The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The final irony is that the Welfare State, which Roosevelt erected and which Eisenhower, no matter how strongly he felt about it, didn’t attempt to pull down, is not for the poor, either. Agricultural workers are not covered by Social Security, nor are many of the desperately poor among the aged, such as “unrelated individuals” with incomes of less than $1,000, of whom only 37 percent are covered, which is just half the percentage of coverage among the aged in general. Of the Welfare State, Mr. Harrington says, “Its creation had been stimulated by mass impoverishment and misery, yet 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…big market farmers….[It] benefits those least who need help most.” The industrial workers, led by John L. Lewis, mobilized enough political force to put through Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which, with the Wagner Act, made the C.I.O. possible. The big farmers put enough pressure on Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s first Secretary of Agriculture—who talked a good fight for liberal principles but was a Hamlet when it came to action—to establish the two basic propositions of Welfare State agriculture: subsidies that now cost $3 billion a year and that chiefly benefit the big farmers; and the exclusion of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migratory workers from the protection of minimum-wage and Social Security laws….

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  In short, one reaches the unstartling conclusion that rewards in class societies, including Communist ones, are according to power rather than need. A recent illustration is the campaign of an obscure organization called Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. to get a bill through Congress for pensions of about $25 a week. It was formed by older men who think other veterans’ organizations (such as the American Legion, which claims 2,500,000 members to their 200,000) are dominated by the relatively young. It asks for pensions for veterans of the First World War with incomes of under $2,400 (if single) or $3,600 (if married)—that is, only for poor veterans. The editorials have been violent: “STOP THIS VETERANS’ GRAB,” implored the Herald Tribune; “WORLD WAR I PENSION GRAB,” echoed the Saturday Evening Post. Their objection was, in part, that many of the beneficiaries would not be bona-fide poor, since pensions, annuities, and Social Security benefits were excluded from the maximum income needed to qualify. Considering that the average Social Security payment is about $1,000 a year, this would not put any potential beneficiary into the rich or even the comfortably-off class, even if one assumes another $1,000, which is surely too high, from annuities and pensions. It’s all very confusing. The one clear aspect is that the minuscule Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. came very near to bringing it off. Although their bill was opposed by both the White House and by the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, two hundred and one members of the House signed a petition to bring the measure to a vote, only eighteen less than needed “to accomplish this unusual parliamentary strategy,” as the Times put it. These congressmen were motivated by politics rather than charity, one may assume. Many were up for reelection last November, and the two hundred thousand Veterans of World War I had two advantages over the fifty million poor: They were organized, and they had a patriotic appeal only a wink away from the demagogic. Their “unusual parliamentary strategy” failed by eighteen votes in the Congress. But there will be another Congress.

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  It seems likely that mass poverty will continue in this country for a long time. The more it is reduced, the harder it is to keep on reducing it. The poor, having dwindled from two-thirds of the population in 1936 to one-quarter today, no longer are a significant political force, as is shown by the Senate’s rejection of Medicare and by the Democrats’ dropping it as an issue in the elections last year. Also, as poverty decreases, those left behind tend more and more to be the ones who have for so long accepted poverty as their destiny that they need outside help to climb out of it. This new minority mass poverty, so much more isolated and hopeless than the old majority poverty, shows signs of becoming chronic….

  Children born into poor families today have less chance of “improving themselves” than the children of the pre-1940 poor. Rags to riches is now more likely to be rags to rags. “Indeed,” the Michigan surveyors conclude, “it appears that a number of the heads of poor families have moved into less skilled jobs than their fathers had.” Over a third of the children of the poor, according to the survey, don’t go beyond the eighth grade and “will probably perpetuate the poverty of their parents.” There are a great many of these children. In an important study of poverty, made for a Congressional committee in 1959, Dr. Robert J. Lampman estimated that eleven million of the poor were under eighteen. “A considerable number of younger persons are starting life in a condition of ‘inherited poverty,’ ” he observed. To which Mr. Harrington adds, “The character of poverty has changed, and it has become more deadly for the young. It is no longer associated with immigrant groups with high aspirations; it is now identified with those whose social existence makes it more and more difficult to break out into the larger society.” Even when children from poor families show intellectual promise, there is nothing in the values of their friends or families to encourage them to make use of it. Dr. Kolko, citing impressive sources, states that of the top 16 percent of high-school students—those scoring 120 and over in I.Q. tests—only half go on to college. The explanation for this amazing—and alarming—situation is as much cultural as economic. The children of the poor now tend to lack what the sociologists call “motivation.” At least one foundation is working on the problem of why so many bright children from poor families don’t ever try to go beyond high school….

