Report on Poverty – Hughes Rudd – CBS News – February 18, 1964 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Poverty and homelessness – something that doesn’t suddenly appear or magically vanish with a few well placed platitudes. Being poor in the city is especially harsh. Homelessness either by economic circumstances (losing a job, being evicted, living on a shoestring to begin with), or by life’s turns. Living on the streets from addiction or slipping through the cracks of an overburdened and woefully inadequate social system – or simply no longer willing to make the sacrifices that modern society dictates.
Lots of things. But it’s always been that way – it hasn’t changed. Society may have changed to a certain degree, but the core issues are still there.
Although the poverty of 2023 is somewhat different than the poverty of 1964 (the year of this mini-documentary), the pain, discomfort, anxiety and humiliation are the same. Most people don’t want to be poor – most people don’t want to be homeless. Yet we live in a society where people are losing value – that we lose so many to addiction and violence and suicide points up to something just being wrong with the system – something terribly wrong with our sense of morals.
In 1964 we tried – President Johnson really believed his War On Poverty was the good fight; we took it to our hearts and thought this could be the panacea that would put society right. We thought Johnson was one of the good guys. Well, until Vietnam came along later in 1964 and we found out otherwise.
Still, the plan to combat poverty looked good on paper. But there was one problem – the same problem there is today. Too much crises and too little solution. The overburdened phone lines – the jammed websites – we didn’t have those problems in 1964 – we had letters and rotary telephones and being on hold with a pocket full of dimes or bus fare to head to the nearest Welfare office to plead a case.
Now we’re overwhelmed – from hospitals to food giveaways, the system is overwhelmed – it is also overwhelmed with people who swear they are being part of the solution, yet their faux sincerity and lack of understanding only make the situation worse.
But then as now, we have the well-intentioned unqualified, like the Home Economist in this piece explaining the difference between real milk and powdered milk and the different ways to fool people into drinking it – someone who probably wouldn’t touch powdered milk with a bargepole, trying to convince the audience of desperate that it’s good for them.
So maybe listening to this piece borders on the depressing – realizing problems can be forever – that they are the same. But in case you thought this wave of poverty and homelessness is something new – here’s proof that it’s always been here – and further evidence it doesn’t work and something new has to be tried.
Take a trip back to February 1964 for a report from Hughes Rudd of CBS News on Poverty.
