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作者

James D. Schmidt

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

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作者单位

摘要

When Simon and Garfunkel recorded these words in the 1964, the folk-pop duo conjured an image that was familiar to New Yorkers. By that time, Ella Howard notes, the street and district known as the Bowery was synonymous with homelessness. This pernicious persistence provides a central theme for Howard’s examination of New York City’s homeless community, and it wends through two other recent books on poverty and vagrancy. If the poor are always with us, these books attempt to move beyond naturalized indigence to understand the reasons for such longstanding continuities. This is not to say nothing has changed, but it does mean that American society has yet to find a way to solve one of its most enduring social problems, a social ill that casts the purported success story of the American system into sharp relief. As Leonard N. Stern, Founder and Chair of the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness and Homes for the Homeless observes in the foreword to Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City: “In a nation of such wealth, it may seem baffling that the story of family homelessness could be allowed to go on for so many years.” The organizational structure of da Costa Nunes and Sribnick’s sweeping history of poverty in New York City can serve as a convenient typology for the larger matter of poverty and homeless in general. They break causative factors into three broader categories: economics, ideas, and institutions. All four authors argue that economic factors explain a great deal of homelessness. Both cyclical downturns and capitalist labor markets have contributed to temporary crises of deprivation and underlying structures of poverty. Intellectual forces have both contributed to the experience of homeless itself and influenced the response of local communities to the presence of the poor. Ideas about class, race, gender, childhood, and the family as well as societal notions about religion, work, and poverty continue to shape the terrain of homelessness. Institutional arrangements account for both poverty and efforts to relieve it. Social welfare policy and the nature of citizenship have created the American way of poverty. To these three categories of causation, we might add a fourth: individuals. These authors highlight the importance of key individuals in shaping how the American polity understood and sought to remedy indigence. Economic Forces In some ways, poverty in a capitalist society is self-explanatory. The division of wealth that pools capital and creates “economic growth” necessarily fosters wide disparities in access to resources. All the authors here note these fundamental problems along the way. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick conclude in the end that homeless is caused by “deep poverty” (242). Changes in the experience of homelessness, however, can be explained more by the cycles of capitalism. The panics of the nineteenth century led to changes in the urban landscape, but the major crisis of the Great Depression stands out as a watershed in the history of poverty. The Depression cast previous secure middle-class people into temporary or continuing poverty and pushed policymakers in novel directions, out of both compassion and fear, Howard argues. Later in the century, deindustrialization swept New York City and other urban areas, leading to yet another “new homeless” population. Structural explanations help explain social problems in broad strokes, but more fine-grained analysis of economic factors can often illuminate more. Although focused on the early republic, O’Brassill-Kulfan is particularly helpful in this regard. Using almshouse records and other public documents from the mid-Atlantic region, she masterfully reconstructs the nature and daily experience of what she dubs “indigent transiency.” Unlike the other authors, who are focused mainly on the local people trapped in New York City, O’Brassill-Kulfan follows the poor up and down the mid-Atlantic coast. For poor laborers in that era, mobility was essential, as much work was seasonal in nature. Poor relief might fill in the spaces in between, but workers needed to go where the jobs were. This necessity of mobility ran headlong into longstanding Anglo-American arrangements for poor relief, which relied on residency as the guiding conception. “Geographic mobility was often the only choice for an individual to maintain their livelihood, and was simultaneously the primary barrier to fulfilling their economic need,” O’Brassill-Kulfan points out (35). She also argues such transiency can be seen as resistance to capitalism, but her account of the early republican poor makes clear that family poverty was endemic to the nature of the labor market. Intellectual Forces Macrolevel economic forces undergirded long trends in homelessness and poverty, but all the authors demonstrate that what people thought about these matters counted for as much. Culturally constructed notions of class, race, gender, prevailing norms regarding childhood and the family, and longstanding Anglo-American conceptions of work colored how people saw the poor and how the poor regarded themselves. It might seem like a redundancy to say that class was important to poverty, but how that dynamic played out differed significantly over the course of U.S. history. Two opposing models can serve as examples. In the early republic, O’Brassill-Kulfan argues, policing of vagrancy became a community-based means of class control, as citizens of the middling sort brought a large number of complaints for vagrancy against their fellows. “Public participation in the policing of an entire class of persons,” she points out, “underscores the clarity with which vagrancy as a legal concept was entrenched in social perceptions in the early republic.” In this way, “law itself to become a tool for the articulation and enforcement of class distinctions and power” (118). At the other end of the spectrum from engagement lies the modern middle class, who has often desired the removal of the homeless from their sight. As Howard demonstrates, after decades of public policies aimed at cleaning up the Bowery, it was really the power of gentrification that put an end to Skid Row. During the 1970s, urban renewal wrought major changes to the urban landscape of New York City, but the influx of the young and hip who frequented CBGBs and other area nightclubs increased the cultural value of the district. By the early 1980s, “the homeless occupied a negotiated space on the Bowery,” (200) and the ongoing wave of gentrification led to the dispersal of the homeless across the city. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick take an even longer view, pointing to numerous instances where city ordinances sought to hide begging and homelessness from the genteel classes. As they astutely point out regarding the Depression era, middle-class observers of the homeless felt “a mixture of empathy and fear.” That elemental paradox could be said to characterize centuries of class-based reactions. Class-based sympathies and anxieties ran through the thinking of the dominant classes, but so too did race. All the authors address this matter with care and insight. In a particularly creative vein, O’Brassill-Kulfan investigates both gradual emancipation and the fugitive slave laws. Almshouse and police records show that lifelong indigent transiency sometimes followed release from bound labor. For slaves who liberated themselves, fugitive status in the North meant a kind of ongoing homelessness. Whether manumitted or self-emancipated, free African-Americans faced a legal regime in which vagrancy laws sought to reinstitute coerced labor. In this way, antebellum legal developments prefigured the coercive schemes of the post-Civil War era. For later eras, race has played a dualistic role. On one hand, homelessness, especially street living, has often been coded as white, and has often been white in reality, as Howard shows. On the other hand, the African-American experience in northern cities after the Great Migration has become central to the debates about family poverty, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. During that era, New York City was front and center in “The Underclass Debate,” a war of words between social researchers and pundits about who or what was responsible for urban poverty. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick are frank about the state of affairs in this period, echoing the language of the time in dubbing areas of the city an “urban wilderness.” Nor do they take the easy route about gang violence that erupted in African-American communities from then onward. “Rather than imposing order on the community, however, gangs spent most of their time fighting other gangs,” they observe (193). Class and race ordered the lives of the poor and influenced policies about their poverty, but all three accounts demonstrate that gender might be the most important category of analysis in trying to understand homelessness. The prototypical bum, be that on the rails or in a skid row lodging house, has been imagined as male. This cultural construct, while sometimes based in demographic reality, often complicates the roles of women and children public understandings of poverty. O’Brassill-Kulfan stresses that indigent transiency in the pre-Civil War era did not look like the tramping phenomenon of the Gilded Age. Almshouses took in women and children, and relief of family poverty dominated the efforts of private relief agencies as well. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick illuminate the importance of family poverty throughout U.S. history, from antebellum widows’ relief to Depression-era Hoovervilles to the “new homeless” of the post-Industrial era. Gender analysis, however, does not simply mean that women have been “left out” of the story of homelessness. Rather, the construction of gender itself has shaped its terrain. Howard does an excellent job of showing how gender altered life for the residents of the Bowery. Skid rows were “nearly exclusively male enclaves,” she notes, and while there were women in The Bowery, “the female homeless population [was] nearly invisible” (9). More than population statistics, how poor women saw their gender roles mattered. During the Depression, for instance, gender influenced how homeless people viewed themselves, as some men blamed women for taking jobs. Moreover, service providers found that gender conventions prevented women from seeking aid and generally altered their experience of poverty. As one contemporary put it: “A man can sleep in the parks, the steps of buildings, and the like, but will a woman do these things?” (37). Class intertwined with gender when it came to relieving homeless women, Howard argues, for “private and public agencies catered to an idealized version of middle-class white femininity” (39). Providers expected poor women to accept assistance only reluctantly, but impoverished women themselves often openly requested assistance and pushed back when it failed to materialize. Decades later, gender continued to influence life on skid row, at least in the eyes of researchers. A noted Columbia University study that began in 1968 averred that homeless women were even more alienated from society than their male counterparts. In the end, the research team “concluded that women’s homelessness differed from that of men, resulting most often not from the loss of a job, but from the end of either an official or common-law marriage.” The homeless female subject of the study, however, often had a more practical understanding. As one interviewee put it, “Rehabilitate men and women on the Bowery. Get them jobs, put them to work” (Howard, 173). Actual homeless people might think about income and shelter, but experts have tried to explain the worlds they inhabit for nearly two hundred years. A less scientific discussion goes back even farther than that. These authors trace these investigations of causation, stressing the contest between individualistic and social explanations, with the former often the winner. Considerable American thinking about poverty and homelessness has drawn on the long Anglo-American tradition of separating the poor into “worthy” and “unworthy.” Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick outline the rise of this kind of thinking in the colonial era and follow it into the nineteenth century. They point to the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (NYAICP), one of the most important relief agencies in the city during antebellum era. The NYAICP “saw pauperism not as a permanent state, but as a temporary condition that could be relieved by individual reformation” (59). Such explanations were not confined to middle-class reformers. O’Brassill-Kulfan shows that indigent transients in the early republic used narratives of their own personal industry to defend themselves against charges of vagrancy. Likewise, Howard argues that the homeless during the Depression “relied on the American logic of individualism, blaming themselves for their poverty” (59). In earlier times such narratives often came from the pulpit, but later eras saw them transfigured into social science. An early example, cited by O’Brassill-Kulfan, is the 1824 report of John Yates to the New York legislature. Like so many that would come later, Yates sought to study the problem of pauperism in New York systematically and statistically. As the decades passed, charts and graphs piled up in similar reports generated by governmental and nongovernmental organizations. By the middle of the twentieth century, modern sociological thinking came to dominate understandings of homelessness. Howard stresses the importance of Robert K. Merton’s notion of disaffiliation. Drawing on Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie, sociologists influenced by Merton eventually understood the homeless “fundamentally as individuals who cut themselves off from society through anti-social behaviors, which might be analyzed and corrected in future cases” (148). Such renditions necessarily continued the use of individualism as a central explanatory framework, but modern social science has contained another vein as well: environmentalism. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick rightfully locate the origins for this line of thinking in the Progressive Era and emphasize the long-term reach of the solutions worked out then. “In many ways, the efforts of progressives to confront the urban problems of congestion, disease, single parenthood, and child poverty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still shape the lives of poor families today,” they conclude (109). Howard also explores academic research that stresses more multivariate ways of knowing, such as Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” thesis. This abundance of research, these books both argue and imply, has not led to surfeit of insight. Individualism still reigns supreme in most popular explanations of poverty. The ongoing struggle to understand homelessness and poverty has occurred in part because it is simultaneously a debate about the meaning and value of work in society. A quotidian example offered by O’Brassill-Kulfan illustrates this point beautifully. In Columbia, Pennsylvania, three women were arrested in 1841 under the state’s vagrancy statute which penalized “refus[ing] to work for the usual and common wages given to other laborers in the like work.” By this definition, Elizabeth Thomas was a vagrant because she declined to take “work when work is offered to her” (112). Antebellum vagrancy statutes directly criminalized refusing to participate in the emergent capitalist labor market, and a nearly a century later such traditions were still going strong. As New Dealer Harry Hopkins somewhat sardonically put it: “America has a tradition that a man should work” (Howard, 81). These sentiments have often led to a conflation of unemployment and homelessness, even though, as both Howard and O’Brassill-Kulfan point out, homeless people have often been employed. American ideas about work have pushed social welfare programs toward workfare and needs testing, a tradition that continues to the present. Institutional Forces Workfare represents a bridge to a third way of looking at homelessness: institutions, policy, and politics. On a basic level, that means anything from almshouses to the Depression-era Federal Transient Program to local efforts such as New York’s Camp Grant. For homeless people themselves, social welfare policy involves jobs but most pointedly it involves housing. In the nineteenth century, that could mean the government-supported almshouse or a privately funded lodging house. For impoverished families not actually homeless, it meant the tenement squalor of the nineteenth-century city or the quiet destitution of a twentieth-century high-rise project. The four authors illustrate the lives of the poor in these places of shelter, but the two more modern accounts turn considerable attention to two matters of housing policy in later eras: urban renewal and the right to shelter. Beginning in the 1950s, New York City saw waves of urban renewal, a polite term for destruction of communities. Vast areas of housing for the poor met the wrecking ball, leaving former residents scrambling for places to live and often leaving them temporarily or permanently homeless. By the 1970s, welfare rights advocates launched a series of court cases on behalf of the homeless, leading to the 1981 consent decree in Callahan v. Carey. The case began to establish a “right to shelter,” a legal fact that has altered the landscape for later housing policy. As time has passed, New York (and other cities) have moved to a focus on what is called rapid re-housing, a strategy that provides short-term relief but often misses underlying causes, as both later books show. The right to shelter suggests that homeless and impoverished people count as full citizens, but these books demonstrate that citizenship has been a contested matter throughout U.S. history. This point is made most clearly and forcefully by O’Brassill-Kulfan. For her, “indigent transiency defined community membership and, by extension, American citizenship at the street level,” (5) in the early republic and, by extension, beyond that time. Drawing on analytical constructs from subaltern studies, she argues that vagrancy laws led to “the criminalization of the exercise of economic and social agency by the poor, by punishing their movements and subsistence activities” (4). This analytical lens is useful, though it can lead to some excesses. For O’Brassill-Kulfan, petty theft is “an illicit economy of subsistence” and “the material circumstances of food theft cases points to the systematic criminalization of subsistence efforts.” (31-32). While theoretically true, it is worth remembering that theft has been penalized by many societies for a very long time, so that antebellum vagrancy laws do not indicate a process of “criminalization.” Still, the general point is well-taken, and it can provide a way to read the other two books. The other authors provide numerous examples of elite- and middle-class