Horatio Alger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger 

 

Horatio Alger
Born	January 13, 1832 Chelsea, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	July 18, 1899 (aged 67) Natick, Massachusetts, U.S.
Pen name	Carl Cantab Arthur Hamilton Caroline F. Preston Arthur Lee Putnam Julian Starr
Occupation	Author
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard College, 1852
Genre	Children's literature
Notable works	Ragged Dick (1868)

Horatio Alger Jr. (/ˈældʒər/; January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was an American writer of young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the "rags-to-riches" narrative, which had a formative effect on the United States during the Gilded Age.

All of Alger's juvenile novels share essentially the same theme, known as the "Horatio Alger myth": a teenage boy works hard to escape poverty. Often it is not hard work that rescues the boy from his fate but rather some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty. The boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue someone from an overturned carriage. This brings the boy—and his plight—to the attention of a wealthy individual.

Alger secured his literary niche in 1868 with the publication of his fourth book, Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. This novel was a huge success. His many books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured stock characters: the valiant, hard-working, honest youth; the noble mysterious stranger; the snobbish youth; and the evil, greedy squire.

In the 1870s, Alger's fiction was growing stale. His publisher suggested he tour the American West for fresh material to incorporate into his fiction. Alger took a trip to California, but the trip had little effect on his writing: he remained mired in the staid theme of "poor boy makes good." The backdrops of these novels, however, became the American West rather than the urban environments of the northeastern United States.

In the last decades of the 19th century, Alger's moral tone coarsened with the change in boys' tastes. The public wanted sensational thrills. The Protestant work ethic was less prevalent in the United States, and violence, murder, and other sensational themes entered Alger's works. Public librarians questioned whether his books should be made available to the young. They were briefly successful, but interest in Alger's novels was renewed in the first decades of the 20th century, and they sold in the thousands. By the time he died in 1899, Alger had published around a hundred volumes. He is buried in Natick, Massachusetts. Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has awarded scholarships and prizes to deserving individuals.

Biography

Childhood: 1832–1847

Alger was born on January 13, 1832, in the New England coastal town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of Horatio Alger Sr., a Unitarian minister, and Olive Augusta Fenno.

He had many connections with the New England Puritan aristocracy of the early 19th century. He was the descendant of Pilgrim Fathers Robert Cushman, Thomas Cushman, and William Bassett. He was also the descendant of Sylvanus Lazell, a Minuteman and brigadier general in the War of 1812, and Edmund Lazell, a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1788.

Horatio's siblings Olive Augusta and James were born in 1833 and 1836, respectively. An invalid sister, Annie, was born in 1840, and a brother, Francis, in 1842. Alger was a precocious boy afflicted with myopia and asthma, but Alger Sr. decided early that his eldest son would one day enter the ministry, and, to that end, he tutored the boy in classical studies and allowed him to observe the responsibilities of ministering to parishioners.

Alger began attending Chelsea Grammar School in 1842, but by December 1844 his father's financial troubles had worsened considerably and, in search of a better salary, he moved the family to Marlborough, Massachusetts, an agricultural town 25 miles west of Boston, where he was installed as pastor of the Second Congregational Society in January 1845 with a salary sufficient to meet his needs. Horatio attended Gates Academy, a local preparatory school, and completed his studies at age 15. He published his earliest literary works in local newspapers.

Harvard and early works: 1848–1864

Alger on Harvard Commencement Day, July 1852

In July 1848, Alger passed the Harvard entrance examinations and was admitted to the class of 1852. The 14-member, full-time Harvard faculty included Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray (sciences), Cornelius Conway Felton (classics), James Walker (religion and philosophy), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (belles-lettres). Edward Everett served as president. Alger's classmate Joseph Hodges Choate described Harvard at this time as "provincial and local because its scope and outlook hardly extended beyond the boundaries of New England; besides which it was very denominational, being held exclusively in the hands of Unitarians".

Alger thrived in the highly disciplined and regimented Harvard environment, winning scholastic and other prestigious awards. His genteel poverty and less-than-aristocratic heritage, however, barred him from membership in the Hasty Pudding Club and the Porcellian Club. In 1849 he became a professional writer when he sold two essays and a poem to the Pictorial National Library, a Boston magazine. He began reading Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and other modern writers of fiction and cultivated a lifelong love for Longfellow, whose verse he sometimes employed as a model for his own. He was chosen Class Odist and graduated with Phi Beta Kappa Society honors in 1852, eighth in a class of 88.

Alger had no job prospects following graduation and returned home. He continued to write, submitting his work to religious and literary magazines, with varying success. He briefly attended Harvard Divinity School in 1853, possibly to be reunited with a romantic interest, but left in November 1853 to take a job as an assistant editor at the Boston Daily Advertiser. He loathed editing and quit in 1854 to teach at The Grange, a boys' boarding school in Rhode Island. When The Grange suspended operations in 1856, Alger found employment directing the 1856 summer session at Deerfield Academy.

His first book, Bertha's Christmas Vision: An Autumn Sheaf, a collection of short pieces, was published in 1856, and his second book, Nothing to Do: A Tilt at Our Best Society, a lengthy satirical poem, was published in 1857. He attended Harvard Divinity School from 1857 to 1860, and upon graduation, toured Europe. In the spring of 1861, he returned to a nation in the throes of the Civil War. Exempted from military service for health reasons in July 1863, he wrote in support of the Union cause and associated with New England intellectuals. He was elected an officer in the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 1863.

