POVERTY

For nearly two centuries Americans have struggled to understand and assist the poor. Unfortunately, the ongoing discussion of poverty has done relatively little to solve the problem. In the nineteenth century one did not have to look far into America's major cities to see evidence of rampant poverty and its negative effects. Both in the public square and in varied publications, questions were posed and debated: Were the poor a degenerate breed beyond help? Was poverty a moral or social crisis? Should the poor be helped or taught to help themselves? Who was to blame for the poor? What types of aid and poverty reform should be instituted? Could poverty be reduced or eliminated? Competing attitudes about the fate of America's poor both contributed to and complicated reform efforts of the time. While many agreed that aid and reform were needed, there was less agreement about what those aid and reform measures should be.

ENDURING QUESTIONS

The nineteenth century debate over the poor was generally divided into two main camps: those who perceived the poor as lazy, feckless, genetically inferior impediments to social progress and those who perceived the poor as materially disadvantaged victims. Members of the former group included Social Darwinists, immigrant restrictionists and exclusionists, nativists, and others, including many apathetic members of the upper class who believed that social reform and assimilation of the lower classes were not only dangerous endeavors but also futile. Of those who noticed the poor at all, some found it easier to dehumanize, objectify, and demean them with various epithets: "Brutes," "Savages," "the Underclass," "the Lower Orders," "Wretches," "Waifs," "the Lumpen Proletariat," and "the Dangerous Classes." Others more benevolent toward the poor believed what history would show—that the poor were particularly subject to and victimized by their environment, hard luck, discrimination, and systematic economic hardships, evidenced most dramatically by a series of depressions experienced in

America in the latter parts of the nineteenth century. Those seeking help for America's poor included members of various reform groups, including settlement and Christian charity organizations, that believed reform and social assimilation were possible and crucial if America's poor were to survive.

Unfortunately, American reform efforts in the nineteenth century were hindered by divisiveness, a lack of resources, apathy, and a lack of imagination. For many, poverty and welfare were perceived as moral problems for which the cures were the mission or the asylum, particularly if the sufferers were male. From 1810 to 1850, America saw its public aid for the poor reduced and hostility toward them increased. By the middle of the century many were leery of assisting the poor at all. Taking a cue from the English political economist Thomas Malthus and his Essay on Population (1798), some Americans advocated abstinence and welfare reduction for the poor, believing that welfare equaled dependence. In Philadelphia the Union Benevolent Association (UBA) was formed, and necessities such as food and fuel were given to the poor in the place of monetary assistance. By mid-century aid was expanded, and Protestant and Catholic charity organizations vigorously competed for the poor in order to evangelize them. Bible societies, tract societies, moral-control societies (such as those supported by the temperance preacher Lyman Beecher), and single-issue crusades (such as prostitution reform) proliferated, as did Sunday schools and paternalistic societies (such as the new industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts, conceived as a controlled Utopia for workers). New reform organizations appeared: the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Children's Aid Society of New York (founded and supported by Charles Loring Brace), and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Harriet Beecher Stowe published We and Our Neighbors in 1873 to show how the church could positively influence behavior and help regulate American society and its moral awareness. But in the wake of the Civil War, Social Darwinist theories flourished, placing the blame on the poor themselves and furthering the idea that welfare only hindered the process of natural selection. Among those reluctant to help the mostly immigrant poor were people like Josiah Strong (1847–1916), author of the 1885 best-seller Our Country and a leading figure in the Evangelical Alliance of Protestant Ministers. Strong adamantly believed that immigration caused criminality and pauperism and that the mixing of cultures via assimilation would debase the culture and the bloodlines of all true "Americans." Speaking in an 1883 Senate hearing, the iron foundry proprietor and wealthy capitalist John Roach (1813–1887) argued that the poor were responsible for their own poverty.

Toward the end of the century, society's understanding of the poor began to change, and for the first time in America, poverty was perceived as complex, systematic, and profoundly economic. In Chicago in 1889 Jane Addams opened Hull-House, which quickly became one of America's most prominent and effective settlement houses. In her Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Addams would directly challenge Strong and Roach, as well as the most-fit philosophy of other America's capitalists like Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), author of The Gospel of Wealth (1900). Addams's response to Strong, Carnegie, and others was that environment, not heredity, was the leading cause of social problems; that the classes were dependent on each other; that open dialogue among all citizens was necessary; and that every citizen had the right and the capacity to join in this dialogue. In chapter 6 of Hull-House, in which she discusses a speech she delivered in 1892 at the School of Applied Ethics Conference, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," Addams writes: "The Settlement, then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by modern conditions of life in a great city. . . . It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race" (p. 95). The efforts of Addams and other reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would help usher in the Progressive Era.

