Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (review)

Poverty and health care are often cited as co-conspirators in undermining successful integration into mainstream society and the success envisioned in the American Dream. Research suggests that people living in extreme poverty tend to be sick more frequently than others and experience more chronic disease and resulting complications. People who become ill with some frequency or for a long time require medical attention, and for those with little money this quickly exhausts already scant funds. Poverty rates in the U.S. increased 20% between 2000 and 2004¹ and those in poverty spent 33% of their income on health in 2003, up from 26% in 1996.² This increased spending pushes those who would otherwise be unlikely candidates to wind up in poverty, closer to the edge.

In Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor provides a contextual history of poverty, and explores theories about poverty from each period in the 20th century. This book provides an excellent explanation for the current state of poverty policy. It also provides a critique that is valuable not just for poverty researchers but for those who are interested in all realms of social policy, including public health.

Poverty research through the years has generated some astonishing work, and sometimes dissonant theories. In the first section of the book under review, taking into account the economic backdrop of each time period, O’Connor keys the reader in to the most successful movements and theories that have influenced poverty knowledge. Beginning in the Progressive Era, with its focus on industrial reform through increased wages and labor standards, social science contributions and missteps are chronicled in great detail. O’Connor deftly weaves between the development of sample survey methodology to the maps used in the Hull House studies, citing such relevant progressive researchers as Charles Booth and W. E. B. Dubois.

After providing this firm foundation in the Progressive Era, the author builds accounts of other important movements and schools of thought. Particularly notably, O’Connor explicates the Chicago School, which produced theories holding that poverty is often a result of disorganization, a spoke in the wheel of an inexorable process that would eventually lead to assimilation. Tangential to the Chicago School was Southern Regionalism, the theory of cotton culture, and how a colonial way of dealing with the U.S. South helped to exacerbate poverty. Finally, O’Connor focuses on the Community Action movement, wherein the downtrodden were empowered through local activism. Eventually, the Community Action movement became a weapon in Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.

As O’Connor assesses each theory and movement, several themes emerge regarding their collective and individual failures. Among them are an inability to focus on race and matriarchal families in the context of structural barriers, an incapacity to understand the inherent political implications of their research, and an insistent concentration on the idea of cultural lag, which in most cases undermined the motivation for structural reform. Although the history of social movements in relation to poverty is central to Poverty Knowledge, O’Connor also documents the rise of research as an industry beginning in the 1960s. As Johnson began waging the War on Poverty, the production of poverty knowledge underwent an important transformation. O’Connor discusses the evolution of research as it was given a more official role in policy decisions. Poverty analysts were called on more frequently to conduct studies focused on indigent populations.

Poverty research, though, through the years came to rely less on ethnographic, social-work-oriented methods and became almost entirely analytic, focusing on nothing but quantitative data. O’Connor takes particular care to note three institutions that helped to shape poverty theories and were pivotal during this time when research was becoming an industry in its own right. These institutions—The Urban Institute, The Institute...