Michael Harrington addresses a meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality in the early 1960s. ©Bob Adelman

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50 Years Later: Poverty and The Other America

MAURICE ISSERMAN Bowery district. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Catholic church) and joined the Young People’s Socialist League, When ’s The Other America: the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of Poverty in the United States first appeared in the American Socialist Party, a party then led bookstores in March 1962, its author had by . A tireless organizer, modest hopes for its success, expecting to sell prolific writer, skillful debater, and charis- at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the matic orator, Harrington succeeded Thomas as book proved a publishing phenomenon, America’s best-known socialist in the 1960s, garnering substantial sales (seventy thousand just as Thomas had succeeded Eugene Debs in in several editions within its first year and that role in the 1920s. was never the over a million in paperback since then), wide road to power in the United States, but and respectful critical attention, and a signif- socialist leaders like Debs, Thomas, and icant influence over the direction of social Harrington were, from time to time, able to welfare policy in the United States during the play the role of America’s social conscience. In decade that followed. By February 1964, the years since Harrington’s death from cancer Business Week noted, “The Other America is in 1989, at the age of sixty-one, no obvious already regarded as a classic work on successor to the post of socialist tribune in the poverty.” Time magazine later offered even Debs-Thomas-Harrington tradition has more sweeping praise, listing The Other America emerged. in a 1998 article entitled “Required Reading” as one of the twentieth century’s ten most influential books, putting it in such distin- Harrington’s most famous appeal to the guished company as Sigmund Freud’s American conscience, The Other America, was a Civilization and Its Discontents and Alexander short work (one hundred and eighty-six pages Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. in the original edition) with a simple thesis: Harrington’s own knowledge of poverty poverty in the affluent society of the United was, for the most part, acquired secondhand, States was both more extensive and more tena- as he would recount in two memoirs, cious than most Americans assumed. The Fragments of the Century (1973) and The Long extent of poverty could be calculated by Distance Runner: An Autobiography (1988). Born counting the number of American households in 1928 in St. Louis, the only child of loving that survived on an annual income of less than and moderately prosperous parents of sturdy $3,000. These figures were readily available in Irish-Catholic lineage, educated at Holy Cross, the census data, but until Harrington Yale Law School, and the University of published The Other America they were rarely Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 considered. Harrington revealed to his readers to become a writer. In 1951, he joined Dorothy that an “invisible land” of the poor, over forty Day’s as a million strong, or one in four Americans at the volunteer at its soup kitchen; there he got to time, fell below the poverty line. For the most know a small subset of the nation’s poor, the part this Other America existed in rural homeless male alcoholics of New York City’s isolation and in crowded slums where

