The Tragedy of American Compassion

The Tragedy of American Compassion

Marvin Olasky

For Susan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote most of this book in 1990 while serving as a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage provided not only the financial support that allowed me to spend a year in Washington, D.C., but a stimulating research and writing environment as well. Charles Heatherly, Adam Myerson, Tom Atwood, Terri Ruddy, Mark Pietrzyk, Ben and Betsy Hart, Duane Higgins, Bruce Edwards, and other colleagues were supportive.

Five years of meetings with the Villars Committee on International Relief and Development taught me much about basic causes of poverty. Discussions with Herb Schlossberg, Udo Middelmann, Ken Myers, Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, George Grant, Lane Dennis, Preston Hawkins, Ron Nash, and Ted Yamamori helped me to think about domestic applications of Villars principles.

Writing a book is like running a marathon, with many individuals handing me cups of water in the later stages. Willa Johnson, Charles Colson, Constance Horner, Charles Murray, Dan McMurry, Heather Richardson, David Bovenizer, Alfred Regnery, Patricia Bozell, Joel Belz, Bill Poole, Milton Friedman, John Perkins, O. Palmer Robertson, Bill Smith, Jan Dennis, Guy Condon, and Robert and Vicki Goodrich all helped in different ways.

I also was impressed by the examples of compassion currently evident at the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, the McAuley Water Street Mission in New York, the Gospel Mission in Washington, and CityTeam in San Jose. Daily forays into the stacks of the Library of Congress allowed me to uncover numerous examples of past compassion. Collections at the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Public Library, the Newberry Library, the New York Public Library, and the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin also proved useful.

Finally, I thank my wife Susan, to whom this book is dedicated: she has a wise head, a gracious heart, and a loveliness that goes beyond narrative. I thank our children Peter, David, Daniel, and Benjamin: their lives teach patience and provide joy. My greatest thanks are to God, who had compassion on me almost two decades ago and pushed me from darkness into light.

PREFACE TO THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by Marvin Olasky

Historians say the book you’re holding was influential in the passage of national welfare reform in the 1990s. If so, that’s because Tragedy turned upside down the conventional conservative response to federal poverty programs: They cost too much. I spent a lot of time in Washington proposing that the biggest problem of twentieth-century welfare was not its cost but its stinginess in providing what many among the poor needed most: CPS (challenging, personal, and spiritual help) rather than EBS (entitlement, bureaucracy, and secularism).

Welfare reform legislation gave only a little nudge toward CPS, so from 1995 to 2002 I tried to sow seeds by giving talks to 125 communities. The ground was often stony, the rainfall insufficient, and the sower feeble, but that work is being carried on by programs like the True Charity Initiative, based in Joplin, Missouri, and others around the country.

The book you’re holding had some influence in Texas, where I became an informal, occasional advisor to Governor George W. Bush. He instructed his state bureaucracy to help rather than hinder religious poverty-fighters. When Bush ran for president, he endorsed the creation of tax credits to help local nonprofits without making them dependent on Washington. At the 2000 GOP convention his aides passed out buttons proclaiming, I’m a compassionate conservative. Lots of delegates put them on.

They didn’t stay on for long. I still like Bush, but political pressures changed the tone of his administration. To make donors happy without busting the budget, his administration dropped the tax credit idea and prioritized reducing the estate tax. Second, 9/11 led to a military budget increase. To win Democratic votes the administration also expanded domestic spending. Conservatives labeled compassionate conservatism merely a euphemism for big government.

In retrospect, compassionate conservatism had its national rollout too soon: Yes, it gained a toehold, but the toe was gnarled and the nail ingrown. After three decades of a centralized war on poverty, the decentralized approach needed more stories of street-level success and more intellectual support.

Now we have both. Community poverty-fighting successes are numerous: More than one hundred programs have won one sign of recognition, a Hope Award for Effective Compassion. Some of my favorite nonprofits, like the Bearing Bike Works in Atlanta and the WorkFaith Connection in Houston, move people from deep poverty or long prison experience to productive labor.

