The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (13 page)

It didn’t happen.

Yes, Medicare and Medicaid expanded access to healthcare. Yes, an expanded food stamps program cut down hunger. Yes, job-training programs, drug rehabilitation clinics, and federal dollars for schools
and housing all flooded into poor communities. But for all of the investments, poverty remained part of the national landscape. Some of the symptoms of poverty were indeed alleviated, yet the grand goal of the Great Society to actually eradicate poverty—to pull it up by the roots and erase all evidence of its existence—proved to be a bridge too far.

Three years after Johnson had launched the War on Poverty, with the country’s attention largely having shifted to the war in Vietnam rather than the domestic “war,” Senator Robert Kennedy would tour the Mississippi Delta and be shocked to see barefoot, malnourished, sickly children living in shanties with no indoor plumbing. By early 1968, as Kennedy campaigned for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, his take on poverty’s unrelenting grip on much of America had gone from surprise to shuddering, incandescent horror.

I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi—here in the United States—with a gross national product of $800 billion—I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven’t developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children, so that their lives are not destroyed, I don’t think that’s acceptable in the United States of America and I think we need a change.

As the senator told an audience at the University of Kansas on March 18 of that year, “I have seen Indians living on their bare and meager reservations, with no jobs, with an unemployment rate of 80 percent, and with so little hope for the future, so little hope for the future that for young people, for young men and women in their teens, the greatest cause of death amongst them is suicide.”

In full oratorical flight now, Kennedy continued, borrowing heavily from Harrington’s imagery of a few years earlier:

I run for the presidency because I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed and their jobs are gone and no one—neither industry, nor labor, nor government—has cared enough to help. I think we here in this country, with the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America, I think we can do better here also. I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever greater promises of equality and of justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddled in the same filthy rooms—without heat—warding off the cold and warding off the rats.

For Kennedy, campaigning on a platform far more radical than the one on which his brother had won election eight years earlier, ongoing poverty of this nature represented a staggering, existential challenge. “If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America.”
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For Martin Luther King Jr., the continued existence of desperate hardship throughout America rendered as hollow victories much of the civil rights achievements of the mid-1960s. In his 1967 book
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
the civil rights leader called for radical measures. “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income,” King wrote. “Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed
income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows.” No longer in a mood to compromise, King argued that “the curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”
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King and Bobby Kennedy were the two public figures best able to articulate the moral importance of dramatic anti-poverty interventions in late 1960s America. With King’s assassination in April 1968 and Kennedy’s two months later, the last best chance for America to embrace systemic anti-poverty policies, and the moral language accompanying them, vanished. A slide began, slow at first, later more rapid, away from understanding poverty as society’s problem and toward redefining it as a problem of individuals and underperforming communities.

Even while President Nixon expanded access to welfare programs, proposed minimum income guarantees, and gave his support to efforts to create universal healthcare access, he built a political base largely centered around Middle America’s resentments toward the poor, the black, the brown, and the different. There was something of a schizophrenia to his politics, a residual desire to ameliorate the plight of the poor, on the one hand—he had, after all, made his way in life from humble beginnings—and a competing urge to denigrate the weak, on the other. Nixon sought the support of the Archie Bunkers of the country, people frustrated both by the speed of cultural changes taking place around them—from the rise of the anti–Vietnam War movement to the emergence of Black Power, hippie culture, and feminism—and also by the shifting contours of the economy. He played to the dyspepsia of a Silent Majority and—like few other mainstream politicians of the late 1960s but all too many of the decades to come—correctly gauged the potency of scapegoating when it came to building a political machine.

In such a milieu, the ideas posited by a New York academic named Daniel Patrick Moynihan flourished. Moynihan had held positions in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—as an assistant secretary of labor under Kennedy, as one of the architects of the War on Poverty under Johnson—and had shot to fame and notoriety during these years after writing a report that decried the emergence of a “culture of poverty.” This culture, Moynihan believed, existed among the country’s urban African American population and was characterized by dependency, sexual profligacy, lack of ambition, violence, and other dysfunction. Harrington, a few years earlier, had also written of a culture of poverty. Yet where for him that culture was largely the product of hardship, for Moynihan it was a primary causal factor explaining poverty’s iron grip on so many millions of Americans’ lives. It wasn’t enough to change material conditions, Moynihan averred; government also had to figure out a way to change poor people’s behavior. It was an argument tailor-made to gel with the concerns of Nixon’s Silent Majority, and the newly elected president realized as much. In 1969, Moynihan was appointed counselor to the president for urban affairs.

