Poverty

Poverty. Poverty has always been a serious problem in America. Throughout its history, large numbers of Americans have been unable to purchase food, shelter, and clothing, or to achieve a reasonable standard of living according to the standards of their time. Their poverty has reflected a variety of factors, from sickness, disability, and natural disaster to labor market conditions, structural problems of economics or demography, the absence of a social safety net, racial and gender discrimination, and other failures of public policy. Yet public authorities and private charities often have adopted moral definitions of poverty, blaming poor people for their inability to support themselves.

A Chronological and Demographic Overview of America.

Expenses for poor relief started to rise in the late eighteenth century. Destitute immigrants crowded nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century cities, and homeless children wandered the streets. By any objective measure, half the population of large cities at the end of the nineteenth century—including many who worked full‐time—must be counted as poor. The number of poor people, which remained very high in the early decades of the twentieth century, soared during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although World War II and the postwar prosperity reduced poverty, the ranks of the poor remained far higher in the 1950s than popular images of the period suggested.

Estimates of poverty remain crude for the years before the federal government instituted an official poverty line in the 1960s. However, poverty rates clearly declined from the 1960s until 1973, when they again began to rise. From the mid‐1970s to the late 1990s, the national poverty rate fluctuated around 14 percent.

Women, too, have figured disproportionately in the ranks of the poor. Excluded from jobs that paid living wages throughout most of American history, many women depended on men for material support. Indeed, virtually all self‐supporting women struggled constantly against poverty. Young women on their own in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century cities earned so little that many turned to forms of prostitution to survive. With no public social safety net in place, job opportunities restricted, and wages low, widows, usually left without payments from life insurance, often found themselves destitute. Even in the late twentieth century, a number of factors—including limited work opportunities and low wages, public benefit programs that discriminated by gender, and an increase in female‐headed families—kept poverty rates higher among women. In 1960, single mothers headed about 8 percent of all families with children; by 1990, the proportion had increased to 25 percent. Nearly half of all families supported by women were poor.

African Americans have, on average, always been poorer than whites. As slaves, most owned no assets whatsoever. From the post–Civil War Era through World War II, southern planters and state legislatures worked to keep blacks in the South as a low‐wage labor force picking cotton and working in domestic service. In 1935, under pressure from southern white politicians, Social Security legislation excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which meant most blacks. In the North, before the Civil War, white immigrants often replaced blacks in occupations customarily open to them, such as barbering and catering, and well into the twentieth century, northern employers relegated blacks to the harshest and most poorly paid jobs.

As they migrated to northern cities in the twentieth century, African Americans increasingly concentrated in segregated, high‐poverty neighborhoods drained of mortgage capital by banks practicing redlining—that is, using loan criteria, originally supported by federal government agencies, that defined black neighborhoods as poor credit risks. Unequal educational opportunities in both the North and South combined with racial segregation and job discrimination to reinforce high levels of poverty among African Americans. However, between 1959 and 1974, as a result of the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and expanded education opportunities, the poverty rate for African Americans dropped from 55.1 percent to 30.3 percent. By 1990, Hispanic Americans experienced poverty at about the same rate as blacks—about 30 percent, compared to less than 12 percent among whites. Both Hispanics and blacks suffered from discrimination and the lack of the educational credentials essential for well‐paying work.

As for unskilled and semiskilled workers, their experience in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century cities was framed by a combination of low wages, irregular work, and periodic illness, rather than long‐term unemployment. In the best of times, they earned barely enough to feed and clothe a family, but seasonal labor demands as well as shifts in the business cycle left them often with no work at all. In and out of work, they alternated between bare self‐sufficiency and dependence. Work‐related accidents and sickness struck ordinary workers and their families frequently and with devastating impact. With little or no insurance, a serious illness could devastate the capacity of families to support themselves; well into the twentieth century sickness and accidents remained prime causes of poverty.

The working poor, ubiquitous in towns and cities before World War II, became less common as economic growth and trade unions fueled rising wages. By the 1980s, however, as real wages declined, their numbers had started to grow once again. Among families with children and an unemployed household head, the poverty rate rose by nearly half—7.7 percent to 11.4 percent—from 1977 to 1993. In the late twentieth century, chronic joblessness also became a new and widespread source of poverty. As manufacturing disappeared from cities, many people found themselves more or less permanently out of the regular labor force, a problem prevalent especially among young black men. Many had not worked in the regular labor market for a long time, if at all, and their prospects for steady, remunerative work remained dim. With neither jobs nor public assistance sufficient to lift them out of poverty, chronic joblessness defined a large, new component of urban poverty.

