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

What is meant by the word "poverty?" Who exactly are "the poor?" 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 poverty is what defines poverty.(1) Speaking generally, poverty is defined across cultures by "need"--need of food, of clothing, of housing, of education. But to some degree that definition begs the question, for what is "need?" Media images of the poor in Africa depict nursing mothers grasping a bowl with a few meager grains and swollen-bellied children clothed in tatters. Images of the poor in America picture alcoholic men standing in lines at church soup kitchens and solemn children dressed in Salvation Army castoffs. "Need"--or the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 poverty 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 the 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 the fears and concerns of the group or groups doing the asking. Since the rise of the metropolis in the mid-to-late 19th century and the removal of economically, racially, and ethnically distinct groups into separate, if at times overlapping spheres in the urban landscape, most Americans have received their images of how the 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 the primary influence on the public's perception of poverty. Who Americans identify as the 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, the graphic and fine arts, photography, advertising, popular science, and the social sciences together intentionally and by default created--and still create--the image of the poor. And because poverty and the cultural images that reflect upon it are embedded in power relationships, the meanings carried by representational conventions in the images "consolidate, perpetuate, and extend the belief systems of the dominant power groups" (Mayne 10). "Relations of power inescapably color the ways in which we perceive ourselves in relation to others," American Studies scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has noted (25). From the beginning of the 1890 to 1917 period, with the publication of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, relations of power and assumptions about superiority influenced the cultural expressions of poverty. …