Notebook: The Brutalizing of America

...In 1962, fifteen years later, those proportions were exactly the same...

...The civil rights struggle and the civil rights leaders have only tenu ous connections with those Negroes, for that fight is taking place inside the context of a society with which they have no identification...

...A real war on poverty means vast increases in transfer payments made to the aged, to those physically unable to work and to the displaced workers who are incapable of being trained for new jobs...

...But the civil rights movement says very little to those unemployed, de moralized Negroes living inside the black ghetto, whose only contact with the white world is through the police, the probation officer and the welfare worker...

...A real war against poverty would take many billions of dollars...

...the polite businessmen who sneer at the suggestion that they should contribute a tiny percentage of their profits to help the poor are brutes too, dressed up in dinner jackets...

...He may have been right, for we have become insensitive to poverty, and only too willing to accept myths to account for its continued existence...

...It is only when the poor overlap with another group, as they do with the Negroes, that they have a voice, albeit a middle-class one...

...But it is not just the doctors and the teachers who fail to give freely of themselves...

...Without a staff, willing to work endless hours at low pay, the program would have failed completely...

...It proposes to give some kind of vocational training to thousands of young men and women...

...Sometimes such men jab electrified cattle prods into people, let loose dogs on them, or slam students to the ground with high pressure streams from fire hoses...

...He must travel accompanied by a score of Secret Service agents, a press secretary, communications specialists, government officials concerned with the administration of programs, politicians who want their photos taken with him, and the eager press...

...And that is my great handicap in understanding the poor for, unlike me, the poor cannot exercise their free will to escape...

...It is American technology, the President says, which now makes it possible to eliminate poverty —as if it had been the lack of technology that in the recent past held us back from doing this...

...Far more fundamental changes in society are required if the unskilled, declassed Negroes and whites are to find any useful place for themselves in the technological age...

...But if those young people are just as unemployed when they finish their training period as they were when they started, we will have done them a grievous injustice...

...Violent redneck resistance to civil rights for Negroes is one mark of the brute...

...Finally, usually unsuccessful attempts were made to persuade reluctant middleclass employers to hire the high percentage of trainees with arrest records...

...I am not trying to suggest that President Johnson is using the poor for political purposes, as the Republican Party is so busily charging...

...The poor are still objects to us, objects to be studied, objects sometimes to be used for political purposes, or objects who should be helped because to do so will cut down on public assistance payments...

...Thus, the great challenge of the next decade cannot be met by any governmental program alone although such programs are an essential framework in which to operate...

...And so, because no one speaks for the poor, not even the poor themselves, the gap between them and the rest of society widens more and more...

...One of the most important parts of the Administration's present antipoverty program is the Job Corps...

...the youth in the South trying to register Negro voters are from the middle-class...

...men without souls...

...Simultaneously, the President obviously also believed that politically his program could be sold to the Congress and the public as a wall only if it came in the large economysize package...

...Of late, the poor have been rediscovered in America...

...He and the proponents of the bill continually pointed out that the poverty war is a very cheap one, that the program contains no new money appropriations, but only consolidates already existing or proposed legislation in a new Act under the direction of Sargent Shriver...

...Only a few teachers now volunteer for work in slum schools...

...And so, after he and his helicopter entourage have left the torn-out gulches of Appalachia and returned to the big white house in the city, not much remains for the poor people who must continue living in the shanties...

...Arthur Ross, more accurately calls a "border skirmish...

...But the ugly fact that we have not cut down substantially on the proportion of the poor is a sign of our brutality...

...It is not, and the President ought not to mislead the public by describing the worthy projects he has proposed as being part of an allout war...

...whose lights flash on and off as a new set of tapes emerges triumphant, from the other end of the machine...

...Tolstoy could not know the fear and dread of want...

...There is a far grimmer prospect, too, that the kind of race riots already occurring will spread, that lower class Negroes and lower class whites, without any commitment to the rule of law, will try to destroy each other as they lash out in blind anger at the reality of their lives...

...But it is impossible for him to share their poverty for poverty is not the lack of things...

...It is not only absent from the anti-poverty program, but from society as a whole...

...And this cheap war was proposed at a time when our Defense budget is $57,000,000,000 per year...

