Poverty is a big subject and an area of policy which affects every part of the USA. It is not much known about but impossible to hide. The poor suffer it, the middle class and the rich pay taxes to relieve it but at the same time they have always sought measures to contain and neutralise the poor. These measures started with indentured labour in the eighteenth century and the poorhouse in the nineteenth; then in the twentieth century this approach was softened by the New Deal and there was a frontal assault on poverty with Johnson's Great Society. In recent years the wheel has begun to turn back. The emphasis is no longer on largesse from the federal government. We now have a harder regime. Benefits are meant to be a bridge to a job and a regular wage: a “hand up and not a handout”. In practice, this means forcibly reintegrating the dropouts from the labour force into the mainstream economy – but often on poverty wages. America has what is practically unknown in Western Europe, the “working poor”. Over 200 years, she has moved from Calvinistic severity through state welfare to something more austere, the concept of “workfare”.
The evolution of these policies contains a wealth of clues to the American character. In the early Republic they said that poverty was a judgement of God on the victim, that the poor man was one of life's failures, or that “demon rum” was the culprit; then that the poor were victims of the rich, or of a malfunctioning economic system; the poor were a blot on the face of a civilised nation, the poor were trapped in a culture of dependency, and (most recently) the poor must be forced back to work. These remarks are almost a commentary on American history as a whole.
Another interesting fault‐line is the contrast between public and private provision. Private charity has always fitted in well with America's age‐old mistrust of government. Whether it was the Charity Organisation Society, the Settlement Houses or Charles Loring Brace's foster homes, there has been a rich tapestry of private initiatives in welfare work – of varying degrees of quality and effectiveness. But frankly, when the Great Depression hit America, private charities were overwhelmed, their efforts dwarfed. Only the federal government with its great power and resources had the wherewithal to do the job. It has been there ever since.
The great exception to this had always been America's treatment of its military veterans. They have been a priority. After the Act of 1862 which authorised pensions for veterans and their widows and children, the costs of looking after the country's fighting men escalated hugely, from $15m to $86m in twenty‐five years. In 1890 Congress, not notably generous in expending public funds, liberalised the terms still further, putting the bill up to $250m. It did not want to see veterans in poorhouses – or in its own striking phrase, to be thrown back “on the frigid bosom of public charity”. But the coldness of the bosom was largely of its own making and many thousands of America's most wretched people experienced that “frigidity” at first hand, particularly during the economic downturn of the 1890s.
Jyotsna Sreenivasan has written almost 700 pages on poverty and she has written them in a wonderfully clear and readable way. On the verso of the title page she is referred to as the “editor” but in fact she researched and wrote the entire book alone, a detail I confirmed with Ms Sreenivasan herself. This is unusual for a lengthy reference book and it is an impressive feat of authorship. I do have some misgivings about the final result however.
Here is what the book looks like: first, the articles are listed in order of appearance and the preface brings together some of the key programs which the federal government has undertaken over the years; then we get several introductory essays on different welfare themes. These are followed by a 50‐page chronology. Then comes the meat of the book – the alphabetical sequence of articles, about 180 of them. They run from Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, to the Works Progress Administration.
The articles cover biographies (including a remarkable number on women), government programs like Head Start, topics like Child Abuse, laws like the G.I Bill, and movements like the Townsend Movement for old age pensions in the 1920s. Each entry ends with cross‐references and three or four books for further reading. There is quite a fair index, reprinted identically in both volumes. From time‐to‐time the sequence of articles is interrupted with primary documents and paragraph‐length quotations from relevant books. Some of these documents are quite substantial: for example, the article on L.B.J.'s Kerner Enquiry into the big city riots of the 1960s is followed by an eight‐page extract from the Kerner Report. All‐in‐all, I found this a perfectly serviceable reference book on poverty.
Some of the pictures were unusually interesting (but there are not enough of them). There was one of nicely turned‐out immigrant girls learning to knit in 1910, cheering orphans on a sight‐seeing bus in 1923, a “Wobbly” with a hat that says “Bread or Revolution”, a destitute woman on the streets of New York selling gum to passers‐by (ca. 1909). And the most chilling one of all – a patient's cell in a Hospital for People of Insane and Disordered Minds in Virginia. It shows a mattress, a piss‐pot and some chains attached to the wall. The rest is bare brick and a cold concrete floor. There is no date on the photo but surely it goes back many years. Nobody serving life for murder should suffer such conditions.
My problems with this book are the same as with many specialist reference works. Firstly there are unaccountable omissions. The coverage is not bad, to be quite fair, and most of the big themes are dealt with pretty well – health care, problems of children and so on. But in a work of this kind I would also expect articles on such topics as Foster Homes, the Charity Organisation Society, Tenements, Ghettoes, Pensions, Social Workers, Single Parents, War on Poverty and the Underclass. None of them is here. Just for once, it would be nice to see the correspondence between editor and publisher. Was pressure put on Ms Sreenivasan to limit the bulk of the book – perhaps for commercial reasons? Was she forced into making key excisions against her better judgement?
My second problem is one common to all editors of reference books: where do you draw the line? A work on poverty could quite legitimately include entries on many other things: the labour movement, immigration, the record of the main presidential administrations, the evolution of party policies on poverty, developments in technology (which often generate unemployment), the differences between the regions and states, political protests, international influences, and so it goes on. I sympathise with the plight of any editor having to draw that impossible line.
I can certainly commend this book as a workmanlike addition to the library shelves but it is not what I would call “encyclopedic”. There is too much missing. Poverty is such a pervasive theme that a bigger book is needed – and more of those good photographs! It is certainly well made and printed, in two ten‐inch high volumes; the paper is good and the pages are sewn. It also comes as an e‐book. Americans are past‐masters at showcasing their civilisation for the world to see. Power and glamour are its public face. The underbelly is poverty – the dark secret of the richest country in the world. If you want to understand its history, this is a good book to have at your elbow.
