Our Invisible Poor

Dwight Macdonald, Our Invisible Poor. The New Yorker, 19 January 1963.
In September 2012, Jill Lepore wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “On January 19, 1963, the New Yorker published a 13,000-word essay, ‘Our Invisible Poor,’ the longest book review the magazine had ever run. No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Ostensibly a review of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, which had all but disappeared since its publication in 1962, “Our Invisible Poor” took in a slew of other titles, along with a series of dreary economic reports, to demonstrate these facts: The poor are sicker than everyone else, but they have less health insurance; they have less money, but they pay more taxes; and they live where people with money seldom go….

“The Other America sold 70,000 copies the year after Macdonald’s essay was published (the book has since sold more than a million copies). “Our Invisible Poor” was one of the most widely read essays of its day. Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, gave John F. Kennedy a copy. The president charged Heller with launching a legislative assault on poverty. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson took up that charge, waging a war on poverty. He lost that war. In the years since, with the rise of a conservative movement opposed to the basic tenets of Macdonald’s interpretation and Johnson’s agenda, the terms of the debate have changed. Government, Macdonald believed, was the solution. No, Ronald Reagan argued, citing the failures of Johnson’s War on Poverty, government is the problem.”

[Read more…]