Oscar Lewis: La Vida; Richard M. Elman: The Poorhouse State
Larner, Susan
THE PooRHousE STATE, by Richard M. Elman. New York: Pantheon Books. 302 pp. $5.95. For long stretches of history, no one but poor has been interested in poverty; but at intervals-and we are in one...
...I think he is dead wrong—and, despite his pessimism, underestimates the problem— when he proposes to change the lives of the dependent poor by making dependency respectable...
...The autobiographies are fascinating, inevitably revealing even to those who are professionally knowledgeable about the poor...
...but it is the introduction which, in the long run, may prove more important...
...But the pathology of the poor that Elman himself has illustrated can't be so easily dismissed...
...He distinguishes between mere impoverishment, with the retention of standard values, and the establishment of what he calls the culture (or sub-culture) of poverty...
...And perhaps—I am no economist— it will prove necessary to permanently pension off a part of our population...
...She shouldn't be such a coward...
...Enough money so that those on welfare may enter the American consumer-culture without a struggle...
...Money that is given freely, with the idea that dependency is a permanent and value-neutral factor in the American economy...
...I say put a good face on bad times...
...Elman has one single answer for the problems of all the people he describes: money...
...on the other hand, they are conniving chiselers, irresponsible, lazy, and sly...
...where they lie, it is to deceive not the interviewer but themselves...
...The independent versions of similar incidents in family life serve to check the validity and reliability of the data...
...You have to face whatever life brings...
...Yes, obviously, money—much more money—must be found to allow the helpless to live decently...
...You can't buy that sort of information, not even from the poor...
...and here one becomes uneasy...
...How can we come to grips with the real problems presented by individuals among the poor who frustrate and infuriate those whose society-appointed task it is to "help" them...
...I doubt it...
...Idiot...
...But for those who read the book as a corrective to incomprehension, the surprising thing is that La Vida provides an increased respect for the totality of the Rios' lives...
...Much must remain open to subjective variation, but great efforts were made to neutralize this effect: The intensive studies of families involved the establishment of deep personal ties without which we could never have obtained the intimate data presented in this volume...
...However, the author's simplistic ideology belies the complexity of his presentations...
...It represents an effort to cope with feelings of hopelessness and despair which develop from the realization of the improbability of achieving success in terms of the values and goals of the larger society...
...These are the questions we will have to answer, and the answers won't be easy precisely because we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon: The culture of poverty . . . once it comes into existence . . . tends to perpetuate itself from genera...
...Soledad said, switching off the set impatiently...
...Lewis lists in meticulous detail the multiple facets of daily life that were analyzed for each member of the family studied, and then goes on to describe the major techniques of the research: the intensive, taped autobiographies, and the recording of a typical day in the life of each of the family members...
...But the typical welfare recipient today is dependent not only because the skills he has to offer are obsolescent— if that were all, retraining programs might work a lot better than they do —but because he is incapacitated by real pathology...
...These are the "worthy poor," as the old codes had it, and they are generally those who in all but monetary matters can identify closely with other members of their society...
...Almost all the writing on poverty has been done by researchers who were not themselves poor, or were poor only temporarily and by choice...
...Each of the men and women of the pseudonymous Rios family comes through with impressive directness...
...By the time slum children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic attitudes and values of their sub-culture and are not psychologically geared to take full ad237 vantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime...
...Those of the poor who manage to deal with their poverty according to the mores of the great world are perceived by that world as honest, thrifty, etc...
...Elman structures his many portraits with an evident fidelity and a good deal of sensitivity: he shows the reader an ADC mother who has just been cut off the relief rolls, without money enough for a pretense of decency, and wholly beyond hope or rationality...
...I recall, for instance, a young Hungarian refugee, a skilled wig-maker who could have earned a very high wage...
...A stalemate of righteousness has resulted...
...I got good value for my money...
...Sincere as he is in his concern for the poor, Elman isn't a serious enough writer or analyst to realize the pitfalls of his reportorial style and his research techniques...
...The main text of the book clearly indicates the success of this technique...
...It is inevitable, I suppose, that some leaders of the New York Puerto Rican community should object to La Vida on the grounds that it lends support to an ugly stereotype...
...The lives they describe are something more than shocking...
...Despite some overstatement, Elman by and large is in the right when he sticks to protesting Welfare abuses...
...The obvious question then is: how can we do more than merely provide opportunities to those who are predisposed to grasp them...
...For here Lewis shows why the two images of poverty have been etched so deeply into our folklore, and why the conflict between their proponents is so specious...