THE OTHER HALF

For many during the latter half of the nineteenth century the question was: Could America's major cities handle unprecedented growth and still meet the needs of all its citizens, regardless of economic status or skin color? If America was going to meet the needs of its citizens, it had to recognize them first, for better or worse. Jacob Riis (1849–1914), journalist, writer, and social reformer, believed that poverty could and must be managed and that America's poor, those he came to call "the other half" in his most famous work, How the Other Half Lives (1890), needed to be seen and heard. An immigrant who arrived in America from Denmark in 1870, Riis embodied the American success story. His Horatio Alger–like rise from immigrant carpenter, to middle-class reporter, to author of note was remarkable yet not unique. Moreover, Riis arrived in New York at a time of great growth and opportunity. Within a decade of his arrival, Americans would see remarkable advances during its so-called Gilded Age, including the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Statue of Liberty (1886) and the founding of the American Federation of Labor (1886).

By the end of the nineteenth century, America would also experience growing pains and face sobering realities: the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the hanging of the Chicago Haymarket anarchists (1886) coincided with the perfection of the machine gun and the first use of the electric chair (1890). Immigration trends were shifting, as a largely Protestant influx from northwestern Europe was replaced by a dominantly Catholic and Jewish presence originating from southeastern Europe. On the West Coast the Chinese American population was growing yet still feeling the dehumanizing effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act—reverberations that would last well into the twentieth century. Edith Maud Eaton (pen name Sui Sin Far, 1865–1914), was among the first to write in defense of Chinese immigrants victimized in a so-called land of opportunity. In "The Land of the Free," for example, a story from her 1912 collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, customs agents take Lae Choo's son away for lack of proper paperwork. Eaton writes, "Thus was the law of the land complied with" (p. 1673). This tremendous growth resulting from immigration would not be stemmed until the 1924 War and Immigration Act.

During this dramatic growth of the urban poor and on the heels of ineffective tenement laws (initiated in 1867, revised in 1879 and 1887), Riis, who was influenced by the builder and reformer Alfred T. White, began to investigate the connections between urban poverty in New York City and its tenement housing. Innovatively using the latest technology, flash photography and the stereopticon or "magic lantern," Riis would radically alter the way Americans viewed the poor. In his 25 January 1888 lecture, titled "The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York," Riis graphically (and, some critics argue, sensationally) showed Americans the squalor and sordidness of the urban tenement. Riis believed that in the tenement houses "all the influences make for evil" (How the Other Half Lives, p. 60). With the publication of How the Other Half Lives (which went through eleven editions in five years) and The Battle with the Slum (1902), Riis not only solidified his reputation as social reformer and significant nineteenth-century author, but he also revealed to Americans a new frontier, the urban slum. Fifty years earlier, E. Z. C. Judson's (Ned Buntline) dime novel The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848) had sensationally shown America's inner-city squalor in notoriously poor places like New York's Five Points district and the Bend, described by Riis as "the home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker" (How the Other Half Lives, p. 96). Other writers in the late nineteenth century, such as Helen Campbell, author of Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1892), would continue to creatively and graphically depict what Riis's photographs showed. Riis's point in How the Other Half Lives is simple and direct: "What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day" (How the Other Half Lives, p. 61).

Stephen Crane (1871–1900), in his short story "Experiment in Misery" (1894), follows Riis's suggestion about tenements: "Suppose we look into one" (How the Other Half Lives, p. 88). In this journalistic piece turned short story, Crane follows a youth who finds his way by bad luck and fate into New York's Bowery. "Experiment" begins with Crane's description of the youth wandering alone at night, "clothed in an aged and tattered suit . . . going forth to eat as a wanderer may eat, and sleep as the homeless sleep" (p. 83). Soon, the youth finds his place in Chatham Square among the other bums and hobos; he is among "aimless men strewn in front of saloons and lodging houses, standing sadly, patiently, reminding one vaguely of the attitudes of chickens in a storm" (p. 84). Along with these miserable sights, Crane provides the horrid smells. The youth is led into a dark tenement and is overtaken by "strange and unspeakable odors that assailed him like malignant diseases with wings" (p. 88). He sees for himself the building's innards, human contents depicted in the waning evening light as a graveyard of the living, "statuesque, carven, dead" (p. 89). Crane's point in "Experiment" is profound: to contrast the poor (men, in this case) as they are perceived—full of "bumps and deficiencies of all kinds" (p. 91)—with the poor as they are, human beings, "standing massively like chiefs" (p. 91) in the morning light. Crane's "Experiment" demonstrates how little society knows of the poor. "It did not know because it did not care" (Riis, How the Other Half Lives, p. 59).

THE AMERICAN DREAM AND ITS REALITY

As Riis, Campbell, Crane, and others showed America its darker underside, its unseen other half, more Americans were beginning slowly to understand themselves in relation to the poor. Specifically, by the turn of the century, Americans could see that widespread poverty, with its urban slums, and later urban ghettos, was the tangible result not only of apathy, ignorance, and misperception but also of more readily visible economic and social factors as well, such as widespread industrialization, rampant capitalism, technological advances, and destructive social attitudes that were leading to blatant discrimination and systematic segregation of the lower classes. Americans had already had an opportunity to see the truth of the country's unequal conditions in the work of a French-born visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to America in the 1830s to study its prison system. Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835) remains a profound and penetrating critique of American democracy and American society in general. In his chapter titled "Equality Suggests to the American the Idea of Indefinite Perfectibility in Man," Tocqueville challenges the idea of equality in America, warning that it, like perfectibility, is a falsehood, an "always fugitive perception that presents itself to the human mind" (p. 157), yet is never fully realized. Near the end of the century, following the failed Reconstruction and failed promises for equality and opportunity, many of America's disenfranchised classes were all too willing to concede Tocqueville's point. Despite Americans' idealistic belief in democracy, equality, and the American Dream, Riis and others had a less-optimistic story to tell.

America's rapid growth in the latter half of the nineteenth century came with a heavy price, as many Americans found themselves lost in a society that provided great opportunity and wealth for some and extreme hardship for many. In his short story "A Deal in Wheat" (1902), Frank Norris shows through his central character, the Kansas farmer Sam Lewiston, the unfortunate fate of many who left farming for the cities as a result of necessity, only to find few prospects awaiting them. Norris's story is an overwhelmingly pessimistic tale in which Lewiston's situation is portrayed as particularly sinister because he fails to realize that his fate is in the hands of two corrupt Chicago capitalists, indifferent and powerful financiers—Truslow, the commodities bear, and Hornung, the bull—who control the price of grain going in and out of Chicago and thereby control Sam. "It's the Chicago price that does it, Lewiston. Truslow is bearing the stuff for all he's worth. It's Truslow and the bear clique that stick the knife to us" (p. 875), states the apologetic Kansas grain buyer, Bridges, to the flabbergasted Sam, who finds that his wheat is worth only sixty-two cents a bushel. Dismayed and without prospects, Sam moves to the city, where his downward movement is vividly described by Norris: "Thrown out of work, Lewiston drifted aimlessly . . . till at last the ooze of the lowest bottom dragged at his feet and the rush of the great ebb went over him and engulfed him and shut him out from the light, and the park bench became his home and the 'bread line' his chief makeshift of existence" (pp. 880–881). The final cruel irony for Sam is that his spiral into poverty leads him to a breadline that can no longer afford to give out its day-old remains because the price of wheat (now selling for an unheard-of two dollars a bushel) is too high. Sam survives, remarkably, but Norris makes it clear that among the poor and destitute in the latter half of the nineteenth century, mere cogs in a society that neither knows nor cares about them, Sam is one of the lucky few.

