Other America, The

Other America, The. The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) was written by Michael Harrington (1928–1989), a young socialist whose first encounter with poverty had come during the two years he lived on New York City's Lower East Side as part of the Catholic Worker movement, a ministry to the poor founded by Dorothy Day (1897–1980). Harrington became known as “the man who discovered poverty” when his book caught the eye of President John F. Kennedy. Influenced by the book, Kennedy proposed to his advisers shortly before his assassination that the federal government undertake a “War on Poverty.”

Harrington's book made two main points. First, poverty was rampant in the United States, with 40 to 50 million victims, despite the prevailing national belief in the “affluent society.” “That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them,” Harrington wrote. “They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.”

Second, Harrington argued that a “culture of poverty” existed in the United States. Suffering the effects of generations of inadequate education, nutrition, housing, and medical care, the poor lacked both the ability and the aspiration to improve their lot in life. Thus, poverty could not be eliminated either by an expanding economy or by exhortations to the poor to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. “Society,” Harrington concluded, “must help [the poor] before they can help themselves.”
See also Affluent Society, The; Great Society; Sixties, The; Socialism; Socialist Party; Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

James T. Patterson , America's Struggle against Poverty, 1900–1985, rev. ed. 1986.
Michael Katz , The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare, 1989.

Maurice Isserman