The "Deserving" vs. the "Undeserving" Poor

     A brief article in the N. Y. Times ("Week in Review," February 8, 2009) reminded me of how little progress we have made in our understanding and conceptualization of "the poor" and in any resolution to end "poverty" in, let's say, the last, 2500 years!! Jason deParle, in "The 'W' Word, Re-Engaged," re-raises the ages old American issue of how the U.S. will address, administer, distribute, handle, deal with, quietly maintain, sometimes ignore, frequently sweep-under-the carpet, and inevitably ghettoize -- "welfare" and those who receive it -- the poor. All of this makes me review in my mind some features in the history of the poor, and especially the perverse history of poverty and the poor in the U. S.

     When Jesus said, "For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always." (Matthew 26:11), he did not mean to say that we can ignore the poor because they are always lingering about, or that he was more important than the issue of the poor, and that they were worth ignoring compared to his presence. He did mean that those around him should seize the moment; in his case, the brief moment he would be alive. And, importantly, he meant that the poor will always be "WITH" us, not segregated from us, not apart from us, but there to be supported. As he said, "whenever you wish you can do good to them" (Mark 14:7), but he would not always be there.

     Most cultures have and do accept the fact that the poor are always "with" them. Two things strike me as interesting historical aspects of this fact:  1) the poor generally have stood in some kind of reciprocal relationship to others, especially the rich, in most cultures and societies; and, 2) the poor are often considered just that -- poor -- and nothing else. In the city of Rome before and after the birth of Christ, the poor were an integral political element that the rich sought to support through food subsidies, housing, and entertainment in exchange for political support. The same relationship holds today in much of Latin America -- most famously today in Cuba and Venezuela. In feudal Europe, the relationship of the poor (serfs and then later peasants) to vassals and lords stood at the very heart of the social structure. In early modern Europe, the poor -- both the agricultural poor and city artisans and servants -- occupied the role of producers and workers, while the obligation of the rich was to consume the products of the poor. With industrialization and modernization (18th century to now), the reciprocal part became more distorted, with the poor increasingly perceived as being exploited, and reciprocity a fiction (thus the rise of Karl Marx and a whole host of socialist and communist thinkers). As for the second facet, for most of history, and in most places, the poor have been seen simply as people without money and resources. Poverty has not meant, and does not mean in many cultures today (especially more traditional ones), that the poor are or have been stupid, lazy, or immoral. Above all, the idea of poverty and the poor has not generally carried with it the notion of the poor being undeserving or unworthy in a broad range of ways (income, food, housing, health, education, entertainment, etc.).

   The image of the poor and poverty in the United States of America (and, interestingly, far less in Canada, where in most regions poverty and the poor are seen to be more of an integral part of the social fabric) has been a perverse and severe one. Poverty in the colonial period was identified strongly with the marginalized -- non-Puritan newcomers in New England, indentured servants and sailors in the middle colonies, and African slaves and non-landing holding poor whites in the South. Radical Protestant ideas of "election" or salvation, which took away free will and put God in complete charge of choosing who would be saved, ironically left residents of communities often judging severely who was worthy and who was unworthy on the basis of poverty. By the time of the Revolution (1770s-1780s), republican virtue was added to the mix, leaving even "enlightened" reformers, in places like Philadelphia, carefully discriminating between the "worthy" and the "unworthy" for the administration of poor relief. Americans haven't stopped doing that. In Jacksonian democracy, it has been argued that the division in society was between "producers" and "non-producers" (A. Schlesinger, Jr., and others), thus making the rich prove their productivity as well. And, in 1899,

Thorstein Veblen, who invented the modern idea of "conspicuous consumption" was able to suggest that the rich, most of whom inherited their wealth and did nothing to contribute to society -- the "leisure class" -- were least deserving.

     That idea did not last, except among left-wing reformers. Even during the Great Depression (1929-1941) and the New Deal (1933-1939), FDR strongly opposed welfare that was not attached to work. Work relief was the very core of the WPA, and even there, wages were kept low in order to allow the private sector of the economy to complete with the government in paying low wages itself. Furthermore, FDR wanted to keep non-work relief to a minimum and low in value in order to encourage people to take jobs, despite the fact that many of the poor (children, for example) could not enter the work force. Most of American society spent the second half of the 20th century trying to move up into the middle-class, while the middle-class, in the last 30 years, at least, has tried to move up to the upper-class. Industrial opportunity, education, the happy

absence of warfare on American soil contributed to real accomplishments in the creation of a broad middle class. But after the 1960s, that progress slowed and reversed. Many Americans have deluded themselves into thinking they were middle-class when in fact they were much poorer. As David Hackett Fisher waggishly noted in one of his books, "Only in America does the middle class own only its debts" (or something close to that).

