America’s War on Poverty
By shivam rajpal
It is hardly necessary to consult Chamber of Commerce brochures to discover that the America of today is an affluent nation; a look around is sufficient. The current income level of Americans is at an all-time high, and their purchasing power is vigorous. They drive one or more cars, watch one or more television sets, own one or more telephones. They have added swimming pools to their backyards and automatic driers to their automatic washers, and they have more time than ever to switch off the appliances and get away from it all. In fact, leisure itself is becoming a serious problem.
For the average schoolchild, the prospect has never been brighter. He knows he can go through high school without having to help support his parents. If he chooses, he can attend a city or community college or a state university, pursue the course of study he selects, and find his place in a constantly expanding business, scientific, academic, or cultural community. His children, he can feel, will have at least equal opportunities—or better. And he has a justifiable confidence and pride in the system that has helped make America the most powerful, comfortable, and free nation in history.
Against this backdrop of success it often appears a contradiction to discuss failure—but that is what one is talking about when one speaks of poverty. And in too many places, poverty is hard to see amid the glitter of prosperity.
Yet most Americans are aware that something is wrong in certain parts of their nation. They are aware, for example, that there is a region called Appalachia [in the eastern United States], where the glitter has been dulled … where prosperity is a word in the dictionary but not a next-door neighbor. They are aware, too, that there is something wrong in certain blocks of their big cities—blocks that are lumped together under
names like New York's Harlem, Chicago's South Side, and Los Angeles' Hunters' Point.
These distant, often isolated neighborhoods, which are now called pockets of poverty, are only part of a much larger problem—one that reaches deep into every community in the United States. For it is safe to say that there is no county, state, city, or town in America free of this kind of economic trouble. The question is not, Does poverty exist? but rather, How much poverty is there?
There remains, in fact, an unseen America, a land of limited opportunity and restricted choice. In it live nearly 10 million families who try to find shelter, feed and clothe their children, stave off disease and malnutrition, and somehow build a better life on less than $60 a week, or approximately $3,000 a year. Almost two thirds of these families struggle to get along on less than $40 a week.
These are the people behind the American looking glass. There are nearly 35 million of them. Being poor is not a choice for these millions; it is a rigid way of life. It is handed down from generation to generation in a cycle of inadequate education, inadequate housing, inadequate jobs, and stunted ambitions. It is a peculiar axiom of poverty that the poor are poor because they earn little and that they earn little because they are poor. There is scant assistance available for the rebel who seeks a way out. The communities of the poor generally have the poorest schools and the scarcest opportunities for training. The poor citizen lacks organization, endures sometimes arbitrary impingement on his rights by the courts and law enforcement agencies, and either cannot make his protest heard or has stopped protesting. A spirit of defeatism often pervades his life and remains the sole legacy for his children.
Thirty years ago in America it was simple enough to recognize the poor, on street corners, in doorways, and on breadlines everywhere. In 1964 one needs an economic road map to find them, for today's poor are a mixed group. They include the children of poverty, those bypassed by industrial change, rural families, members of minority groups, fatherless families, and the aged.
This is not an all-inclusive list. There are some who fit none of these descriptions, and certainly many who do fit them are not poor. But it is safe to say that most of the poor share one or more of these characteristics, and as a group they constitute a stubborn core of poverty in the United States.
THE CHILDREN OF POVERTY
Patterns of poverty are established early in life. Thousands of children grow up in homes where education, ambition, and hope are as scarce as money. Many of these children attend school with little incentive or guidance from home to get them through. They drop out as soon as the law permits. Others fail to attend school at all.
By the time such children reach the age of 16, they have begun a lifelong drift through a series of low-skill or no-skill jobs that grow increasingly harder to find as automation spreads through business and industry. Some who cannot find jobs at all turn to drug addiction, petty crime, then major crime.
But most simply find a niche of minimum usefulness to themselves and society, where they may remain for the rest of their lives. They need opportunities for escape, but first their attitudes have to be rebuilt—in a sense, from the ground up. For poverty can be a state of mind, and many of these young people already feel defeated.
