Michael Harrington's The Other America

...There is now a broad consensus that everyone ought to be working, and that state governments DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 83 RECONSIDERATIONS should provide low-income workers with health care, child care, and tax subsidies that will "make work pay...

...Harrington wrote in 1962 that "what is needed if poverty is to be abolished is a return of political debate...

...Employment, however, has not increased nearly as sharply as welfare receipt has dropped...

...The left's responsibility is to point out that for thirty years, except for a brief blip in 1998-2000, the U.S...

...But it is still true that in the year 2000, after seven years of economic boom and five years of aggressive welfare reform, a third of the neighborhood's tax filers with dependents— people getting out of bed and going to work to provide for their children—were living below the official poverty line, even after factoring in their earned income tax credits (EITC...

...Labor unions and "middle-class liberals" won't do the trick, especially as long as they are "caught in the irrationalities of the American party system," with the Democratic Party held hostage by Southern racists...

...Such a program should have, of course, a work incentive...

...one of their victims was the son of a well-known local minister...

...A saner definition of poverty would include a much larger fraction of Metcalfe Park residents...

...When Harrington writes, So the new form of the old slums will continue...

...In the summer of 2001, a Metcalfe Park youth gang called the Murda Mobb committed a highly publicized series of killings...

...In his excellent The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, Maurice Isserman relates that Harrington and his Socialist Party colleague Paul Jacobs designated themselves the task force's "gadfly division," puckishly concluding their memos with the declaration, "Of course, there is no real solution to the problem of poverty until we abolish the capitalist system...

...If unions or churches (or organizations like Larry Moore's) organized Metcalfe Park residents under the banner "WHERE ARE THE JOBS?," Wisconsin's political leadership would have no easy answer...

...Will the public sector unions cooperate with the plan...

...From 1994 to 2000, the number of welfare recipients in the neighborhood declined by 2,497—but the number of households with dependents who filed income tax returns increased by only 1,259...

...And this brings us back to Harrington's original pessimism about forming a political coalition against poverty...

...I know it's not that simple, but...

...If only the American left had been a little tougher, a little smarter during the last forty years, what might Metcalfe Park look like today...

...The only groups with such a continuing interest are the workers and the farmers who hire them...

...You might imagine—and some people did imagine, back when Wisconsin's welfare reform was enacted in the mid-1990s—that the scarcity of decent jobs would by now have people at the barricades...

...It is here that things seem most grim...

...And almost entirely lost in this fracas was the old notion, both more radical and more popular, of reforming labor markets to ensure that all of us have access to jobs with decent wages and benefits...

...No, it's not that simple...

...Last January, I visited Larry Moore's office to talk about all of this: jobs, youth crime, high school dropouts, everything that has gone wrong...

...They were walking a picket line, seeking union recognition...

...Is this hypocrisy and dissembling...

...We are in a similar bind in 2002—only today the smothering consensus isn't the myth that We Are All Middle Class...

...In the end, the federal war on poverty's major fruits were the imperfectly designed Medicaid and Head Start programs, along with a hodgepodge of neighborhood development projects funded via the Office of RECONSIDERATIONS Equal Opportunity...

...The new arrangements are loaded with hypocrisy and injustice: states generally aren't going out of their way to ensure that everyone entitled to these work supports is actually receiving them...

...Fractured along lines of race, region, gender and class, and too often poisoned by antidemocratic venoms, the U.S...

...it's now the left's responsibility to make that declaration a true one...

...The committee took this step explicitly because growing numbers of Milwaukee families are reaching their lifetime welfare time limits...

...This dramatic late1960s expansion of welfare protected millions of people from abject poverty and played a role in strengthening women's bargaining power within families...

...You will find faces that are often happy but always, even at the moment of bursting joy, haunted...

...The book ends with a list of the political forces arrayed against the poor: free-market ideologues, segregationists, employers protecting their access to cheap labor...

...left expended immense energy from roughly 1970 until the "reforms" of 1996 in defensive battles to protect benefit levels and access to entitlements— which it mostly lost...

...Bear in mind that the official poverty line is $11,940 for a household of two and $18,100 for a household of four...

...The data that follow are from a study of zip code 53210 conducted by Lois Quinn and John Pawasarat of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment and Training Institute...

...And it is that...

...Like Harrington, we should find the will to move forward, even where we see very little basis for optimism...

