The Poverty of Antipoverty (a series of firsthand reports on the Poverty Program)
Kopkind, Andrew
With this issue, DISSENT begins a series of first-hand reports on specific projects of the Poverty Program. As Michael Harrington and others have noted in these pages, the War on Poverty is...
...The most visible, ultimately the most expensive, and the most unpredictable part of the war is community action...
...Two years ago the OEO was simply a federal command post for the War on Poverty, hardly a modest operation at that...
...Little by little, everything that troubles America has become the concern of the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...We were all Marxians then, and now we are all Freudians: the poor must be "motivated" to change their conditions themselves...
...Since these groups are usually organized around local issues, political and social attitudes are debated under conditions of intense practical pressure...
...It is almost as if the War on Poverty were part of a programmatic series of events which is moving America in the 1960's...
...Shelves of books are produced on antipoverty, panels discuss it, committees meet on it...
...High-minded social workers and higher-minded volunteers act as the catalysts, and the emphasis is all on the young—on training and educating rather than doling and protecting...
...It is not likely that anyone can draw a coherent picture of what the War on Poverty is doing...
...Is Upward Bound educating the poor for roles that they can never fill because the "system" won't let them in...
...Or in more gradual ways: tutoring under-achieving school children, helping the elderly to find useful things to do, teaching the poor how to be careful shoppers...
...Essentially, it is the notion that the government should spend $500 million a year to encourage rapid social change...
...Youths are sent off to Job Corps camps where they may be able to learn skills that could lift them permanently from the unemployable underclass...
...Despite the enormity of the obstacles, attacks are mounted with energy and optimism...
...Does VISTA have any strategy for bringing change or does it merely supply extra staff for understaffed service agencies...
...Something less dramatic will emerge from this War on Poverty...
...At this early stage, they can be seen only on small screens...
...So it is now a war on class hostility, racial segregation, and powerlessness of the poor: on middle-class alienation, bureaucratic proliferation, the insufficient economy, inadequate education, political elitism—in short, the condition of man in the modem world...
...It can be done in the most militant of ways: organizing the poor to threaten the "power structure" and gain material benefits...
...But even a cursory glance at the country will show that things have come a long way in five years...
...VISTA workers organize slum-dwellers in East Harlem in block groups that can challenge the slumlords, the bureaucrats, and even the social workers who seem to keep the poor in their place...
...To change the condition of poverty will require a major reconstruction of institutions, and that is a task few governments take on themselves...
...If the War on Poverty brings any of that about, it will take years to be recognized...
...Antipoverty, the Negro revolution, the student movement, the activism of the clergy, the peace protest, the organization of independent political groups—it is all a slow but deep social earthquake, and before the faulting stops, there will be more changes than anyone now can predict...
...The money the OEO spends and the power it can confer on previously invisible elements of society makes it the most politically sensitive legislation in this generation...
...Government cannot do the job for the poor, but it can provide the materiel...
...As Michael Harrington and others have noted in these pages, the War on Poverty is woefully inadequate both in scope and concept...
...It will figure in every election campaign from now on—probably for the rest of our lives...
...Does the Job Corps train its charges for work that will be automated out of existence in a few years...
...The Left criticizes the whole effort, from theory to appropriation, as inadequate...
...The essential thread running through it all is the concept of participation, and despite the increasing political attacks, it is likely to be part of national policy in our times...
...Under a Head Start project in Mississippi, thousands of Negro children go to pre-schools run by their parents and neighbors, out of the debilitating reach of the traditional white school boards...
...Even the poverty warriors themselves have a woefully inadequate analysis of the problems, and the fuzziest notions of their solution...
...It is running at a cost of $1.75 billion a year, but it is now much more—something close to a Department for Fulfilling the American Dream: the Ministry of Hope...
...Most important, can community action agencies really fight the politics which seem increasingly to circumscribe their activities...
...Poverty" has turned out to be not a single phenomenon, like housing or water pollution, but a reflection of all the ills of the society...
...Only recently have most Americans found out what is going on in their home towns...
...some of them have called the OEO a "fuddle factory...
...it is too big and far too diffuse for comprehension...
...The end of poverty will not be announced like V-J Day, with fire-crackers and funny hats...
...Inevitably, new activists are declaring themselves and attempting to bring radical perspectives to bear on situations which will present more and more opportunities for political activity...
...There are unresolved questions about all the programs...
...Certainly the distance between rhetoric and reality in the poverty war is greater than anywhere else (with the possible, and depressing, exception of foreign policy...
...Even if the "other war" in Vietnam does not blow the whole scheme (and us with it) to bits, and antipoverty efforts are expanded, the winds of change are not likely to amount to a revolutionary hurricane in this affluent society...
...In theory it is something between controlled, social revolution and subsidized self-help, and in practice it swings to one side or the other in response to the prevailing political winds...
...In future issues we hope to print reports from others directly involved in the struggle to escalate the War on Poverty into a full-scale assault on the appalling inequities in jobs, housing, and education—ED...
...Is Head Start simply plugging children into class-education one or two years earlier than regular school...
...Republicans may grumble...
...Of the 35 million considered "poor" in the U.S., 15 million are under 18...
...Ending poverty means closing the still-widening gap between the "haves" and "have-nots," fragmenting the ghettoes, employing the unemployed, fully-employing the underemployed, opening politics to all people and classes, eliminating the wide disparities in education...
...The answer to all the questions is both yes and no...
...Yet wherever poverty funds go, a political fight begins, a fight in which city hall patronage is militantly attacked by new combinations of radicals, many of whom had never before been motivated to political action...
...To define the problem of poverty and to describe the antipoverty war is not to conclude that the desired effects will automatically follow...
...Still, it is almost impossible to speak of the poverty war in terms of success or failure...
...Politics is all...
...The task force which set up the Poverty Program believed that as far as politics and imagination would allow, it must not be another New Deal of welfare handouts...
...There are few useful tests...
...Are Neighborhood Youth Corps workers merely telling the poor to act middle-class so that they can get better jobs...
...Both sides are right in a way, but the campaign continues and things (perhaps not precisely what is predicted) begin to happen...
Vol. 13 • September 1966 • No. 5
