CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" -A Symposium: Is There Really A New Poor?

...the poor today have only a culture of poverty...

...q.e.d.: they are getting worse"—though they certainly do not, I will argue, dictate a complacent view of the fate of the Other America...

...If we are assessing trends, however, there is a question as to just what we compare this grossly inequitable situation with...

...But the point to stress is surely the opposite...

...These conclusions will not be palatable to the kind of mindless radical who reasons, "things are terrible...

...The long-term trend of per capita income in this country is dramatically upward, and the way in which that income is distributed has not shifted abruptly in a direction unfavorable to those on the lower end of the scale...

...And the crucial contrast, from which so much else follows: the poor were once on the lowest rungs of a ladder most of them could climb...

...IT IS DOUBTFUL THAT A NEW poverty has recently been created in this country because of creeping arteriosclerosis of the occupational structure...

...the shift from the CCC practice of sending a lad's wages home to his parents to the Job Corps practice of paying members directly, is a revealing symptom of the social change that has weakened the economic viability of the working-class family...

...erty or fall into it by earning $50 more or $50 less a year...

...In days of old (precise time conveniently unspecified), the cliché goes, the immigrant saw poverty as a temporary state and looked forward to the day when he or his children could gain greater access to opportunity and financial resources...

...But you needn't dig at all deeply into historical data to arrive at the conclusion that, however hard it may be for many people to find steady employment in our society today, it was often still harder in the past...

...A COMPELLING, dramatic image, this, but is there any evidence that it is true...

...If we can assume that some fixed figure represents a minimal, decent income for a family of a certain size, and that all those below it are living in poverty, it is obviously important to know if it is pretty much the same families who fall below that line year after year, as is commonly assumed by proponents of the "new poverty" thesis, or if there is a great deal of annual turnover in the composition of the group...

...We also would want to know, of course, how much long-term persistence varies with such characteristics as race, female-headed households, unemployment or underemployment of male household heads, etc...

...There were once working-class enclaves—often with ethnic boundaries, but not necessarily—within which the mobility values of the larger society were redefined in more attainable terms...

...The case of the Negro naturally also leaps to mind here...

...As to the first, we have a decent times series on average annual unemployment only back to 1900, and one broken down for 61 STEPHAN THERNSTROM specific occupational groups—which is really what we want—only since 1940...

...Unskilled and semiskilled laborers still do rise to a higher occupation during their lifetimes, in at least a minority of cases...

...Americans, he said, use the past only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson in doing otherwise and doing better...

...The most obvious case would be the aged, who once were free to die with their boots on and now suffer compulsory retirement...

...which a youth is old enough to work but too young to set up a household of his own...

...A little less unemployment can still be too damned much unemployment, in a culture where people have become civilized enough to understand that recurrent unemployment is due not to the will of God, but to the inaction of man...

...at comparable skill levels the Negro receives lower wages, is more often unemployed, etc...

...We are now acutely aware that the rich get richer and the poor get children, so much so that we tend to forget that there ever was a time when kids were an economic asset...

...Appallingly little is known about this essential matter...

...In reading Arthur Dunmeyer's extraordinary testimony before the Ribicoff Committee, I kept thinking of that, and of Bukharin's dictum: "in revolutions, appetite grows with the eating...

...I have never understood why so many Americans believe that to assert things are bad, you must insist that they are getting worse...

...One is that wherever the line is drawn—$3000, $4000, or whatever—an ever-smaller fraction of the American population falls below that line...

...There has been a good deal of heated argument about precisely where to draw the poverty line, but little attention to what seem the two points of greatest significance...

...indeed, discussions of this point often allude to the shrinking of the unskilled category in this century and the mushrooming of the white-collar group, as if that proves something...

...Even if we gave them all the cash necessary to put them above the poverty line tomorrow, their incomes would be a little less than half the median family income in the United States Why should they be content with that...

...If we compare Negro-white differentials in the past, the only way of arguing a long-term deterioration in the Negro position would be to assume sharecroppers were better off then urban laborers...

...Most important, it is necessary to compute these rates using a variety of poverty lines rather than one dollar figure...

...But everything about contemporary America conspires to make both copping out entirely and lowering one's sights more difficult...

