A Sense of Urgency

...Today, when the poor—particularly the Negro poor—must depend, like it or not, on support from white society, such anesthesia can prove fatal And Donovan's book, though often repetitious, communicates something of the sense of urgency and desperation that is shared by so many of the anti-poverty workers who enlisted for what they thought might be a glorious fight Sadly, the same cannot be said of Goals for Urban America, largely a compendium of papers delivered during the 1965-66 academic year at the University of Chicago's Center for Urban Studies Far from bemg visionary and inspiring, it seems maddeningly nrelevant or, at the least dated and generally obvious While contributors constitute an impressive list—August Heckscher, David Owen, Senator Joseph Clark, Terry Sanford, Martin Meyerson, Nathan Glazer, Whitney Young and Senator Robert F Kennedy—at the end we are not greatly informed about the possibilities for the future CHANGING YOUR ADDRESS...

...must content themselves with work considerably more vigorous than shuffling papers And it is just those people, not upper crust intellectuals, who are most seriously affected by the deepemng urban crisis Former governor Sanford urges a greater state role in urban problem-solving, as a source of leadership as well as financial support?but only after the state house relinquishes its death's grip of unrealistic restraint on local government Meyerson says the Federal government can best provide the kind of massive aid needed, particularly in the field of research (an example of this may be the Urban Think Tank recently announced by the White House, along the lines of the Rand Corporation) What must come under scrutiny, he says, are the varieties of urban programs that too often conflict with each other and prevent any kind of unified progress The Federal home loan program, to cite one case, helps tie the white suburban noose around the city while urban specialists try to mamtam viable communities Nathan Glazer begins boldly with "a number of statements about race in the city that m the present content are quite controversial," but which turn out to be rather well accepted axioms by now that the problem of the Negro in the North is not precisely the same as it is in the South, and that, consequently, the successful policies and tactics below the Mason-Dixon line are not quite so appropriate in Harlem The closest approximation to a concrete set of goals for urban America today is made by Senator Kennedy in a multi-faceted program tor rebuilding the cities With a bustling, New Frontier spirit, it envisions an admirable degree of coordination that would tie in education (even the drop-out would not be lost from the school system entirely as he joins in the rebuilding of his neighborhood and his own reorientation to responsible—read, job-holding—citizenship), community participation (though just how much of the original community would be there at the end must be unclear), and occupational development The book's worst offender is editor Meltzer, particularly in his epilogue essay (with Joyce Whidey) entitled "Social and Physical Planning for the Urban Slum " It informs us that the problems of the slum are related to conditions elsewhere in the city and even the nation, and decries current methods of describing and analyzing the ghetto and its plight "As distinct from the prevalent attitude which sees the slum as a challenge to sales and market ingenuity, an approach is needed which builds on the social structure of the community, and seeks not to dominate but rather to capture the rhythm and style of life The despair which characterizes the slum is compounded by public and private approaches which undermine any prospect for reinforcing the slum's indigenous communal capacity to strengthen its social structure and family organizational patterns " Meltzer undoubtedly means to be sincere and compassionate, yet the ghetto's current rhythm and style and communal capacities, insofar as they differ from that of the nation at large, seem to have increasingly less relation to the kmd of society in which we live Certainly they must be considered and conserved, but does Meltzer really want to delay the major tasks ahead until precisely the right sympathetic harmony can be found'' He certainly gives that impression In a period when "the fire this time" has become a cliche for more than merely literary reasons, it approaches the height of irresponsibility to further dull what moral sensibilities we have left with a thesis like this one "There are no criteria for determining either which functional area is most critical or which problems within functional areas should have priority attention We have, m other words, no basis starting from this view for evaluating the relative importance of housing, for example, as against education or employment We have no basis, therefore, for determining the relative weight to be assigned to individual problems or to the impact of relationship among and between problems " To save some time in a period that cries out tor action, perhaps we could employ a makeshift means of measuring these disparate aspects of ghetto blight, say along the same lines we measure hghtbulbs—m Watts, or perhaps Newarks, or De-troits While the quest for better indices is always admirable, our problems now are immense enough to take aim at without waiting for more studies and improved gauges, or "an evaluation system which is problem-solving oriented to the accomplishments resulting from an entire program mix," whatever that means Meltzer makes his first mistake early m the essay when, discussmg plans for urban problems, he says "Given all of our activity, there is no question of the fervor of our mission, there is senous question, however, whether we have sufficient clarity or consensus of purpose to be any more effective in the future than we have in the past " For, as Donovan demonstrated, what the fight needs is a good deal more fervor to give it the support and commitment it requires Whitney Young, in declaring that the Negro problem is central to all the other problems of the city, proposes an awesome novel that might produce the desired effect It would be the story of the city if its problems are not solved, a tale of mounting welfare and police expenses, steadily declining revenue, the disappearance of industry and commerce, and the flight of the populace—all except the lowest class, of course Young says "I submit that any writer who wants to take it from there on a fictional basis and detail the spirahng abandonment and collapse of a great city predicated on these beginnings has the outhne for a terrifying work that is too close to reality for comfort" Indeed...

...A Sense of Urgency THE POLITICS OF POVERTY By John C Donovan Pegasus 157 pp $5 75 GOALS FOR URBAN AMERICA Edited by Brian J L Berry and Jack Meltzer Prentice-Hall 192 pp $4 95 Reviewed by DAVID M. ALPERN National Affairs Department, "Newsweek" What ever happened to the War On Poverty...