WINTER 2012 DISSENT 83 RECONSIDERATIONS middle-class visitors seldom ventured. ”That of $22,314 for a family of four. In absolute the poor are invisible is one of the most numbers it was the greatest number of important things about them,” Harrington Americans living below the poverty line since wrote in his introduction in 1962. “They are the Bureau began keeping such records in not simply neglected and forgotten as in the 1959, three years before the appearance of The old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, Other America. The report revealed that some they are not seen.” groups of Americans were particularly hard- hit: For blacks, the poverty rate was 27 percent, for Hispanics, 26 percent. Residents That was then. Fifty years since the publi- of Rust Belt cities in the old industrial cation of The Other America the poor are still heartland of the Northeast and Midwest also among us—and in a testament to the lasting suffered disproportionately: Reading, significance of Harrington’s work, not at all Pennsylvania, had the nation’s highest poverty invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus rate of 41.3 percent followed by Flint, no longer a matter of debate; what if anything Michigan, at 41.2 percent. Age was also a can be done to improve their condition factor, with young families over-represented: remains at issue. according to census data, 35 percent of In September 2011, the United States American children were being raised in Census Bureau reported that over forty-six poverty. The recession that began in 2007- million Americans—nearly one in six—were 2008 exacerbated poverty, but so did the living below the officially established poverty “welfare reform” measures, enacted in the line in 2010, as defined by an annual income prosperous 1990s, restricting federal and state cash aid to poor families. If the extent of poverty is no longer debatable, explanations for its tenacity as a Leave a legacy social problem as well as possible solutions remain controversial. Harrington’s own expla- nation in The Other America for the tenacity of of ideas... poverty, ironically, would lend ammunition A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to both to those who sought to expand federal Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs spending on the nation’s social welfare safety you hold dear will continue to have a public forum. net—and, in time, to those who wished to cut Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of back such spending. Independent Social Ideas. We ask you to consider one of the following options: Harrington lived a life of more or less voluntary poverty in the 1950s, eking out a 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular meager living as a freelance magazine writer asset. “I bequeath $______to the Foundation for such publications as Commonweal and for the Study of Independent Social Ideas.” Commentary (it was in the latter, then a 2. You can leave a specific percentage of your magazine of bracingly liberal sentiments, that estate. “I bequeath ____ percent of my estate to an early version of what became The Other the Foundation for the Study of Independent America first appeared in 1959 as a two-article Social Ideas.” series). In his career as a freelancer, he proved 3. You can leave the remainder of your estate. a gifted borrower and adapter of others’ ideas, “After distributing the specific bequests listed a kind of intellectual jack-of-all-trades who above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder could write knowledgeably on topics ranging of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of from contemporary literature to civil liberties, Independent Social Ideas.” from ballet to Bolshevism. He read widely and proved a quick study in mastering and trans- For more specifics on this or other lating into an easily accessible prose the some- information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive #2008 times esoteric concerns and language of a New York, N.Y. 10025 variety of disciplines. And in an act that (212) 316-3120 [email protected] proved that ideas truly do have consequences

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(although not always or only the ones however, significant evidence of literary craft intended), in the late 1950s he picked up the in the book, notwithstanding the informal and theory of the “culture of poverty” from anthro- almost conversational tone that Harrington pologist Oscar Lewis. adopted in his prose. His creative achievement Lewis, whose ethnographic study of involved not only the sympathetic description Mexican slum-dwellers, Five Families: Mexican of the lives and problems of the poor, but the Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, was creation of his own authorial persona. published in 1959, contended that being poor was not simply a condition marked by the absence of wealth; rather, poverty created “a The voice Harrington adopted throughout The subculture of its own.” However different Other America was calm and reasonable, but their places of origin, he argued, poor people also idealistic and impassioned. Unlike many in Mexico might have more in common—in left-wing pamphleteers, he had the ability to terms of family structure, interpersonal rela- convey moral seriousness without lapsing into tions, values systems and so forth—with their moralism. There is no hint in his writing of counterparts in Puerto Rico or New York City the sanctimonious bullying of the better-off than with other, better off people from their that pervaded so much of the radical style to own countries. come later in the decade. His tone suggested Echoing Lewis, Harrington argued that that the reader was a reasonable person, just American poverty constituted “a separate like the author, and reasonable people, once culture, another nation, with its own way of apprised of the plight of the Other America, life.” Poor Americans were not distinguished would agree on the need to find solutions. The from their affluent counterparts simply by enemies he identified in the book tended to be their lack of adequate income. Rather, they distanced abstractions like “social blindness” were or “the vocabulary of not caring” rather than identifiable individuals or political groups. people who lack education and skill, who Harrington often illustrated points with his have bad health, poor housing, low levels of favorite literary device, the use of paradox. aspiration and high levels of mental The “welfare state benefits those least who distress.…Each disability is the more need help most,” he wrote, because social intense because it exists within a web of security pensions and unemployment benefits disabilities. And if one problem is solved, were more likely to be available and more and the others are left constant, there is generous to those with good and steady little gain. employment. Poverty was “expensive to Poverty would not be solved automatically maintain,” because poor communities by the expansion of the economy (as in “a required extensive public spending on fire, rising tide lifts all boats,” the belief of many police, and health services. liberals at the time), and it certainly would Paradox was combined in The Other America not be ended by exhortations to the poor to lift with revelation, the bringing of hidden evils themselves up by their own bootstraps (the to light. “Beauty can be a mask for ugliness,” remedy that appealed to conservatives). he wrote of Appalachia, because the wealthy “Society,” Harrington concluded, “must help tourist passing through West Virginia’s them before they can help themselves.” mountain ranges might miss the desperate America needed to undertake a broad program quality of life of the rural poor in that state. of “remedial action” on behalf of the Other “America has the best-dressed poverty in the America—a “comprehensive assault on world,” thanks to inexpensive chain store poverty.” clothing, allowing the poorly housed, fed, In the introduction to The Other America, educated, and doctored to blend in with more Harrington wrote that the poor needed “an affluent fellow citizens when they mingled in American Dickens” to make them visible to public spaces. better-off citizens, although quickly hastening To peer beneath the deceptive surfaces of to add that he was no Dickens. There is, affluent America, Harrington suggested, it was

