U.S. ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMME OVER 5 MILLION PERSONS REACHED IN 18 MONTHS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31088, 17 June 1966, Page 8

U.S. ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMME OVER 5 MILLION PERSONS REACHED IN 18 MONTHS

(By Dr. JOHN X. OWEN. Department of Sociology. Arizona State University) Since the economic depression in the 19305, the United States has made concerted attempts to increase the of it. neediest families. Minimum wage legislation, fair labour ’.j insurance and welfare benefits for the aged and unemployed wereall part of the “New Deal” programmes of the Roosevelt administration. The development of trade unions has also done much to lift the wages of millions of United States workers, together with postwar remedial measures at the state and national level.

Compared with 1929, a great deal is known today concerning the living standards of the poor, but several key questions remain unanswered, namely, why do some persons elevate themselves out of poverty while others remain impoverished? Do the poor live in a separate culture with its own norms, expectations, and attitudes? What are the actual aspirations of the poor? Do many of them actually desire to acquire middle class incomes, values, and styles of life? Is poverty simply a matter of money or is it an attitude of mind and spirit? What, essentially, are the needs of the poor and how can present efforts on their behalf be genuinely applicable to these needs? These are issues upon which more clarification is necessary. An Inherited Plight The Government’s programme to .eradicate poverty presupposes that while middle class values and virtues should not be forced upon the under-privileged, they should be encouraged to help themselves. While 90 per cent of

the poor are born to impoverished parents, the fact that few young people who are not born and reared in poverty ever decline into this condition as adults suggests that poverty is partly an inherited plight, and that if children from low-income families had opportunities comparable to those of the middle class, more of them would move up to middle class status. America’s traditional competitive ideology with its stress upon “hard work.” individualism, and ambition is now seen to produce phychological hardships for many groups exposed to this ethos for whom the likelihood of personal advancement has not been on a par with the more fortunately placed. One aim of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 is to enable local communities to inform Washington of their needs, by suggesting plans for action to combat poverty. Their proposals are evaluated by local specialists in social welfare, education, and health services, and funds are then allocated. No blank cheques are written for a community. The result has been to open new doors of possibility for the under-privileged, among

whom are many of America’s 20 million Negroes.

The Los Angeles racial eruptions of August, 1965, gave a new urgency to official efforts to alleviate poverty. Overcrowded urban slums which breed disease, crime, and psychological frustration are symbolic of the plight of many northern Negros. The riots of Watts showed in sharp focus that these unhealthy housing ghettos would have to be eliminated and that where local authorities were slow in responding to the Negro's protests, the Federal Government would have to extend its active support, if future racial explosions are to be forestalled.

The Anti-Poverty Programme includes federal rent subsidies, to enable lowincome families to move into better housing, the higher rent being subsidised in part from Government funds.

Because the supply of city housing available to Negroes has traditionally been limited, owing to zoning discrimination, they have often received smaller housing value for their dollars than have whites. As victims of supply and demand in the past, they had little protection against landlords. But recent federal legislation makes it more difficult to exclude Negroes from middle class residential areas, and in many cities slum eradication schemes include the building of attractive new housing for low-income families.

Known as “urban renewal,” the plan has begun to change the appearance of city slums, but one problem has been that of time elapsing between tearing down old buildings and erection of new housing. A significant advance lies in new methods of inserting prefabricated flats (walls, ceilings, floors, modern kitchens) into the interior of old buildings. In New York an entire block of flats can now be “renewed” in less than a week, a departure that could revolutionise slum clearance projects, in blighted areas such as Harlem. A Key Weapon The Negro’s economic condition is highly sensitive to fluctuations in unemployment rates, since Negroes have a higher ratio of unskilled workers than whites. Lack of education and a high rate of failure to complete secondary school have for years restricted the future of thousands of Negro youths. The ratio of Negro school “dropouts” nationally is 57 per cent, a fact that has spurred several training schemes. Education is, in fact, one of the key weapons in the war on poverty. In Chicago the number of persons dependent on public welfare has gone down by almost 10 per cent since 1962, and officials attribute this gain to a new scheme whereby welfare recipients are given literacy classes and vocational training. The Elementary and Secondary School Education Act of 1965 allocated many millions of dollars to enable poor children to acquire basic skills before entering school. The child from a poverty background is handicapped from the outset. “Operation Head Start” works to supplement this deficiency at over 13,000 centres where 560,000 children last summer

