In Honor of Mike: Thirty Years After The Other America

...Across the tracks" was not a very long way to go...

...Still another reason for the rise in poverty has been the decline in government assistance programs for the poor and unemployed...

...Macdonald was also a brilliant journalist—lucid, witty, sharp...

...He need not have worried...

...others he could not have foreseen...

...And Mike's book helped too...

...Let me quote from two authoritative studies about recent American poverty...

...More problematic, though a matter of great importance, is the central premise out of which Mike wrote: that if only people knew the reality they would respond with indignation, that if only people became aware of "the invisible poor," they would act to eliminate this national scandal...

...By the 1960s, wrote Mike, poverty had become "invisible": 342 • DISSENT The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation...

...One of the things that helped change the mood of the country was the daring of the "Freedom Riders," a group of black and white young people who traveled to the South in 340 • DISSENT order to help blacks assert their right to vote...

...This was especially noticeable among intellectuals, some of them ex-radicals who would soon transform themselves into "new conservatives...

...I remember thinking that Mike's book, fine as it was, would probably be numbered among those "worthy" publications that sell four or five thousand copies and then fade away...

...They are not seen, and because of that they themselves cannot see...

...The Hispanic rate has climbed from 21.9% in 1973 to 28.7% in 1991...

...At another point in his book Mike offered a still more vivid description of the extreme states to which poverty could drive people: The other America is becoming increasingly populated by those who do not belong to anyone or anything...

...True, during the 1960s, as a result of the once-famous "War Against Poverty," there was a significant reduction in the number of poor Americans, but the trend became reversed in the 1970s and 1980s...

...probably the two combine to make a vicious circle...

...Those who suffer levels of life well below those that are possible, even though they live better than medieval knights or Asian peasants, are poor...

...I only wish Mike were still here among us, to cry out at the shame of a nation...

...Some 900,000 additional children became poor [in 1991] as the child poverty rate rose from 20.6 percent in 1990 to 21.8 percent in 1991...

...Macdonald had been a comrade of Mike's and mine in a small socialist group some years earlier but had since gone his own way politically...

...Still, we remained friends, and, unlike many other intellectuals of those days, he retained a strong capacity for moral response—which most of the time means moral indignation...

...He defined it as a historically relative concept, clearly different in a rich country like the United States from what it would be in a stricken country: There are new definitions [in America] of what man can achieve, of what a human standard of life should be...

...That it persists over the years makes it worse, since many people sink more deeply into what has been called "the culture of poverty," losing all hope and sometimes even giving up the search for jobs...

...Over the 1980s, the already-low wages of low-income workers fell 15.9% for male and 6.9% for female workers in the bottom 20% of the earnings' distribution...

...Some of these developments Mike anticipated...

...The America . . . of vast inequalities and dramatic contrasts is rapidly ceasing to exist...

...The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, headed by Robert Greenstein, reports: In 1991 the number of poor Americans hit its highest level in more than 20 years, as 2 1 million more Americans fell into poverty . . . . The increase in poverty was particularly sharp among children...

...In the 1930s, during the depth of the depression, we were better prepared to acknowledge such dismal facts than we were in the 1960s, a time of widespread social delusion...

...According to Mike's estimates, this meant that between forty and fifty million Americans, or about one-fourth of the population, were living in poverty...

...The intellectuals, in short, grew enamored, as they often do, of the Zeitgeist, that most treacherous of deceptions...

...In his autobiographical Fragments of the Century Mike wrote about the sudden rise to fame and success that The Other America brought him...

...The poverty rates of blacks have been at least three times that of whites since 1979, reaching 32.7% in 1991...

...The prose of The Other America is clean and lucid...

...Of course, some of the facts are by now dated, and one of Dwight Macdonald's criticisms—that Mike should have included reference notes—is to the point...

...Actually, we were living off the benefits of a postwar boom, and, partly in consequence, a mood of self-congratulation swept the country...

...polemics, I must admit, that were little heeded...

...In 1979, some 12.1 percent of full-time yearround workers were paid wages this low...

...In fact, those in poverty in 1989 were significantly poorer than the poor in 1979...

...I doubt that many readers of The Other America didn't know...

...All of us who live in big cities share the experience of having learned to walk past the homeless as if their being on the streets were some sort of natural event—maybe we dig up a few coins, maybe we don't, but the indignation we may have felt upon first noticing the homeless gradually wears off...

...Mike continues: "Then John Kennedy, who had been deeply moved by the suffering he had seen in West Virginia during the 1960 primary, asked Walter Heller, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors, if there were anything to these new theories about poverty...

...L these thirty years there have of course been changes with regard to the American poor...

