Beyond the Statistics-The Brutality (The Shame of Anation, by Philip M. Stern)
Harrington, Michael
THE SHAME OF A NATION, by Philip M. Stern. Photographs by George de Vincent. Foreword by Hubert H. Humphrey. New York: Obolensky. 182 pp. $5.95. By now, there is a fair-sized library...
...By now, there is a fair-sized library devoted to the definition and description of poverty in the United States...
...the faces of the aging poor, and of the impoverished mothers...
...For, incredible as it may seem, there are still the Goldwaterites who think that the discovery of poverty is simply a mathematical trick on the part of the bleeding hearts...
...And The Shame of a Nation constantly emphasizes and illustrates this perverse inversion of decent values...
...This attitude has enough power to find its way into Look Magazine, normally one of the most humane of the mass publications...
...In this context, it provides a convincing indictment of the exceedingly narrow limits of the welfare state...
...And there is a real need for exactly this kind of a work...
...The publisher tells me there are no current plans for a cheaper paperback...
...And there are some fine collections of readings for that undergraduate audience which is now required to examine the reality of the other America of the poor...
...We spend pennies on a welfarism which is utterly inadequate according to our present public standards...
...For there is a most important theme that runs throughout, one that is fraught with political implications...
...But it would be a mistake to classify Stern's book as simply a gut, emotional presentation of the issue of poverty...
...One television documentary—for instance, the late Ed Murrow's magnificant hour show on the misery of the migrant workers-stirs up more conscience and consciousness than a thousand graphs...
...He is, of course, subsidized by the Government—to ti a sum of $75 last year...
...Here, then, are the slums, urban and rural...
...The simple answer which can be made to him— and hopefully to some of his millions of readers—is: go and read The Shame of a Nation and see for yourself...
...Photographs by George de Vincent...
...The chief of Look's Washington Bureau was apparently persuaded by the argument of two statisticians that the whole poverty problem had been inflated by counting in graduate students, happy family farmers, old people with fine houses, etc...
...John Patterson is a North Arkansas cotton farmer with a house appraised at $600 and a few acres of sandy soil...
...We also invest dollars in subsidies for the middle class and the rich, e.g...
...There is the rural reality, for instance...
...And yet, there is clearly a need for presentations which go beyond statistics and bureaucratic categories...
...And a book like The Shame of a Nation, which shows living, breathing poor people in sensitive words and moving photos, has the same kind of impact...
...Its subsidy was $301,700...
...My one real regret with regard to this book is that a $5 hardcover edition will not reach the mass audience which The Shame of a Nation deserves...
...75 for a poor farmer, $301,700 for a cotton corporation...
...Here are some of the brutal facts of life about the American welfare system and the degrading amount of time and money which we spend in trying to catch the "undeserving" poor in an infraction of some bureaucratic rule —like the night-time visit to see if there is an able-bodied man in the home of an ADC mother...
...Somebody should make them...
...And there is the little known impoverishment of the Southwest, the bitter life of the "Spanish surnamed" and of the "anglos" who work with them...
...In a nearby county, there is a 4,000 acre corporation farm...
...The Government itself has financed some excellent studies (Mollie Orshansky's analysis for the Social Security Administration is an outstanding example...
...George de Vincent's pictures of the squalid shacks filled with children (who are already without a future at five or six) can hardly be dismissed as the work of some biased statistician...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