Gradually at first, then with increasing rapidity, American popular opinion shifted. We became more impatient, less forgiving, in our attitudes toward the poor and the pathologies that all too often accompanied harsh living environments. In the post–World War II years, polls suggested that fewer than one in four Americans wanted to reduce public expenditures on welfare. By the early 1970s, solid majorities favored cutting back welfare dollars for the poor. And by 1977, more than 90 percent of respondents believed welfare recipients should be working.
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From the 1970s on, as misery and hardship stubbornly refused to vanish from the national landscape, America’s commitment both to reducing income inequality and to mitigating the effects of that inequality began to wane. Both rhetorically and in terms of practical policies, America’s leadership class began a long march away from redistributive liberalism. Tax policy became more regressive. And the
tax code came overwhelmingly to benefit the wealthiest Americans, with a falloff in the progressive nature of the tax bands and the near-complete emasculation of the estate tax system. Huge companies such as GE found ways to avoid paying any corporate taxes,
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and billionaires such as Warren Buffett, who made most of his money from capital gains, ended up paying a smaller percentage to the government in taxes than did their secretaries.

Cumulatively, programs and wage protections developed over the better part of a century came under tremendous pressures as the great unraveling of public infrastructure picked up pace.

That this unraveling could pick up such speed was at least in part due to the fact that such policies had never had the sort of across-the-board political support seen for welfare systems in most other modern industrial democracies. In fact, taken as a whole, America’s welfare system has always been an uneasy balancing act between the federal government and the states. Its access has been more or less tied into employment, its availability very much influenced by the direction of the political winds both federally and on a state-by-state basis, as well as by shifting religious and cultural values. Historically, it has been more generous to women than to men, its political process more open to giving aid, and wage protections, to women than to the “free agents” thought to make up the male populace. Thus, by 1923 fifteen states had enacted minimum-wage laws designed to protect low-paid women working in what were known as the “sweated” industries. But it wasn’t until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, passed as a cornerstone of the second part of the New Deal, that men received the same protection.
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Historically, also, its union movement—a movement that in other countries was an integral part of Labor or Socialist parties, which sought to bind the interests of all parts of the working class—was more limited, both in its aspirations and its political achievements. Despite a militant history in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, in the decades after the 1935 Wagner Act paved the way for the mass unionization of the industrial professions, unions increasingly came to lobby for skilled workers, forgoing the hard work of organizing the unorganized, and leaving the mass of day laborers and unskilled workers as badly off as ever. There were exceptions, of course—Cesar Chavez and California’s farm workers, and more recently the Justice for Janitors campaign. But, across the postwar decades, unions taken as a whole did a dismal job of moving beyond their traditional bases. As a result, many of the benefits accrued by labor in such industries as auto and mining never trickled downward. At the bottom of the economy, poverty remained pretty much untouched, its victims—living largely outside of trade union culture—voiceless and overwhelmingly without political muscle.

From the late 1970s onward, as unions were dramatically weakened, that hardship and insecurity welled upward once again like a chronic infection never quite tamed. By the 2000s, workers even in top-tier professions such as auto manufacturing were seeing their wages pushed downward and their benefits packages eviscerated. An auto worker signing on in 2012 could expect to earn far less, in real terms, over the course of a lifetime of hard work than could his father or grandfather working in the same industry in bygone decades.

As for the quality pensions fought for by previous generations of trade unionists, increasingly they were being relegated to the history books. In 2005, Hewlett-Packard began dismantling its pension plan for existing employees and announced that new hires would simply have no pensions. The intent? To save $300 million a year for the tech giant. Having narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 2009, in the years following the large automakers all began pushing their retirees to accept lump-sum buyouts in lieu of lifelong pensions. It might have been a good deal if you weren’t planning to live to a ripe old age; it was a far riskier proposition if you anticipated you still had several decades left in you. In 2012, the airplane manufacturer Boeing pushed its unions to accept 401(k)s in lieu of defined benefit pensions for newly hired engineers and technical professionals.