Expert answer:HISTORY 105 Homework
Answer & Explanation:writing (one paragraph in length) based on the Harrington reading.short paragraph about 5-6 sentences Harrington-Other America.pdf
harrington_other_america.pdf
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Chapter z
The Economy:
Abundance,
Consumerism, and
Poverty
r. Michael Harrington, The Otber America, 196z
Few books published in America during tbe earry
r96os had more impact
than Michael Harrington’s The other America
a
– searing indictment of
pouerty in the united states that ran counter
to the era’s”dominant themes of
tuidespread abundance and perpetual economic grou,,tb.
As a socialist,
Harrington was troubred by tbe way that American
capitarism, for ari its
success in raising auerage liuing standards, actually
wirked n ,rpr.iu*
inequalities of ruealth and opportunity based around
dlfferenceiof race,
ethnicity, gender, and class. writing in the tradition
of tie best *muckmking,,
iournalism of the Progressiue Era and extending more recent critiques of
American economic structures, notably
John K)nnrth Galbraitb,sihe
Affluent Society, Ha*ington reuealed tie plight of
some 40 to jo million
i.mpouerished, despondent, and largely neglected
Americarns. e’*”i.,
bes.t-seller, Harrington’s book herpid-to tirust
tbe issue of pouetrty’ into the
public consciousness and politicar arena ubere presidents
John F. Kennedy
and Lyndon B. Johnson Dere among tbose ,tho
feil under its l”i”r”,rr.-In particular, Johnson’s war on pouerty and other aspects
of his Great society
programs sougbt to use
federal power to address some of tbe problems
Harrington had identified.
The poor are increasingly slipping out of the
very experience and consciousness of the nation. If the middle class never
aia iike ugtin.r;
pou..,r it
was at least aware of them, ,.Across the tracks,,
,r”o, a very to’rrg *ry ,o
*r,
;;;
42
The r96os: A Documentary Reader
go. There were forays into the slums at Christmas time; there were charitable organizations that brought contact with the poor. Occasionally, almost
everyone passed through the Negro ghetto or the blocks of tenements, if
only to get downtown to work or to entertainment.
Now the American city has been transformed. The poor still inhabit the
miserable housing in the central area, but they are increasingly isolated
from contact with, or sight of, anybody else. Middle-class women coming
in from Suburbia on a rare trip may catch the merest glimpse of the other
America on the way to an evening at the theater, but their children are
segregated in suburban schools. The business or professional man may
drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus, but it is not an important
experience to him. The failures, the unskilled, the disabled, the aged, and
the minorities are right there, across the tracks, where they have always been.
But hardly anyone else is.
In short, the very development of the American city has removed poverty
from the living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middleclass Americans. Living out in the suburbs it is easy to assume that ours is,
indeed, an affluent society.
This new segregation of poverty is compounded by a well-meaning
ignorance. A good many concerned and sympathetic Americans are aware
that there is much discussion of urban renewal. Suddenly, driving through
the city, they notice that a familiar slum has been torn down and that there
are towering, modern buildings where once there had been tenements or
hovels. There is a warm feeling of satisfaction, of pride in the way things
are working out: the poor, it is obvious, are being taken care of.
The irony in this . . . is that the truth is nearly the exact opposite to the
impression. The total impact of the various housing programs in postwar
America has been to squeeze more and more people into existing slums.
More often than not, the modern apartment in a towering building rents at
$4o a room or more. For, during the past decade and a half, there has been
more subsidization of middle- and upper-income housing than there has
been of housing for the poor.
Clothes make the poor invisible too: America has the best-dressed poverty
the world has ever known. For a variety of reasons, the benefits of mass
production have been spread much more evenly in this area than in many
others. It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is
to be decently housed, fed, or doctored. Even people with terribly depressed
incomes can look prosperous.
This is an extremely important factor in defining our emotional and
existential ignorance of poverty. In Detroit the existence of social classes
became much more difficult to discern the day the companies put lockers in
The Economy: Abundance, Consumerism, and Poverty 41
the plants. From that moment on, one did not see men in work clothes on
the way to the factory, but citizens in slacks and white shirts. This process
has been magnified with the poor throughout the country. There are tens of
thousands of Americans in the big cities who are wearing shoes, perhaps
even a stylishly cut suit or dress, and yet are hungry. It is not a matter of
planning, though it almost seems as if the affluent society had given out
costumes to the poor so that they would not offend the rest of society with
the sight of rags.
