Maximum Feasible Participation

American Literature and the War on Poverty

Stephen Schryer

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503606081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

This book traces American writers' contributions and responses to the War on Poverty. Its title comes from the 1964 Opportunity Act, which established a network of federally funded Community Action Agencies that encouraged "maximum feasible participation" by the poor. With this phrase, the Johnson administration provided its imprimatur for an emerging model of professionalism that sought to eradicate boundaries between professionals and their clients—a model that appealed to writers, especially African Americans and Chicanos/as associated with the cultural nationalisms gaining traction in the inner cities. These writers privileged artistic process over product, rejecting conventions that separated writers from their audiences.

"Participatory professionalism, " however, drew on a social scientific conception of poverty that proved to be the paradigm's undoing: the culture of poverty thesis popularized by Oscar Lewis, Michael Harrington, and Daniel Moynihan. For writers and policy experts associated with the War on Poverty, this thesis described the cultural gap that they hoped to close. Instead, it eventually led to the dismantling of the welfare state. Ranging from the 1950s to the present, the book explores how writers like Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Alice Walker, Philip Roth, and others exposed the War on Poverty's contradictions during its heyday and kept its legacy alive in the decades that followed.

1

Jack Kerouac’s Delinquent Art

“They’re always printing things about Jack that aren’t true—you know, about the Beat Generation and all that juvenile delinquency. Everybody says, ‘Beat Generation!—He’s a juvenile delinquent!’ But he’s a good boy—a good son. He was never any juvenile delinquent. I know, I’m his mother.”

“Yeah,” he added, “We’re middle class, we’ve always been middle class. We’re middle class just like you.”

Gabrielle and Jack Kerouac, 1959 interview¹

In interviews and essays published after On the Road transformed Jack Kerouac into a literary celebrity, he inveighed against journalists’ equation of the Beat Generation with juvenile delinquency.² Beat, he complained, “never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.”³ Repeatedly in the late 1950s, highbrow and Hollywood interpreters of Kerouac’s work read it through the lens of the Cold War fascination with youth criminality. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, argued, “The spirit of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes me as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amok in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns.”⁴ Echoing this conflation, when 20th Century Fox attempted to purchase screenplay rights to On the Road, they hoped to reimagine Kerouac’s novel as a synthesis of The Wild One and Rebel without a Cause (1955)—the two most celebrated juvenile delinquency films of the 1950s. Jerry Wald, who entered into failed negotiations with Kerouac, wanted to cast Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty and conclude the film with his fiery automobile death in a nod toward James Dean’s recent demise.⁵

These readings responded to obvious aspects of On the Road. Dean, the novel’s central figure and archetypal Beat, is a former delinquent who spends time in a New Mexican reform school after a series of compulsive car thefts. He is a thinly fictionalized version of Neal Cassady, whose manic conversation and letter-writing style became the inspiration for Kerouac’s version of process art—the spontaneous prose that he made famous with On the Road. Even more fundamentally than the black jazz musicians whom Kerouac admired, white delinquents embodied the energies that he hoped to capture in his fiction. In spite of his mother’s insistence that he was a “good son,” he often imagined himself and other hipsters as potential delinquents. At the same time, Kerouac depicted hipsterism and delinquency as tragic conditions. Indeed, one feature of Kerouac’s work that distinguishes it from that of other Beat writers is his refusal to consistently depict hipsters as figures who embody the “special spirituality” that he described in his late-1950s interviews. His notion of the Beats as “solitary Bartlebies” encapsulates the mythos publicized in texts like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957). This mythos envisaged hipsters as doomed but heroic figures who, like Melville’s Bartleby, refuse to fit into the white-collar workplace. However, Kerouac rarely affirmed this mythos in an unadulterated fashion. Rather, his work is an anxious inquiry into the psychological and cultural reasons behind certain American young men’s failure to adapt to the US class structure. Rather than imagine this failure as an act of resistance, Kerouac depicted it as a tragic flaw—an inability to become, as he put it, “middle class just like you.”

