Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 1, 1986 – Southern Changes

Women and Children in Poverty

Diana Pearce — Sat, 01 Feb 1986 05:00:01 +0000

Women and Children in Poverty

By Diana Pearce

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986 pp. 1-2, 16-20

Two out of three adults in poverty today are women. Three-fourths of America’s more than 34 million poor consist of women and their children. Over half of children in poverty live in women-maintained families.

We truly have a new poverty problem, a new kind of poor. It is not just that the demographics have changed. The very nature of poverty has changed. And that calls for a change in the nature of the solutions. We should not just reinstitute the New Deal and the War on Poverty, for they were not intended to deal with women’s poverty.

The femininization of poverty means that in the last two decades women-headed families have increased from thirty-six to fifty percent of all poor families. There are now more than three and a half million families maintained by women alone whose income is below the poverty level.

Although women are poor for some of the same reasons that men are poor-because they’re in high unemployment areas, because of racial discrimination, and because of physical handicaps, there are two characteristics of women’s poverty that distinguish it from the poverty experienced by men: children and labor market discrimination.

First, women often have the economic as well as the emotional burden of child rearing. Most people are aware that the rise in the divorce rate and the increase in the number of children born out of wedlock has increased the number of single-parent families, primarily woman-headed

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families. When a family with children breaks up, or when children are born to an unmarried couple, the man frequently becomes, or remains, single and the women becomes a single parent.

The circumstances of a woman alone in America, struggling to maintain a household, is highly correlated with poverty. The current system of child support in this country is a disgrace. Forty-three percent of children who have absent parents–usually absent fathers–get child support. Only half of these children receive the full amount awarded. The average child support awarded is $2,100 a year per family, not per child–that’s less than ten percent of the median income.

More disgraceful is our lack of public support for children who are without sufficient income from either parent. I’ve compared the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) support rates to the support standard for foster children-a good standard to use because that is what the state determines it costs to take care of a child. Nationwide in ]974, foster parents received three times as much as the natural, single parent mother (receiving AFDC) to take care of a child. In 1982, the ratio was four-to-one. That is, if you go from two children to three children, the average increase in AFDC payments in 1982 was forty-nine dollars a month Compare that with the the average state payment for a foster child: almost two-hundred dollars a month. In some states the ratio is seven or eight to one.

Some mothers living in poverty have come to feel that the best way they can provide for their children is to give them up to foster care. Because the foster mother can get at least four times as much money as the natural mother to provide food, clothing and shelter, and sometimes more, the children would be better off, at least materially.

The other distinctive characteristic of women’s poverty is the disadvantage that women experience in the labor market. This is the familiar “fifty-nine-cents-on-a-dollar,” and the fact that women college graduates still earn less than men who are high school dropouts. Those figures however, only compare men and women who work full-time, year-round.

Only forty-eight percent of women workers work full-time, year-round. The majority of women workers only manage to get part-time or part-year work, or both. Women find themselves unable to get full-time jobs. Only thirty-eight percent of women who maintain households alone are able to get full-time year-round work. Their wages are even less than the fifty-nine cents on a dollar–considerably less if they are minority women.

Women disproportionately fill jobs that are set up to be part-time. These jobs are in the most rapidly expanding industries. Employers deliberately create these jobs as part-time so that they don’t have to provide fringe benefits or sick leave. Sometimes people don’t even get breaks or lunch hours. They don’t get paid vacation. They don’t get paid holidays. They don’t get many of things that the full-time worker gets. Women are bearing the brunt of the expansion of part-time jobs and are being kept poor because of it.

Many women work at the minimum wage–eighteen percent compared to eight percent of men. Even if you work full-time, year-round, at a minimum wage job you do not earn enough to support yourself and one child above the poverty level for a two-person family.

The minimum wage, until 1981, had remained pretty close to the poverty line for a family of three. But today if you are a minimum wage worker, you have to work fifty hours a week to support yourself and two children at the poverty level. Deductions for social security add another three or four hours. Pretty soon you’re working seven days a week. The minimum wage is no longer a living wage. And women are disproportionately minimum wage workers.

So we have the two sources of women’s poverty: poverty from children, poverty from disadvantage in the labor market. We have a welfare sytem, however that was designed not for the problems of poor women, but for the problems of poor men. I call that system a Dual Welfare

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System, for our welfare programs can be grouped into two very different groups, a primary sector and a secondary sector.

Most of the resources spent by the welfare system are devoted to programs in the primary sector that are geared to one’s being, or having been, a full-time, year-round, worker: programs such as unemployment compensation, social security, worker’s compensation. These are relatively generous.

When unemployment compensation was established, the rhetoric used then spoke of “regular workers” versus “casual workers.” Unemployment insurance was set up to protect workers who had worked full-time for a number of years, and then were laid off through no fault of their own. But, as we have seen, women workers don’t fit this “regular worker” model. Many women work part-time. They don’t make the minimum earnings or the minimum hours to qualify for unemployment compensation.

Women often leave employment for reasons that don’t have to do with their competence on the job. Sometimes they leave because they cannot fulfill their domestic obligations and work their job. What happens, for example, if an employer shifts an employee who is also a single, working mother from a day to a night shift? What if she cannot arrange for nighttime child care and is, as a result, forced to leave her job? The law says that’s her fault, not the employer’s. The result is that she can’t get unemployment compensation.

In many states, if you leave work voluntarily because you have been sexually harassed by your employer you can’t get unemployment compensation.

Disproportionately, because women do not fit the Male Worker (regular worker) Model of unemployment compensation, or of other welfare programs that provide support or give access to job training programs, they have to turn to the secondary welfare system.

The secondary welfare system contains the “means-tested” programs that are stigmatizing, penurious in benefits and that push women back into employment as quickly as they can, no matter how inappropriate or how insecure the jobs are. These secondary welfare sector programs are built upon what I call the Male Pauper Model.

The Male Pauper Model grew from the English Poor Laws, and from the nineteenth century work houses. In this model, poor people are viewed as able-bodied persons who are just lazy and need to be forced to go to work. Benefits are set so low that anybody who possibly can work will be pressed into the labor market as quickly as possible. If neccessary they are forced through compulsory programs we now call “workfare.”

Thus, the US welfare system now consists of a primary set of programs that women find themselves ineligble for and a secondary set of programs that women find demeaning, impoverishing and that push them into competition for low-skilled, low-paid employment.

By the way, ninety percent of women presently on welfare have worked. Before the Reagan budget cuts, many poor women worked while they were also on welfare. That’s very difficult to do now because you are allowed to earn so little before you are forced off welfare.

What about job training programs in the secondary welfare system? We have two major ones: WIN (Work Incentive Program) and to some extent JTPA dote Training Partnership Act).