...But despite the obvious political use which can be made of the poverty issue, there is evidence that the President is genuinely interested in the problem of poverty and genuinely disposed to help alleviate it...

...Even worse, the Administration made important compromises of principle in its frantic effort to get the bill passed, even sacrificing, unnecessarily, Adam Yarmolinsky to satisfy the yowling of the North Carolina Congressmen, who see in Yarmolinsky the devil incarnate...

...how many doctors in San Francisco are willing to exchange a lower Sutter Street address for one further out on the same street...

...It is commitment that distinguishes man from the brute...

...Under such conditions, no matter how well-intentioned he is, how can he learn about the psychologically crippling effects poverty has upon those who must live in it, especially when all his visits to the poor are, literally as well as figuratively, flying ones...

...The belief in service was once far more prevalent in American life than it is today...

...Above all, such a war may mean the creation of new jobs by government, for the record of private industry is a dismal one...

...But those who participate in such ugly physical violence are not the only brutes...

...Reporters from The New York Times and the Podunk Gazette are busy on their new poverty beats...

...William Dean Howells once said of Tolstoy that, It is wonderful what Tolstoy has done...

...Thus, the prospect before the country is not only one of challenge to the status quo from the reasonably wellorganized and reasonably well-disciplined civil rights groups, fighting for reasonable demands...

...For a nobleman with the most aristocratic tendency, to refuse to be supported in idleness, to insist upon working with his own hands and to share as much as possible the hardship and toil of a peasant class which but recently was a slave class is the greatest thing he could do...

...Instead, more and more have turned their backs on the poor and, much worse, on the children of the poor...

...Before the training was completed, it was necessary to bring in the whole battery of social services found in the community...

...It is certainly true that for the majority of the population, affluence is a reality today in some measure at least...

...How many doctors in New York are willing to give up their lower Park Avenue practices for one on upper Park Avenue...

...Howells was right...

...the shouting pickets in front of the automobile dealers in San Francisco are from the middleclass and such actions as these are carried out in the framework of a legal structure which takes into account demonstrations, v o t e r registration drives, picketing and even rude shouting...

...Certainly, then, it is impossible for the President of the United States to really learn the reality of life among the poor...

...that failure is endemic to our society...

...Thus, even the most serious investigators of life among the poor suffer grave handicaps in their work...

...The war against poverty, the fight for civil rights and the struggle to make our communities into healthy living places will not be won by men in government whose commitment to community is diluted by sectional interests, an irrational fear of planning and brute-like prejudices...

...But the kind of brutality to which I am referring is not primarily physical, although often its consequences are...

...with them, there is the chance, at least, of winning...

...the minimum wage would then need to be extended to all workers, including those in agriculture who also need the coverage of unemployment insurance...

...it is the fear and dread of want...

...One important reason why the idea of such service is resisted is that we have accepted, as a nation, a set of myths about the poor American and why he is poor...

...As they trudge down the road to get their surplus food packages, about all that remains of his visit is their reminiscences of how "folksy" LBJ was: he talked their language and knew all about beagles...

...In that year, the 20% of the families with the lowest incomes received only 5% of the national income, while the top 5% of the families received 20% of the national income...

...Unlike the farmers, the mute farm workers get no subsidies...

...Unfortunately for the poor, they have no organized voice and no economic power...

...The distribution of income in the United States follows this pattern...

...The poverty program also lacks, quite apart from new ideas and a great deal of money, the kind of personal identification, the personal quality, the personal involvement that have made the Peace Corps, for example, so suc cessful...

...Neither can I nor any other person who lives among the poor but is not poor himself...

...And that is cruelty, that is brutality...

...Our technology has become the wonder of the world, but while other industrial nations with far less natural resources than ours have succeeded in virtually eliminating poverty, we still have it...

...the fight for such jobs, necessary as it is, reflects middle-class attitudes not found inside the squalid slums where the truly impoverished Negroes live...

...To cite only one example: last year, the private sector of our economy did not create a single new job for teenagers at a time when the labor market is being flooded with youth...

...The lack of real communication with the poor, of contact with their real problems and knowledge of their aspirations means that the poor are not, as yet, involved in making plans for improving their lot or helping to carry out such plans...