This focus on hipsters’ alienation from America’s class structure echoes the concerns of 1950s and early 1960s social scientists, who attempted to understand the proliferation of disaffected teenagers and young men in an affluent society. These theorists attributed this proliferation to the simultaneous breakdown of working-class cultures and the institutions that transmit middle-class habits and values. This twin breakdown left young lower-class men stranded in a cultural no-man’s-land between two classes. Kerouac’s fiction attempts to map out this no-man’s-land; his autobiographical novels return again and again to young men who are alienated from the cultural attitudes of both the traditional working and new middle classes. Thus, Kerouac’s fiction also maps out the location where future writers and social scientists would locate the underclass and the kind of literary and welfare activism that they would use to address its needs. As Carlo Rotella notes, the problem of juvenile delinquency, “which played such an important role in discussions of the inner city during the 1950s and early 1960s, was subsumed by the problem of race that defined the urban crisis during the 1960s.”⁶ This shift took place when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, as OEO planners took ideas from delinquency theorists such as Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin and applied them to the problems of inner-city black and Latino/Latina youth. As I argue in this chapter, Kerouac’s fiction prefigures this shift. In his depictions of hipsters and white delinquents, he synthesizes two competing strands of postwar delinquency discourse: a strand that insists on delinquents’ alienation from American class structures and a strand that insists on their Oedipal attachment to overbearing mothers. Kerouac’s hipsters and delinquents, in other words, are white versions of the black and Latino/Latina underclass that would populate social scientific and literary texts about the inner city from the mid-1960s onward. At the same time, Kerouac also prefigures the tensions confronted by subsequent African American and Latino/Latina writers who drew on a process aesthetic to cross the cultural gap between middle-class professionals and the underclass. A potential delinquent himself, Kerouac experiences this gap as an internal division that he tries and fails to suture with his improvisatory art.

Hipster Anomie

Although delinquency discourse in the 1940s and 1950s articulated many of the same themes as poverty discourse in the 1960s, each defined its object in different terms. As Rotella notes, delinquency theory marked the beginning of postwar sociologists’ recognition of the existence of structural poverty in the United States. Attempting to understand juvenile violence, sociologists became aware of “the prospect of a permanent ghetto underclass drastically and lastingly cut off from opportunity and the rest of the metropolis by lines of racial difference and class conflict.”⁷ However, the 1950s delinquent was not always a lower-class ethnic or racial minority. Post–World War II social scientists distinguished between two species of delinquent, each distinct in its class origins and in its potential threat to society. The first was the anomic delinquent, who frequently belonged to an ethnic or racial minority and deviated from middle-class behavior because he lacked occupational opportunities. The second was the psychopathological delinquent, born to a middle-class family but psychologically stunted due to the influence of a weak father and domineering mother.⁸ Both theories were efforts to chart out the delinquent’s cultural distance from the white middle class, explaining the circumstances under which outsiders and certain insiders fail to assimilate middle-class values and work habits. Crossing this cultural divide became the motivation for the participatory professionalism institutionalized in the War on Poverty.

The first type of delinquent was the product of 1950s sociologists’ application of Émile Durkheim’s notion of anomie to the behavior of rebellious male youth. Durkheim developed this concept in Suicide (1897) in an effort to explain why the suicide rate spiked during economic depressions and times of sudden, widespread affluence. Every society, he argued, is governed by a system of expectations about the economic rewards that accrue to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In a well-governed society, “each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limit set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond.” In times of sudden socioeconomic change, however, this system is thrown into disarray. Anomie refers to this state of unregulated expectations: either people are forced to come to terms with diminished opportunities, or their desires expand beyond the viable limits of these opportunities. When either happens, people are prone to frustrated outbursts of violence against themselves and others. For Durkheim, this mismatch between ambition and opportunity was something that afflicted the well-to-do, especially people involved in industry and finance. The poor, he argued, were shielded from it: “The less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely.”⁹ In the 1950s, delinquency theorists revised this assumption, arguing that the specific conditions of American society make poor people particularly prone to anomie. According to their theory, first developed by Robert Merton and later elaborated by A. K. Cohen, Lloyd Ohlin, and Richard Cloward, the United States is an unusually anomic society. It is a nation that emphasizes the accumulation of wealth, power, and fame as social goals above all others. However, this emphasis is not accompanied by a well-elaborated system of norms governing how these goals should be achieved and what groups can reasonably hope to do so. As a result, all Americans’ desires outstrip their opportunities; everyone is like the suicidal financiers described in Durkheim’s study. This condition is especially acute among impoverished young men. Impelled by a consumeristic mass media, they share the same desire for wealth, power, and fame as all other Americans. However, they lack the practical skills and opportunities to pursue those goals. Instead, lower-class youth turn to illegitimate means at their disposal; they join youth gangs, hoping to achieve wealth and notoriety through theft, violence, and other criminal activities. As a result, the subcultures established by anomic delinquents seem like parodies of straight, middle-class society. As Paul Goodman put it in Growing Up Absurd, “There have now been numerous reported cases of criminal delinquent acts performed to get a picture in the paper, just as a young man on Madison Avenue may work hard for a year to get two five-second plugs on TV. The delinquents, perforce, take short cuts to glamour.”¹⁰