(25,000 in New York City alone) were given medical care and fundamental skills to facilitate their profiting from school experience. Research in pediatrics and psychology shows that if a child between the age of one and six has a serious handicap malnutrition, illiteracy, or emotional deprivation) it is highly unlikely that he will do well in school. But a good start in infancy can take him through the school years with a foundation for vocational success. Many volunteers are at work on this pre-school programme. Heads of Families A Work Experience prts* gramme also affords occupational training and preparation to unemployed heads of families whose children currently receive welfare payments. The father out of work, instead of being given money, now receives training leading to a job. It may be a relatively low-paid post, but it is work that he would otherwise not have been qualified to accept previously, and over 100,000 persons are being trained under this scheme.

One of the most publicised measures is the Job Corps, which seeks to give remedial education and vocational training to poor boys and girls aged 16 to 21 who have dropped out of school. The skills inculcated range from automobile mechanics to bricklaying, carpentering, refrigerator repairing, and cooking. Operated at 97 centres throughout the country, the programme has enrolled 44,000 young people. Many more applied, on a first-come, first-accepted basis. The scheme is voluntary and boys can leave at any time. Some have done so, though 96 per cent returned to the camps after spending last Christmas at home. Negro, Indian, and white youths are enrolled, living and training together. At Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, more than two-thirds of the boys are Negro, and fewer than 10 per cent have left the programme. Many bigcity Negroes from broken homes, hardened by urban pressures, appear more able to adapt to the new environment.

For the boy who has been slow in normal school work but shows interest in manual or mechanical tasks, the Job Corps offers the chance for satisfying employment. It is now attempting to attract boys from rural areas, where almost half of America’s poor families live. Dedicated Workers Some of the staff at Job Corps centres are from V.I.S.T.A. (Volunteers in Service to America), a group of 2000 dedicated workers chosen, trained, and assigned to local agencies for a year of service at low salaries.

A broad scope of activities includes counselling to juvenile delinquents in many cities, organising rural libraries and health centres, home visits to the elderly, volunteer literacy efforts, counselling to unwed mothers, self-help community work, recreational activities in urban slums, remodelling rural schools, physical fitness education, and work with Indians. At a country school in Tennessee, volunteer guidance has stressed self-help in occupational therapy, with training for the mentally retarded. Young V.I.S.T.A. workers are in the slums of Atlanta, and 30 others (the first of 200 who are needed) are in the new State of Alaska, working with Eskimos in building community centres, sawmills, teaching, and providing health and recreational services, together with the preservation of ancient arts and crafts in this isolated region. Several hundred V.I.S.T.A. recruits are now being trained. For indigent persons over 65, newly legislated federal medical benefits (Medicare), to take effect on July 1, are designed to ease the financial burden of expensive illness.

A Beginning Over five million persons have been reached, directly ar indirectly, by the AntiPoverty Programme in the last year and a half. Some Americans are sceptical as to whether the plan will appreciably alleviate the problem, but the entire scheme is so recent that any evaluation of its future success is at this date premature. Some officials claim that what is needed is a massive effort to improve education, wipe out slums, and inaugurate birth control. It is perhaps hard for New Zealanders to visualise that America’s 195 million people manifest so many extremes of rich and poor, suburbs and slums, educated and unschooled. The root causes of poverty lie deep in the culture and economic system, in difference of individual motivation and ability, racial attitudes. technological change, unproductive farms. and population increase. But the new programme is a beginning, a move in a constructive direction, and from the lessons learned from it some of today's poor, and future generations, may be expected to benefit. (

An article by Dr. Owen defining America’s poverty problem was printed last Wednesday. This article outlines the stupendous efforts being made to combat American poverty.