Michael Harrington’s Emthe Other Americaem And Its Effects On The 1960′S
The statue of liberty has an inscription on it that says something to the effect of give us your sick, your tired, your poor. This implies at least to me that America brings a lot of people hope and simply by arriving here in this country that great opportunity awaits anyone that works hard. When immigrants came to places like Ellis Island from economically dormant areas in Europe they viewed the icon that lady liberty and America as a whole as a beacon of prosperity, a land of milk and honey.
This view of America has always been true since our inception in 1776 despite some definite bumps in the road such as the barriers that were put up by issues such as the difficulties presented by the Articles of Confederation, the Great Depression, and the struggles for civil rights for all that we have encountered throughout our centuries as a nation. Through all this plight and unrest America has persevered and in many ways these problems that we have endured have indeed made the nation stronger.
To be perfectly honest though there are some serious tribulations that quiet could use some addressing in this country of ours that need to be confronted. One of these blemishes on our record is some of the gigantic poverty that still exists within our borders, in all pockets of the country. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a utopia and I realize that fact. To put a question to all poverty or even a majority of poverty to be extracted from this country is not realistic in any sense of the word. There will always be poverty to some extent on every corner of this nation.
Let me also go on to say that compared to many of the developed more socialistic nations such as France, England, and definitely communists like Cuba the United States does a far better job of taking care of those who are in the lower income scales, in other words the impoverished. So in no way am I calling for more government run programs, more centralized control over the economy coming from Washington or even any deviation from our recent market-consumer based supply and interrogate system. Looking at a private-public sector partnership that they currently have in Massachusetts order to address the healthcare conundrum may be a road we need to go down.
“The Other America” by Michael Harrington was originally published in 1962. To give a little background information on Harrington himself, some of the organizations that he aligned himself with included the Workers Defense League, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and he was an active member of the Socialist Party of the United States till the day he died in 1987. Obviously Michael was on the fringe of the political spectrum if he was a member of the Socialist Party of the United States in my notion so to say that his viewpoints are “mainstream” theory would be a misnomer and I simply wanted to read this book and report on it in order to net a different perspective on poverty in the United States.
To say the least the statistics, facts, and figures presented in Harrington’s book are outdated and certainly skewed. However, many of the issues that are presented in this text such as the lack of affordable health coverage, the disappearing act that many of our “family farms” are doing, and the inaffordabillity for the elderly to have a secure retirement just to name a few collected ring true today.
Another reason this text was fascinating to me at least as a person with a disability and someone who receives Social Security on a monthly basis I always hear folks who begrudge “ample government” and “wasteful spending on welfare programs”. So it was interesting to get a different angle on whether these safety nets as I like l them really work and either help people survive economically or even help dig them out of poverty. It may have not been the best choice of reading to build because of Harrington’s obviously slanted belief to the left and big government, but his opinion seems like an educated one nonetheless.
“The Other America” also caught the attention of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Administration and in some people’s eyes was the impetus for Johnson to declare a “War on Poverty.” Some of the agenda that Johnson implemented to help fight this war included Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, and the creation of the department of Housing and Urban Development in order to produce housing more affordable for all Americans.
Harrington was actually brought in to be a part of a task force headed by Maria Shriver’s father in the 1960’s to postulate ideas on how to combat poverty. Harrington’s book albeit maybe a gigantic of an exaggeration or questionable in some areas of research at least gave Johnson and his economic advisers some numbers to discover at so they could at least get a feel for what they were dealing with.
Harrington makes the claim that at the time when he wrote this book there were 40 to 50 million citizens who live on this land. “They were bad and they still are.” (Harrington pg. 1) at the reprint of this in 1971. Now I detest to be a negative nelly and go after the first statistic he puts in here, but I think that number is somewhat misleading. The author himself later admits “I have been looking for stagnation and retrogression.” (Harrington pg. 175) The point that I am trying to produce is that data can and usually is manipulated to fit a certain point of view depending on the project and the prerogative of the writer. For me to question the veracity of Harrington’s research would be foolish on my fragment because I basically know nothing about conducting field research. The part that makes the most sense about the forty to fifty million people living in poverty at that time is that they have no standing within our society, no yelp within the political arena or community at all. Too often those in high places speak about the bad as if they understand, but it is no more then hollow rhetoric.
Harrington takes a compassionate and on the surface reasoned near to things like combating the lack of quality housing developments in America. He is highly critical of the approach of the government in 1949 when Republicans and Democrats came to the negotiating table and drew up a compromise in order to address the pressing issue of public housing. Conservative minded Senators like Bob Taft realized that there was an immense shortage of housing in the country, but the truth is no legislative undertaking in the history of all governments is perfect. There needs to be compromise when drafting a bill and a substantial part of that compromise had to deal with the restraints that the budgeting process can place on a project.
So when Taft and other budget hawks fell “100,000″ (Harrington pg. 34) short of their modern goal of houses built. Harrington however, forgets that money just doesn’t appear out of thin air and he is highly critical of people like Taft for showing some fiscal restraint. When President Kennedy vows to take up the project some twelve years later in 1961 and still falls short of Harrington’s expectations Harrington also speaks poorly of John Kennedy. This criticism is also unwarranted in my book because Kennedy had a lot on his plate following foreign affairs and trying to dig the country out of an economic recession.
Harrington unbiased simply takes the approach that if you give the poor housing this must mean that they will automatically take superb care of it and there will be no more slums in America. Let’s be perfectly just here, I contemplate we all know that most poor in America are often segregated from the more affluent people. What this means is that the awful live by one another and often times a kid growing up in that situation all they are going to see is struggle and strife. If that’s all the person sees in their life often times it’s hard to know how to get out of it. Poverty is cyclical, and for some it runs within a never ending cycle.
This all means that if your parents lived in a run-down old house, you are likely to live in a run down old house unless you are granted greater opportunity and take advantage of it through the educational process. I’m not taking a shot at the poor I’m simply making an observation upon human nature that we live what we know and peep.
Harrington opines and describes the different forms of poverty, he goes more in depth then I will because it seems easier to explain my blueprint. There are two kinds of poverty from a territorial standpoint in my view. There is island poverty which means that there is poverty in determined sections of a large city or area, but it’s pretty much condensed as far as its level of severity. Let’s take the District of Columbia as an example, there are droves of homeless people just mere feet away from the White House and they’ve been for decades on end.
If someone were to move just a few miles to say Northern Virginia you are going to find one of the most diverse and vibrant economies in the country with biotechnological research companies like VA Biotech (Flagg pg. 2) stationed there and computer companies like International Business Machine (Zucker pg. 4) also with its headquarters based out of there. The schools in Northern Virginia are spectacular and you’ll run into some very opulent housing. This is an example of island poverty to me. Where there is immense poverty in certain sections of a land mass, but the entire dwelling is not stricken with the complication. I guess you could say that Washington D.C. (the inner city especially) is on an island all to itself.
Then there is abject poverty which poisons an entire region for generations on end. The constituency that Harrington uses as an example that has been hemorrhaging jobs for generations is Appalachia, up there in the West Virginia-Eastern Kentucky zone of the nation. “Beauty can be a mask for ugliness.” (Harrington pg. 40) This is how Harrington describes the Appalachians. As people drive through and see all the beautiful scenery, say if they were on their vacation. The people out for stroll enjoying the backdrop and beautiful vista that the Appalachians can provide in spring or fall especially are completely oblivious to the struggle that the people living there have to work through. He then goes on to imply unjustly that most of these vacationers are care-free about the troubles of the unpleasant and fair want some pretty pictures along their journey.
He goes on to mention the “1,500,000 people who left the area during the decade of the 1950′”. (Harrington pg. 41) Harrington then goes into different reasons why people end up living in poverty. He talks about mental illness and how that could lead someone into unpredictability within the job market. This seems to me at least to be a rather obvious point given that if someone is suffering from a psychological ailment that they would potentially be less dependable as far as showing up to work or being able to do the job efficiently.
Then Harrington talks about how people who abuse alcohol would find themselves down at the shelter where he exercise to work because they often couldn’t keep their houses due to all the debt they’d accumulated from years of drinking. Obviously if your alcoholism gets bad enough to the point where you race into that much debt it must also inhibit you from maintaining a job and a decent standard of living. So although I have empathy for the drunks and the mentally impaired I think it is not surprising that these groups of people are living in poverty, not only wait on in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but also today.
One of the most intriguing issues that we deal with today is immigration, migrant workers, and the proliferation of corporate farms. When consumers in the United States spend an “average of 20 percent less of their income on food than any other nation in the world” (Harrington pg. 39) back then just imagine the abundance of food and the speed at which it can be produced nowadays through the use of mechanization. Of course with this industrialization and need for increased efficiency and profit margins there is a downside. Many of the smaller farmers are being forced off their land because they are unable to find a reasonable enough price for their cut.
These farmers are people who were raised on farming; they lack any other usable skill within this industrialized society, so thus they go from a farmer who makes a decent living to someone who becomes another number for the Department of Labor to put in a chart as living under the poverty line. Then with the integration of major free trade agreements into today’s economy such as the North American Free Trade Agreement farmers now have to also compete with overseas markets and once again they are unable to because of the extremely cheap labor in Mexico. I am not saying that free trade is a bad thing especially from a consumer point of opinion, but if you look at the socioeconomic it can have on both countries from a labor-manufacturing standpoint free trade is usually a negative.
The other side of this coin is of course the struggle of the migrant worker. Now you can debate on whether illegal immigrants should or shouldn’t be allowed in this country to perform even the most menial tasks at pathetic wages. There are reasonable compassionate people on both sides of that issue, but the one fact that no one can deny is the fact that yes, even illegal immigrants are human beings who should not have their human rights violated. Harrington believes the immigrants should have the right to unionize, but then basically admits that these workers are too nomadic in their lifestyle in order to build a sustainable worker’s rights program. Harrington basically is quite notable of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations for not doing more to organize, but for Harrington to attack them is like punching your best friend as they try and help you out of a scrum in my opinion so I’m not quite sure why he so harshly critiques them.
