The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

and their jobs are gone and no one—neither industry, nor labor, nor government—has cared enough to help. I think we here in this country, with the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America, I think we can do better here also. I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever greater promises of equality and of justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddled in the same filthy rooms—without heat—warding off the cold and warding off the rats.
    For Kennedy, campaigning on a platform far more radical than the one on which his brother had won election eight years earlier, ongoing poverty of this nature represented a staggering, existential challenge. “If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America.” 14
    For Martin Luther King Jr., the continued existence of desperate hardship throughout America rendered as hollow victories much of the civil rights achievements of the mid-1960s. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? the civil rights leader called for radical measures. “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income,” King wrote. “Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteedincome must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows.” No longer in a mood to compromise, King argued that “the curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” 15
    King and Bobby Kennedy were the two public figures best able to articulate the moral importance of dramatic anti-poverty interventions in late 1960s America. With King’s assassination in April 1968 and Kennedy’s two months later, the last best chance for America to embrace systemic anti-poverty policies, and the moral language accompanying them, vanished. A slide began, slow at first, later more rapid, away from understanding poverty as society’s problem and toward redefining it as a problem of individuals and underperforming communities.
    Even while President Nixon expanded access to welfare programs, proposed minimum income guarantees, and gave his support to efforts to create universal healthcare access, he built a political base largely centered around Middle America’s resentments toward the poor, the black, the brown, and the different. There was something of a schizophrenia to his politics, a residual desire to ameliorate the plight of the poor, on the one hand—he had, after all, made his way in life from humble beginnings—and a competing urge to denigrate the weak, on the other. Nixon sought the support of the Archie Bunkers of the country, people frustrated both by the speed of cultural changes taking place around them—from the rise of the anti–Vietnam War movement to the emergence of Black Power, hippie culture, and feminism—and also by the shifting contours of the economy. He played to the dyspepsia of a Silent Majority and—like few other mainstream politicians of the late 1960s but all too many of the decades to come—correctly gauged the potency of scapegoating when it came to building a political machine.
    In