The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (12 page)

A couple generations later, however, as the rise of industrial societies in Europe created huge economic dislocations and massive political unrest, Europe revisited the issue. Between 1883 and 1889, Otto von Bismarck’s Germany created a slew of social insurance programs. In England, at about the same time, social reformers such as Arnold Toynbee began calling for the creation of a government-funded safety net. And in 1908, Parliament passed the Old Age Pensions Act—part of a two-year spasm of social reform that culminated in the fabled People’s Budget of 1909. French reformers preached voluntary mutual assistance schemes and increasingly urged the government fund universal assistance programs out of a general tax base. After decades of agitation, the French Parliament enacted a state pension system in 1910.

In the United States, though, support for such reforms remained more tenuous. True, an array of progressive political groups supported workers’ compensation laws by the early twentieth century. And by 1917, with the Supreme Court having upheld the constitutionality of these laws, thirty-seven states had systems in place, most of them compulsory. In fact, as a region, only the Deep South had completely neglected to implement compensation schemes for at least some categories of injured workers. But in contrast to this, enthusiasm for social insurance systems didn’t take off prior to World War I. True, several states in America created their own very limited pension plans during these years, especially for widows and for teachers—who at the time were mainly women—and several also seeded their own unemployment insurance systems. Yet not until the New Deal did the idea of a federal system gain traction. Before then, even the American Federation of Labor and the left-wing
Nation
magazine opposed mandatory Social Security.
⁵
Hence the paradoxical fact that when, in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressives came out in support of social insurance, including a form of compulsory medical insurance, an alliance of conservatives, socialists, trade unionists, and
federalists combined to defeat it. Opponents argued that the imposition of mandates on working Americans, forcing them to pay into a system to support the elderly and to provide medical coverage for the sick, was foreign to the country’s founding principles. What was happening in Europe was, they argued, too paternalistic, too coercive. Moreover, in a land of great social mobility and endless opportunity such systems were unnecessary. Keep them for the ossified Old World—keep them for places where one’s station in life was determined by one’s parentage.

Thus, while America’s peer nations across the Atlantic were experimenting with forms of universal old age pensions and healthcare coverage—to tackle the extremes of poverty that had driven so many Europeans to migrate to the United States in search of higher living standards—when it came to the creation of nationwide safety net protections America stalled. Hobbled by the South’s antipathy to any form of welfare, and by a broader national reluctance to corral citizens into insurance programs against their will, advocates for the sorts of reforms occurring in Europe ran up against a brick wall. It would take the Great Depression, and the collapse of both the working and the middle classes’ sense of stability and burgeoning economic possibility, to shift public opinion behind the establishment of Social Security and government aid in the arena of housing and employment. In fact, it wasn’t until 1935, six years after Wall Street’s catastrophic collapse, that Congress legislated into being Social Security, disability and unemployment insurance, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And it was not until 1937 that Congress would take the lead on funding large-scale public housing.

As for healthcare reform, long a holy grail of social reformers, attempts by Franklin Roosevelt before World War II and Harry Truman at the end of the war to create universal healthcare foundered on the rocks of opposition from the American Medical Association, as well as more general hostility from the same political wellspring that had opposed Social Security’s creation. Truman’s proposal for a 4 percent payroll tax to cover a national health insurance system, which he proposed
in a special message to Congress on November 19, 1945, was denounced as being an attempt to “socialize medicine.” It was a critique that would crop up repeatedly over the decades, when Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton, and finally Obama proposed significant overhauls to the country’s dysfunctional and inequitable healthcare systems. Ultimately, it would take the upheavals of the 1960s to partially get around this critique and pave the way for Medicaid and Medicare—though in the case of Medicaid, Congress gave the states considerable leeway as to whom they covered and what services they provided. And it would take the 2008 financial collapse to create just about enough momentum for President Obama to get Congress to pass a watered-down version of universal healthcare. Even then, the backlash was massive, the acrimonious debate creating a climate in which the conservative Tea Party movement could flourish.

So, too, it would take the calamity of 1930s-era deflation, and the threat of wholesale bankruptcy for America’s millions of farmers, for the federal government, at the urging of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, to start providing food aid to the country’s hungry. It would take the work of Michael Harrington and others a generation later to prod Washington to set up a national food stamps system and then to expand vital nutritional programs such as school breakfasts and lunches and WIC, the Women, Infants, and Children program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

At first, this food assistance to the poor was, essentially, a way of propping up agricultural prices by having local counties buy up surplus crops and thus preserve market buoyancy. “We must adjust downward our surplus supplies until domestic and foreign markets can be restored,” Wallace, who had grown up on a farm in rural Iowa, declared in his first radio address on March 10, 1933.
⁶
The strategy worked for the farmers, and to a degree it alleviated hunger for a portion of the indigent population. It was, however, massively incomplete. Too few people received the aid; too many regions and categories of poor were left unhelped.