  The problem of educating the poor has changed since 1900. Then it was the language and cultural difficulties of immigrants from foreign countries; now it is the subtler but more intractable problems of internal migration from backward regions, mostly in the South. The old immigrants wanted to Better Themselves and to Get Ahead. The new migrants are less ambitious, and they come into a less ambitious atmosphere. “When they arrive in the city,” wrote Christopher Jencks in an excellent two-part survey, “Slums and Schools,” in the New Republic last fall, “they join others equally unprepared for urban life in the slums—a milieu which is in many ways utterly dissociated from the rest of America. Often this milieu is self-perpetuating. I have been unable to find any statistics on how many of these migrants’ children and grandchildren have become middle-class, but it is probably not too inaccurate to estimate that about 30,000,000 people live in urban slums, and that about half are second-generation residents.” The immigrants of 1890–1910 also arrived in a milieu that was “in many ways utterly dissociated from the rest of America,” yet they had a vision—a rather materialistic one, but still a vision—of what life in America could be if they worked hard enough; and they did work, and they did aspire to something more than they had; and they did get out of the slums. The disturbing thing about the poor today is that so many of them seem to lack any such vision. Mr. Jencks remarks:

  While the economy is changing in a way which makes the eventual liquidation of the slums at least conceivable, young people are not seizing the opportunities this change presents. Too many are dropping out of school before graduation (more than half in many slums); too few are going to college….As a result there are serious shortages of teachers, nurses, doctors, technicians, and scientifically trained executives, but 4,500,000 unemployables.

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  “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime,” Aristotle wrote. This is now a half truth—the last half. Our poor are alienated; they don’t consider themselves part of society. But precisely because they don’t they are not politically dangerous. It is people with “a stake in the country” who make revolutions. The best—though by no means the only—reason for worrying about the Other America is that its existence should make us feel uncomfortable.

  The federal gover
nment is the only purposeful force—I assume wars are not purposeful—that can reduce the numbers of the poor and make their lives more bearable. The authors of Poverty and Deprivation take a dim view of the Kennedy administration’s efforts to date:

  The Federal Budget is the most important single instrument available to us as a free people to induce satisfactory economic performance, and to reduce poverty and deprivation….

  Projected Federal outlays in the fiscal 1963 Budget are too small. The items in this Budget covering programs directly related to human improvement and the reduction of mass poverty and deprivation allocate far too small a portion of our total national production to these great purposes.

  The effect of government policy on poverty has two quite distinct aspects. One is the indirect effect of the stimulation of the economy by federal spending. Such stimulation—though by wartime demands rather than government policy—has in the past produced a prosperity that did cut down American poverty by almost two-thirds. But I am inclined to agree with Dr. Galbraith that it would not have a comparable effect on present-day poverty:

  It is assumed that with increasing output poverty must disappear [he writes]. Increased output eliminated the general poverty of all who worked. Accordingly it must, sooner or later, eliminate the special poverty that still remains….Yet just as the arithmetic of modern politics makes it tempting to overlook the very poor, so the supposition that increasing output will remedy their case has made it easy to do so too.

  He underestimates the massiveness of American poverty, but he is right when he says there is now a hard core of the specially disadvantaged—because of age, race, environment, physical or mental defects, etc.—that would not be significantly reduced by general prosperity. (Although I think the majority of our present poor would benefit, if only by a reduction in the present high rate of unemployment.)

  To do something about this hard core, a second line of government policy would be required; namely, direct intervention to help the poor. We have had this since the New Deal, but it has always been grudging and miserly, and we have never accepted the principle that every citizen should be provided, at state expense, with a reasonable minimum standard of living regardless of any other considerations. It should not depend on earnings, as does Social Security, which continues the inequalities and inequities and so tends to keep the poor forever poor. Nor should it exclude millions of our poorest citizens because they lack the political pressure to force their way into the Welfare State. The governmental obligation to provide, out of taxes, such a minimum living standard for all who need it should be taken as much for granted as free public schools have always been in our history.

  It may be objected that the economy cannot bear the cost, and certainly costs must be calculated. But the point is not the calculation but the principle. Statistics—and especially statistical forecasts—can be pushed one way or the other. Who can determine in advance to what extent the extra expense of giving our 40,000,000 poor enough income to rise above the poverty line would be offset by the lift to the economy from their increased purchasing power? We really don’t know. Nor did we know what the budgetary effects would be when we established the principle of free public education. The rationale then was that all citizens should have an equal chance of competing for a better status. The rationale now is different: that every citizen has a right to become or remain part of our society because if this right is denied, as it is in the case of at least one-fourth of our citizens, it impoverishes us all. Since 1932, “the government”—local, state, and federal—has recognized a responsibility to provide its citizens with a subsistence living. Apples will never again be sold on the street by jobless accountants, it seems safe to predict, nor will any serious political leader ever again suggest that share-the-work and local charity can solve the problem of unemployment. “Nobody starves” in this country any more, but, like every social statistic, this is a tricky business. Nobody starves, but who can measure the starvation, not to be calculated by daily intake of proteins and calories, that reduces life for many of our poor to a long vestibule to death? Nobody starves, but every fourth citizen rubs along on a standard of living that is below what Mr. Harrington defines as “the minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifies as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States.” Nobody starves, but a fourth of us are excluded from the common social existence. Not to be able to afford a movie or a glass of beer is a kind of starvation—if everybody else can.

