The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives Read Online Free Page A

Poverty, did serve to limit hunger’s reach. In the early 1930s, when real per capita income in America had fallen by a third and when tens of millions of people had literally no income, New York City reported more than one hundred residents a year dying from hunger and related causes. 9 Elsewhere, similar tales of starvation could be easily found. In cities throughout the South, the unemployed received no assistance, 10 and around the country, soup kitchens were all that stood in the way of famine for those without work, without homes, and without incomes. By 1980, after decades in which the federal government had taken an ever more active role in both reducing the cost of food and in subsidizing food purchases for the poor, low-income Americans could access food stamps, WIC, free breakfast and lunch programs in schools, Meals-on-Wheels for the elderly, and a slew of other well-funded systems. “In a few years this nation basically eliminated hunger as a problem,” wrote the authors of the 1985 Harvard University School of Public Health–sponsored report Hunger in America , as they examined the extraordinary demise of hunger in the postwar period and bemoaned its woeful and entirely unnecessary reemergence during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “The success was relatively swift and not difficult to see,” they continued. “We have enough food to end hunger in this land. All that remains is the political will.” 11
    Johnson’s expanded safety net yielded results in other arena too. As recently as 1959, for example, upward of 35 percent of the elderly were living in poverty—much of it caused by high medical bills. Once Medicare was passed in the 1960s, however, that number plummeted. By the year 2000, the government was reporting that only 10 percent of the country’s elderly residents were living at or below the poverty line. 12
    The Progressive Era had introduced a number of workplace protections for Americans but had shied away from tackling broader conditions of hardship. The New Deal had begun to roll back poverty in America. The Great Society, of which Medicare for the elderly was a core part, set itself the peculiarly high ambition of actually ending it.
    From the presidential bully pulpit on down, national resources were mobilized in what President Johnson, in his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, would, with a somewhat utopian flourish, term a “War on Human Poverty.” This phrase was later improved upon by the deletion of the word “human.”
    Johnson, who had assumed the presidency a mere six weeks earlier, following John Kennedy’s assassination, urged Congress to think big and to think holistically.
    Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined; as the session which enacted the most far-reaching tax cut of our time; as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States; as the session which finally recognized the health needs of all our older citizens; as the session which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies; as the session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid program ever; and as the session which helped to build more homes, more schools, more libraries, and more hospitals than any single session of Congress in the history of our Republic. 13
    According to such a line of reasoning, science would render poverty and the tangled web of hardship associated with economic want as quaint, as obsolete, as the horse-drawn carriage.
    The speech ranks as one of the most ambitious State of the Union addresses ever delivered; it is worth quoting at length, for it represents one of the few times in American history that a president has so wholeheartedly prioritized the problems of the poor and the destitute:
    This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all