Beyond the Bottom
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
Beyond the Bottom The Underclass By Ken Auletta Random House. 348 pp. $17.50. Reviewed by Richard J. Margolis KEN AULETTA has really written two books, and they keep getting in each other's way....
...Still, as Auletta argues, society had written off those 10,000 long before the MDRC came along...
...and fourth, a catchment category made up of drunks, junkies, derelicts, crazies, bag ladies and—in case anyone feels left out?sadistic slashers...
...80 years ago, "the dangerous classes" or "the dregs...
...At another he compares it to the Missouri Compromise: "I learned that the underclass, as Thomas Jefferson said of the Missouri Compromise, is 'like a firebell in the night.' It is both America's peril, and shame...
...I'm glad I stuck it out," he said...
...Department of Labor...
...third, "the passive, who have become dependent on welfare and government support...
...For those who completed the year-long instruction, a job placement service stood ready to come to the rescue...
...Despite the richness of the effort, to an outsider the results might seem rather thin...
...At one point he assures us that the underclass is "the new American dilemma...
...First, there are the "hostile street and career criminals...
...In the end, he calls anticlimactically for further discussion, and then presents us Henry Wheeler Shaw, that all-but-forgotten 19th-century aphorist, with an epigram poor Shaw must have produced on an off-day: "Silence is one of the hardest things to refute...
...It is not possible to decipher such prose—and the deeper Auletta delves, the murkier his meditations grow...
...Apparently hoping to extract a ton of meaning from a pound of material, the writer falls into the very trap he says his editor at the New Yorker, Ted Shawn, cautioned him against: He has written "a sociological yak piece" about the underclass...
...On-the-job training was merely part of the generous project...
...The underclass, of course, has always been with us, but each generation of reformers has preferred its own nomenclature...
...It rambles, it mumbles, it pontificates...
...On such unpromising material the MDRC lavished much special attention...
...Auletta's account of the graduation ceremony is touching, in part because we are already acquainted with the trainees and their trials, in part because the rhetoric is so ingenuous, hopeful and, well, commencement-like...
...Especially useful are the sympathetic closeups of the trainees, many of whom led lives of desperation (some quiet, some noisy...
...The question Auletta poses—Can society rescue these denizens of the lower depths?—was the question the MDRC attempted to answer...
...Precision too often eludes Auletta, and exaggeration not often enough...
...Indeed, Auletta's up-to-date categories echo those older terms and their inherent "3-d" meanings of danger, despair and depravity...
...Actually, they do nothing of the kind, they overlap like crazy, but let it pass...
...Second only to firebells, one guesses...
...Auletta's other book, which keeps interfering with the first like some obtrusive radio broadcast, is a near-total disaster...
...second, "the hustlers...
...Members of the underclass," he writes, "seem to fall into four distinct groups...
...Of the 10,000 who enrolled in one or another of MDRC's 15 programs between 1975-80, only 3,200 ever finished...
...To make it possible for even a third to enter the world of work was no small achievement...
...Twenty years ago the underclass would have been called "the hard-core poor...
...The rest either dropped out or were kicked out...
...also included were individual counseling, formal skills classes, and sessions in what our grandparents might have called "deportment...
...The group running the experiment was fathered by the Ford Foundation and, until Reaganomics set in, mothered bytheU.S...
...Eleven out of the 26 who entered BT-27 that year went on to graduate...
...I now have a lot of education____I'm leaving with more confidence in myself...
...There trainees learned "not just English, math and typing, but how to use an alarm clock or telephone, follow dress codes, cash checks, say please and thank you, tell the truth about their pasts, write letters, conduct job interviews...
...It called itself the Manpower Demonstration and Research Corporation (MDRC), and I will return to it in a moment...
...Look out, world, here I come...
...He has much to tell us about a significant, little-publicized social experiment that took place during the '70s...
...This is mostly because so many of his illusions are so stunningly inappropriate...
...I'm overcharged with confidence...
...Since the author's sights are in focus here, his observations are first-rate...
...Hoping to learn more about the underclass, Auletta sat in for seven months on Basic Typing 27 (BT-27), an MDRC course given at its West 37th Street training center in Manhattan...
...In one, he introduces us to an unusual (now defunct) work-training program aimed at helping members of "the underclass" succeed in mainstream society...
...William Mason, a 37-year-old black man from Brooklyn who had spent the previous year in prison for possession of narcotics, gave the valedictory...
...I had a lot of pushing and a lot of pulling...
...As Auletta notes, "its efforts were targeted on those hardest to reach—longterm welfare recipients, ex-convicts, ex-addicts, delinquent youths...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 10