On the intellectual front, the book you’re holding stood pretty much alone three decades ago, but dozens of others published in the twenty-first century now provide thoughtful support. Some of my favorites have clear titles: Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor… and Yourself, Robert Lupton’s Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It!), Lawrence Mead’s From Prophecy to Charity: How to Help the Poor, and Howard Husock’s The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It.

When I read Tragedy earlier this year for the first time since the 1990s, four errors jumped out at me. The first is stylistic: Young journalists I hectored during twenty-nine years of magazine editing that began soon after this book’s publication will be right to hoot about my use of passive constructions. Punctuation was also semi-academic in places: I should have performed more semi-colonoscopies and bowel resections.

The second problem is deeper: colorblindness regarding the effects of segregation. The title of Gene Dattel’s history, Reckoning with Race, is good: I didn’t sufficiently reckon with it. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, John McWhorter’s Losing the Race, and Jason Riley’s Please Stop Helping Us are books from the left and right that describe the particular problems African Americans faced and face.

A third problem: I should have done a better job of explaining two nineteenth-century terms, worthy poor and unworthy poor, that today leave readers sputtering. Back then, those with biblical faith knew God creates all humans in His image, so all lives are worthy and none unworthy, but they made a pragmatic distinction: Who among the poor would use charitable funds to feed and house their families and themselves, and who would spend every available dollar on drugs or alcohol?

Josiah Quincy two centuries ago had a better nomenclature: able (ready and willing to work), unable (and thus worthy of alms), and able but unwilling. Quincy also recognized the need to know the poor individually and not make assumptions based on appearance. He learned about numerous and minute shades of difference in disabilities, so he did not attempt to draw hard and fast distinctions. Helping the poor was and is an art, not a science.

My fourth error lay in not taking into account the decline of U.S. manufacturing that was picking up speed as I wrote. Work is important both financially and psychologically, and factory closings discouraged many workers. College or bust high school curricula amplified the problem: Unacademically-inclined high school students often graduated or dropped out without a skill, and some then dropped out of the workforce and into drug use.

This is a re-issue, not a rewriting, so I’ve left the content that follows as it was, warts and all. Tragedy’s legacy at this point is mixed. Three decades of accomplishments in some communities have fallen far short of the original hope for a warmhearted but tough-minded approach based on historical success. But cultural change nationally and political change in Washington take a long time, and I hope some who now read this book will be prepared to take another whack at the piñata.

PREFACE

by Charles Murray

This is a book of hope at a time when just about everyone but Marvin Olasky has lost hope. The topic is poverty and the underclass.

The reasons for hopelessness are everywhere, but they are most obvious and most depressing in the inner city. There, in every large city in America, the family as we have known it throughout Western history seems terminal. More than 80 percent of children are born to single women. The father who fills the most ordinary of traditional roles—lives with the mother, goes to work every morning, brings home a paycheck every week, and shows his children by example how a responsible male adult is supposed to behave—has nearly vanished. It is harder to put numbers to the situation regarding mothers, but the reports from case workers and a few clear-eyed journalists reveal a world in which some substantial proportion of women play their role of mother appallingly badly, leaving the children unnurtured, undisciplined, sometimes unfed and unwashed. Children grow in a world where cause and effect are meaningless—where, for the same behavior, they are on one occasion ignored, on another laughed at indulgently, and on yet another cursed and beaten. Nor is that the only way in which cause and effect, praise and blame, can be turned topsy-turvy in the inner city. The drug dealer is lionized, the man who mops floors is scorned. The school girl who gets pregnant is envied, the school girl who studies hard is taunted.

The numbers are often secondary. What proportion of inner city adults is addicted to crack? Nobody really knows. But whatever it is, the drug trade has torn apart the social fabric of neighborhood after neighborhood. How many homeless are there? It is easy to discredit the inflated estimates that the newspapers uncritically pass on, but it takes very few homeless people sleeping in doorways to change the feel of a streetscape and soon to change the ethos of a community. Is crime as bad as people think it is? To people whose every routine of everyday life has to be altered out of fear of becoming a victim, debates over the statistical trendlines are beside the point.