WINTER 2012 DISSENT 85 RECONSIDERATIONS necessary to enrich individual observation poverty, the Kennedy administration had been with social measurement. He made extensive considering proposals use of statistics in The Other America, but he dealing separately with such problems as found ways to present them that prevented the slum housing, juvenile delinquency, unem- non-public policy specialist’s eyes from ployment, dependency, and illiteracy, but glazing over. “Sometimes in the course of an they were separately inadequate because official Government report,” he wrote, “a they were striking only at some of the human being will suddenly emerge from the surface aspects of a bedrock problem, and shadow of statistics and analyses.” Or, in that bedrock problem had to be identified another passage, “Sometimes the statistics of and defined so that it could be attacked in a poverty can be read like a detective story.” The concerted, unified, and innovative way. technique made author and reader allies in the Perhaps it was Harrington’s book that iden- struggle to come to grips with a vast—but tified the target for Kennedy and supplied understandable and thus solvable—social ill. the coordinating concept: the bedrock Harrington did not imagine the poor as problem, in a word, was “poverty.” Words finer, more authentic, or more generous and concepts define programs; once the human beings than their better-off brethren, target was reduced to a single word, the as Beat novelist Jack Kerouac had recently timing became right for a unified program. done in On the Road or as John Steinbeck had done a generation earlier in The Grapes of Following Kennedy’s assassination in Wrath. The lives of the poor as portrayed in November 1963, his successor, Lyndon Baines The Other America were generally nasty, brutish, Johnson, took up the issue, and in his State of and short, precisely because they lacked such the Union address in January 1964 pledged amenities of middle-class life as decent his administration to waging an “uncondi- housing, education, nutrition, and medical tional war on poverty.” Sargent Shriver, care. Kennedy in-law and director of the Peace Harrington did not hesitate to present the Corps, headed up the task force charged by seedier side of the Other America, including the new president with drawing up anti- domestic violence, sexual promiscuity, and poverty legislation, and he invited the author substance abuse. In his view this was all a of The Other America to Washington as a part and product of the culture of poverty, a consultant in February 1964. judgment not on the poor as individuals, but Harrington’s success, symbolized by that on a society until now indifferent to their invitation to lend his expertise to the federal plight. anti-poverty effort, would have ironic conse- The Other America was a book about poor quences. The Other America popularized the people, but it was not a book written for poor phrase “culture of poverty,” which went on to people. The readers Harrington was speaking shape the main thrust of Johnson’s war on to were themselves citizens of the affluent poverty. But a close reading of Harrington’s society, whose consciences he sought to stir. book reveals an ambiguity in his employment And among those readers, reputedly, was of that term. Throughout the book he used President John F. Kennedy, although whether “culture of poverty” interchangeably with he actually read the book, or just the lengthy another term, “vicious circle,” a staple of and favorable review by reformist literature since the . that appeared in the pages of in “Here is one of the most familiar forms of the February 1963, remains in dispute. Either vicious circle of poverty,” Harrington wrote in way, according to James Sundquist, a political a typical passage: scientist who was involved in early discus- The poor get sick more than anyone else in sions of anti-poverty legislation, The Other the society. That is because they live in America brought to an end “piecemeal” slums, jammed together under unhygienic thinking about social problems in the conditions; they have inadequate diets, and Kennedy administration. As Sundquist noted cannot get decent medical care. When they in a 1969 essay on the origins of the war on