His first novel, Marie Bertrand: The Felon's Daughter, was serialized in New York Weekly in 1864, and his first boys' book, Frank's Campaign, was published by A. K. Loring in Boston the same year. Alger initially wrote for adult magazines, including Harper's Magazine and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, but a friendship with William Taylor Adams, a boys' author, led him to write for the young.

Ministry: 1864–1866

On December 8, 1864, Alger was enlisted as a pastor with the First Unitarian Church and Society of Brewster, Massachusetts. Between ministerial duties, he organized games and amusements for boys in the parish, railed against smoking and drinking, and organized and served as president of the local chapter of the Cadets for Temperance. He submitted stories to Student and Schoolmate, a boys' monthly magazine of moral writings, edited by William Taylor Adams and published in Boston by Joseph H. Allen. In September 1865 his second boys' book, Paul Prescott's Charge, was published and received favorable reviews.

Child sexual abuse

Early in 1866, a church committee of men was formed to investigate reports that Alger had sexually molested boys. Church officials reported to the hierarchy in Boston that Alger had been charged with "the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys". Alger denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered his association with the church dissolved, and left town. Alger sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of remorse, and his father assured them his son would never seek another post in the church. The officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.

New York City: 1866–1896

Alger relocated to New York City, abandoned forever any thought of a career in the church, and focused instead on his writing. He wrote "Friar Anselmo" at this time, a poem that tells of a sinning cleric's atonement through good deeds. He became interested in the welfare of the thousands of vagrant children who flooded New York City following the Civil War. He attended a children's church service at Five Points, which led to "John Maynard", a ballad about an actual shipwreck on Lake Erie, which brought Alger not only the respect of the literati but a letter from Longfellow. He published two poorly received adult novels, Helen Ford and Timothy Crump's Ward. He fared better with stories for boys published in Student and Schoolmate and a third boys' book, Charlie Codman's Cruise.

In January 1867 the first of 12 installments of Ragged Dick appeared in Student and Schoolmate. The story, about a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability, was a huge success. It was expanded and published as a novel in 1868. It proved to be his best-selling work. After Ragged Dick he wrote almost entirely for boys, and he signed a contract with publisher Loring for a Ragged Dick Series.

Ragged Dick, serialized in Student and Schoolmate and later expanded into a full-length novel

In spite of the series' success, Alger was on financially uncertain ground and tutored the five sons of the international banker Joseph Seligman. He wrote serials for Young Israel and lived in the Seligman home until 1876. In 1875 Alger produced the serial Shifting for Himself and Sam's Chance, a sequel to The Young Outlaw. It was evident in these books that Alger had grown stale. Profits suffered, and he headed West for new material at Loring's behest, arriving in California in February 1877. He enjoyed a reunion with his brother James in San Francisco and returned to New York late in 1877 on a schooner that sailed around Cape Horn. He wrote a few lackluster books in the following years, rehashing his established themes, but this time the tales were played before a Western background rather than an urban one.

In New York, Alger continued to tutor the town's aristocratic youth and to rehabilitate boys from the streets. He was writing both urban and Western-themed tales. In 1879, for example, he published The District Messenger Boy and The Young Miner. In 1877, Alger's fiction became a target of librarians concerned about sensational juvenile fiction. An effort was made to remove his works from public collections, but the debate was only partially successful, defeated by the renewed interest in his work after his death.

In 1881, Alger informally adopted Charlie Davis, a street boy, and another, John Downie, in 1883; they lived in Alger's apartment. In 1881, he wrote a biography of President James A. Garfield but filled the work with contrived conversations and boyish excitements rather than facts. The book sold well. Alger was commissioned to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln, but again it was Alger the boys' novelist opting for thrills rather than facts.

In 1882, Alger's father died. Alger continued to produce stories of honest boys outwitting evil, greedy squires and malicious youths. His work appeared in hardcover and paperback, and decades-old poems were published in anthologies. He led a busy life with street boys, Harvard classmates, and the social elite. In Massachusetts, he was regarded with the same reverence as Harriet Beecher Stowe. He tutored with never a whisper of scandal.

Last years: 1896–1899

Alger's gravestone at Natick, Massachusetts

 

In the last two decades of the 19th century, the quality of Alger's books deteriorated, and his boys' works became nothing more than reruns of the plots and themes of his past. The times had changed, boys expected more, and a streak of violence entered Alger's work. In The Young Bank Messenger, for example, a woman is throttled and threatened with death—an episode that would never have occurred in his earlier work.

He attended the theater and Harvard reunions, read literary magazines, and wrote a poem at Longfellow's death in 1882. His last novel for adults, The Disagreeable Woman, was published under the pseudonym Julian Starr. He took pleasure in the successes of the boys he had informally adopted over the years, retained his interest in reform, accepted speaking engagements, and read portions of Ragged Dick to boys' assemblies.

His popularity—and income—dwindled in the 1890s. In 1896, he had what he called a "nervous breakdown"; he relocated permanently to his sister's home in South Natick, Massachusetts.

He suffered from bronchitis and asthma for two years. He died on July 18, 1899, at the home of his sister in Natick, Massachusetts. His death was barely noticed. He is buried in the family lot at Glenwood Cemetery, South Natick, Massachusetts.