This youthful army of the poor that forms ranks in city slums and rural backwaters across the nation includes still another group—the children
of poor families who grow up with the motivation and the ambition, but not the opportunities, for higher education. If they get through high school they are unable to find part-time work to help them meet college expenses or contribute to needed support at home.
There are, in all, 11 million children among the 35 million poor of this nation. The leading edge of the postwar wave of infants has been reaching the critical 16- to 21-year-old bracket for the past few years. There are 5.5 million in this bracket now. In a single month in the fall of 1963, 730,000 of them were unemployed and not registered in schools. By 1970 there will be over 7 million in the 16- to 21-year-old group, and unless the trend is reversed, the number of youths not working and not attending school can be expected to total well over a million.
THE BYPASSED
Unparalleled technical advances in America have brought to most of our labor force and their families a standard of living undreamed of 30 years ago. But for a considerable minority it has brought considerably less.
There are thousands who are simply bypassed by modern technological advances. They are unable to secure regular employment in an economy that increasingly creates jobs with requirements that are beyond their meager skills and education.
There is also the semiskilled or unskilled worker, suddenly displaced from his job when the plant relocates or the machine takes over, who faces weeks or months of unemployment or a forced retirement. Nine months after the closing of a plant in Trenton, N.J., in October 1961, 1,900 employees—almost two thirds of the work force—were still unemployed and looking for work. In Sioux City, Ia., 40 percent of the former employees of a plant remained unemployed for six months after it closed in June 1963. In Iron City, Wis., a mine closed in August 1962, leaving about 40 percent of the miners still looking for work nine months later. In Fargo, N.D., one third of the former employees were still unemployed a year after their plant closed.
Some of these workers, who have nontransferable skills or are 'too old' at 40 or 50 to be reabsorbed into the labor force, are unable to get regular jobs, and in many cases any work at all. These find themselves in a downward spiral that pulls their children down with them. Still others, somewhat luckier, are able to find steady work, but in low-pay occupations and industries and at wage rates that are insufficient to keep their families out of the grip of poverty.
THE RURAL POOR
Our technological upheaval has cast off another luckless group—the small farmer and the surrounding community that depends on his solvency. Some farmers have ridden the tides of our economic growth to unprecedented income levels. But many more, caught between falling agricultural prices and soaring investment costs, have found themselves in a trap that appears to offer no escape except, perhaps, to an unpromising new life in an urban slum.
One and a half million farm families live on less than $250 a month; 2.8 million rural families in nonfarm occupations struggle along at the same income level. Over a million of these rural families must somehow stretch $80 a month to cover their needs. For the children of these families, who are without shoes or clothes for school and without money for school supplies or lunches, even primary education is a luxury. Nearly half a million of these rural youths between the ages of 14 and 24
have completed no more than the sixth grade. Their horizons thus stop at the edge of a few acres of exhausted land.
Nowhere is the ironical fact that the poor are furnished with the poorest services more poignant than in the rural areas. Here are found the one-room school-house held together by a single overburdened teacher, the families too isolated to avail themselves of health services, the homesteaders unable to apply the benefits of agricultural research.
Many rural farm families find that even a semibarren piece of land offers them more certitude than the prospect of a new life in a strange environment. With limited education or skills or with failing health, they have no choice but to squeeze some sustenance from the land they know.
Others have already joined the vanguard of an unhappy exodus, a growing legion of unskilled, uneducated workers who come to the city in search of better opportunities—something they may not find. Often they discover that they have accomplished nothing but a relocation of their poverty.
THE MINORITY POOR
A substantial segment of the poor in the United States need not puzzle over the complicated economics of poverty. These are the poor of minority groups. For them the equations are simpler. They are hired last, paid less, and fired first. They work mainly in the lowpay occupations, and in those they earn less than their white counterparts. The Negro college graduate can expect to earn only as much income as the white worker who never went beyond the eighth grade; in comparable occupations the white man can expect to earn almost 50 percent more in his lifetime than the Negro and the Puerto Rican and almost one third more than other Spanish-speaking Americans.
