Politics and Society in Modern America

Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History

Alice O'Connor

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400824748
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem, " in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy.
Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide.
The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Origins: Poverty and Social Science in

The Era of Progressive Reform

AT THE END of the nineteenth century social investigators in several of the world’s most advanced industrial societies set out to bring new scientific understanding to the problem of poverty. In this they were very much caught up in the international wave of organizing, policy innovation, state building, and, above all, social learning that characterized the decades between 1880 and the beginning of World War I as an era of progressive reform.¹ They were also moved by the central paradox Henry George referred to in the title of his wildly popular Progress and Poverty (1879) and in subsequent lecture tours: that great wealth and unprecedented productive capacity brought increasing poverty. So, too, were they dedicated to challenging the precepts of “laissezfaire,” a doctrine they associated with unbridled free market capitalism, the narrow pursuit of individual self-interest, and the rise of a social scientific justification for inequality and concentrated wealth.² Drawing on a combination of classical economics and Social Darwinism, Yale University sociologist William Graham Sumner had argued that inequality was a social expression of the natural laws of economic competition—the survival and dominance of the fittest—and that any attempt to intervene in the free market system would simply set progress back on its heels.³ Poverty was not only inevitable but, in Sumner’s words, “the best policy”: deprived by their own or by nature’s doing, the poor had no special claim on society at large.

The new knowledge, in contrast, would distinguish itself from other types of “scientific” investigation in several ways, which together make the Progressive Era a foundational period for twentieth-century poverty research. In the first instance it would be rigorously empirical—for the most part, quantitative—distinguishing it from the more abstract discourse of classical economics that inscribed poverty, along with the operation of markets, with the aura of natural law. The new poverty knowledge would take its cue instead from the insurgent, German-influenced “new economics” expounded by Richard T. Ely, Henry Carter Adams, and other founders of the American Economic Association in 1885, which embraced a more historical and institutional, but above all, social and ethical understanding of how the capitalist economy had evolved.⁴ Second, the new poverty knowledge would be rigorously objective, as distinct from the morally judgmental inquiries of charity work, and would devote itself to devising more and ever-better scientific methods for gathering, categorizing, and analyzing the facts of social, as opposed to merely individual, circumstance. Third, the new poverty knowledge would in no other sense be neutral; it would, without bias toward specifics, serve the interests of reform. Moreover, the new knowledge would be instrumental in other ways as well, serving the institution-building objectives of a burgeoning array of public and private organizations—social settlements, philanthropies, professional and civic groups, state and federal bureaus of research—that were beginning to look beyond the patchwork of local poor laws and private charities for ways of prevention rather than relief.⁵ The first order of business for the new poverty knowledge, then, was not only to denaturalize but to depauperize the “poverty problem,” by redirecting attention from individual dependency to social and, especially, to labor conditions as underlying cause.⁶

To be sure, the new poverty knowledge was not without moral judgment; it, too, deemed relief a corrupting influence and distinguished between deserving and undeserving poor. But Progressive investigators took some care to distinguish social research from individual casework, to make theirs a study of poverty rather than the poor. It was above all this shift in sensibility that set the stage for the future development of poverty knowledge as a social scientific research field, informing at once the extraordinary outpouring of investigation into social conditions and the wave of philanthropic institution-building that marked the Progressive Era. Ironically, it was in the name of this very same sensibility that succeeding generations of social scientists would seek to distinguish theirs from that early Progressive project, with an approach to knowledge that was at once more recognizably scientific and less immediately attached to reform. It was thus as a more naturalistic, behavioral science that the new poverty knowledge would seek to establish its cultural and political authority. By the 1920s, University of Chicago sociologists had taken a first step in that direction, with an “ecological” analysis of poverty that focused more on issues of identity and culture than on employment and wages, and that provided the conceptual underpinnings for programs of community action against poverty in the second half of the twentieth century.