These problems seem intractable because so many things, costing so much money, have been tried so often without success. Nothing new is left to try. Another jobs program? We spent tens of billions of dollars on jobs programs in the 1970s, and they failed even to dent the numbers of inner-city men who have dropped out of the job market. Another program to take women off welfare through education and training? The history of such programs is long, and they tell a monotonous story: the successes have only small effects at the margin, there are many more failures than successes, and the net number of women on the welfare rolls grows. Escalate the war on drugs? More money for inner city schools? More family planning programs? Whatever the nostrum, we have by now accumulated stacks of reports evaluating past attempts, and they document the reasons why the next effort won’t work either. If you doubt the end of optimism, listen to political candidates. They know better than to talk about how to help the underclass, for no one believes them anymore.

In another sense, however, the problems of the underclass are easy to solve—if indeed the problems are a matter of too little money. As a rough-and-ready calculation, assume that the U.S. has 7.5 million families below the poverty line and that on the average it would take a $12,000 income supplement to bring those families above the poverty line. Both numbers represent the high end of the poverty problem as it has existed in the last decade. Even so, to erase poverty would cost only $90 billion, at a time when federal expenditures on cash and noncash benefits for persons with limited income, as the federal government’s Statistical Abstract puts it, are passing $150 billion. Without adding a dime to the federal budget, we could, right now, bring every family above the poverty line and have something on the order of $60 billion left over to fund special programs for housing, medical care, or whatever, on top of that poverty level income. So it is easy to cure poverty, even under the constraints of the current budget deficit. Why not do it?

In practical terms, we don’t do it because much of that $190 billion is not for persons of limited income at all, but for the poverty industry—bureaucrats, caseworkers, service providers, and a grab-bag of vendors in the private sector who plan, implement, and evaluate social programs on government contracts. Even the money that does trickle down to the street does not go to people below the poverty line, but to persons with incomes considerably above it. All of these constituencies would block any attempt to cash out the current programs and write the monthly checks to poor people that would end poverty.

But suppose that these highly practical constraints did not apply. If we could put everyone above the poverty line with a check, should we? And in answering that question, we come face to face with the deeper questions about compassion and the poor that this book poses.

The profound truth that Marvin Olasky forces us to confront is that the problems of the underclass are not caused by poverty. Some of them are exacerbated by poverty, but we know that they need not be caused by poverty, for poverty has been the condition of the vast majority of human communities since the dawn of history, and they have for the most part been communities of stable families, nurtured children, and low crime. It is wrong to think that writing checks will end the problems of the underclass, or even reduce them. If tomorrow we were to adopt the plan I just outlined, giving every family enough money to put them above the poverty line, we can be confident that two things would happen.

First, the number of families that require such assistance would promptly grow by a sizable number, as families that once managed to stay above the poverty line through their own labor began to take it a little easier—a natural human reaction with disastrous long-term consequences. We might predict this outcome simply through common sense, but we don’t have to rely on common sense in this instance. The United States government proved it for us back in the early 1970s with a huge demonstration project known as the Negative Income Tax Experiment. A guaranteed income will produce significant reductions in work effort. Those losses will be concentrated among young men. To end poverty by writing checks is an efficient way to increase the size of the underclass, not reduce it.

Second, the suffering that makes us despair for the inner city, especially the suffering of children, would go on. We may take the elemental case of malnourished children as an example. It is nearly impossible in the contemporary United States for a mother to be left without a way to provide her children with a decent diet. Government programs, beginning with AFDC and food stamps and working down through a long list of special food programs, not to mention churches, neighbors, and a profusion of private services, offer ways for a competent mother even in the most desperate of circumstances to make sure her child’s stomach is filled with good food every day. And yet many children are malnourished nonetheless. The food is out there. Too often, a competent mother is not. More money is not going to make competent mothers of incompetent ones, nor conscientious mothers of irresponsible ones. More money is not going to bring fathers back to the children they have sired and then abandoned. Indeed, the guarantee of an income above the poverty line, no matter whether the father stays or not, is more likely to break up families than reunite them—another of the grim but commonsensical findings of the Negative Income Tax Experiment. A guaranteed income is not going to reduce drug abuse or alcoholism. It probably would not even reduce homelessness much—the number of homeless who are on the streets just because they don’t have enough money for an apartment is small compared to the number who are there for complex reasons.

