Robert Heilbroner and the Growing Concern with Poverty in the US

Abstract

This paper examines Robert Heilbroner’s 1950 article in Harper’s Magazine on poverty in the USA. It argues that this piece was the first attempt to raise popular concerns about poverty in the USA after World War II, and in many ways sought to do what John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and Michael Harrington’s The Other America accomplished. Heilbroner was not successful in bringing the issue before poverty to public attention because he wrote at a time of great economic growth and at a time before TV brought images and ideas to a large fraction of the American public. He also wrote in a very conservative era, where McCarthyism reared its ugly head and where calls to eradicate poverty were met with intimations of a Communist conspiracy.