Yesterday, _American Prospect_ blogger Ezra Klein “wrote”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=12&year=2008&base_name=biden_hearts_rail about VP-Elect Joe Biden’s fondness for railway systems and, more grandly, the happenstance origins of major programs in our country: since Biden likes trains, we might see more train funding, goes the thought. Klein made the following comparison:
For instance, John F. Kennedy’s interest in poverty, which laid the groundwork for the War on Poverty, came because he read Dwight MacDonald’s long essay on Michael Harrington’s book _The Other America._ And thus a national crusade was born. If he’d missed that issue of _The New Yorker,_ the path of American social policy might have proven quite different.
Now _that_ got my attention. I’d never heard of this. Is it really true? Did JFK really move to reduce poverty because of MacDonald’s _New Yorker_ article? MacDonald’s review, titled “The Invisible Poor,” appeared in the January 19, 1963, issue. The full article can be read on the _New Yorker_ “website”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1963/01/19/1963_01_19_082_TNY_CARDS_000075671?currentPage=all (Digital Edition link “here”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1963-01-19#folio=082).
If you search on “harrington macdonald kennedy” on Google, it quickly becomes evident that the story is an accepted piece of Kennedy administration lore. I’m guessing that this was a fairly celebrated incident at the time.
Here’s “Jon Meacham”:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_/ai_14687957 in the _Washington Monthly_ in 1993:
President Kennedy read this in the January 19, 1963, _New Yorker,_ in a long review by the critic Dwight Macdonald of Michael Harrington’s book _The Other America._ The book and the review together forced a sea change in American attitudes toward the poor. Just five years earlier, in 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith had declared poverty no longer “a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought,” and nobody thought to contradict him until Harrington, a socialist journalist, came along.
The Harrington/Macdonald case convinced Kennedy, who had first witnessed large scale poverty in Appalachia during his 1960 West Virginia primary campaign. An antipoverty program was being drafted when the president was murdered, and Lyndon Johnson quickly picked up the standard.
Astonishing. I honestly didn’t know that the War on Poverty started with JFK. I thought it was all Johnson, using the memory of JFK as means to his own ends rather than completing his predecessor’s project. I mean, I’d heard that sort of language used to describe it, but I had dismissed it as sentimentality, I guess. But Kennedy really did start it.
To my eyes, MacDonald’s review does not particularly read like an article that would launch $6.6 trillion of government spending (as George Will, a critic of the effort, “reckons it”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301756.html). It is possible that we are more aware of poverty, relative to MacDonald’s audience, or just more accustomed to strong advocacy. MacDonald spends a lot of time carping about the poor writing and evidentiary standards of Harrington’s competitors but duly wades through the statistical evidence with a hardheaded refusal to accept the conclusions of others.
But then, right when the argument is at its most abstruse, out pops clarity. These words sound intended to reverberate in the Oval Office itself:
They [the authors of another book under review] claim that 77,000,000 Americans, or _almost half the population,_ live in poverty or deprivation. One recalls the furor Roosevelt aroused with his “one-third of a nation—ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” But the political climate was different then.
Different, eh? Kennedy apparently decided that maybe he could prove MacDonald wrong.
I don’t have much more to add. Were Emdashes readers aware of the significance of MacDonald’s review? I’d love to hear more about it.