...One of the clichés about the new poor is that their aspirations are lower than those of the old poor—they are a defeated bunch, living in 63 STEPHAN THERNSTROM a system "designed to be impervious to hope...

...There is the interesting finding that of the families who climbed above the line between 1962 and 1963, two-fifth remained under the $4000 mark, one-fifth earned between $4000 and $5000, and twofifth pulled in more than $5000...

...It may be that decisive career choices are being made earlier than they once were—that now people permanently drop out of the race for certain attractive positions when they drop out of school, positions for which there were once fewer formal requirements, but I am very doubtful that this has resulted in less recruitment from below...

...In the year 1900, 44.3 per cent of the unskilled laborers in the United States were unemployed at some time...

...A SECOND OBSERVATION is that it is very important to know whether the poverty line currently in favor in Washington, or some other (presumably higher) figure preferred by those of us on the Left, marks off an entity with more or less stable membership, or whether it is a mere category into which Americans fall and out of which they climb in rapid succession...

...and that wage differentials between unskilled and other types of work are now larger...

...The workingmen of nineteenthcentury America whom I described in my study Poverty and Progress toiled with remarkable dedication to accumulate the funds to pay for tiny cottages of their own and were amazingly successful at it...

...It would be premature to descry an incipient revolution around us, but there are hints at least that fundamental questions which have been left to the market place—the core question of income distribution—will be increasingly open to political conflict and decision...

...Furthermore, it appears that youths who are working and yet living at home are less likely today to turn their earnings over to daddy...

...Neither of these propositions can be substantiated...

...From Louis Furman's Poverty in America...

...but in the long run, presumably, their children are better off...

...At a minimum, however, one can say that those who are convinced that poverty in the U.S...

...Probably not, though no one has proved it yet...

...the poor today are a fixed underclass, a permanent proletariat...

...it was also a kind of primitive unemployment compensation scheme, in that even in very hard times, it was unlikely that all six wage-earners would be thrown out of work...

...Rather, the discussion now is on helping the poor...

...You can fill in the rest for yourself easily enough: the poor of old had a culture...

...No one has any idea about the extent of continuity in the lowest income categories in the American past—say in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—though there is a common and highly questionable assumption that there was little continuity then...

...This has become a received truth in discussions of contemporary poverty without the benefit of the slightest critical examination, it seems to me...

...59 STEPHAN THER/s1STROM There has been no major increase in the proportion of the national income going to those on the bottom in recent decades—a fact American liberals have been pathetically slow to recognize...

...Admittedly they expect more, in some ways it can be said that they need more, but that it is more is of considerable consequence, however it might seem to those of us who do not have to worry about the grocery bills...

...Their conception of "making it" seems a pathetic delusion...

...With that exception—admittedly not a small one—I see no basis for the common cliché about the sluggish unskilled labor market...

...But it was, of course, a delusion that made many of them behave in ways that kept them out of trouble, and it is quite possible that the more we do now to improve their worldly lot, the more trouble they'll make...

...The enlightened capitalists and the economists they hired do a surprisingly intelligent job of describing the extent and character of contemporary poverty, I grudgingly admit...

...As to the argument about wage rates and differentials, I have found no evidence which indicates any sharp decline in the position of the unskilled relative to the skilled...

...I think that one can be clear-headed about what is happening without being complacent about the status quo...

...THE OTHER MAJOR CHANGE which demands attention is the steady erosion of the subcultures which defined the expectations of workingmen in the past...

...It would seem to be rather low if one could assume that remaining in the persisting group from one year to the next did not alter one's probability of escaping it in future years, for 70 per cent persistence over two years would mean 49 per cent persistence over three years, 34 per cent over four years, 24 per cent over five, etc...

...I have been able to turn up only two fragments of evidence which bear upon this point, and neither does much to support the case of the pessimists...

...Certainly, there are great expectations abroad in some quarters...

...yield relatively straightforward conclusions...

...The fact that horror stories like this become increasingly difficult to duplicate as we approach the present, plus the mild but distinct downward trend in the overall unemployment time series since 1900, makes me feel very skeptical about the common assumption that things are getting worse for those on the bottom...

...We probably cannot make the assumption I have made, but clearly we need more long-term studies to see how much reality departs from the convenient assumption that these are independent trials...

