As Lily Geismer argues in her new book, Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, Harden served as an archetype of the “deserving poor,” a contrast both to Ronald Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” caricature and Clinton’s own racialized representations of criminal offenders. Like those of the black graduates of Public School 67, her achievements represented the possibility of individual triumph over racism and poverty.
For both certain Progressive Era reformers and the New Democrats, the idea of the deserving poor served not only as a rejoinder to negative stereotypes of poor people but also as a means of understanding and addressing inequality. Outraged by the conditions of immiseration that workers experienced, many Progressives nevertheless believed that corporations could advance the common good: if made to recognize the moral and actual value of treating hardworking employees humanely, employers would cease the practices of discrimination and exploitation that caused them harm.
These reformers had to resolve the tension between their observations of the widespread suffering caused by industrial capitalism and their faith in its ultimate capacity to bring about human flourishing. Some of the poor, they reasoned, suffered as a result of vice or idleness. Others did abstain from immoral temptations, but their continued suffering was an aberration — the result of poor luck, unhappy circumstance, or exceptional corporate greed.
With training and effort, these deserving subjects could transcend poverty. Even as they fought to eliminate the worst abuses of corporations, reformers also tried to make workers better suited to corporations’ needs by imparting the values of an industrial work ethic and thrifty spending.
While Progressives typically saw the aberration of poverty as the evil of capitalism’s excess, Geismer argues that the New Democrats saw it as evidence that capitalism had not spread far enough. Little Rock, Arkansas, was, in their formulation, one of the places “left behind” by globalization, its poor, aid-dependent residents unable to take advantage of a booming market’s opportunities for prosperity.
But if they understood its problems somewhat differently, reformers at the beginning and end of the twentieth century shared an agenda for capitalism’s improvement. Like the founders of industrial training schools, the New Democrats believed that they could persuade investors and employers to uplift the poor, if only the poor first uplifted themselves through education and thrift. Meager substitutes for large-scale redistribution, these programs of individual empowerment made inequality worse rather than better.