Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland Community

David L. Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351497558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With a few notable exceptions, sociological studies of poor, native-born, non-ethnic whites in rural areas are rare. This book corrects this oversight with an ethnographic study of a small, poor, white, heartland community that the author calls "Potter Addition." The community consists of some 100 families and is located on the rural-urban fringe of a medium-sized Midwestern city.

Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland Community is the story of three generations of rural families who, one after another, have been driven from the land during the last seventy-five years. Harvey argues against the grain of a number of recent studies that "Potter Addition's" poverty, like much modern poverty, has its origins in the productive contradictions of late capitalism. It is not the result of some moral or motivational defect of the poor themselves. At the same time he shows, even as they struggle to survive their uncertain niche and learn how to adapt, these families play an active role in reproducing the everyday material and cultural details of their poverty from the substance of their daily experiences.

Working from this premise, Harvey provides a detailed ethnographic description of "Potter Addition" and its people. The volume focuses especially on the family and kinship structures that have developed in "Potter Addition" and shows how they fit into the overall response of the poor to their uncertain and unpredictable class situation. This is a unique effort by a knowledgeable researcher who, in this work, boldly steps outside conventional realms of discourse in sociology and geography.

CHAPTER
1
First Impressions and Second Thoughts

In the spring of 1966 it was first suggested that I undertake this study. The War on Poverty was by then in its first flowering and there was still hope that we might escape Viet Nam relatively unscathed. Money for poverty research was suddenly available and it was my good fortune to be working for a multidisciplinary research institute that was renowned for its ground-breaking work on educating marginal populations. Funding had been found for developing programs that would meet the educational needs of poor children, and in keeping with the multidisciplinary nature of the institute, sociologists and psychologists would be expected to make their contribution. It would be the job of the sociologists to identify the institutional and community-based factors that contributed to the educational burdens of poor children.

To this end I was asked by Bernard Färber and Michael Lewis, the principal investigators directing the sociological part of this research, to take part in a three-pronged study of poverty in the city of Grand Prairie. Färber would use survey research techniques to investigate class-specific differences in kinship patterns. Lewis would study the large black community that had flourished in the North End of Grand Prairie since the 1860s, tracing the roles that racial oppression and class-based inequality played in generating black poverty. I would undertake a participant-observer study of Potter Addition, a notorious “hillbilly slum” located on the rural-urban fringe of Grand Prairie.

Because of my working-class background and border state origins, Färber and Lewis thought that I would be a natural for this project. I was less enthusiastic. I was reluctant to abandon my antiwar activities and even more chary about taking money from a government that was each day becoming more and more vicious in implementing its foreign policy. Moreover, I was still not at peace with my origins and my father. He had been dead for two years, and I had been alienated from him for more than a decade before his death. Living in Potter Addition would dredge up memories of my father and force me to confront our relationship. I was not sure I was yet up to that. There was also the issue of coming to grips with my own class origins: of facing once more my youthful mar-ginality; of exhuming the scarring experiences and unresolved ambivalence from which I had become increasingly insulated during my years in the university. Surely participant-observer research in Potter Addition would reopen old wounds and force me to relive things that I had so artfully avoided thinking about for more than a decade.

Before giving an answer, I wanted to visit Potter Addition and see what I was getting into. Thus, I drove to the edge of Grand Prairie, to a place called Four Corners, where Speer Avenue and State Route 111 intersect. I turned left on Route 111 and drove past a series of small businesses housed in a set of unremarkable buildings. A half mile beyond Four Corners the highway passed over a littered, steep-banked drainage ditch that contained only a trickle of water. On the north bank of the ditch a graveyard extended a quarter mile up the highway. Huge elms and a high hedge running its full length gave it a dark, cavernous appearance. At the far end of the cemetery a small country road, Banks Avenue, intersected Route 111.

On the other side of Banks Avenue stood a cluster of blighted businesses: a group of white, two-storied “tourist cabins,” a flower shop, and an auto repair business. The buildings’ disrepair communicated the economic despair and marginality of their owners. The cabins could have appealed to only the most destitute of travelers, while the florist shop, with the freshness and beauty of its flowers, seemed out of place. Some distance down the highway, I saw Spooner Road and the abandoned brick schoolhouse that I had been told would mark the intersection of Spooner Road and Route 111. When I got to the intersection, I turned onto Spooner Road. Its blacktopped surface was already sticky from the unseasonably hot sun. I saw no structures on the north side of the road, save the old schoolhouse. A field of golden-hued, red winter wheat, beginning to droop under its ripening burden, stretched a mile or so to the raised embankment of a cloverleaf, which joined Route 111 to the new interstate. A half mile down Spooner Road, on the right, stood an incongruous grove of pine trees. You might have mistaken the stand for a nursery, until you were full upon it and saw the large, white, two-storied house standing in the middle of the pines. Grand in scale, yet prosaically sensible in its midwestern sobriety, it was the residence of an agronomy professor, as I later learned. I would hear it said more than once during my stay in Potter Addition that he had planted his full acre in trees to dissociate his home from the blight of Potter Addition. Some vacant land separated the pine grove from a white house that had originally been a church. Its bell-less steeple signaled it had once been a house of God, while the swing set in a trampled yard barren of grass testified that it was now a residence. Past another gap of unused land, I got my first glimpse of Potter Addition.