...It doesn't really matter that my sheaf of credit cards is left at home on the dresser when I put on my old clothes to go out as an unemployed worker, for I know that I can escape this ugly life at will...

...The President may have been right in his judgment that Congress and the public would resist the kind of largescale expenditures required for a real war on poverty...

...There are more lobbyists for utility companies congregating in the state capitols than there are lobbyists for pensioners...

...President Johnson feels compelled to describe as a "war" what Dr...

...The staff, itself made up of Negroes, discovered it had great difficulties in recruiting other Negroes and then in communicating with them...

...The leadership of the Negro civil rights movement does not come, generally, from the 2,000,000 poor Negro families...

...men who are irrational, unthinking, without life or sensibility...

...It is bad business to have poor people, the businessmen are told, while another popular argument advanced is that if we have poor people in the midst of affluence, we will look bad in the eyes of the world...

...Even before they can learn technical skills, they need to be made literate, they need to learn about foods and diet, they need to learn birth control information, they need to learn the basic rules of behavior which keep abrasive personal relationships at a minimum...

...And those who are to work with this group need preparation for the culture-shock they will experience in these communities where words have a different meaning than in the world outside...

...A real war against poverty cannot even be started with a billion dollars that have been juggled around from various other budgets...

...Even worse, since 1947, no substantive change has occurred in the distribution of income among the poor...

...Obviously, we are better off today than when President Roosevelt, in 1937, called one-third of the nation ill-fed and ill-housed, for now only one-fifth of the nation is ill-fed and ill-housed...

...No matter how little money I take with me, I cannot know what it is like to really have very little money...

...And unless we meet this challenge, the next ten years will find the country even more divided than it is to day, and those ten years may then be known as "The Brutal Decade...

...out an eye to its political consequences...

...Only a tiny percentage of the poor Negroes have any concern with whether or not the Bank of America hires Negro tellers...

...It is only the personal commit ment of the individuals involved in the training of 100 funtionally illiter ate Negroes in Norfolk, Virginia, that made it possible to overcome at least some of the enormous and unexpected problems encountered in the program...

...Being arrested in a demonstration at the World's Fair is a middleclass action...

...Rather, I am concerned with the passive brutality of men who seem not to possess reason...

...Unions seek to raise the wages of their working members, but can do little for the unemployed...

...They are trapped, separated from our conception of a decent life not, as I am, by a bus ride or a telephone call, but by a gap so wide that my normal life is only a fantasy world to them...

...In 1890, a very tiny percentage of the population owned most of the country's wealth...

...The poor are being stratified, classified and quantified...

...Nearly half the jobs added to the work force since 1957 have been in state and local governments...

...The idea that poverty ought to be eliminated because it is immoral is advanced only rarely...

...But often a kind of unconscious cruelty results from this spurt of wellmotivated concern with the poor...

...I number myself in this group, but no matter how I try to get some sense of what life is like for the poor by traveling the country as an un employed worker, living in shabby skid row hotels, sitting in dreary casual labor offices, working as a dishwasher or stooping over tomato vines, I can only get glimpses of what it means...

...We may yet pay in future physical brutality for our past psychic brutality...

...Without committed individuals, society will lose...

...Indeed, between 1957 and 1963, a period when the population of the United States increased by more than 17 million people, private industry generated only 300,000 new full-time jobs...

...Only people can meet this challenge, people who now live inside the communities where the victims of poverty and prejudice live, or people who will go, freely, into those communities, leaving behind on the dresser, the superfluous contents of their intellectual wallets...

...So, too, the concept of over-all economic planning to abolish poverty is voiced generally by those outside the govern ment structure...

...Today that wealth is spread far more widely, but still disproportionately...

...But he is wrong to call the program he has proposed a "war...

...It would require lifting minimum wages to at least $2.00 an hour...

...But this fact only compounds our guilt, for that improvement has not been accompanied by a growth in responsibility for the less affluent...

...We will have raised their aspirations without providing an opportunity for those hopes to be realized...

...He could do no more...

...Obviously, no President, in an election year, does anything or at least very little, with...

...Millions of punched cards are clicking through the sorting machines and data about the poor is being fed continuously on tapes into the humming computers • Revised from a speech originally delivered to the Annual Conference of the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, May 21, 1964 in San Francisco...

...That fear Tolstoy could not know...