...Such had been the fate of many serious books in earlier years, and such would be the fate of many serious books in later years...

...But when Mike's book "took off," it seemed a modest signal that fundamental changes were starting to occur in this country...

...And then, as Mike was browsing one day in a Paris bookshop, he noticed a lengthy and absolutely first-rate essay-review by Dwight Macdonald in the New Yorker dealing with American poverty in general and Mike's book in particular...

...Their horizon has become more and more restricted...

...Enough of statistics...

...There has been one distinct improvement, and that is in the condition of the elderly...

...Finally Mike's book was a cri de coeur, an appeal to the conscience of the country: How can you allow such a scandal to fester in this country...

...He wanted to show that there was a vast difference between, say, the poverty of earlier immigrant generations, which could hope that hard work and frugal living would enable them to improve their lot, and the poverty of the kinds of people he was describing—the blacks driven off southern plantations, the folks rotting in Appalachia, the slum dwellers who see no escape...

...For example, 8% more poor persons had incomes at 50% of the poverty line in 1989 than in 1979...

...Attitudes of social complacency would dominate the years of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, spreading even to segments of the liberal community...

...The conservative mood—it would reappear in the 1980s—had found its first major postwar expression in the 1950s...

...This came as a shock to many people, and they refused to believe it: they thought Mike was exaggerating...

...Everyone has had a say, yet poverty remains This is not the result of some decree of nature, as certain benighted souls maintain, nor is it a result of the "laziness" of the poor, as some cabdrivers and right-wing ideologues will tell you...

...And the scandal is heightened when we remember that in the Reagan-Bush years there was an orgy of financial speculation, often resulting in tremendous increases of wealth among the already wealthy, as well as to an increasing polarization between the rich and all others in the American population...

...Alas, we have seen in the intervening years that people can indeed "know" and yet remain passive, in fact that some know and can even become calloused...

...Reading The Other America again after a lapse of some thirty years, I have been impressed by how well the book has stood the test of time...

...However, at the time of writing this, I would note the danger that is posed to the elderly by the increasing number of corporations and companies that are forfeiting on their promise to provide health insurance for retirees...

...Like the overall number of poor people, the number of poor children was greater than in any other year...

...The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the central area, but they are increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else...

...What he wanted, however, was to shock the country...

...A Census report issued in May 1992 showed that the proportion of full-time year-round workers who are paid wages too low to lift a family of four out of poverty has grown sharply in recent years...

...It is due to social neglect and cynicism...

...There are social and economic problems regarding which liberals and socialists can work together in harmony, enacting reforms that decent men and women can endorse...

...they are less and less religious...

...Now the American city has been transformed...

...When Michael Harrington's The Other America began to win a large audience after its publication in 1962, both he and his friends were very much surprised...

...Emphasis added) At the time Mike wrote, the U.S...

...Experienced for any length of time, poverty made people feel "hopeless and passive, yet prone to bursts of violence: the poor are lonely and isolated, often rigid and hostile...

...They are no longer participants in an ethnic culture from the old country...

...I wish I knew the answer to that question, since it would tell us a great deal, not necessarily pleasant, about the moral and psychological composition of the American people...

...Mary McCarthy, for example, could write something so absurd as this: "Class barriers disappear or tend to become porous: the factory worker is an economic aristocrat in comparison to the middle-class clerk...

...One of the first questions he had to confront is by no means as simple as it may seem: What is poverty...

...President Kennedy's youthful earnestness and charm promised an America more sensitive to the many social problems that were festering just beneath the surface of social life...

...Even after becoming a socialist leader without very many followers, Mike never spoke with the dryness of soul one finds in many a professional politician, including some on the left...

...In 1990, some 18 percent were...

...To be poor is not simply to be deprived of the material things of this world...

...I suspect that Mike may have been offering an overdrawn description, that he was claiming too tight a connection between material condition and spiritual-emotional consequences...

...Indeed, one of the most terrible developments has been the large increase of poverty among children...

...they do not belong to unions or clubs...

...Mike structured his book as a sequence of vignettes—poverty here, poverty there, with appended sketches of the moral and psychological costs, and just enough of a sprinkling of statistics to back up his case...

...People had only to remember Franklin Roosevelt's famous phrase—one third of the nation illhoused, ill-clad, ill-nourished...

...And the Economic Policy Institute, in a richly SUMMER • 1993 • 343 detailed study, The State of Working America by Larry Mishel and Jared Bernstein, reports: Despite the growing economy between 1983 and 1989, poverty rates were high by historic standards...

...One felt about him that the compassion of his books came out of the very depths of his being...

...Then the Macmillan Publishing Company offered Mike a $500 advance (not bad for a young writer in those days) so that he could enlarge the article into a book...