Eight million Negroes—nearly half the total Negro population of the United States—are poor. One third of the Negro population lives in southern cities, one fourth on southern farms, and the balance largely in the northern cities. In both the North and the South the Negro faces the same problem: In relation to his white counterpart, he is falling farther and farther behind. During the fifties the average income of the Negro male improved substantially. For every dollar he earned in 1949 he earned $1.75 in 1959. But the white man running ahead of him ran a little faster. While the Negro was earning one dollar in 1949, his white counterpart was earning $1.90; in 1959, every time the Negro earned $1.75, the white man earned $3.20.
In 24 of the 26 states with large Negro populations, the Negro's share of per capita income fell during the fifties; in some of these states the gap between white and Negro income widened dramatically. In Michigan in 1949, when the equalizing effect of World War II was still being felt, the Negro earned 87 percent as much as the white. Ten years later he earned only 75 percent as much. In North Carolina his comparative earnings fell from 54 percent of his white counterpart's to 43 percent; in Tennessee from 68 percent to 56 percent; in Arkansas from 53 percent to 39 percent.
In the southwestern United States live 3.5 million Spanish-speaking Americans. Not only does the Spanish American face the burdens of prejudice and inadequate education; like the Puerto Rican, he also faces a language barrier.
Perhaps the hardest hit among the poverty-stricken minorities is the American Indian. Of the 550,000 American Indians, 380,000 live on or near reservations, most of them in poor circumstances. Their average family income is only a quarter to a third the national average. Their average educational level is only half as high as the national average. And although they are American-born, go to American schools, and have received special attention from the federal government, social and economic barriers continue to imprison them in islands of poverty.
THE FATHERLESS FAMILIES
Death, divorce, and disability often leave the same barren legacy; there are 2.3 million fatherless families in America who have inherited nothing but the father's poverty. Many of them were poor while the father was still present; some are poor because the father is disabled, has deserted, or has died; and some are fatherless because they are poor. Low-income families often live with far more strains—financial, physical, and moral—than do comfortable families, and these strains may reach the point where the father unshoulders his burden by deserting.
The mother is often too ill-equipped to bear the crushing responsibility suddenly thrust upon her. Frequently the presence of young children forces her to remain at home. Even if her children are older or adequate day-care arrangements can be made, the mother may lack the education, training, or experience needed to get an adequate job.
Only 16 percent of the mothers of families receiving public assistance have completed high school; less than 10 percent have had experience in office or sales work or in related occupations, as against 40 percent of mothers not on welfare. Most of these mothers of fatherless families have had experience chiefly as domestics, service workers, and unskilled laborers. Up to now the likelihood that such mothers will find employment that will furnish the stability and income so sorely needed in the absence of an able, breadwinning father has been remote. Only half the fatherless families in the nation have incomes above the poverty line.
THE AGED
There are 6.8 million heads of families in the United States who are over 65 years of age. Half of them have incomes of less than $3,000 a year, and half of these support their families on less than $1,000 a year.
Many of the aged end their lives in poverty because they began them in poverty. Their income throughout their working years was never sufficient to provide that margin of savings that affords independence and dignity after retirement. Although the majority of all the aged are covered by social security benefits, nearly two thirds of the poorest aged—those living alone and earning less than $1,000 a year—are not covered by social security.
The great medical advances that continually create new ways to prolong life have assured a steady growth in the number of aged persons in our society and, accordingly, an increase in the problems of the aged. During the last 15 years the number of aged heads of families increased 37 percent. It is estimated that by 1980 there will be 9 million persons over 75 years of age in this country, and if the present pattern is allowed to continue, many millions of them will be living in stark poverty.
THE COST OF POVERTY
Collectively, the six groups from whom the community of poverty is largely drawn make up only a minority of the American population. But the costs of their poverty are shared by all Americans.