Instead of turning onto Potter Avenue and entering the community, however, I continued down Spooner Road, past the two intersecting streets that gave Potter Addition its skeletal, rectangular outline, and out a short distance into the country. On my first pass I had noticed only the huge, arching trees. Most were three feet or more in diameter, rising in Gothic curves of green, gray, and sun-reflected gold to form a cooling haven for the houses below. I turned around and retraced my path. This time I would attend more carefully to the houses. The six or seven dwellings were a bit rundown. Two were covered with the heavy, redbrick tar paper that had been popular before the advent of aluminum siding. One house had a lean-to, which obviously was not part of the original structure, attached to its back wall. Perhaps it had been built to give a daughter who had come of age some small measure of privacy from her brothers. Another house, sitting far back on a lot overgrown with weeds, looked more ramshackle than the rest. While clearly not suburban housing, these were by no means the slum dwellings I had been told to expect. Marginal at best, they were no different from those found in most midwestern hamlets with populations of under two thousand. In the Midwest such dwellings usually were occupied by solid, small-town “working-class” families.

Turning onto Potter Avenue, I saw a well-kept trailer. A high aluminum awning ran its full length, and its yard was surrounded by a low cyclone fence. The yard was covered with a well-raked, thumb-sized schist that glistened in the sun. The concrete slab that served as a driveway was decorated with potted plastic flowers. Tacky perhaps, but not slummy; its clones could be found in any number of Sun Belt retirement villages. Across the street was a well-tended vegetable garden, about one eighth of an acre in area. Its corn and tomatoes were already well along for that time of year. South of the garden stood a shabby gray trailer. Two junk autos parked in front of it established what would become a leitmotif for the entire community. South of the trailer, about twenty feet from the road, was an ugly but functional firehouse. Built of cinder blocks and capped with an oddly pitched roof, it housed two fire trucks. Later I learned it had a “clubhouse” in the back, which was used for various community social functions.

Past the firehouse was a series of homes resembling suburban tract housing. Across the street stood a row of older homes, all in need of paint and minor repairs. Again, peppered across the landscape were more junk cars. Some were up on concrete blocks, while others sat on the ground in various stages of cannibalization. Groups of men and teenagers, engrossed in “shade tree diagnostics,” clustered around two of the cars. Further south, on the west side of Potter Avenue, I spied the first real shack. It showed no trace of paint on its bare-board exterior, and its window screens, peeling back at the corners, looked like earmarked pages in a book. The roof, shingled in random colors, sagged in the middle. Images of my short stay in Appalachia came to mind. South of the shack someone had recently assembled a prefab redwood garage. A door and a square window had been inserted where the overhead door should have hung. Wood scraps in the yard and the absence of curtains on the window suggested that no one had yet moved in.

Two doors down from the garage, on the left, was a large all-metal warehouse. To the right, lodged between two junkyards and set well back from the road, was Betty’s Market. The northernmost yard appeared defunct, while the other, Bull Gomes’s garage and junkyard (judging from the number of cars parked on the west apron of the road), was a thriving concern. Gomes’s establishment was housed in a giant, wooden, boxlike structure, which was covered with a nondescript tar paper-like material. Next to it sat a large Quonset hut in which, I later learned, Gomes lived and rented apartments. In back of the garage, extending the full length of the one-and-one-half-acre lot, was the junkyard. I surmised this was the place that produced the occasional columns of black smoke from burning cars that I had noticed on my trips to Farmer City. The junkyard’s autos and parts had, over time, spread to the front of the garage and apartment house.

The road here passed over the crest of a low ridge. The autos, the columns of trees, and the small garden plots were still everywhere. I saw the first visible signs of livestock being raised in the back of one of the properties. The area’s visage had shifted: nothing dramatic, more a change of mood than of tangible substance. There was still a mix of shanties and better kept, more proper dwellings, but the shanties, many deserted, now preponderated. There seemed to be more trailers at this end of the community, and the shacks here were smaller and looked more despairing. The houses were seedy in appearance. One trailer, circa 1940, had a cancerous wooden attachment built onto its front. Next to the trailer was a small building resembling a child’s playhouse. In front of it sat an ancient gentleman petting a black and white mongrel. Here, finally, was the “rural slum” I had heard so much about.