Before his death, Alger asked Edward Stratemeyer to complete his unfinished works. In 1901, Young Captain Jack was completed by Stratemeyer and promoted as Alger's last work. Alger once estimated that he earned only $100,000 between 1866 and 1896; at his death he had little money, leaving only small sums to family and friends. His literary work was bequeathed to his niece, to two boys he had casually adopted, and to his sister Olive Augusta, who destroyed his manuscripts and his letters, according to his wishes.

Alger's works received favorable comments and experienced a resurgence following his death. By 1926, he sold around 20 million copies in the United States. In 1926, however, reader interest plummeted, and his major publisher ceased printing the books altogether. Surveys in 1932 and 1947 revealed very few children had read or even heard of Alger. The first Alger biography was a heavily fictionalized account published in 1928 by Herbert R. Mayes, who later admitted the work was a fraud.

Legacy

Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has bestowed an annual award on "outstanding individuals in our society who have succeeded in the face of adversity" and scholarships "to encourage young people to pursue their dreams with determination and perseverance".

In 1982, to mark his 150th birthday, the Children's Aid Society held a celebration. Helen M. Gray, the executive director of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, presented a selection of Alger's books to Philip Coltoff, the Children's Aid Society executive director.

A 1982 musical, Shine!, was based on Alger's work, particularly Ragged Dick and Silas Snobden's Office Boy.

In 2015, many of Alger's books were published as illustrated paperbacks and ebooks under the title "Stories of Success" by Horatio Alger. In addition, Alger's books were offered as dramatic audiobooks by the same publisher.

Style and themes

Alger scholar Gary Scharnhorst describes Alger's style as "anachronistic", "often laughable", "distinctive", and "distinguished by the quality of its literary allusions". Ranging from the Bible and William Shakespeare (half of Alger's books contain Shakespearean references) to John Milton and Cicero, the allusions he employed were a testament to his erudition. Scharnhorst credits these allusions with distinguishing Alger's novels from pulp fiction.

Scharnhorst describes six major themes in Alger's boys' books. The first, the Rise to Respectability, he observes, is evident in both his early and his late books, notably Ragged Dick, whose impoverished young hero declares, "I mean to turn over a new leaf, and try to grow up 'spectable." His virtuous life wins him not riches but, more realistically, a comfortable clerical position and salary. The second major theme is Character Strengthened Through Adversity. In Strong and Steady and Shifting for Himself, for example, the affluent heroes are reduced to poverty and forced to meet the demands of their new circumstances. Alger occasionally cited the young Abe Lincoln as a representative of this theme for his readers. The third theme is Beauty versus Money, which became central to Alger's adult fiction. Characters fall in love and marry on the basis of their character, talents, or intellect rather than the size of their bank accounts. In The Train Boy, for example, a wealthy heiress chooses to marry a talented but struggling artist, and in The Erie Train Boy a poor woman wins her true love despite the machinations of a rich, depraved suitor. Other major themes include the Old World versus the New.

All of Alger's novels have similar plots: a boy struggles to escape poverty through hard work and clean living. However, it is not always the hard work and clean living that rescue the boy from his situation, but rather a wealthy older gentleman, who admires the boy as a result of some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty that the boy has performed. For example, the boy rescues a child from an overturned carriage or finds and returns the man's stolen watch. Often the older man takes the boy into his home as a ward or companion and helps him find a better job, sometimes replacing a less honest or less industrious boy.

According to Scharnhorst, Alger's father was "an impoverished man" who defaulted on his debts in 1844. His properties around Chelsea were seized and assigned to a local squire who held the mortgages. Scharnhorst speculates this episode in Alger's childhood accounts for the recurrent theme in his boys' books of heroes threatened with eviction or foreclosure and may account for Alger's "consistent espousal of environmental reform proposals". Scharnhorst writes, "Financially insecure throughout his life, the younger Alger may have been active in reform organizations such as those for temperance and children's aid as a means of resolving his status-anxiety and establish his genteel credentials for leadership."

Alger scholar Edwin P. Hoyt notes that Alger's morality "coarsened" around 1880, possibly influenced by the Western tales he was writing, because "the most dreadful things were now almost casually proposed and explored". Although he continued to write for boys, Alger explored subjects like violence and "openness in the relations between the sexes and generations"; Hoyt attributes this shift to the decline of Puritan ethics in America.

Scholar John Geck notes that Alger relied on "formulas for experience rather than shrewd analysis of human behavior", and that these formulas were "culturally centered" and "strongly didactic". Although the frontier society was a thing of the past during Alger's career, Geck contends that "the idea of the frontier, even in urban slums, provides a kind of fairy tale orientation in which a Jack mentality can be both celebrated and critiqued". He claims that Alger's intended audience were youths whose "motivations for action are effectively shaped by the lessons they learn".

Geck notes that perception of the "pluck" characteristic of an Alger hero has changed over the decades. During the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, "the Horatio Alger plot was viewed from the perspective of Progressivism as a staunch defense of laissez-faire capitalism, yet at the same time criticizing the cutthroat business techniques and offering hope to a suffering young generation during the Great Depression". By the Atomic Age, however "Alger's hero was no longer a poor boy who, through determination and providence rose to middle-class respectability. He was instead the crafty street urchin who through quick wits and luck rose from impoverishment to riches".

