First, Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:
It’s been exactly fifty years since Americans, or at least the nonpoor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.
Harrington’s book jolted a nation that prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one-quarter of the population lived in poverty—inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farmworkers and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.
At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently and led lives characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is…a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”
Alexander Harrington responds in Dissent:
Barbara Ehrenreich has published an article in the Nation titled, “Michael Harrington and the ‘Culture of Poverty.’” In it, she quotes a passage from my father’s book The Other America in order to argue that he “offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable.” “‘We’—the always presumably affluent readers—needed to find some way to help the poor,” writes Ehrenreich, “but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them.”
This is the passage Ehrenreich cites: “There is…a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.” This has been taken out of the context of the subchapter in which it appeared, and the context of the book as a whole. My father introduced the idea that economic circumstances make a class of people different from others by retelling the famous (and apocryphal) exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. “The rich are different than you and me,” said Fitzgerald. Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” My father then wrote:
Fitzgerald had the much better of the exchange. He understood that being rich was not a simple fact of life, like a large bank account, but a way of looking at reality, a series of attitudes, a special type of life. If this is true of the rich, it is ten times truer of the poor…And this is sometimes a hard idea for a Hemingway-like middle-class America to comprehend.
He was not arguing that economic circumstances have made the poor alone different from and inferior to a virtuous middle class, but that economic circumstances shape every aspect of the lives of every member of every social class. And the reason, according to The Other America, why Fitzgerald’s assertion is “ten times truer for the poor” is that their circumstances are so brutal.