Who Speaks for the Poor?
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Who Speaks for the Poor?
On the morning when I started to write this review—September 8, 2010—NPR’s Morning Edition reported at length on President Barack Obama’s proposals to create jobs and accelerate economic recovery. Obama and his spokespeople referred over and over again to the plight of the “middle class,” whose prosperity they promised to restore. In all the talk about job creation and the renewal of economic growth, there was, however, one group left unmentioned: poor people. Despite the rise in poverty accompanying economic recession, poverty remains startlingly absent from either Democrats’ or Republicans’ political rhetoric. The Obama administration is not insensitive to poverty—in fact, quite the opposite. But they have felt it necessary to smuggle programs that assist poor people into other legislation. Is this the result of public disinterest, the conviction that poverty will elicit nothing more than a huge yawn from the mass of voters? Or is it more than that: a national aversion to programs that address poverty head-on? Has poverty become another “third rail” in American politics?
President of the Other America and Who Cares? do not answer these questions in the same way, and the tension between their explanations raises important interpretive and research issues. Schmitt’s reconstruction of Robert F. Kennedy’s political career points to a link between economic justice and civil rights that turned poverty into a potentially winning issue as RFK tapped into a passionate social movement. Katherine Newman’s and Elisabeth Jacobs’ evidence, on the other hand, suggests one constant in American politics from at least the New Deal to Obama: most Americans have not cared very much about poor people and have been reluctant to help them. In the face of public apathy or [End Page 700] hostility, it was the bold and committed presidents who pushed through effective antipoverty programs.
Initially, yet another book about RFK might be passed over as redundant. But that would be a mistake. President of the Other America is a carefully argued, well-researched, nicely written and organized book with important things to say. Two prevailing interpretations, Schmitt points out, dominate interpretations of RFK’s relation to poverty. One sees it as an “opportunistic liberal shift designed to outflank President Johnson to the left.” The other finds his “empathy for the nation’s racial and economic outsiders” the result of “personal growth set in motion by the assassination” of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Both views, however, miss the point. RFK’s developing relationship with poverty and poor Americans “is eminently richer and more complex” (p. 2). Schmitt’s argues, in brief, for
[Robert] Kennedy’s centrality to the national debate on poverty from the reemergence of the issue in the early 1960s, to the genesis of a large-scale federal antipoverty initiative, to the urban crisis following the Watts riot, to the fight over the poverty program’s survival, to his presidential campaign. Kennedy consistently focused public attention on the issue throughout the 1960s and his policy proposals, while limited and flawed, were also substantive and creative
(p. 3).
When he writes of RFK’s links to the “other America,” Schmitt uses the phrase in a broader sense than did Michael Harrington, its originator. Schmitt’s “other America” refers to “a collective description of racial minority groups and poor whites who had been excluded historically and structurally from the full promise of American society” (p. 5). Like other recent scholars, he finds economic issues intertwined with civil rights from the beginning of the struggle for equal access, desegregation, and first-class citizenship for African Americans. However, RFK was not a populist. Instead, deeply influenced by Catholic social teachings, he was a communitarian who “sought the commitment of the...
