NPACH Perspective:
A War on Poverty, or a War on the Poor?
Over 40 years ago in his classic study, The Other America,
Michael Harrington introduced the grim realities of poverty
to a nation intoxicated by post-war prosperity.
Harrington’s journey across the country shocked readers
as it located in urban slums and rural America alike a level
of desperation and suffering previously unrecognized by much
of the public and policy makers. The book’s haunting
descriptions of an “underclass” informed and helped
pave the way for President Johnson’s war on poverty, a
massive federal effort to attack the economic and political
neglect that sustained gross inequality.
Four decades later, we might consider updating Harrington, as
economic class remains this country’s dirty little
secret. While 1% of the population owns 41% of the
nation’s wealth, the latest U.S. Census data revealed 36
million people were living in poverty, an increase of over 4
million people in just the last 3 years. Readers of the
Washington Post, which presumably include Members of Congress
and their staff, were recently introduced to the human face
of these numbers. A burning front page headline story
described the plight of a single mother and her children
forced to live in a $65 a month storage unit after being
evicted from their apartment (“Storage Unit As Shelter
Not Unique, Workers Say,” Washington Post, November 24,
2004 ). The mother worked, and the children, not being of
school age, had nowhere else to go. Understandably, residents
of the nation’s capital were shocked and letters poured
in to the Post and other local media. While such stories make
for sensational headlines and take on special meaning during
the holiday season, they have become all too common within
the flow of America’s ongoing housing crisis.
And yet, absent from the recent Presidential electoral
campaign was any discussion of poverty at all. Instead, tax
cuts for the wealthy, saving the middle class, and protecting
the homeland became the dominant themes and set the
parameters of the debate. Moreover, while millions of
Americans lack adequate housing, health care and income
supports, the campaign and national dialogue stooped so low
as to include a discussion of “values” which
unconscionably omitted poverty or any notion of collective
responsibility for it. Just how hostile is the current
political climate to our hopes for social justice? Consider
that the current HUD Secretary has called poverty a
“state of mind,” and that Members of Congress who
propose even modest attempts to address poverty and its ill
effects are routinely dismissed as “tax and spend
liberals,” and you realize just how far the country has
moved in the years since Harrington’s study. The Other
America remains. Strap yourself in and get ready; the war on
poverty has become a war on the poor.