The Other America
Poverty in the United States
The 1962 book that made American poverty visible and helped shape the War on Poverty.
Harrington described an America of forty to fifty million poor people in Appalachia, in the cities, among the old and the migrant, who had become invisible to the prosperous majority. Published in 1962, the book is credited with prompting the Kennedy administration’s poverty research and shaping Johnson’s War on Poverty. Its argument is that poverty had become a closed culture rather than a temporary condition.
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John Kerry
I think in conjunction with that, probably Michael Harrington’s The Other America in the 1960s was huge for those of us who came of age in that period. It really created the war on poverty and defined Lyndon Johnson’s initiatives and the great social leap forward of that period. And I think Paul Wellstone is an outgrowth of that in every respect.
Interview · August 2011
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