About one-quarter (22 percent) of America’s children now live in poverty. Almost as many poor people live in the suburbs as in cities – a phenomenon that was unthinkable 50 years ago. In 2010, 46 million Americans – over 15 percent of the population – lived in poverty. Even Canada – which has a similar economy and distribution of wealth to the United States – has a much lower poverty rate and does not permit the level of sheer destitution and misery found in the United States, including hunger, slums and the growing army of homeless people sleeping on park benches and in vacant buildings.
Since the 1970s, the poverty rate has fluctuated, but has persistently been two or three times higher than in most European societies, which have much more generous social welfare policies and stronger labor unions. The nation’s poverty rate has never returned to the level Harrington described in “The Other America.” But Harrington lamented that the level of spending for antipoverty programs (less than 1 percent of the federal budget) was never sufficient to make a larger dent in the problem. If this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the other America a generation from now and it will be the same or worse.”
“The fate of the poor,” he concluded, “hangs upon the decision of the better-off. Once they become aware of the situation, Americans should be ashamed to live in a rich society with so many poor people. Harrington wrote that the poor were invisible to most Americans because they lived in rural isolation or in urban slums. Reporters and television talk-show hosts wanted to interview him. Harrington was soon in great demand as a speaker on college campuses, union halls and religious congregations. This slim, 186-page volume became a best-seller and became required reading for social scientists, elected officials, college students, members of study groups sponsored by churches and synagogues, reporters and intellectuals, the new wave of community organizers and the student activists who traveled to the South to join the civil rights crusade. Fifty years ago (in March 1962) Michael Harrington wrote a book, “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” – a haunting tour of deprivation in an affluent society – that inspired Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to wage a war on poverty.
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