ENVIRONMENT AND THE POOR: PARADOX AND PROSPECTUS

For some, the correlation between environment and social condition was key in determining why the poor were poor: Did a deficient environment lead to degradation and potentially destructive behavior? Did indecent homes produce indecent lives? Did the poor create their environment, or did their environment create the poor? For many, the situation of the poor presented a paradox, and the best way to help them was anything but clear. As the critic David Ward adeptly puts it, "On the one hand, the limitations of the slums obstructed the self-improvement of their residents, but on the other hand, the hereditarian and cultural disabilities of residents inhibited their capacity for self-improvement" (p. 146). In Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Crane explores the underworld of the Bowery, examines questions of cause and effect, and undermines the belief that the poor can improve themselves. Maggie's world of the Bowery is cruel and indifferent, a world in which death and life are parceled out in matter-of-fact sentences: "The babe, Tommie, died. He went away in an insignificant coffin, his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, Maggie, had stolen from an Italian. She and Jimmie lived" (p. 15). Although one is later told that "The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be the most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl" (p. 20), Crane's praise is cynical and ironic. There is little to believe in regarding Maggie's prospects as one of America's many poor and disenfranchised souls. Maggie is shown to be a product of her environment, but by the end of the nineteenth century, it was generally agreed upon that America's slums and their inhabitants were a consequence rather than a cause of poverty.

For others, the poor were simply not human and therefore not worthy of consideration, time, or money; they were simply brutes, incapable of reform despite a democratic America inclined toward a belief in human and societal perfectibility. In his Vandover and the Brute (an experimental novel, written early in his career but published posthumously, in 1914), Norris shows mankind as a complex animal, often controlled by its baser nature. Vandover, son of a wealthy owner of slum properties, is portrayed as all too vulnerable to his own desires and to all the negative influences of San Francisco in the 1890s. As a result, he regresses, actually moving backward on the evolutionary scale. Moreover, Norris seems directly to challenge Tocqueville, who writes in Democracy in America, "Although man has many points of resemblance with the brutes, one trait is peculiar to himself—he improves: they are incapable of improvement" (p. 156). Vandover tells a different story, one in which his transformation works in reverse; his "improvement" results in his utter decline, and his degeneration is a strong corrective to the American ideal of self-improvement and moral and social progress.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) would also use literature to investigate the effects of society on mankind, particularly on people of color, those labeled the lowly. In his novel The Sport of the Gods (1902), Dunbar introduces us to the Hamiltons, a black family caught in the middle between black and white society, the North and the South, social and racial discrimination. In chapter 14, "Frankenstein," Joe Hamilton succumbs to the pressures of his situation, his cruel fate, and the decadence of New York City, where the Hamiltons have relocated after the head of the family, Berry, has been imprisoned for allegedly stealing from his former employer in the South. A victim of social, racial, and economic circumstances, Joe degenerates into something less than human. Dunbar writes: "Five years is but a short time in the life of a man, and yet many things may happen therein. For instance, the whole way of a family's life may be changed. Good natures may be made into bad ones and out of a soul of faith grow a spirit of unbelief" (p. 113). Later in chapter 14 the incredulous and powerless Joe searches for answers, and he seeks to lay blame for his decline, desperately telling Hattie Sterling that he has been victimized: "'You put me out—you—you, and made me what I am.' The realisation of what he was, of his foulness and degradation, seemed just to have come to him fully. 'You made me what I am, and you sent me away'" (p. 119). Dunbar's work anticipates what modern critics more fully understand, that "poverty abides no line drawn by color or culture" (Jones, p. 1).

Historically unrecognized, the plight of America's poor was given visibility in the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questions posed then are enduring, as they speak to modern society's need to pay attention to the poor lest it drown in their misery. As America continues to seek ways to meet the needs of its poor and disenfranchised citizens, poverty remains an issue full of questions and controversies—and divergent perspectives, attitudes, and responses.

see alsoCity Dwellers; Health and Medicine; Reform; Socialism; Tramps and Hobos; Wealth

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. 1910. Edited by Victoria Bissell Brown. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and Other Stories. 1893. Edited by Alfred Kazin. New York: Signet, 1991. Includes "Experiment."

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. 1902. New York: Signet, 1999.

Eaton, Edith Maud. "In the Land of the Free." 1912. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, concise ed., edited by Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Norris, Frank. "A Deal in Wheat." 1902. In Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, Realism to the Present, 4th ed., edited by George McMichael. New York: Macmillan, 1989.

Riis, Jacob A. The Battle with the Slum. New York: Macmillan, 1902.

Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives. 1890. Edited by David Leviatin. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1996.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. Edited by Richard D. Heffner. New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1956, 1984.

Secondary Works

Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Jones, Jacqueline. The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present. New York: Basic, 1992.

Ward, David. Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Chad Rohman