Overcoming Welfare: Expecting More from the Poor and from Ourselves.

• Author: ZILIAK, STEPHEN T.
• Position: Review

Overcoming Welfare: Expecting More from the Poor and from Ourselves By James L. Payne New York: Basic Books, 1998. Pp. xii, 243. $26.50 cloth.

Overcoming Welfare, the title of James L. Payne's new book, is as provocative as the change he wants America to undergo. The idea of "overcoming" is powerful. For some, "overcoming" evokes images of a Nietzschean desire to invent a higher self. For others, the images of "overcoming" are associated with life's little vices, no less salacious: overeating, drug-inhaling, thumb-sucking, porno-watching, unhealthy dependencies. Payne wants Americans to "overcome" welfare, to get over life's little vices in the service of a higher, virtuous self.

That America has a miserable record after four hundred years of public assistance is hardly the lament of conservatives alone; the idea has broad support among scholars in the field, from Frances Fox Piven to Gertrude Himmelfarb. Payne's optimistic vision is old but admirable. He wants to replace welfare with a more economically productive, democratically participatory, flexible, voluntaristic, and spiritually uplifting alternative. He suggests that the alternative is exemplified in America's past, in the Charity Organization Movement of the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, however, Payne's scholarship on that period betrays his vision. The book is slave to a naive and utopian behaviorism (pp. 5, 11, 28, 191, 193); it manifests a will to see acts of True Charity and Independence in the briefest of voluntary encounters (pp. 25-26, 194, 199). The book ignores the quantitative evidence (throughout). Overcoming Welfare has its share of little vices, too.

In an earlier age, it seems, one had to pay dearly--lose the lungs, the liver, or a youthful skin--to publish just one book on poverty and welfare. James Agee did, that he might honestly convey what he had experienced in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939). Michael Harrington did, in his exposition of The Other America (1962). Josephine Shaw Lowell did, preparing for her slender book, Public Relief and Private Charity (1884). Think of W. E. B. Du Bois, writing from vast firsthand observation The Philadelphia Negro (1899), and Gunnar Myrdal, displaying in hair-raising detail the facts of An American Dilemma (1944). Think of the volumes of Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew on the laboring poor of London. These are big, important books; they still give shape to the scholarship on poverty, charity, race, and welfare...