Poor people often blame themselves and accept the stereotype that they have moral flaws. But poverty reflects broad societal failings more than individual shortcomings, a social-welfare expert shows. Often these people divert their eyes and try to make themselves invisible, a tendency you can observe if you address each person who serves you or performs what society regards as menial labor by name and look them in the eye.
I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
—Malcolm X
Throughout our history, poverty has usually been understood to be rooted in personal, moral failure: weakness of character, the absence of a work ethic, and disdain for the norms of society at large spread like a disease from person to person, from family to family, and produce entire communities beset with vice and despair.
Some even suggest that poor Americans inhabit an entirely separate culture, a “culture of poverty,” one that manifests itself, according to anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1914–1970), in seventy-five distinct traits. Among them, we find a hatred and fear of the police; the absence of participation in mainstream institutions (and a distrust of them); low marriage rates; a “present-time” and fatalistic orientation; territoriality; early sexual activity; female-centered families; a lack of impulse control; a “tolerance for pathology”; and feelings of marginality, helplessness, dependence, and inferiority.
It is the urban poor, others have argued, who are especially distinct, and their inability or unwillingness to alter these “pathologies” is the chief cause of their poverty. As Jacob Riis (1849–1914) professed long before Lewis: “The thief is infinitely easier to deal with than the pauper, because the very fact of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man.”
It is the supposed passivity among the very poor that often draws the attention of politicians, reformers, and critics of welfare. But it has been prominent even among more liberal voices. American socialist Michael Harrington wrote this in The Other America, his 1962 book credited with bringing the Kennedy administration’s attention to poverty:
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 . . . 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 that they see little reason to hope.
Harrington is not quite blaming poor people for their state, but he seems to suggest that there is little that can be done in the face of such deeply ingrained norms. Others have concluded that trying to relieve poverty is therefore futile, or even counterproductive. If people are poor, it is their own fault. In a land of such opportunity, after all, how else could we explain it?
NO CITY ON A HILL
It is in many ways our oldest and most enduring national myth, one that has taken many forms: the streets are paved with gold. With hard work, any American can achieve anything. Any boy (or girl, we now add) can grow up to be president. We’re a beacon to the world, a land of freedom and opportunity. Even before leaving the Mayflower and stepping on our shore, William Bradford (1590–1657) proclaimed in 1630, “We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
In 1699, Governor Bellomont of New York boasted, “I believe there is not a richer populace anywhere in the King’s dominions,” and, when the creation of a workhouse was first suggested, he reported that the Assembly “smiled at [the proposal] because there is no such thing as a beggar in this town or county.” Years later, novelist Herman Melville continued the myth.
Such a being as a beggar is almost unknown; and to be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism.
America’s most famous French visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), famously remarked upon it in his 1835 book Democracy in America:
No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions. It was easy to see the influence of this basic fact on the whole course of society. . . . Men there are nearer equality in wealth and mental endowments, or, in other words, more nearly equally powerful, than in any other country of the world or in any other age of recorded history.
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), thanks to his rags-to-riches Autobiography, must also take part of the blame for this enduring trope, but even Gordon Wood, an eminent historian of our founding era, finds this Shining City evident from our earliest stirrings of resistance to Britain: “The social conditions that generically are supposed to lie behind all revolutions—poverty and economic deprivation—were not present in colonial America . . . the white American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off.” We should give Wood credit, and note his caveat (white American colonists), but even so, his assertion is unfounded.
Recent research by historians of the colonial era shows that claims of a relatively free and equal society, one without dire need, are without much merit, and that it was “a poor man’s country for many of its citizens.” The number of those needing and receiving aid rose throughout the eighteenth century. Mobility even then was limited, especially in the cities, and poverty was a constant presence throughout people’s life spans. Many had to rely upon assistance from churches, private aid societies, friends, neighbors, and family, and by the time of the American Revolution, local officials spent perhaps as much effort in “warning out” (or expelling) the nonresident poor as they did in caring for residents in need.
By the end of the eighteenth century, all large American cities had discovered the need for almshouses and workhouses. Women, then as now, were disproportionately poor and reliant upon public aid, a condition that grew worse, not better, over the course of the eighteenth century. And during that period, while the number of landholders rose, so too did the number who were born and died without property. Infant mortality rates in the colonies were no lower than in England, and as historian Gary Nash (1933–) writes, “among the mass of those who sought opportunity in the British American colonies, it is the story of relentless labor and ultimate failure that stands out.”
Historian John K. Alexander noted in 1980 that in the late 1700s Philadelphia “had far more social distance between classes and far more class conflict than is often supposed . . . thus questioning the claim that the late colonial and revolutionary periods were marked by a high degree of social unity, harmony, and simple humanitarianism.” Wood himself admitted “wealth was more unequally distributed after the Revolution than before.”
Simple narratives of abundance and opportunity, of progress and prosperity, will no longer do. Poverty and inequality have been a constant presence in this country, and the causes have been constant, too: disruption and dislocation brought by war and large-scale economic change; sickness, death, fire, and natural disaster; seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labor; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and gender; the power conferred by inherited wealth and status; and a political system that inhibits the ability of majorities to exert their will over elite minorities. Yet we have been unwilling to acknowledge this, and instead of relieving poverty we blame poor Americans for their condition, rationalizing our neglect with disdain for their supposed lack of aspiration, their poor work ethic, their despair.
A RATIONAL SURRENDER
Oscar Lewis wrote of the culture of poverty that “there is nothing in the concept that puts the onus of poverty on the character of the poor,” for it is the effects of poverty that he has documented, not the causes.
The diminished expectations, the refusal to participate in mainstream institutions, the cynicism, and other characteristics we might indeed find among very poor people—these are not marks of moral failure, he insists, but complicated (if unconscious) strategies used by those with little discernible power and little cause for hope to protect themselves from disappointment. It first developed centuries ago, Lewis argued, as a reaction to the tumultuous transition from feudalism to capitalism.
We’ve now seen enough into the lives of poor Americans to understand how diminished expectations, or even utter hopelessness, might, alas, be prudent, given the formidable obstacles to their survival, let alone success. If one expects nothing, after all, it is more difficult to be disappointed. The anthropologist Elliot Liebow observed it in the men he chronicled in Tally’s Corner, his insightful 1967 book on the lives and attitudes of poor black men who hung out on a sidewalk in the nation’s capital: “Convinced of their inadequacies, not only do they not seek out those few better-paying jobs which test their resources, but they actively avoid them, gravitating in a mass to the menial, routine jobs which offer no challenge—and therefore pose no threat—to the already diminished images they have of themselves.”
Adapted from A People’s History of Poverty in America, part of the People’s History book series edited by the historian Howard Zinn.