Herman Melville and the American tradition of poor-shaming

Southern Illinoisan, July 10, 2015

 Wisconsin's legislature debates bills limiting what foods the poor can use their welfare money on (no bagels, white rice or—presumably in a revival of Levitical law—shellfish). Kansas passes a law limiting welfare recipients to withdrawing no more than $25 a day from ATMs or using the money to visit swimming pools or movie theaters. Meanwhile, dozens of cities have passed laws making it illegal to feed homeless people. In the words of a Depression-era folk song, "There is mean things happening in this land."

Such attempts to shame and punish the poor have roots deep in American cultural history. As Thomas Piketty points out in his 2014 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the wealth of the landed aristocracy in the nineteenth-century European societies described by writers like Honore de Balzac and Jane Austen was not based on any presumption that the gentry had ever done anything to actually deserve it. But in the new American republic, with its less formal and rigid class structure, one’s social position supposedly represented one’s worthiness. “Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States,” Piketty comments, “is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom."

Seeking to understand the nuances and complexities of American culture often sends me back to the works of Herman Melville. In many ways, Melville stands as the American equivalent of Balzac and Austen, a trenchant observer of the emergent market society of the mid-nineteenth century. In novels like Moby Dick (1851), Melville described capitalism as a world system, and one with the inherent danger of totalitarianism, while in his short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), he dissected the psychological isolation and spiritual vacuity of office work culture.  

Melville most fully confronted developing views of wealth and poverty in such stories as “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (1854). The story opens with a conversation between the narrator and his friend, Blandamour, who waxes poetic on the gifts provided to the poor by snow, including Poor Man's Manure to fertilize the land, and Poor Man's Pudding, "as relishable as a rich man’s." Thus, Blandamour concludes, “through kind Nature, the poor, out of their poverty, extract comfort.”

Deciding to test Blandamour’s rosy optimism, the narrator drops by to visit the home of a poor couple. “The house was old and constitutionally damp....  Nothing but bare necessities were about me; and those not of the best sort.” He is greeted warmly by a pregnant woman, who invites him to lunch, but cautions, “I do not know how you will like our pudding. It is only rice, milk and salt boiled together,” to which the narrator comments, “Ah, what they call ‘Poor Man’s Pudding,’ I suppose you mean.”

“A quick flush, half resentful, passed over her face. ‘We do not call it so, sir,’ she said, and was silent.”

Over lunch, the narrator learns something of the couple’s life, including the loss of two children in infancy and the wife’s loneliness. The husband works as a woodsman in the local squire’s forest and his greatest wish is to buy a horse so that his wife can travel to church on Sundays, as the four-mile distance is too far for her to walk in her current state.

Melville’s narrator concludes that the American ideal of equality exacerbates the psychological degradation of poverty. “The native American poor never lose their delicacy or pride; hence, though unreduced to the physical degradation of the European pauper, they yet suffer more in mind than the poor of any other people in the world. Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while they enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate  ... of the practical misery and infamy of poverty—a misery and infamy which is, ever has been, and ever will be, precisely the same in India, England, and America.”

The long arc from Blandamour’s patronizing indifference to current lawmakers’ heartlessness would have come as no surprise to Melville, who clearly saw the lack of empathy for society’s losers inherent in American culture. But as his narrator concludes, “Of all the preposterous presumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”