Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alice O'Connor's book describes how American social scientists reframed the problem of poverty over the course of the twentieth century and how their ideas in turn had an impact on social policy. Along the way, she offers brief but insightful discussions of the major figures of twentieth-century social science, from the sociologists of the Pittsburgh Survey and the Southern Institute for Research in Social Science to Michael Harrington and Charles Murray.	1
O'Connor admires the Progressive-era sociologists and social investigators who focused on poverty as an aspect of the "labor problem" and produced such analytical writings as Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895) and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899). These examples of "advocacy through objectivity" (p. 26) seemed to promise that social science would produce the knowledge base for a welfare state with full social citizenship.	2
But the Progressive era was no more than a false dawn of American liberalism, according to O'Connor. Academic sociology soon broke with reform; Chicago School sociologists focused on the "ecology" of the city as a whole, rather than on poor people and their successors viewed the poor as a class apart. By the time of the Cold War, experts had begun to see poverty not as a societal problem but as the peculiar possession of an anomalous "forgotten minority," sometimes of an anomalous region (the South or Appalachia). By the 1950s, the sympathetic ethnographic writings of engaged social investigators had given way to the voyeuristic narratives of such as those of anthropologist Oscar Lewis, whose "culture of poverty" theories were easily generalized from Mexico to North American ghettoes. From there it was a short step to the Moynihan Report, to a racialized "urban crisis," and, in the 1990s, to the discovery by social scientists of a menacing "underclass."	. . .