...II IF WE TURN to another aspect of the new poverty thesis—the assumption that it is now far more difficult for a low-skilled manual laborer to work his way up the occupational ladder than it once was—there is again a startling lack of evidence to buttress the claim...

...is increasingly being meted out in life sentences have yet to do the homework to substantiate the claim...

...This change in the outlook of the poor can be explained by changes in the opportunity structure...

...Television is the prime symbol of the change I have in mind, though not necessarily the prime agent...

...Conditions no longer call for deep-seated and widespread social change...

...of a sample of Italian workers in Chicago, for example, 57 per cent had been out of a job some time during the previous year, with the average time unemployed running over seven months...

...Is an annual rate of persistence in poverty of about two-thirds a high one or a low one...

...Expropriation of property is no longer seriously considered as a remedy...

...obviously, we want to know how many people depart from pov60 IS THERE REALLY A NEW POOR...

...The long-term trend, indeed, has been toward a diminuation in wage differentials between these two groups...

...I would argue that they could well be getting a little better—the situation of the poor in America is, on the whole—and still be intolerably bad...

...I find it hard to believe that those poor bastards breaking their backs in the industrial city I studied were receiving their just reward, even though they seemed to have believed it...

...When a Negro leader in San Francisco greets the news that a few hundred new jobs paying $1.25 an hour have been opened up with the comment that "if you're working at the minimum wage, man, you're still unemployed," we certainly cannot assume that he is speaking for the Negro working class...

...But they naively assume that to disprove the law of increasing misery is to assure that no one on the bottom will ever want to rock the boat...

...They would emphasize that the demand for unskilled labor, the capacity of the economy to absorb raw newcomers and assure them of steady wages, is not what it was when the Golden Door was open to all...

...Was the gap in wages and employment security between Irish and Yankee laborers in the 1850's or Italian and Yankee laborers in the 1890's as large as the racial gap today...

...Are many of the poor temporary victims...

...IN SUM, I DO NOT SEE any grounds for believing that this country is now threatened by a mass of "new poor" whose objective situations, especially their opportunities to rise out of poverty, are much worse than those of earlier generations...

...To the extent, then, that in talking about poverty we really have in mind the problem of the Negro, the historical trend is open to debate (depending on the point of comparison we think most reasonable...

...There have, however, been some changes which have made things tougher for those on the bottom of the ladder and which have been responsible for some of the distress and discontent which have been mistakenly attributed to the supposed tightening of the occupational structure and the presumed glut on the unskilled labor market...

...That could be true without lowering the rates of occupational mobility, of course...

...ONE SUCH FRAGMENT is the often cited statistic that about 40 per cent of the parents receiving AFDC in 1964 were themselves raised in a home where public assistance had been received...

...The rich have been getting richer, all right, but the poor have been getting richer at much the same rate...

...We need only note the creative ferment that has been provoked by the current Administration's version of "helping the poor" to realize that this is by no means the case...

...their sons still make the jump more frequently than their fathers...

...The poor once had political machines which protected them...

...To conjure up a Golden Age from which to judge the present and find it wanting is quite unnecessary, and as de Tocqueville pointed out long ago, it is even slightly unAmerican...

...Robert Hunter's 1904 study, entitled Poverty, pulls together a few chilling fragments we might profitably recall...

...To say that this relationship has changed in a way unfavorable to the unskilled is to assert that the pool of unemployed laborers—the Mandan industrial reserve army—is characteristically larger now than it was in the past...

...III One of these has to do with the costs and rewards of having a large brood of children...

...It is possible, of course, that the unskilled labor market now offers fewer employment opportunities to certain kinds of people, and greater opportunities to others...

...If, for instance, we insist that the authentically poor are the kinds of people Oscar Lewis describes in his studies of "the culture of poverty," it is difficult to say anything at all about whether there are more or fewer of them and whether their lot is better or worse than it used to be, because the historical record provides few clues by which to make a judgment...

...What is more remarkable is that hardly anything is known about the continuity of low income in present-day America...

...The poor of today are more inclined to regard poverty as a permanent way of life with little hope for themselves or their children...

