The Experts' War on Poverty

Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America

Romain D. Huret, John Angell

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501712173
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

In the critically acclaimed La Fin de la Pauverté?, Romain D. Huret identifies a network of experts who were dedicated to the post-World War II battle against poverty in the United States. John Angell's translation of Huret's work brings to light for an English-speaking audience this critical set of intellectuals working in federal government, academic institutions, and think tanks. Their efforts to create a policy bureaucracy to support federal socio-economic action spanned from the last days of the New Deal to the late 1960s when President Richard M. Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan. Often toiling in obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war not only on poverty but on the American political establishment. Their policy recommendations, as Huret clearly shows, often militated against the unscientific prejudices and electoral calculations that ruled Washington D.C. politics.

The Experts' War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social facts these social scientists employed in their work, and thereby reveals the unstable institutional foundation of successive executive efforts to grapple with gross social and economic disparities in the United States. Huret argues that this internal war, coming at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War, undermined and fractured the institutional system officially directed at ending poverty. The official War on Poverty, which arguably reached its peak under President Lyndon B. Johnson, was thus fomented and maintained by a group of experts determined to fight poverty in radical ways that outstripped both the operational capacity of the federal government and the political will of a succession of presidents.

Part I

A Science of Poverty (1945–1963)

1

The Poverty Paradox

The economist Dorothy Brady, in December 1949, was the first to point out the poverty paradox in postwar America. After earning a PhD in mathematics from Berkeley in 1933, she turned to economics, with a focus on income distribution. To members of congress who questioned her expertise, she inverted the question about the elimination of poverty as a result of economic prosperity, asking why poverty persisted in spite of increased general wealth: “Social scientists have an obligation to resolve the paradox of an apparently invariable proportion of inadequate income throughout a long period which has seen spectacular gains in the general standard of living and improving social legislation.” This notion of a “poverty paradox,” based on the principle of relative poverty, supplanted the idea of absolute poverty, a notion that had prevailed earlier in the century, particularly after the Great Depression. Brady’s paradox and her appeal for a solution became a central concern for the small community of researchers studying low-income populations after World War II.¹

The rapid expansion of a middle-class lifestyle was a striking feature of the postwar years. Little space was devoted to poverty in the new economic context and among politicians promoting economic growth. The rise of mass consumption in the country’s expanding suburbs transformed the very definition of poverty. The Cold War, and the identity questions that it awoke in the nation, confirmed consumerist norms as an integral feature of what it meant to be an average American. The poor remained outside these norms and thus outside of the “American Way”—an anomaly that would soon disappear.²

Research conducted by federal agencies revealed that poverty was a persistent problem in the newly affluent nation, however. Understanding this paradox became a major purpose for researchers, among them Ida Craven Merriam, who employed the research resources of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to measure, analyze, and question the prevalence of low-income families in affluent America. With new statistics and figures, she helped to construct a scientific approach to an issue that often incited indignation in public discourse. Cloaked in the anonymity of their agencies, the small group of researchers around her endeavored to make sense of such blatant paradox in postwar American society.³

Ida Craven Merriam

In May 1946, while Congress was debating the universal health care proposal promoted by the SSA, a staff member in the agency’s Bureau of Research and Statistics named Ida Craven Merriam drafted an internal report to Isidore Falk, the bureau director. Prior to joining the federal government, Falk had taught at the University of Chicago and was an instructor in public health at Yale University. He joined the Social Security Board in December 1936, initially as an economist. Later, he was asked to direct the agency’s research unit. The report that Merriam submitted to him addressed the insincerity of Congress members who complained about even having to read the proposed legislation. “Health insurance,” she lamented, “is now added to the list of so-called ‘communistic’ and ‘socialistic’ proposals.” However, she optimistically maintained that a “historical perspective is comforting to those who introduce social legislation.” Her progressive position on trends in American history expressed less a historical truth than the growing unease among a generation of postwar liberals forced to face the resurgence of conservative policymakers after the high hopes that came out of the war and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s promise to ensure “freedom from want.”⁴