Throughout American history, poverty has displayed a rural as well as an urban face. In rural areas, low wages, soil exhaustion, the exploitation of sharecroppers and miners, declining prices of farm commodities, and natural disasters all promoted poverty. Rural poverty in southern Appalachia initially inspired the War on Poverty in the early 1960s and the redesign and vast expansion of the food‐stamp program a few years later. Although rural poverty persisted, by the 1970s public attention focused more on urban poverty, especially the concentration and persistence of poverty in inner cities. The number of city census tracts where the rate of poverty reached 20 to 40 percent increased alarmingly in northern and midwestern cities during the 1970s; in the 1980s it spread to cities in the South and West as well. In the nation as a whole, the number of census tracts with a population at least 40 percent poor rose 50.1 percent in the 1970s and 54.3 percent in the 1980s.

From the early Colonial Era, public authorities grappled with poverty. Colonial poor laws initially followed British precedents, which included outdoor relief—that is, aid to people outside institutions. Although widely condemned, outdoor relief remained a staple of public policy throughout American history. In the late twentieth century, state‐level outdoor relief was called “general assistance” (or something similar); at the federal level, it became Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamps, Supplemental Social Insurance, or, simply, what most Americans called “welfare.” Public authorities also built institutions for the poor, including alms houses (which, by the early twentieth century, largely had become public old‐age homes), hospitals, dispensaries, and orphanages. This combination of outdoor relief and institutional support kept public spending on poverty high and contentious.

Private Charity and Governmental Responses.

A myriad of voluntary associations and private charities also responded to poverty with direct relief, institutions, and advice for the poor. Through the charity organization movement, which flourished in the 1870s and 1880s, private philanthropy unsuccessfully attempted to abolish outdoor relief and rationalize charitable giving across the country. Private charity and voluntary associations never proved capable of meeting the needs of America's poor. Economic depressions—such as the depression of 1893–1896 and the Great Depression of the 1930s—only underlined the limits of the voluntarist approach. Nonetheless, private organizations played an indispensable role in the nation's response to destitution, less as an alternative to government than as a partner. Because all levels of government have always depended on the private sector to operate services or institutions with public money, America's response to poverty has rested on a mixed economy.

The major federal government response to poverty began with the New Deal Era of the 1930s. For the first time in American history, the federal government provided direct relief—initially through short‐term measures such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Civilian Works Administration. Of more lasting importance were the Economic Security Act of 1935 (often called the Social Security Act), which instituted unemployment insurance, old‐age insurance, and aid to dependent children; the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulated working conditions; and the Wagner Act, which established labor's right to bargain collectively. In the 1960s, influenced by Michael Harrington's pathbreaking book The Other America (1962), the federal government extended its antipoverty efforts through President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, whose programs, notably Operation Headstart and Legal Services, attempted to expand and equalize opportunities and to empower poor people through community action. The Great Society programs of the same era expanded social security and other income‐related programs, increased public housing, and with Medicare and Medicaid created the first national health insurance. These programs reduced poverty, hunger, and substandard housing and extended health care to millions.

Though poverty arises mainly from objective factors, as we have seen, public discussions often trace it to moral failure or flaws in individual character. Since the early nineteenth century, discussions of poverty have stressed a distinction between the deserving and undeserving, or the worthy and unworthy, poor. Although contradicted by empirical evidence, this moral definition has retained a powerful hold on the way issues of poverty have been addressed in America. In the 1870s, it legitimated attempts to abolish outdoor relief; in the 1980s and 1990s, it helped justify reductions in public benefits and the passage of a federal welfare bill that ended the poorest Americans’ entitlement to public assistance.

The 1980s and 1990s proved years of paradox. Homelessness increased (sometimes related to problems of addiction or mental illness); poverty was endemic in many inner‐city districts; the share of children living in poverty increased; factory jobs declined, diminishing the prospects of unskilled or poorly educated youth, especially in the inner cities. Yet, public policy rested increasingly on market models that emphasized individual rather than social responsibility. Federal, state, and local governments redesigned programs by reducing funding, tightening eligibility standards for public assistance, and emphasizing sanctions intended to force the dependent poor into the workforce. At the century's end, were there enough jobs to substitute work for welfare? Would forcing individuals to accept responsibility for their fate motivate them to improve their lives? Answers to these questions promised to reconfigure poverty once again and profoundly affect American society in the twenty‐first century.
See also Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse; Cotton Industry; Drugs, Illicit; Homelessness and Vagrancy; How the Other Half Lives; Immigration; Individualism; Industrial Diseases and Hazards; Laissez‐faire; Migratory Agricultural Workers; National Labor Relations Act; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Racism; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Sixties, The; Slums; Social Class; Wagner, Robert F.; Welfare, Federal; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Charles Loring Brace , The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years Work among Them, 1872.
Jacob A. Riis , How the Other Half Lives, 1890.
Robert Hunter , Poverty, 1904.
Raymond A. Mohl , Poverty in New York, 1783–1825, 1971.
Michael B. Katz , The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare, 1989.
Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, 1993.
James Patterson , America's Struggle against Poverty 1900–1994, 1994.
William Julius Wilson , When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, 1996.

Michael B. Katz