Sociologists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s had already explored the idea that lower-class youth were ambivalently attached to middle-class values. In particular, Chicago school urban ecologists had argued that lower-class delinquency resulted from the cultural dislocation experienced by immigrant youth. Frederic Thrasher, in a 1927 study of Chicago gangs, described juvenile delinquency as an “interstitial” phenomenon, one that emerged within “fissures and breaks in the structure of social organization.” These fissures were both geographical and cultural; delinquency emerged in unstable slums that lie between the industrial core and surrounding residential neighborhoods, and it thrived on the “cultural frontier” between traditionalist immigrant communities and mainstream US society.¹¹ For Thrasher and other pre–World War II sociologists, however, this phenomenon was temporary, a generational aberration before ethnic assimilation into the middle class. Moreover, even within the frontier neighborhoods, most youth fell into stable patterns of behavior. In terms that William F. Whyte used in a 1943 study of young Italian Americans, most immigrant youth were either “corner boys” or “college boys.” The former lacked ambition, were “primarily interested in their local community,” and eventually settled into working-class trades. The latter were “primarily interested in social advancement,”¹² acquired the work habits of the American middle class, and eventually gravitated toward professional careers.

For post–World War II observers, in contrast, these behavior patterns were disappearing. Traditional corner boys had vanished; the ethnic institutions that once sustained them—such as community social clubs and the urban political machines—no longer existed.¹³ Similarly, it was increasingly difficult to be a college boy. With the middle classes fleeing to the suburbs, lower-class neighborhoods became isolated and underserviced. The poor were concentrated in what John Kenneth Galbraith called “islands of poverty” cut off from the affluent society.¹⁴ This concentration was especially true for African Americans and other racial minorities, who were trapped in their neighborhoods by housing discrimination. Instead of becoming corner boys or college boys, impoverished young men became disturbed hybrids of the two: they combined the corner boy’s resistance to middle-class advancement with the college boy’s boundless dissatisfaction.

Kerouac’s 1950s fiction explored this troubled frontier between lower- and middle-class behavior, imagining it as the terrain occupied by hipsters and white delinquents. For Kerouac, this frontier was both the condition of possibility for his own delinquent art and a debilitating internal division that he tried and failed to overcome. Kerouac consistently drew on a racist romanticism to describe the groups most afflicted by poverty in the 1950s, especially African Americans and Latinos/Latinas. This racist romanticism is exemplified by Sal Paradise’s desire in On the Road to become a “Negro,” “Denver Mexican,” or “poor overworked Jap” while visiting Denver (OR, 169–170). Sal conflates all of the US racial minorities into a common culture of joy and kicks and juxtaposes them against the “white sorrows” of the middle-class majority (OR, 171). As Robert Holton, among others, has shown, this tendency to lump together nonwhites is a consequence of Kerouac’s primitivist notion of the Fellahin, which he shared with other Beat writers such as William S. Burroughs.¹⁵ The “Fellahin Indians of the world,” Sal comments, are “the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world between Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the self same deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia” (OR, 268). In Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the term “Fellahin” describes cultural groups left behind after the collapse of a world civilization. In the modern world, it describes remnants of older cultures that survive on the margins of the modern West. Westerners are animated by their culture’s Faustian spirit, which endows them with a sense of their place in world history and leads them to conquer ever-new conceptual and geographical territories. The Fellahin, in contrast, consist of people who no longer occupy a meaningful historical trajectory: “Life as experienced by primitive and by Fellahin peoples is just the zoological up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance.”¹⁶ To extend Spengler’s pervasive organic metaphors, the Fellahin are a civilization’s dead husk, gradually returning to the soil out of which that civilization was born. They are at one and the same time pre- and posthistorical. Describing them as “the source of mankind and the fathers of it,” Sal states that they will remain on the earth long after the “Fellahin apocalypse” sweeps Western civilization away (OR, 286).

Most of Kerouac’s fiction reversed Spengler’s negative valuation of the Fellahin. In particular, he affirmed African Americans and Latinos/Latinas’ spontaneity and planlessness, drawing on it as an alternative to the product aesthetic instilled in him by his English professors at Columbia University. In his 1957 manifesto, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac outlined his version of the antiformalist aesthetic theorized by Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson. For both Kerouac and Olson, this aesthetic was rooted in the author’s body, especially in the physical rhythms of his or her breath.¹⁷ Spontaneous prose no longer seeks to fashion a New Critical well-wrought urn, separable from both author and reader and the world they inhabit. Rather, it creates a this-worldly rapport between author and reader based on their respective bodily sensations. For Kerouac, one possible model for this spontaneous bodily aesthetic was jazz music—for him, as for other Beats, the quintessential Fellahin art. Describing spontaneous writing as “blowing (as per jazz musician),” he imagined that it creates telepathic communities: “Fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then the reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by the same laws operating in his own human mind.”¹⁸ By entering into this community, author and reader step outside the future-oriented temporality of Faustian civilization into the timeless p...