At the end of Potter Avenue I turned left onto the road into which it emptied and glanced at the street sign—Banks Avenue. It was the street I had passed earlier on Route 111. There was, it seemed, a more direct route to Potter Addition. After turning, I spied yet a third, and then a fourth junkyard. The lots were deeper than those on Potter Avenue. They contained as many as four or five structures, often arranged in files of two or three houses each. It was all but impossible to determine if those houses set deepest on the lots were inhabited. Besides looking at the housing, I was now forced to watch out for children. The street suddenly contained fifteen or twenty youngsters, riding bikes and driving homemade go-carts. Some children were clustered about talking, while others were off on their own, playing and “popping wheelies” on their bicycles.

Suddenly I was at the end of Banks Avenue. At a second cluster of businesses it had turned in elbow fashion, veered north, and become North Star Avenue. Some one hundred feet or so from where I sat, a graveled, two-lane path stretched south from the intersection of North Star and Banks. After running first between a junkyard and a row of houses, it degenerated into two ruts overgrown with weeds, and finally disappeared into a thick, second-growth foliage that grew on the edge of the drainage ditch I had crossed earlier on Route 111.

I turned left onto North Star, drove twenty feet, and came to a sudden halt. On the left were two boxcars set flush against each other. These were people’s homes! It was a scene from a work of fiction. The name Rose of Sharon came to mind: Rose of Sharon, lying on that filthy floor with the dead Moses set adrift in the flooding irrigation ditch; her people without salvation; Rose of Sharon clutching the dying old man to her breast.

As the son of an itinerant pipefitter I was no stranger to lean times. In my youth I had seen my parents periodically dodging creditors and collection agencies. These experiences had not, however, steeled me to accept the poverty I now confronted. I could grasp the abstract poverty I encountered in books, or heard in the depression stories that my mother and father told me—tales of hard times tinged by a dread of their imminent return—but this was different. On that bright near-summer day in 1966, I was not prepared to find dark remnants of the 1930s. Coming over the crest of the ridge, I had entered the world of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a world of poverty and despair that had been memorialized by the photographers and artists of the Farm Security Administration.

Those first impressions of Potter Addition, though altered by fifteen months of participant-observation and by twenty years of reflecting on those images, have never left me. The period of actually living in the community was one of reeducation. The people of Potter Addition took my family into their homes and tutored me in the subtleties and nuances of living on the edge. I lived with them, worked in their youth club, joined in their community activities, and shared (as much as any outlander in a tight little community ever can) their lives, joys, and sorrows. I collected some eight hundred pages of field notes and almost one hundred hours of taped interviews during my stay. In those interviews the “teacher was taught” by his friends and neighbors.

The conditions of that reeducation were not always scientifically controlled. The atmosphere was saturated with personal politics and endless ideological confrontation. Continuous attempts were made by a proud community to propagandize my wife and me, as it sought to defend itself against being negatively stereotyped as a latter-day Hooverville. Residents often tried to deny the very poverty through which they and I daily walked. At other times, when denial seemed fruitless, they sought to soften my interpretation of their poverty. At every opportunity prideful people defended themselves against the “lies” that outsiders daily spun.

During my fieldwork I never felt “off stage,” was never able to relax fully, and only seldom escaped the constant efforts of the people to shape my research. In the context of this protracted struggle I developed my ideas about the community and how it operated. I cannot assure the reader, even now, that my “scientific vision” has remained untouched by the negotiated meanings and passions that emerged during my field-work. Nor is it devoid of the unsettled personal accounts I have already mentioned. I took them with me into the community and, as part of me, they entered into the ethnographic record. In Potter Addition I made friendships and associations that were more familylike than professional. I was permanently influenced by the community, even as I undoubtedly must have changed it in the very act of studying it. As in all participant-observer encounters, I became as much a part of the data as those whom I studied. The ghosts and shadows of that personal struggle are interwoven into the fabric of this work, as are the academic polemics and politics that surrounded the antipoverty movement in the 1960s.

