The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  IN HIS SIGNIFICANTLY titled The Affluent Society (1958) Professor J. K. Galbraith states that poverty in this country is no longer “a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought.” Dr. Galbraith is a humane critic of the American capitalist system, and he is generously indignant about the continued existence of even this nonmassive and afterthoughtish poverty. But the interesting thing about his pronouncement, aside from the fact that it is inaccurate, is that it was generally accepted as obvious. For a long time now, almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and—more important—the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.

  Dr. Galbraith states that our poor have dwindled to two hard-core categories. One is the “insular poverty” of those who live in the rural South or in depressed areas like West Virginia. The other category is “case poverty,” which he says is “commonly and properly related to [such] characteristics of the individuals so afflicted [as] mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of modern economic life, excessive procreation, alcohol, insufficient education.” He reasons that such poverty must be due to individual defects, since “nearly everyone else has mastered his environment; this proves that it is not intractable.” Without pressing the similarity of this concept to the “Social Darwinism” whose fallacies Dr. Galbraith easily disposes of elsewhere in his book, one may observe that most of these characteristics are as much the result of poverty as its cause.

  Dr. Galbraith’s error is understandable, and common. Last April the newspapers reported some exhilarating statistics in a Department of Commerce study: the average family income increased from $2,340 in 1929 to $7,020 in 1961. (These figures are calculated in current dollars, as are all the others I shall cite.) But the papers did not report the fine type, so to speak, which showed that almost all the recent gain was made by families with incomes of over $7,500, and that the rate at which poverty is being eliminated has slowed down alarmingly since 1953. Only the specialists and the statisticians read the fine type, which is why illusions continue to exist about American poverty.

  Now Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker and the Fund for the Republic who is at present a contributing editor of Dissent and the chief editor of the Socialist Party biweekly, New America, has written The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Macmillan). In the admirably short space of under two hundred pages, he outlines the problem, describes in imaginative detail what it means to be poor in this country today, summarizes the findings of recent studies by economists and sociologists, and analyzes the reasons for the persistence of mass poverty in the midst of general prosperity. It is an excellent book—and a most important one….

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  In the last year we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip van Winkle, to the fact that mass poverty persists, and that it is one of our two gravest social problems. (The other is related: While only 11 percent of our population is non-white, 25 percent of our poor are.) Two other current books confirm Mr. Harrington’s thesis: Wealth and Power in America (Praeger), by Dr. Gabriel Kolko, a social historian who has recently been at Harvard and the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Income and Welfare in the United States (McGraw-Hill), compiled by an imposing battery of four socio-economists headed by Dr. James N. Morgan, who rejoices in the title of Program Director of the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

  Dr. Kolko’s book resembles Mr. Harrington’s in several ways: It is short, it is based on earlier studies, and it is liberally inclined. It is less readable, because it is written in an academic jargon that is merely a vehicle for the clinching Statistic. Although it is impossible to write seriously about poverty without a copious use of statistics—as this review will demonstrate—it is possible to bring thought and feeling to bear on such raw material. Mr. Harrington does this more successfully than Dr. Kolko, whose prose is afflicted not only with academic blight but also with creeping ideology. Dr. Kolko leans so far to the socialist side that he sometimes falls on his nose, as when he clinches the inequality of wealth in the United States with a statistic: “In 1959, 23% of those earning less than $1,000 [a year] owned a car, compared to 95% of those earning more than $10,000.” The real point is just the opposite, as any citizen of Iran, Ghana, Yemen, or the U.S.S.R. would appreciate—not that the rich have cars but that almost a quarter of the extremely poor do. Similarly, although Dr. Kolko has two chapters on poverty that confirm Mr. Harrington’s argument, his main point is a different and more vulnerable one: “The basic distribution of income and wealth in the United States is essentially the same now as it was in 1939, or even 1910.” This is a half fact. The rich are almost as rich as ever and the poor are even poorer, in the percentage of the national income they receive. Yet, as will become apparent later, there have been major changes in the distribution of wealth, and there has been a general improvement in living standards, so that the poor are much fewer today than they were in 1939. “Most low-income groups live substantially better today,” Dr. Kolko admits. “But even though their real wages have mounted, their percentage of the national income has not changed.” That in the last half century the rich have kept their riches and the poor their poverty is indeed a scandal. But it is theoretically possible, assuming enough general increase in wealth, that the relatively poor might by now have achieved a decent standard of living, no matter how inferior to that of the rich. As the books under consideration show, however, this theoretical possibility has not been realized. Inequality of wealth is not necessarily a major social problem per se. Poverty is. The late French philosopher Charles Peguy remarks, in his classic essay on poverty, “The duty of tearing the destitute from their destitution and the duty of distributing goods equitably are not of the same order. The first is an urgent duty, the second is a duty of convenience….When all men are provided with the necessities what do we care about the distribution of luxury?” What indeed? Envy and emulation are the motives—and not very good ones—for the equalization of wealth. The problem of poverty goes much deeper….