     Denial and invisibility has been part of the problem, as Michael Harrington

pointed out in "The Other America" in 1962. Most poverty, by then, was out of sight, off the main highways, in rural America, or in urban ghettoes where rich and white America refused to drive. Other factors, like the rise of casual dress (tee-shirts and jeans, for example) no longer visually distinguished the poor from the middle class. But other problems

 with the idea of poverty and the poor arose at the same time. When I was in college in the early 1960s, I attended a presentation by the anthropologist-novelist Oscar Lewis (The Children of Sanchez). It was the first scholarly-academic talk I had ever attended, and was I impressed! Lewis was introducing (at about the same time as Harrington) the idea of "a culture of poverty." The idea was that the poor formed communities of their own, apart from the rest of society, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. For Lewis and Harrington, these "cultures of poverty" had arisen from profound systemic failings of the mother culture, not from some inherent moral failings of the poor themselves. I distinctly remember Lewis, in response to questions, explaining that being poor did not mean being stupid, the eloquence of some of the poor Mexicans he interviewed attesting to that fact. That was a whole new representation of the poor from what I had heard before. My recent travels to Mexico have confirmed this in my mind, as I have found very poor Mexicans more politically astute, for example, than their richer brethren.

     The Harrington-Lewis conceptualization of "cultures of poverty" became the foundation for Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," and it appeared that the will to end poverty had finally arrived. Two major elements of American life, however, not only stymied that will but produced an American relationship with poverty and the poor that may be the most retrograde in human history. 1) The first problem is that with new attention paid to poverty and the poor, the exaggerated American idea and psychology of human agency kicked into over-drive. "Rugged individualism" and belief in being the author of one's own destiny do not begin to describe the perversity of the American religion of agency. Stemming from the radical protestantism of the 17th century, individual agency became the prime interpretive tool in understanding society. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, born into poverty himself and the Congressional point man in the "war against poverty," was so imbued with the idea of individual agency that, in the end, he became a principle enemy of the poor by "blaming the victim" in poverty. The individual as cause of his/her own poverty is now even more powerfully embedded in the American psyche. The second force was and is right-wing anger, a modern anger that was driven mad by the New Deal and then by LBJ's social policies, and that highjacked the war on poverty as a means of retaliation. Always able to mangle any idea that has unexpectedly crossed their path, the right latched onto the "culture of poverty" idea of Harrington and Lewis, and distorted it into meaning that the poor had created their own ghettoes of poverty, and were responsible in furthering that culture, and were using it to milch money out of taxpayers who had earned their money (another moronic and mangled interpretation of how individuals are solely responsible for even multi-million dollar salaries).

    From the late 1960s onward, individual agency and the "culture of poverty" became occasion to ask just what the poor "deserved" to have. In the 1960s and 70s, the question often was, should they be allowed to have a color TV, and call themselves poor, or even a TV? What should they be allowed to buy, to have? Should they live a life of no pleasure, no intellectual stimulation, no engagement in the material and intellectual middle-class world? In 1980, Ronald Reagan officially launched the rightist anti-poor movement when he cleverly married racism and an attack on the poor by asking whether or not a "big buck" he had seen spending "food stamps" in a grocery store for "T-bone steaks" should be allowed to do so. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton was emboldened enough to match his sexual exploits and slight-of-hand denials by "ending" poverty by shutting down welfare. Well, in fact, he hid the funding of poverty, and his successor continued the process of minimal provision by under-the-table means.

   Needless to say, we are at the nadir of any desire for addressing poverty or changing our conception of what it is to be poor, or even how to successfully live "with" the poor. As Megan Mcardle has recently observed, "The mental model most Americans use for dealing with poverty is Dickens-with-a-hotplate." Will this change as the fortunes of most of us retreat in the New Depression? Will having less allow us to conceive of the idea that living well involves material advantage only to a small degree? American history certainly doesn't hold a lot of promise for this in the U.S., but it may improve things in the rest of the world.

(Ideas from, and conversations with, June Tagg, Pat Chuchryk, and Malcolm Greenshields have contributed to this essay. They are not responsible, of course, for the imperfections in this essay).