Down and out.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Americans' indifference to poverty

In the thirties and again in the sixties, Americans answered the call to fight sweeping wars on poverty. Here's why the battle seems so passionless today

For a long time now, almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal's social legislation and - more important - the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country... [But] in the last year, we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip van Winkle, to the fact that mass poverty persists, and that it is one of our two gravest social problems. (The other is related: While only 11 percent of our population is non-white, 25 percent of our poor are.)

President Kennedy read this in the January 19, 1963, New Yorker, in a long review by the critic Dwight Macdonald of Michael Harrington's book The Other America. The book and the review together forced a sea change in American attitudes toward the poor. Just five years earlier, in 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith had declared poverty no longer "a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought," and nobody thought to contradict him until Harrington, a socialist journalist, came along.

The Harrington/Macdonald case convinced Kennedy, who had first witnessed large scale poverty in Appalachia during his 1960 West Virginia primary campaign. An antipoverty program was being drafted when the president was murdered, and Lyndon Johnson quickly picked up the standard. "That's my kind of program," he said. What Harrington started turned liberals on to the poverty cause like no other public effort since the New Deal. The sixties' currents, for example, took Jay Rockefeller first to the Peace Corps then to West Virginia to work in antipoverty causes; they also interested people like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of the president and wife of Sargent Shriver, in juvenile delinquency.

Today, 30 years later, the problem is not that the affluent don't know the poor exist but that poverty now seems all too familiar and solutions all too elusive. For those waiting for poverty to become chic again - another Harrington, another New Frontier/Great Society intellectual circle, another crusade - the truth is the poor frustrate most Americans. While 76 percent of voters told Gallup in 1992 that poverty and homelessness were "very important" issues, the percentage who believe government can have a positive impact has fallen from 74 percent in 1960 to 24 percent today. Sixty-five percent are unwilling to pay $200 more a year in taxes for "assisting low-income families." This spring, 66 percent told NBC News/Wall Street Journal pollsters that they would like to see cuts in welfare spending.

Thirty-five million Americans live below the poverty line, and 14 million of them (62 percent of whom are non-white) are on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the government's least popular program. The number of poor (defined as an annual income of less than $14,228 for a family of three) rose in 1992; one out of every four American children now live in poverty. While Clinton has expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (in effect raising a $4.35-an-hour job to a $6-an-hour job) and is seeking universal health insurance - things that will help millions of the working poor - welfare recipients increased 68 percent between 1970 and 1993, especially swelling in times of economic stress. On this most enduring and aggravating piece of the poverty problem - welfare Clinton's reformers are fuzzy on how they are going to pay for moving people from welfare to work after the promised Clinton two-year limit on AFDC benefits ends.

So don't be fooled by the campaign rage for welfare reform from California to Wisconsin to New Jersey. On the stump, "welfare reform" is a euphemism for cutting spending, and no one who is serious about really solving the problem thinks it can be done for less than double-digit billions. How did we come to this pass of public cynicism and political skittishness? And how do we get out of it?

* Unlike the last two eras of concern for poverty - the thirties and the sixties - the middle and upper middle classes don't know poor people.

Though it is difficult to recall now, only recently has America come to think of a "culture of poverty" - a phrase coined in 1959 by Oscar Lewis - or of a permanent "under-class" - a term popularized by Ken Auletta in a landmark 1982 book. How, in the thirties and early forties, did FDR rally support for his social legislation? For one, the democratic effects of the Great Depression meant the middle class was more likely to know people who were poor or even to be poor themselves, however temporarily. In the years after World War 1, 2.5 million people left the nation's farms for county seats and big cities but kept up with relatives and old friends who remained in the impoverished countryside. In fact, 68 percent of all families were below the poverty line in the mid-thirties. Harper Lee's description of Maycomb, her fictional Alabama county in To Kill a Mockingbird, gives a sense of what life circa 1933 was like: "There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with. . . But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had...