American Experiment (387 page)

Why still another failure? Blame would fall on the Vietnam War, Watergate, institutional clogs, inadequate leadership. The main reason for the lost war, it would become clear, was not only political but also intellectual—a failure of definition and concept, historical perspective, social analysis.

The poor were variously defined as the low-income, the unemployed, the “have-nots,” the powerless, the proletariat, or even the
Lumpenproletariat,
described by Marx and Engels as the “social scum,” that “passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,” far more likely to be a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” than to be truly proletarian. What, conceptually, was poverty—economic, social, political,
material, motivational, attitudinal, or some or all of these? Where were the poor—diffused throughout the populace or fragmented in separate enclaves or occupying some discernible cultural shape of their own?

The historical record was largely ignored, even though Anglo-Americans had had six centuries of experience in dealing with such questions, going back to the English Poor Laws. “We find that throughout this period, in both England and later in the United States,” Chaim Waxman wrote, “poverty has been considered a negative condition, that the poor have been perceived as ‘not quite human,’ and that social welfare legislation has been primarily concerned with the maintenance of public order (the order of the non-poor), rather than with the condition and care of the poor on their own account.” While the New Dealers put the lives of the jobless ahead of public order, relief was to go only to the unemployables. “Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers,” Roosevelt declared, for to “dole out relief was to “administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” By the 1960s, the years of LBJ’s war on poverty, the planners of that war spent little time analyzing the successes and failures of New Deal welfare and unemployment programs, perhaps because the Roosevelt record was so mixed. The poverty war planners had to shape their programs so hurriedly that they hardly had time to answer the question that would not disappear: who are the poor?

Were the poor, however defined, merely the people clustering around the bottom of the economic or social or prestige or self-esteem ladder, people not fundamentally different from the rest of us but suppressed by the system, cruelly stigmatized by the “haves,” casually beggared by the throw of the social dice—perhaps loaded dice? Or did the poor—the persistingly poor—form a whole separate culture with its own traditions, customs, outlook, motivation, goals, social or antisocial behaviors? “Let me tell you about the very rich,” said Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator. “They are different from you and me.” Could the same be said of the very poor? The answer to this question had critically important analytical, political, and policy implications.

To a number of American sociologists and anthropologists the poor in large American cities appeared to be locked in mutually reinforcing conditions of poor nourishment, inadequate housing, mental and physical illness, low motivation and self-esteem, limited education and skills, crime and delinquency. As a staff memorandum of the Council of Economic Advisers put it in 1963, “cultural and environmental obstacles to motivation” among the poor led to “poor health, and inadequate education, and low mobility, limiting earning potential,” which in turn led to poverty, which led to poor motivation, and so on, around and around the vicious
circle. Oscar Lewis’s portrait of an autonomous, poverty-ridden enclave in the heart of Mexico City was one of the most graphic studies of the subculture of poverty. That subculture was not always wholly malign. It could be a world of instant gratification and delayed deprivation—social prestige built on defiance of cops and teachers, gang warfare, drug and alcohol abuse, intensive and promiscuous sex leading to high birth rates, illegitimacy, and disrupted families. “Irrational” or “immoral” behavior such as abusing teachers or fighting in the streets might be quite realistic and adaptive given the subculture’s way of life and divergent value system.

For other analysts, called “situationists” or “structuralists,” this was a picture of hopelessness and a counsel of despair. They described the poor as sharing the dominant hopes and values of the larger society but failing to realize them through the existing structure of opportunity. In this view, the poor turned to “deviant” or “delinquent” behavior precisely because they lacked any other means of attaining the material and psychic satisfaction propagated by the ruling culture. If money was a supreme aim, stealing might be a sensible tactic. If sex was glorified in film and glossy print, one might indulge in it without much thought of consequences nine months away.