...The other fragment is a set of figures which reveal that 69 per cent of the families with incomes below the poverty line in 1962 were in the same unhappy position in 1963 as well, with the racial breakdown of that rate 67 per cent for whites and 76 per cent for Negroes...

...Some families are worse off today because they can't reap the benefits of child labor...

...for the American way is to reject the achievements of the past as a standard for the present or future...

...But what about the demand relative to the supply...

...Having multiple wage earners, all of whom felt that what they earned was not their own but the family's, was not only a means of generating a surplus for the savings account...

...Chamber of Commerce concludes comfortably that the objective situation of the poor is so encouraging now that "the old socialist tradition in discussing income [distribution] is dying out...

...The latter families are, of course, the really impressive ones, and one would like to know much more about how many of them ever fall back and under what circumstances...

...Much depends, of course, upon just whom we have in mind when we refer to "the poor"—the semantic hazards here are even greater than in most issues of social policy...

...But the unpleasant truth that there is no pronounced trend toward more equal distribution of income in this country should not obscure the elementary fact that the disadvantaged are now receiving the same fraction of a pie which has grown substantially larger...

...This may sound impressive, but not when we recall that a high proportion of these parents were presumably children in the Great Depression, when more than a quarter of the American population was on relief at some point...

...Indubitably, the demand for unskilled labor is not what it used to be, if we take as our measure the proportion of jobs that are classified as unskilled...

...But few of them lived past what we now consider retirement age, so that isn't much of an argument for the good old days...

...I SEE NO REASON to mourn the passing of these enclaves of old...

...AFDC parents are somewhat overrepresented by this measure, to be sure, but this is not very telling proof of the persistence of hard-core poverty...

...It is perfectly clear that the labor market today is not colorblind...

...In nineteenth-century America the earnings of young children were of decisive importance in enabling laboring families to secure a property stake in the community, and there is evidence that much the same sort of thing happened elsewhere well into the present century...

...But it is significant that in the past a reaction like this would be utterly unimaginable...

...There are some contemporary analogues to those cottages, as books like the Middletown volumes, Chinoy's study of automobile workers, and Berger's Working Class Suburb make clear...

...The real changes I see are generally encouraging, or at least mixed...

...A recent analysis of the poverty problem by the U.S...

...Some people with desperately low incomes, after all, are graduate students...

...Many of the poor today expect more, and they will take less from others in order to get it, precisely because the enclaves of old have been levelled, with all the docility and deference they fostered...

...But such simple operational definitions as income, concentration in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs, etc...

...Documentation of the claims advanced in this essay will be found in two related papers by the author: "Poverty in Historical Perspective," in a forthcoming Harvard University Press volume edited by Daniel P. Moynihan, and "Urbanization, Migration and Social Mobility in Late-NineteenthCentury America," in Barton Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past (Pantheon, 1968...

...The extension of compulsory school attendance has steadily narrowed the span of years in 62 IS THERE REALLY A NEW POOR...

...One thinks of Samuel Gomper's famous reply when pressed as to the objectives of the labor movement: MORE...

...now they have only social workers who spy upon them...

...To some extent, it has had the opposite effect, in that the change has been part of an increasingly universalistic process of selection...

...This, of course, no longer holds true...

...Impressive though it is, the evidence on rates and patterns of occupational mobility does not entirely dispose of the arguments of the pessimists...

...Perhaps, however, a more fruitful point of comparison would be with the most recent immigrant group at other points in the past...

...I FIRST, A WORD on the poor considered as an income class...

...This benefit was available in only one phase of a man's life cycle, of course—it is not very common to have a steady stream of children throughout one's entire life—but if a house could be paid for during that phase, the reduction in income that came with the departure of the children would be tolerable...

...It is clear that the educational requirements for many desired jobs have been going up steadily, but it also appears that, on the whole, the expansion of educational opportunities has kept pace with, if not outrun, this development...

...This is not the place for an exhaustive analysis of the data, but I suggest that the answer is negative...

...For all of the facile talk we hear about the barriers against mobility growing ever higher, the fragmentary knowledge we have about the American class structure in the past and the extensive literature on current occupational mobility patterns suggests that changes in the opportunity structure over the past century have been minimal, and that those minimal changes are in the direction of greater upward mobility today...