Desmond’s scholarly focus is not only political but personal. He is unabashed in discussing how his own experience of growing up poor led him to the central questions in Poverty, by America. “After my father lost his job, the bank took our home, before it was all the rage, and we learned to do without that, too,” he writes. “Mostly I blamed Dad. But a part of me also wondered why this was our country’s answer to when a family fell on hard times.” These moments of memoir are few, but they are fundamental to Desmond’s argument that poverty persists because it is lucrative for everyone who doesn’t experience it themselves. The poor experience poverty—but it is the rest of us who help generate and sustain it.
In Poverty, by America, Desmond provides some of the history of how the nation has framed and understood the problem of poverty. In the late 19th century, the growth of cities by way of immigration and industrialization led to some of the most troubling aspects of poverty, especially overcrowded slum housing and labor exploitation. Yet who was responsible for dealing with this problem? The captains of industry, who underpaid their workers? The state, which sought to control and sometimes criminalize the poor? Or the local churches and community groups devoted to charity? At the time, piecemeal approaches to addressing poverty—almshouses, mutual aid societies, and settlement houses—failed to meet the challenge of keeping the poor fed, housed, and healthy.
The early 20th century introduced a wave of new approaches to addressing poverty. Many Progressives sought to improve the quality of urban life through the establishment of free kindergartens and the building of public parks. They believed in the spirit of reform, but their interventions on behalf of the poor were sometimes shaped by contempt and racism. The next major shift came as a result of the Great Depression, which brought state officials into the conversation about how to alleviate poverty, thus providing the draft for some of the most ambitious New Deal programs, which established the federal government’s key role in ending poverty.
With the Depression and the coming of World War II, liberals and reformers began to view the state as having more responsibility for providing its citizens with their most basic needs, but the specter of racism and ethnocentrism persisted, shaping accessibility to Social Security, direct cash aid, and food assistance. While the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration emboldened labor and created new social safety nets, the political and social reforms of the era could only alleviate and ameliorate poverty; the notion of abolishing it had yet to come.