Key Readings on Poverty in the U.S.

by Leigh Graham

Published December 30, 2008 @ 10:39AM PT

The Census provides detailed data on poverty in the U.S. After memoirs, works by biographers, anthropologists, historians and journalists tend to provide the most illuminating accounts of the experience of poverty in the United States. This non-exhaustive list is heavy on journalistic and social science analyses of poverty; recommendations for memoirs and more personal texts are welcome!! Furthermore, as is too often the case in citing “classic” or best-selling work, male authors predominate. Please let us know what works by women are missing here. Recommended readings are organized by issue area.

The Classics

1) The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, by William Julius Wilson (1987) has got to be the most cited contemporary work on domestic poverty in the last 25 years. If you want to understand the current version of the debate on the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor, read Wilson’s book to see how his thesis on the de-industrialization of cities and the creation of the “underclass” has been hijacked by those interested in blaming teen pregnancy, urban black crime, and a general ghetto culture for the persistence of poverty.

(For the original work popularizing the “culture of poverty” thesis, read anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959). When done, file Lewis and Wilson under “The Unintended Consequences of Well-Intentioned Liberals.”

(For the seminal conservative piece on U.S. poverty, check out Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 by Charles Murray (1984). And please hate it.)

2) Historical perspectives on domestic poverty are essential to understand the changing and consistent faces of poor Americans over time. Classic scholarship from the first half of the twentieth century include How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis (1901); Twenty Years at Hull House with Autobiographical Notes, Jane Addams (1912); and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans (1939). Riis and Addams show readers the urban poverty experience, with their examinations of, respectively, tenement life in New York and the anti-poverty efforts of the settlement house movement in Chicago. Agee and Evans offer moving text and photos of sharecroppers in the South during the Great Depression; theirs is a seminal collaboration from the New Deal era.

3) Like the aforementioned Five Families, The Other America, Michael Harrington (1962) was an influential text for anti-poverty policy and shaping public awareness of poverty in the second half of the twentieth century. Harrington demonstrated that the poor are often “invisible” to the rest of us, operating in a separate world from our own. Yet, the most significant work on poverty until Wilson’s book was The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a.k.a., The Moynihan Report, by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965). Moynihan argued that slavery’s legacy, family structure, urbanization and discrimination were causing high rates of poverty and insecurity among African-Americans. It was a politically charged work of the ‘60s considered by some to be an attack on black families, while others saw it as the call to action it claimed to be.

America’s Working Poor

4) Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) is the most accessible portrayal of the everyday struggle for millions of Americans to make ends meet on low wages and without benefits or job security – that is, America’s “working poor”. Recommended runners-up include two works by anthropologists, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David Shipler (2005), and No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, Katherine Newman (2000).

Women & children, welfare reform, and poverty

5) American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare is an in-depth chronicle of the impacts of welfare reform on single mothers and their children by New York Times journalist Jason DeParle (2005). (An interview with DeParle is here.) Here is the original text of the 1996 bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Anthropologist Sharon Hayes also gets at the gendered impacts of welfare reform in Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (2003).

6) 13.3 million children live in poverty in the United States. Born from Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, the Children’s Defense Fund is the leading child advocacy organization in the country for children’s health and welfare, particularly for poor children and children of color. Their website offers a range of data and information on children and poverty in the U.S.; they recently updated and released the compendium, the State of America’s Children. In 2007, CDF released a report on the “prison pipeline” and risks of incarceration for black and Latino boys.

Poverty, politics, & policy

7) President-Elect Barack Obama laid out his ideas on poverty in the 2008 Winter edition of Pathways magazine (PDF pgs. 14-16). To see how his ideas matched up with former candidates Sen. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, check out my blog post “The Poverty Candidate” and this post by Racialicious blogger Latoya Peterson.

8. For ideas on anti-poverty advocacy and policy, The Center for American Progress has published a 12-point guide for cutting poverty in half in the next 10 years. Anti-poverty activists don’t necessarily agree with this strategy: check out “The New Poverty Wars.”

9) For a terrific, highly readable overview on the “poverty industrial complex”, don’t miss historian Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in 20^th Century U.S. History (2001). The book was published at the end of the Clinton Administration; it sets up readers nicely to consider our poverty eradication options with the incoming Administration.

Poverty & Hurricane Katrina

10) To learn more about poverty’s role in one of the greatest humanitarian crises we’ve witnessed in a generation, please check out research by the Institute for Southern Studies on Gulf Coast recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, such as this “blueprint” for “community action.”

Remember that President Bush acknowledged the role of chronic poverty in New Orleans and the U.S. South in Katrina’s impacts, in his post-Katrina speech to the nation in Jackson Square in New Orleans. Bush’s promises to combat poverty went unfulfilled. Homelessness has skyrocketed in New Orleans, and much needed public housing has been razed. In Mississippi, government funds for affordable housing are being spent on port expansion instead.