Only a few days before he died, President Kennedy was presented by his staff with a report on the problem of poverty in the United States. He had called for this after reading a short but remarkable book. The Other America, written by a young sociologist called Michael Harrington. Kennedy had no chance to act on the report, but on the day after his assassination, it formed part of the briefing which President Johnson received as soon as he entered the White House. With characteristic shrewdness and foresight, Mr Johnson seized upon the poverty problem as a major moral and practical issue which should be presented to the American public during an election year. This was the origin of his famous poverty programme – or the ‘poverty package’ as it is known in Washington – and the energy with which Mr Johnson has pursued it has made poverty, after civil rights, the biggest single talking-point in American politics in this day and age.
Our first difficulty in preparing a programme about poverty in America, was one of selection. According to government economists in Washington, nearly 40 million Americans – a fifth of the population – belong to families with an income of $3,000 a year or less. All are officially classified as poor. But they are poor in a thousand different ways and for a wide variety of reasons. To get at the roots of the problem, to identify the main causes of poverty – and so prepare the way for solutions – a good deal of simplification is necessary. In the course of our researches, and in travelling 20,000 miles across the United States, we found we were able to isolate four major factors.
The first is the collapse of traditional industries, particularly mining. In the Appalachian mountains, which stretch across eight states near the Atlantic seaboard, the coal industry is in irretrievable decline. Many thousands of miners are totally unemployed, with no prospect of getting work in the area. Their families live on food handouts, for they are no longer eligible for unemployment benefit. Here there is great distress, anger and often violence. Appalachia has received more attention than any other single region, and constitutes a special section of the ‘poverty package’, but only migration can solve its problems, because they spring from a fundamental change in the structure of the US economy.