Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  In the late fifties a new and totally different interest in poverty emerged, an effort to study it, to measure it, to analyze its characteristics, to devise policies to deal with it. This curiosity mushroomed with extraordinary speed. At the outset, when Robert Lampman, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, compiled a bibliography of poverty, it filled less than two typed pages. Dorothy Campbell Tompkins published another in 1970 which came to 442 double-column pages with 8,338 entries.

  Observers have been mystified to explain this sudden impulse to confront poverty. The flood of European immigration to the U.S., which created the problems that Jacob Riis wrote about, was now little more than a trickle. The Great Depression, which explained the interest in the thirties, was now a fading bad memory. While there were recessions in the late fifties and early sixties, they were relatively brief and mild, and in 1964, when the poverty law was passed, the economy was moving up into a boom. The impulse seems to have emerged from the joining of two diverse developments—a vigorous restatement of the traditional inequity argument against capitalism, especially by economists, and the great internal migration of poor black people from the rural South to the urban ghettoes of the North. The latter was augmented by a similar but smaller movement of Puerto Ricans to New York City. Both migrations were noted by sociologists and social workers, the latter dramatized by the authors of the brilliant Broadway musical West Side Story.

  Liberal economists, to say nothing of Marxists, had been nurtured on the inequity argument. In summary, it went as follows: capitalism had succeeded dramatically in expanding the output of goods and services. But it had failed to distribute income and wealth equitably, giving too big a share to the rich. Thus, the state must intervene with policies to shift income from the wealthy to those in need. In modern welfare states, these programs included the progressive income tax, unemployment compensation, health insurance, old age pensions, workers’ compensation, a minimum wage, the encouragement of collective bargaining, the elimination of discrimination in employment, and welfare. Except for the last, the very poor were still bypassed. They enjoyed few of the fruits of either capitalism or the welfare state. Thus, the argument continued, this gap must be filled by a special poverty program for the underclass. In the early sixties the theory received a postscript. When it became clear that the Keynesian tax cut would be enacted, it also became evident that only those above the minimum income levels specified in the income tax code who paid taxes would benefit from the reduction. The really poor, who either had no or so small an income as to escape taxation, had no tax to cut. Equity, the argument ran, demanded that something else be done for them.

  Relatively small numbers of blacks had lived in northern urban ghettoes prior to World War II. Their numbers swelled during and after the war. This was partly natural increase, but mainly the great migration from the rural South. A good number of these people had scratched out a marginal living as sharecroppers raising cotton. On October 2, 1944, eight of the first workable mechanical cotton pickers were tested on the Hopson plantation near Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta. Howell Hopson kept careful books. The machines picked 62 bales that day. Hopson’s figures showed that machine picking cost $5.26 a bale, picking by hand $39.41. Each machine picked as much cotton as 50 people. Sharecropping no longer made economic sense and work for the croppers in the Delta petered out. A one-way ticket from Clarksdale to Chicago on the Illinois Central cost $11.50. The great migration began.

  Between 1940 and 1960 the net black emigration from the rural South was almost 3 million. There were four main streams: from southern farms to southern cities—Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston; from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia into Washington, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York; from Mississippi and Alabama via the Illinois Central to Chicago and other midwestern cities; and from the Southwest to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Oakland. By 1960, 80 percent of blacks in the North lived in segregated ghettoes.

  “The circles of hell,” the phrase Braudel had applied to the preindustrial urban poor in European cities, was an appropriate name for the American ghettoes. They had the oldest, most substandard, and most crowded residences. Housing was rigidly segregated by race and, flowing from that, virtually everything else. Schools, parks, garbage removal, water, and police protection were of low quality. There was a high level of illiteracy. Health was much worse than among whites. A large proportion of families was headed by women. Vice and crime flourished, particularly among teenage gangs.

  Heretofore race had been an acute problem only in the South. With the emergence of the northern ghettoes the issue confronted the entire nation. The disaster of the ghettoes was forcing American cities, particularly the largest, into a state of perpetual crisis. Middle-class white citizens of these towns, like their counterparts in Braudel’s Europe, wanted race to be invisible, hoped that poor blacks would either go away or become quiet segregated neighbors. That was a dream. But some sociologists, social workers, and activists worked on urban problems, recognized their gravity, and searched for remedies.2

  John Kenneth Galbraith led the liberal economists in calling attention to poverty in 1958 in The Affluent Society, a book that attracted a wide audience. His basic argument, as the title suggested, was that the great majority of Americans received the benefits of a rich and growing economy. But he noted briefly that the public sector and the poor did not share adequately in the gains. The private economy received “an opulent supply” and the public sector got “a niggardly yield.” In a brief chapter entitled “The New Position of Poverty” he wrote that it “does survive” as an affliction upon an uncounted number, some poor because of personal inadequacy, others because they lived on “islands” of poverty. He was disturbed because “it is not efficiently remedied by a general and tolerably well-distributed advance in income.” Affluent America, if it were “both compassionate and rational,” could easily move most of these people out of poverty. He offered only a first-step remedy: investment in the children of the poor in order to break the generational poverty cycle. These were well-intended and reasonably sensible observations, but Galbraith merely introduced the topic.

  The entire professional career of Paul H. Douglas, both as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and as a U.S. senator from Illinois, could be read as an attempt to redress economic inequity. In the late fifties Senator Douglas was chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and invited Robert Lampman, an authority on income distribution, to make a study of poverty. In 1959 the committee published his brief paper, The Low Income Population and Economic Growth. It was, evidently, the first systematic, if tentative, effort to measure poverty in the U.S., the kind of task Booth had undertaken in London.

  Lampman assumed a poverty threshold annual income of $2500 for a family of four in 1957 dollars. An individual would be poor if he had an income of less than $1,157, a six-person family if below $3,236. In 1957 there were 32.2 million persons whose incomes fell beneath these levels, 19 percent of the total population. He found a clustering of poverty among the elderly, nonwhites, on farms, in the South, in families headed by women, and in families headed by a person with no more than an eighth-grade education.

  This marked an improvement over the preceding decade. Between 1947 and 1957 the number in poverty had declined from 26 to 19 percent. The basic reason for the improvement was economic growth. Lampman was concerned that the process might not continue because several of the clusters of the poor were not responsive to growth. Like Galbraith, he was particularly disturbed because a fifth of the nation’s children was being reared in poverty. “Probably no public program has made and can continue to make so important and fundamental a contribution to the elimination of poverty as free public education.”

  In 1962 Leon Keyserling’s Conference on Economic Progress published Poverty and Deprivation in the U.S. A lawyer by training and the main draftsman of the Wagner Act in 1935, he had become a self-taught economist. He had been chai
rman of Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers and his Conference studies were wholly economic in orientation. Using 1960 dollars and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ definitions of “modest but adequate budgets” (compared with Lampman’s 1957 base and more stringent budgets), Keyserling divided Americans into five categories:

  Families

  Individuals

  Poverty

  Under $4000

  Under $2000

  Deprivation

  $4000 to 5,999

  $2000 to 2,999

  Deprivation-comfort

  $6000 to 7,499

  $3000 to 4,999

  Comfort-affluence

  $7500 to 14,999

  $5000 to 7,499

  Affluence

  $15,000 and over

  $7500 and over

  On the basis of these categories, 38 million Americans lived in poverty in 1960, about 20 percent of the population. This compared with Lampman’s 1957 estimates—32.2 million and 19 percent. In addition, according to Keyserling, another fifth of the American people, 39 million, lived in “deprivation.” Combined, those in poverty and deprivation came to 77 million, about 43 percent of the population.

  Poverty and deprivation clustered in these categories: the South, agriculture, personal services, the elderly, families headed by women, blacks, the deficiently educated, and those in poor health.

  The interest of social scientists in the crisis of the cities seems to have begun with Leonard Duhl, a psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. He interpreted “mental health” broadly and in 1955 assembled a group of experts to discuss the erosion of the cities. Sputnik was launched in 1957 on a day when they were meeting. One said, “If they think they’re out in space, they should see us.” Henceforth they called themselves Space Cadets. Duhl funded several important urban studies mainly concerned with black ghetto life.

  Paul Ylvisaker was an official at the Ford Foundation who lived in New Jersey. The bus he took to the Newark airport went through the black ghetto, which resembled the Western Front during World War I. He urged the foundation to start an action program to assist urban ghettoes, which became the Gray Areas Project.

  Ylvisaker had no patience with government bureaucracies—federal, state, or local. Thus, he favored what later came to be called community action projects—locally controlled and shaped specifically to meet the needs of the town. He started a number of Gray Areas programs. New Haven, under the leadership of Mayor Richard Lee and Mitchell Sviridoff, a former UAW official, developed education and job training for recent black migrants from the South. Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina used Ford money to develop programs across his state. The most important Gray Areas project was Mobilization for Youth, which, with the support of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., developed a broad program for the Lower East Side of New York covering law enforcement, recreation, counseling, improved education, and job training. Mobilization was unusual in having a theoretical underpinning for its program supplied by two sociologists, authorities on juvenile delinquency, at the Columbia School of Social Work—Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin.

  In 1960 Cloward and Ohlin published Delinquency and Opportunity, a theory of urban gangs. They defined three types of delinquent subcultures: the criminal, based on the pursuit of material gain by extortion, fraud, and theft; the conflict, pursuing status by the manipulation of violence; and the retreatist, persons who withdrew by dependence on drugs. These subcultures concentrated in the inner cities of large metropolitan areas and seldom appeared in the suburbs or in smaller communities. This was mainly due to the fact that big cities exposed lower-class adolescent males to a wider gap between their aspirations for material success and their realistic opportunities to achieve it. The delinquent subculture was an adaptation of escape from this trap. The criminal and conflict systems opened illegal avenues of achieving success. The retreatist, attractive to persons who had withdrawn from competition, erected a barrier against failure.

  Delinquency, Cloward and Ohlin concluded, did not emerge from individuals or subcultures; it arose, rather, from “the social systems in which these individuals or groups were enmeshed.” Thus, “the major effort of those who wish to eliminate delinquency should be directed to the reorganization of slum communities.” That was the vision of Mobilization for Youth.

  Eunice Shriver, according to Nicholas Lemann, was the Kennedy family “social worker” and “a world-class nagger.” She had long been interested in juvenile delinquency. In 1961 she persuaded her brother, the President, to push through Congress the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act, which established the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime. She then persuaded her brother, the Attorney General, to house the committee in the Justice Department. In prep school Robert Kennedy had had a friend, David Hackett, who had helped out during the 1960 campaign. Kennedy made him the executive head of the committee. Hackett hired Richard Boone, who had studied parole and had worked for the Chicago police department. This group, presumably because of its interest in street gangs, became known as the Guerrillas. Hackett established contact with Duhl’s Space Cadets and Ylvisaker’s Gray Areas Project. Hackett, who came to his job with no background in the subject, was much taken with Lloyd Ohlin’s ideas.

  Hackett and Boone had $15 million to finance experimental local action projects. They backed programs in the slums, some already supported by NIMH and Ford; most of these projects were intended to help young black people in the urban ghettoes.

  In 1961 Oscar Lewis, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, published The Children of Sanchez. It was his sixth study of family poverty since 1943, mainly about Mexico. He used the tape recorder for interviews because it allowed “unskilled, uneducated, and even illiterate persons … [to] talk about themselves and relate their observations and experiences in an uninhibited, spontaneous, and natural manner.” This, Lewis thought, “made possible the beginning of a new kind of literature of social realism.” The book laid out in absorbing detail the lives of the five members of the Sanchez family (a fictitious name), who lived in a single room in the Case Grande vecindad, a one-story slum tenement in the heart of Mexico City.

  By 1961, Lewis, like Henry Mayhew a century earlier, though with much greater precision, had developed a theory of the culture of poverty, which he set out in The Children of Sanchez. By this he meant “a design for living” which parents pass on to their children. Poverty was more than economic deprivation, “of the absence of something.” It was also “positive” in having “a structure, a rationale, and defense mechanism without which the poor could hardly carry on. In short, it is a way of life, remarkably stable and persistent, passed down from generation to generation along family lines.” The culture existed only among those at the very bottom, “the poorest workers, the poorest peasants, plantation laborers and that large heterogeneous mass of small artisans and tradesmen usually referred to as the lumpen proletariat.”

  This culture of poverty had universal characteristics which transcended regional, rural-urban, and national differences. In an earlier study, Five Families, Lewis had found remarkable parallels in London, Glasgow, Paris, Harlem, and Mexico City. Compared with other classes, those in poverty had a high death rate, low life expectancy, more children, and, because of child labor and working women, many more gainfully employed. The culture was neighborhood-oriented and people within it were marginal in both the nation and the city.

  In Mexico City, for example, most of the poor have a very low level of education and literacy, do not belong to labor unions, are not members of a political party, do not participate in the medical care, maternity, and old-age benefits of the national welfare agency know as Seguro Social, and make very little use of the city’s banks, hospitals, department stores, museums, art galleries, and airports.

  Daily life was a constant struggle for survival against unemployment, low wages, child labor, the absence of savings, food shortages, pawning, and borrowing pes
os at usurious interest rates. The social characteristics of the culture included lack of privacy, alcoholism, frequent resort to violence, early initiation into sex, consensual marriages, male abandonment of wives and children, mother-centered families, a time orientation toward the present, fatalism, machismo, and pathology. A doctor was unaffordable and a hospital was where one went to die. The poor relied on home remedies. They rarely went to church but prayed to the images of saints and made pilgrimages to popular shrines. They distrusted the government, hated the police, and were cynical about the church.

  Galbraith, Lampman, and Cloward and Ohlin were concerned that poverty was not wholly responsive to economic remedies. If one accepted the Lewis definition of the culture of poverty, at least for the underclass, that worry became overpowering.

  In the early sixties poverty was discovered by many more middle-class Americans than those to whom this literature was addressed. In 1960 Edward R. Murrow’s television landmark, “Harvest of Shame,” was shown on the CBS network. A powerful indictment of poverty among migratory farm workers, it was seen by millions of viewers then and later.

  In Night Comes to the Cumberlands, published in 1962, Harry M. Caudill dramatically depicted the tragic human and physical conditions in Appalachia, particularly the 19 counties of eastern Kentucky known as the Cumberland Plateau. Here half a million white people lived in abject poverty, their beautiful land ravaged by a century of reckless coal mining. Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall placed Caudill’s book alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in its power to evoke the condition of the poor.

  Nature added emphasis to the book’s message. In March 1963 there were immense rains and severe flooding in the Cumberlands. Kennedy, reminded of the conditions he had witnessed next door in West Virginia during the 1960 primary, declared the plateau a disaster area and sent in federal relief. On October 20, 1963, the New York Times carried a powerful story of poverty in the Cumberlands by Homer Bigart, one of its star reporters. Kennedy was deeply moved.