The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History.

Collections of essays are notoriously uneven in focus and quality. No matter ho carefully they select contributors, no matter how clear their guidelines, editors rarely are able to sustain throughout the volume those themes they pronounce are central at the outset. Happily, this collection, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council's Committee for Research on the Urban Underclass, is an exception to the generalization. It commands attention not only because of the ways that historical research is used to challenge stereotypic notions about the causes and nature of urban poverty since the 1960s, but also because of the skill and care with which the essays have been brought together.

According to Michael Katz, social commentators since the late 1970s have made the term "underclass" a "convenient metaphor" to evoke the novelty, danger, and complexity of contemporary inner-city crises. Social scientists, moreover, employ the term as a metaphor for social transformation; they generally assume rather than demonstrate that the recent explosion in juvenile delinquency, teen-age pregnancies, drug abuse, random violence, and urban disorder are unprecedented in the nation's history. Michael Katz wanted this volume to reframe The "Underclass" Debate by stipulating continuities and changes in social, economic, and political processes over time. Combining rather than choosing between structural and cultural analyses, the collection focuses on "the interplay of structure, culture, and action. It tells a story of processes politics, and ideas. It reframes the underclass debate by shifting the focus away from individual and family pathology to a set of processes at work over a very long span of time and to the ideas and the politics that generated and sustained them."

The "Underclass" Debate is divided into four sections. Part One deals with the roots of ghetto poverty. Jacqueline Jones traces the origins of the Northern "underclass" to the Southern Diaspora. Joe Trotter probes class divisions withi Afro-American urban communities during the industrial era. In Part Two, which treats the transformation of America's cities, Thomas Sugrue argues that the reorganization of space and work over time restructured urban poverty. David Bartelt suggests that market limits and housing policies may have been more critical than class or mobility in shaping the underclass. "Families, Networks, and Opportunities" ties together Suzanne Model's essay on the ethnic niches tha immigrants and minorities created in New York City during this century, Kathryn Neckerman's argument that familial underclass patterns emerged between 1900 and 1940, Mark Stern's analysis of poverty and family composition since 1940, and Andrew T. Miller's analysis of the social-science and policy-relevant literatur on African-American families. In Part Four, Robin Kelley describes the "politic of opposition" waged by the Black poor in Birmingham, Alabama, from 1929 to 1970; Erik Monkkonen assesses both visible and hidden ways that 19th-century institutions such as jails, asylums, and Magdalene Houses shape contemporary policies to aid the poor; Harvey Kantor and Barbara Brenzel indicate how postwa reforms of urban education proved a poor substitute for a more fundamental restructuring of society; and Thomas F. Jackson assesses the impact of the War on Poverty on mobilizing the poor. In a concluding essay, instead of highlighting his colleagues' major findings about the underclass, Katz pleads for a "renewed public sphere" that begins rather than ends with the notion that the crisis within the country's inner cities can only be solved when the nation is ready to grapple with the legacy of racism and institutional failures.

Given such divergent foci, why does this book hang together so effectively? Three reasons come to mind. First, most of the authors refer to the same "classic" texts. DuBois, Moynihan, and Piven & Cloward are often mentioned, but William J. Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) and Katz's books serve as th touchstones. Interestingly, in the name index more than five lines each are required to list the references to works by Reynolds Farley, Ted Hershberg, Kenneth Jackson, Christopher Jencks, Jacqueline Jones, Allen Matusow, Gilbert Osofsky, Allan Spear, and Joe Trotter--suggesting that a community of discourse exists among the contributors. This leads to a second point: the striking numbe of times authors explicitly refer to one another's essays. In so doing, they se the stage for developing an analytic framework complicated enough to embrace th array of historical factors under scrutiny. Finally, the material seems fresh because contributors could not turn to their files in a search for a reusable past. Social historians, notes Robin Kelley, "have essentially ignored the blac urban poor in the twentieth century, and those few scholars who have examined race and urban poverty in the United States from a historical perspective tend to focus on policy issues rather than on the lives and struggles of the poor themselves." As historians earnestly reconstruct the structure and dynamics of ideas, networks, and actions of the underclass over time, stereotypic ideas may well crumble.

The infusion of history into The "Underclass" Debate is most welcome. One can wish for more, of course: I was surprised that gender and generational issues seemed secondary; I wondered how much variations in the size and perduring bleakness of inner cities affected opportunities. But these are minor quibbles. The book deserves wide reading.

W. Andrew Achenbaum University of Michigan, Ann Arbor