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There are, in other words, two kinds of poverty: physical and psychological. Both differ from anything in the American experience in that they are increasingly institutionalized, nearly to the point of becoming endemic. Poverty in the past, as U.C.L.A. Economist Paul Bullock notes, was "a temporary, perhaps one-generation, condition through which particular groups passed as they adjusted to the economic and cultural requirements of American capitalism." During the Depression, virtually an entire nation felt the pangs of penury. Even during good times, as a 1948 Gallup poll, which classified 50% of Americans as "poor or on relief," indicated, plenty of people were poor. Today's self-perpetuating pauperdom cannot be rationalized.
Poor Definitions. Few phenomena in human history have been so closely scrutinized by statisticians as American poverty. From Michael Harrington's 1962 study. The Other America, to last month's report by the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty, Hunger, U.S.A., which found that 10 million Americans are chronically malnourished, the condition of the U.S. poor has been catalogued in a sierra of statistics. Central to any understanding of the subject is the "poverty line," a sliding scale devised five years ago by Social Security Economist Mollie Orshansky. Her flexible income line rises for large urban families and recedes for those in rural areas, dipping as low as $1,180 a year for a single male on a farm, and soaring to $7,910 for a city family with eleven or more children. The level for an urban family of four—which is as close to a typical situation as can be found—is $3,335.
To be sure, many who fall below the line are poor only by definition, such as a married medical student whose current low income is offset by bountiful prospects for the future, or the elderly couple whose monthly income of $150 in Social Security payments may suffice if they own their home, car and furniture. Nor does the poverty line distinguish between costs of living in different regions: $3,335 a year stretches a lot further in Gadsden, Ala., than in New York City. Nonetheless, the Orshansky measure, if anything, underestimates the real dimensions of poverty in the U.S.
According to the Office of Economic Opportunity, which for nearly four years has waged President Johnson's War on Poverty, the poor make up 15% of the U.S. population. Contrary to the impression given by riots and all the other conspicuous problems of the slums, Negroes are not the major component of that group, at least not in numbers: two out of every three poor Americans are white. Of the 11 million rural poor, nearly 9,000,000 are white. Since 70% of the nation's citizens live in cities and towns, it is not surprising that more than 60% of the poor are urban dwellers. In age, nearly half of the poor are 21 or younger; a quarter 55 or older. Indeed, a third of all Americans of 65 or older—5,400,000 of them —are poor.