Then, many of the poor are the wrong age to be seen. A good number of
them (over 8,ooo,ooo) are sixty-five years of age or better; an even larger
number are under eighteen. The aged members of the other America are
often sick, and they cannot move. Another group of them live out their lives
in loneliness and frustration: they sit in rented rooms, or else they stay close
to a house in a neighborhood that has completely changed from the old
days. Indeed, one of the worst aspects of poverty among the aged is that
these people are out of sight and out of mind, and alone.
The young are somewhat more visible, yer they too stay close to their
neighborhoods. Sometimes they advertise their poverty through a lurid
tabloid story about a gang killing. But generally they do not disturb the
quiet streets of the middle class.
And finally, the poor are politically invisible. It is one of the cruelest
ironies of social life in advanced countries that the dispossessed at the
bottom of society are unable to speak for themselves. The people of the
other America do not, by far and large, belong to unions, to fraternal
organizations, or to political parties. They are without lobbies of their
own; they put forward no legislative program. As a group, they are atomized. They have no face; they have no voice….
Out of the thirties came the welfare state. Its creation had been stimulated
it helped the poor least of all. Laws
like unemployment compensation, the Wagner Act, the various farm programs, all these were designed for the middle third in the cities, for the
organized workers, and for the upper third in the country, for the big market
farmers. If a man works in an extremely low-paying job, he may not even
be covered by social security or other welfare programs. If he receives
unemployment compensation, the payment is scaled down according to
by mass impoverishment and misery, yet
his low earnings.
One of the major laws that was designed to cover everyone, rich and poor,
was social security. But even here the other Americans suffered discrimination.
Over the years social security payments have not even provided a subsistence
level
of life. The middle third have been able to supplement the federal
pension through private plans negotiated by unions, through joining medical
44
The r96os: A Documentary Reader
insurance schemes like Blue Cross, and so on. The poor have not been able to
do so. They lead a bitter life, and then have to pay for that fact in old age.
Indeed, the paradox that the welfare state benefits those least who need
help most is but a single instance of a persistent irony in the other America.
Even when the money finally trickles down, even when a school is built in a
poor neighborhood, for instance, the poor are still deprived. Their entire
environment, their life, their values, do not prepare them to take advantage
of the new opportunity. The parents are anxious for the children to go to
work; the pupils are pent up, waiting for the moment when their education
has complied with the law.
Today’s poor, in short, missed the political and social gains of the thirties.
They are, as Galbraith rightly points out, the first minority poor in history,
the first poor not to be seen, the first poor whom the politicians could leave
alone.
The first step toward the new poverty was taken when millions of people
proved immune to progress. lrhen that happened, the failure was not
individual and personal, but a social product. But once the historic accident
takes place, it begins to become a personal fate.
The new poor of the other America saw the rest of society move ahead.
They went on living in depressed areas, and often they tended to become
In some of the West Virginia towns, for instance,
aLentire community will become shabby and defeated. The young and the
depressed human beings.
adventurous go to the city, leaving behind those who cannot move and those
who lack the will to do so. The entire area becomes permeated with failure,
and that is one more reason the big corporations shy away.
Indeed, one of the most important things about the new poverty is that it
cannot be defined in simple, statistical terms. Throughout this book a
crucial term is used: aspiration. If a group has internal vitality, a will – if
it has aspiration – it may live in dilapidated housing, it may eat an inadequate diet, and it may suffer poverty, but it is not impoverished. So it was
in those ethnic slums of the immigrants that played such a dramatic role in
the unfolding of the American dream. The people found themselves in
slums, but they were not slum dwellers.
But the new poverty is constructed so as to destroy aspiration; it is a
system designed to be impervious to hope. The other America does not
contain the adventurous seeking a new life and land. It is populated by the
failures, by those driven from the land and bewildered by the city, by old
people suddenly confronted with the torments of loneliness and poverty,
and by minorities facing a wall of prejudice.