...There have been a number of negative developments...

...Shortly thereafter Kennedy decided to make the abolition of poverty a major domestic goal," So books can sometimes (not very often) change the course of things...

...Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that $4,000 a year for a family of four and $2,000 a year for an individual living alone constituted the dividing line between modest well-being and poverty...

...In his autobiography Mike confesses that he worried about the fact that nowhere in The Other America did he openly declare his socialist convictions—his belief that it would take governmental planning and social investments to deal with poverty "even in a reformist way...

...The rise of the single-parent family has led to increased poverty among both adults and children...

...Some 14.3 million were poor last year...

...Heller told him that there was and gave him a copy of [Mike's] book...

...It is to enter a fatal, futile universe, an America within America, with a twisted spirit...

...Some remnant of his earlier Christian belief, some part of the ethic he had learned from the Catholic Worker movement, led him to feel that sooner or later human beings will respond to a moral appeal...

...I suppose Mike came to recognize this with the passage of the years, but I think that somehow he could not quite bring himself to acknowledge it...

...Perhaps the most important factor in the increase of poverty during the 1980s has been the steady decline in wage levels, so that we now have in America a group that is called the working poor—people who do have jobs, who work hard, who try desperately to stay afloat as providers of families (sometimes men, sometimes women) but who earn such wretchedly low wages that they sink below the poverty line...

...His essay-review, almost a small book in its own right, "made poverty a topic of conversation," wrote Mike, "in the intellectualpolitical world of the Northeast...

...Now, some thirty years since Mike's book came out, there have been thousands of articles and speeches, scores of books depicting and analyzing poverty...

...The reason poverty rates remained high despite the [economic) recovery has to do with wage decline and the failure of the "safety net," i.e., the government system of taxes and transfers designed to ameliorate poverty...

...The scandal remains, and that makes The Other America a book as significant today as it was on the day of its publication...

...Another factor in the increase of poverty has been the use of illegal drugs among some of the poor, especially black youth—it is hard to say whether poverty leads to illegal drug use or drug use to poverty...

...It is due to a failure of political will...

...344 • DISSENT...

...And while I do not write as an expert on poverty, let me try very briefly to list some of the new factors...

...He had published an article, "Our Fifty Million Poor," in Commentary magazine —then quite different from the rigidly conservative Commentary of today—and this article, he said, caused "a small stir...

...It now seems a little comic to recall that leading liberal intellectuals wrote solemn essays taking for granted that we had solved our social problems and therefore could turn to themes of a "higher," more spiritual nature...

...The fact is that poverty remains a major blight on the American scene...

...In any case, Mike, in his numerous speeches and articles, was making it perfectly clear what his political opinions were...

...The youthful purity of feeling, the sweetness SUMMER • 1993 • 341 of temper that marked Mike's words and acts seem to me as touching, now that I turn back to his book, as they did thirty years ago...

...One of the most interesting, if debatable, points in The Other America was Mike's insistence that poverty is not just one social attribute among others: it is an encompassing condition...

...they see one another, and that means they see little reason to hope...

...We now began to think that the years of conservative doldrums in which the cold war had dominated political life were coming to an end...

...Many Americans then began to assume that the cyclical recessions characteristic of capitalist economies had been eradicated or at least suppressed in the United States, and that the economic crises and social inequities that had prevailed before the Second World War and that Franklin Roosevelt's reforms had by no means eliminated were now becoming things of the past...

...Partly because they have become a politically potent segment of the population that has learned how to organize and exert pressure in behalf of its needs and partly because programs like Social Security and Medicare have helped a good deal, poverty among the elderly has decreased significantly in the last thirty years...

...I can almost hear him saying, "They must...

...Michael Harrington, still very young, was one of these, joining in our polemics against the dominant trend...

...In its first several months after publication, The Other America did fairly well, earning Mike royalties of about $1,500, enough for a trip to Paris...

...Poverty should be defined in terms of those who are denied the minimal levels of health, housing, food and education that our present stage of scientific knowledge specifies as necessary for life as it is now lived in the United States...

...If the middle class never did like ugliness and poverty, it was at least aware of them...

...When poverty was a condition spread through much of the population, its effects seemed not as damaging socially and psychologically as when it became concentrated in a large minority of Americans...

...Only a handful of intellectuals—a few liberals, a few radicals, some of them huddling around the newly created magazine Dissent— kept up stringent criticism of American society...

...EDS...

...But he was merely following official statistics, and everything that would later happen in this country suggests that he was essentially right...

...The following essay was written as an introduction to this reprint, describing some of the circumstances of publication and discussing briefly some of the problems raised in the book...