Geck observes that Alger's themes have been transformed in modern America from their original meanings into a male Cinderella myth and are an Americanization of the traditional Jack tales. Each story has its clever hero, its "fairy godmother", and obstacles and hindrances to the hero's rise. "However", he writes, "the true Americanization of this fairy tale occurs in its subversion of this claiming of nobility; rather, the Alger hero achieves the American Dream in its nascent form, he gains a position of middle-class respectability that promises to lead wherever his motivation may take him". The reader may speculate what Cinderella achieved as Queen and what an Alger hero attained once his middle-class status was stabilized, and "[i]t is this commonality that fixes Horatio Alger firmly in the ranks of modern adaptors of the Cinderella myth".

Personal life

Scharnhorst writes that Alger "exercised a certain discretion in discussing his probable homosexuality" and was known to have mentioned his sexuality only once after the Brewster incident. In 1870 the elder Henry James wrote that Alger "talks freely about his own late insanity—which he in fact appears to enjoy as a subject of conversation". Although Alger was willing to speak to James, his sexuality was a closely guarded secret. According to Scharnhorst, Alger made veiled references to homosexuality in his boys' books, and these references, Scharnhorst speculates, indicate Alger was "insecure with his sexual orientation". Alger wrote, for example, that it was difficult to distinguish whether Tattered Tom was a boy or a girl and in other instances, he introduces foppish, effeminate, lisping "stereotypical homosexuals" who are treated with scorn and pity by others. In Silas Snobden's Office Boy, a kidnapped boy disguised as a girl is threatened with being sent to the "insane asylum" if he should reveal his actual sex. Scharnhorst believes Alger's desire to atone for his "secret sin" may have "spurred him to identify his own charitable acts of writing didactic books for boys with the acts of the charitable patrons in his books who wish to atone for a secret sin in their past by aiding the hero". Scharnhorst points out that the patron in Try and Trust, for example, conceals a "sad secret" from which he is redeemed only after saving the hero's life.

Alan Trachtenberg, in his introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Ragged Dick (1990), points out that Alger had tremendous sympathy for boys and discovered a calling for himself in the composition of boys' books. "He learned to consult the boy in himself", Trachtenberg writes, "to transmute and recast himself—his genteel culture, his liberal patrician sympathy for underdogs, his shaky economic status as an author, and not least, his dangerous erotic attraction to boys—into his juvenile fiction". He observes that it is impossible to know whether Alger lived the life of a secret homosexual, "[b]ut there are hints that the male companionship he describes as a refuge from the streets—the cozy domestic arrangements between Dick and Fosdick, for example—may also be an erotic relationship". Trachtenberg observes that nothing prurient occurs in Ragged Dick but believes the few instances in Alger's work of two boys touching or a man and a boy touching "might arouse erotic wishes in readers prepared to entertain such fantasies". Such images, Trachtenberg believes, may imply "a positive view of homoeroticism as an alternative way of life, of living by sympathy rather than aggression". Trachtenberg concludes, "in Ragged Dick we see Alger plotting domestic romance, complete with a surrogate marriage of two homeless boys, as the setting for his formulaic metamorphosis of an outcast street boy into a self-respecting citizen".

War on poverty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty 

 

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Poverty Bill (also known as the Economic Opportunity Act) while press and supporters of the bill look on, August 20, 1964

 

The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. The forty programmes established by the Act were collectively aimed at eliminating poverty by improving living conditions for residents of low-income neighborhoods and by helping the poor access economic opportunities long denied them.

As a part of the Great Society, Johnson believed in expanding the federal government's roles in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies. These policies can also be seen as a continuation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which ran from 1933 to 1937, and the Four Freedoms of 1941. Johnson stated, "Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it".

The legacy of the war on poverty policy initiative remains in the continued existence of such federal government programs as Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), TRiO, and Job Corps.

Deregulation, growing criticism of the welfare state, and an ideological shift to reducing federal aid to impoverished people in the 1980s and 1990s culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which President Bill Clinton claimed: "ended welfare as we know it."

Major initiatives

• The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which created the Community Action Program, Job Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), centerpiece of the "war on poverty" – August 20, 1964
• Food Stamp Act of 1964 – August 31, 1964
• Elementary and Secondary Education Act – April 11, 1965
• Social Security Act 1965 (Created Medicare and Medicaid) – July 19, 1965

The Office of Economic Opportunity was the agency responsible for administering most of the war on poverty programs created during Johnson's Administration, including VISTA, Job Corps, Head Start, Legal Services and the Community Action Program. The OEO was established in 1964 and quickly became a target of both left-wing and right-wing critics of the War on Poverty. Directors of the OEO included Sargent Shriver, Bertrand Harding, and Donald Rumsfeld. 

The OEO launched Project Head Start as an eight-week summer program in 1965. The project was designed to help end poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a program that would meet emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs. Head Start was then transferred to the Office of Child Development in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (later the Department of Health and Human Services) by the Nixon Administration in 1969.

President Johnson also announced a second project to follow children from the Head Start program. This was implemented in 1967 with Project Follow Through, the largest educational experiment ever conducted.

The policy trains disadvantaged and at-risk youth and has provided more than 2 million disadvantaged young people with the integrated academic, vocational, and social skills training they need to gain independence and get quality, long-term jobs or further their education. Job Corps continues to help 70,000 youths annually at 122 Job Corps centers throughout the country. Besides vocational training, many Job Corps also offer GED programs as well as high school diplomas and programs to get students into college.