In the past, when poverty was general in the unskilled and semi-skilled
work force, the poor were all mixed together. The bright and the dull, those
The Economy: Abundance, Consumerism, and Poverty
4j
who were going to escape into the great society and those who were to stay
behind, all of them lived on the same street. ‘Sfhen the middle third rose,
this community was destroyed. And the entire invisible land of the other
Americans became a ghetto, a modern poor farm for the rejects of society
and of the economy.
It is a blow to reform and the political hopes of the poor that the middle
class no longer understands that poverty exists. But, perhaps more impor-
tant, the poor are losing their links with the great world.
If
statistics
and sociology can measure a feeling as delicate as loneliness . . . the other
America is becoming increasingly populated by those who do not belong to
anybody or anything. They are no longer participants in an ethnic culture
from the old country; they are less and less religious; they do not belong to
unions or clubs. They are not seen, and because of that they themselves
cannot see. Their horizon has become more and more restricted; they see
one another, and that means they see little reason to hope. . . .
Finally, one might summarize the newness of contemporary poverty by
saying: These are the people who are immune to progress. But then the facts
are even more cruel. The other Americans are the victims of the very inventions and machines that have provided a higher living standard for the rest of
the society. They are upside-down in the Economy and for them greater
productivity often means worse jobs; agricultural advance becomes hunger.
In the optimistic theory, technology is an undisguised blessing. An increase in productivity, the argument goes, generates a higher standard of
living for the whole people. And indeed, this has been true for the middle
and upper thirds of American societ5 the people who made such striking
gains in the last two decades. It tends to overstate the automatic character of
the process, to omit the role of human struggle. . . . Yet it states a certain
truth-for those who are lucky enough to participate in it.
But the poor, if they were given to theory, might argue the exact opposite.
They might say: Progress is misery.
As the society became more technological, more skilled, those who learn
to work the machines, who get the expanding education, move up. Those
who miss out at the very start find themselves at a new disadvantage.
A generation ago in American life, the majority of the working people did
not have high-school educations. But at that time industry was organized
on a lower level of skill and competence. And there was sort of continuum
in the shop: the youth who left school at sixteen could begin as a laborer,
and gradually pick up skill as he went along.
Today the situation is quite different. The good jobs require much more
academic preparation, much more skill from the very outset. Those who
lack a high-school education tend to be condemned to the underworld – to
46
The r96os: A Documentary Reader
low-paying service industries, to backward factories, to sweeping and
janitorial duties. If the fathers and mothers of the contemporary poor were
penalized a generation ago for their lack of schooling, their children will
suffer all the more. The very rise in productivity that created more money
and better working conditions for the rest of the society can be a menace
to the poor. . . .
Poverty in the r96os is invisible and it is new, and both these factors make
it more tenacious. It is more isolated and politically powerless than ever
before. It is laced with ironies, not the least of which is that many of the
poor view progress upside-down, as a menace and a threat to their lives.
And if the nation does not measure up to the challenge of automation,
poverty in the r96os might be on the increase.
Source: Michael Harrington, The Otber America: Pouerty in the United States
(New York: Macmillan Publishing Company ry621, pp. rr-r3, r6-zr. Reprinted
with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright
renewed @ r99o by Stephanie Harrington. All rights reserved.
z. Council of Economic
Advisers, Annual Report, 1965,
t966
‘Wbile prosperity
was uneuenly spread, the strength of the US economy
during the r96os prouided a crucial context for many of its most important
social, political and cuhural deuelopments. This excerpt from tbe 1965
report of the Council of Economic Aduisers – an aduisory body set up by
‘World
Congress after
War II to assist the president in formulating economic
policy – captures botb a sense of pride in the performance of tbe economy and
an unflincbing confidence that growth would continue indefinitely.
Interestingly, giuen the empbasis on free-market principles and tbe importance
of priuate enterprise, tbe report is also careful to note the significance of
strategic federal interuentions to encourage economic growth, uitb all that
seemed to promise in terms of full-employment and greater prosperity
throughout tbe nation.
The Sustained Expansion of 196r-64
As 1965 begins, most Americans are enjoying a degree of prosperity unmatched in their experience, or indeed in the history of their nation. In
r964, some 7o million of them were at work, producing,$6zz billion worth
of goods and services.
…
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