“Poverty is like a giant infection which contaminates everything -- we know that unless we can eradicate it by the use of all our new scientific and economic materials, it can in time destroy us.”
Our Quote of the Week brings the destructive nature of poverty into focus. It also reminds us of two important facts: that poverty affects all of us, and that we do have the means to eradicate it. We meditate on these words as we mark the 60th anniversary of Sargent Shriver’s tenure as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity this week.
On October 16, 1961 President Lyndon Johnson swore in Sargent Shriver as the Director of Office of Economic Opportunity, the office that created and administered the programs of the War on Poverty. This week’s quote is from a speech Sargent Shriver gave soon after that, the Address by Sargent Shriver at the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Dinner.
In the speech, Shriver is ambitious in how he introduces the concept of a War on Poverty to his audience, saying:
“We need now -- [...] this entire country needs now -- a new revolution – a social revolution.”
Shriver paints a vivid picture of the far-reaching effects of poverty on an individual, recounting the story of one man:
"[This man] had been laid off from a low-paying, unskilled job; a finance company was pressing him to continue payments on a new TV set which had never worked; his wife and he quarreled constantly over money problems; his oldest child had just been charged with stealing from the collection plate in church; and the entire family was faced with eviction from a public housing project because their income was too low. That man needed a lawyer, a social worker, and a homemaker. He needed job training and marriage counseling and help in budgeting his finances. He tried to get that help. But he didn’t know where to start. He went to the legal aid agency but was told they didn’t do marriage counseling, didn’t handle separations, didn’t represent juveniles and couldn’t do anything about getting his TV set fixed. He went to the employment service which provided him only with occasional day work. He took a test for a draftsman training course but heard nothing for months. Do you know how he got the help he needed? He broke into a pawn shop just to get arrested so that his family could qualify for public assistance. He got help then -- in the form of a defense attorney. And only then did it came out that he had scored the highest score in the city on the aptitude rest for the draftsman training course.”
Indeed, the programs of the War on Poverty — Community Action, Head Start, Neighborhood Health Services, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, now AmericorpsVISTA), Foster Grandparents, Legal Services, Job Corps, and Upward Bound — were designed to address the multitude of issues that people struggling with poverty deal with, in a holistic way. They were meant to deliver the “social and psychic, the educational and spiritual goods” that could empower those who needed it.
The latest official numbers on poverty show that in 2022, 11.5% of the population or 37.9 million people lived in poverty in the United States. While the programs of the War on Poverty continue to exist and to make a material difference in people’s lives, Sargent Shriver’s notion that we must tackle poverty in a holistic way has long been abandoned, as the Office of Economic Opportunity was systematically disbanded in the years following his tenure. Sargent Shriver was right in his assessment of poverty and the ways to tackle it: poverty is like an infection, and to treat it, we must use a coordinated effort that addresses the variety of causes and effects that it creates.
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