I discovered this personally in a curious way. After I wrote my first article on poverty in America, I had all the statistics down on paper. I had proved to my satisfaction that there were around 50,000,000 poor in this country. Yet, I realized I did not believe my own figures. I could prove that the other America existed, but I had never been there.
Poverty is often off the beaten track.
It always has been. The ordinary tourist never left the main highway, and today rides interstate turnpikes. He does not go into the valleys of Pennsylvania where the towns look like movie sets of Wales in the thirties. And even if he were to pass through such place by accident, the tourist would not meet the unemployed men in the bar or the women coming home from a runaway sweatshop. The Other America.