Ida Craven Merriam was born in Philadelphia in 1904, the second child of an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a prosperous businessman, an archetypal Teddy Roosevelt Republican, who transmitted his Presbyterian faith and the ethical values and moral rigor typical of the Progressive Era to his daughter. Years later, Merriam recalled her amazement that even Democrats could be respectable. As an adult, she attempted to distance herself from her strict Christian upbringing, and like many young people of her social level at the time, she experienced a moral and spiritual crisis that prompted an effort to reconcile her Christian faith with the brutal nature of industrialized society. Years of university education helped her come to terms with the contemporary world’s contradictions and with her anguish, as she described it, about the profound social changes caused by economic modernization.⁵

Merriam enrolled at Wellesley College in the early 1920s. The university environment marked a clear break with her past, and under the influence of a friend, she became interested in Christian socialist thought, particularly in the writings of the British economist Richard Tawney (1880–1962). Tawney’s book The Acquisitive Society (1920) denounced the corruption of the capitalist world, which he described as rotting from within because it lacked a religious or moral foundation. An advocate for socialism with a human face and a follower of Max Weber, Tawney argued for the reconciliation of capitalism and Protestantism, arguments that heightened Merriam’s interest in economic and sociopolitical issues. Although she graduated with a double major in English and history, she followed in the footsteps of numerous Wellesley students by pursuing graduate studies in economics at the University of Chicago. In the city, she also encountered the feminist movement and its social implications through the influence of her residence hall director, the feminist Sophonisba Breckinridge. Under Breckinridge’s guidance, Merriam’s interest in social issues continued to develop. Chicago initiated the largest pension program for mothers in the United States in 1911. Evolving alongside movements for industrial justice and women’s suffrage, the mothers’ pension movement sought to provide “justice for mothers” and protection from insecurity. On the advice of the well-known political scientist Charles Merriam, whose course she took at Chicago and with whom she worked on the city council for a few weeks in 1923, Merriam decided to enroll in a new doctoral program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.⁶

The Brookings Graduate School was founded in 1923 to train experts in public policy to staff organizations and agencies in Washington. The multidisciplinary curriculum spanned a wide range of social sciences, greatly enhancing Merriam’s knowledge of economics and statistics, a rarity among women of her generation because of powerful academic segregation that reserved economics departments for men, channeling women toward home economics. This stark academic division along gender lines was mirrored in research topics, with women scholars tending toward subjects related to social work rather than social policy.⁷

Merriam’s dissertation explored the nineteenth-century French railway system as well as the water-borne transportation system in New England during the same period. When she completed her doctorate in 1928, job offers flooded in, and she was hired as an editorial assistant for an encyclopedia of the social sciences edited by tax scholar Edwin Seligman and economist Alvin Johnson. Funded by a consortium of scholarly organizations, the encyclopedia project was designed to provide a complete portrait of the social sciences in the late 1920s. Merriam created the list of the principal themes to be explored in each entry and authored six of the encyclopedia articles. She also maintained a cross-indexed reference list that traced the projected links among entries.⁸

This editorial position provided Merriam with an understanding of the academic organization of the social sciences while also cultivating her talent for what she called “classification.” During the 1929 crisis and after her editorial work, Merriam drifted professionally for a number of years, finding her job search frustrated by academic gender segregation. It was difficult for women scholars to join social science departments, and they tended to be concentrated in research positions in philanthropic foundations, the federal government, or the private sector. Merriam was forced to settle for temporary positions at universities such as the Connecticut College for Women or socially progressive institutions such as the Bryn Mawr Industrial Summer School, which offered education to immigrant and working-class women.⁹

This period of relative inactivity provided ample opportunity for her to analyze the causes of the Great Depression and reflect on possible solutions. The collapse of the capitalist system demonstrated the deficiencies of President Herbert Hoover’s regulatory model, which limited the role of the federal government to cooperation with businesses and minimal direct intervention. The economic doldrums reinforced Merriam’s convictions about the inhumanity of the contemporary world. As a product of the reformist branch of liberal Protestantism concerned with primarily social justice, she symbolized the “surrogate socialists” of the interwar period who, according to Gary Gerstle, constitute one strand of American liberalism.¹⁰