If this analysis was correct, the solution according to situationists lay with the larger society, with the
environment
of the poor. Society must widen opportunity and thus give the poor a strong helping hand. To deal with juvenile delinquency, develop “new opportunities for the disadvantaged youth,” read a staff memorandum to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in early November 1963. If poor children were doing badly in schools, improve the schools. If poor people felt uninvolved and powerless, set up a community action program for participatory democracy.

Inevitably, the divergent analyses had different policy implications. To integrate the poor into the wider culture would call for a social transformation of the poor themselves, according to the “culturalists.” No, said the situationists, the overall society must be reformed to make room for all. In practice the two sides overlapped in their policy choices, but their theoretical divergence more often produced political and policy divergence as well. It also produced a great deal of intellectual confusion. Of one program Moynihan wrote, “… it was not social science competence that was missing in the conception and management of this program; it was intellect.” The essential fact was, he wrote with emphasis, that the “
government did not know what it was doing.
It had a theory. Or, rather, a set of theories. Nothing more.”

This central theoretical issue—between culturalist “transformation” and structuralist “opportunity broadening”—was never resolved. Rather,
the politicians spun out disparate policies and programs, some of which helped alleviate destitution but which together did not conquer poverty. The intellectual failure was all the more poignant, for it became clear after the war on poverty was fought and lost that poverty was so entrenched and intractable that both strategies were necessary. That is, the effort at regeneration must be made deep within the culture of poverty even while society as a whole broadened its opportunity structure. An effort of this magnitude, however, seemed to be beyond the intellectual as well as the institutional resources of the nation.

This made a “spearhead” strategy all the more tempting. Throughout the decades following the great depression many intellectuals as well as politicians had embraced the notion that some single solution could break through the poverty gridlock or that some special political effort by the poor themselves could hoist them out of poverty by their own bootstraps. Economic strategies such as Keynesianism and New Deal programs such as Social Security and minimum-wage legislation were expected to help the poor, and did to some degree, but they failed to break open the structure of poverty. Political action by the poor themselves brought some relief but invariably petered out.

During New Deal days the Workers’ Alliance of America, with a membership estimated as high as 600,000, had appeared by 1936 to be building a strong, militant, national coalition of poor people. Members agitated, demonstrated, protested, and lobbied, but with only marginal impact on the relief and welfare policies of FDR and Harry Hopkins. After a few years the Alliance faded away amid division and frustration. In the late 1960s welfare rights groups began to band together in the National Welfare Rights Organization, which, in contrast to the mainly white Workers’ Alliance, was composed largely of blacks, especially black women. Under the gifted leadership of Dr. George A. Wiley, a professor of chemistry turned civil rights activist, NWRO members staged hundreds of demonstrations, marches, and other protests against welfare restrictions. But the members divided over tactical questions, they failed to build a mass organization, and NWRO died in early 1973, a few months before Wiley’s death by drowning in Chesapeake Bay. The slum organizer Saul Alinsky led blacks in Rochester and Chicago to some notable victories over rents and housing but concentrated on local efforts rather than forging a national coalition of the poor. An ambitious series of federally sponsored community action programs faltered.

It became obvious that the very condition and structure of poverty thwarted the poor in efforts toward political mobilization and activism. The poor were poor politically as well as financially, educationally,
motivationally. Kenneth B. Clark looked back on the lessons of the failed community action program and reflected that “those of us who were involved in setting up the prototype of these programs” were “somewhat naive and sentimental. We did not take into account the effect of poverty and deprivation on the human personality. We did not calculate that for the poor the chief consequence of the culture of poverty is a kind of human stagnation, acceptance, defeat, which made meaningful involvement of the poor more verbal than real.”

A quarter century after Lyndon Johnson launched his war against poverty, Clark’s lessons seemed more pertinent than ever. To a small but significant degree, blacks—the best tests of progress—had closed the gap with whites in the percentage of high school graduates and of enrollees in college. They had held their own or caught up a bit in median family income. But the black unemployment rate had doubled. The National Urban League reported that 25 percent of black households were affected by crime; the rates of drug use, crime, and violent deaths were considerably higher among blacks than whites; and 40 percent of black children lived in homes without fathers. Thus the culture of poverty continued, and in a form that would blight lives well into the twenty-first century.