...Searching through old reports and texts to confirm his belief that the idea of a poverty program was already aborning m the Kennedy Administration, he discovered that he had himself coined the phrase "war on poverty" four days before the November assassination, at a Maine conference of social scientists But Donovan stresses that Johnson wanted the War On Poverty to be the means by which he could "leave his mark on history [with] a program that would be uniquely his " It was a peculiar uniqueness, though, with Kennedy in-law Sargent Shnver running the show and much of the groundwork already laid as early as 1963 in response to a quickening civil rights movement and worsenmg Negro employment statistics In fact, the program's smgle most imaginative and adventurous feature, Community Action with "maximum feasible participation," was the product of a holdover Kennedy Presidential committee on juvenile delinquency Its political implications were somehow overlooked by almost everyone in Washington at the time, including the President Soon it was to become the cause of the program's most serious difficulties "One of the major problems of the poor," a workbook published by the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) notes, "is that they are not m a position to influence the policies and procedures of the organizations responsible tor then-welfare " And Community Action, in the view of those who conceived it, was to be nothing less than a radical new way to redistribute power by giving the ghetto organization initiative and access to the levers of local government Once this became apparent to local officials, the poverty program was m trouble Indeed, only by agreeing to channel sharply reduced Community Action hinds through city halls around the country did the Administration succeed m saving the oeo from being virtually dismantled The critical point, Donovan concludes, is that Community Action was originally tucked in by the social scientists "without any significant pressure from the great interest groups and certainly without any pubhc demand," thus making it "politically more than the President bargained for " "Whether the issue was ever sharply posed for Presidential decisions will perhaps never be known," he adds "One does wonder a little, though, whether President Johnson would have had much enthusiasm for section 202 (a) (3) if it had been suggested that such a specific legislative mandate to involve poor people would bring his Administration into sharp conflict with, let us say, Mayor Daley of Chicago the moment it became operative " Still second-guessing, Donovan observes that the President's single-minded dedication to making the War On Poverty his personal program led him to hand it down to the Congress as a pre-packaged "must" —not for study, alteration or improvement, but simply for ratification The result, he contends, was that this great new domestic crusade had little chance to impress the legislators or win important friends When the going got rough, there was much less latent support for it than there might have been, even allowing for the diminished Democratic majority following the 1966 elections Another factor, I suspect, was a kind of unconscious hostility on the part of some Congressmen when they realized that they had allowed Community Action to slip right by On the larger question of whether there is actually strong enough motivation in the white community for supporting any real effort to eradicate poverty, Donovan is also pessimistic LBJ's anti-poverty campaign "came too easy" for the President and the country, he says "The year that President Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty, most Americans got a tax cut Consequently, two or three years later when a Congressional committee charged 'extravagance' in the conduct of the war against poverty, the charge may have seemed plausible enough The figure $15 billion sounds ample to someone who assumed it wasn't costing the taxpayer and who is not quite sure at what or at whom the war on poverty is aimed " Following Daniel Moynihan, Donovan attributes this lack of understanding and support, at least in part, to the professionalization of reform, which leads to a lack of "moral exhilaration " He wonders whether increasing reliance on the complex calculus of modern social science has not "anesthetized" our moral senses He notes, for instance, that the commonly accepted goal of 4 per cent unemployment for the nation as a whole conceals a Negro unemployment figure of 8 per cent More threatemng still, the figure rockets to 25-33 per cent for Negroes 16-21 years old, who we now see are the most despondent about their plight m white society Unemployment among these young Negroes was 25 per cent in 1966, when the national unemployment rate dipped below the 4 per cent figure, or "precisely at the moment white Americans thought the nation had finally achieved full employment Is it any wonder that our moral senses have been dulled...

...At least three weeks' notice is required for all changes of address Include your old address—or address label Subscription Department THE NEW LEADER 212 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 beyond the fact that there must be greater coordination at all levels of government, cooperation with private enterprise, and new modes of finance because—surprise1—the city can no longer pay its own way Heckscher and Clark believe that from its very beginnings, this country has had an anti-urban bias "The most serious problem in urban affairs m the United States today is psychological," declared the Senator "As a nation we have gone off to live m the wicked city and we are still ashamed to admit that we like it " He goes on to give a good basic review of the unfairness and inadequacies of local tax structures, which are still tied to property although real estate has long ceased to be the best measure of wealth Heckscher, now the noted esthete-m-charge at New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation, takes off on a greater flight of fancy He praises New York City's Pan Am building as a harbinger of future urban installations because of the ingenious way it has integrated rail, bus auto and even hehcopter travel, ignoring the huge clot it causes m vehicular and pedestrian traffic as yet another skyscraper office building m a downtown clogged with them Then he goes on to paint a portrait of a city conceived in brand new terms, essentially "placeless," where the activities of men are organized more through communication than transportation "Modern work," Heckscher says, "requires the processmg of information, and the intangible can be so instantaneously and so cheaply flashed across space that it must begin to seem absurd to move cumbrous human bodies The public shall stay where they are—is not that the essence of the new urbanism7" Well, it certainly is a lyrical concept, but a bit impractical in the forseeable future for those who, unlike Heckscher...

...The answer is here but, unfortunately, it holds out no great hope for the future In The Politics of Poverty, John C Donovan reports that "despair among young Negroes mounted as the overly-advertised poverty war failed to change the conditions of their lives," and his analysis of the conception, evolution and eventual enfeeblement of Lyndon Johnson's offensive leads one to believe that nothing is likely to revive it The War On Poverty, Donovan demonstrates, contamed the seeds of its disintegration Developed largely by social science technicians and forced upon the Congress by the President, it never had the chance to wm the influential friends and public support so desperately needed It was under-financed from the outset and permitted to pass Congress with the unsuspected tune bomb of Community Action requiring "maximum feasible participation" of the poor ticking away inside Chairman of the Department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College and a former New Frontiersman, Donovan served as an aide to Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz from 1962-65...