(3 of 11)
No Monopoly. Poverty is nationwide in its distribution. It reigns not only in the grimy ghettos of the big cities, but also along the rills of Appalachia, in the lush fields of Southern and Middle Western farm lands and as far north as Bethel, Alaska's Lousetown, where Eskimos dwell in chilly discomfort. Even the suburbs are afflicted. Of the more than 212,000 families in New York's Westchester County, one of the nation's wealthiest enclaves, at least 44,000 families are in dire economic straits; outside of Detroit the suburb of New Haven (pop. 1,650) is marred by "Early Dachau" apartments for the poor.
While no region has a monopoly on poverty, the South comes the closest. Virtually half of America's poor live in the 16 Southern and border states, an area that holds less than a third of the total U.S. population. Moreover, the South is the spawning ground for much of the poverty that scars the rest of the land: since 1940, some 4,000,000 Negroes and uncounted poor whites have left the South for what they hoped would be a more rewarding life in the cities of the North and West. Few have found it.
The rural poor often merely swap a mud-ringed shack for a squalid tenement, a diet of clear grease and chitlins for one of cupcakes and orange soda. Inadequate nutrition, as Hunger, U.S.A. pointed out, can account for "organic brain damage, retarded growth and learning rates, increased vulnerability to disease, withdrawal, apathy, alienation, frustration and violence." The poor must wait longer at clinics and hospitals, have fewer doctors available to them; they cling to medical superstitions (some poor Southerners believe, for example, that a stocking full of eggshells hung over their door will "cure" menopause). Hence it is no surprise that infant mortality is twice as high among the poor, active tuberculosis four times greater. "The people living in the poor southern section of wealthy Los Angeles," writes Paul Jacobs of California's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, "have about the same amount of health care available to them as do the people who live in poor areas of Greece."
Breeding Poverty. The number of American poor has declined in absolute numbers from 34 million in 1964 to just under 30 million today, but many experts believe that the nation may be reaching an irreducible minimum—at least under existing programs. Though the Labor Department last week announced that unemployment had dwindled to a scant 3.5%, lowest figure since last January, which matched the boom year of 1953, the jobless total in the poorest neighborhoods of the nation's 100 largest cities stood at 7% during most of this year, and shows little sign of improvement. That poverty breeds poverty can scarcely be denied: according to one recent study, 71% of all poor families have four or more children (v. 1.35 offspring for the nation at large), and though two-thirds of all poor mothers are married and living with their husbands, half the husbands do not hold regular jobs. The other half hold full-time jobs that do not pay enough to lift them above the poverty line.