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  The most obvious citizens of the Other America are those whose skins are the wrong color. The folk slogans are realistic: “Last to be hired, first to be fired” and “If you’re black, stay back.” There has been some progress. In 1939, the non-white worker’s wage averaged 41.4 percent of the white worker’s; by 1958 it had climbed to 58 percent. A famous victory, but the non-whites still average only slightly more than half as much as the whites. Even this modest gain was due not to any Rooseveltian or Trumanian social reform but merely to the fact that for some years there was a war on and workers were in demand, whether black, white, or violet. By 1947, the non-whites had achieved most of their advance—to 54 percent of white earnings, which means they have gained, in the last fifteen years, just 4 percent.

  The least obvious poverty affects our “senior citizens”—those over sixty-five. Mr. Harrington estimates that half of them—8,000,000—live in poverty, and he thinks they are even more atomized and politically helpless than the rest of the Other America. He estimates that one-fourth of the “unrelated individuals” among them, or a million persons, have less than $580 a year, which is about what is allotted for food alone in the Department of Agriculture’s minimum-subsistence budget. (The average American family now spends only 20 percent of its income for food—an indication of the remarkable prosperity we are all enjoying, except for one-quarter of us.) One can imagine, or perhaps one can’t, what it would be like to live on $580 a year, or $11 a week. It is only fair to note that most of our senior citizens do better: The average per-capita income of those over sixty-five is now estimated to be slightly over $20 a week. That is, about $1,000 a year.

  The aged poor have two sources of income besides their earnings or savings. One is contributions by relatives. A 1961 White House Conference Report put this at 10 percent of income, which works o
ut to $8 a week for an income of $4,000—and the 8,000,000 aged poor all have less than that. The other is Social Security, whose benefits in 1959 averaged $18 a week. Even this modest sum is more than any of the under-$4,000 got, since payments are proportionate to earnings and the poor, of course, earned less than the rest. A quarter of them, and those in general the neediest, are not covered by Social Security. The last resort is relief, and Mr. Harrington describes most vividly the humiliations the poor often have to put up with to get that.

  The problem of the aged poor is aggravated by the fact that, unlike the Italians or the English, we seem to have little respect for or interest in our “senior citizens,” beyond giving them that honorific title, and we don’t include them in family life. If we can afford it, we are likely to send them to nursing homes—“a storage-bin philosophy,” a Senate report calls it—and if we can’t, which is the case with the poor, they must make do with the resources noted above. The Michigan study has a depressing chapter on “The Economics of Living with Relatives.” Nearly two-thirds of the heads of families queried were opposed to having their aged parents live with their children. “The old do not understand the young, and the young do not understand the old or the young,” observed one respondent, who must have had a sense of humor. Other replies were “Old people are pretty hard to get along with” and “The parents and the children try to boss each other and when they live with you there’s always fighting.” The minority in favor gave practical reasons, like “It’s a good thing to have them with you so you can see after them” and “The old folks might get a pension or something, so they could help you out.” Hardly anyone expressed any particular respect for the old, or a feeling that their experience might enrich family life. The most depressing finding was “People most able to provide support for relatives are most opposed to it. Older people with some college education are eleven to one against it.” The most favorable toward including older people in the home were Negroes, and even they were mostly against it.

  The whole problem of poverty and the aged is especially serious today because Americans are living longer. In the first half of this century, life expectancy increased 17.6 years for men and 20.3 years for women. And between 1950 and 1960 the over-sixty-five group increased twice as fast as the population as a whole.

  The worst part of being old and poor in this country is the loneliness. Mr. Harrington notes that we have not only racial ghettos but geriatric ones, in the cheap rooming-house districts of large cities. He gives one peculiarly disturbing statistic: “One-third of the aged in the United States, some 5,000,000 or more human beings, have no phone in their place of residence. They are literally cut off from the rest of America.”

  Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated deflation of Scott Fitzgerald’s romantic notion that the rich are “different” somehow—“Yes, they have money”—doesn’t apply to the poor. They are different in more important ways than their lack of money, as Mr. Harrington demonstrates:

  Emotional upset is one of the main forms of the vicious circle of impoverishment. The structure of the society is hostile to these people. The poor tend to become pessimistic and depressed; they seek immediate gratification instead of saving; they act out.

  Once this mood, this unarticulated philosophy becomes a fact, society can change, the recession can end, and yet there is no motive for movement. The depression has become internalized. The middle class looks upon this process and sees “lazy” people who “just don’t want to get ahead.” People who are much too sensitive to demand of cripples that they run races ask of the poor that they get up and act just like everyone else in the society.

  The poor are not like everyone else….They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class looks upon.

