The American welfare state from the 1930s to the 1960s

Poverty has long been interpreted in many different ways. One particularly intriguing and enduring concept of poverty is the idea of an ‘underclass’. On the one hand, it appears to be embedded in human nature to regard a small minority at the bottom of society as somehow sub-human and very different from the rest of us. Seeming reluctance to work, alcoholism, drug dependency, mental instability, general unreliability, irresponsible child-rearing – these and other allegedly sub-human qualities are said to be the prime cause of their poverty and apparent social failure. A major problem is that in this version, the ‘underclass’ may be intergenerational and therefore only a serious re-education into economic respectability will achieve the desired result of a long-term behavioural improvement. Even worse is the implication that the transmission mechanisms may be more robust: if membership of the ‘underclass’ is hereditary, then only drastic measures to restrict fertility would cut its size. On the other hand, many (including this author) would argue that the ‘underclass’ concept is essentially a political construct – a long-standing, enduring and deeply flawed way of explaining inequality and even rationalising poverty, focusing very selectively on the alleged misbehaviours of those who happen to be at the bottom of society at a particular time. It is clear that the concept of an ‘underclass’ enjoys popularity in some economic conditions, but not others. What is certain is that ‘underclass’ discourses in the United Kingdom go a long way back into history – back to at least the Old Poor Law in the late eighteenth century – and the concept has enjoyed periodic reconstructions over at least the last two hundred years. From Charles Booth’s speculative but empirically rigorous attempts to demonstrate that heredity played an important part in determining the likelihood of pauperism through to the concept of a ‘social problem group’, ‘problem families’,