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become sick, they are sick longer than any Harrington had indeed succeeded in focusing other group in society. Because they are sick Washington’s attention on the “invisible land” more often and longer than anyone else, of the poor. But, as Sundquist noted, “words they lose wages and work, and find it and concepts define programs.” And the difficult to hold a steady job. And because concept that caught the attention of policy- of this, they cannot pay for good housing, makers, thanks to The Other America, was “the for a nutritious diet, for doctors. At any culture of poverty.” And if the problem was given point in this circle, particularly when one of culture rather than simply lack of there is a major illness, their prospect is to income, policymakers reasoned that federally move to an even lower level and to begin financed jobs were not the appropriate the cycle, round and round, toward even solution. more suffering. The policies eventually adopted by Shriver for the war on poverty were intended to help Harrington sought to convince his readers the poor to improve themselves, so that they that poverty was a condition not easy to shed. could take advantage of an expanding Everything in the lives of the Other Americans economy—a “hand-up, not a handout” as he conspired to keep them in poverty. Outside put it at the time. That meant an emphasis on intervention by the federal government was measures such as pre-school enrichment and necessary to improve their condition. But job training programs, along with the estab- nothing in the “vicious circle” he sketched lishment of community action agencies in above was culturally determined in the sense poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Compared to that Oscar Lewis had meant when he talked of job programs, these were relatively inex- the culture of poverty as a normative system at pensive initiatives, which was part of their odds with the values of the larger society, an political appeal. Johnson had made it clear to ingrained and unchanging way of life passed Shriver that appropriations for his “uncondi- down from generation to generation. No part tional war” had to be fought on the cheap. of the circle Harrington described was related Thirty years earlier, at the height of the New to a low level of aspiration, a tendency to Deal, Congress had appropriated five billion indulge in immediate gratification, a dollars for public works programs; in the first propensity for violence, or sexual promiscuity. year of the war on poverty, the appropriations Poor nutrition, poor medical care, poor for Shriver’s programs were held to under a housing, and the resultant frequent and billion dollars (which, given the rate of lengthy illnesses were a result of lack of inflation in the meantime was more like a income, not of cultural traits or behaviors. tenth than a fifth of the original sum). Everything that Harrington described in this Underfinanced and not always well particular example of the vicious circle could targeted, the war on poverty was still not the be improved through the simple expedient of utter failure of later conservative legend. additional household income. Community action agencies proved a contro- Harrington’s prescription for combating versial and short-lived experiment, soon aban- poverty was a broad federal jobs program, doned. But other programs, like the pre-school putting the unemployed to work, in essence a program Head Start, were more successful. return to the New Deal’s strategy for coping The poverty rate declined sharply during the with the Great Depression. But the war that course of the decade, from 22.4 percent in the federal government fought against poverty 1960 to 12.1 percent in 1969. The decline in in the 1960s did not use that strategy. poverty among the elderly was particularly