POVERTY AND INDUSTRIAL REFORM:

THE SOCIAL SURVEY MOVEMENT

Of all the methods of Progressive Era social investigation none better captures the blend of social science and reform sensibility—of advocacy through objectivity—than the social surveys conducted in the cities that were home to industrial capital and, in the U.S., to an increasingly immigrant and nonwhite working class. The earliest and most renowned of the surveys—in London, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh—have since been recognized as precursors to the emergence of the more sophisticated sample survey methodology familiar to our own time. But the social surveys of the Progressive Era are relevant for reasons that go well beyond methodology, most importantly for establishing a framework within which poverty could be investigated as a problem of political or social economy—of low wages, un- and “under”-employment, long hours, hazardous work conditions—and of the policies and practices governing the distribution of income and wealth. It was a framework, moreover, within which investigators could, however sporadically, examine the political economy of racial and gender as well as class inequality—here again by scrutinizing the discriminatory policies and practices that shaped the labor market and even, tentatively, relationships within the working-class family. Equally important, the social survey aimed to be both comprehensive and contextual, an aim that drew attention beyond individuals and households to the community, the neighborhood, the workplace, and to the details of associational life.

The social survey was also notable as an effort to join research with reform in several ways: by devoting as much energy to displaying and publicizing as to amassing the data; by using it as the basis for local organizing and community action; and by making research a collective endeavor that engaged the energies of amateur as well as professional social scientists—although not, as later models of action research would, working-class community residents themselves. Finally, at its height the social survey joined forces with the new, more institutionalized private philanthropies to create a space outside either the state or the university to generate knowledge for Progressive reform. As a movement, more than in any single community study, the social survey quite literally began to map out the substantive and institutional terrain of poverty knowledge that would be explored by future generations of social scientists, some with much different models and concerns in mind.

In terms of sheer size and international attention, nothing in the social survey movement could approach Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, a seventeen-volume study published between 1889 and 1903, considered in its time and subsequently to be “the first great empirical study in the social survey tradition.”⁷ Booth himself may have appeared something of an unlikely poverty surveyor—a wealthy shipping merchant turned amateur social scientist, a member of the Royal Statistical Society who financed his own research and made it his personal avocation—but he was no stranger to reform circles. Active as a philanthropist since early in his career, he was consistently a voice for individual self-reliance and welfare capitalism, who nonetheless envisioned a substantial role for the state in providing for the elderly and certain categories among the poor: at one point he toyed with the not-uncommon idea of state-run labor colonies for the most “shiftless” of London’s poor. He was also known to engage in respectful, albeit oppositional, debate with British socialists, including his cousin by marriage and co-investigator, Beatrice Potter Webb.⁸

Booth’s study was notable for its painstaking and detailed data, but what truly drew attention was his use of graphic and statistical display, best illustrated in his famous “Descriptive Map of London Poverty” (published in 1891), which soon became a kind of traveling centerpiece of social economy exhibits around the world. To be sure, there were many revelations in Booth’s statistical findings, which American investigators were eager to reproduce. Not in the least of these was what Booth found about the extent and causes of poverty, reportedly a surprise even to him: 30 percent of Londoners lived below or just at his somewhat impressionistically defined “line of poverty,” and problems with employment—lack of jobs, low wages, or intermittent work—were chiefly to blame. Contrary to popular opinion, “habit” and behavior could account for only a small proportion of London’s poverty; the lowest, virtually self-reproducing class of “semi-criminals” measured less than 1 percent of the population at large. The other leading causes, besides employment, were illness and family size. Indeed, contemporary readers may be struck with a certain sense of dejà vu: Booth’s findings touch on the contemporary contours of poverty, as well as on the myths contemporary poverty knowledge seeks continuously to dispel. Equally striking in this regard was Booth’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of the poor, who made up the bottom half of an elaborate eight-part scheme of social classes—A for the “lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers, and semicriminals,” B for the marginally employed “very poor,” C for seasonal laborers, D for the low-paid, regularly employed poor—on a scale that went from there to skilled laborers on through to the wealthy “upper middle class.”⁹

But it was the maps, as much if not more than the voluminously reported findings, that offered a distinctive way to look at poverty—in a way, in contrast to the poignant but voyeuristic and individualized photographs published in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), that appealed to middle-class intellect rather than mere sentiment. For there, in color-coded relief, Booth and his assistants made poverty a part of the social and industrial fabric, of what would later be called its social ecology, and still later its “built environment,” by locating each of his eight classes in residential neighborhoods to create a dramatic illustration of the social geography of poverty and wealth.¹⁰ The maps also made poverty concrete and compelling, as a social problem to be reckoned with, to an educated middle class. Indeed, Booth’s study, which helped to launch the social survey movement in the United States, was entirely filtered through middle-class perceptions: For all the extraordinary detail of its data, there was no direct testimony—no actual household survey—to back it up. Booth’s survey relied instead on the observations and estimates of amateur investigators and local school board home visitors for statistical and qualitative data on everything from occupations, income, expenditures, and housing conditions to the street life of the neighborhoods.

