The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (11 page)

Intellectually, this is gibberish; it’s a classic circular argument, a cause and a consequence defined in terms of each other. But psychologically, it’s powerful, providing a reassuring rationale for affluence and the pathologies of privilege that too often prevent a clear-eyed understanding of complex social problems: “I am rich because I am a good person; I am a chosen person; I am a person marked by God for greatness. You are poor because you can’t cut it with the Creator; you aren’t destined for salvation; and your poverty is a sign of your cosmic failing.” By extension this becomes, “My country is thriving because we are a virtuous people; yours is sinking because your culture is delinquent.”

That poverty was a sign of moral failing—of drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, laziness, and lack of ambition—was an idea hard-baked into British politics from the Tudor period onward. Poorhouses, and later workhouses, were carefully structured around principles of “less eligibility,” designed to be as unpleasant as possible in order to avoid being seen as somehow attractive options for a slothful underclass. When churches stepped in to fill the void left by a largely absent state when it came to helping the poor, they, too, generally did so in ways that provided barely subsistence relief offered up in tandem with large doses of religious moralizing, admonitions to temperance, and warnings about the spiritual dangers of depravity.

In his classic turn-of-the-century exploration of poverty,
Life and Labour of the People in London
, the late-Victorian British journalist Charles Booth gently noted of one church actively fighting poverty: “This church has a large and very aggressive temperance society. ‘If they scent a drunkard they are always at him.’ But as to the people at large it is not temperance, nor lantern lectures on current topics, nor anything of that sort in which interest is found. The ‘little things they care about,’ and about which information is provided by the cheap newspapers, are betting and sport of every kind.”
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Until well into the twentieth century, America’s approach to poverty relied largely on religious charities and, to a point, do-good social workers stepping in to keep poor people from absolute destitution. When progressive social workers in late-nineteenth-century American cities set up settlement houses, modeled on community centers established in England in the preceding decades, they brought a charity vision to the problems of poverty rather than a belief that government should step in to solve the great problems of urban poverty generated by industrialism.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency onward, however, a series of reform bursts—in the pre–World War I years, during the Great Depression, and in the 1960s and early 1970s—created the infrastructure for a modern, bureaucratic welfare state. And yet, for all the energy invested in this century-long project, today that infrastructure remains fragile—in many ways more vulnerable to political and economic vagaries than at any time since its founding. Today, the language used by conservatives to discuss poverty and its perceived pathologies, and the charity-based solutions offered up by conservatives to deal with its rawest manifestations, is more akin to that of the nineteenth-century English vicars than to the ideas developed by generations of twentieth-century welfare reformers.

SOUTHERN MORES, THE GREAT UNWASHED, AND A FARMER FROM IOWA WITH A GOOD IDEA

That the pillars of America’s welfare system remain so unstable, despite a century of construction, is largely a result of how they were built and of the federal/state compromises made during that process. Federal systems
were
created, but unlike in, say, Germany, France, or the United Kingdom—all of which began the long process of building modern social insurance systems and central government-funded welfare programs in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries—they were frequently left to the
states to fund and administer. And many of those states, especially the more conservative and religious amongst them, were peculiarly hostile to the poor in their midst. Baseline anti-poverty yardsticks
were
created, but local and state governments could choose whether or not to go beyond these minimums.

Aspirations generated by federal reformers to curb economic hardship too often rubbed up against either local indifference or tax revolts that denuded programs of the dollars needed to make them effective. As a result, in some states, namely in the Northeast and upper Midwest, benefits have historically been fairly generous. In others, in particular the Old South and, increasingly, parts of the West, those benefits have been miserly at best. In states such as Mississippi and Alabama, anti-tax sentiments, combined with extreme racial and class stratifications, have made the creation and expansion of safety net systems for the poor all but impossible. A slew of welfare benefits in these states are, on a good day, only bare-bones. On a bad day, they are practically nonexistent. Because more than 40 percent of the nation’s poor live in the Old South, more than five million of them children, southern resistance to implementing decent welfare programs has had, and continues to have, dire implications for the nation’s overall ability to tackle poverty.
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Witness the story of 71-year-old Clara Joseph, a onetime supermarket clerk, theater usher, and elevator operator in southern Louisiana, who had spent a lifetime working minimum-wage jobs and whose house was flooded with five feet of water during Hurricane Katrina. The victim of four strokes, she had been forced to retire a few years before I met her. Her income consisted only of $579 a month in Social Security. She didn’t receive other top-up assistance from the state and routinely found her basic monthly bills were unaffordable. Her way of bridging the gap between that income and her expenses: turning up at food pantries four hours before they opened every weekend so that she’d be near enough to the front of the line that she might actually get some fresh meat and a few
fresh vegetables. Come much later, she averred, and the pickings were slim.

