The Cultural Construction of Urban Poverty: Images of Poverty in New York City, 1890–1917

Abstract

What is meant by word Who exactly are the Homeless men with hands outstretched? Welfare mothers with children at their skirts? Appalachian miners in blackface? Migrant families with overburdened Model T's? The images we recall establish our vision of poverty. Poverty is a judgmental and culturally determined term. The perception of is what defines poverty.(1) Speaking generally, is defined across cultures by need--need of food, of clothing, of housing, of education. But to some degree that definition begs question, for what is need? Media images of poor in Africa depict nursing mothers grasping a bowl with a few meager grains and swollen-bellied children clothed in tatters. Images of poor in America picture alcoholic men standing in lines at church soup kitchens and solemn children dressed in Salvation Army castoffs. Need--or choice of what goods and services constitute a minimally adequate standard of living--is more a matter of cultural standards than one of scientific evidence. Even after compilation of statistics, of census figures, and of quantitative social science research, which tell who is unemployed, who is homeless or living in substandard housing, and who is on relief, what is done with those numbers (even supposing them to be accurate), is culturally and socially determined.(2) And, perhaps above all, it is a political matter--not only because values that would establish an appropriate standard of living are implicit and explicit within a political system or platform, but because public and private responsibility and action are related to political system as well. Asian or African or American, Republican or Democrat, each system and each group conceives of its responsibilities differently--a result of each's resources, values, and constituents. Discussions about typically generate three core questions: Who is poor? Who is responsible for those in poverty? and What should be done to ameliorate that poverty?(3) The nearly universal, consensual asking of these questions suggests that concept of poverty is more than an economic status or a social condition, but is in addition--and perhaps even primarily--a genre of expression that when subjected to scrutiny illuminates both fears and concerns of group or doing asking. Since rise of metropolis in mid-to-late 19th century and removal of economically, racially, and ethnically distinct into separate, if at times overlapping spheres in urban landscape, most Americans have received their images of how other half lives through secondary sources. The growth of cities and their division into different residential, commercial, and industrial spaces created an environment in which cultural images could become primary influence on public's perception of poverty. Who Americans identify as urban poor is, to a large degree, culturally directed. With minimal first-hand experience or opportunity to observe class, racial, and ethnic extremes, cultural performances, ranging through newspapers and magazines, novels, popular songs, plays and films, graphic and fine arts, photography, advertising, popular science, and social sciences together intentionally and by default created--and still create--the image of poor. And because and cultural images that reflect upon it are embedded in power relationships, meanings carried by representational conventions in images consolidate, perpetuate, and extend belief systems of dominant power groups (Mayne 10). Relations of power inescapably color ways in which we perceive ourselves in relation to others, American Studies scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has noted (25). From beginning of 1890 to 1917 period, with publication of Jacob Riis' How Other Half Lives, relations of power and assumptions about superiority influenced cultural expressions of poverty. …