Michael Harrington Describes Poverty in The Other America (1962)

talked of one factor which had supposedly disappeared 20 years ago: poverty in America. One who did speak out was author/journalist Michael Herrington. Here at the beginning of 1963, the holidays just over, most Americans have just known a time of good food, presents, and family. They probably think that's the way all Americans live. But it's not true. Because during these holidays just past, there were millions and even tens of millions of Americans who were poor, who were miserable, in body and in spirit. A lot of times we think that in these United States, the people all live and find brick stone elevator-type apartments with heat like some of the ones you've just seen. But actually very close to here, right over the hill, up that way, there are streets, we've been told of them by President Eisenhower's Civil Rights Commission that they are so dense, so packed

with human beings, that if the rest of America were like them, we could fit the entire population of the United States of America into three boroughs of New York. The tragic thing about this, in this 1963, is that many of us, and perhaps most of us who have known the good holiday season, don't know that these people exist. But once was a time in America, when the poor in a sense were our strength, when the poor were the immigrants, when the slums were teeming places, a people who were on the verge of hope, who were entering into the society. But now more and more, and this is the tragedy of poverty, 1963. More and more, the slums are not the waystations of hope for immigrants. They are prisons for people who are caught there. For example, they're the old people in the United States. Over half of them, about eight or nine million people, who are not only poor in income, but who are sick, who are living alone, who are frustrated, who are in neighborhoods that they don't understand. There are Negroes

in the United States. Negroes who work at 58% of the white wage. There are farm workers, there are workers in the coal fields whose jobs have been destroyed by automation. But perhaps most tragic of all to think about at the beginning of this new year, is the fact that the recent unemployment statistics indicate that most of that new unemployment comes from young people. That today, when a young person drops out of high school, when a young person doesn't have the skill and education that a society of automation requires, he probably doesn't have a chance for the rest of his life. The thing we have to think about today is that we may be for the first time in our history in the United States on the verge of having a hereditary poor, a permanent poor, and the real tragedy is that at this very moment where we have in our grasp with our technology, with our productivity, with our science, we have right there in our grasp the possibility of realizing men's immemorial dream, for the first time in history abolishing poverty, at this moment, perhaps we are creating

a hereditary poor. Let's take a look at the idea of the affluent society and the idea that everyone is well-