Suburban Nation/Jim Crow Nation (pt.2)

The Other America

• Michael Harrington's "The Other America" (1962):
  • First appeared in Commentary magazine in 1959/60.
  • Discusses poverty affecting 50 million Americans, in a U.S. population of 181 million.
  • Poverty disproportionately affects unskilled workers, rural dwellers, immigrants, racial minorities, the elderly, and the disabled.
  • Highlights unemployment, poor wages (40% of the workforce in unskilled or “service” jobs), hunger, lack of access to health care, and unsafe living and working conditions.

The Invisibility of Poverty

• Reasons why poverty is “invisible” to most Americans:
  • Homeownership:
    • 1940: 44%
    • 1960: 62%
  • Suburban population doubles (to 74 million) between 1950 and 1970, with 83% of the nation’s population growth in the suburbs.
  • Poverty is often out of sight, concentrated, and segregated from middle-class communities.
    • Depicted as a personal, familial, or community “failure” (Harrington and the “culture of poverty”).

The Culture of Poverty

• Harrington’s perspective:
  • “There is…a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”
• Edward Banfield’s (Harvard Univ.) perspective:
  • “The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment…. Impulse governs his behavior…. He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless…. [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”
  • “[In the “hardest cases,” the poor need to be cared for in] semi-institutions…and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social- worker—semi-policeman.”

Women, Men, and Family Norms

• Women fired from skilled, high-paying positions with limited access to training and professions.
• The Modern Woman (1947) describes the “independent woman” as a “contradiction in terms.”
• Motherhood held up as the natural “norm.”
• Women denied the right to serve on juries, take out credit cards, or make contracts.
• Life magazine calls women’s employment a “disease.”
• Nonconformists often diagnosed as mentally ill, institutionalized, and even treated with electroshock.
• Nixon: the American home had been “designed to make things easier for women.”
• Single men depicted as “immature,” “narcissistic,” or “deviant."
• Civil Service Commission forces out thousands of government employees suspected of being homosexual, calling them “security risks;” electroshock prescribed as a “cure.”

Social Issues

• Alcoholism, sedative abuse, violence against children and spouses (psychiatrists described battered wives as “masochists” who provoke the violence), widespread sexual abuse of women and minors.
• Marital conflict, a lot of separation and divorce.
• Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique identifies the “problem that has no name”—widespread unhappiness among white, middle-class women.

Backlash: Red Scare, Policing Gender/Sexuality

• Split of the Democratic party.
  • Reform was “ascendant” in core parts of the Democratic party: Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy; Americans for Democratic Action (1947).
  • Met by a wave of repression against political dissent:
    • HUAC hearings and the “Age of McCarthyism”.
    • Blacklists.
    • AFL and CIO purges radicals (communists, civil rights activists) from the unions (1946, 1949).
    • Truman’s loyalty program for civilian employees (1947).
    • Civil rights plank in 1948 Democratic Party platform met with the formation of the Dixiecrat Party (Strom Thurmond).
    • Internal Security--McCarran Act (1950).

Future Outlook

• Big change is in the works.
• On all of these fronts, the U.S. is in for a big shake-up.
• By the 1970s, dominant political and cultural institutions are reckoning with past discrimination (some better than others!).
• Next week, the lecture will begin to examine how and why the battle over “who counts” was revolutionized in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.