And so the impasse. If the social programs of the welfare state give us no way out, and if money gives us no way out, what is left? Therein lies Marvin Olasky’s story.

The underclass we have always had with us. Descriptions of a subpopulation of American poor who fit the current notion of an underclass may be found from the inception of sociology and, as Dr. Olasky describes, appear in writings that go back to the earliest days of colonial America. But the number of people who fit that description constituted a minuscule proportion of poor people. Even in the great cities, filled with people who were miserably poor by today’s standards, the neighborhoods that corresponded to today’s inner cities in their crime and social disintegration—Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen, for example—were isolated areas within the much larger, teeming, but energetic and functional ethnic communities that made up the social quilt of the city.

Why was the underclass so much smaller then, at a time when poverty was so much closer to real destitution than poverty as we know it today? Within the welter of candidate explanations is Marvin Olasky’s central truth: Human needs were answered by other human beings, not by bureaucracies, and the response to those needs was not compartmentalized. People didn’t used to be so foolish as to think that providing food would cure anything except hunger, nor so shallow as to think that physical hunger was more important than the other human hungers, nor so blind as to ignore the interaction between the way that one helps and the effects of that help on the human spirit and human behavior. The Tragedy of American Compassion is the recounting of an American history that today’s Americans never learned.

In telling this story, Dr. Olasky concentrates appropriately on the effects on the poor, for it is there that the overridingly important message lies: It worked. Free societies know how to do many potentially contradictory things at the same time: create communities in which the men and women routinely understand and act on the responsibilities of adulthood, provide help to the small proportion of people who need it, and provide moral uplift—yes, moral uplift is the right phrase, overdue for resurrection—to the even smaller proportion of the needy who are the nucleus of an underclass.

This message runs headlong into the received wisdom. American social history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is typically taught through the texts of Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair. They portrayed part of American reality, to be sure—but only part. Given the massive influx of immigrants during that period, the comparative poverty of the entire country—for America even at the opening of the twentieth century had only a tiny fraction of the wealth of contemporary America—and the unprecedented social dislocations brought about by industrialization, the achievements of earlier ages in dealing with the needy were astonishing. It was not a perfect system, and America wanted perfection. When the New Deal came along, it seemed that perfection was within our grasp if we simply used government to do more efficiently what private institutions had been doing all along. We were wrong in that belief, but we are equally wrong today in thinking that because government cannot do the job, nobody can. What is required is no more complicated, and no less revolutionary, than recognizing first, that the energy and effective compassion that went into solving the problems of the needy in 1900, deployed in the context of today’s national wealth, can work wonders; and secondly, that such energy and such compassion cannot be mobilized in a modern welfare state. The modern welfare state must be dismantled.

While the potential for changing the condition of the underclass is the main story line, there is a subtext in The Tragedy of American Compassion that is just as important, for this is a book not just about the underclass, but about all of us. Few urban or suburban communities anywhere, including the most affluent, can be satisfied with the way their members live together. We have become a nation of subdivisions and apartment blocks, places where people eat and sleep but too seldom live together as neighbors and copartners in making their little platoons work. Bonds and affiliations—words that Marvin Olasky uses repeatedly and powerfully—are broken, and we too often have nothing of value to take their place. Dr. Olasky opens up new ways of thinking about the question that has preoccupied me in recent years, and one that I believe will increasingly be recognized as the great social question for millennium’s end and beyond: How can human beings at every level of income and abilities live happily together in postindustrial urban communities?