Each of these programs are so small as to be considered tokenism. They essentially ration jobs. But women do enter into them. Women constitute fifty percent of the people who take JTPA training programs. Yet, even here, they are shunted into the programs that pay the least. For example, JTPA on-the job work experiences which offer non-paying job training is sixty-two percent female. Paid on-the-job training is fifty-eight percent male. When it comes to wages, women too get shortshrift; their average wage of $4.20 an hour (remember, this is the secondary sector) is eighty-five percent of the wages received by men graduating from the same program, and on a full-time basis puts their income at about the poverty level for a three-person family.

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Women are forced into a cycle of alternating between very poor jobs and going on welfare. As soon as a job ends, women find they’re not eligble for unemployment compensation. They didn’t earn enough money or they didn’t work long enough–so they go back on welfare. Once on welfare they’re forced through the programs and are sent back out into a poor job again. Never getting anywhere. Never getting to the point where they have enough job training skills, enough work experience to get out of poverty in any permanent way.

We have a gender-differentiated way of thinking about welfare programs. We think about “income support” for women and children. We talk about “jobs” and “job training” and “equal opportunity” for men. The reality is that everybody is expected to–and must, work. By talking about work and welfare in this gender differentiated way, and yet forcing women into unequally-paid work, women’s poverty is perpetuated and institutionalized.

There’s been some talk about re-instituting programs from the 1960s’ War on Poverty. Think carefully back to all those programs. They analyzed and concentrated on relieving poverty among the “able-bodied.” Basically, they were intended to help men, black as well as white. And they did. Particularly young men.

As it was originally written, the Job Corps legislation excluded young women. It was amended so that they could participate, but it was not intended for them and did not have much effect on them. The same thing is true for many of the programs that are under discussion now. They do not address the nature or needs of women in poverty.

Among our most successful programs during the 1970’s in reducing poverty were those for the elderly. We asked, “What is the nature of poverty among the aged?” One of the problems was fixed incomes, so we indexed Social Security. A second problem was medical expenses. As people get older, their health problems increase, but there was no way they could increase their income to deal with rising medical expenses. So we created the Medicare program. It has never been adequate, and the Reagan Administration has cut it back, but we created a program that dealt with the problem.

A third problem was housing. We said, “A lot of people who aren’t able to buy a house are finding themselves without housing when they are older.” So we created subsidized housing for the elderly. With these and other programs we substantially reduced poverty among the aged.

Now, we have to do the same thing with regard to pov-

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erty among women. We have to ask, “What is the nature of women’s poverty?” Then we have to devise and develop programs that meet the nature of that poverty. I’m going to suggest six principles that I think should guide us as we develop an agenda for women’s poverty.

The first one is: dual systems are inherently unequal. Services for poor people alone tend to be poor services. We need universal programs. We need universal income support programs. We need universal health care programs.

There is, for example, a great deal of talk about people who are uninsured for health care. Do you know what is being proposed? That for middle class people we develop health insurance programs, and for poor people we develop charity hospitals. Hospitals and doctors will be given a pot of money to dole out health care-on their terms-to the poor. That is the wrong way to do it. Dual systems are inherently unequal.

They will always end up being poor services for poor people. We need a non-stigmatizing, universal, system. And there are many ways to pay for it out of the tax system.

Second principle: while programs need to be universal in terms of application, they need to be targeted at specific needs of the poor. Instead of providing a few subsidized child care spaces for a few people, we need universal child care system, much like our public education system. Women-maintained families, especially, need child care.

We emphatically don’t need employer-controlled child care. We’ve had enough experience with company doctors and company stores to know what happens when you have services in control of the same people whose primary motives is profit.

We need programs that address the specific labor market disadvantages faced by women workers as women. We need job training programs that prepare women for non-traditional jobs. We need to prepare women for sexual harassment and sex discrimination so that they know how to handle these situations. Almost no job training provides that unless they’re ones run by women’s organizations.

The third principle is that we need to get rid of the destructive dual system rhetoric when we talk about social welfare programs. We make false judgments and distinctions between dependent and independent. I don’t know any “rugged individualist” who is not socially dependent.

Another false distinction for most women workers is that of being “at work” and “being at home”. Most women know that such dual rhetoric is destructive of self-esteem and that it doesn’t make any sense for their lives. There’s work for pay and there’s work at home.

The fourth principle insists that we need to develop programs that value the work that women do. If a young man gives two or three years to serve in the US armed forces, he is rewarded in many ways. He receives education benefits, health care benefits for the rest of his life, and burial benefits. He is given social esteem.

If a woman gives one year or a few years to having children, she is castigated and ultimately punished for having interrupted her career. We need to value her gifts of her time-perhaps with Social Security earnings sharings, parental leave, or something like veteran’s preference points which would credit women for the time they spent out of the labor force raising children. Women should not be impoverished for making the choice to have children.

Our fifth principle is that we should value children as the precious resources and as the future of this society that they are. Just as no children today should be denied equal access to education or health care because of their race, we need to declare that no children should be denied equal accesss to education, health care, shelter, because of the marital status of their parents.

Sixth, programs should recognize and value–

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equally-different family forms, and not try to solve poverty by imposing one model on all of us. Two parent families-other things being equal-may be preferable. I don’t think all the evidence is in, but clearly “other things” aren’t always equal. For many families the choice is between a two-parent family which is psychologically and physically abusive of the mother and children, and a single-parent family that is not. Often, even with the great economic costs, a one parent family is preferable.

The problem of joblessness among young black men is a problem that ought to be solved in its own right. If that problem were to be solved, and if the man’s wages were to be shared (through marriage or child support), it might contribute to reducing women’s poverty, but it is not the solution, or even a major solution to women’s poverty.

Now some specifics. We need a universal income support system to recognize women’s work as valuable work.

Anybody who wants to work and can work, but can’t find work. should have access to income support as an unemployed person. In the United States, about forty percent of the women who are unemployed are either new entrants or reentrants to the labor market. That means they cannot get unemployment insurance, nor access to the various job service and retraining programs that are available to people who are the “insured unemployed.” Likewise, unemployment insurance systems in Europe provide for young people who graduate from high school, have never worked, but can’t find a job.

In the US, we have a false distinction: a woman with children who receives public assistance is considered to be a “welfare mother.’ She is not considered “unemployed”, even though ninety percent have worked, and some even work while on welfare. She may be looking for a job to support herself and her family, but she does not have a right to unemployment insurance–an income support program whose benefits are often several times as high as those of welfare programs. This makes a big difference. If you don’t have enough resources, you can’t do much about solving your problems.

We should have one income support system. One that is not stigmatizing. We should include everybody who is not working and everyone who has a job but whose earnings are inadequate. For example, in some states-but nowhere in the South-we have “short-time compensation.” Someone whose full-time job is cut back to half-time can get unemployment insurance coverage for that halftime they are not working.

However, if you are a part-time worker, already working only four hours a day. you’re not eligible for the program. ‘[‘hat doesn’t make any sense. The person who can’t get a full-time job is usually in as much, if not more, need than the person who has been cut fron1 full-time to part-time hours.

