NECESSITOUS MEN

Posted By POSCA

In the social dialogue over the question, “What is to be done with the poor?”, those on the left inevitably invoke one of their greatest shibboleths—FDR’s argument concerning so-called “necessitous men”—men who are desperate because they are held in the vise of grinding poverty. Because these men are so poor, the argument goes, they have no hope for the future and are, therefore, desperate to adopt any solution to their grinding poverty that comes along. Accordingly, they are susceptible to fascism or communism because these ideologies (in the form of National Socialism or Marxism/Leninism) promise an end to poverty for all time. As a consequence, democratic governments are threatened by the existence of necessitous men and should beat totalitarian ideologies to the punch by lifting people from poverty before they are seduced by anti-democratic ideas.

This is the way FDR expressed it at the DNC Convention in 1936:

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor —these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for. (Italics added)

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor —other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

And in the State of the Union address for 1944, he re-addressed the idea when he also proposed something he called the “Second Bill of Rights:”

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

It should be obvious why those on the left are inspired by these words: they justify the largest government imaginable. Only government has the wherewithal to protect us from the peril posed by the existence of necessitous men. Only government can house, feed, care for, educate and employ those who are trapped in persistent poverty.

Admittedly, there may be something persuasive in the claims that poverty is a national defense issue and that government should act to defend itself by expunging poverty from the socio-political landscape.

However, Posca is aware of a fundamental flaw in Roosevelt’s argument—a flaw exposed by another darling of the left, a man named Jacob A. Riis, author of the famous plea for relief entitled How The Other Half Lives. Whether intended or not, Riis gives good reason to believe that the central tenet of FDR’s argument is false. That is, in his attempt to accurately describe the condition of poor people in New York City at the dawning of the 20^th century, Riis points out that necessitous men are desperate men—not because they are seeking a radical political solution to their problems—but because they are desperate to lift themselves from grinding poverty. Although some may be attracted to radical political ideas, Riis over and over gives evidence that necessitous men are too busy bettering themselves to worry about politics. It is important to remember the very reasons they came here in the first place.

In fact, Riis divides the class of necessitous men into the sub-class containing “paupers” and the sub-class containing the “honest poor,” and he is unafraid to judge relief measures on the basis of whether or not they promote something he calls “pauperization,” which he condemns. He is very much against any anti-poverty measures that promotes the dependency of necessitous men upon public or private agencies—the old distinction between the “hand up” or the “hand out.” He abhors assistance that builds dependency relationships between the recipient—the pauper—and the agency providing the assistance. The “honest poor” are those who find themselves in dire circumstances, but are working hard to escape from them. In essence, a pauper is a professional seeker of hand outs; an honestly poor person is seeking to permanently free himself from the circumstances in which he finds himself.

And Riis has the evidence to support his belief that the “hand up” is always preferable to the “hand out” when it comes to freeing people from poverty in the United States. One such example is found in the work of the Children’s Aid Society, which he describes in Chapter XVII (“The Street Arab”). New York City at the dawn of the 20^th century saw thousands of young boys—so-called “street Arabs”—who lived and slept in the streets without anything like parental or other supervision. The houses of the Children’s Aid Society targeted these young boys and provided them with the means to make something of themselves. This is how Riis describes it:

How wisely the men planned who laid the foundation of this great rescue work and yet carry it on, is shown by no single feature of it better than by this. No pauper was ever bred within these houses. Nothing would have been easier with such material, or more fatal. But charity of the kind that pauperizes is furthest from their scheme. Self-help is its very key-note, and it strikes a response in the boy's sturdiest trait that raises him at once to a level with the effort made in his behalf. Recognized as an independent trader, capable of and bound to take care of himself, he is in a position to ask trust if trade has gone against him and he cannot pay cash for his "grub" and his bed, and to get it without question. He can even have the loan of the small capital required to start him in business with a boot-black's kit, or an armful of papers, if he is known or vouched for; but every cent is changed to him as carefully as though the transaction involved as many hundreds of dollars, and he is expected to pay back the money as soon as he has made enough to keep him going without it. He very rarely betrays the trust reposed in him. Quite on the contrary, around this sound core of self-help, thus encouraged, habits of thrift and ambitious industry are seen to grow up in a majority of instances. The boy is "growing" a character, and he goes out to the man's work in life with that which for him is better than if he had found a fortune.

And does this effort pay dividends? This is the judgment he reaches:

A large share of (the work of the Children’s Aid Society), in a sense the largest, certainly that productive of the happiest results, lies outside of the city, however. From the lodging-houses and the schools are drawn the battalions of young emigrants that go every year to homes in the Far West, to grow up self-supporting men and women safe from the temptations and the vice of the city. Their number runs far up in the thousands. The Society never loses sight of them. The records show that the great mass, with this start given them, become useful citizens, an honor to the communities in which their lot is cast. Not a few achieve place and prominence in their new surroundings. Rarely bad reports come of them.

Thus, not only is it the case that Riis prefers the “hand up” in abhorrence of the private or public “hand out,“ but nowhere in any of his evidence is there the suggestion that necessitous boys are inclined to become incensed anti-social radicals. In fact, if the Children’s Aid Society is unable to reach a boy, then it is likely, says Riis, that he will join one of the street-gangs operating in New York City. These gangs are only political in the sense that they seek to corrupt politicians who will in turn allow them to more freely pursue criminal activity. To be more precise, the street-gang is just another vehicle for extricating oneself from poverty. Of course, it involves breaking the law, but the purpose is the same.

But this is by no means the only evidence Riis adduces. For example, there is a group of Germans that, without any assistance from private or public agencies, managed to extricate itself from poverty. It is discussed in one of his footnotes:

The Sheriff Street Colony of rag-pickers, long since gone, is an instance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during years of hard work in squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a township in a Western State, and the whole colony moved out there in a body. There need be no doubt about their thriving there.

Time and again, Riis points to groups or nationalities that, without any assistance from public or private agencies, bettered themselves by rising above poverty. He discusses the Irish “wave” and the progress it made; he mentions the Italians who made a fortune by cornering the garbage or refuse market in New York City; and he mentions the great success of Jews from Eastern Europe in cornering the world garment market. There were no government or charitable group handouts—they looked for opportunity, took advantage of it, and escaped.

The point is this: necessitous men may live in grinding poverty, but they are not therefore sitting around waiting for fascism or communism to save them. This may be true in nations where communism and fascism have replaced other forms of totalitarian government—kingdoms, for example—but there is no evidence it is occurring in the United States, a place that attracts those who wish to make something of themselves. In fact, various waves of immigrants have been able to succeed without any assistance from public or private agencies. They did it by hard work and by saving the fruits of their labor, and as a consequence they have the added benefits of independence and self-respects. And the descendants of those immigrants continue that tradition.

FDR’s argument may work in Europe, but it is based on a fallacy in the United States, a place where necessitous men do not turn to totalitarianism—but to themselves—to overcome poverty. This is the essence of what it means to be an American.

Trust me, Posca knows.