In the midst of plenty

In the People recently there appeared an article written by Michael Gabbert under the heading “30,000,000 Americans Go Hungry.” In heavy type were references to “Children often are sent out to work on the land”; “In poverty-ridden tenements life is one long struggle against rats”; “And eight out of ten of the hungry ones are white.”

We are told that one-sixth of America’s population live below the minimum acceptable standards of health, housing, food and education. According to official figures thirty million men, women and children are living in poverty and squalor in America’s slums, migratory labour camps, depressed areas or Indian “reservations.”

In his new study, researcher Ben H. Bagdikian examines poverty at the level on which the poor see it themselves. He uses individual cases—individual cries for help—to illustrate the great American paradox of poverty amidst plenty: a paradox in which the poor, though without electricity, scrabble for junk-heap refrigerators so that they may use them to keep food safe from marauding rats . . . in which every major city from the East coast to the West coast has its own “Skid-row” of human derelicts . . . in which automation has brought untold misery to once proud workers.

Thus Bagdikjan destroys a couple of beliefs comfortably held by the well-off.

It has been assumed by many that the poor are mainly negroes and half-castes; in fact, 78 out of every 100 are whites. It has also been assumed that most of the American poor are in the agricultural South, when, in fact, 57 out of every 100 live in the more industrialised North. The writer continues by saying: “The answer to poverty is jobs, and in America six men out of every 100 are jobless.” Even that is not a true picture, men in work live in poverty.

The effect of poverty is seen in the schools. At one Chicago elementary school 1,000 students enrol every autumn and most of them leave before the following June because their parents have been evicted, have left the district to seek work elsewhere, or have given up and returned in desperation to the land.

So illiteracy goes on. The parents prefer—or are forced—to put their children to labour on the land in order to eke out a miserable existence. One recent survey showed that nearly half a million children between the ages of ten and fifteen worked on the land. It also showed that in 20 out of every 100 accidents on the farm it was children who suffered injuries. The desperate march away from the land is reproduced in most of the major cities—New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland’ and Washington. In the last decade a vast migration of 27 million men, women and children have left the land; many of them to find equal poverty in the towns.

J. E. ROE