The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives Read Online Free

Medicare—though in the case of Medicaid, Congress gave the states considerable leeway as to whom they covered and what services they provided. And it would take the 2008 financial collapse to create just about enough momentum for President Obama to get Congress to pass a watered-down version of universal healthcare. Even then, the backlash was massive, the acrimonious debate creating a climate in which the conservative Tea Party movement could flourish.
    So, too, it would take the calamity of 1930s-era deflation, and the threat of wholesale bankruptcy for America’s millions of farmers, for the federal government, at the urging of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, to start providing food aid to the country’s hungry. It would take the work of Michael Harrington and others a generation later to prod Washington to set up a national food stamps system and then to expand vital nutritional programs such as school breakfasts and lunches and WIC, the Women, Infants, and Children program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
    At first, this food assistance to the poor was, essentially, a way of propping up agricultural prices by having local counties buy up surplus crops and thus preserve market buoyancy. “We must adjust downward our surplus supplies until domestic and foreign markets can be restored,” Wallace, who had grown up on a farm in rural Iowa, declared in his first radio address on March 10, 1933. 6 The strategy worked for the farmers, and to a degree it alleviated hunger for a portion of the indigent population. It was, however, massively incomplete. Too few people received the aid; too many regions and categories of poor were left unhelped.
    In 1961, a generation later, newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy signed an executive order creating a pilot food stamp program, funded by the federal government, in eighteen states. After Kennedy’s death, President Johnson pushed Congress to pass a Food Stamp Act that allowed counties across the country to choose to opt into the food stamp system, with poor families paying a percentage of their income to access food stamps worth considerably more—the stamps, in other words, were not free but were heavily subsidized. In the late 1960s, the voluntary nature of the system was replaced. Over several years leading up to 1974, all counties would have to opt into the system. By the mid-1970s, food assistance paid for by the feds, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, had become the country’s single most effective intervention against poverty; by the end of the decade, food stamps alone had expanded to the point that the program was costing the government more than $20 billion (in 2012 dollar values) annually. 7
    In fact, even while President Richard Nixon rhetorically tilted rightward—talking of a Silent Majority enraged by lax criminal justice codes, a mollycoddling welfare state, and the presence of a seemingly permanent underclass—in reality he presided over significant expansions of the welfare state, especially when it came to anti-hunger programs. He also sought to create a universal healthcare system that in many of its particulars looked strikingly like the one ultimately implemented under President Obama nearly four decades later.
    Three years after Nixon left office, Congress eliminated the requirement that poor families had to buy into the food stamp program; thenceforth, the cost of the food stamps was fully borne by the federal government. “The most important accomplishment of this period was the elimination of purchase prices as a barrier to participation,” wrote the social scientist Dennis Roth in a history of the food stamp program commissioned by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 8
    LYNDON JOHNSON’S UNFINISHED WAR
    Although far from perfect, at its acme this inelegant safety net developed in the first three quarters of the twentieth century and, given a peculiar impetus by Johnson’s War on