I use the word happily with intent, for it is central to what Marvin Olasky has to say. We have learned in this century that the search for human happiness is not well served by egalitarian systems, let alone socialist ones. We have relearned in the last few decades the age-old lesson that narcissism and materialism are not satisfying bases for a fulfilling life. Marvin Olasky recognizes openly what most of us sense less articulately: the problems of America’s social policy are not defined by economics or inequality, but by needs of the human spirit. The error of contemporary policy is not that it spends too much or too little to help the poor, but that it is fundamentally out of touch with the meaning of those needs. By reminding us that it was not always so, this badly needed history points us toward a possible and better future.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

INTRODUCTION

The Current Impasse

At Christmas in Washington the social pendulum swings. Stepping inside Union Station on a cold December night is like entering a magic kingdom: classical music fills the air, high-rent shops line the mall areas, and even the Amtrak waiting rooms are generally clean. But outside, over there, away from the bright light, sounds a different song. Panhandlers wait near the escalator heading down to the Metro stop. Some seem coolly efficient in their work. Some are inebriated and occasionally aggressive. Others are pathetic. And one, with a sly sense of humor, sings, Rich folks roasting on an open fire,/ Homeless stepping on their toes.

At quitting time in America’s capital two classes step on each other’s toes. Most people, whether officials or clerks, head home to families and friends. Some people, volunteer doormen at the Metro, try to cadge a few more quarters from package- and guilt-laden passersby before heading toward shelters or grates. Most of the better-off avoid eye contact with these most visible poor. They know the homeless are with them, and they do not know how to react.

The confusion is not caused by a lack of instructors. Across the country, day after day, morning talk shows and newspapers tell us to be compassionate toward the poor. These days, the word compassion slides over tongues like a social lozenge—in one month, in five major newspapers, I found the word about three hundred times. But does compassion mean giving a dollar at the Metro entrance, and then appropriating a billion dollars for federal housing? Are those who refuse to do one or the other rich folks roasting on an open fire? In the 1990s, are they ready to be consigned—in their own minds or in social and political reality—to the circle of hell reserved for the selfish?

What should we do? One charity leader said, The important thing to remember is that we must get involved in some way—any way¹

But what if many points of light are actually points of darkness? If we have a cabinet full of medicine bottles, do we recommend dipping randomly into any of them? Aren’t there usually warning labels, or at least suggestions that we take certain pills with food or milk? How do we befriend the homeless? a tipsy Washington troubadour sang. The answer is blowing in the wind. Are we to grab a butterfly net and try to snag an answer as it flaps by?

No. The answer is not blowing in the wind, nor is it necessary to eat this and drink that, like Alice in Wonderland. The answer is sitting on pages of old magazines and reports deep in the stacks of the Library of Congress. Americans in urban areas a century ago faced many of the problems we face today, and they came up with truly compassionate solutions. We may not realize this, because only two kinds of books on the overall history of poverty-fighting in America are now available. A few of the books argue that the free market itself solves all problems of poverty. The more conventional approach stresses government intervention to restructure economic relations. But neither kind emphasizes the crucial role of truly compassionate individuals and groups in the long fight against poverty. Neither goes beyond smug rejection or neglect of pre-twentieth-century moral understandings.

Without the informed spirit that historical understanding can provide, the long debate about poverty in America has reached an impasse. In Washington, political leaders talk grandly of helping the poor, but even the word compassion, which once had the power to compel action, is now merely a rhetorical device trotted out regularly by Republicans as well as Democrats. Around the country, compassion fatigue is evident as people tire of seeing generosity misused or, apparently, of no use. As columnist Ellen Goodman noted, For many of us, there is a slow process by which… generosity can turn into resentment and sympathy can turn hard.²

Thoughtful journalists are throwing up their hands. Columnist William Raspberry is typical: Washington, like cities across America, is doing a rotten job of housing its homeless. But I haven’t a clue as to how to do it much better.³

Among philosophers and political theorists, confusion reigns. James S. Fishkin ended his book on The Limits of Obligation with an honest abdication: Some great revision in our assumptions or in our actions is required. But because I feel genuinely caught in this dilemma myself, I am not now advocating any particular resolution.⁴

Yet, while we sit around and debate, or increasingly give up, generations are being lost. Crack babies in inner city hospitals tremble and twitch uncontrollably. Teenage mothers, alone with squalling children, fight the impulse to strike out. Women in their thirties, abandoned by husbands, wait for their numbers to be called in cold welfare offices. Homeless men line up impatiently at food wagons before shuffling off to eat and drink in alleys smelling of urine.

