My friend Michael Katz died this
weekend. Michael wrote brilliantly about the history of cities, of poverty, and
of education. His books are meticulously researched and argued; they sharpen,
and often change, the way you think. Among my favorites are: The Irony of
Early School Reform, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, The Undeserving
Poor, The Price of Citizenship, One Nation Divisible (with
Mark Stern), and there are others, all wonderful.
He helped me immeasurably over the
last twenty years with my work. Immeasurably. And a few years back, we got to
collaborate, editing a series of essays on school reform. As I’m sure his many
students would verify, Michael’s feedback was something. He was tough-minded
and didn’t hold back, though he provided the hard news in a way that made your
writing better. And when you got praise—and he was generous with praise—well,
you could take it to the bank, for Michael was not a bullshitter. I will always
remember and celebrate his intellectual integrity. I am going to miss him very
much.
I reprint below a post I wrote in
October, 2013 when a revised edition of The Undeserving Poor came out.
It’s a phenomenal book, and it couldn’t be more timely.
***
Sometime in the early 1990s, I found
historian Michael B. Katz’s book The Undeserving Poor, which had been
published a few years before. I still remember sitting in my small back
bedroom—a makeshift study—scribbling notes all over the pages of the book as
Katz described and analyzed the ways Americans have defined and discussed
poverty. He had me hooked from the first sentence: “The vocabulary of poverty
impoverishes political imagination.”
The Undeserving Poor was not
so much a history of poverty in the United States as a history of ideas about
poverty, and the ideas were complex and, for the most part, troubling. I began
to understand how it is that poor people are so often categorized and
characterized in such one-dimensional and insidious ways: as shirkers, or
passive, or morally defective, or stupid—as people responsible for their
poverty because of some damning personal or cultural quality. I also began to
understand the reasons behind various interventions aimed at poverty—or
refusals to intervene. I had never read a book quite like this, one that
demonstrated just how much the ideas
and language in the air matter in the
construction of public policy. As someone who had a background in literature
and in psychology, I certainly was trained to appreciate the power of language,
but Katz helped me see the intimate connection between words (and the ideas
driving those words) and specific social attitudes, political positions, and
legislative initiatives. The book was eye-opening, and it would have a profound
effect on my own way of understanding social issues and writing about them.
The Undeserving Poor has just
been reissued by Oxford University Press, and Katz has used the occasion to
revise the book in major ways, not only updating it but adding a good deal of
new material to it. Let me admit that Michael Katz is a friend, and we have
recently written together, but my initial impression of The Undeserving Poor
was formed years before I met him. I thought it was a hugely important book
when I first read it, and I think this new edition is hugely important as well.
Especially now. We as a nation pretty much ignore poverty as a public policy
issue. The ideas in the air regarding poverty in the U.S. are, to use Katz’s
1989 phrase, “impoverished.” The solutions that have political sway are either
market-based (during the last election some conservatives were suggesting that
the poor needed to start their own businesses) or involve educational or
social-psychological interventions, such as helping the poor develop mental
toughness or “grit.” There is no serious talk about jobs programs or housing or
expanded social services or restoring the safety net. Within such comprehensive
policies, educational and market-based interventions would make more sense and
have a chance of succeeding.
More than any book I know, The
Undeserving Poor helps us understand why Americans talk about poverty the
way we do and why our public policy—sometimes noble, sometimes
mean-spirited—takes the shape it does. It is one of the important social
science books of our time.
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I am sorry for the loss of your friend. Thank you for posting this tribute. I just purchased "The Undeserving Poor" and "In the Shadow of the Poorhouse". It was my grandmother's greatest fear that she would die in a poorhouse. She died young, age 51, from a kidney disease that could have been treated had she money and access to a doctor. It seems to me that we are silently watching people, large numbers of people, "fall" into poverty, and are doing nothing to shut off the valve. I will read with great interest!
ReplyDeleteI was so happy to find your blog Dr. Rose, and now so sad to read that Dr. Katz had passed away. I'm a doctoral candidate who's been researching the Lancasterian schools and have had occasion to read Irony a couple of times. I'm so sorry for your loss, he sounds like he was a great friend and colleague.
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