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WINTER 2012 DISSENT 87 RECONSIDERATIONS striking, thanks to the creation of pages of Commentary, which had by this time and increased Social Security benefits (not moved decisively into the neoconservative strictly speaking part of the war on poverty, camp) were actually counter-productive, but sharing the same sponsors and goals); encouraging the spread of single-parent over the years since, older Americans have families and of a culture of dependency. remained underrepresented in the ranks of the That argument, much more than poor as a result of those federal programs, Harrington’s views, would determine the fate with only 9 percent falling below the poverty of social welfare policy in the United States in line in 2010. the decades that followed. For Ronald Reagan, it was axiomatic that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the So if Johnson’s social welfare programs estab- problem.” Reagan was a conservative lished a record of, at least, modest successes, Republican who had consistently opposed why have they fared so poorly in popular social welfare spending since emerging as a memory of the 1960s? “We fought a war political contender in the mid-1960s. There against poverty,” President Ronald Reagan were those, including Harrington, who hotly once famously quipped, “and poverty won.” If contested such views during Reagan’s admin- so, it’s hard to understand why the poverty istration; his book The New American Poverty, level has never returned to the levels of the published in 1984, challenged those who late 1950s, neither in the economically blamed the poor for their own condition and troubled 1970s nor during the Great Recession argued for a resumption of bold anti-poverty that began in 2008. In politics, however, initiatives. But when Democratic presidential perception not infrequently trumps reality. candidate Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992 Americans like their wars, actual and pledging to “end welfare as we know it” and metaphorical, to deliver swift and uncondi- later proclaimed that “the era of big tional victories, and that kind of victory was government is over,” it was clear who had beyond the capacity of the war on poverty. won the political argument on the merits and Harrington had been drawn initially to the liabilities of social welfare spending. The poor concept of the culture of poverty because he never returned to the invisibility that had thought it would serve as a prod to federal been their fate in the 1950s, before the publi- action on many fronts: providing the poor cation of The Other America; but concern over with better housing, better medical care, their condition never returned to the list of better education, as well as job creation. What national priorities, not even in years of he did not anticipate was that the theory could Democratic political ascendancy. cut in other ways, antithetical to his own values and policy preferences. In the 1970s, the “neoconservatives” (a term coined by How relevant does The Other America remain Harrington in 1973 to describe former liberals today, as the poverty level creeps back up who had grown disaffected with government from its low point in the late 1960s and early social welfare programs), would use the 1970s? As social theory, the book shows both notion of the culture of poverty to argue for the signs of age and the imperfections of its abandoning the federal war on poverty. central concept. Harrington’s culture-of- Harrington had argued that structural barriers poverty thesis was at best ambiguous, at worst to social mobility helped create and an impediment to making the case for what he perpetuate a set of symptoms—low aspira- regarded as the real solution to poverty, tions, petty criminality, and the like—that federal spending on jobs programs. (In later distinguished those living in the culture of books, he made no use of the term.) poverty from the mainstream. But what remains vital in The Other America Neoconservatives, in contrast, described these many years later is its moral clarity. In such attitudes and behavior as the operative the final chapter of the book, Harrington causes of poverty. And federal social welfare asked his reader to make use of their programs, they argued (sometimes in the “vision”—and to do so in two senses. First, he

88 DISSENT WINTER 2012 RECONSIDERATIONS asked them to “see through the wall of his days were numbered from the cancer that affluence” and recognize the true dimensions would kill him less than three months later, of poverty in the United States and its cost in he was in a reflective mood. He reminisced human dignity. Second, he declared that they about his own days as a young socialist need to deploy their vision “in the sense of activist, hitchhiking around the country in the purpose and aspiration.” Harrington late 1950s and gathering material that he summoned his readers to “war on poverty” not would use in The Other America. As Leventhal just for the sake of the poor but for their own recalled the conversation: sakes. Americans, he felt, should be unwilling He said that he had felt an incredible degree to live in a society that, having the resources of freedom and learned so much in those to provide everyone a decent standard of years. He said I should make the most of it, living, was instead divided into two nations. being an organizer and traveling around, “The fate of the poor,” he concluded, “hangs getting to see the country and getting to upon the decision of the better-off. If this know what the country was all about. He anger and shame are not forthcoming, really loved this country and thought that someone can write a book about the other you had to love the country to be a radical, America a generation from now and it will be to be a socialist, and to want to change it. the same or worse.” The Other America can be read as a jeremiad, Among all the ways it can be read, The a lamentation about social wickedness, an Other America is Michael Harrington’s love attempt to inspire “anger and shame” in its letter to the United States, a country he readers. But it is, in the end, an optimistic believed in enough to want to see it change book, less an indictment and more a reminder for the better. to Americans to live up to their better instincts, and in doing so redeem the promise is the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of of equality enshrined in the national creed. In History at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and the May 1989, Harrington gave his final public author of The Other American: The Life of Michael address, to a group of labor journalists in New Harrington (2000). This article is adapted from the intro- York City. Dinah Leventhal, a young socialist duction to The Other America by Michael Harrington. activist then working for the Amalgamated Copyright © 2012 by Maurice Isserman. Excerpted with Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union, was in permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. the audience. After the talk, she and Harrington spoke for a few minutes. Knowing

Arguing the World

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