The books about poverty that resonate most for me come in two forms. Novels and narrative nonfiction books often take a personal, sometimes painfully vivid and honest portrayal of a family or individual in a way that can personalise the potentially abstract issue for readers. My own book, The Forgotten Girls, follows in this tradition. To write it, I returned home to my small, poor town in the Arkansas Ozarks after many years of living in big cities on the east coast to find my childhood best friend: through our reconnection, I explored the ways that the different places we lived marked our adult lives.
The other type, equally important, takes a broad view and explains the history of American poverty as a series of policy and political choices. These take the focus off the individual and, at their best, explain the larger forces that can often shape our lives, whether we know it or not. This list is a blend of the two, the best of each sort of story. Taken together, they illustrate an exceptionally grim truth about US society.
1. First published in 1962, this book took a broad, structural view of how poverty persisted in the US despite the boom years after the second world war which launched many into a growing middle class. Harrington explored factories, farms, and mountain shacks to show how so many were left behind. Within a few years, President Lyndon B Johnson would begin rolling out his Great Society agenda to combat the destitution Harrington wrote about.
2. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson This masterpiece about the US’s racial stratification is an essential book about the country’s poverty. It explains how the US was founded explicitly as a racist system designed to keep the descendants of slaves on the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, and all of the ways this caste system is perpetuated.
3. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond Desmond’s work on families being thrown out in the poor neighbourhoods of Milwaukee was the first glimpse many of us had at all the ways low-income families struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Housing is a basic necessity many families in the US can’t count on today because of a system that gives power to landlords and keeps low-income families trapped in a cycle of eviction. A sociologist, Desmond’s original research was groundbreaking. As a bonus book, his latest, Poverty, by America, also explains the larger forces that immiserate so many in the US.
4. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan M Metzl A psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Metzl explains how and why many poor whites support the politicians who promise to cut the programmes that might help them while persisting in those that hurt them. Ranging from gun violence to a lack of universal health care, it is the real story about the people voting against their own interests.
Journalist Sander Vanocur interviews Floyd McKissick, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, in a black neighbourhood of Baltimore, Maryland in 1967.
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nonfiction
Buy American? Easier Said Than Done.
In “Making It in America,” Rachel Slade examines the challenges of domestic production through the lens of one Maine company.
The Maine-based company American Roots, writes Rachel Slade, was founded with the goal of manufacturing in the United States with an entirely domestic supply chain.Credit...Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald, via Getty Images
Jenna Sauers
Jenna Sauers writes about culture.
MAKING IT IN AMERICA: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. [and How It Got That Way], by Rachel Slade
Is it possible to buy American in an age of offshoring? And is that the right goal — for workers, consumers or the planet? The journalist Rachel Slade explores these questions in “Making It in America,” which takes as a case study one small clothing manufacturer in Maine.
Slade follows Ben and Whitney Waxman, who in 2015 founded American Roots with the goal of not only manufacturing in the United States, but also operating with an entirely domestic supply chain.
The company specializes in custom work wear: T-shirts, sweatshirts and a signature hoodie that sounds simply spectacular. [It has a six-paneled hood for superior fit and a zipper pull so chunky it can be fastened without removing your welding gloves.] Whitney, who studied anthropology, manages the factory while Ben, a former organizer, handles sales.
By following the Waxmans over years as they build their business — and more than once come close to losing everything — Slade tells a story of trade, globalization, capital, labor and the political choices that have led to American manufacturing’s decline, and makes an impassioned case for its return.
Slade argues that free trade policy is responsible for the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector. Five million American manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1994 and 2013, and garment manufacturing was one of the first industries to move offshore. Subsequent job growth has been concentrated in industries like retail and hospitality; these jobs are lower-paying and mostly not unionized. This drop in pay has been slightly offset, but not made up for, by the lower prices that are free trade’s most tangible benefit.
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