Only transforming leadership of the rarest quality—the kind that Martin Luther King, Jr., had displayed a decade before—could have combined in the late seventies the egalitarian ideals, the intellectual grasp, the educational effort, the setting of priorities, the organizational dynamics, the grass-roots mobilization, and the electoral strategy necessary to topple the structure of poverty and give the poor their share of American abundance. Such leadership was lacking in the politically and intellectually disordered wake of Vietnam and Watergate. There was no Martin Luther King for the poor.

During the 1970s, when the United Slates still loomed as the economic overlord of the Western world, European intellectuals asked barbed questions as to why this capitalist nation so steeped in affluence could not take care of its own poor. Washington had plenty of advice and even dollars for developing nations afflicted by rural and urban poverty—why could it not deal with deprivation in the Bronx and Watts and Appalachian hollows? If American leaders—even Nixon—were now posing as Keynesians, why did they not apply modernized or post-Keynesian strategies to their own economic policy making? Some pointed to the case of Sweden, which had long served as an example to Americans as an effective “middle way.” By
the mid-1970s Sweden was outperforming the United States in real growth per capita, employment levels, and, to some degree, even the inflation rate. To be sure, Sweden’s was a more homogeneous society and a more “manageable” economy than the American, but in many respects it was even more vulnerable to outside forces.

If European critics liberally criticized American economics, however, for the most part they had unabashed admiration for American science and technology. Americans had landed on the moon, dominated the Nobel sweepstakes, flooded the world with electronic marvels and household gadgets. Above all, Europeans admired the ubiquitous American automobile, which changed its decor and contours as often as did Paris fashions. To be sure, they laughed at reports—true, as it turned out—that a California minister sermonized to ranks of cars in his drive-in church, and that a Detroit funeral home enabled mourners to drive up to a window and remain in their cars while they enjoyed a thirty-second viewing of the deceased. But even the more sophisticated critics could not escape the spell of the gleaming new American automobile. Behind the Iron Curtain too, it was a common experience for Americans returning to their parked cars to find them encircled by gaping admirers.

It was indeed the era of triumph for the American auto. Everything appeared to be coming together for the industry during the Johnson and early Nixon years. While the chart of annual new car sales in the 1960s and early 1970s was uneven, the overall trend was exuberantly upward, topping 10 million, of which only a small fraction were imports. The average price of a new car as a percentage of United States median family income had fallen steadily since the fifties. The Big Three—or at least the Big Two, GM and Ford—were thriving.

Over half a century earlier the erratic financial genius William Crapo Durant had combined Buick, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Chevrolet into the mighty General Motors Corporation, which, with the crucial help of Du Pont money, came to dominate the automobile market. Under Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the ablest automobile industrialist of them all, General Motors modernized its financial systems and pioneered installment loans to customers, annual model changes, and a radical decentralization of operations. Sloan even applied class analysis to his products: Chevrolet, he said, was “for the hoi polloi, Pontiac for the poor but proud, Oldsmobile for the comfortable but discreet, Buick for the striving, and Cadillac for the rich.” By the 1970s its buy-outs, immense capital resources, and long-range planning were paying off for GM, which steadily outpaced in sales the other domestic automakers combined.

But Ford had also prospered in the sixties and early seventies, enjoying
well over 2 million new car sales a year. The company had finally shaken off the archaic hold of its founder after his grandson, Henry Ford II, took over company leadership in 1945. Young Ford quickly sacked the despised aide of the founder, Harry Bennett, made peace with the United Automobile Workers, failed dramatically with the Edsel but then triumphed with the Falcon and the Mustang. He showed a special talent for bringing into the company or promoting such high-powered executives as Ernest R. Breech, Robert S. McNamara, and Lee Iacocca.