Yes, there are a bunch unfavorable organized labor bosses, but sometimes you’ve got to slash deals with the devil so to speak to get where you want to go in life. However, Harrington once again sort of gives off the impression of naivety by basically saying if the unions just got their act together and played nice (as if that ever would happen) everything would be worthy better. Obviously also from a sociological aspect Harrington certainly employs a class conflict, semi-Marxist point of view by basically ridiculing America’s wealthy for not showing more compassion for the lower classes. In fact the class that Harrington focuses on most in the book is the underclass, those who cannot catch the means to afford the basic necessities of life. You could of course draw the comparison between Harrington and Marx and how Harrington also looks at the burgeroise with disdain and considers himself a champion of the proletariat as they fend off assaults on their way of life.
Harrington also goes into detail of the struggle of the elderly to survive in this society. This is a tussle that is discussed quite extensively by any sociologist worth their salt, no matter their philosophy on whether we as a nation have a responsibility to take care of our aging members. It does seem a little draconian to me to not want to help the people who left us with such a sizable country filled with so many opportunities. Harrington basically argues that we need to expand Social Security and increase benefits for folks who he says are in their “golden years.” Of course this was the late sixties through the seventies when he was espousing the ideas and we’ve reach to realize that with people living longer due to medical advances Social Security is on a collision course with bankruptcy without some reform. So, due to this expansion of benefits for anyone doesn’t seem plausible and many people should fair feel lucky for whatever pecuniary help they currently receive.
Even if Social Security were to open to default in a sense and lose some if not all of its solvency most mainstream social scientists and economists would agree that it certainly did help a lot of the elderly out of poverty to some extent, by giving them at least something to fall back on. According to many sources the poverty rate amongst those sixty five and older dropped somewhere near forty percent when Social Security was first implemented back in the 1930’s. This means that the poverty rate Harrington then goes on to argue that the elderly struggle financially through their golden years because they don’t accumulate out and socialize enough, build social contacts or “social capital” (Putnam pg. 15) as many sociologists like Robert D. Putnam put it.
They would use this social capital in order to build connections in order to stay out in the job market to supplement their income with. Although I also conclude that many of the elderly are somewhat secluded from the rest of the world, that’s simply not as true as Harrington makes it out to be. If you really think about it, it’s the elderly those who Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” who attend church services more regularly then those in their youth. To highlight the generational gap and to see if Harrington’s argument of reclusion holds up decades later we have to look at more recent data. According to the data level-headed by Robert Putnam in 2000 the weekly church attendance among high schoolers “has dropped from fifty two percent in the 1970’s (when Harrington was relevant) to forty percent as of 1999.” (Putnam pg. 75) In incompatibility church going amongst the elderly has only dropped five percentage points according to an aggregate percentage of surveys.
I’m not saying that church is the only social function that the elderly go to and since they go to church they must not be impoverished, but to say there is a growing disconnect between society and the elderly like Harrington says isn’t exactly suitable. In fact if you think about at least according to the data offered by Putnam it shows that the younger generation may have trouble digging their way out of a tough financial stretch if they don’t go to church and do those social networks.
Really, you can’t excuse Americans of not caring about the elderly either. Despite the fact that the sociology textbook basically implies that the more industrial a country gets the more it scorns the elderly. In some respects, this is true however America is a very giving group of people. This is a fact that Harrington of course conveniently for his hold argument to sound better. Well, as a polemic if you will I offer up the fact that “per capita income has risen seventy four percent in the United States since 1961″ (Putnam pg. 156) During this time our philanthropic efforts are still way ahead of the rest of the world so any perceived drop-off in charitable giving complained about by Harrington is basically invisible.
The next closest country in generosity would be some country in Europe. I know many countries probably deem so many here in America are greedy, slovenly, etc. Well, just sight at the billions Americans offered up in response to the tsunami in the Thailand-Southeast Asia status of the world.
To put it lightly I judge Americans are well aware of poverty. Far more aware then folks like Harrington give us credit for. Maybe incidents like Hurricane Katrina kind of woke us up and we will be more alert of the plight of others, but overall we do a pretty good job in my thought. Maybe the fact that Americans gave so noteworthy money to things like the tsunami and earthquake relief in Pakistan while people of all political viewed dropped the ball when it came to the response to the incident in Fresh Orleans shows that maybe we don’t pay enough attention to our maintain country and too much to the affairs of others. That’s unprejudiced one point of thought and I think that is pretty much all Harrington offers up when it comes to his book “The Other America” is honest one point of view and numbers can be shuffled around neatly in order to fit that perspective.
Works Cited
Flagg, Michael, and Michael S. Rosewald. “Va. Biotech Looks to Md. For Inspiration.” Washington Post 2 Dec. 2004, natl ed., sec. C: E01.
Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. 1962. 2nd ed. New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1971.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000.
Zucker, J., A. Demaid, and S. Ogden. “Access Enhancement Objects for data management in Smalltalk.” Computer Languages, Systems & Structures; 32.4 (Dec. 2005): 195-202.
Additional Resources
Flagg, Michael, and Michael S. Rosewald. “Va. Biotech Looks to Md. For Inspiration.” Washington Post 2 Dec. 2004, natl e
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