Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century by Alyosha Goldstein (review)

Postwar U.S. liberalism, writes Alyosha Goldstein, required “that the poor and dispossessed participate in their own self-government, that they themselves become the primary agents of social reform and rehabilitation, and that they give voice to their needs and desires so as to enter the fold of governmental authority.” Both at home and abroad, community action became a “strategy of containment” essential to liberal democracy and empire. At the same time, the compulsion to participate in reform elicited challenges to U.S. capitalism, racism, and imperialism by poor people who rejected the ideals of social reconciliation and political incorporation. In a creative and wide-ranging book, Goldstein explores the competing meanings of community, participation, self-help, and self-determination that emerged through the practice of community action, the relationship between domestic and international experience, and the nature of midcentury liberalism.

Goldstein, a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, uses material in English and Spanish from nearly twenty U.S. archives, and intelligently synthesizes secondary literature on the War on Poverty, social movements, international development, and U.S. foreign relations. The book’s narrative portions are within reach of advanced undergraduates, its new material is of use to specialists, and its driving theoretical orientation will interest those in American and postcolonial studies.

Building on Alice O’Connor and sociologist Giovanna Procacci, Goldstein depicts poverty as a “depoliticizing discourse” that allowed U.S. policymakers to discuss deprivation and inequality in isolation from capitalism and empire. Poverty, in this view, became a discrete problem stemming from the supposed pathologies of the poor, who in turn became a discrete group of people requiring personal transformation and expanded opportunities. Goldstein’s novel contribution to this familiar argument is his claim that U.S. policymakers deployed a single notion of poverty on a global scale. From the Peace Corps to the War on Poverty, government officials attacked the fatalism and social alienation that supposedly afflicted poor people worldwide. Community action became their chosen tool to awaken individual aspirations, foment collective self-help, and channel discontent into manageable expressions of liberal democratic citizenship.

In Goldstein’s telling, community action originated as an instrument of citizen mobilization in U.S. cities during World War I. After 1945 in Puerto Rico, it was reborn as a strategy for governing the poor in the context of economic restructuring, decolonization, and Cold War. Puerto Rico’s programs became models for the Third World, which in turn shaped the War on Poverty and its policy of “maximum feasible participation.” Beyond placing domestic programs in international context, Goldstein compellingly shows how the U.S. population came to regard poor people at home as foreign and underdeveloped. He further explores the ways in which poor people used and resisted the government’s homogenizing, denigrating characterization of them. American Indians, for instance, demanded a program like Puerto Rico’s Operation Bootstrap in order to challenge the U.S. policy of termination and reassert their status as sovereign nations entitled to U.S. subsidies.

Goldstein’s central claim is that liberalism required expressions of allegiance to the state and political participation by the dispossessed, and that community action operated in tandem with political violence to produce those phenomena. In three chapters interpreting the era of the War on Poverty, he argues that the Office of Economic of Opportunity selectively recognized community organizations that accepted the existing political economy, and that recognized groups served to consolidate ethnically identified political blocs that competed within the rubric of liberal democratic pluralism. Community action was a method of political incorporation, and “whether particular community program goals managed to alleviate poverty was, in the end, largely incidental.” Meanwhile, when groups from the Appalachian Volunteers to the Poor People’s Campaign used participatory procedures for socially disruptive ends and condemned political and social relationships that produced poverty, they faced violent repression. The...