At Issue; 18; What Price Poverty

I have just about come to the conclusion that there's not very much help can be done for this section. I suppose that our children will grow up and just gradually drift away from here. They'll have to seek work elsewhere because there's no work here for them. I suppose the older people will just continue to settle down here and draw their checks and die here. My customers don't have money to spend for much foolishness and you don't see it in the shelf and they buy the necessities. Would you sell much meat? Well, in the volume of business, no, I don't and meat's pretty high. I think that if it is practical and possible to rehabilitate impoverished areas in Europe

and Asia and Africa, it is far more imperative that we aid impoverished areas within the fabric of our own country. National Educational Television presents At Issue, a commentary on events and people in the news. At Issue this week, what price poverty? An examination of the problems of poverty in America and the Johnson administration's proposals to mount a new campaign to eradicate it from the American landscape. Poverty is not a new problem, but for some years it seemed to have disappeared from our national conscience. Recently, interest in poverty was renewed by the publication of such books as The Other America by Michael Harrington.

Mr. Harrington tells of the history of poverty. In the 1800s and 30s, when the French aristocrat de Tocqueville came to the United States and wrote his famous book Democracy in America, the thing that impressed him about this society most of all was that there were no extremes, no poverty. It was for a European, a strange country, a country without the rich and without the poor. By the turn of the century that America had already vanished, immigration, vast masses pouring in from Europe, the growth of cities, the growth of the industrial system had changed. And in the first decade of the 20th century, the muck rakers, the progressive movement of social reformers, people like Jacob Rees and Jane Adams, discovered the other half, discovered an American society in which 50% of the people were now poor and miserable. And then a sense poverty wasn't an issue much from that time until the 1930s. And then it became an unavoidable political issue as the entire economy was in difficulty.

Franklin Roosevelt and a memorable phrase declared, I see one third of a nation ill-powered, ill-planned, ill-nourished. One might add, by present standards, he was talking about two-thirds of a nation. After World War II, a strange thing happened. Well, the first time you were not dealing with the other half, you were dealing with a society which was rich enough to have a minority poor. That minority poor was composed of those people who were immune to progress, who did not gain from the affluence. That minority poor, unlike the poor of the 1930s, was composed of people who did not register to vote and who did not have great political impact. And in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States, acclaimaxing a development which in a sense had begun under the late President Kennedy, once more put the issue of poverty to the American people declaring that 20% of our families are poor.

And this administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. And I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. My name is Lonzo Elkins, and I lived, you've been living here for the past 17 years. Then working in the coal mine about all my life, but for the last 18 or 19 years, I've been in the mines. I've got four kids in the moment in school, and it's pretty hard to try to keep them in school because I haven't managed to keep them in, but I'm out right now, and I don't

know. It looks like I've told them I was two or four, and I don't have no job, and I don't have no income whatsoever. And I don't know what I'm going to do, probably I can find job later, I don't know, until I do find one. I don't know what I'm going to do. Have you ever thought of leaving this country and looking for work elsewhere? Yes, I have, I don't know no trade, nothing only coal mine, and it's pretty hard for a coal mine to go up somewhere and get a job in a factory, plan or income, to tax stay here a week, that's why. Have you heard anything about this retraining program? I've heard of it, but I went down there, if iceberg wants to see them back to me, didn't work take me in, all right, go right and have any education. How much education do you have? Well, I went to the fourth grade. We asked Mrs. Alkins about her children.

Well, I really don't know, but I hope they do better than I've done, I mean, you know, in progress, and I hope that they can find a happier way of coming up to the family of their own if they get a family, to what we've had. With me and the husband, no education, when either one couldn't go out and get nothing, it's just slavery, and I don't want them to have something like that. They usually live on what we make by storing it away from when there is such as taters and beans, stuff like that, although I'm afraid I'm not going to make it through. This one are on what potatoes are raised. I really don't have nothing much for breakfast as far as having something. They don't go hungry, but I didn't know that terabadi stars for vitamins, because home can stuff, you know, there's no vitamins in it. I don't have any meat of whatever. No fats. I just barely get enough flour to fix their beans, taters, and braids, and it's really hard. It's tough on the people here in Kentucky. The poverty map of the United States could begin here in Appalachia, a mountainous area,

of very poor farmers, depressed industries, and unemployed coal miners. Then it would cut across the American South, again, an area of rural poverty with a particular emphasis on the Negro farm, poor. The edge of the South, merging into the Southwest, you would come to one of the great areas of the migrant workers, who annually trek from Texas, North through the wheat fields, all the way up to the Canadian border. And around the Canadian border, you would also find another important area of unemployed coal miners in the North. And finally, the third great area would be over here on the West Coast, starting on the Imperial Valley south of Los Angeles, moving up through the fields, the incredibly rich fields of the West Coast, and finally coming out in the archers of the Pacific Northwest, another area of the annual trek of misery of the migrant workers. Poverty is not just a rural problem.

It festers in the hearts of our cities. In Washington, social worker Harold Dance. The people that are living in these neighborhoods are people that have many needs that are not being met by the community. Many of them are without food, some are without jobs. Many have rents and arrears, and are hardly able to make it as we see making it today in this type of society. Since I've been working with Mr. neighborhood, I have found that a lot of the poverty is not outside any more like it used to be years ago, but now they have big, beautiful buildings, but we find that the people inside are still suffering from the same characteristics that made up poverty years ago, such as hunger, lack of employment, health problems, are constantly coming up, and we are trying to work with them in terms of being preventive, as well as helping in the present situation.

Well, I don't know what a living is a good word for it. I'd say it's more or less existing. Wilbert Cohen, Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, is one of the key planners in the poverty fight. Al Perlmutter talks to him about the role of education. If I had to enumerate one as the primary factor that causes poverty, it is lack of education. There's no question in my mind, but that a fundamental reason for most of poverty in the United States is the lack of educational attainment. In one of the studies that I did a couple of years ago on this, I found that two-thirds of the people I've found to be poor were people who had an eighth grade education or less, and a very substantial proportion of their parents had an eighth grade education or less, so that a key factor in poverty is lack of educational attainment and the lack of educational

attainment of their parents, the inability to be trained to meet the job and other requirements of our rather complex civilization. What will be the administration's main efforts to wage this offensive on poverty? The most important, in my opinion, is a enlarged and expanded vigorous program of elementary and secondary education, where a part of which will be directed toward focusing on these pockets of educational poverty, which I feel are the areas that transmit poverty from one generation to another, and by providing some federal funds into the localities to raise the whole educational level in these communities and in these neighborhoods, we can substantially reduce the incidence of poverty in the next decade or two. Sherman Meade, once a minor, teaches at the Middle Milestone School in eastern Kentucky.

There's three rooms. We have three teachers here at this school. It runs from one to eight. We have an enrollment at the present time of 73. We feed here approximately seven average of seven to a day, and we charge the child ten cents for lunch. If they don't know how to die, I'm going to make every effort to see that they get that lunch regardless. Now, today, they will be fed milk for their protein rich food. They'll get meatloaf for their vitamin C. They'll receive a boiled potato with a jacket on. They'll have whole kernel, yellow corn. They'll have cornbread. They'll have butter. They'll have applesauce and ice cream. This meal will constitute the most important meal that most of these children

will have during the day. I'm sure that a high percentage of them come out of the house without any breakfast at all in the morning. Now, you must know these kids pretty well. In your estimate, what percentage of them would you say have the chance of finishing high school? I'll make a guess at it. I'll guess ten percent. Ten percent. We'll finish high school. Why will so few finish? The financial need of the child, I would say, will be the greatest cause. But high school is supposed to be free public education. Yes, high schools are free, yet it requires the lunches and it requires clothes and things like that that some of these children will not be able to afford. Chairman of the economics department at Barnard College in New York, Robert Lecatchman,

he sees the need for drastic changes in our educational program. On education, it seems to me, we need to offer educational opportunity practically from the cradle to the grave, from nursery school to pre-mortuary, is really the appropriate educational opportunity. A person of 40, 45 should both have the opportunity to learn a new skill and employers should be willing to hire such people. This demands as much of a shift of attitude on the part of the employing sector of the community as it does on the part of the employee sector. I'm not a politician and I accept the verdict that it's a very astute political move. As an economic measure, I have my doubts, the amount is very small. This is not necessarily disastrous if it is recognized and stressed by the President that the amounts will rise

very significantly in coming years, but if the President continues the emphasis upon economy on thrift, on attacking poverty by measures which cost very little in themselves, I think that all of us are going to be in for a very disappointing experience. I think we're going to find that these programs are going to lead to very, very little amelioration of the conditions that they're designed to ameliorate. Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers Walter Heller, he was asked how President Johnson can cut the budget and at the same time appropriate new funds for the war on poverty. Well, he has stressed, and I think quite rightly, that there's no inconsistencies he puts it between frugality and compassion. What he has done in this year's budget and those of us who've worked with him closely on it have seen the process at close range and have been very much impressed with how successful he has used, successfully he has used the scalpel, so to speak, not the meat axe.

What he has done is to cut back those programs in the defense area, those programs in atomic energy, those programs in the space area which were either duplicative or in some cases wasteful, in some cases out of date, and taken these funds and put them into the poverty program. Eastern Kentucky has a massive poverty problem. There I would think that the proportion of federal resources to state, local and private would be higher. The iron range of northern Minnesota has a rather different kind of poverty problem, perhaps the proportion of resources would be different there, so I don't think this lends itself to an easy formula. And I believe that that's one of the major things that will be stressed in President Johnson's program is adapting the specific measures, focusing them in such a way that they fit the problems of a particular community, a particular area, because that's the only

way in which you're going to get an efficient use of funds and an effective use of funds. So that formulas, in this case, for the country as a whole, simply aren't going to work. It's got to be adapted to the particular problems of a particular area. I've cut mine in 48, and I got knocked out, and I ain't worked any other day since. I've got something wrong with men, I've been there for a hospital and around the country, and nothing they can do for me. How have you been able to manage, not working since 1948? None. I haven't been able to do anything since 1948, maybe where to 25th, that's the least. I drove so scaredy, I've been going here about six years now. Do what I love to say and do I do need, but I can't get it, so I'm just going to say more about it.

That was Frank Quellen, his son, George Quitt School, in the 7th grade. We asked him why. I really couldn't get my man on the bus, and why, but I wish I would own him now. You're 20 now, and you haven't found a job, and what do you think is going to happen to you in the future? Well, I think it's going to be rough, the way it looks, you know. We asked the youngest Quitt and how long he expects to stay in school. At least to your house, go, well, I doubt if I can go all the way, where it takes money. Harry Carl, a lawyer in White'sburg, Kentucky, is the author of Night Comes to the Comberlands, a history of the depressed Appalachia region. They thought for people believe that an authority, a patterned after the TVA, perhaps a southern mountain authority, and which would develop the water and cold resources of the region in a great electric power complex, offers the best hope for the region's rehabilitation.

For example, if a single male per kilowatt hour produced could be plowed back into the region, and if the region's potential could be fully developed, the revenue from such a public corporation would bring approximately $1 million annually to each East Kentucky County for internal development. I think that without this kind of long range and long sustained investment, the area can never hope to attract the industry or real capital investment from the outside. What are the chances for such a project? reporter Andy Stern talks with John Sweeney, assistant to Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., under Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the new Appalachia Regional Planning Commission. There's two problems here. One is that in order to create a TVA-type complex based on the sale of cold-generated power,

there's a tremendous subsidy necessary by the federal government in both the construction of the plant and in the foregoing of taxes that ordinarily commend from private industry. I think that the question you have to answer is whether that kind of a subsidy would do more for Appalachia than what we're proposing, namely of putting roads, dams, training schools in. I think our basis is that the first priority is the latter, namely the roads and the schools. Secondly, I happen to believe with David Lillianthal that the reason why there is no more TVAs has been proposed in the Columbia Valley and Missouri Valley and now in Appalachia is because TVA is an integrated government operation in which many of the functions of several government agencies are melded into one, TVA, bills, dams, constructs, access roads, etc., duties which are now undertaken, for example, by the Corps of Engineers, soil conservation service

and the creation of these new agencies has been resisted strenuously right here in Washington by the existing federal agencies and with the great deal of understanding as to why this has been resisted. Nevertheless, it would be a very difficult job to get it through the Congress. We've decided not to try and waste too much effort at the beginning but rather go on the roads and dams, etc. We're recommending a vast increase in public investment in specific facilities such as roads so that industry can get its products in and out so that recreation seekers can get in and out of the region of control of the water, which has been a tremendous problem throughout the Appalachian area, some new ways to utilize timber coal and agricultural land, which are the three great resources of the region, and forth an emphasis on upgrading the job skills in this area so that when industry does come in and look around and find that they can get in and out, they'll also find a labor market which can support their own

employment needs. Swedish economist Gunner Mertal has long been a student and critic of American society. He was interviewed while attending a Washington conference on poverty and plenty. Dr. Mertal, could you speculate on why there is the sudden renewed interest in poverty in America at this point? Well, I would find it more surprising that this movement didn't start much earlier. For the long time, we have had great pockets of poverty and recently we have had the great unemployment rise in quite for some time. That is the more remarkable thing, that I feel that we are now in a big movement. One of the great things that many about American nation is that now and then you have a revival, you have a change of mind, and I think, for instance, of the big change from isolationism to taking word responsibility, which happens in a few years.

I think we are in that type of change of American attitudes, and I'm not surprised that they take a little time to start. Why is it that America is so backward in so many of these areas while your country is not? Well, the reasons, of course, go far back in history. First, Americans have become accustomed to live with large segregated groups of poor people and have a sort of distant, not quite actual knowledge about their poverty. This is from the nigglass, from slavery. I mean, you have all the immigrants. You have the Indians and their reservations, and so on, which has made them accustomed to such feelings. Then, of course, you have the great inhibition of public expenditure. We have it in all countries, but I think you are a particular bad case. Of course, this is very much against development trends, because we are moving towards a society where there will be very much more of expenditure for collective use.

But most of these things must be furnished by government, because private industries cannot do it. I mean, you cannot ask the private industry to do it. I'm all for private enterprise, but I don't believe that private enterprise will be able to take care of these things, and so we are changing their value-meet certain inhibitions in America, which will be overcome. I know that the political system in America, the Congress, you have a number of elements of inertia, your seniority system for chairman and committees, et cetera, et cetera. But on the whole, Congress, I do believe, is very accurately reflecting public opinion among those who are voting. We must remember that the poor don't vote so much in America. The real business is to get the public opinion in America changed, and then you will see the Congress changing, too. Has the very rapid rate of growth in the United States in the last six months changed your generally pessimistic views that you expressed in challenger affluence?

Nobody assumes that this boom will last forever, even if it gets the extra impetus from the law of Texas. Nobody assumes that it will last more than part of this year or that the recession will come next year. And when it comes to the crest of the boom, I think a very clear thing is that unemployment rate is still to be very high, and when you get down a recession, it might raise to 7 and 8%. Confirming this thing, which we know, namely that the trend is to arising unemployment. Fundamental because of that, I don't think that a big change is done. On the other hand, of course, politically that is a change, because for the first time, the administration, the government is proposing a tax reduction to stimulate business, and even more than that, to prolong a boom. This is an absolutely extraordinary thing in American economics, and I think in moving

the right direction, away from the taboos of balanced budget, which, of course, politically means a difference, means that America will, in all probability, continue along this road. It's not a rapid advance you can have because to eradicate poverty and create employment is a long, long journey, which will take its time, but I think the politicians will find in Congress that poverty is a good election issue. Last man I worked for, he was paying us 12 hours a day, and we were loading three ton cars, and he told me that he wanted to lend them to 12 cars to go, and say, if a man didn't load that, he didn't stay there. And I told him that we couldn't load it, that we'd done loads of it good, we'd load eight, nine cars, and he said, we'd do it if we stayed there, and so, he'd know what I couldn't do it, and he laid me off, and practically all of mine ran there, and these

small truckmen, if you don't load them, they were 25, 30, and up to 40 ton of colds, you ain't got no job, they just cut you off on another man in place, and I came to load that much cold. Now I used to do the load, but I can't no more kill myself trying it, so you take a man that actually load cold like that, and don't have no mercy on you, it ain't much of a man to it, but I like it. Down in some lone valley, in a lone someplace, where the wild birds do whistle, and their notes do increase, they're well pretty serile, I've been you, I do, and I'll dream of pretty serile, wherever I go.

This is NET, National Educational Television. Poverty is not just a rural problem, it festers in the hearts of our cities.

In Washington, social worker Harold Dance. The people that are living in these neighborhoods are people that have many needs that are not being met by the community. National Educational Television presents dialogue on red China, and then pause a little bit, and this is NET, National Educational Television.