IN aggregate wealth and individual opportunity, no nation in history can match the U.S. Its cities, for all their problems, gleam like gilded Camelots in contrast to most of mankind's habitations. Its fields generate a superabundance of food, its factories a surfeit of goods and gadgets. The gross national product this year will top $846 billion, and median family income is approaching $8,000 a year—about $2,000 more than that of the country with the next highest standard of living. Sweden. The accouterments of affluence are everywhere: Americans possess more than 60 million automobiles, 70 million television sets (10 million with color), $500 billion worth of common stock. At least two-thirds of U.S. families own their homes.
Yet in the midst of this unparalleled abundance, another nation dwells in grinding deprivation. It comprises the 29,700,000 Americans who are denied access to the wealth that surrounds them —a group three times the population of Belgium. They are the men, women and children—black, white, red, yellow and brown—who live below the "poverty line."
The nation of the poor is often invisible to the rest of America. Unlike the destitute of other times and places, its inhabitants are not usually distinguishable by any of the traditional telltales of want: hunger-distended bellies or filthy rags, beggar's bowls or the lineaments of despair. Harlem's broad avenues—clean by Calcutta's standards—bop to the stride of lively men and women in multihued clothing; the tawdry tenements of Chicago's South Side are forested with TV antennas. Even in Mississippi's Tunica County, one of the poorest in the nation, where according to the latest census eight out of every ten families live below the poverty line, 37% of the households own washing machines, 48% own cars, and 52% own television sets. In the Los Angeles district of Watts, California's most notorious Slough of Despond, the orderly rows of one-story, stucco houses reflect the sun in gay pastels, and only the weed-grown gaps between stores along the wide main streets—"instant parking lots"—hint at the volcanic mob fury that three years ago erupted out of poverty to take 34 lives and destroy $40 million worth of property.
Scope & Symptoms. Foreign observers of U.S. urban riots are frequently stunned at the vigor of the American poor. How, they wonder, can a looter claim to be hungry and oppressed, yet walk off with a color-television set as easily as if he were hefting a loaf of bread?
Clearly, American poverty is unique, both in its scope and its symptoms. According to a U.C.L.A. study, "it may refer to a family's or person's ability to purchase goods and services, to the opportunities open to individuals or groups for improving their economic position, [yet] it has subjective dimensions as well, determined by some kind of norms accepted by the society at large. People who fall below the norm do not necessarily consider themselves to be poor, and people who are above the norm may feel poverty stricken."