The Other America: Poverty in the United States

My original copy of The Other America with it's prolific empty highlighting and the vacuous notes of a college freshman of 50 years ago is long gone. The current copy was picked up at a library sale to be part of my project to re-read years later those books I had loved when a youth. My re-reading took place at the second point in my political life when a self proclaimed socialist was making a recognizable contribution to the public policy discussion in the US. Most of what Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other commentators on the income gap or the 99% vs. the 1% was already said by Harrington half a century ago. Harrington wrote with a clarity and urgency that others writing on the subject have lacked. Most strikingly different show more was the optimism he had that something could, would be done about poverty in America. Surprisingly that optimism was not entirely unwarranted. While exaggerated claims for the War on Poverty cannot be sustained, there was a real - if inadequate - response from government and American society that this book was instrumental in evoking. show less

This is a depressing read because it's nearly 60 years old and yet so much of it is still true. LBJ's War on Poverty did lessen poverty, especially amongst the elderly. But too many of us believe in Reagan's quip that "we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won"--cutting benefits and giving up. Harrington's book still articulates the problems with conservative thinking on poverty, and his analyses of rural areas and black poverty still have a great deal of truth today.

Michael Harrington delivered a classic rendering and attack on Poverty in America in the 1960s
which led to The War on Poverty.

It would have been great if it had succeeded.

As important today, or possibly more so, than when it was written over fifty years ago. Any outrage over the shocking numbers inside can only be multiplied today by the sheer fact of national avoidance of the problem.

The classic book on poverty in the United States which began President Johnson's War on Poverty.

Class work on poverty in the U. S. which is still relevant 50 years later

A look at the underside of the American dream.