...and that tenacious organism, the culture of poverty, will settle down comfortably in our urban rot .. . he isn't using a sky-is-falling rhetorical device, he's making an honest prediction...

...In the afterword to a 1970 edition of The Other America, he argued that the Nixon administration's proposals for a guaranteed income would not succeed without a concomitant plan for job creation...

...Are teenage gang members fundamentally monstrous today in a way they weren't in 1968...

...His parents had moved from the rural south a few years earlier to find work in an African-American neighborhood in the industrial Midwest—the kind of densely populated slum where, Harrington feared, "the poor [were] increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation...

...Because AFDC and its ancillary programs were so deeply unpopular, the U.S...

...The social democratic activists who governed Milwaukee in the early twentieth century would surely scorn our failures of imagination, will, and backbone...

...And in the late 1960s and early 1970s, civil rights organizations picketed the city's informally segregated factories, challenging racist employers and unions to behave decently...

...It is difficult to imagine how and when the left will regain the organizational strength to fight successfully in the hand-to-hand combat Macdonald describes...

...Harrington and Jacobs urged the Johnson administration to anchor its antipoverty efforts in the New Deal model of public works projects and government-created jobs...

...There are precedents: Milwaukee's early socialist movement fought for the eight-hour work day (at the cost of seven workers fatally shot by the state militia in 1886) and campaigned for public works jobs long before the New Deal...

...But the new consensus does create rhetorical space for an organized, disciplined left...

...Metcalfe Park's civic leaders are devoting most of their energy this year not to fighting for jobs but to coping with street crime...

...It's not that Public Opinion doesn't become Aroused every now and then...

...Thompson has publicly insisted again and again that anyone who wants work can find it...

...Now we've got to deal with these monsters that have been created through another thirty years DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 81 RECONSIDERATIONS of the cycle of poverty...

...So far, no such militancy has re-emerged in the era of welfare reform...

...Imagine what the people of Metcalfe Park, Milwaukee, might fight for...

...Harrington himself, of course, spent many years trying to keep that idea alive...

...So a guaranteed income with a work incentive means a commitment to genuine full employment...

...Here Moore gave a bitter smile...

...The city council plan raises all sorts of questions (Will the city be allowed to use federal welfare or job-training funds to create such jobs...

...The neighborhood's average household income rose steadily during the 1990s, suggesting that some of our worst fears about welfare reform were unfounded...

...Although violent crime has declined in the neighborhood by 40 percent since 1993, it's still felt on a visceral level as a crisis, something that wrecks everyday life even more seriously than unemployment...

...Public Opinion is too public—that is, too general...

...Once Public Opinion ceased to be Aroused, the battle was again between the two antagonists with a real, personal stake in the outcome, and there was no question about which was stronger...

...When he writes of the "16,000,000 Americans denied coverage by the Minimum-Wage Act of 1961," his quiet anger gets the blood pumping, even today...

...By some important measures, Metcalfe Park's citizens are in less desperate shape than they were a decade ago...

...One of Harrington's great gifts was his ability to make reform seem plausible and moral outrage obvious and necessary...

...They lost...

...He's a compact, muscular man with the sort of efficient, world-weary air carried by high school principals of a certain age...

...left since 1970 has been much less than the sum of its parts, rarely concentrating its forces behind viable and sustainable proposals to increase popular power...

...But at least it suggests the kinds of doors that might be opened with more and better organizing...

...Suppose the poor people's movements that fought for welfare expansion in the 1960s had not demobilized in the following decades—that they'd continued to fight for job training, child care, health care...

...But this also means that there must be a vast increase in the number of decent jobs...

...This point turned out to be moot, since Nixon's guaranteed-income proposal never came to fruition...

...Unions have improved their capacities during the last several years, but this may have been too little, too late...

...they have lobbyists, lawyers, and media consultants, but almost no grassroots presence...

...Instead of the typical American practice of taxing the earnings of the welfare recipient 100 percent (by reducing his benefits by the amount of his wages), the individual should be allowed to keep a decreasing portion of his income supplement as his pay goes up...

...84 n DISSENT / Summer 2002...

...of its very nature, it can have no sustained interest in California agriculture...

...This is a crude measure, but it suggests that roughly 1,200 people in the neighborhood have left (or been pushed off) welfare but failed to find work...

...Of course it is, but that very hypocrisy makes the new welfare/work-support regime much more susceptible to popular pressure than was the AFDC structure of a decade ago...

...It was aroused twenty-four years ago when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, but Mr...

