Poverty & Passion

As the U.S. economy soars past a $600 billion G.N.P. and more Americans live better than ever before, official Washington seems far more intrigued by the fact that it has rediscovered poverty. The plight of the poor provides lively chitchat for capital couples as they twist to Lester Lanin or uncork a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild. Party pros argue the election-year merits of the poverty issue as they slide their steak knives into a Chateaubriand. With some bitterness, Writer-Social Critic Michael Harrington observes: "I guess poverty has become fashionable."

Harrington helped to make it so. His book, The Other America: Poverty in the U.S., has sold 70,000 hard-cover and paperback copies. It impressed Jack Kennedy, who used the Harrington phrase "the invisible poor" in his speeches. Presidential Economic Adviser Walter Heller is thoroughly familiar with Harrington's thin, 191-page volume; when Heller told Johnson that he had been assigned by Kennedy to draw up an anti-poverty program, Lyndon agreed that it was a good idea. It is especially a good idea for politicians in an election year too. Only last week the President named Peace Corps Chief Sargent Shriver to head up the Administration's anti-poverty campaign.

"Bleak & Grim." Author Harrington has not been consulted, but it is clear that his book contributed to Johnson's new drive. Born into relative comfort in St. Louis (his father was a patent attorney), Harrington went to Holy Cross

College, got his master's degree from the University of Chicago at 21. He has been a welfare worker in St. Louis, an unpaid editor of Manhattan's social-conscious Catholic Worker, a conscientious objector during the Korean war, a researcher for the Fund for the Republic. Now a freelance writer, he lives in a $65-a-month Greenwich Village tenement with his wife Stephanie.

He is, at 35, a Norman Thomas Socialist who views U.S. society from "the most pessimistic point of view" and whose interpretation is "bleak and grim." He admits that his "moral point of departure is a sense of outrage." His book is barbed with generalizations about "the strangest poor in the history of mankind." It suffers from poorly drawn examples that often fail to punctuate his points. It jumps with startling hyperbole and flaccid statistics; he says, for example, that there are some 50 million poor in the U.S.,* but admits this may be an exaggeration. Yet when he writes of the poor in the mass --racial minorities, urban workers dispossessed by technology, low income farmers, the aged--his indignation is moving.

"Among Strangers." The U.S., argues Harrington, handles its impoverished older people with a "storage-bin philosophy" and they are "trapped in the decaying central area of the city, living among strangers ... in a land where youth is worshiped and death is rarely mentioned by name. America really doesn't care about them."

The nation's farm poor are "the double victims of technology: exiled from their homes by advances in agricultural machinery; unfitted for life in the city because of the consequences of industrial mechanization. For most middleclass Americans, aid to farmers is a gigantic giveaway. Yet the poor farmers do not, for the most part, receive a cent as a result of these laws. There is hunger in the midst of abundance."

"Life Without a Future." The displaced worker in the city also suffers doubly, says Harrington, because most were among those who "struggled and accomplished in the '30s and '40s. They have a pride, a spirit, and the last thing they want to do is to go to welfare." Yet the golden gifts of the welfare state --such aids as social security and the minimum wage--"all tend to go to the strong and to the organized."

City slums, as Harrington sees them, breed "a personality of poverty ... To be poor is to enter a fatal, futile universe, an America within America, with a twisted spirit. When pleasure is available, slum residents tend to take it immediately. The smug theorist of the middle class would probably deplore this as showing a lack of traditional virtues. Actually, it is the logical and natural pattern of behavior for one living in a part of American life without a future."

Paying the Bill. How would Harrington attack poverty? "There is only one institution capable of acting to abolish poverty. That is the Federal Government. I do not rejoice, for centralization can lead to an impersonal and bureaucratic program; I am only recording the facts of political and social life in the U.S." While the Federal Government must make the plans and pay the bill, "the actual implementation can be carried out through myriad institutions, and the closer they are to the specific local area, the better the results."

From what Lyndon Johnson has disclosed of his anti-poverty program so far, Harrington's solution--federal funds funneled through local organs--appears to be getting White House consideration. But it is unlikely that the Administration will go all the way with many of Harrington's dramatic ideas.

Americans no longer regard the impoverished as lazy good-for-nothings, but it is equally naive to categorize the poor as victims of an affluent majority. That an "invisible poor" does exist, there can be no doubt. But efforts to erase poverty will require something better than vacuum-cleaner research, and a lot more examination of specifics. Given such an approach, few can then ignore Michael Harrington's fundamental point. "The nation of the well-off," he says, "must be able to see through the wall of affluence and recognize the alien citizens on the other side. There must be a passion to end poverty, for nothing less than that will do."

*Harrington's estimate is based on his contention that an urban family of four earning less than $3,000-$3,500 a year can be considered poor.

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