Results and aftermath

Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate: 1959 to 2015. United States.

In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level since comprehensive records began in 1958: from 17.3% in the year the Economic Opportunity Act was implemented to 11.1% in 1973. They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since. It is important to note, however, that the steep decline in poverty rates began in 1959, 5 years before the introduction of the war on poverty (see figure 4 below).

A 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that according to Johnson's standard of poverty, the poverty rate declined from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 2.3 percent in 2017.

The 'absolute poverty line' is the threshold below which families or individuals are considered to be lacking the resources to meet the basic needs for healthy living; having insufficient income to provide the food, shelter and clothing needed to preserve health. Poverty among Americans between ages 18–64 has fallen only marginally since 1966, from 10.5% then to 10.1% today. Poverty has significantly fallen among Americans under 18 years old from 23% in 1964 down to less than 17%, although it has risen again to 20% in 2009. The most dramatic decrease in poverty was among Americans over 65, which fell from 28.5% in 1966 to 10.1% today.

In 2004, more than 35.9 million, or 12% of Americans including 12.1 million children, were considered to be living in poverty with an average growth of almost 1 million per year. According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, since the Johnson Administration, almost $15 trillion has been spent on welfare, with poverty rates being about the same as during the Johnson Administration. A 2013 study published by Columbia University asserts that without the social safety net, the poverty rate would have been 29% for 2012, instead of 16%. According to OECD data from 2012, the poverty rate before taxes and transfers was 28.3%, while the poverty rate after taxes and transfers fell to 17.4%.

Nixon attacked Job Corps as an ineffective and wasteful program during his 1968 presidential campaign and sought to substantially cut back the program upon taking office in 1969. The OEO was dismantled by President Reagan in 1981, though many of the agency's programs were transferred to other government agencies.

According to the Readers' Companion to U.S. Women's History,

Many observers point out that the war on poverty's attention to Black America created the grounds for the backlash that began in the 1970s. The perception by the white middle class that it was footing the bill for ever-increasing services to the poor led to diminished support for welfare state programs, especially those that targeted specific groups and neighborhoods. Many whites viewed Great Society programs as supporting the economic and social needs of low-income urban minorities; they lost sympathy, especially as the economy declined during the 1970s.

United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Jimmy Carter, Joseph A. Califano, Jr. wrote in 1999 in an issue of the Washington Monthly that:

In waging the war on poverty, congressional opposition was too strong to pass an income maintenance law. So LBJ took advantage of the biggest automatic cash machine around: Social Security. He proposed, and Congress enacted, whopping increases in the minimum benefits that lifted some two million Americans 65 and older above the poverty line. In 1996, thanks to those increased minimum benefits, Social Security lifted 12 million senior citizens above the poverty line ... No Great Society undertaking has been subjected to more withering conservative attacks than the Office of Economic Opportunity. Yet, the war on poverty was founded on the most conservative principle: Put the power in the local community, not in Washington; give people at the grassroots the ability to stand tall on their own two feet. Conservative claims that the OEO poverty programs were nothing but a waste of money are preposterous ... Eleven of the 12 programs that OEO launched in the mid-'60s are alive, well and funded at an annual rate exceeding $10 billion; apparently legislators believe they're still working.

Reception and critique

Public trust in government was at an all time high just before the great society was implemented

 

President Johnson's "war on poverty" speech was delivered at a time of recovery (the poverty level had fallen from 22.4% in 1959 to 19% in 1964 when the war on poverty was announced) and it was viewed by critics as an effort to get the United States Congress to authorize social welfare programs. Republicans ran against the War on Poverty program.

Some economists, including Milton Friedman, have argued that Johnson's policies actually had a negative impact on the economy because of their interventionist nature, noting in a PBS interview that "the government sets out to eliminate poverty, it has a war on poverty, so-called "poverty" increases. It has a welfare program, and the welfare program leads to an expansion of problems. A general attitude develops that government isn't a very efficient way of doing things." Adherents of this school of thought recommend that the best way to fight poverty is not through government spending but through economic growth.

Prof. Tony Judt, the late historian, said in reference to the earlier proposed title of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that "a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive" and attributed the decline in the popularity of the Great Society as a policy to its success, as fewer people feared hunger, sickness, and ignorance. Additionally, fewer people were concerned with ensuring a minimum standard for all citizens and social liberalism.

Conservative Research Fellow at the Independent Institute James L. Payne followed this line of thinking when he wrote that "the war on poverty was a costly, tragic mistake [because]...abolishing poverty did not seem far-fetched to the activists ... [and] it was a perspective that led to intolerance ... The simple economic theory of poverty led to a single underlying principle for welfare programs ... In adopting the handout approach for their programs, the war-on-poverty activists failed to notice – or failed to care – that they were ignoring over a century of theory and experience in the social welfare field ... The war-on-poverty activists not only ignored the lessons of the past on the subject of handouts; they also ignored their own experience with the poor."

Economist Thomas Sowell also criticized the war on poverty's programs, writing "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."

Others took a different tack. In 1967, in his book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King "criticized Johnson's war on poverty for being too piecemeal", saying that programs created under the "war on poverty" such as "housing programs, job training and family counseling" all had "a fatal disadvantage [because] the programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis...[and noted that] at no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived." In his speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New City, King connected the war in Vietnam with the "war on poverty":

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor –both black and white – through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.