...Lewis devotes a great deal of care to a description of the planning and accomplishment of his research...
...Perhaps something of the flavor of this unique family biography comes through in this anecdote from a day spent with the eldest daughter, Soledad: The television set was still turned on and they all watched a scene in which a young girl was con templating suicide...
...Lewis takes exception, however, to the view that the values of the subculture are to be seen as entirely negative...
...The alleviation of financial stress, while plainly a good thing in itself, is not a cure for cultural pathology...
...There is a great deal of pathos, suffering and emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty...
...or again, a tubercular bartender, half a victim of bureaucracy, half a con-man...
...Their books tend to be written with the innate bias of their political convictions...
...Hell, some people shit on themselves over every little thing that happens to them...
...People are perceived as caught up in a tangle of poverty, bureaucratic inertia, and social pathology...
...How can we bridge the gap between the dominant goals and those of an alien culture...
...It does not provide much support or long-range satisfaction, and its encouragement of mistrust tends to magnify helplessness and isolation...
...In some cases we visited the families regularly for a few months and learned a great deal about theft lives in casual conversations...
...tion to generation because of its effect on the children...
...239 While it is no doubt true that a large proportion of the pathology found in the poor is created by poverty itself, the reverse proposition—that money will create health—does not hold...
...It is particularly frustrating that in this area, so in need of imaginative criticism, the insight and fervor Elman displays should be lost in a welter of illogic, half-truth, and blithering ideology...
...The culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society...
...A good many of his interviews were recorded in return for payment, and Elman seems quite unaware that this might fault his data: In the early summer of 1965, I stood outside the Welfare Centel on 28th Street, stopping people when they left to ask whether they would submit to a brief interview about their life on public assistance in return for five dollars...
...He describes some of the advantages that derive to the slum poor from the very limitations of their outlook, and the strengths they gain which enable them to survive in conditions that could not be mastered by the values of the larger society...
...There is an avidity for experience in the face of repeated disillusionment, an absence of pomposity, a survival of intelligence despite the most limiting ignorance, that more than counterbalances the violence, greed, and rather pathetic 238 self-deception that are so prevalent in their lives...
...Sociologists, economists, social workers, and politicians of all persuasions have issued numberless studies 236 of poverty, and as a result have succeeded in establishing two entirely contradictory images of the poor: on the one hand, they are the salt of the earth, hard-working individuals victimized by our economic system...
...Nevertheless, there is none of the currently fashionable romanticizing of poverty, and Lewis concludes rather grimly...
...The book is divided into two major sections: a theoretical and methodological introduction, and a main text made up of the taped autobiographies of the members of a Puerto Rican slum family...
...SUSAN LARNER...
...How can she think of killing herself...
...But it is hard to imagine a research method which would come closer to the ideal than that presented in La Vida...
...No trouble lasts a hundred years...
...The tape recordings of the life histories were begun only after we knew the family well...
...They are obviously comfortable in the presentation of themselves...
...On the other hand The way of life which develops among some of the poor . . . is the culture of poverty...
...Or again, there was the Puerto Rican man who felt his manhood so undermined by his wife's factory earnings and her increased independence that his only recourse was to illness and a place on the welfare rolls as a certified invalid...
...The book begins by itemizing the by now familiar—and noxious—details of the administration of Welfare: the minimal provision of funds, the endless humiliating investigations, the fantastic bureaucratization...
...but at intervals-and we are in one such period now-it has become respectable to see it as a problem...
...But she had eaten herself into an obesity of such enormous proportions that shame and physical incapacity kept her trapped in her apartment...
...Dope...
...In La Vida, Oscar Lewis has at one stroke vacated the old argument and provided a genuine entree into the life that poverty imposes on the poor...
...Richard Elman's The Poorhouse State is a muckraking assault on America's public assistance system...
...As Oscar Lewis points out, such pathology is rooted in a true culture, and as such is passed on from generation to generation...
...There is always an element of uneasiness in the notion that all the crucial factors in the life of an individual—much less a family—can be captured by the techniques of scientific observation...
...on the whole it seems to me • .. a rather thin culture...
...The bulk of the text, however, consists of a series of interviews and reports of casual, first-person encounters...
...How can we deal with the real problems presented by institutions among the poor which are at variance with those of the larger society...
...Some of the attitudes and actions of the protagonists are unlovely indeed, and those who choose to seek out elements of viciousness will succeed...
...they go beyond that, they are in some respects quite foreign...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