We need anti-discrimination-against-women provisions in our job training programs. Currently, if you run a job training program. You’re rewarded for how many people you place in jobs. A white man comes in and needs only two weeks of training to get a job. A woman comes and needs child care, remedial math (she dropped out of high school), and more time and experience to get a job. That takes more resources. The job training program which opens itself fully to women’s needs is going to be castigated for not getting as many people jobs as another program which is more concerned with mere body counts-that’s called “creaming”. And it’s been a characteristic of job programs since they started.

Why not reward programs for placing people according to how difficult they are to place?

We need to raise and index the minimum wage. The minimum wage was intended to be a minimum living wage. We should restore that commitment. We have not raised the minimum wage since 1981.

We need to create more jobs both in the private and public sectors. We have a system where we subsidize capital, where there are real incentives for an employer to add a machine to increase his capital investments. (It’s not for nothing our system is called capitalist.) We need incentives for employers who want to expand production-not to add a machine or to add overtime hours for present workers-to give them an incentive to hire new workers.

If everybody who is working today worked only forty hours, had just one job and no overtime, and if we took those overtime hours and hired new workers-and did so by public policy that would subsidize it in the employer’s interest-we would create enough new jobs for every person who is now unemployed. The jobs are there, but not available to those who need them.

And, we should create new jobs. We started to do this under CETA and then cut back. There are a lot of services we need. We need educational excellence. We need teacher’s aides. We need library aides. We need social workers. We need child care. We need a lot of services for a better society.

We should have universal fringe benefits. We need to make sure that all jobs provide not only the minimum income, which is what raising and indexing the minimum wage would do, but minimum security against income loss due to health crisis, unemployment, disabilty, and so on.

We need a system of universal health insurance.

We need to make sure that unemployment insurance covers everybody who is a worker. We need to make sure that disabilty covers everybody who is a worker, including women during pregnancy.

We need decent housing. The absence of shelter is becom-

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ing an increasing crisis for women and their children-the hidden homeless. You don’t see women and their children on the streets nearly as much as you see homeless men. But if you look at the lists for public housing, people who have been found eligible and are waiting, you will see that we have a crisis of shelter for women and children. This crisis is exacerbated by increasing discrimination in the private market against families with children. Twenty-five percent of rental units across the country exclude chidren altogther. Another fifty percent restrict them-only two children, no children over eight, no children under six, and so forth. In some cities, eighty percent of the new rental housing excludes children.

This trend is growing. Gentrification and the building of condiminiums are further reducing the supply of moderate income housing. In public housing, we’ve cut back on rent subsidies. We’ve cut back on construction. Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) estimates that there are now three million single parent families that are doubling up.

How do we get from where we are to where we want to go?

First, we have to use our imagination and out of our experience devise and revise programs that will work. This means the development of programs at the local level as models for national programs and the changing of national programs–such as income support programs. We need to rethink from the ground up.

But, I don’t think we’re going to get simply because of good ideas, or obvious next steps. We have to organize and make demands. We must push for the election of people who realize we have a crisis and who are willing to work on these issues. And frankly, I think that means we need more women to raise the issues and concerns of the new poor.

Diana Pearce is Director (and founder) of the Women and Poverty Project, and visiting professor of Sociology at American University in Washington, DC. She has written and spoken widely on poverty issues, and coined the phrase the “feminization of poverty” in 1978. She has also researched housing discrimination and school desegregation, including serving as an expert witness in the Yonkers (NY) Ouachita Parish (Monroe, LA) cases.

American Poverty, World Poverty

Ray Marshall — Sat, 01 Feb 1986 05:00:02 +0000

American Poverty, World Poverty

By Ray Marshall

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 3-7

For poor people in this country, and in the world, the outlook is not good. And because the lives of the poor are joined together with ours, their problems and poverty are ours-directly and indirectly, in our communities, through international trade, and through immigration.

Rising unemployment is a worldwide phenomenon. Joblessness in the Third World is fifty percent, and climbing. The International Labor Organization estimates that to keep that figure from going up by the end of this century for people already born we’ll need to create 700 million new jobs.

There are not 700 million jobs in the whole industrialized world today. Things are going to get worse.

The Greatest Economic Policy Mistake

The American economy is losing its competitiveness across the board, not just in the smokestack industries but, as a presidential commission reported in 1985, in seven out of ten high-tech industries. Our ability to maintain jobs in this country is being eroded.

The main reason for the loss of competitiveness and for our loss of two million jobs is the over-valued dollar-which comes about directly because of Reaganomics. The 1981 tax cut was the single greatest economic policy mistake in US history. Historians will leave no doubt about that.

To give you some idea of the magnitude of the damage that has come from the tax cut decision, Ford Motor Company estimated in 1983–before things got as bad as they are now–that of the $2,000 differential between American and Japanese automobiles, $1,400 was because of exchange rates. The Caterpillar Company estimated that on a $200,000 piece of equipment, they ought to have a $30,000 advantage over Komatsu. They’ve got a $30,000 disadvantage.

So what do they do? They leave the country. They’re moving the jobs to other countries. Not because of inefficiency in the United States, not because we can’t be more competitive in real terms. They’re moving those jobs from the United States because with differentials in exchange rates of that magnitude they simply cannot compete. They cannot produce in the United States. Ninety-five percent of all the increased capital goods final demand over the past business cycle came from imports. Ninety-five percent.

Our capital goods industries–our machine tools and basic production capability–are in shambles. And although we also have structural problems, the fundamental problem is the over-valued dollar that came about because of high real interest rates, that came about because of the enormous budget deficit, that came about because of the 1981 tax cut.

Corporations Beyond the Rule of Law

There are other problems. What to do about multinational and transnational corporations? (Transnational companies are owned by people from different countries. Multinationals are American companies operating in different countries.)

Transnationals and multinationals are driven by profits. Whatever is second to profits is a long way behind. They will move the jobs wherever they can make the greatest profit. Ordinarily that means to where they can get the lowest wages. So they are able to whipsaw countries. And whipsaw workers.

I’ve seen no effective means to bring multinational and transnational corporations under the rule of law, to make them responsible for their actions. I think it can be done, but I see no organization now to do that.

Many of the jobs in the South are on their way to the Third World. We will not be able to keep them. Many of them came here because of low wages. And this is their last stop in this country. In the Third World, Mexico is a high-wage country and their wages are about one-fifth of ours.

American Poverty

The US poverty figures remain high. The little improvement among some categories last year was very little. We have to be very discouraged about the overall decline in the national poverty rate from 15.2% to 14.4%

Income is being redistributed in the United States. The top ten percent of income recipients have never received a larger proportion of the income at any time since we’ve been keeping numbers than they did in 1984. (see Tables l and 2) The bottom forty percent of income recipients in the country have never received a lower proportion of income than they did in 1984. The lowest ten percent of income recipients in the country have lost about $400 since 1980 while the richest ten percent have added $5,000 to their median income.

Programs to help the poor have been drastically reduced. You know those numbers. Most discouraging, most alarm-

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ing is what is happening to children. Poor children are much worse off now than when the War on Poverty started. There are more of them. Their numbers are increasing while the resources to deal with their problems are diminishing.

Over one-half of poor children live in families headed by women. These children’s futures are inextricably bound up with the conditions of women in poverty. They will never escape from that. If they don’t get proper nutrition as infants and children, they and we are damaged by that forever. These programs have been drastically reduced despite evidence that they save the government three dollars for every dollar spent.

Among our most important anti-poverty programs are our anti-discrimination laws. But, now we’ve got an administration intent upon weakening civil rights enforcement. In their attitudes about discrimination against women and blacks, they would send us back to the 1940s.

Many of the organizations that might help poor and near-poor people are either weakened or are looking the other way.

Unions are weakened and under full-scale attack. The National Association of Manufacturers has formed a Council for a Union-Free Environment. They wouldn’t have dared do that twenty years ago. I don’t think they will pull it off. But in the process they have greatly weakened unions and unions’ ability to represent the interests of workers.

Community-based organizations and civil rights groups have been weakened.

The government–which in a just and humane society should always be concerned about the least fortunate–is looking the other way. They have convinced themselves that there’s no problem or, that it’s the poor’s own fault that they’re poor.

The Democratic Party seems unconcerned about the poor. It has not even demonstrated the concern that would be in its own self-interest: by registering the poor to vote. We could only get six out of over thirty Democratic governors involved in encouraging community service organizations to register voters.

We’ve also got the “neo-liberals” who are disaffected. They believe that the programs that tried to help the poor failed. They believe that if we just let the market work and have the proper macroeconomic policies we don’t need jobs programs and we don’t need most of these programmatic interventions. That strikes me as looking the other way. Denying a problem that clearly exists.

An Intellectual Code of Nonsense

We are seeing a weakening of the intellectual support for human resource development programs. Having such intellectual support during the New Deal was one of the reasons we were able to make progress.

People used to believe that a just and humane society took care of the least of these our brothers and sisters. And, that in so doing, we were helping the country. We did not believe we could prevent depressions and have lasting prosperity unless all major goups shared in that prosperity.

We still say that people are our most important asset. And it’s unquestionably true. But many people who know that, don’t understand it.

So we have cut programs for education that have demonstrated their effectiveness. And we have cut programs like WIC, the women’s, infants and children nutrition program which returns three dollars to the government for each one it spends.

In the past, we believed that these programs were not costs but investments. Public education was an investment in this country. So was the GI Bill. We didn’t only look at the cost of doing things.

Creating a just society once meant something pretty concrete. It meant a bias in favor of the disadvantaged. Nothing was more unjust than the equal treatment of unequals. We felt an obligation to the poor and the disadvantaged.

All this now is being challenged by an intellectual code that contains several parts. The first is Reaganomics, an economic theory of sheer nonsense. I don’t think anybody of sound mind and any training believed that supply-side economics–the doctrine that was used to justify the 1981 tax cut-ever had a chance. You remember what this promised–that by cutting taxes by 750 billion dollars and increasing defense spending to 1.6 trillion, we would so stimulate the economy that we would balance the federal budget by the end of 1983.

The result was the creation of a budget deficit so huge that people now view balancing the budget as the most important thing we can do–even if it means cutting out education and nutrition for children.

As former Reagan budget director David Stockman said in his famous interview, you couldn’t sell trickle-down out loud, so you called it supply-side. That’s all Reaganomics was and is: the myth that if you make the rich richer, we’ll all be better off.

Well, we made the rich richer. And we made the poor poorer–they have been trickled down on. Investment went down. Savings went down. And the result is a budget deficit larger than that produced by all the preceding administrations combined.

Beyond Reaganomics, other doctrines have undercut intellectual and popular support for economic justice. One idea–put forth by Charles Murray in his book Losing Ground–is that government assistance programs are

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counterproductive. Murray’s view, which continues to be surprisingly well-received, holds that social spending makes the receipients dependent and the problems worse. Murray says that as a result of the War on Poverty and the rest of the government’s social spending programs, poverty went up.

A variant of that argument is, “The programs didn’t work.” That’s the easiest one to deal with. Because the evidence is overwhelming that the programs did work. And produced rich dividends for the country.

But let’s look at the ideas of Reaganomics and then at the notions of Murray. First, is the budget deficit our most important problem? Not really. The budget deficit is not likely to cause a recession. It is troubling. Its real effects are on interest rates, the exchange rate, and in creating an obstacle to economic growth. But bringing the deficit down will not necessarily reduce real interest rates.

There are various reasons for that. First, in the deregulated financial environment, competition for deposits keeps the interest rates up. There used to only be competition on one side of the market. Moreover, with very low corporate profits, corporations are no longer as sensitive to interest rates. So there is likely to continue to be high demand for money. Also, there’s simply a lot of speculation, which causes rates to be high and volatile.

By trying first to balance the budget by 1987, we could end up with a deeper recession than that of 1981-82. It’s the wrong time to do it. And the worst possible way to do it would be to make further cuts in domestic spending. We need to reduce the budget deficit as much as possible by raising revenues, cutting military spending, restoring many of the cuts in human resource development programs, raising taxes and reforming the tax system.

Now, let’s look at Charles Murray’s arguments. The evidence is overwhelmingly against the idea that government domestic spending is counterproductive. Bet me just tick off a few reasons.

First, there is the assumption, underlying Murray’s view, that the poor don’t want to work. Nonsense. If you have had any experience with these programs you know that if you make a few lousy jobs available, you get inundated with applicants. Secondly, Murray doesn’t exclude the elderly from his federal expenditure numbers, but he excludes them in terms of how their lives have improved. The elderly have benefitted tremendously from government programs. They have received 86% of social welfare spending. Poverty among the elderly has declined from over 25%, at the beginning of the War on Poverty, twice the overall level, to fourteen percent in 1983.

The neo-conservative argument ignores the fact that a relatively small part of social welfare spending goes to the non-elderly. We are told by Murray that black male teenage crime is a result of government spending. What government program is for black teenage males? None. There’s no social spending on black teenage males. Indeed I know of no human resources development program where conditions got worse because we spent more money.

Even from looking at Murray’s own statistics, the only conclusion you can come to is that social program spending reduces poverty. When we quit spending and reduce

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programs, poverty went up. Problems get worse because of changing conditions or poor program design, not because we spent money. There is overwhelming evidence that programs like the Job Corps that have had time to grow and learn from their mistakes have greatly improved the employability of the young people they were designed to help and are good investments of public resources.

Things have gotten worse for many people because we have discontinued the programs, not because we adopted them. We have serious problems of a secular rise in unemployment; growing inequality, which will greatly weaken an already fractured national unity; and the development of a self-perpetuating social and economic underclass-made up disproportionately of minorities, but including many whites as well.

One manifestation of this self-perpetuation is the teenage pregnancy problem. Unwanted pregnancies among children is a serious national problem with devastating long-run consequences. Its causes are not well understood, but they can be understood with study and attention. I would guess that a good bit of the problem relates to unemployment and social isolation of very poor young people. In the black community, joblessness, racism, the movement of middle- and working-class people out of predominantly black areas (thus removing role models and sources of social stability), and growing unemployment among young black males, all have contributed greatly to a self-perpetuating system of helplessness and despair.

I believe we should make the elimination of this growing underclass a high national priority.

Many object to the costs of programs to change this situation, but we will pay dearly if we do not deal with it.

Most of the work force growth between now and the first two decades of the twenty-first century will be among women and minorities By about 2015, there probably be a combined minority population of 91 million in the US; this will constitute about 34% of the population and well over forty percent of the work force (because white males are older and more likely to retire).

How well prepared these young people are for twenty-first century jobs depends on what is happening to them right now. And the evidence is not encouraging. Most eighteen year old minority males are not sufficiently literate to function in even the emerging low-wage jobs.

Probably less than ten percent of our growing prison population can function at the twelfth grade level. The fact that it costs between $25,000-$30,000 to keep somebody in prison for a year is only part of the cost of inadequate human resource development.

If there is any one fault with what we did in the past, it was that we paid too much attention to income transfers and not enough attention to making people self-sufficient. For the poverty problem is going to be solved by poor and near-poor people themselves. The rest of us (and organizations like the SRC) can help, but programs must be designed to give people greater ability and incentives to help themselves.

So what can we do? It’s very clear that we need a new international economic order. That we’ve got to renegotiate GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs). We’ve got to have much better coordination between the economic policies of the major industrial countries.

We’ve got to say to Japan and Germany and other countries, “You’ve got to help. We’ve got to move together. And what you ought to do now is to start stimulating your economy. What we all ought to do now is relax our monetary policies to bring real interest rates down. And we’ll start doing some things to balance our budget.”

Within the US, we need a full employment strategy. We need to create enough jobs at decent wages to provide one for everybody who is willing and able to work. We can and ought to do it. We can’t do it through monetary-fiscal policies alone, but we can create jobs There’s a lot of useful work to be done.

We know that a full-employment policy would be good business. With a jobs program, $15 billion could save the federal government $30 billion. We’ve demonstrated that in the past. The main reason we don’t do it now is the neoconservative mythology that it didn’t work. We ought not let them get IJY with that. The contrary evidence is overpowering.

We need to greatly strengthen our human resource development. Our education, our health care. We must educate people, get them trained.

Worker ownership of industry has already started in

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other countries, and is beginning in the United States. We ought to develop policies to facilitate worker participation in and ownership of industry.

We must strengthen collective bargaining.

We need to strengthen community-based organinzations that assist people in gaining greater control of their own destinies.

We must get ready, for our time will come I think the country will be looking for new answers by 1988 when many of Ronald Reagan’s chickens come home to roost and the consequences of his policies are more obvious.

What should we do? We must keep the faith. We must do what we think is right. We ought not be stampeded into doing things simply because they are popular. We especially should avoid the trap that balancing the budget should take priority over everything else-an idea t hat seems to be very popular with many Democrats. We ought to learn. We ought to act We ought to challenge. We ought to develop strategies and tactics to improve the conditions of the poor. We ought to organize. We ought to register voters. We ought to form coalitions.

We ought to present our analysis and the realities of life under Reaganomics to as wide a popular audience as we can, using the most modern and accessible forms of media. We should make clear what life for the working poor is really like. We should present the examples of young people who have been trained in the civil rights movement or in community-based organizations who are now assuming positions of leadership in the country. We should present the lives of young women who have been able to escape from welfare and poverty because of government programs which support training and childcare. We should present the very real stories of adults who have learned to read and write because of an adult literacy program.

We should not let people make abstractions of human suffering. Above all we should not be afraid to experiment, to try new approaches to dealing with our human problems. We should not be afraid to make mistakes and we should learn from our mistakes.

Rather what we should fear most, as citizens of the richest nation on earth, is the judgment of the world community and of history that we were unwilling to tee good and faithful stewards of our resources, that we deliberately decided not to use our resources to try to improve the human condition.

One of the reason that I am proud to have been associated with the Southern Regional Council is that this organization can stand that test. Whatever else historians may say about the SRC, I am confident that they will say we at least tried to use our resources to make the South a better place for all of our people.

Ray Marshall holds the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and is vice-president of the Southern Regional Council.

Casualty Count. The War Against the Poor

Robert Greenstein — Sat, 01 Feb 1986 05:00:03 +0000

Casualty Count. The War Against the Poor

By Robert Greenstein

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 7-10

If you look at the statistics of American poverty today, one set–the figures for children’s poverty–hits you over the head. Fifteen years ago the child poverty rate was between thirteen and fourteen percent. Last year it was over twenty-one percent. The poverty rate for children is a full one-third higher than in the late 1970s when the unemployment rate was at the same level as it is today.

And, while there has been a very slight recent reduction in the overall poverty rate during the past year, and in the overall child poverty rate, all the reduction in child poverty has occurred among white children. None of it has occurred among black or Hispanic children.

The poverty rate for black children under the age of six now has reached just over fifty-one percent. One out of every two black children under the age of six in the United States lives in poverty.

Nor do we expect any substantial further reduction in poverty soon. Real wages (wages adjusted for inflation), which are an important predictor of the poverty rate, remain unchanged from a year ago. Inflation isn’t going up very fast, but wages are going up even less than inflation. The

Page 8

real purchasing power of wages did not improve in 1985.

Why is this happening?

Before the scant decline in the poverty rate was announced, Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldrige, hailed the improved unemployment figures and predicted that the poverty rate for 1984 would go down to thirteen percent.

It didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, several economists at the Institute for Research on Poverty in Madison, Wisconsin, were forecasting the 1984 poverty statistics almost exactly on the mark. What were the differences between how the Reagan Administration and the Wisconsin researchers analysed the circumstances of poverty?

The Administration assumed the major issue was the economy: unemployment goes up, poverty goes up, unemployment comes down, poverty comes down.

The economists at the Institute for Research on Poverty recognized that changes in the economy are important, but found that the domestic budget cuts since 1981 also have played a role and have had a long-lasting effect in increasing the number of families with children who are poor.

They also found the benefits of the current economic “recovery” are less evenly distributed than those of any previous economic recovery of recent decades. The gap between rich and poor is growing. In fact, the gap between upper and lower income families in the United States is wider today than at any time since the US Census began collecting data on income distribution in 1947.

The poorest forty percent of all US families now have a smaller share of the national income than at any time since 1947.

The richest forty percent of all US families now have a larger share of the national income in any time since 1947.

What’s more, if you examine median family income since 1980 you’ll find that the a family in the poorest forty percent of the population had nearly $500 less in annual income by 1984 than in 1980 (after adjusting for inflation). By constrast, the median family of the top forty percent was $1,800 richer in 1984 than in 1980. And the median family income in the top ten percent of the population had increased by $5,000 in those years. That’s before-tax income–even before the effects of the Reagan help-the-rich tax cuts.

These figures have implications for rich and poor, and for black and white. Nearly two-thirds of black families fall into the bottom forty percent of the overall population. Only one of every five black families falls into the top forty per cent. Or to put that another way, while white median family income is a tad higher now than in 1980, black median family income is over $500 lower after adjusting for inflation.

What the figures also show is that not only has the number of poor grown (in 1978 there were about 25 million people below the poverty line, today there are nearly 34 million), but that those who are poor have gotten poorer. The typical poor family is farther below the poverty line.

The Working Poor

Another factor of recent years affecting the rise in poverty is a very serious decline in wages. Larger and larger numbers of people who work remain poor. The number of people who work full-time year-round and are still poor has increased by two-thirds just since 1978, and now exceeds two million persons.

The increasing numbers of working poor are related to the growing weakness of labor unions, foreign competition and the shift from manufacturing to service jobs. Just as important is the unprecedented stagnation of the minimum wage. The minimum has not been adjusted now in nearly five years. The minimum wage has fallen twenty-five percent in relation to inflation since January 1981.

What does a declining minimum wage mean if you work forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year for $3.35 an hour? In 1978 if you were a member of a family of four in which one wage-earner worked full-time and year-round at the minimum wage, your family would have been $1,150 below the poverty line. The same situation in a family of three would have put that family above the poverty line.

Today, a family of four with a single wage-earner working forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, finds itself $4,000 below the poverty line. Today, a family of three–for instance, a minimum wage earning mother of two children–working full-time, year-round, is $1,600 below the poverty line. A family of two (a full-time working mother and one child) is about forty or fifty dollars below the poverty line. These families are falling further below the poverty line each year because the minimum wage is not being adjusted for inflation.

And, it’s not just the minimum wage. Many workers are paid fifty cents or a dollar above the minimum. Families are working, they are trying, but they are remaining in poverty.

The Unkindest Cuts

Now, these are some of the basic situations that confront us. And what has the federal response been? To cut the very programs which give the most help to the working poor while, at the same time, using the money cut from domestic programs to finance the continuing military build-up.

While the programs affected are many in number and their effect is often life-saving–Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps, SSI, low-income housing, low-income energy assistance, legal servi-

Page 9

ces and so forth (about thirty programs in all)–their budgets are actually quite small. If you add together all of the programs targeted for low income persons, you’re talking about one-tenth of the federal budget. Yet that one-tenth of the federal budget bore thirty percent of the budget cuts enacted from 1981 through 1983, when the bulk of the domestic reductions were made. In other words, the low income programs shouldered three times their share. No other part of the federal budget has been cut as deeply. And, many of these programs stand to be cut deeply again in fiscal year 1987, if the Administration has its way.

Let’s take a couple of areas and highlight what has happened.

In the AFDC program, the Reagan Administration says the cuts have been “successful.” Yet, this past July, the General Accounting Office came out with a major report on the impact of the cuts in AFDC. The GAO found 440,000 families-nearly all of them working, female-headed families-had been cut from AFDC. Many of those families were poor even before being cut. Many more were made poor.

In many states the families cut from AFDC also lost Medicaid coverage. An estimated 700,000 children lost Medicaid coverage.

When the GAO looked further, it found that the average family that was cut from AFDC had lost between $1,500 and $2,500 dollars a year in benefits. The GAO determined that between twenty and fifty percent of the families that were cut now have no health care coverage for themselves or their children.

About half the families reported having run out of food at least once and having no money to buy more. Over one-quarter of these families had some utility shut-off at least once after being dropped from AFDC.

This GAO study did not even examine the effects of all the cuts in the AFDC program, such as the denial of AFDC

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benefits during the first five months of pregnancy to a woman pregnant with her first child. This, despite knowledge that prenatal care during early periods of pregnancy is quite important to healthy growth.

And then, there are other program areas. The cuts that have been made in low-income housing are truly staggering. Not only did we raise the rents for everybody in public and subsidized housing twenty-five percent or more, but in many cases we cut their food stamps and their AFDC benefits as well. We cut back on federal support for construction and rehabilation of low-income housing units. We are now losing about a half a million low-income units a year nationwide, due to rent increases, condominium conversion, abandonment, decay and so forth.

As recently as the mid-1970s, federal money was paying for the construction or rehabilitation of over 300,000 units a year. That’s been cut by two-thirds. The 1987 budget as proposed by the Reagan Administration provides no funds for any further construction or rehabilitation of low-income housing.

Nor has most of the impact of past housing cuts yet been felt. The shortage of low-income housing today is nothing like it will be ten years from now, when the forward-funded housing of the Ford and Carter administrations trickles out. The low-income housing situation is expected to will be substantially worse ten years from now.

Despite statements of Reagan Administration officials that their proposed 1987 budget will protect low income Americans, the proposals included in the President’s latest budget request will, if enacted, represent the deepest cuts in programs for the poor since the large reductions enacted 1981. An analysis of the 1987 Reagan budget reveals that spending for programs for the poor would be cut $8.2 billion next year from current levels. Virtually every low income entitlement program would be cut. Two million elderly persons living below the poverty line would be required to pay more out of their own incomes for Medicare.

The President’s 1987 budget calls for “recisions” (cancellations) of $7 billion already appropriated by Congress in fiscal year 1986 for some fifteen low income programs and for the elimination–next year–of fourteen low income programs. Among those set for extinction and of particular importance to poor people in the South are legal services, community services block grants, rural rental housing loans, rural home ownership loans, rural water and sewer grants.

And, while the 1987 budget proposal would exact a substantial toll on poor families and low income elderly persons, appropriations for the military would increase by $34 billion–a rise of eight percent after inflation. As in past years of the Reagan Administration, cuts in domestic programs in the 1987 budget would not only bear nearly all of the brunt of reducing the deficit, they would also finance the ongoing military build-up.

Robert Greenstein is director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. For more information about the Center and its work, write to 236 Massachusetts Ave., NE, .Suite 305, Washington, DC 20002. 202-544-O591. Mr Greenstein’s remarks printed here are revised from his talk at the 1985 annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 by John T. Kneebone. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Patricia Sullivan — Sat, 01 Feb 1986 05:00:05 +0000

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 by John T. Kneebone. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Reviewed by Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 22-24

The term “liberal” often obscures more than it explains. The adjective “southern” is certain to add to the confusion.

There is an implicit assumption that “southern liberal” means white southern liberal. The image of a southern liberal between the two world wars, the period John Kneebone addresses, evokes an ambivalent figure. The system o~ legalized white supremacy was firmly intact, and many “liberals” endorsed Mark Ethridge’s 1942 statement that “there is no power in the world-not even all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis-which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation.”

Thus, John Kneebone feels compelled to qualify his definition from the start. “Southern liberalism,” he explains, “must emphasize the adjective. Downplaying the southernness of these people tends to identify them with national racial liberalism that takes its traction from a history emphasizing the ideals of Jefferson’s declaration, the abolition movement, the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, the abolition movement, and Negro protest in the twentieth century.” The liberalism Kneebone writes about has limitations which time brings to the fore. His is a provocative study of a particular style of “southern” liberalism which came of age in the 1920s and 1930s and was moribund by the end of World War II-a victim of its own inner contradictions, underscored the emerging black protest movement.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 is organized around the lives and careers of five men: Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980) of the Baltimore Evening Sun, George Fort Milton (1894-1955) of the Chattanooga News, Virginius Dabney (1901-) of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ralph McGill (1899-1969) of the Atlanta Constitution, and Hodding Carter (1907-1972) of the Greenville (MS) Delta Democrat-Times. Hardly two generations removed from the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the past was very much present in the minds of these journalists. They maintained that the slavery system bore the seeds of its own demise, and, therefore, the Civil War was an unnecessary war. The journalists focused their attention on Reconstruction as the event which traumatized the process of change in the South, and caused the political and social unrest that disrupted the region through the turn of the century. The Progressive era brought back a semblance of order through the enactment of segregation and disenfranchisement law in the South. A delicate balance had been restored, and the subjects of Kneebone’s study dedicated themselves to maintaining social harmony while nurturing the progress promised by increasing urbanization and industrializtion.

These men came of age professionally during the post World War I period. Southern journalists of the 1920s won national acclaim as the voices of reason and tolerance in a region that seemed woefully lacking in both. They applied a critical eye to the southern social scene and challenged the excesses of fundamentalism, the Klan, lynching and prohibition. By the end of the decade, Kneebone explains, an identifiable southern journalism existed. The journalists had assumed their “class” responsibility as social reformers with a twofold mission: to educate the southern white masses, and to explain the South to northerners in order to discourage “outside” interference in southern affairs. They further refined their position during the Agrarian debate of

Page 23

the early 1930s when they held forth as proponents of progress through “regulated industrialization.”

Race relations remained largely on the periphery of the journalists’ concerns during the 1920s. In 1930 the number of lynchings, which had been on the decline during the previous decade, increased dramatically. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) responded with an investigation which reinforced the belief that these evils were uniquely lower class in origin. The key to establishing and maintaining good race relations, then, was to modify and cultivate the behavior of the white southern masses. The Scottsboro case also failed to raise any serious questions about the base injustice of legalized white supremacy. While striving to curb its excesses, the journalists worked to insure that the segregation system worked. They were confident that urbanization would contribute to better race relations, and adopted Robert Parks’ model of vertical segregation as their goal in realizing a more equitable society. Black folk remained an invisible people whose patience, endurance and submission were taken for granted as white reformers promoted gradual change within the limits of Jim Crow.

Events during the 1930s tested the position that the journalists had secured for themselves. They enthusiastically endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first term as the embodiment of Rational Leadership, a true statesman who stood above partisan squabbles. His aggressive legisla. tive program met the crisis of the depression and implemented programs to provide for the larger social good. By 1937, however, their view of the President had begun to sour. Roosevelt’s second term victory was based on a coalition of labor, black and urban voters, suggesting a class appeal which countered the journalists’ ideal of social harmony. The President’s court-packing plan and his attempt to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party in the South completed the disillusionment. Outside interference in regional affairs could never be justified, even if it intended to mobilize political support for New Deal programs the journalists favored. By 1938 their opposition to FDR and the New Deal paralleled that of the South’s most conservative representatives in Congress.

The Depression and the New Deal had released forces for change in the South which challenged the moderating influence of Kneebone’s subjects. Just as they retreated from Roosevelt, another group of Southerners rallied to demonstrate their support of the President in founding the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). As Arthur Raper, a founding member of SCHW, explained to me a few years ago, the events of the 1930s had shaken the foundation of southern society. “A lot of folks were up on their feet and talking and expecting things that they had never expected before …. Here was … a very basic ferment, and people needed to respond to it in some way.” The SCHW went beyond the CIC (which addressed itself to the “better” elements of the community as agents of gradual change), and made a mass, interracial appeal. Organized by southern New Dealers and labor activists, the SCHW hoped to build a broad-based constituency for progressive political action in the South. The organization concentrated on eliminating voter restrictions which kept the great majority of southerners from the ballot box, and later joined the CIO and NAACP in promoting voter registration and education drives throughout the South. The SCHW acted on the assumption that an expanded electorate, which included working class and black voters, was essential to liberalizing the South. This approach contradicted the basic premises shared by the southern journalists. They believed in cooperative endeavors led by the elite class, and they strongly opposed any type of racial or class activism. These men lacked a basic faith in the “democratic” process, and did not promote enfranchisement of the masses as part of their reform program. They eschewed politics in favor of Howard Odum’s ideal of social planning by “nonpartisan” leaders as the means for advancing the general welfare.

By the end of the 1930s, the journalists were on the defensive. Events overseas, however, seemed to provide a reprieve from pressing social concerns. “Dr. Win the War” had replaced “Dr. New Deal” and the journalists enthusiastically endorsed the war against fascism. World War 11 caused them to abandon the anti-war doctrines which had served as the intellectual foundation of the southern liberal program for gradual reform. Their support for the war undercut an earlier notion that the Civil War had demonstrated the futility of war for principle. Hitler had changed

Page 24

all of that. There were moral issue worth fighting for. Gerald W. Johnson acknowledged that “the principle of freedom is a unit to the extent that when any man’s freedom is attacked every man’s freedom is threatened.” George Fort Milton proclaimed, “the world cannot endure half slave and half free.” The war became their cause-and their undoing. For when black Americans internalized wartime rhetoric, and publicly endorsed the indivisibility of freedom and democracy, the journalists were forced to confront the color line. When they did, they qualified those very principles which justified the war against Hitler. By the end of the war, the journalists had become apologists for the segregation system and relinquished whatever leadership role they might have played in the emerging civil rights movement.

Kneebone demonstrates quite convincingly that the black protest of the World War II period caught his subjects totally off guard. Clearly, there had been very little communication of consequence between most whites and blacks in the South prior to the war. As Kneebone points out, his journalists along with the rest of the CIC leadership had very limited relations with a very limited number of black leaders, and always with the assumption that “white southern liberals would determine the agenda and set the pace for racial reform.” Charles S. Johnson and others were consulted for their endorsement and cooperation, not for their critical judgment or unqualified participation. The journalists had effectively insulated themselves from the ferment within the black community. This ferment took on sustained momentum and direction during the 1930s when Charles H. Houston and a team of black lawyers around the South began coordinating the legal attack on the segregation system which would culminate with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Building on the protest surrounding the Scottsboro case, Houston used the courtroom as a classroom to further educate, politicize and organize local blacks. These preliminary efforts helped to revive and expand NAACP membership in the South, which boomed during the war years. The fact that Charles Houston is not mention in Kneebone’s study further suggests the extent to which Kneebone’s subjects ignored the dynamics for change emerging within the black community.

