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

Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. $1,000 invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the state and the local level and must be supported and directed by state and local efforts. For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.
    The new president laid down a new measure of success: “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” For Johnson’s vice president, the liberal Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, the clarion call to defeat poverty marshaled all the can-do instincts of the American spirit. “We can afford it,” he wrote of the War on Poverty in the foreword to the 1965 book The Shame of a Nation , a collaborative effort between photographer George de Vincent and writer Philip Stern to chronicle the lives of America’s forgotten poor. “We have the wealth, the energy, yes, and the daring and imagination to defeat poverty in America, to relegate to the history books the sad and somber portraits in this volume.”

    It didn’t happen.
    Yes, Medicare and Medicaid expanded access to healthcare. Yes, an expanded food stamps program cut down hunger. Yes, job-training programs, drug rehabilitation clinics, and federal dollars for schoolsand housing all flooded into poor communities. But for all of the investments, poverty remained part of the national landscape. Some of the symptoms of poverty were indeed alleviated, yet the grand goal of the Great Society to actually eradicate poverty—to pull it up by the roots and erase all evidence of its existence—proved to be a bridge too far.
    Three years after Johnson had launched the War on Poverty, with the country’s attention largely having shifted to the war in Vietnam rather than the domestic “war,” Senator Robert Kennedy would tour the Mississippi Delta and be shocked to see barefoot, malnourished, sickly children living in shanties with no indoor plumbing. By early 1968, as Kennedy campaigned for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, his take on poverty’s unrelenting grip on much of America had gone from surprise to shuddering, incandescent horror.
    I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi—here in the United States—with a gross national product of $800 billion—I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven’t developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children, so that their lives are not destroyed, I don’t think that’s acceptable in the United States of America and I think we need a change.
    As the senator told an audience at the University of Kansas on March 18 of that year, “I have seen Indians living on their bare and meager reservations, with no jobs, with an unemployment rate of 80 percent, and with so little hope for the future, so little hope for the future that for young people, for young men and women in their teens, the greatest cause of death amongst them is suicide.”
    In full oratorical flight now, Kennedy continued, borrowing heavily from Harrington’s imagery of a few years earlier:
    I run for the presidency because I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed