To the Editor:
In . . . his review of Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies [“Art, Life & Violence,” August], Dwight Macdonald refers to John K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and to Michael Harrington’s The Other America. He does a disservice to both. . . . He is especially slovenly when he writes that, on the basis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures indicating that an annual family income of $4,000 a year marks the upper limits of poverty, “Mr. Harrington therefore concludes that between 40 and 50 million Americans now live in poverty, real poverty, the kind that one reads about in Gorky or Zola. . . .” But Mr. Harrington and Mr. Galbraith have both gone out of their way to point out that poverty can only be measured relatively, within a given historical time and place . . . and would completely reject such an idea. . . .
Mr. Macdonald is certainly right in suggesting that Galbraith’s use of a $1,000 annual family income in defining poverty is grossly inadequate. . . . One of the chief merits of Mr. Harrington’s book is the way in which he has shown that poverty is a much broader and more frightening thing than Galbraith suggested. But it is very clear that in almost every other sense Harrington’s book owes Galbraith a heavy debt. . . .
Mr. Harrington’s book is also brilliant and important because he sees that the pervasive misery and hopelessness of poverty in this country will continue unless there is swift and major Federal action. And he shows that there is a serious danger that poverty may soon become much worse unless something drastic is done. For this reason alone The Other America should receive far more than the sidelong attention that Macdonald has given it. . . .
Robert H. L. Wheeler
New York City
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Mr. Macdonald writes:
If Mr. Wheeler wants a full-face look by me at Mr. Harrington’s excellent book (also at three other current studies of American poverty), let him watch for a review-article by me in the New Yorker shortly. I’m puzzled by his charge of slovenliness; the facts are just as I stated: on page 3, Mr. Harrington estimates the number of under-$4,000 poor at possibly as high as 50,000,000 and he states on page 7: “Forty to fifty million people are becoming increasingly invisible.”
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