John Kneebone has written a compelling study of the evolution of a predominant strand of southern liberal thought between the wars, and its ultimate demise. However, it is important to note that as Kneebone’s subjects were turning inward, southern liberalism was blossoming through the lives and careers of a number of their contemporaries. Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Lucy Randolph Mason, C.B. Baldwin, Frank Graham, Palmer Weber, Arthur Raper, Josephine Wilkins and others were also rooted in the southern past. But they looked beyond the Civil War Reconstruction period to the Jeffersonian ideals of the late eighteenth century. These individuals concentrated on givng the democratic process full play in the South, and in the nation. Their concerns complemented the efforts of Charles Houston, Ella Baker, E.D. Nixon, Charles Gomillion, and a host of black leaders throughout the South who were motivated by the promise of the Constitution. Virginia Durr’s Outside the Magic Circle, and Robert J. Norell’s Reaping the Whirlwind are important companion pieces to Kneebone’s Southern Liberal Journalists. Together they help demonstrate the broad range of “liberalism” that should be suggested by the adjective “southern.” They also direct our attention to the New Deal-World War 11 period as an exciting and important era in the history of the South–and of the Civil Rights Movement-and one which historians have just begun to explore.

Patricia Sullivan is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and lecturer in history at the University of Virginia.

In Country, a novel by Bobbie Ann Mason. Harper &Row 247 pp. $15.95

John Egerton — Sat, 01 Feb 1986 05:00:05 +0000

In Country, a novel by Bobbie Ann Mason. Harper &Row 247 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 8, No.1, 1986, pp. 20-22

The tumultuous decade of the 1960s still hovers over us like a great gray cloud, a mighty shadow of lingering hope and despair and wonder. We look back now with amazement bordering on disbelief at the exhilarating and traumatic ascensions and plunges that our society somehow survived in those years-black liberation and the movements it spawned for women and other minorities, the war in Southeast Asia, multiple assassinations, moon landings, urban and environmental crises, the drug culture, and much more. It may be emotional exhaustion as much as anything else that has slowed the runaway roller-coaster since then; in any case, the rumble of revolutionary thunder seems now to echo less frequently and more distantly.

Trying to make sense of those times, to tote up the gains

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and losses and chart new directions, is a complex and unending task. We look to participants and eyewitnesses, to politicians and commentators, to scholars and creative artists for a better understanding of what went on and what the consequences will be. The picture is not yet clear, though, and may not be for a long time to come. Most historians regard the period as still too recent for definitive interpretation and analysis (some would call it both literally and figuratively too close for comfort). Novelists, on the other hand, may feel no such constraints; armed with literary license, they can probe selectively, explore at will, blend reality with imagination, and finally give us sweeping or tightly focused visions of our former selves.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, a novel, looks back to Vietnam from the vantage point of a small town in western Kentucky in 1984. Her characters are working-class white people living in the present. On the surface, hers is a simple tale briefly told. But in the spare and unadorned language we stumble upon some unexpected and disturbing images: of Vietnam’s continuing legacy, of mass culture seeping into the pores of the society, of an out-of-the-way country place that could be Anywhere USA, of ordinary people like us who seem harmless and even at times humorous but also aimless and immobilized.

An eighteen-year-old girl named Samantha Hughes–Sam to everyone–is the central figure. She lives with her thirty-five-year old uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam veteran whose only regular activities are having breakfast at McDonald’s with some of his old army buddies and watching M*A*S*H reruns on TV. When his father asks him why he doesn’t get a job and “stop fooling around,” Emmett answers: “Ain’t nothing worth doing. Most jobs are stupid.”

Sam’s father was killed in Vietnam, and her mother has remarried and moved away. Her grandparents live nearby, but she seldom sees them. She has finished high school and is thinking about going to college-either that or going back to her counter job at Burger Boy. Her current boyfriend, Lonnie Malone, is a bag boy at Kroger, and her closest friend is a girl named Dawn who has just discovered she is pregnant.

Emmett has health problems that Sam believes are caused by residual poisoning from Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant we used so extensively in Vietnam. She wants to know what really happened in the war, to know how her father died and what Emmett and his companions experienced there, but no one seems able to tell her anything: “She knew very well that on TV, people always had the words to express their feelings, while in real life hardly anyone ever did. On TV, they had script writers.” In Hopewell, Kentucky, a.k.a. Anywhere USA, no one seems to grasp what is happening, let alone have the words to explain it.

Sam and Emmett and their friends seem utterly shackled by contemporary culture. Their reference points are in television and music videos, supermarkets and shopping malls, processed foods and packaged entertainment. History to them reaches only as far back as the sixties, “a much better time to be young than now.” Far from being dangerous or menacing, they are simply ineffectual, even impotent. If they have jobs, the work is routinized and low-paying and dead-end; if they have family ties, the connections are tenuous and habitual.

Emmett and the other veterans, physically or mentally scarred by their war experiences, seem destined never to recover; now in their mid-thirties, they have been old men

Page 22

since they came home fifteen years ago. But Sam and her friends also seem old before their time, though they are still teenagers, and when the two generations come together, they find common ground in stereo music and cable TV, in Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Carson, in HBO, MTV, Cinemax. Whatever can’t be captured in a half-hour sitcom or a seven-minute music video is not likely to be seen and heard, let alone remembered.

The Southeast Asian experience, whether terrifying of thrilling, is the only thing different in the lives of the older men. Those who were “in country”–in Vietnam–know it is all that sets them apart; some of them resent that, others take pride in it. Sam’s concern for Emmett’s health and her curiosity about her father’s death are the only compelling interests she seems able to sustain.

Set as it is in 1984 (the same year it apparently was written, since it was published in 1985), In Country is full of the most contemporary and immediate references–Reagan, Mondale, Ferraro, and so forth. Even so, the book portrays characters who are isolated and adrift, lost in inner space with no apparent hope of rescue–or even a clear sense that they are lost. The bleakness of their plight is all the more poignant because they seem so real, so believable, so familiar.

One of the marks of Bobbie Ann Mason’s skill as a writer is her ability to disguise intent. Is she telling us, like Jean Paul Sartre, that our destiny as human beings is to wander aimlessly in a meaningless universe? Is she describing reality as she sees it in one little corner of the globe? Has she simply invented a few fictional characters who can’t “express their feelings” because they don’t have TV script writers to give them a voice? Is she poking fun at lower-middle-class white people in the small-town South, or being critical of them, or showing sympathy for them, or celebrating them?

Who’s to say? You pay your $15.95 and you take your choice. Along the way, you may encounter some people you’ll think you’ve met before–friends, neighbors, relatives–or even catch a glimpse of yourself. Bobbie Ann Mason’s strength is in fashioning familiar characters out of plain, direct, straightforward language. I am moved by her power to do that. I only wish her people were sometimes able to rise above themselves and do something really wild -cancel the cable subscription, sell the stereo, boycott the shopping malls, or even, heaven help us, break the habit of dining daily under the golden arches.

John Egerton lives in Nashville. He is author of many essays and books, including Generations (Univ. Press of Kentucky) which won the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award in 1984.