  The poor are also different in a physical sense: they are much less healthy. According to Poverty and Deprivation, the proportion of those “disabled or limited in their major activity by chronic ill health” rises sharply as income sinks. In reasonably well-off families ($7,000 and up), 4.3 percent are so disabled; in reasonably poor families ($2,000 to $3,999), the proportion doubles, to 8 percent; and in unreasonably poor families (under $2,000), it doubles again, to 16.5 percent. An obvious cause, among others, for the very poor being four times as much disabled by “chronic ill health” as the well-to-do is that they have much less money to spend for medical care—in fact, almost nothing. This weighs with special heaviness on the aged poor. During the fifties, Mr. Harrington notes, “all costs on the Consumer Price Index went up by 12 per cent. But medical costs, that terrible staple of the aged, went up by 36 per cent, hospitalization rose by 65 per cent, and group hospitalization costs (Blue Cross premiums) were up by 83 per cent.”

  This last figure is particularly interesting, since Blue Cross and such plans are the A.M.A.’s alternative to socialized medicine, or, rather, to the timid fumblings toward it that even our most liberal politicians have dared to propose. Such figures throw an unpleasant light on the Senate’s rejection of Medicare. The defeat was all the more bitter because, in the usual effort to appease the conservatives (with the usual lack of success—only five Republicans and only four Southern Democrats voted pro), the bill was watered down in advance. Not until he had spent $90 of his own money—which is 10 percent of the annual income of some 3,000,000 aged poor—would a patient have been eligible. And the original program included only people already covered by Social Security or Railroad Retirement pensions and excluded the neediest of all the 2,500,000 aged poor who are left out of both these systems. These untouchables were finally included in order to placate five liberal Republican senators, led by Javits of New York. They did vote for Medicare, but they were the only Republicans who did.

  Mental as well as physical illness is much greater among the poor, even though our complacent cliché is that nervous breakdowns are a prerogative of the rich because the poor “can’t afford” them. (They can’t, but they have them anyway.) This bit of middle-class folklore should be laid to rest by a study made in New Haven: Social Class and Mental Illness, by August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich (Wiley). They found that the rate of “treated psychiatric illness” is about the same from the rich down through decently paid workers—an average of 573 per 100,000. But in the bottom fifth it shoots up to 1,659 per 100,000. There is an even more striking difference in the kind of mental illness. Of those in the four top income groups who had undergone psychiatric treatment, 65 percent had been treated for neurotic problems and 35 percent for psychotic disturbances. In the bottom fifth, the treated illnesses were almost all psychotic (90 percent). This shows there is something to the notion that the poor “can’t afford” nervous breakdowns—the milder kind, that is—since the reason the proportion of treated neuroses among the poor is only 10 percent is that a neurotic can keep going, after a fashion. But the argument cuts deeper the other way. The poor go to a psychiatrist (or, more commonly, are committed to a mental institution) only when they are completely unable to function because of psychotic symptoms. Therefore, even that nearly threefold increase in mental disorders among the poor is probably an underestimate.

  The poor are different, then, both physically and psychologically. During the fifties, a team of psychiatrists from Cornell studied “Midtown,” a residential area in this city that contained 170,000 people, of all social classes. The area was 99 percent white, so the findings may be presumed to understate the problem of poverty. The description of the poor—the “low social economic status individual”—is blunt: “[They are] rigid, suspicious, and have a fatalistic outlook on life. They do not plan ahead….They are prone to depression, have feelings of futility, lack of belongingness, friendliness, and a lack of trust in others.” Only a Dr. Pangloss would expect anything else. As Mr. Harrington points out, such characteristics are “a realistic adaptation to a socially perverse situation.”

  As for the isolation that is the lot of the American poor, that is a point on which Mr. Harrington is very
good:

  America has a self-image of itself as a nation of joiners and doers. There are social clubs, charities, community drives, and the like. [One might add organizations like the Elks and Masons, Rotary and Kiwanis, cultural groups like our women’s clubs, also alumni associations and professional organizations.] And yet this entire structure is a phenomenon of the middle class. Some time ago, a study in Franklin, Indiana [this vagueness of reference is all too typical of The Other America], reported that the percentage of people in the bottom class who were without affiliations of any kind was eight times as great as the percentage in the high-income class.

  Paradoxically, one of the factors that intensifies the social isolation of the poor is that America thinks of itself as a nation without social classes. As a result, there are few social or civic organizations that are separated on the basis of income and class. The “working-class culture” that sociologists have described in a country like England does not exist here….The poor person who might want to join an organization is afraid. Because he or she will have less education, less money, less competence to articulate ideas than anyone else in the group, they stay away.

  One reason our society is a comparatively violent one is that the French and Italian and British poor have a communal life and culture that the American poor lack. As one reads The Other America, one wonders why there is not even more violence than there is….

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  The poor actually pay more taxes, in proportion to their income, than the rich. A recent study by the Tax Foundation estimates that 28 percent of incomes under $2,000 goes for taxes, as against 24 percent of the incomes of families earning five to seven times as much. Sales and other excise taxes are largely responsible for this curious statistic. It is true that such taxes fall impartially on all, like the blessed rain from heaven, but it is a form of egalitarianism that perhaps only Senator Goldwater can fully appreciate.