Again, this is not a criticism of these people, or these programs, though their successes were often modest. It’s simply acknowledging that it is always very difficult to offer assistance without also at the same time pushing a cultural agenda. If you push that agenda too far, the assistance gets rejected and the attempt at help fails.
Without writing a book on it here and now, here are some bullet points:
Jane Addams and Hull House, and the settlement houses of the so-called Progressive period (1889-1920): Teaching the immigrants and poor hygiene, sanitation, and sobriety, but also undercutting Catholic traditions, old world cultural norms and family values, and completely ignoring the incompatibility of middle-class WASP cultural norms with working class incomes and needs. Irish and Italian communities were particularly affected. The movement in general was highly motivated by Protestant religious thought, and by Victorian attitudes towards class.
City Reform: During the same period, the destruction of the old ward system by Progressives was motivated by the admirable goals of improving efficiency and ending corruption. The net effect, though, was to strip the poor of their only real political power, by destroying the admittedly corrupt ward bosses. The ward bosses had served as job providers, enforcers, lenders, and sounding boards for their communities, in exchange, yes, for graft and coerced votes. When they went away, the cities were redrawn into fewer, larger districts where the poor’s voting power was diluted, and with city manager structures that served the interests of business and the affluent, not the poor and the immigrant communities. The reformers assumed that because they wanted it to be easier to do business, and to not have to pay bribes, that everyone would benefit from the changes. While in the long run, yes, these changes were probably good, the were bad in the short term because the reformers neglected to consider the impact on the very people they said they were helping.
The New Deal: While mostly consisting of broader, more national programs, the New Deal initiatives played out locally. In addition to pervasive racism, which limited the impact of most programs on non-white communities, the design and implementation of such programs as the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Rural Electrification Act were in the hands of Washington technocrats who, while well-meaning, often had little understanding of the culture and daily lives of people in rural America. The AAA in particular undercut a lot of traditional farming culture and values in its bureaucratic approach to farming and supply and demand, and sparked a fair bit of opposition across the board.
The Great Society: Johnson’s “war on poverty” used the idea of community action programs to “elevate” the urban and rural poor was vastly expensive, enthusiastically supported by its creators, and ultimately unsuccessful. The core idea was to educate, train, and acculturate people out of poverty by making them, in effect, middle class in outlook and habit. Instead, the technical and educational aspects ran into the cultural resistance of communities to outsiders who, being largely white, middle class, affluent, and educated, had no real connection to or understanding of the communities in which they operated. Great things came out of this—Food Stamps, Medicare, Head Start, PBS, etc.—but much of the lack of success ultimately can be attributed to the tone deaf nature of the programs in dealing with local cultures.
The Equal Rights Amendment: Passed in 1972, the Amendment would have put specific language in the Constitution prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender. It garnered 35 of the required 38 state ratifications by by 1977, but though the deadline was extended ultimately to 1982, it failed to pass and faded away. One big reason, yes, was the mobilization of conservative opposition around Phyllis Schlafly , who built a coalition of anti-abortion activists, Catholics, anti-pornography crusaders, and social conservatives to paint the ERA as a socialist measure that would destroy protections for women like alimony and child support, and would vastly increase prostitution and other vice. But the big problem that killed the ERA was more the fault of its supporters, like the National Organization for Women. NOW represented, mostly, white, professional, more educated and affluent women who saw equality in the workforce as a path to success in professional fields. Trouble was, these women had difficulty relating to or communicating to women who were not in the same situation. Working women, rural women, un-or undereducated women, single mothers, all of these groups faced a very different future in their minds if ERA passed. No alimony, no child support, forced to work in crappy jobs like their husbands or boyfriends—these women lived in a different world from lawyers and business execs. The ERA, I’m convinced, was a good amendment, but the lack of sensitivity towards working class women on the part of its supporters doomed it by allowing the conservatives to drive a huge wedge between women.
People are learning; there are tons of local programs that are very sensitive to local concerns, and don’t try to mix the preaching in with the help. But at the national level we are talking about, in terms of the political parties, this sort of Tarzan and the natives approach is all too common. Real assistance has to take into account the people being helped, and the national parties have not been terribly good at this. The solution lies in local efforts, funded by the national purse, I think, but giving up that cultural control is hard for people, whether consciously or unconsciously.
