A Long Way to Go
Sexton, Patricia Cayo
A Long Way to Go The Shame of a Nation, by Philip M. Stern. Photographs by George de Vincent. Foreword by Vice President Hubert M. Humphrey. Obolensky. 182 pp. $5. Reviewed by Patricia Cayo...
...Many omens are good: the staggering Goldwater defeat, the remarkable and simultaneous rise of economic growth rates and decline of unemployment, the victories in civil rights and the breakthroughs of Federal aid to education and medicare, the shift of power attending reapportionment, aid to the decaying cities, and the war on poverty...
...Whose welfare state is it, the authors ask, when the national average welfare grant per person is one dollar a day, while the annual United States tax subsidy to the Humble Oil Company is nearly half a billion dollars, the postal subsidy to Life magazine is $10 million, and the cost of putting a man on the moon $20 billion...
...Stern, author of The Great Treasury Raid, and de Vincent, artist and photographer, traveled some 27,000 miles around the country to put together this panoramic view of the nation's poor...
...It is perhaps the most inescapable portrait that has been drawn so far of the face of American poverty...
...The camera then moves to Chicago and the sickness of city slums, to the elderly, and finally to the children of the poor, who suffer most...
...We have a long way to go...
...The book describes the poor—real people, rather than poverty as an abstract—and its simple prose and striking photographs let nothing get lost in winding verbiage, statistics, or ambiguities...
...This social transformation could lead one away into sweet Utopian dreams except for the starkness of several realities: the war economy on which the present prosperity is built...
...the menace of an escalated war...
...The camera moves on to a "four room shack clinging precariously to the side of a-hill near Hazard, Kentucky" and the Appalachian exiles, then to the rural poor of the Deep South...
...the rotten shape the world is in aside from a few pockets of prosperity, and the massive poverty that is still staring at us from our own doorstep...
...Philip Stern and George de Vincent's new photographic commentary, The Shame of a Nation, helps us look that massive poverty in the face, something that few of us spend any time doing, so that we may see more clearly the vast distance stretching between here and Utopia...
...Reviewed by Patricia Cayo Sexton TThough I come to optimism as ¦¦¦ cautiously as any stranger approaching the unknown, it is a temptation these days to feel that at last we are on the way to creating a great society, at home if not abroad, and that this crazy, mixed up economic-political system of ours—energetic, adaptive, and humanitarian under stress—can perhaps make it...
...You can't get away from it...
...Traveling throughout Africa last summer, in the least developing places of the world, I never saw anything worse than the sights in this book...
...The volume starts at the bottom, among the desperate poor: the farm laborers working "under open skies," a migrant mother and her four children who spend the winter in Florida in a tin shack, a bean picker at sixty cents a hamper—three dollars a day or six dollars if lucky...
Vol. 30 • July 1966 • No. 7
