America's Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century

Throughout the 20th century, by practically every standard of measurement, the United States was the wealthiest nation in the world. Nevertheless, there always have been poor. This complex study by James Patterson, Professor of History at Brown University, seeks to explain the coexistence of wealth and poverty people in American society during the last century. In the process, Patterson makes a number of incisive observations about the nature of poverty. In the preface to the current edition, written in 1994, Patterson provocatively asserts his "continuing belief that poverty in the United States is not only a major concern - [is] perhaps the biggest the nation faces." This book is not easy reading, but it is essential for anyone seeking to understand an important issue in American politics at the beginning of the 21st century.Patterson's explication of competing theoretical approaches to the problem of poverty is excellent. In speaking about the 1940s and 1950s, Patterson identifies three "overlapping insights," although it is clear that these schools of thought evolved and recurred over the course of the century. The cultural anthropological perspective asserted that "class and poverty were cultural instead of economic" and that the behavior of poor people "is usually a perfectly realistic, adaptive, and - in slum life - socially acceptable response to reality." The liberal view originally expected the "economic revival of 1940-42 [to] solve the problem of destitution, [but] they insisted that welfare must remain an important element in public policy." The structuralists, according to Patterson, also "assumed the long-term need for extensive need for extensive public welfare" but also sought "major initiatives to counter low wages and underemployment." In the middle of the book, Patterson makes the astute, invaluable point that "policy formation rarely follows from a single intellectual perspective," and the implication is that legislated poverty programs often have drawn from two or more of these perspectives. Patterson writes: The economic growth between 1900 and 1929 prompted great optimism among social scientists." According to Patterson: "Some reformers, reflecting the optimism of the age, rejoiced that `public welfare' was replacing" older philosophies. During the crisis of the Great Depression in the1930s, some social workers feared the creation of a "permanent relief class," and President Roosevelt stated that he meant to get the federal government to "quit this business of relief." Although the "early welfare state" offered "categorical assistance for the needy over sixty-five, blind people, and dependent children," Patterson writes that a "distaste for welfare" persisted. When general prosperity returned during the 1940s, according to Patterson, it was "mainly the result of heavy government spending during World War II." That led to renewed optimism about ending poverty through economic growth, alone, and it was not un