In 1961, a generation later, newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy signed an executive order creating a pilot food stamp program, funded by the federal government, in eighteen states. After Kennedy’s death, President Johnson pushed Congress to pass a Food Stamp Act that allowed counties across the country to choose to opt into the food stamp system, with poor families paying a percentage of their income to access food stamps worth considerably more—the stamps, in other words, were not free but were heavily subsidized. In the late 1960s, the voluntary nature of the system was replaced. Over several years leading up to 1974,
all
counties would have to opt into the system. By the mid-1970s, food assistance paid for by the feds, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, had become the country’s single most effective intervention against poverty; by the end of the decade, food stamps alone had expanded to the point that the program was costing the government more than $20 billion (in 2012 dollar values) annually.
⁷

In fact, even while President Richard Nixon rhetorically tilted rightward—talking of a Silent Majority enraged by lax criminal justice codes, a mollycoddling welfare state, and the presence of a seemingly permanent underclass—in reality he presided over significant expansions of the welfare state, especially when it came to anti-hunger programs. He also sought to create a universal healthcare system that in many of its particulars looked strikingly like the one ultimately implemented under President Obama nearly four decades later.

Three years after Nixon left office, Congress eliminated the requirement that poor families had to buy into the food stamp program; thenceforth, the cost of the food stamps was fully borne by the federal government. “The most important accomplishment of this period was the elimination of purchase prices as a barrier to participation,” wrote the social scientist Dennis Roth in a history of the food stamp program commissioned by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
⁸

LYNDON JOHNSON’S UNFINISHED WAR

Although far from perfect, at its acme this inelegant safety net developed in the first three quarters of the twentieth century and, given a peculiar impetus by Johnson’s War on Poverty,
did
serve to limit hunger’s reach. In the early 1930s, when real per capita income in America had fallen by a third and when tens of millions of people had literally no income, New York City reported more than one hundred residents a year dying from hunger and related causes.
⁹
Elsewhere, similar tales of starvation could be easily found. In cities throughout the South, the unemployed received
no
assistance,
¹⁰
and around the country, soup kitchens were all that stood in the way of famine for those without work, without homes, and without incomes. By 1980, after decades in which the federal government had taken an ever more active role in both reducing the cost of food and in subsidizing food purchases for the poor, low-income Americans could access food stamps, WIC, free breakfast and lunch programs in schools, Meals-on-Wheels for the elderly, and a slew of other well-funded systems. “In a few years this nation basically eliminated hunger as a problem,” wrote the authors of the 1985 Harvard University School of Public Health–sponsored report
Hunger in America
, as they examined the extraordinary demise of hunger in the postwar period and bemoaned its woeful and entirely unnecessary reemergence during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “The success was relatively swift and not difficult to see,” they continued. “We have enough food to end hunger in this land. All that remains is the political will.”
¹¹

Johnson’s expanded safety net yielded results in other arena too. As recently as 1959, for example, upward of 35 percent of the elderly were living in poverty—much of it caused by high medical bills. Once Medicare was passed in the 1960s, however, that number plummeted. By the year 2000, the government was reporting that only 10 percent of the country’s elderly residents were living at or below the poverty line.
¹²

The Progressive Era had introduced a number of workplace protections for Americans but had shied away from tackling broader conditions of hardship. The New Deal had begun to roll back poverty in America. The Great Society, of which Medicare for the elderly was a core part, set itself the peculiarly high ambition of actually ending it.

From the presidential bully pulpit on down, national resources were mobilized in what President Johnson, in his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, would, with a somewhat utopian flourish, term a “War on Human Poverty.” This phrase was later improved upon by the deletion of the word “human.”

Johnson, who had assumed the presidency a mere six weeks earlier, following John Kennedy’s assassination, urged Congress to think big and to think holistically.

Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined; as the session which enacted the most far-reaching tax cut of our time; as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States; as the session which finally recognized the health needs of all our older citizens; as the session which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies; as the session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid program ever; and as the session which helped to build more homes, more schools, more libraries, and more hospitals than any single session of Congress in the history of our Republic.
¹³

According to such a line of reasoning, science would render poverty and the tangled web of hardship associated with economic want as quaint, as obsolete, as the horse-drawn carriage.

The speech ranks as one of the most ambitious State of the Union addresses ever delivered; it is worth quoting at length, for it represents one of the few times in American history that a president has so wholeheartedly prioritized the problems of the poor and the destitute:

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. $1,000 invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the state and the local level and must be supported and directed by state and local efforts. For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.

The new president laid down a new measure of success: “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” For Johnson’s vice president, the liberal Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, the clarion call to defeat poverty marshaled all the can-do instincts of the American spirit. “We can afford it,” he wrote of the War on Poverty in the foreword to the 1965 book
The Shame of a Nation
, a collaborative effort between photographer George de Vincent and writer Philip Stern to chronicle the lives of America’s forgotten poor. “We have the wealth, the energy, yes, and the daring and imagination to defeat poverty in America, to relegate to the history books the sad and somber portraits in this volume.”