The Other America

The Other America: Poverty in the United States is a 1962 book by socialist writer Michael Harrington on the dire living conditions of the American poor. It was a muckraking-style exposé which spotlighted the entrenched poverty of 40–50 million people in a country that was being touted as "the affluent society". The book was also said to have been a catalyst for the Johnson administration's War on Poverty program.

Harrington would go on to write over a dozen more works such as The Accidental Century (1965), Toward a Democratic Left (1968), and Socialism (1972), but none was as impactful as The Other America, which was listed by TIME magazine as one of the 10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Background

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith's 1958 bestseller The Affluent Society contained a critique of U.S. government policy that had allowed an "indefensible disparity between the opulence of the private sector and the starvation level at which the public sector was forced to operate." The book's title, combined with its analysis of the post-WWII expansion of the American middle class, led many to interpret The Affluent Society as a celebration of widespread prosperity.

It was against this backdrop that Harrington began his investigation of the poor. Monica Potts notes that he "was among the only writers to see the persistence of poverty despite the country's historically large middle class." The Other America grew out of his research for an article entitled "Our Fifty Million Poor: Forgotten Men of the Affluent Society", published in the July 1959 issue of Commentary magazine. In the article, he wrote that if a $3,000 annual income was necessary for a family of four to stay out of poverty, then nearly a third of the U.S. population lived "below those standards which we have been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food, housing, clothing and health."

Harrington recalled in his autobiography that he initially ignored inquiries from publishers about converting his Commentary article into a book "until Emile Capouya at Macmillan and a few of my socialist friends convinced me that no one else would translate the available data into readable English. When The Other America turned into a success, I was astounded. Like the Zen archer who hits the target because he does not aim at it, I had given birth to a kind of classic without thinking too much about it."

Book summary

The invisible poor

In the opening chapter, Harrington challenges the notion that mass poverty was largely eliminated in the U.S. He says the misconception arose because the poor are increasingly invisible: Harrington offers various reasons for why the poor are not seen, among them that rural poverty is usually found off the beaten path, away from main highways, and that urban poverty had become remote from most people's daily experience because of the post-WWII suburbanization of American cities: "Living out in the suburbs, it is easy to assume that ours is, indeed, an affluent society."

"Culture of poverty"

In the next chapters, Harrington categorizes different pockets of poverty. In Chapter 2, he lists those who have fallen—often due to job loss from factory closures or workplace automation—into the "economic underworld"; he calls them "the rejects of the affluent society". He chronicles the rural poor, including migrant farm workers and Appalachians (Ch. 3), Negroes in the urban ghetto (Ch. 4), Skid Row denizens (Ch. 5), the impoverished elderly (Ch. 6), and the mentally ill (Ch. 7). He writes about substandard housing in U.S. slums (Ch. 8), and then in Chapter 9 he explains how the poor get ensnared in a "culture of poverty". Harrington helped popularize the phrase; it appears dozens of times in the book, beginning with this passage: An irony for the socialist Harrington was that "culture of poverty", which he employed to elicit sympathy for the poor, would become a rhetorical weapon utilized by conservatives to chastise the poor. In a 2012 interview, Frances Fox Piven said that Harrington was talking, in terms similar to those used by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, about the culture of marginalization within which America's poor lived: "What happens to people when they are forever, permanently, consigned to live in ways that are not the ways of the majority, that are not the ways of the dominant culture, when they are consigned to a kind of degradation and hopelessness." Instead, he makes a moral and ethical argument, rather than a political argument:

The Other America continued a tradition of muckraking in the nation's journalism and literature—exemplified in works such as How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis—in which social wrongs are exposed to the reading public in order to trigger moral condemnation and political action. In a 2012 retrospective article, historian Maurice Isserman wrote, "The Other America was a book about poor people, but it was not a book written for poor people. The readers Harrington was speaking to were themselves citizens of the affluent society, whose consciences he sought to stir." According to New York Post editor James Wechsler, Harrington told him in 1962 that the anticipated sales amount was 2,500 copies "if all went well". Then, in January 1963, The New Yorker magazine published a lengthy rave review by Dwight Macdonald entitled "Our Invisible Poor". The article catapulted The Other America to national attention. Macdonald arranged (as Harrington subsequently discovered) for a second publication date, which soon lifted the book to bestseller status. The New Yorker review also attracted the attention of Ted Sorensen, an adviser to President Kennedy, which led to Harrington's book circulating in the White House, where it stimulated anti-poverty legislation. He gave the book major credit for the launching of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964.

Looking back in 1988, Harrington wrote, "Even though I have fled the success of The Other America for twenty-five years, it was an extraordinary stroke of luck that the book received the acclaim it did and then went on to have a minor but real historic impact." He added, however, that the book's triumph proved to be a mixed blessing for his writing career:

In August 2011, TIME magazine listed The Other America among its "100 best and most influential" nonfiction books written in English since the founding of the magazine in 1923. At a conference on the 50th anniversary of the 1962 publication, Cornel West said that while he admired the book, he never approved of its title, a criticism he voiced to Harrington in the 1980s:

Documentary film

Bill Donovan's documentary film, Michael Harrington and Today's Other America: Corporate Power and Inequality (1999), encapsulates Harrington's ideas through archival footage and interviews with his colleagues and political opponents. Among the interviewees are John Kenneth Galbraith, Gloria Steinem, William F. Buckley, Charles Murray, and citizens who struggle to earn a living or depend on social services. The documentary also features a brief history of socialism in the U.S. and raises questions about the merits and relevance of trade unions; the problems of migrant workers, farmers, and big business; and the failures of America's public schools and healthcare system.