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Chapter z The Economy: Abundance, Consumerism, and Poverty r. Michael Harrington, The Otber America, 196z Few books published in America during tbe earry r96os had more impact than Michael Harrington's The other America a - searing indictment of pouerty in the united states that ran counter to the era's"dominant themes of tuidespread abundance and perpetual economic grou,,tb. As a socialist, Harrington was troubred by tbe way that American capitarism, for ari its success in raising auerage liuing standards, actually wirked n ,rpr.iu* inequalities of ruealth and opportunity based around dlfferenceiof race, ethnicity, gender, and class. writing in the tradition of tie best *muckmking,, iournalism of the Progressiue Era and extending more recent critiques of American economic structures, notably John K)nnrth Galbraitb,sihe Affluent Society, Ha*ington reuealed tie plight of some 40 to jo million i.mpouerished, despondent, and largely neglected Americarns. e'*"i., bes.t-seller, Harrington's book herpid-to tirust tbe issue of pouetrty' into the public consciousness and politicar arena ubere presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Dere among tbose ,tho feil under its l"i"r",rr.-In particular, Johnson's war on pouerty and other aspects of his Great society programs sougbt to use federal power to address some of tbe problems Harrington had identified. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation. If the middle class never aia iike ugtin.r; pou..,r it was at least aware of them, ,.Across the tracks,, ,r"o, a very to'rrg *ry ,o *r, ;;; 42 The r96os: A Documentary Reader go. There were forays into the slums at Christmas time; there were charitable organizations that brought contact with the poor. Occasionally, almost everyone passed through the Negro ghetto or the blocks of tenements, if only to get downtown to work or to entertainment. Now the American city has been transformed. The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the central area, but they are increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else. Middle-class women coming in from Suburbia on a rare trip may catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theater, but their children are segregated in suburban schools. The business or professional man may drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus, but it is not an important experience to him. The failures, the unskilled, the disabled, the aged, and the minorities are right there, across the tracks, where they have always been. But hardly anyone else is. In short, the very development of the American city has removed poverty from the living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middleclass Americans. Living out in the suburbs it is easy to assume that ours is, indeed, an affluent society. This new segregation of poverty is compounded by a well-meaning ignorance. A good many concerned and sympathetic Americans are aware that there is much discussion of urban renewal. Suddenly, driving through the city, they notice that a familiar slum has been torn down and that there are towering, modern buildings where once there had been tenements or hovels. There is a warm feeling of satisfaction, of pride in the way things are working out: the poor, it is obvious, are being taken care of. The irony in this . . . is that the truth is nearly the exact opposite to the impression. The total impact of the various housing programs in postwar America has been to squeeze more and more people into existing slums. More often than not, the modern apartment in a towering building rents at $4o a room or more. For, during the past decade and a half, there has been more subsidization of middle- and upper-income housing than there has been of housing for the poor. Clothes make the poor invisible too: America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known. For a variety of reasons, the benefits of mass production have been spread much more evenly in this area than in many others. It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed, or doctored. Even people with terribly depressed incomes can look prosperous. This is an extremely important factor in defining our emotional and existential ignorance of poverty. In Detroit the existence of social classes became much more difficult to discern the day the companies put lockers in The Economy: Abundance, Consumerism, and Poverty 41 the plants. From that moment on, one did not see men in work clothes on the way to the factory, but citizens in slacks and white shirts. This process has been magnified with the poor throughout the country. There are tens of thousands of Americans in the big cities who are wearing shoes, perhaps even a stylishly cut suit or dress, and yet are hungry. It is not a matter of planning, though it almost seems as if the affluent society had given out costumes to the poor so that they would not offend the rest of society with the sight of rags. Then, many of the poor are the wrong age to be seen. A good number of them (over 8,ooo,ooo) are sixty-five years of age or better; an even larger number are under eighteen. The aged members of the other America are often sick, and they cannot move. Another group of them live out their lives in loneliness and frustration: they sit in rented rooms, or else they stay close to a house in a neighborhood that has completely changed from the old days. Indeed, one of the worst aspects of poverty among the aged is that these people are out of sight and out of mind, and alone. The young are somewhat more visible, yer they too stay close to their neighborhoods. Sometimes they advertise their poverty through a lurid tabloid story about a gang killing. But generally they do not disturb the quiet streets of the middle class. And finally, the poor are politically invisible. It is one of the cruelest ironies of social life in advanced countries that the dispossessed at the bottom of society are unable to speak for themselves. The people of the other America do not, by far and large, belong to unions, to fraternal organizations, or to political parties. They are without lobbies of their own; they put forward no legislative program. As a group, they are atomized. They have no face; they have no voice.... Out of the thirties came the welfare state. Its creation had been stimulated 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 upper third in the country, for the big market farmers. If a man works in an extremely low-paying job, he may not even be covered by social security or other welfare programs. If he receives unemployment compensation, the payment is scaled down according to by mass impoverishment and misery, yet his low earnings. One of the major laws that was designed to cover everyone, rich and poor, was social security. But even here the other Americans suffered discrimination. Over the years social security payments have not even provided a subsistence level of life. The middle third have been able to supplement the federal pension through private plans negotiated by unions, through joining medical 44 The r96os: A Documentary Reader insurance schemes like Blue Cross, and so on. The poor have not been able to do so. They lead a bitter life, and then have to pay for that fact in old age. Indeed, the paradox that the welfare state benefits those least who need help most is but a single instance of a persistent irony in the other America. Even when the money finally trickles down, even when a school is built in a poor neighborhood, for instance, the poor are still deprived. Their entire