“THERE IS A FAMILIAR America. It is celebrated in speeches and advertised on television and in the magazines. It has the highest mass standard of living the world has ever known,” wrote Michael Harrington in 1962 in The Other America. While Americans in the 1950s agonized over the consequences of their affluence, “there existed another America. In it dwelt somewhere between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 citizens of this land. They were poor. They still are.” They did not suffer poverty “in the same sense as those poor nations where millions cling to hunger as a defense against starvation,” but “tens of millions” of them at the “very moment” he wrote were “maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency.” They were “hungry.… without adequate housing and education and medical care.” Still, Harrington observed, “the millions who are poor in the United States tend to become invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them.” Harrington’s purpose was to expose this “huge, enormous, and intolerable fact of poverty in America.”1
Harrington wrote to arouse the conscience of a nation. His book was a sensation. It has sold over a million copies. It is alleged to have played a role in rousing President John F. Kennedy to plan an attack on poverty. In important ways, the war on poverty that followed Kennedy’s assassination transformed the landscape of poverty in America. By 1973 the poverty rate had dropped from 22 percent at the time Harrington wrote, to 11.1 percent—poverty’s nadir in America. By 2011 poverty had drifted upward: 46.2 million Americans lived below the official income poverty line. They were 15 percent of the population—an extraordinary, unacceptable share—but much lower than when Harrington called the nation to account.
Poverty remained a “huge, enormous, and intolerable fact.” Unlike the era when Harrington wrote, Americans seemed to remain not only oblivious to its extent but hostile to any frontal assault by government. Poverty had become so much a third rail in American politics that it received almost no mention by presidential candidates and most other politicians. In part, the increased economic segregation in where Americans lived rendered much poverty hard to see, and municipal governments tried to force homeless persons and beggars away from shiny, revitalized city centers. But the barriers to visibility were psychic as well. The statistics were well publicized and easily accessible. Americans, for the most part, chose not to pay them much attention or act on their implications. All this was very strange at a time when massive increases in inequality and insecurity rendered the well-being of ordinary Americans more and more precarious.
How to account for the relative invisibility and political toxicity of poverty as a public issue in twenty-first century America is a topic about which historians, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and pundits surely will argue. This book does not attempt a comprehensive answer. Rather, it focuses on one necessary component of any explanation: how Americans have thought and talked about poverty and how they have put poverty talk into action. For more than two hundred years, one theme has run through this American response to poverty. It is the idea that some poor people are undeserving of help because they brought their poverty on themselves. This belief can be traced in what has been said about poor people; it can be located, as well, by identifying who was, and who was not, given assistance in times of need. The identity of the undeserving poor has shifted with time and context, but the category has endured.
The key words in the subtitle of this book have been chosen with care. They are “enduring” and “confrontation.” Enduring points to the stubborn persistence of poverty in American history. Poverty is deeply rooted. Before the twentieth century, the nation lacked both the economic surplus and policy tools to eradicate it; all that could be hoped for was to ameliorate the condition of the poor by keeping them from perishing from starvation, wretched housing, and disease. That situation began to change in the twentieth century with what one historian has called the “discovery of abundance” and with increasingly sophisticated methods for transferring income, delivering services, and providing the essentials of a decent life. For about a decade, this combination of abundance and method backed by popular support and political will worked spectacularly well.2 Since then, poverty has been allowed to grow once again, not, it must be emphasized, as the inevitable consequence of government impotence or economic scarcity, but of political will.
Confrontation, the second key term in this book’s subtitle, has multiple referents. It refers to the continuing confrontation with poverty throughout the nation’s history. It includes both ideas—whose importance and consequences must not be underestimated—and the actions of both public and private sectors. It embraces, as well, ideas and actions emanating from the political Right as well as the Left, both of which have been constant players in the nation’s confrontation with poverty.
As a practical matter, the use of labels for political Right and Left is inescapable in moving between sides of the political spectrum, as this book does, without repeatedly interrupting the story, even though labels obscure shades of meaning. In telling this story, I often use the terms “liberal” and “liberalism.” These, of course, have had multiple meanings over the centuries, from the classic liberalism emphasizing individual freedom and unfettered markets to “New Deal liberalism” with its emphasis on activist government. It is in the latter sense that I use the term. In this book it is a shorthand for a political position that stresses the role of an active government in directly promoting the economic and social well-being of citizens through public policy. It contrasts with conservatism understood as a position more skeptical of the legitimacy and capability of government and more reliant on markets to solve public problems. The terms also have taken on meanings with respect to social issues that on the surface appear to contradict their positions on the role of government in economic affairs. Liberalism in general stands for reduced governmental interference with individual freedoms, especially in matters of conscience and sexuality. Conservatism has come to imply a far more authoritarian government intrusion into civil liberties and private lives. These, of course, are rough and ready definitions that skirt over subtleties, changes over time, and overlaps between positions. But they do highlight real tendencies in modern politics identifiable in the stories told in this book and, for this reason, constitute a defensible shorthand.
To emphasize, as this book does, that large numbers of poor people throughout the nation’s history have been labeled as undeserving is to say that poverty has been viewed as a problem of persons. Its roots lie in personal deficiencies—moral, cultural, or biological. This tendency to view poverty as a problem of persons, I contend, offers the oldest and most enduring answer to the question, what kind of a problem is poverty? But it is not the only answer. Poverty has been written about, as well, as a problem of place, resources, political economy, power, and market failure. These answers are important because each has carried—and continues to carry—different implications about the direction and priorities for actions against poverty. In this book, I pay attention to each of them. But I look behind them as well. Each of them tells a causal story about the origins of poverty. They do not address the enduring meta-questions of why we should care about poverty, whom we should help, and the consequences of our actions.
Three perennial issues frame discussions of poverty’s origins. They have coursed through every debate on poverty during more than two centuries. The first of these is who to help. This problem has been partly about the allocation of finite resources and partly about the exercise of moral judgment: who deserves to be provided with cash, food, housing, medical care, or other goods and services? The second issue is the impact of relief, welfare, or charity on individual behavior. It is what the economists call moral hazard. Does the availability of help undermine incentives to work, marry, and maintain a stable family life? The third issue is ethical. What do we owe each other? Beyond our families and immediate communities, what are the limits of our social obligations? The great debate about the answers to these questions has structured poverty talk and action since before the nation was born through to the present, and we will encounter it again and again throughout this book.
This is a book with a purpose. It wants to enlighten readers about the persistence of poverty as both a fact and an issue. It tries to show poverty’s complexity and to provide readers with a framework for understanding the politics of poverty. It hopes to convince readers that ideas really do have consequences and that alternatives always have existed—history is the story of choice, albeit constrained, not inevitability. Poverty remains a national disgrace in part because of the way we define and think about it—which, in turn, shapes the energy we put into its eradication. Or, as Charles Darwin admonished in 1839 in The Voyage of the Beagle, “if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin …”