Of one thing we can be sure in this confusing political time: whatever else our new president assumes as he sets out to obliterate everything his predecessor accomplished, he firmly believes poor and working-class people are stupid. And his brand of populism seems to tell him if poor people come from certain countries, they are likely to be evil as well.
This kind of thinking is not new, but it led to an American Health Care Act that would have deprived many poor and working-class people of health insurance while further enriching already wealthy people like the president. Apparently, the assumption among those who favored the AHCA was that the people victimized by this method of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t understand what hit them. And to be fair, it’s likely some people who gained health insurance for the first time under the Affordable Care Act didn’t know it was actually the very same “Obamacare” being attacked for seven years by Republicans.
When it became clear in phone calls, letters, emails and rowdy meetings with constituents that many potential victims of the American Health Care Act actually understood what was going to hit them when the ACA was repealed and replaced by the AHCA, the president and most Republicans in the House stood by their support of the replacement. Ironically, members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus were able to kill the bill because they opposed parts of the AHCA that held onto features from Obamacare meant to be kind to poor and working-class citizens by making their insurance affordable.
Now you can’t help wondering what Trump and the Republicans might have learned from the defeat of AHCA and how they might adapt. My guess is Trump’s contempt for poor people is steadfast and will influence his jobs, tax and tariff policies. It’s what makes him able to lie to them even when many of them support him. So maybe it’s worth looking at an early instance of the popular rejection of a Trump-like view of poverty.
My semi-scholarly career began in 1964 with an article thrillingly titled Poverty in the Ladies’ Home Journal: 1895-1919. Suddenly now, this long-neglected account of the famous magazine’s gradual recognition that poverty and depravity might not be the same thing seems relevant.
It took a while for the Ladies’ Home Journal to take a firm hold on the idea that poor people aren’t necessarily evil or stupid, and the magazine got little help from advertisers along the way. In 1910, for example, Quaker Oats featured a grim photograph of slum dwellers, claiming beneath the photo that interviews in “the homes where are bred the anemic, the incapable, the undeveloped” uncovered almost no one who ate oatmeal. In contrast, they found “in one university, that 48 out of 50 of the leading professors regularly eat oatmeal.” When they added the fact that oatmeal was one of the cheapest foods available in 1910, an unstated conclusion seemed inescapable.
The editor responsible for the Journal’s gradual recognition that poverty has complex causes was Edward Bok. He started the process shortly after he took over the magazine in 1895 by publishing a short essay on the pain of poverty at Christmas time by Edward Bellamy, whose best-selling socialist utopian novel Looking Backward fostered a political movement that set itself against economic injustice.
We live in a time when our president and a few political leaders abroad consider poor people so terrifying the Quaker Oats ad men in 1910 seem compassionate by comparison. Today, the Journal’s position by 1919 sounds shockingly progressive. Editor Bok offered a definition of “Americanism” that included these ambitions: “we shall realize that we are our brother’s and sister’s keepers … that we must live for others, often forgetful of self.”
In 1919 the Journal published a series of articles exploring America’s inadequacies in urban housing. And a piece proposing several kinds of prison reform asked a question of judges often raised today about our criminal justice system: “When you sentence a man to from twenty years to life, do you ever think that at the same time you pass also a sentence of suffering, poverty and perhaps death upon that man’s family?”
When Bok retired in 1919, the Journal had 1,252,813 subscribers, which was serious mass circulation in those days. Compared with the millions worldwide devoted to Facebook, it seems modest, but so far as I know, the Journal was never accused, as Facebook has been, of helping to build a world of “fake news.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded with a long manifesto, “Building Global Community,” to the charge that Facebook contributed to the polarizing echo chambers and spread of misinformation that produced the election of Donald Trump. He promises to use Facebook “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.” Facebook’s global purpose, Zuckerberg says enigmatically, is “not only helping people connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to create more meaningful groups for people to connect with.”
If I’m asked to choose between a wealthy, powerful young man who relies on algorithms to shape an abstract “global community” and a less wealthy but more powerful old man committed to a mean-spirited “America first,” I prefer going back to Bok. Faced with his own time of political change and confusion, he talked President Theodore Roosevelt into letting a reporter interview him once a month while he was shaving. The resulting articles in the 1906 Ladies’ Home Journal were more clarifying than many posts today on Facebook as well as those dreadful presidential tweets.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.