environment, their life, their values, do not prepare them to take advantage of the new opportunity. The parents are anxious for the children to go to work; the pupils are pent up, waiting for the moment when their education has complied with the law. Today's poor, in short, missed the political and social gains of the thirties. They are, as Galbraith rightly points out, the first minority poor in history, the first poor not to be seen, the first poor whom the politicians could leave alone. The first step toward the new poverty was taken when millions of people proved immune to progress. lrhen that happened, the failure was not individual and personal, but a social product. But once the historic accident takes place, it begins to become a personal fate. The new poor of the other America saw the rest of society move ahead. They went on living in depressed areas, and often they tended to become In some of the West Virginia towns, for instance, aLentire community will become shabby and defeated. The young and the depressed human beings. adventurous go to the city, leaving behind those who cannot move and those who lack the will to do so. The entire area becomes permeated with failure, and that is one more reason the big corporations shy away. Indeed, one of the most important things about the new poverty is that it cannot be defined in simple, statistical terms. Throughout this book a crucial term is used: aspiration. If a group has internal vitality, a will - if it has aspiration - it may live in dilapidated housing, it may eat an inadequate diet, and it may suffer poverty, but it is not impoverished. So it was in those ethnic slums of the immigrants that played such a dramatic role in the unfolding of the American dream. The people found themselves in slums, but they were not slum dwellers. But the new poverty is constructed so as to destroy aspiration; it is a system designed to be impervious to hope. The other America does not contain the adventurous seeking a new life and land. It is populated by the failures, by those driven from the land and bewildered by the city, by old people suddenly confronted with the torments of loneliness and poverty, and by minorities facing a wall of prejudice. In the past, when poverty was general in the unskilled and semi-skilled work force, the poor were all mixed together. The bright and the dull, those The Economy: Abundance, Consumerism, and Poverty 4j who were going to escape into the great society and those who were to stay behind, all of them lived on the same street. 'Sfhen the middle third rose, this community was destroyed. And the entire invisible land of the other Americans became a ghetto, a modern poor farm for the rejects of society and of the economy. It is a blow to reform and the political hopes of the poor that the middle class no longer understands that poverty exists. But, perhaps more impor- tant, the poor are losing their links with the great world. If statistics and sociology can measure a feeling as delicate as loneliness . . . the other America is becoming increasingly populated by those who do not belong to anybody or anything. They are no longer participants in an ethnic culture from the old country; they are less and less religious; they do not belong to unions or clubs. They are not seen, and because of that they themselves cannot see. Their horizon has become more and more restricted; they see one another, and that means they see little reason to hope. . . . Finally, one might summarize the newness of contemporary poverty by saying: These are the people who are immune to progress. But then the facts are even more cruel. The other Americans are the victims of the very inventions and machines that have provided a higher living standard for the rest of the society. They are upside-down in the Economy and for them greater productivity often means worse jobs; agricultural advance becomes hunger. In the optimistic theory, technology is an undisguised blessing. An increase in productivity, the argument goes, generates a higher standard of living for the whole people. And indeed, this has been true for the middle and upper thirds of American societ5 the people who made such striking gains in the last two decades. It tends to overstate the automatic character of the process, to omit the role of human struggle. . . . Yet it states a certain truth-for those who are lucky enough to participate in it. But the poor, if they were given to theory, might argue the exact opposite. They might say: Progress is misery. As the society became more technological, more skilled, those who learn to work the machines, who get the expanding education, move up. Those who miss out at the very start find themselves at a new disadvantage. A generation ago in American life, the majority of the working people did not have high-school educations. But at that time industry was organized on a lower level of skill and competence. And there was sort of continuum in the shop: the youth who left school at sixteen could begin as a laborer, and gradually pick up skill as he went along. Today the situation is quite different. The good jobs require much more academic preparation, much more skill from the very outset. Those who lack a high-school education tend to be condemned to the underworld - to 46 The r96os: A Documentary Reader low-paying service industries, to backward factories, to sweeping and janitorial duties. If the fathers and mothers of the contemporary poor were penalized a generation ago for their lack of schooling, their children will suffer all the more. The very rise in productivity that created more money and better working conditions for the rest of the society can be a menace to the poor. . . . Poverty in the r96os is invisible and it is new, and both these factors make it more tenacious. It is more isolated and politically powerless than ever before. It is laced with ironies, not the least of which is that many of the poor view progress upside-down, as a menace and a threat to their lives. And if the nation does not measure up to the challenge of automation, poverty in the r96os might be on the increase. Source: Michael Harrington, The Otber America: Pouerty in the United States (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company ry621, pp. rr-r3, r6-zr. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright renewed @ r99o by Stephanie Harrington. All rights reserved. z. Council of Economic Advisers, Annual Report, 1965, t966 'Wbile prosperity was uneuenly spread, the strength of the US economy during the r96os prouided a crucial context for many of its most important social, political and cuhural deuelopments. This excerpt from tbe 1965 report of the Council of Economic Aduisers - an aduisory body set up by 'World Congress after War II to assist the president in formulating economic policy - captures botb a sense of pride in the performance of tbe economy and an unflincbing confidence that growth would continue indefinitely. Interestingly, giuen the empbasis on free-market principles and tbe importance of priuate enterprise, tbe report is also careful to note the significance of strategic federal interuentions to encourage economic growth, uitb all that seemed to promise in terms of full-employment and greater prosperity throughout tbe nation. The Sustained Expansion of 196r-64 As 1965 begins, most Americans are enjoying a degree of prosperity unmatched in their experience, or indeed in the history of their nation. In r964, some 7o million of them were at work, producing,$6zz billion worth of goods and services.
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