The good news is that the impasse can be resolved. Many lives can be saved if we recapture the vision that changed lives up to a century ago, when our concept of compassion was not so corrupt. In one sense, we have thought ourselves into this social disaster—and we can think ourselves out of it. The key to the future, as always, is understanding the past. This book, by laying out the history, attempts to suggest a new form for the debate over poverty and a new way out of the impasse.

CHAPTER ONE

The Early American Model of Compassion

In the 1980s a philanthropic trade association, the Council on Foundations, issued a press release noting several billion dollars in member contributions. Newspapers called the council the most generous group of people in human history.¹

The superlative probably was accurate in terms of dollar amounts, but some cash-poor Americans of colonial times excelled in different measures of generosity—a word in those days primarily associated not with money but with nobility of character and, as in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, with gentleness and humility.²

The model of early American generosity toward those in greatest need stressed personal aid in times of disease. Pilgrim leader William Bradford, describing how sickness shrank his small band of settlers following their landing at Plymouth in 1620, commended the 6. or 7. sound persons who could still move about and

in ye time of most distres… spared no pains night nor day, but with abundance of toyle and hazard of their owne health, fetched them woode, made them fires, drest them meat, made their beads, washed their lothsome cloaths, cloathed and uncloathed them; in a word, did all ye homly & necessarie offices for them.

Bradford wrote that they did all this willingly and cherfully, without any grudging in ye least, shewing herein true love unto their friends & bretheren.³

This early American model also emphasized hospitality, particularly the opening of homes to those suffering destitution because of disaster. Minutes from the Fairfield, Connecticut, town council meeting of April 16, 1673, show that Seriant Squire and Sam moorhouse [agreed] to Take care of Roger knaps family in this time of their great weakness…⁴

; and minutes from the Chelmsford, Massachusetts, town meeting in November 1753 speak of a payment to Mr. W. Parker for taking one Joanna Cory, a poor child of John Cory, deceased, and to take care of her while [until] 18 years old.⁵

Significantly, the honored generosity lay primarily in the giving of time, not treasure. Those who made room for widows and orphans often received compensation for out-of-pocket expenditures from town councils or other community organizations.⁶

The model also insisted on decent living on the part of those who were helped. Groups such as the Scots’ Charitable Society (organized in 1684) open[ed] the bowells of our compassion to widows such as a Mrs. Stewart who had lost the use of her left arm and whose husband was Wash’d Overboard in a Storm.⁷

But the open hand was not extended to all; the society ruled that no prophane or diselut person, or openly scandelous shall have any pairt or portione herein. The able-bodied could readily find jobs in a growing agricultural economy; when they chose not to, it was considered perfectly appropriate to pressure them to change their minds.

The need to offer personal help and hospitality became a frequent subject of sermons, which in colonial days were powerful in shaping cultural values, meanings, and a sense of corporate purpose.⁸

With other media largely absent, the sermon stood alone as the weekly medium of public communication, and thus would be heard and discussed. When Benjamin Colman noted in 1725 that "Acts of Compassion and Mercy to our poor and needy Brethren [are] esteemed by the Lord of the Sabbath to be Holiness to himself," people listened.⁹

When Colman explained that compassion and Mercy to the poor is Conformity to God, it is unlikely that many wanted to be out of conformity.¹⁰

Congregationalist and Presbyterian sermons regularly noted that faith without works of compassion was dead. Anglicans also argued that those blessed materially by God should compassionate the poor by descending into misery when necessary in order to help pull them up: This in one order of life is right and good; nothing more harmonious.¹¹

And when Methodism spread in the eighteenth century, American followers propagated John Wesley’s advice to Put yourself in the place of every poor man and deal with him as you would God deal with you.¹²

The only question might be, how would we want God to deal with us? As a cold official who provides material without love? As a warm sugar daddy who gives without discipline? Cultures build systems of charity