Clara would drive up in her little old white sedan, a woolen hat rolled down over her head, her eyes small and watery behind horn-rimmed spectacles. She would park her car, slowly get out from behind the wheel, make her way to the sidewalk, and sit and wait. It seemed an awfully long time to wait for a bag of food. But Clara didn’t seem to mind. Most of her friends, she announced, were now also using the pantries.

In the face of regional animus, particularly from southern politicians, the central institutions of America’s social safety net—a welfare system for destitute families, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Social Security, nutritional programs for pregnant women and for children, redistributive taxation policies, subsidized housing, Medicaid and Medicare—emerged in fits and starts throughout the twentieth century. From the Progressive Era at the start of the 1900s, through the New Deal, into the postwar years, the Great Society programs of the 1960s, and finally the Nixon era, government agencies were created and policies promoted to mitigate the ravages of poverty. “It was an issue that had to be focused on,” argued UC Santa Barbara’s Alice O’Connor. “It had a moral tug on the public consciousness.” Then, qualifying her comment, she quickly added, “But compassion only goes so far; it leads to charity, which people do when they’re comfortable, and they don’t have to give up a whole lot to be charitable. If you don’t have the strong politics behind it, it’s not going to go very far.”

Even an incomplete system implemented with half-hearted enthusiasm, however, requires huge amounts of money to function. As government obligations grew, so the need to raise revenue increased, and a host of taxes were used to garner this money: federal and state income taxes—first used, to great effect, by the Union during the Civil War years, made a permanent part of the landscape four decades
later, during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency—state property taxes, state and local sales taxes, corporate taxes, a slew of industry-specific taxes, so-called “sin taxes,” and for many decades the infamous southern poll tax. When all of that wasn’t enough to make ends meet, governments borrowed money and issued bonds.

Within the federal system, as the infrastructure of modern governance evolved, so richer states, New York and California for example, came to contribute more in taxes to the federal government than they received back in benefits; conversely, poorer states paid far less into the system than they got back. Resources were thus at least partially redistributed within the fifty states of the nation. Paradoxically, the most federal largesse went to the impoverished, anti-tax, and ostensibly anti–big government South, which by 2010 was getting back $1.40 in federal assistance for every dollar in taxes that it contributed to Washington. Even with this assistance, however, since its own tax base was so extraordinarily low the South had neither the ability nor the willpower to create the sort of comprehensive safety net system aimed at by the more liberal northeastern states.
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And thus, in that part of the country in particular, even in the heyday of federal liberal activism, deep poverty continued to fester and state responses to lag.

From Georgia, a man posted an entry on my Voices of Poverty website explaining how he and his wife had been unable to afford a doctor because the low-wage jobs that he worked never provided health insurance. She had, he wrote, died of untreated pneumonia at the age of 50. Shortly afterward, he had been hit by a car. “Only by the grace of God was I able to survive the next six years. But now, I am going down slow. Every month, I have less and less and I am falling farther and farther behind. I pray that things will improve, but my horizon seems to have a picture of my losing my home, and then slowly starving to death.”

As of 2012, Georgia was one of twenty-five states that provided no medical coverage to low-income, childless adults. Partly because of this, more than one in five Georgians had no health insurance as of 2009, according to Census Bureau data.
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In fact, of all the southern
states, only Arkansas and Tennessee provided some, albeit very limited, healthcare coverage for this part of their population.

The South’s aversion both to taxes and to mandated government safety net structures had a long, and somewhat surprising, pedigree. In the late eighteenth century, popular radical writers such as Condorcet in France and Tom Paine in England had called for the creation of comprehensive social insurance systems based around universal pensions, child allowances, and education for all. Neither, however, managed to successfully alter prevailing political and moral doctrines. In France, after the frenzy of the revolutionary years the counterrevolution of the post-Napoleonic period put a halt to radical social experiments for decades. And in the United Kingdom, at least partially in response to the violence unleashed by revolutionaries in France, the early nineteenth century saw a tide of conservative reaction. Give money to the poor, the theory went, and you were encouraging indolence, dependency, and ultimately societal chaos. In 1834, after the publication of the Poor Law Report, “outdoor relief”—the giving of state moneys to the able-bodied poor in a non-workhouse context—was banned. For most of the rest of Queen Victoria’s near-seventy-year reign, “the great unwashed” were either left to find their own ways through terrain of hunger, homelessness, and disease, or were corralled into the sorts of ghastly workhouse settings made infamous by the writings of Charles Dickens.

In America, the South in particular took the Victorian lesson to heart, though to a lesser degree so too did the rest of the country. As did most of Europe. After all, Great Britain was the dominant power of the age, its economic prescriptions as hard to avoid as, say, the Washington consensus’s emphasis on opening up markets to international trade, privatizing public services, and deregulation a century and a half later. Coercive poor law politics, shaped around workhouses, poor houses, and other near-prison-like conditions for confining
and attending to the subsistence needs of the poor was, as a consequence, the dominant response to poverty on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century.