These liberals believed that only the efficiency of science could defeat poverty. Within the internal debate in the social sciences in the 1930s that focused on how to apply knowledge and the role of researchers in the process, Merriam sided with “purposive thinkers” for whom social science should serve a commitment to personal authenticity and social justice. This perspective on the crash of 1929 led her to support the New Deal as the only credible solution to the country’s economic, moral, and spiritual crisis. Roosevelt’s political project also offered her a professional boost, and at the invitation of the director of the Brookings Graduate School, she returned to Washington and joined the Bureau of Research and Statistics (BRS), the new research division of the SSA.¹¹

The research unit was created in 1935 in response to a congressional mandate for predictive studies that would forecast the viability of the Social Security system. Merriam joined the bureau in 1936, eventually scaling the bureaucratic ladder to become director of the division that coordinated these studies in 1942. At the BRS, she befriended Isidore Falk. Inspired by President Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech, Merriam and Falk funneled their energies into a universal health care proposal based on a 1942 report by the British economist William Beveridge. Falk was responsible for the scientific portion of the report, and Merriam compiled notes and collected data.¹²

After the war, Merriam and Falk published two reports that served as the basis for congressional debates regarding an updated version of the health care proposal known as the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill. They were closely involved in stormy debates in Congress in which Merriam tried to allay fears of universal medical coverage and her alleged communist affiliation. Unfortunately, however, they failed to predict the strength of Republican opposition, and the BRS paid a heavy price for its public support of the program.¹³

Merriam was criticized with particular vehemence by Congress members for using research for partisan purposes. The annual budget of the BRS was reduced by 30 percent in 1947 and by 80 percent in 1948, leading to savage staff reductions from 160 in 1946 to a mere 30 in 1948. In this hostile environment, the powerful lobbying arm of the American Medical Association arranged for Falk to be removed as director, and a blacklist that circulated within the SSA caused the internal cohesion of the staff to collapse. While Merriam was not blacklisted, she accused the director, Arthur Altmeyer, of failing to support staff members whose names appeared on the list and of sacrificing some of them to ensure the institution’s survival.¹⁴

This episode was a powerful lesson. Merriam lucidly attributed the bill’s failure to the lack of preparation and political naïveté of the BRS staff. At one point in the congressional hearings, she had replied candidly to a senator that further study was needed to assess the effect of a proposed quantitative change on overall costs. Robert Myers, an actuary with the administration who testified with her, later lectured her on the disastrous effects of her answer, and she acknowledged that it would be critical in the future to consider the full political context. Once again, Merriam’s hopes, born of the war, collided with institutional complexities. The anti-intellectual atmosphere of the early 1950s, fueled by McCarthyism and the Cold War, was not propitious for the emergence of innovative social programs. It was possible, however, to continue to focus on social issues by coordinating statistical research in the Census Bureau, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture, but only with discretion.

Measuring Income Distribution in the Census Bureau

In February 1946, a demobilized soldier named Herman Miller answered an advertisement for a statistician position with the Census Bureau. Born in February 1921 in New York, Miller was the son of German emigrants and a prime candidate for the job. A brilliant student, he studied economics and statistics at the City College of New York, whose student population was composed of primarily the children of immigrants. During the 1930s, both students and faculty enthusiastically supported the New Deal. On graduating in 1942, Miller was drafted and sent to the Pacific front. After the war and a period of professional uncertainty, he was considering resuming his studies to take advantage of the 1944 GI Bill when the Census Bureau ad caught his eye. The position appealed to him partly because it would allow him to pursue a doctorate while also working for the agency.¹⁵

At the time of Miller’s hiring, the Census Bureau was in the process of updating its data collection and management methods. Between 1930 and 1960, new survey methodology and improved national record keeping, eventually aided by the first computer, Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). Designed by the Remington Rand Company, it was the first computer able to handle both alphabetical and numerical information easily. It greatly enhanced the agency’s statistical capabilities. A new generation of academically trained statisticians was replacing turn-of-the-century pioneers, prompting a scientific shift as training and the economic crisis compelled this new generation to value economic data over traditional demographic information. An economist and statistician by training, Miller was perfectly suited for this transition. His academic orientation in the field of income distribution reinforced the porous relationship between academics and the federal adminis...