The public issues of three decades reverberate throughout this work. Having never been resolved, they haunt our consciousness. Much has changed in the three decades since I first visited Potter Addition. The nation’s call to conscience and social justice was consumed in the crucible of Viet Nam. We have paid dearly for that flaw in national character. The great issues of the 1960s—poverty, racism, and the war— have been submerged in a sea of reaction and willful social amnesia. Still, they are part of our unfinished agenda. In the late 1960s there was a turning point, a moment when the panic over violence in America led to calls for a moratorium on combating social injustice. Walter Miller, a scholar whose reputation for understanding the poor and combating poverty could never be doubted, by 1968 could write in both frustration and apprehension:

The immediate proposal is this: that all federal agencies, and all agencies within the orbit of federal influence, be advised forthwith to terminate the practice of using, in speech, reports, legislative proposals, and all other documents, the major terms of the Poverty Ideology—particularly such terms as “the poor,” “the power structure,” “the ghetto,” “denial of opportunity,” “deprivation” and “alienation.” This proposal assumes first that the conceptualization underlying these terms provides a major incentive for domestic violence in that it justifies a policy of revenge for past and present injustices, and second that it promotes a dangerously divisive image of the United States as comprising two irreconcilable warring camps: the exploited and the exploiters. Even those who remain unconvinced of the validity of these assumptions might see fit to support this measure on the grounds that it can be implemented at little cost relative to the benefits that could accrue if the assumptions are valid.

The long-term proposal is that an appropriate and adequately supported agency, in or out of government, deliberately and systematically undertake the development of a conceptual formulation that can serve as a sound basis for national policy with respect to low status populations in the United States. As already mentioned, many feel that the diversion of national attention and resources to Asian warfare has seriously impeded efforts to accommodate pressing domestic problems; this diversion could be turned to advantage if it were conceived as a temporary lull that provides an opportunity to prepare the groundwork for a revitalized postwar renewal of these efforts. Most important, it affords an opportunity to remedy one of the most critical defects of the War on Poverty—the absence of an adequate conceptual rationale. (Miller 1968, p. 304)

With an irony and vengeance befitting The Monkey’s Paw, Miller and many other liberal scholars obtained their lull. By the 1970s, that lull became benign neglect as the issues of race and poverty were replaced by new, seemingly more urgent social problems. Class-based social problems gave way in the public consciousness to environmentalism, the struggle to legitimate alternative life-styles, and the frantic flight toward renewed conspicuous consumption. The 1980s saw the circle completed. With the rebirth of the old mean-spiritedness, America’s poor were once more stigmatized and became—in the popular mind— the source of their own degradation.

Intellectual styles also shifted during this thirty-year period.¹ In the 1960s many poverty researchers studied poverty “from the bottom up.” Descriptions of who the poor were, their subculture, and the structural regularities of their everyday life became integral parts of poverty’s problematic. Works such as Herbert Gans’s (1962) The Urban Villagers, Elliot Liebow’s (1967) Talley’s Corner, and Oscar Lewis’s (1966) La Vida are today classics of this genre. Each attempted in its own way to look beyond the statistics and grasp poverty as a lived, everyday experience.

But there was more to studying poverty from the bottom up, for while poverty research was expected to make policy recommendations, many sociologists and anthropologists went beyond mere programs of amelioration. Rejecting the “cultural deprivation” paradigm as a paternalistic misunderstanding of what living poor actually entailed, many began to argue that poverty’s subculture was more than an aggregation of individual deficiencies and “negative” cultural traits. Scientists of a progressive orientation argued that poverty’s subculture and the ethnic diversity so often associated with it warranted protection and preservation as valued life forms. They maintained that the path to security need not be paved with embourgeoisification. The idea that the poor had a right to codetermine politically their own future and, if they so chose, to preserve valued family patterns and cultural orientations became a major source of friction between liberal scholars and their New Left progeny.

During the 1970s a major political and intellectual shift occurred as social agendas were altered to reflect the diminished expectations of an increasingly apprehensive nation. Poverty was redefined as primarily an economic and technical problem. It was approached “from the top down,” and the poor became little more than a faceless, bureaucratically administered, client population. They were united by a single, abstract statistical trait: all those who lived below a politically manipulated “poverty line” (Orshansky 1965; Rodgers 1982, pp. 14-49). Talk of “self-determination” and “maximum feasible participation” was abandoned and replaced with purely administrative preoccupations. A class of alleged social superiors once again assumed the ego-inflating, bourgeois mantle of caretakers. By the 1980s the final step had been taken: The poor had been safely criminalized once again, becoming objects of either fear or contempt, and in some cases, both.

The research reported here spans these academic and political changes. It began during a period of progressive resurgence and political hope. It was completed at the ebb of that progressive ideology. Thus, it reflects both my early commitment to doing politica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 First Impressions and Second Thoughts
• 2 The Social Reproduction of Poverty
• 3 Potter Addition
• 4 The World of Work
• 5 Labor, Leisure, and Ideology
• 6 Saving and Spending
• 7 The Uxoricentric Family
• 8 The Antinomies of Family Life
• 9 The Dialectics of Lower-Class Kinship
• 10 The Moral Foundation of Lower-Class Kinship
• 11 The Social Construction of the Kindred: Sibling-Based Descent Groups
• 12 Uxoricentric Descent Groups
• 13 Potter Addition Today
• 14 Potter Addition and Its Poverty
• Notes
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index