  The problem is obvious: the persistence of mass poverty in a prosperous country. The solution is also obvious: to provide, out of taxes, the kind of subsidies that have always been given to the public schools (not to mention the police and fire departments and the post office)—subsidies that would raise incomes above the poverty level, so that every citizen could feel he is indeed such. “Civis Romanus sum!” cried St. Paul when he was threatened with flogging—and he was not flogged. Until our poor can be proud to say “Civis Romanus sum!,” until the act of justice that would make this possible has been performed by the three-quarters of Americans who are not poor—until then the shame of the Other America will continue.

  RENATA ADLER

  JULY 4, 1964

  IN LITERARY CRITICISM, polemic is short-lived, and no other essay form becomes as quickly obsolete as an unfavorable review. If the work under attack is valuable, it survives adverse comment. If it is not, the polemic dies with its target. A critic is therefore measured not by the books he prosecutes but by the ones he praises (we turn to Edmund Wilson for Proust, Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway, not for Kafka), and it is surprising that among a younger generation of critics polemic should be so widely regarded as the most viable and rewarding kind of criticism. Three recent works—The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel, by Arthur Mizener (Riverside); A World More Attractive, by Irving Howe (Horizon); and Doings and Undoings, by Norman Podhoretz (Farrar, Straus)—may provide an explanation.

  Arthur Mizener is the most affirmative critic of the three, the least polemical, and the least interesting. His book is little more than a splicing together of enthusiasms. He recounts plots (from Trollope to Updike), lists dates, quotes and compares passages (good ones, from many sources); he seems tempted to pick up the novels whole and deliver them to the reader. His critical sympathies, in short, are strong; his critical intelligence, however, is weak or self-effacing. Mr. Mizener seldom explains or analyzes, and whenever he does, his prose neatly strangles whatever his thought may have been:

  The problem for writers like Dreiser is apparently how to release from deep beneath the viscous and muddy surface of their conscious minds their imaginative apprehension of their experience, and the only way they seem able to do so is, paradoxically, by a slow roiling of the muddy surface.

  What criticism of the novel needs is a theory that will put at the center of our attention the world envisioned by the novel, which will then serve to limit and discipline the exercise of our metaphysics upon it. Our lot would very much like to circumambulate the novel’s charms for the nearly exclusive purpose of keeping our metaphysics warm. The only valid source of discipline for this corrupting impulse to metaphysical speculation is the unique object that is the novel itself.

  What the second of these paragraphs seems to recommend is that the critic leave theories alone and let literature speak for itself. And Mr. Mizener, for one, is clearly well advised to do so. The effect, however, of his constant citing of excerpts from the works themselves is to make his book almost a scrap album. Or a whirlwind tour of the sights. (“And on your left, ladies and gentlemen, the beautiful opening passage of Across the River and Into the Trees….And, on your right, the historic scene from E. M. Forster….Notice, in particular, the portico…”) The effect is also, on a slightly higher plane, that of a benign, unanalytic book column in a reviewing section of the Sunday newspapers, to which Mr. Mizener is a frequent contributor.

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  Whil
e Mr. Mizener subordinates himself so completely to the works he admires that his intelligence becomes invisible, Irving Howe does the reverse; he dominates a book and wrenches it to suit his concern of the moment. And his concern is nearly always extra-literary—sociological or political. The title of his new book, A World More Attractive, suggests a utopian outlook, and even in his literary essays he is primarily concerned with social action—“images of war and revolution, experiment and disaster, apocalypse and skepticism; images of rebellion, disenchantment, and nothingness.” When a writer—Wallace Stevens, for example—seems less preoccupied with these “images” than Mr. Howe himself, Mr. Howe discerns them as a “premise,” or a “background,” or a “pressure upon all subjects”:

  Stevens does not examine society closely or even notice it directly for any length of time; he simply absorbs “the idea” of it….A perspective upon history is brilliantly maintained; history as it filters through his consciousness of living and writing at a given time.

  This line of argument can, of course, be used to demonstrate that anyone is really writing about anything whatever—“as it filters through his consciousness of living and writing at a given time”—and the author of A World More Attractive makes frequent and imaginative use of what we might call the ascribed, or foisted, premise: “Dostoevsky had not read Max Weber. But the anticipation is there.” For Mr. Howe seeks, above all, to establish a position, and he uses his intelligence to force that position upon the literary work. (If the work resists, so much the worse for it; Mr. Howe will find it lacking in “moral style.”) Yet it need not be supposed that this exercise of intelligence gives Mr. Howe an advantage in clarity over Mr. Mizener: