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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (June, 2001)
Alice O'Connor. _Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social
Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History_.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xi + 373 pp.
Notes and index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-691-00917-1.
Reviewed for H-Pol by Edward Berkowitz <[log in to unmask]>, Department
of History, George Washington University
A Wealth of Knowledge about Poverty
The Office of Economic Opportunity may have died a bureaucratic
death and had its parts distributed to other agencies, but the
research effort it spawned survived to influence the next round
of poverty politics. Instead of the poverty warriors who headed
one branch of the Office and engaged in community action, the
true winners of the poverty wars were economists who wanted to
test the results of social action on the poor. It was, after
all, the economists who planned the initial stages of the war on
poverty and gained presidential approval of poverty legislation.
Only at the last minute did these economists lose control over
the legislative agenda to an eclectic group of foundation
officers and veterans of social action who advocated what came
to be known as community action. The economists had always seen
poverty legislation as an avenue for policy evaluation and
research. Hence, it seemed natural to them to test what had
become their ultimate policy proposal: a guaranteed income that
would be paid both to the working and the non-working poor, to
families headed by women and to "intact" families that contained
both a father and a mother living at home. In a remarkable
development, the economists secured approval to conduct one of
the largest social experiments in the nation's history, the
negative income tax experiments.
The results were, at best, ambiguous, but, as an exercise in
microeconomics, they reinforced the idea that the problem of
poverty was one of labor supply. If one could remove the
barriers to labor force participation on the part of the poor,
then the labor market would do its benevolent work and lift
people out of poverty. This rational view of poverty
complemented, rather than contradicted, another view that had
been developed in post-war academia that focused on the
psychological dynamics of families. Families trapped in a
culture of poverty needed personal services to break the
debilitating cycle.
In the end, the poor got neither a guaranteed annual income or
much in the way of social services. Instead they received an
open-ended invitation to pull themselves out of poverty and join
the middle-class, a result to be achieved not through government
action but rather through government inaction.
For Alice O'Connor the story of postwar poverty knowledge is
therefore a mournful one in which, at base, poverty researchers
found the poor themselves -- rather than the larger society that
surrounded the poor -- to be at fault. They believed that the
true causes of poverty lay in the deficiencies of poor families,
poor communities, or poor individuals, rather than in the
institutionalized systems of patriarchy, racism, or capitalism
itself. Despite the sophistication of econometric and
psychological research, the poverty industry succeeded, at base,
in repauperizing the poor. It was nineteenth century morality
with better numbers. Politically it was easier to end welfare
and throw the poor on the mercy of the labor market than to end
the pernicious, deeply rooted practices that kept the poor in
poverty.
To be sure, the author tells her story with considerably more
nuance, style, and historical range than I can impart here. The
book consists of an intellectual history survey of research on
poverty from the progressive era to the present. It begins with
the researchers associated with Hull House combing the streets
of the neighborhood around Halstead Street and codifying the
results in a series of maps and essays that showed just how
impersonal and unforgiving the factors causing poverty were.
These were amateurs in an age before academic specialization,
women rather than men, and these were people who had a Victorian
sense of optimism that facts would lead irresistibly to action.
In the 1920s and 1930s academics, credentialed by doctorates
rather than social standing and who tended to be men rather than
women, turned social action of the Hull House type into
sociology. As the point of view in policy studies expanded from
the neighborhood to the city, researchers tended to distance
themselves from the poor. What before was a matter of moral
outrage became at the hands of the sociologists a more
biological and hence immutable phenomenon, as suggested by the
use of the term "ecology" as an organizational scheme for the
city.
Sociologists gave way to anthropologists who studied the poor in
a city as they might a group of natives on a remote South Sea
island. Although many of these researchers brought a sense of
compassion with them to places like Muncie, Indiana, they
produced work that was better read as a chronicle of change over
time rather than as a critique of the institutions that
impoverished the residents. To be sure, the Lynds returned to
Middletown and worried about the relief arrangements being made
for the victims of the depression, but many of their colleagues
maintained their distance from the social phenomena under study.
To do otherwise would contaminate the results.
In the postwar era, it became a matter of national obligation,
at least in elite circles, to celebrate the munificence of the
capitalist system and the appropriateness of the nuclear family.
As a consequence, those who were immune to the social uplift of
capitalism or who lived outside of a nuclear arrangement were
somehow deficient. Anthropology joined with psychology to
explain how it was that such people lived in a self-reinforcing
culture of poverty. In the literature of the 1950s, poverty was
often portrayed as an isolated phenomenon, an island of
dysfunction in a supremely functioning society that brought
plenty to those that followed the rules. In a return to the
optimism of the progressive era, poverty became a source of
national waste that inhibited societal productivity and showed
America off to bad advantage in the cold war. A view developed
that poverty, like the diseases that were succumbing to medical
research, could be cured, if only social policy experts were
accorded the dignity of doctors and allowed to operate on the
poor. The prescriptions made by these experts were soon written
into the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.
Complications quickly ensued. The political system could
translate the ideas of experts only imperfectly. The ideas of
the human capital economists, for example, that the nation
needed to invest more in education and training, led to the Job
Corps, but as an institutional arrangement the Job Corps left
much to be desired. It was difficult to reprise the Civilian
Conservation Corps and bring young urban residents to isolated
locations and prepare them for the world of work. The line
between imparting human capital and simply maintaining
discipline was a difficult one to draw. Furthermore, the war on
poverty, planned largely outside of the concern for civil
rights, quickly became caught up in the civil rights battles of
the era. The link between race and poverty was always a
politically contentious one, particularly since the national
ideology did not include racism as an important component. In
the absence of racism as a cause, the association of race and
poverty was difficult to explain without attributing some sort
of deficit to African-Americans. When flamboyant academics like
Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified this deficit as a deficiency
in family structure, contentious culture wars developed that
threatened to upend the whole anti-poverty enterprise.
Politicians turned to racially neutral schemes -- a logical
impossibility in O'Connor's view -- which left many
African-Americans impoverished.
The war on poverty, reinforced by its own sophisticated
research, all too easily became a war on the poor. Instead of
facing up to the nation's shortcomings or attempting deep
structural changes in the nature of the system, policymakers
instead turned to superficial remedies that were reinforced by
the results of poverty research.
I emphasize again that the author adds much to this story that I
cannot detail here. The book includes, for example, insightful
readings of rural sociological studies produced at the
University of North Carolina, William E. B. DuBois's landmark
study of conditions in Philadelphia, and the econometric
research of the Urban Institute and the Institute for Research
on Poverty at Wisconsin. As Michael Katz, a historian who has
written on these matters, notes on the dustjacket blurb, "Alice
O'Connor knows more about the social science literature on
poverty than any other historian in America." It is difficult
to disagree.
Inevitably, despite her considerable skepticism about the
efficacy of poverty research, the author gets swept up in her
sources. As an exercise in intellectual history, the book
occasionally loses track of political developments. I found it
somewhat difficult to follow O'Connor's accounts of the
launching of the war on poverty, the Moynihan report, or the
recent Clinton welfare reform legislation, largely because the
author simply assumes that the reader has a political narrative
in mind that can be brought to bear on the more esoteric
knowledge that she presents. It leads to a number of missteps,
as in the statement (p. 152) that, "By early 1963 the poverty
issue was becoming hard for the administration to ignore." On
the contrary, it figured little in the politics of the moment
and could easily have been ignored. A striking fact about the
war on poverty was how little demand for political action
preceded it. In discussing the welfare reforms of the Carter
era, the author notes the animosity between the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare and the Department of Labor. More
of a political history perspective might have enabled her to
observe that this inter-departmental rivalry did not begin
there; it could be traced back to the passage of the Social
Security Act in 1935. As companions to this book, therefore, I
suggest works that fill in the political back-story, such as
James Patterson's _America's Struggle Against Poverty_ or
Michael Katz's _The Undeserving Poor_. Readers might also want
to take a look at a basic history of welfare, such as Gilbert
Steiner's _The State of Welfare_ before attempting to read this
book.
There is also a level of abstraction and of qualification and
nuance in the book that makes for difficult reading. Part of
the problem for the reader is that abstract ideas often serve as
the subjects of sentences. "The new poverty knowledge was not
without moral judgment," the author writes (p. 26), making it
hard for the reader to keep track of the narrative, if not the
argument. Sometimes, too, the author just tries to pack too
much meaning into a sentence that is already hard to understand:
"But equally important to the argument was a commitment to a
largely unquestioned cultural ideal that even at the time had
come under criticism for being overly individualistic,
achievement-oriented, mired in the materialism of consumer
capitalism, and, although couched in terms of a color-blind
society, essentially white" (p. 202). Sometimes the prose is so
nuanced, the clauses so serpentine, that the result reads like
the prose of Henry James: "Underlying this struggle was an
artificial, unspoken yet deeply institutionalized hierarchy of
knowledge that made the SSRC keeper of what was the 'basic' or
'scientific' as distinct from MDRC and Urban Institute-style
'applied' or 'policy-relevant' research on the one hand, and on
the other from what could be learned from living and/or working
in urban neighborhoods -- which academic social science had no way
of recognizing as knowledge at all" (p. 281). The editor did
not help the author by including so many long sentences and in
editing the book so that it contains a series of long
paragraphs. The reader needs more of a break from the book's
intellectual intensity than the editor provides.
