Other America, The

Michael Harrington published The Other America: Poverty in the United States in 1962. His study helped ignite a national debate on the persistence of poverty amid an otherwise strong and sustained period of economic growth. Indeed, following World War II, the United States had indisputably become the world's most powerful and wealthiest nation. Still, as The Other America effectively conveyed, not all shared in the prosperity.

In The Other America, Harrington argued that despite a rising standard of living, over a fifth of the population—or about 25 million people— remained deeply impoverished. He found the problem most acute among several specific demographics. First, he claimed that many rural whites, living primarily in Appalachia and the Ozarks, had failed to secure any of the postwar bounty. Their physical isolation from the nation's great cities and the decline of such rural industries as mining and logging left them in a perpetual state of economic depression. Next, he described so-called “rejects,” those who worked in big cities and small towns but who were hopelessly stuck in low-wage employment, unable to find higher-paying union jobs in industry. They lacked basic job protections, had no contract or health care, and had bosses who effectively acted as “monarchs” on the shop floor, according to Harrington.

Beyond what he described as the “invisible” poverty of rural whites, Harrington described several other populations of impoverished people. He found pervasive racism to be a serious impediment for African Americans trying to exit poverty. Racism, according to Harrington, also accounted for their inability to secure well-paid employment. Housing discrimination also ghettoized poor people of color, limiting their opportunities even further. Additionally, poverty plagued older citizens; illness, disease, and hopelessness often typified the experience of growing old in the United States.

With meager old-age benefits, many retired people in the United States lived the final years of their lives in destitution—ill-housed, forgotten, and cast aside by upwardly mobile, younger members of society. For different reasons, Harrington also found widespread poverty among young adults. Unlike older Americans, Harrington [Page 1664]believed that many young people were poor by choice. These “bohemians,” artists, graduate students, and writers—whom Harrington categorized as creative workers—lived in the slums of cities, often at odds with an older generation of ethnic whites.

Beyond a description of who in the United States was poor, The Other America advanced the controversial “culture of poverty thesis,” first articulated by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959. Like Lewis, Harrington proposed that poverty was the result of structural economic forces, but perhaps more important, it was also the result of a culture whereby poor people allegedly knew no better and thus showed little initiative to move beyond the social class of their birth.

Harrington believed this was especially true of poor rural whites and urban African Americans. Many of these families had lived in impoverished communities for decades and seemed unable and unwilling to advance into the middle class. Entrenched, generational poverty, maintained Harrington, presented the most intractable problem.

Despite its critics, The Other America was nevertheless the most successful and influential study on poverty to come out of the decade, even if it was not the first (John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society broached the topic as early as 1958). Curiously, The Other America was met mostly with ambivalence and failed to create much of a stir. It was not until Dwight Macdonald, a well-known reporter for The New Yorker, wrote an extensive review of the book months after its release that it gained a widespread readership. The review, highlighting poverty among poor whites in Appalachia and migrants in the southwest, garnered the attention of the John F. Kennedy administration and liberals throughout the nation.

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