The Future Doesn’t Work

In September 1995, journalist Dale Maharidge wrote an epitaph for his own career. He and photographer Michael S. Williamson had produced three books in the 1980s about American poverty and the working class: Journey to Nowhere, And Their Children After Them, and The Last Great American Hobo. When an editor at Gale Research Inc. asked him to describe their work covering the destitute lives of so many Americans, Maharidge confessed that the reporting had taken a lot out of them:

Perhaps one can never understand [poverty]. All I know is that each book took a chunk out of our lives. One sets out to educate Americans about poverty in the hope that in some small way conditions will be changed. Then comes the realization that Americans don’t seem to care. This, along with the horror of the lives one documents, takes a toll. I can’t speak for Michael, but I plan to never again write a non-fiction book about poverty (p. 74).

Maharidge broke his own vow, and his latest collaboration with Williamson, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, asks a difficult but essential question for Americans today: “what do we want to become as we move forward?” (p. 10).

Someplace Like America expands on some of Maharidge and Williamson’s earlier stories and updates some of the tales of desperate Americans they had met in the 1980s. They got a creative jumpstart from Bruce Springsteen, who reached out to them after reading one of their books and then wrote two songs based on it. In the process, it connects the economic struggles of the ‘70s and ‘80s, when poverty and homelessness were clearly tied to factory closings, with the current economic crisis that levels white-collar workers who never imagined themselves unemployable, standing in line at a food pantry, or jumping trains to find work.

It is the voices of these people—their words and images—that make this book so exhausting, and so necessary. Maharidge lets his subjects speak at length, without interruption. They are “the real experts,” he writes, and they deserve to be heard (p. 7). Some make a lot of sense, some sound just this side of crazy, but all contribute to this honest narrative about the state of working men and women in America. Maharidge doesn’t romanticize his subjects, but he also doesn’t disrespect them by condensing them into sound bites wrapped in windbag pontifications. We meet them as he and Williamson find them, and it’s impossible to look away.

The stories are jarring, even for those who study and report on poverty and the working class. There’s Sam, for example, whom the authors met on his first night at a homeless shelter. He lost his cleaning service. After he refused to go on welfare, his wife and kids moved in with her mother. Sam bought a one-way Amtrak ticket, hoping to find work. “I feel like I’ve stepped into Bangladesh,” he told the authors. “I grew up having everything. We grew up in the fifties and sixties. We had all the good things. I thought ‘poor’ meant you didn’t want a job” (p. 48).

The book offers many such comeuppance moments for men who used to draw hard lines in the sand. Ken Platt is pictured on the book cover as a young boy in 1984, with his arm hooked around his barrel-chested father, Ken Platt Sr., on the abandoned factory floor at U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works in Youngstown. Now he’s the father of two young boys and barely employed as a millwright at Republic Steel. “When you make minimum wage, you invest in bread and bologna,” he told Maharidge. “I used to say people on welfare were cheating. Now I know better” (p. 44).

Future journalists and citizen bloggers should study this book for its craft. It is sometimes a bit rambling, but it’s full of hard-core examples of the...