If this criticism can be dismissed as a matter of preference,
so, too, can another more fundamental objection that might be
raised. The author simply assumes that America is a racist and
sexist society that lacks the necessary political will to end
poverty. As a consequence, the research that the book describes
does not challenge these conditions so much as it frames or
validates schemes for understanding poverty that ignore
America's bedrock inequalities. The tone of this critique is
similar to that found in Linda Gordon's influential _Pitied But
Not Entitled_.
Both this book and Gordon's book can be read as critiques of
liberalism and in particular as critiques of America's welfare
state. O'Connor notes, for example, that knowledge about
poverty is segmented, just as America's social welfare programs
are segmented between programs for "men and women, white and
nonwhite, and especially poor and nonpoor." Such programs are
divided between "universalistic, relatively more generous,
non-stigmatized programs" and "means-tested, ungenerous
'welfare' programs for the poor" (p. 57). Later we learn that
America's social welfare programs "routinely" (p. 102) left
farmers and other displaced workers without protection against
life's hardships. Single, nonwidowed mothers found themselves
at the mercy of an ungenerous, capricious Aid to Dependent
Children program at least until the 1960s. Even the more
generous programs, such as Social Security, failed to provide
the same level of benefits to non-whites as to whites. In
short, America's welfare state is deeply flawed along the fault
lines that divide whites and blacks, men and women, and the rich
and poor.
All of that may be true and is certainly true of particular
programs at particular points in time. Still, it consigns
liberal reform to the category of failure that should be
jettisoned when the opportunity for real reform comes along. I
wonder if such a view does justice to the achievements of a
program such as Social Security which even O'Connor admits has
been America's most effective anti-poverty program. Here is a
program that struggled in its first fifteen years and failed to
pay higher benefits or reach more people than welfare but that
grew to become one of the largest social welfare programs in the
world. It is a program that covers nearly everyone in the labor
force with a progressive benefit formula in which, to use the
rhetoric of political conservatives, the poor receive a far
higher return on their social security "investments" than do the
non-poor. It also includes a disability program and a survivors
program that disproportionately benefit non-whites, women, and
the poor. To be sure, it is not a panacea and perhaps we have
relied on it to solve too many of our social problems, but it
does show the efficacy of liberal reform. (That's why it is
such a target of conservative reformers like the present
President Bush). Maybe it is time to bring liberal reform back
into the narrative of America's welfare state.
I guess I am questioning the political wisdom of O'Connor's
analysis. In pointing out the flaws of America's welfare state,
the author, who is certainly not a conservative, only makes the
work of the conservatives in dismantling the welfare state
easier. That makes me uncomfortable, particularly when the
development of America's welfare state can be read in such a
different way.
Of course, I am taking the book in a direction that the author
does not intend. It is about ideas, not programs, and by
painting such a bleak picture of the research that supports our
anti-poverty enterprise, the author, it could be argued, is only
following the evidence where it leads her. But there are other
streams of evidence, other poverty researchers than the ones she
chronicles. One group, for example, saw a vital link between
ill health and poverty and tried to develop evidence to show a
connection between access to health care and poverty. This
group fought for things like national health insurance and
Medicare, with at least partial success. Analysts in the Social
Security Administration did research in the 1940s to demonstrate
the poverty of groups like sharecroppers in order to argue that
they required Social Security protection. Such researchers are
largely missing in this book.
Nonetheless, Michael Katz's point on the cover stands. This is
the definitive book on social science and poverty. This book
contains some strikingly original research and some provocative
findings on the development of poverty knowledge. A work of
great erudition, it represents a very impressive achievement. It
remains for those in the political history community to fill in
some of the links between the intellectual history presented
here and the more conventional narrative of twentieth century
political history and perhaps to tease out the political and
policy implications of this highly original work.
Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
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