Fielding put it 200 years ago, “the sufferings of the poor are less known than their misdeeds.”

The Mind-Set of Hopelessness

Invisible or not, the poor are real. Fifteen of them live in two rooms in one Atlanta building, where they cannot even make love in private. “I ain’t got no stove in the basement and I ain’t got no stove in the kitchen,” says a Harlem woman who lives in a building jammed with whores, rats and babies. “I ain’t got no paint and I ain’t got no windows and I ain’t got no providements. I keep the place clean just so the doctor can come in, and some day the undertaker. What’s a poor person? A poor person is when you see me!”

Poverty is the Greene County, N.C., Negro worker, whose annual income averages $213. Poverty is the Georgia woman who cannot fill out a job application because she does not know the meaning of “spouse” or “maiden name.” Poverty is the laid-off Colorado miner who does not move to a richer job market because he cannot sell his house and is afraid to lose his seniority or pension. It is the Detroit construction hand who has not worked since most of the big building jobs moved to the suburbs, because he is too illiterate to get a driver’s license and the buses do not go out that far.

The U.S. economy has enabled millions to climb up from poverty, and plenty of people defined as poor by the Government do not think of themselves that way. Says a Houston cleaning woman: “I’ve got three kids at home, and I raised them on less than $2,000 a year, and I’m proud of it. You ain’t poor until your spirit goes, and I think it goes if you keep on taking handouts.” One impoverished ex-miner in Pennsylvania has a freezer loaded with vegetables from his backyard garden—and a shotgun in the kitchen to pepper the pants of any welfare worker who wants to check up on just how much he possesses.

Yet millions of others lack this kind of spunk—which stirs politicians and scholars to explanations. Senator Abraham Ribicoff argues that the poor “fared badly in the lotteries of parenthood, skin pigmentation and birthplace.” Author Harrington speaks of the “thickness” of poverty—the dead ambitions that make for apathy, immobility, unaspiring hopelessness. One Government study by psychiatrists found that many of the poor are “rigid, suspicious, have a fatalistic outlook. They do not plan ahead. They are prone to depression, futility, lack of friendliness and trust in others.” In the burned-out mining towns of Appalachia, ninth-generation Anglo-Saxon American men cluster around TV sets that blare from the grim, grimy tar-paper shacks. “They’re not much interested in what’s on the screen,” says John D. Rockefeller IV, a 28-year-old poverty worker in West Virginia, “but it gives them something to watch and pass the long hours of the day.”

In a civilization where a family can be termed poor even if it is adequately clothed and fed, most philosophers tend to agree with Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s contention that “poverty is not purely economic, but cultural. There is spiritual, social and moral deprivation.” U.C.L.A. Chancellor Franklin Murphy sees poverty in the lack of “the intangibles—opportunity and the experience of beauty.”

Undoubtedly, the best way out of that kind of depression is education. In the land where the dream of almost every immigrant family has been to school its children for a better life, where Economist John Kenneth Galbraith remarks that he has never met a truly educated person who was impoverished, the U.S. President’s 1964 economic report declares that “poverty and ignorance go hand in hand.” Two-thirds of America’s poor families are headed by people with no more than a grade school education. But to expand education without expanding jobs would be to create bitterness, argues Economist Leon Keyserling, who believes that the surest cure for poverty is to speed the economy’s growth.

What to Do Without the Poor?

The Government is battering at poverty from all sides: the aid-to-education bill, the rent-subsidy housing bill, medicare, civil rights, social security step-ups and further tax cuts to stimulate economic expansion. More specifically, under Sargent Shriver and his Office of Economic Opportunity, the Government in the past year has started the War on Poverty for which last week’s appropriation provides funds. In it are nine programs of job training, relief, experiment and redirection of existing welfare. It aims to prove that poverty, more than being just relieved, can be cured in a free, rich nation. Taking a tip from Maimonides, the U.S. hopes not merely, to balm the distress of the poor but to reshape their skills, attitudes and even their personalities.

The programs range from Head Start preschool courses and job-training camps for high school dropouts to low-interest (41%) loans for dirt-poor farmers and vocational courses for slum adults. The Community Action Program, the boldest idea, is mobilizing the poor themselves, organizing people of rundown neighborhoods to run their own child-care centers and basic education courses, and to conduct self-help drives to improve housing and sanitation.

The federal effort has touched off many fights between militant slum leaders and city and state politicians, who fear that if the poor people or their clergymen get control of the poverty millions, they will have excessive powers of patronage. The new money bill gave Governors a partial veto over Shriver’s projects. Inevitably, there have been charges of graft, waste and, above all, naivete. The battling bogged down the poverty programs in Chicago, Denver and—most explosively—Los Angeles. On the brighter side, there is harmony and noticeable progress in New York City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, West Virginia and several other poverty targets. In Atlanta $36,000 invested in a pilot anti-poverty program produced jobs for 272 unemployed—who now have a payroll of $744,000. Says the local anti-poverty chief, Boisfeuillet Jones: “If this isn’t good business, I don’t know what is.”

If the poverty program everywhere could get returns at Jones’s rate, it would be a stunning achievement. Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal contends that the American poor are the greatest underdeveloped market in the world. Psychiatrist Leonard Duhl, planning chief of the National Institute of Mental Health, looks forward to the poor learning “the value of books and good music and even wine.”

Euphorically, some people are even beginning to wonder what society might be like without the poor. Would they be missed? After all, the poor provide often beneficial political ferment and a useful troubling of the sluggish conscience. The ancient prophets, and a great many modern ones, were kept in business largely by the poor. In his new book, The Accidental Century, Michael Harrington speculates that “there could be a new, unimpoverished political equivalent of the poor,” composed of middle-class people threatened in their jobs by automation and cybernation.

In the sense that men will always form a spectrum from the richest on down, sociologists will never be able to say that any nation is free of poverty. Some future U.S. President may deplore “one-third of a nation ill-wined, ill-minked and ill-mansioned,” for the minimum living standards that define poverty are certain to go on rising. But that rise is what constitutes victory in a war on poverty.