Skeletons In The Affluent Closet
Seligman, Ben B.
THE OTHER AMERICA, by Michael Harrington. Macmillan, 1962. 191 pages. $4.00. WEALTH AND POWER IN AMERICA, by Gabriel Kolko. Frederick A. Praeger, 1962. 178 pages. $4.85. Those who have been...
...Suburbanites at shopping centers no longer glimpse the poverty of downtown...
...Kolko would have done better to pay attention to those shifting standards rather than adopting a virtually absolutist position in his statistical analysis, for an important argument is thereby weakened...
...With the welfare state beyond reach, these people are lonely, insecure, fatalistic, without pleasure...
...And persistent prejudice denies proper education...
...Not too long ago, the poor were found in those families with incomes under $2000 a year...
...Frederick A. Praeger, 1962...
...Perhaps the major flaw in the overall analysis stems from the refusal to acknowledge the decline of ownerdomination in American industry...
...They are migrant farm workers, "hill-billies" hidden by the pleasant foliage of the Appalachians and the summer resorts of the Catskills...
...What is the point, one may ask, of insisting that there has been no change in the distribution of personal income since 1910 when the very data employed show a 15 per cent drop in the share received by the highest tenth...
...There are some minor differences between him and Harrington: he prefers a $3000 income cutoff to define poverty...
...That is to say, there has been some shift in income distribution...
...today, the line of separation is closer to $4000, or perhaps more...
...He wanted to know them as people...
...proper housing and proper jobs to those of black skin...
...they have no political voice...
...He came to know poverty as few "outsiders" know it today...
...All the indignation gets lost in a welter of data, good, bad and indifferent...
...But no matter how we look at the numbers, the poor have not been eliminated simply because the standard for dividing poverty from relative well-being has been altered...
...And they are the aged, of whom there are now more than ever before...
...As Harrington so well puts it, there is another America, and it is high time we took a close look at it...
...They seldom vote...
...They are displaced mine workers made idle forever by John L. Lewis' desperate and secret deals with the coal operators...
...he talked with workers cast adrift by automated industry...
...America's poor, says Harrington, are the strangest in history— they are invisible...
...The poor, says Harrington, comprise the unseen work force of the city...
...Harrington underscores the fact that 60 per cent have incomes which are 20 per cent less than what is required to live in the cheapest city of the nation...
...It is a culture that perpetuates itself in endless desperation...
...More important, he has revealed a hidden subculture of American society—one in which there is a set of values that statistics cannot possibly describe...
...Of course, much more is discussed here—the farce of public housing, juvenile delinquency, mental illness and the utter lack of any political forum in which the poor might speak their piece...
...This is the well-sustained thesis of Michael Harrington's passionate and angry book...
...There are perhaps fifty million of them, more than a fourth of the population in the richest, most powerful nation in the world...
...Here Kolko seeks to rebut the famous Berle-Means thesis...
...For one thing, Kolko writes as if he were the first to have discovered the existence of income maldistribution, wealth concentration, economic power and poverty...
...Harrington has written a remarkable book, angry enough at times to border on the savage, but one that is to be read and trusted for its fundamental truths...
...They are Negroes, long-time habitants of our culture of poverty, usually at work, if at all in the lowest and poorest paying jobs...
...he assisted the Catholic Workers group in their remarkable mission on the Bowery...
...Why does poverty persist in so prosperous a nation...
...Otherwise, there is little to complain about: income distribution data are distorted by the expense account economy...
...Meanwhile, the vaunted economic stabilizers introduced by the New Deal are beginning to fail: eves since 1954 the number of workers exhausting their unemployment insurance has been on the increase...
...The poor in this country suffer from no temporary aberration of the economic system, but are subjected rather to a persistent and degrading suppression of their living standards and whatever humanity they had once possessed...
...taxation still remains largely regressive and more burdensome for low-income groups...
...Consider the aged...
...Louis...
...The answer is not hard to find: among other things, fundamental structural changes in the economy imposed by automation have created hard pockets of unemployment...
...Not content with a mere reading of government reports, Harrington sought out the poor...
...and wealth is just as lopsidedly distributed as income...
...They are small farmers, the last of the yeomanry...
...Harrington also includes the intellectual poor—the beats and the Bohemians, who are not always remittance men and who also suffer from hunger...
...We delude ourselves that social security now makes life pleasant for them...
...we ignore the simple statistic that average benefits are about $70 a month, or under $900 a year...
...Further, minimum wage legislation protects those who don't need it: the recent extension to retailing, for example, affected only one-twelfth of almost 3 million workers in "covered" employment...
...Those who have been preoccupied by the marvels of American affluence often forget that beneath it all is a heavy layer of extraordinary poverty...
...How right he is when he says that we merely tolerate old people and store them away in institutions to await death...
...Thus, dispersion of stock ownership is a fact, and attention, it would seem, must be focused on techniques of control...
...They are out of sight and out of mind...
...Then, more often than not, the odd twists and interpretations given to the statistical material tend to become self-defeating...
...At any rate, both of these books are welcome antidotes to the euphoria of recent years...
...Gabriel Kolko's short study of income and wealth ought to be a good complement to Harrington's book, for it is so thoroughly saturated with statistics...
...And the poor have no one to speak for them...
...Moreover, there is no denying the palpable fact that the major benefits of income changes, such as they are, have gone to middle-income groups...
...However, this conclusion, after all his research, has the character of a non-sequitur, particularly when he concludes that those who do control our major corporations own at most one-fifth of outstanding shares...
...Unprotected by most social legislation, they are unskilled and untrained, and more often than not are brutalized by unscrupulous employers and racketeer unions...
...All this Kolko develops in satisfactory fashion...
...This is the face of poverty in America...
...he insists, rather, that ownership and control are still identical...
...He visited the flea-bitten agencies that supply dishwashers to restaurants...
...he served as a social worker in St...
...It is at this point that the sociology and economics of the corporation meet...
...The average traveler on speedy turnpikes does not see the rundown company town where permanently unemployed loiter on street corners and in bars...
...the latter's is slightly more (Leon Keyserling goes even higher—to $4000...
...They are the restaurant workers, the hospital employees, clerks in small shops, janitors, menial jobholders...
...Unfortunately, it doesn't come off as well as might be expected...
...And it is good to see that Kolko has dropped secondhandcar registrations as a measure of low consumption, an argument he offered in an early DISSENT article...
...Harrington has done well to remind us that affluence is not total...
Vol. 9 • July 1962 • No. 3