This criticism was repeated in his speech at the same place later that month when he said that "and you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such." The next year, King started the Poor People's Campaign to address the shortcomings of the "war on poverty" and to "demand a check" for suffering African-Americans which was carried on briefly after his death with the construction and maintenance of an encampment, Resurrection City, for over six weeks. Years later, a writer in The Nation remarked that "the war on poverty has too often been a war on the poor themselves," but that much can be done.

In 1989, the former executive officer of the Task Force on Poverty Hyman Bookbinder addressed such criticisms of the "war on poverty" in an op-ed in The New York Times. He wrote that:

Today, the ranks of the poor are again swelling ... These and other statistics have led careless observers to conclude that the war on poverty failed. No, it has achieved many good results. Society has failed. It tired of the war too soon, gave it inadequate resources and did not open up new fronts as required. Large-scale homelessness, an explosion of teen-age pregnancies and single-parent households, rampant illiteracy, drugs and crime – these have been both the results of and causes of persistent poverty. While it is thus inappropriate to celebrate an anniversary of the war on poverty, it is important to point up some of the big gains ... Did every program of the 60's work? Was every dollar used to its maximum potential? Should every Great Society program be reinstated or increased? Of course not ... First, we cannot afford not to resume the war. One way or another, the problem will remain expensive. Somehow, we will provide for the survival needs of the poorest: welfare, food stamps, beds and roofs for the homeless, Medicaid. The fewer poor there are, the fewer the relief problems. Getting people out of poverty is the most cost-effective public investment."

In March 3, 2014, as Chairman of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan released his "The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later" report, asserting that some of 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans have not provided the relief intended and that there is little evidence that these efforts have been successful. At the core of the report are recommendations to enact cuts to welfare, child care, college Pell grants and several other federal assistance programs. In the appendix titled "Measures of Poverty", when the poverty rate is measured by including non-cash assistance from food stamps, housing aid and other federal programs, the report states that these measurements have "implications for both conservatives and liberals. For conservatives, this suggests that federal programs have actually decreased poverty. For liberals, it lessens the supposed need to expand existing programs or to create new ones." Several economists and social scientists whose work had been referenced in the report said that Ryan either misunderstood or misrepresented their research.

Welfare culture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Welfare culture refers to the behavioral consequences of providing poverty relief (i.e., welfare) to low-income individuals. Welfare is considered a type of social protection, which may come in the form of remittances, such as 'welfare checks', or subsidized services, such as free/reduced healthcare, affordable housing, and more. Pierson (2006) has acknowledged that, like poverty, welfare creates behavioral ramifications, and that studies differ regarding whether welfare empowers individuals or breeds dependence on government aid. Pierson also acknowledges that the evidence of the behavioral effects of welfare varies across countries (such as Norway, France, Denmark, and Germany), because different countries implement different systems of welfare.

United States

In the United States, the debate over the impact of welfare traces back as far as the New Deal, but it later became a more mainstream political controversy with the birth of modern welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. The term "welfare culture," however, was not coined until 1986, by Lawrence Mead.

Welfare in the United States

Decline in welfare benefits since 1962. (in 2006 dollars) 

 

Welfare may refer to any government-based aid used to promote the well-being of its citizens. In recent decades, however, welfare has been restricted to refer to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), which provides monthly stipends for indigent families that meet a specific array of criteria.

The term "welfare culture" uses the more broad interpretation of welfare, all government social programs. However, scholars like David Ellwood and Lawrence Summers (1985) believe that the debate over welfare culture could be more accurate if each specific welfare program were examined individually. Specific programs include Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and disability benefits.

Evolution of the debate in the United States

Kent R. Weaver argues that most scholars cite the Social Security Act of 1935 as the origin of the American welfare state. That reform enacted a wide expanse of services for the poor and financially stressed, including unemployment benefits, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (later replaced in by the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program under the Clinton administration), retirement income stipends, subsidized housing, and many others.

Scholars such as June Axinn and Mark J. Stern (2007) estimate that the Social Security Act of 1935 and the newly institutionalized programs accompanying the New Deal increased the capacity to find employment, avoid starvation, and secure some form of affordable housing. Furthermore, economist Robert Cohen (1973) estimated that the New Deal sparked a reduction in unemployment from 20% to 15% by the end of the 1940s.

Stanley Feldman and John Zaller (1992) cite a number of economists and political historians who opposed government-based aid, because such critics credit the economic stimulus during World War II as the true solution to the unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression. During the war, American industries began to produce military weapons, food, and other material needs for the troops. The new economic incentive, in addition to a net export and an influx in gold, reduced interest rates, increased investments, and sparked job growth. Christine Romber (1992) and various other economic historians began to criticize the New Deal as the cause for unnecessary and unjustified reliance on government programs.

However, Jerold Rusk (2008), a political scientist, recognizes a consensus among economic, history, and political scholars, which acknowledges that the effects of the New Deal are difficult to separate from the effects of World War II, which prevents any legitimate conclusion from being drawn on the debate.

In the early 1960s, President Johnson began his War on Poverty by introducing many new elements to welfare, including Medicare, Medicaid, increases in subsidized public housing, and more. David Frum (2002) believed such increases in government programs were counterproductive and found positive correlations between government aid and those who could not stay above the poverty line without such aid. Frum concluded that welfare bred dependence on the government.

During the Johnson administration, a sociologist, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published a study on the impacts of welfare on behavior during the 1960s. His report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), is commonly referred to as the "Moynihan Report."

The Moynihan Report advocates for increased welfare for poor black families but that welfare does not empower the destitute to find solutions to their financial troubles. Moynihan stated, "The breakdown of the negro family has led to a startling increase in welfare dependency." Welfare, although helpful, was a reactive measure failing to address the true roots of poverty. Moynihan concluded that more proactive means to empower black families include the promotion of vocational training and a value in education.

Johnson's precedent for increasing welfare benefits hit its pinnacle in the late 1970s under President Jimmy Carter when Temporary Assistance to Needy Family (TANF) recipients were receiving $238 a month, adjusted for inflation. According to the Census Bureau, a strong correlation with poverty reduction is noted, suggesting a link between welfare and empowerment. Poverty dropped from 23% of the population to 12% during the Johnson years. Poverty did not see an increase again until 1982 with 15% of Americans facing poverty, two years after welfare programs experienced serious cuts under President Ronald Reagan.

However, the findings are not without their criticisms. According to the US Census Bureau, poverty had already begun to decrease before Johnson passed the Equal Opportunity Act. Additionally, unemployment reached some of its lowest rates in history under President Dwight Eisenhower near the end of the 1950s. Before Eisenhower left office, unemployment was estimated to be less than 5%.

In 1986, Lawrence Mead introduced a series of studies on welfare culture. Mead compared changes in income levels and welfare benefits across urban dwellers from the 1960s through the 1980s. Mead's studies suggest that over half of all welfare recipients will not need to stay on welfare for more than 10 years, but only 12% will be off welfare in less than 3 years. Mead concludes that welfare has demonstrated some proven effects for helping impoverished families meet their basic needs and find employment, thus acting as a tool for empowerment. However, Mead acknowledges that the welfare system can do better. Mead believes welfare culture could breed empowerment more effectively if mandatory participation in education/job training programs were required for welfare recipients.

Evidence of behavioral effects

Anthropologist Oscar Lewis studied the behavioral effects of poverty on indigent Mexicans. He introduced the concept of the "culture of poverty" and 70 personality traits that he saw in the mentality of the impoverished, including helplessness, disdain for the government, lack of confidence, hopelessness, and a sense of futility that accompanies the search for employment.

Criticism of welfare

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_welfare 

 

The modern welfare state has been criticized on economic and moral grounds from all ends of the political spectrum. Many have argued that the provision of tax-funded services or transfer payments reduces the incentive for workers to seek employment, thereby reducing the need to work, reducing the rewards of work and exacerbating poverty. On the other hand, socialists typically criticize the welfare state as championed by social democrats as an attempt to legitimize and strengthen the capitalist economy system which conflicts with the socialist goal of replacing capitalism with a socialist economic system.

Conservative criticism

People waiting in line for relief checks in the United States during the Great Depression

In his 1912 book The Servile State, Anglo-French poet and social critic Hilaire Belloc, a devout Roman Catholic, argued that capitalism was inherently unstable, but that attempts to amend its defects through ever-more burdensome regulation could only lead to the rise of what he calls the "Servile State". According to Belloc, this servile state resembles ancient slavery in its reliance on positive law as opposed to custom or economic necessity by themselves. Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek mentions Belloc's Servile State favorably in his book The Road to Serfdom. Along with others such as G. K. Chesterton and Eric Gill, Belloc advocated abolishing profit-making banking in favor of credit unions and replacing capitalism with a system they called distributism which they believed would preserve private property and revive the dignity of work exemplified by the small craftsmen and property holder of the Middle Ages.

Some conservatives in the United Kingdom such as James Batholomew and Theodore Dalrymple claim that the welfare state has produced a generation of dependents who prefer to remain on assistance and make no real effort to find employment, even though assistance is officially only available to those unable to work or who are temporarily unable to find work. The welfare state in the United Kingdom was created to provide certain people with a basic level of benefits in order to alleviate poverty, but these conservatives believe that it has fostered irresponsible and immature attitudes in many of its recipients.

Some British conservatives such as Conservative Party co-chairman Sayeeda Warsi also criticize the "'something for nothing' culture" of the welfare state, claiming that the high extent of the welfare state "discourages the unemployed from finding jobs". 55% of people in England and 43% of people in Scotland believe that "benefits for unemployed people are too high and discourage them from finding jobs".

According to political scientist Alan Ryan, "[m]odern conservatives argue that liberalism promises a degree of personal fulfillment that the welfare state cannot deliver and that attempts to deliver it will inevitably lead to disillusionment". Additionally, citizens' resentment of paying taxes to create benefits for others creates "hostility between more and less favored groups that is wholly at odds with what modern liberals desire". Ryan also argued:

Moreover, the welfare state must employ an extensive bureaucracy whose members are granted discretionary powers and charged by law to use those powers for the welfare of their clients. This means that classical liberals' concern for the rule of law and the curtailing of arbitrary discretion is ignored: bureaucrats are given resources to disburse to their clients. [...] The liberation the welfare state promises – liberation from anxiety, poverty, and the cramped circumstances of working-class existence – is easily obtained by the educated middle class and is impossible to achieve for most others. There is thus a grave risk of disillusionment with liberalism in general as a result of its failure when it overextends itself. Some writers suppose that the worldwide popularity of conservative governments during the 1980s is explained by this consideration.

Liberal criticism

Advocates of classical liberalism, economic liberalism and neoliberalism such as adherents of the Chicago school of economics like Milton Friedman faulted the New Deal version of social insurance for creating "notches" that perverted economic incentives, with J. Bradford DeLong arguing:

The government, Milton Friedman and others argued, told the poor: make more money and we will take away your free housing, food stamps, and income support. People are rational, Friedman said, so they will not work for long if they get nothing or next to nothing for it. The big difference between the Malthusian conservative critics of social insurance in the early nineteenth century and the Chicago critics of the 1970s is that the Chicago critics had a point: Providing public support to the "worthy" poor, and then removing it when they began to stand on their own feet, poisoned incentives and was unlikely to lead to good outcomes. And so, from 1970 to 2000, a broad coalition of conservatives (who wanted to see the government stop encouraging immorality), centrists (who wanted government money spent effectively), and leftists (who wanted poverty alleviated) removed the "notches" from the social-insurance system. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush and their supporters created the current system, in which tax rates and eligibility thresholds are not punitive disincentives to enterprise.

Certain American libertarians criticize the welfare state because welfare programs do not work to reduce poverty, improve education, or improve health or retirement. According to them, welfare programs also increase out-of-wedlock births and decrease the incentive to work. Moreover, they believe welfare programs reduce freedom by reducing the opportunity of individuals to manage their own lives.

Socialist criticism

A Swedish Sami boy getting oats and beans from the government's food relief program

Critiques of the welfare state and of social welfare programs have come from various socialists perspectives, ranging from Marxists to anarchists. In these perspectives, criticism of the welfare state often goes alongside criticism of the structural issues of capitalism and the inability for social welfare measures to solve fundamental economic issues which Marxists consider inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Initially, social insurance schemes were promoted by liberals and conservatives to appeal to working class voters to undercut the appeal of socialism. While some socialist parties tolerated social insurance, socialists often viewed advocacy of such programs as antithetical to their goal of replacing capitalism with socialism.

Marxian socialists argue that modern social democratic welfare policies are unable to solve the fundamental and structural issues of capitalism such as cyclical fluctuations, exploitation and alienation. Accordingly, social democratic programs intended to ameliorate the issues of capitalism—such as unemployment benefits and taxation on profits—create further contradictions in capitalism by limiting the efficiency of the capitalist system by reducing incentives for capitalists to invest in further production. As a result, the welfare state only serves to legitimize and prolong the exploitative and contradiction-laden system of capitalism to society's detriment.

Democratic socialists such as the American philosopher and mathematician David Schweickart contrast social democracy with democratic socialism by defining the former as an attempt to strengthen the welfare state and the latter as a political movement seeking to create an alternative to capitalism. According to Schweickart, the democratic socialist critique of social democracy is that capitalism can never be sufficiently "humanized" and any attempt to suppress the economic contradictions of capitalism would only cause them to emerge elsewhere. For example, attempts to reduce unemployment too much would result in inflation while too much job security would erode labor discipline. As socialists, democratic socialists aim to create an alternative to capitalism. In contrast to social democracy, democratic socialists advocate a post-capitalist economic system based either on market socialism combined with worker self-management, or on some form of participatory-economic planning.

Market socialism is also critical of and contrasted with social democratic welfare states. While one common goal of both systems is to achieve greater social and economic equality, market socialism does so by changes in enterprise ownership and management whereas social democracy attempts to do so by government-imposed taxes and subsidies on privately owned enterprises to finance welfare programs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt III and David Belkin criticize social democracy for maintaining a property-owning capitalist class which has an active interest in reversing social democratic welfare policies and a disproportionate amount of power as a class to influence governmental policy.

Karl Marx famously critiqued the basic institutions of the welfare state in his Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by warning against the programs advanced by liberal democrats. While Marx proclaimed that the communists had to support the bourgeoisie wherever it acted as a revolutionary, progressive class because "bourgeois liberties had first to be conquered and then criticised", he specifically argued that measures designed to increase wages, improve working conditions and provide welfare payments would be used to dissuade the working class away from socialism and the revolutionary consciousness he believed was necessary to achieve a socialist economy and would therefore be a threat to genuine structural changes to society by making the conditions of workers in capitalism more tolerable through welfare schemes.

Eduard Bernstein, a reformist social democrat, was skeptical of the welfare state and social welfare legislation. While Bernstein viewed it as something helpful for the working class, he feared that state aid to the poor might sanction a new form of pauperism. Ultimately, Bernstein believed that any such policies should be of secondary concern to the main social democratic concern of tackling capitalism as the source of poverty and inequality.

The most extreme criticism of states and governments is made by anarchists, who advocate for the abolition of all social hierarchies, including the state. Despite the anti-state and anti-market views of social anarchism, most anarchists ultimately advocate for the strengthening of the welfare state, arguing that social safety nets are short-term goals for the working class. According to Noam Chomsky, "social democrats and anarchists always agreed, fairly generally, on so-called 'welfare state measures'" and "[a]narchists propose other measures to deal with these problems, without recourse to state authority". Some anarchists believe in stopping welfare programs only if it means abolishing both government and capitalism.