The Other America.

• Author: Hayward, Steven

For a while during the late 1960s and early '70s, it was a rhetorical fashion to say, "Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank]." My own contribution to this cliche was, "Any nation that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax." But mostly this nostrum was deployed by Sens. Humphrey and McGovern or the editorial writers of The New York Times in relation to poverty or some other intractable social problem.

Because Marxist-inspired class warfare has never resonated very well in American politics (as President Clinton found out to his surprise in the tax bill fight), establishing and enlarging the redistributionist state required a more nuanced justification rooted in the nation's middle-class "can-do" spirit, which was best exemplified in the moon-landing crusade. The breakthrough book that provided this rationale was Michael Harrington's The Other America, published in 1963. Together with J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society, Harrington's book supplied the intellectual basis for the Great Society's vast expansion of the welfare state beyond its previous New Deal borders. President Kennedy read The Other America shortly before his death and is said to have been moved by it to order his New Frontiersmen to begin drawing up policy blueprints based on the book.

Harrington contended that the number of Americans living in poverty was much larger than the usual statistics showed. But the most important part of his argument was a new conception of the nature of poverty. Harrington attempted to debunk the common view that poverty was chiefly the result of defects in character and initiative among poor people, arguing instead that the poor were victims, trapped in a culture that was...