The maps were the most direct link to the first and most well-known of the U.S. settlement house surveys inspired by Booth’s example, Hull House Maps and Papers, published in 1895. Acknowledging the “greater minuteness” of the territory—the study was confined to the third of a square mile immediately to the east of Hull House, in Chicago’s 19th ward—its authors invoked the “great interest” generated by Booth’s maps as a source of “warm encouragement” for their own work.¹¹ Their debt was most visible in the now-famous color-coded Hull House maps, which graphically displayed the wage levels, diversity, and the residential density in that working-class neighborhood. But Hull House differed from Booth’s work in several important respects, indicating both the distinctive characteristics of urban poverty, and some of the more homegrown roots of the new poverty knowledge in the United States.¹²

First, the Hull House maps underscored the degree to which race and ethnicity were essential dimensions of social stratification, and a central preoccupation in American reform. The issues were particularly salient for Hull House residents, who had founded their settlement in 1889 amidst the vast “new immigration” that brought thousands of racially “other” Southern and Eastern Europeans to a city that was already home to large concentrations of British, Irish, and German immigrants. The results were in plain view in the most pronounced of the Hull House innovations: accompanying the color-coded Map of Wages was a color-coded Map of Nationalities, which had no counter-part in Booth’s work. There, observers could see not only the intermingling of “eighteen nations . . . in this small section of Chicago,” but also their segmentation into “little colonies” that reflected an internal hierarchy in the slums—blacks (“colored”) were clustered on the least desirable blocks; Italians and Jews frequently relegated to the rear apartments in larger tenements.¹³ Here the “minuteness” of the study area was in fact its strength, capturing in miniature the multi layered patterns of wage inequality and residential segregation that would only later harden into a stark separation between black and white. In this regard, though, the great visual contribution of the maps did not extend to the analysis in the accompanying papers. Save for a largely descriptive and methodological opening comment by resident Agnes Holbrook, the neighborhood data plotted on the maps are nowhere discussed in the book. The Hull House Papers, instead, amount to an eclectic compilation of essays by various residents and associates based on their own independent research, featuring exposes of child labor and the infamous “sweating system” by Florence Kelley, a comparative study of cloakmakers in New York and Chicago by a young resident named Isabel Eaton, a series of separate essays on the Jews, the Bohemians, and the Italians of the 19th ward, and a contribution from Hull House founder Jane Addams on the role of settlements in the movement for industrial democracy. The purpose of the maps was to “present conditions rather than to advance theories,” Holbrook noted.¹⁴ Connecting the patterns of workers’ earnings and racial segregation would await the more systematic and concentrated efforts of W.E.B. DuBois.

In fact, the absence of a visible editorial hand or even common database in the volume points to a second distinctive aspect of the Hull House survey, and, in the 1890s, social policy investigation in the U.S. more generally. Unlike Life and Labours, which originated as a personal act of investigation and philanthropy, Hull House Maps and Papers grew out of a much more scattered sequence of connections that linked the settlement house to both university-trained scholars and government research bureaus in what remained a decidedly ad hoc process of generating knowledge for the work of policy and reform. Indeed, Booth was quite consciously responding to a generalized but “evident demand for information” emanating from contemporary policy debates. He also, by virtue of his social standing and ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• Chapter 1 Origins: Poverty and Social Science in The Era of Progressive Reform
• Chapter 2 Poverty Knowledge as Cultural Critique:The Great Depression
• Chapter 3 From the Deep South to the Dark Ghetto:Poverty Knowledge, Racial Liberalism, and Cultural “Pathology”
• Chapter 4 Giving Birth to a “Culture of Poverty”: Poverty Knowledge in Postwar Behavioral Science, Culture, and Ideology
• Chapter 5 Community Action
• PART TWO
• Chapter 6 In the Midst of Plenty: The Political Economy of Poverty in the Affluent Society
• Chapter 7 Fighting Poverty with Knowledge: The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Analytic Revolution in Government
• Chapter 8 Poverty’s Culture Wars
• PART THREE
• Chapter 9 The Poverty Research Industry
• Chapter 10 Dependency, the “Underclass,” and a New Welfare “Consensus”: Poverty Knowledge for a PostߞLiberal, Postindustrial Era
• Chapter 11 The End of Welfare and the Case for a New Poverty Knowledge
• Notes