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SOCIOLOGY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other America

by: Michael Harrington, 1976

ISBN: 0140213082

 

America in the early 1960's was two nations, one affluent, where everything was possible, and another replete with misery, poverty, and social stagnation, perpetuating itself in a vicious cycle.  The two Americas, were still with us one decade later after Johnson declared 'war on poverty' and is still with us today, perhaps more so than ever, given that Welfare has been 'reformed' to serve less and less people, and social security is on the verges of becoming ancient history--if George Bush has his way.

 

Harrington first described 'The Other America' and published his findings in 1962, the book shocked the nation including its young idealistic president who earnestly promised to rescue those caught in a vicious cycle of poverty.  An Assassin stopped that from happening but JFK's ideas would later form the crux of Johnson's 'Great Society'.  The attempt did reduce misery and poverty in America, but since Nixon was elected, poverty in America has been on an upward spiral.

    

I first met Michael Harrington one autumn day in 1979 as he delivered a lecture on the state of America at Rutgers University.  He presented his ideas with a great sense of urgency and dynamism, and without excusing a perspective which he described as social democracy.  I would later debate the ideas that Harrington proposed, with mainstream political science professors who labeled Harrington 'a socialist and a dreamer.'  The criticism is a 'straw man argument'; destroy the messenger and you thereby destroy the argument, a rhetorical ploy often used in mainstream American politics. In logic, the straw man argument is a fallacy, in other words such an argument is nonsense.  So Harrington's words and his vision, have stayed with me these many years, resounding in clarity.  Perhaps his vision is a dream waiting to happen, akin to Martin Luther King's dream.  Upon re-reading this book recently I am forced to recognize that this is a classic that still deserves to be read and 'intellectually digested.'

 

'The Other America' is a descriptive work, that cites statistics, examples, case histories 'ad nauseum', if anything, it established beyond doubt the existence, the misery of how many fellow Americans lived across the United States in the early 1960's.  The book recites a pattern created by circumstances of poverty that cement a vicious cycle hard to escape.  Harrington would later argue with equal fervor, and armed with facts and statistics, that America continued to struggle with these same circumstances in the 1970's and 1980's.

"...being poor is not one aspect of a person's life in this country; it is his life.  Taken as a whole, poverty is a culture...the point is not to make them wards of the state. Rather, society must help them before they can help themselves." (p.171)

"...there is no realistic hope for the abolition of poverty in the United States until there is a vast social movement, a new period of political creativity.  In times of slow change or of stalemate, it is always the poor who are expendable in the halls of Congress... it is much easier to catalogue the enemies of the poor than it is to recite their friends." (p.182)

"...it is obvious that these statistics represent an enormous, an unconscionable amount of human suffering in this land. They should be read with a sense of outrage.  For until these facts shame us, until they stir us to action, the other America will continue to exist, a monstrous example of needless suffering in the most advanced society in the world." (p.202)

 


Updated  April 01, 2005

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