in relation to the past. But the second reason does not exist for us; in our incredibly wealthy America, with its capacity to eliminate poverty completely and forever, to distribute health facilities, education, and housing to all sections of the population in needed quantities, there should be a shouting stress on our unfulfilled capacity and on the shamefulness of existing inequality.
To emphasize inequality in the colonial period is not to make any judgment on what was done or was not done to change the situation in that time; it is rather useless—because it is too late—to “judge” the past. The only socially useful judgments are of the present, and the helpful thing about reading the past is that it may have the effect on the observer that Aristotle saw in the tragic drama—a heightened perception of one’s own life as a result of viewing and feeling, through the magnifier of space and time, the failures of another’s experience. This, I suggest, is the most useful function of historical analysis. It is our present needs which require a focus on the class inequalities of the American past.
But what of the present?
CLASS TODAY
Three news items from contemporary America.
In the summer of 1961, a young father in Council Bluffs, Iowa, named William Maguire, used a rope to strangle three of his children to death, then, with his remaining child, a six-year-old boy, drove his auto head-on into a parked truck, killing them both. Maguire left a note addressed to his wife, who had been ill for some time and in a hospital: “Sorry, but this is best way out. Pains in back after accident Feb. 9, 1961, and bills since then. I can’t take it any longer. All three kids in trouble all the time makes it worse. Love. Mac.”
Around the same time in New York City: “With the eyes of thousands of theatre-goers and other persons fastened on him, an unemployed father of five children balanced precariously for an hour atop the flashing sign above the Manhattan Hotel last night before being pulled to safety. From his perch more than 400 feet above Eighth Avenue, the man shouted incoherently of lies he had been told and sobbed that he could not support his children.”
In the fall of 1962, in Atlanta: “Neighbors stopped Mrs. Mary H. Harden, a 35-year-old mother of three, from burying her sons alive on a construction site adjacent to the new expressway. … At a hearing on Monday Mrs. Harden said that she had tried tq ‘put them out of their misery.’ She also said that neither she nor the children had eaten from Thursday until Saturday, and that she had been evicted from her Forrest Road residence.”
One needs to put aside on occasion first-rate newspapers, quality magazines, and other respectable sources of news about American civilization, and pick up the big-city tabloids, to read about the family knifings, the suicides, the drownings of babies by their mothers, and the thousands of other horrors that dramatize the huge (and to middle-class America, invisible) underworld of poverty in the United States. These outbursts of frantic violence induced by economic distress might be dismissed as only isolated and rare incidents, if we were not confronted with the statistics of American poverty, which indicate that for every sensational item in the newspapers there are hundreds of thousands of stories of personal tragedy, grief, misery, being played out behind closed doors all over the country, unnoticed by that two-thirds of the nation which shares somewhat in the shallow prosperity of our “affluent society.”
The 20,000 Americans who commit suicide every year * represent only the sharpest point of a pyramid of anguish which at its base probably includes forty million Americans—that 20 percent of the families who earn between $1000 and $4000 a year (of the twelve million single people, 20 percent earn under $1000 a year)10—a pyramid whose construction materials are varied in outward appearance, but whose essential ingredient is the same: poverty. We have always deluded ourselves about American prosperity; this is a sacred bubble which few are anxious to puncture publicly. We quote happily the “average” American salary (in the last few years, over $7000), and receive the feeling of satisfaction that comes with knowing all Americans are doing well these days. There is no better way to conceal the sharp edges of individual suffering than to wrap them all in the smooth round packages of national “averages.”
Our country looks different, however, when you break it into economic classes, and see how well each class does. In 1966, about 30 percent of the population (about seventy million people) were in families earning under $5000 a year, with about half that number earning under $3000 a year. ($3000 was just about the cost of maintaining one son or daughter in a private college or university for a year.) About 40 percent of the population were in families earning between $5000 and $10,000 a year—enough money not to be considered poor, but not enough to avoid a desperate struggle to pay basic bills. And 30 percent of the population earned over $10,000 a year.11
Measured by European or Asian standards, this is affluence. Measured against the enormous wealth produced in the United States, this is a horrendously inefficient distribution of that wealth. Granted that there is a relatively large, comfortable middle class, there is something grossly unfair in the wealthiest fifth of the population getting 40 percent of the nation’s income, and the poorest fifth getting 5 percent (a ratio virtually unchanged from 1947 to 1966).
Statistics cannot accurately depict the condition of that thirty million people below the $3000-a-year level. Farm workers in Massachusetts were described as follows in the Boston Sunday Globe, October 2, 1966:
A farm north of Boston is an example of conditions at their worst. The men work for 95 cents an hour. They work up to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. They live in a shack with cardboard on the floor. The farmer does not allow the men off the farm to shop. He does not allow them to have visitors. There are twenty men on the farm. Their one toilet is an outhouse. A priest saw how the men live and work, and described their conditions as “slavery.”
When Robert Lampman testified before Congress in 1960 for the National Bureau of Economic Research, he reported that the top one percent of the nation (about 400,000 families) own over one-fourth of all tangible wealth (money, stocks, bonds, mortgages, real estate) in the United States, as well as 75 percent of the value of all corporate stock in the United States. Even if there were a gradual improvement in the distribution of income it would take a very, very long time to cut significantly into this disproportionate allocation of wealth.
In fact, the changes in the relative position of very rich and very poor are insignificant, while incomes in the middle ranges have gone up markedly. The bottom tenth of the population got one percent of the total money income in 1947, and still one percent in 1960; the top tenth’s share decreased from 33 percent to 27 percent.12 Between 1950 and 1960 both the lowest one-fifth and the highest one-fifth of American families increased their take-home pay by the same percentage. But this meant that in dollars, the lowest one-fifth earned $500 more, while the upper one-fifth earned $5000 more. Percentages deceive.
Again, statistics dull the sensibilities about wealth and poverty. Whether you are poor or rich determines the most fundamental facts about your life: whether or not you are cold in the winter while trying to sleep; whether or not you suffocate in the summer; whether or not you live among vermin or rats; whether the smells around you all day are sweet or foul; whether or not you have adequate medical care; whether or not you have good teeth; whether or not you can send your children to college; whether or not you can go on vacation, or have to take an extra job at night; whether you can afford a divorce, or an abortion, or a wife, or another child.
No statistics can tell us in personal terms about those thirty or forty or fifty or sixty million human beings in this country who are up against it: the porters, the waiters, the unskilled factory workers, the delivery “boys,” the maids and office cleaners, the migrant workers, the filling station attendants, the hangers-on, the tenant farmers, the petty clerks—the people who have to drink or take drugs, the physically disabled, the mentally disturbed, the foreigner