Two thirds of poor families have an average annual income of $2,000 or less. If this could be raised to just over $3,000—above the poverty line—their total income would be $7 billion higher. Looking at it another way, if the average production of even 10 million earners among the poor could be increased enough to lift their earnings a modest $1,000 a year, the nation would gain $14 billion of added annual output. This would mean a fresh stimulus to the national economy and, at the same time, a reduction of outlay for the public assistance and social services the poor receive.
If governmental public assistance commitments could be cut by one fourth, the tax burden could be reduced by $1 billion. And as the community of the poor diminishes, there would accordingly be less need for the expansion of police, fire, and public health departments, which function so busily among the poor. These services cost the nation $8 billion annually. A 10 percent reduction in the cost (or almost $1 billion a year) is a plausible estimate of the savings that could be effected by the elimination of poverty-stricken communities.
This is a clear dollars-and-cents justification for a revitalized and redirected attack on poverty, even apart from a moral obligation to help the poor. Moreover, if the poor are raised above the poverty line, all Americans will benefit from their new capacity to adapt themselves to the constructive goals of the nation.
Clearly, much is already being done, through the efforts of federal, state, and local governments, religious organizations, charitable fund-raising drives, and foundations. But the castoffs, the rural poor, the minority poor, the fatherless families, and the aged have been falling farther and farther behind. As the nation's wealth has grown, a dwindling portion of it has accrued to the bottom 20 percent of our income earners during the last decade. The ratio of nonwhite to white income, which grew rapidly from 41 percent to 54 percent under the economic stimulus of World
War II, continued to improve slowly and erratically during the fifties but has now fallen back almost to the 1947 level. And during the last decade, while professional and managerial workers have increased their income by over 150 percent, service workers and nonfarm laborers have improved their lot by only 74 percent.
Thus the gulf between the affluent and the poor widens, and the poor—presently one fifth of our nation—grow less and less visible to the rest of us.
THE ANTIPOVERTY PROGRAM
The war on poverty is the oldest war in history. It is a war that can never be won quickly, of course, but it can be won decisively in America through a concerted federal, state, and local effort to eliminate the conditions and causes of impoverishment. Indeed, the United States, with its enormous wealth, technical know-how, and productive capacity, has already demonstrated its ability to direct these resources toward whatever goals are set, and to achieve them.
Two factors are absolutely prerequisite to success in any effort to eliminate poverty: The economy must remain strong and continue to develop, thereby providing maximum employment at optimum pay, and the last barriers to this maximum employment—barriers that seal off so many Americans from the opportunities available to the majority—must be overthrown.
The broad bases of the 1964 income tax cut, education and training programs, and housing, welfare, and social security measures have already provided a firm foundation for future programs. Since 1961 such
measures as the Area Redevelopment Act, the Manpower Development and Training Act, and the Vocational Education Act have made important contributions toward eliminating the roots of poverty. Indeed, it is already possible to visualize, on the near horizon, an America without poverty.
The Antipoverty Act (formally titled the Economic Opportunity Act), enacted under the Johnson administration in August 1964, is designed to help communities wage local attacks on poverty. Community projects are to include remedial education, slum clearance, homemaking services, and personal guidance. The act also provides for a loan program to help low-income farmers and small businessmen improve their earning capacity through the purchase of new land, equipment, or whatever else is necessary.
In addition, the act establishes the following:
*A job corps in which 40,000 young men and women will receive remedial education and job training in residential centers. Enrollment in the corps is expected to reach 100,000.
*A work-training program to keep up to 200,000 teenagers from dropping out of school. This program will assist in obtaining part-time jobs in hospitals, playgrounds, and other nonprofit projects.
*A work-study program to help needy college students by financing part-time work on and off campus.
*A domestic Peace Corps, known as VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). The volunteers will work on Indian reservations, in mental hospitals, and in areas of poverty.
The goal of the Antipoverty Act is to launch a coordinated program directed toward a final battle against poverty in the United States—to provide, for the young, the opportunity to learn; for the able-bodied, job experience to qualify them for future work; and for all Americans, the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.
Thank u