...Harrington's text seems to predict our condition— not through explicit scare stories about what would happen if poverty were left to fester, but through an undercurrent of melancholy: In the late fifties I talked to some hospital workers in Chicago...

...Its alleged success is a large reason why former governor Tommy Thompson was tapped to head the federal department of health and human services...

...At one point I asked, "If there were suddenly enough decent jobs for everyone in the city, to what extent do you think these crime and dropout problems would go away...

...The effect is aided by the book's archaic habit of rendering large round numbers as numerals: all those zeroes staring us in the face...

...Today's myth is that the labor market can and will serve us all, if only we reduce taxes (the Republican version) or raise our education levels (the Democratic...

...the inadequacies and tragedies of our past public housing policy will remain with us...

...But there is also some reason for hope...

...Harrington reports that things in the Imperial Valley are still much the same: low wages, bad housing, no effective union...

...For a few years, the local labor movement as a whole was on fire: teamsters and dockworkers launched wildcat strikes in 1972...

...And a more or less accurate one...

...THAT LAST prediction was quickly challenged by events...

...And at best it will create only five hundred jobs, a small fraction of the city's need...

...But The Other America is also a gloomy 82 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 book—gloomier, in an odd way, than Harrington's later, more explicitly socialist books, which enjoyed much less popular success...

...DAVID GLENN has written for the Nation, Lingua Franca, and the New York Times Book Review...

...Today Moore is executive director of the Metcalfe Park Residents Association— Metcalfe Park is one of Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods...

...But the arousement never leads to much...

...They have declared that work will pay...

...One small mark of progress: On May 30, under pressure from the community group Esperanza Unida, a committee of the Milwaukee City Council voted to work toward creating an emergency program of publicly created jobs that would pay at least $12 an hour plus benefits...

...In his famous 1963 New Yorker essay about The Other America, Dwight Macdonald argued that social scientific reports and journalistic exposés, even those from people as skilled as Harrington, are no substitute for actual political organization and power...

...From a small office on top of a North Avenue storefront, Moore helps connect neighborhood residents with social services or sympathetic lawyers, and he oversees development projects funded through Community Development Block Grants...

...economy hasn't seen anything like true full employment...

...And the civil rights and feminist organizations of the 1960s have almost entirely demobilized...

...But welfare expansion also had a number of perverse effects (and not just the ones conservatives like to talk about...

...But as one reads The Other America in 2002, it's impossible not to share Moore's sense of rage and anguish at opportunities lost...

...But let me tell you something: It would have been that simple if they'd created jobs for everyone back in the late sixties...

...In New York City, where Aid for Dependent Children payments are around the level of menial jobs in the economy, there is no motive for mothers to look for work and they haven't...

...Suppose the labor movement had seized the industrial recession of the 1980s as an occasion to fight for federal job creation to repair our economy's chronically deficient job demand...

...It is difficult to find any basis for optimism in this area...

...Wisconsin is a flagship state for welfare reform...

...All of a sudden it was 1973: oil crisis, recession, and the beginning of business's counteroffensive against labor and the left...

...Labor unions and middle-class liberals have not, in fact, done the trick...

...X 4.4...

...If Metcalfe Park's 1,483 tax filers who were below the poverty line even after factoring in their earned income tax credits organized to demand a higher minimum wage and/or a higher EITC, the state's political elite would have, again, no comfortable way to reply...

...That strategy was endorsed by Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz—but Johnson rejected it as far too expensive...

...Meanwhile, at the state level, poor people's organizations that had mobilized in the context of civil rights struggles successfully pressured governments to relax their eligibility standards for Aid to Families with Dependent Children...

...The reality and the suffering of the "invisible poor" had to be injected into the complacent political atmosphere of post-Eisenhower America...

...The Other America is usually remembered as a document of muscular, confident early1960s liberalism...

...And the states' efforts to create "jobs" for welfare recipients often involve absurd minimum-wage make-work and/or de facto subsidies for corporations like Sodexho Marriott...

...Within two years of the book's publication, the Johnson administration had declared "war on poverty," and Harrington himself spent twelve days in Washington as an informal adviser to a best-andbrightest task force headed by Sargent Shriver...

...In certain states, the post-1996 welfare reforms have produced a (very) faint echo of the kind of guaranteed income/full employment structure that Harrington urged back in 1970...

...Moore's comment probably isn't quite right...

...There is no comparable set of forces on the left, Harrington writes...