President Obama, elected to the presidency on a campaign based on reviving 'hope' and promising 'change', now presides over a nation with nearly 40 million hopeless citizens in poverty. Unless a significant 'change' occurs in the current faltering economy, millions more will fall into lives of destitution and despair by the end of 2009..
In a nation founded on the revolutionary notion of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', America has never been able to successfully reconcile its core beliefs in individualism and self-reliance with social justice and egalitarianism. As a result, the world views the United States as an incomplete or deeply flawed experiment in democracy. Many wonder how a country, which claims to be the 'greatest nation on earth' on the basis of its constitutional system, can give tax breaks to its wealthiest people while continuing to allow 12-15% of its population to live off of food stamps and sleep in cardboard boxes on the street. Indeed, more Americans are becoming aware of the chasm between their laudable ideals and the realities of indigence.
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On several occasions in the 20th century, poverty in America was declared to be on the verge of extinction. At his nominating convention in Palo Alto, California in August, 1928, Herbert Hoover declared, 'Unemployment in the sense of distress is widely disappearing...We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor house is vanishing from among us...'. His bold prediction lacked historical context. The 1920s was a decade of largely artificial or perhaps fleeting wealth-creation at best. It was simply another 'bubble' made through easy credit, installment plans and irrational optimism in the stock market. When the bubble burst a year later, the nation descended into a forlorn state as the percentage of unemployed surpassed 20%. Clearly, unregulated capitalism was not the panacea to solve the social ills of America.
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When Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous second inaugural speech on 20 January 1937, he famously uttered, 'I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished'. Another line from the same historically notable speech 'I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day' not only raised the issue of the working poor of his era but also would apply to the condition of tens of millions of Americans today. Despite more than four years of massive government spending and the creation of new social programs intended to raise the US out of the Great Depression, the economy and the plight of the average citizen remained quite precarious. If business could not guarantee prosperity for the entire nation, then neither could a rigid, centralized economic system.
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A quarter of a century passed, and the WWII generation elected one of its own to the highest office in the land in the person of John F. Kennedy. In his second year as president, a little-known intellectual published a book entitled The Other America: Poverty in The United States. His name was Michael Harrington (1928-89, pictured), and he was unusual in that his politics veered toward socialism. As is still the case, socialism was considered politically untenable and socially unacceptable in the US. Despite his non-mainstream political predilections, The Other America was read widely in circles of power and had a transformational effect on the 1960s. Harrington's reference to the poor as being 'invisible' in the public arena, a term Hilliary Clinton recently echoed in her recent campaign for the Democratic nomination, struck a chord with leaders from all walks of life.
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In his first State of the Union address (only two months after the tragic assassination of his predecessor) Lyndon Johnson, who had been influenced by Harrington's book, told the nation, 'This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.' Subsequent to that speech, LBJ successfully created several new governmental programs with the hope of lifting many struggling Americans out of poverty. Of all of his initiatives, which included Head Start, work-study and food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid proved to be the most vital and effective tools in reversing the numbers of the needy. The progress made was short-lived, however, due to the expenditures laid-out for the Vietnam war. As Washington became more and more preoccupied with communism and national security, the issue of poverty in America dropped out of civic discussion.
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Forty years after the Johnson presidency, the United States needs to confront the ravages and social complexities of poverty once again. Forty to fifty million people will go to sleep tonight without adequate shelter or food in the richest country in the world. How much longer will Americans tolerate this violation of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'? To become one prosperous nation, it will take a non-ideological commitment by business leaders, the government, community activists and volunteers to end the greatest scourge in history. Hence, if President Obama truly desires a legacy of greatness, he will need to 'change' poverty with more than the slogan of 'hope'.
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J Roquen