reformers seeking to “clean up” the streets and the larger society, erasing homeless people from the polity and rendering their concerns invisible. Individuals These authours are rightly focused on the broader sweep of poverty and homelessness and that history is largely a history of economics, ideas, and institutions. At the same time, however, they implicitly point to the importance of key individuals. Many of these names will be familiar to historians and even some casual readers. As in almost all accounts of social welfare, Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children’s Aid Society, makes his appearance. More than any other antebellum reformer, Brace pioneered the tradition of intervention into the lives of the poor, including family separation and removal of children. After the Civil War, a new generation of women reformers sought to alter public and private charity. A leading light in this era was Josephine Shaw Lowell. Initiating a campaign to reduce public assistance, Lowell and others sought to create “scientific charity,” in which the uses of charitable funds would be checked (in both senses of the word) and genteel ladies would provide models for how to live. Such an approach would lead to “reunion between the classes” (Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick, 98). In the new century, progressives turned more attention to the actual lived experience of poor people, and journalists and photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine led the way, capturing the hardships of urban life. The Depression-era saw a new generation of heroes for the working classes, and in New York City that meant Fiorello LaGuardia, a man who “became a symbol of reassurance in those troubled times,” write Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick (151). In later years in New York City, no individual had more influence of the lived experience of poor and homeless people than Robert Moses. History has not generally treated him kindly, and neither do the two later books reviewed here. Starting in the late 1940s, Moses headed urban renewal in New York City. As Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick put it, “Moses had a grand vision for beautifying and shaping the city, but he cared little about how his plans would disrupt the lives of individuals” (177). The West Side project that led to Lincoln Center destroyed about 7,000 low-income units, replacing them with only 4,400, of which 4,000 were luxury apartments. Howard’s assessment of Moses is equally harsh: “Moses hoped the working classes would benefit from many of the broader changes he would make, but saw no place for the skid-row homeless in his sanitized version of the city and attempted to erase them from the urban landscape” (123). In a broader context, Moses carried on the traditions of his predecessors. Urban planners and charity reformers were always calling for “cleaning up” the streets. That meant removing the refuse, material and human. Actions taken by Moses, Da Costa Nunes, and Sribnick argue, “exemplified the problems created by ignoring the needs and desires of local community members” (177). That moral could fit a lot of the stories told in these books. Reformers and planners such as Moses ignored the individual lives of the impoverished, but these authors do not. All effectively humanize their subjects. O’Brassill-Kulfan’s achievement in this area is particularly impressive. The indigent transient population of the early republic left few records themselves. Her mining of the available sources to reconstruct a part of their world exemplifies the best of social history. We meet the men and women who came and went from almshouses and pauper auctions. Typical is Robert Caldwell, an Irish-born servant. Indentured to a tailor in Norristown, Pennsylvania, he eventually became free, moved to Philadelphia, and drifted through numerous working-class jobs. In this life of freedom, Caldwell did not live in one location for more than a year until age forty-six. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick relate the story of one Mrs. Finnegan, a poor woman on relief during the Depression in New York’s Chelsea district. As her neighbor, Peggy Dolan remembered it, a snooping charity worker met with a violent response when she told Mrs. Finnegan that she would be off relief for buying new bed sheets. “And bingo! She knocked her down a whole flight of steps,” Dolan recalled. Howard’s account of Skid Row also brims with personal stories, many of which upset conventional stereotypes. Social researchers in the 1960s, for instance, found men there more accepting of homosexuality than the broader society and culture. As one interviewee put it, “Sure, I’ve gone with some fags—when I couldn’t afford women” (167). A Conclusion about Conclusions If the subjects of these books often appear as unconventional, in the end, the analyses offered by the authors are standard fare. All emphasize the importance of “structural” explanations, a common approach in academic analysis of poverty. For O’Brassill-Kulfan, that means a more pointed understanding of capitalist labor markets and the role geographical mobility plays in those markets. Her conclusion ties the debates about vagrancy in the early republic to recent struggles over immigration reform. Da Costa Nunes and Sribnick close their account by reminding us that homelessness is caused by “deep poverty” but policies rarely address this fact. “Homelessness today is not caused by simply a lack of housing but is instead caused by an array of social ills that need to be addressed if we are ever to permanently reduce the homeless population,” they argue (243). Similarly, Howard decries programs that are “too deeply buried in single-issue research”(221), but she closes on more cheerful note, pointing to a 2010 plan from U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness called “Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to End Homelessness.” Their approach provides reason for hope because “the plan highlights the structural causes of homelessness by identifying lack of affordable housing, inadequate income supports for the near homeless, and a broken healthcare system as causes”1 (222). The agency’s ongoing vision is a broad one: “No one should experience homelessness— no one should be without a safe, stable place to call home.” As these books illustrate, realizing that vision is likely a task that is never complete.