Poverty

Poverty in the United States does not simply mean that the poor do not live quite as well as other citizens. It means many old people eating dog and cat food to supplement their diets. It means malnutrition and deprivation for hundreds of thousands of children. It means greater susceptibility to disease, to alcoholism, to victimization by criminals, and to mental disorders. It often means unstable marriages, slum housing, illiteracy, ignorance, inadequate medical facilities, and shortened life expectancy. Poverty can mean low self-esteem, despair, and stunting of human potential.

Even though the United States has always had an impoverished "underclass", poverty has not always been regarded as a significant social problem. Unemployment and the poverty it caused were certainly seen as a major social problem during the depression years of the 1930's, but World War II diverted public attention to other issues. In the relatively prosperous postwar years new issues aroused public concern—anxieties about the cold war, and America's new global involvement. The topic of poverty was almost nonexistent in sociological literature. Of the eleven most widely used social-problems textbooks published in the United States between 1956 and 1964, eight did not mention poverty at all, and only one—published in 1964—gave the topic serious treatment. It was only in the 1960's that poverty reemerged as a major social problem, perceived once more as a condition that represented a glaring gap between American ideals and American reality.

Why did the problem of poverty recede from public consciousness for so long? John Kenneth Galbraith has argued that the poverty that afflicted millions in the 1930's was regarded primarily as a problem of unemployment. Once the New Deal and the post-World War II economic recovery provided new job opportunities, and a very large section of the population that had previously experienced poverty began to enjoy a more secure and affluent life style, it came to be widely assumed that poverty as a major problem had been eliminated.

But some people were left behind forgotten. The newly prosperous middle classes moved away from the city centers and insulated themselves from the poor in the expanding suburbs. The poor gradually became invisible to the rest of society—confined to city ghettos, trapped in the more remote rural areas, living in isolation in rented rooms and old-age homes. No social movements or powerful lobbies pressed their case, and it went unheard.

Short Answer Questions

1. Apart from its material sides, what is poverty like?
2. After the Second World War people focused their attention on ____.
3. How did sociological literature of the 1950's and 1960's deal with the subject of poverty?
4. What does the word "eliminated" in Paragraph 3 mean?
5. What is the main idea of the last paragraph?

(Keys.)