|  |
Primary source: Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962.
Caption: With this book, writer and social activist Michael Harrington helped launch the New Left movement of the 1960s and its concerns about American poverty and social injustice.
[ . . . ]
. . . [T]ens of millions of Americans are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care. . . .
[ . . . ]
This book is a description of the world in which these people live; it is about the other America. Here are the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life. . . .
The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them. . . . The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us . . . . Thus, one must begin a description of the other America by understanding why we do not see it. . . .
. . . . Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been. The ordinary tourist never left the main highway, and today he rides interstate turnpikes. . . .
[ . . . ]
|
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 2–3.
|
| |
