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The other one-third of poor mothers are widowed, abandoned, divorced or unmarried—and the last have proved to be the most fecund of all. Fully 40% of all offspring on the national rolls of the Aid for Dependent Children program are illegitimate. AFDC spent $2.3 billion last year, up from a quarter of a billion dollars 20 years ago. One angry black Atlantan estimates that 616 poor Negro households in her housing project contain only 30 headed by a husband. The rest are women-dominated. Mrs. Marie Childress of Cleveland, for example, receives only $102 a month to feed and clothe ten children. Many AFDC mothers conceal pregnancies as long as possible, and by not seeing doctors, often end up with birth difficulties.
Hopelessness & Helplessness. Statistics at best can only delineate the bare perimeters of poverty. The sensations of being poor are scarcely comprehensible to the 170 million Americans who are not poor: the hollow-bellied, hand-to-mouth feeling of having no money for tomorrow; the smell of wood smoke that hangs over Southern shantytowns—romantic to the suburbanite, but symptomatic of scant heat and pinchgut rations to the poor; the bags of flour delivered by a well-meaning welfare agency, in a household that has no oven; the pervasive odor of human urine and rat droppings in perennially damp walk-ups; the bite of wind or snow through a wall of rotten bricks and no hope that the landlord will repair the crack. Poverty is the certainty of being gouged—particularly by one's own kind. For if the poor share anything it is oppressors: credit dentists and credit opticians; credit furniture stores and credit food markets where for half again as much as the affluent pay, stale bread and rank hamburger are fobbed off on the poor. Poverty spells the death of hope, the decay of spirit and nerve, of ambition and will.
"Poverty is a psychological process which destroys the young before they can live and the aged before they can die," says Yale Psychologist Ira Goldenberg. "It is a pattern of hopelessness and helplessness, a view of the world and oneself as static, limited and irredeemably expendable. Poverty, in short, is a condition of being in which one's past and future meet in the present — and go no further."
In recent months, TIME correspondents from coast to coast have surveyed the dimensions of American deprivation. From the eroded gullies of Appalachia to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, through the gumbo of the Mississippi Delta and the muskegs of Maine — and of course in the slums of every major American city — they sniffed the stench of penury, tasted the grits and sowbelly of the poor man's kitchen, and listened to the anger and anomie that suffuse the voice of the poor. Some of the manifold faces of poverty: