Why America Lost the War on Poverty--And How to Win It

Bibliographical Essay

bibliographical essay The notes to each chapter in this book open avenues for further research. Here I highlight works of history. What follows is a sketch, not the full-blown article that someone might write on the historiography of poverty in modern America. One should start with two basic sources. The first is the Census Bureau’s annual report on poverty lines and poverty thresholds. The report appears in late August and covers the previous year. The 2001 edition was called Poverty in the United States: 2000. In recent years the bureau has broadened the title of these annual reports, and the 2005 edition was called Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2004. One may purchase hard copies from the Government Printing O≈ce, but it is easy to print a copy from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site, [www.census.gov]. A second valuable reference work that includes dozens of articles, source listings, and a minihistory on the modern period is Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor, eds., Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy (2004). Three books o√er historical surveys: James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (2000), Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (1989), and Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (2001). Although it lacks much conceptualization, Patterson’s book is valuable because it packs one hundred years of history into 250 pages. Katz writes mostly an intellectual history of the 60s, 70s, and 80s; he examines how Americans constructed negative stereotypes of the undeserving poor and the underclass. O’Connor’s book is high-level intellectual history and, in its grasp of the subject, authoritative. The next step will be for historians to explain why American researchers and intellectuals have so often taken the low road, blaming the poor and ignoring class structures that channel people into poverty. Maurice Isserman’s The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (2000) is a wellresearched biography of a leading socialist who usually avoided the low road, except in his most famous book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962). While there is a fair amount of serious historical work on ideas and—as we will see— politics and policy, there is not so much history of poor people from the bottom up. It is as though the call for the history of the common people in the 1960s helped to shape women’s history, ethnic history, and labor history but never got to the subject of poor people in the postwar era. Examples of what can be done include journalist Nicholas 326 / bibliographical essay Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1992), which blends a history of the common people with stories of the War on Poverty; sociologist Nancy Naples’s Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (1998); and Jacqueline Jones’s The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (1992). Undoubtedly, others have written histories of poor people that I do not know about, but there does not seem to be much in published books and articles. An adequate history of the poor in the postwar era would have to be written as part of a history of the working class, or, to use a softer term, that majority of Americans who, while not poor, lived close to the edge. The poor should not be isolated in a separate history that assumes that they are fundamentally di√erent from the nonpoor. A subtopic one might study, for example, is how blue-collar workers felt about poverty, poor people, and their own situation in the 40s and 50s. We all know the sentiment that in the old days ‘‘we were poor but did not know it,’’ but was it true? A related topic involves the way union leaders and union activists thought about the poor and how that a√ected their politics. An adequate history of poor people would have to study the apparently nonpoor working class. The lines were not rigid, and many who were poor would become not poor and vice versa. Also, histories of the poor and the working class would have to study people’s real incomes and their experience with unemployment and underemployment. I do not...