George Bernard Shaw
According to the New York Times, last week the Census Bureau reported that “another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year,” meaning that the 46.2 million people living below the official poverty line “was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” The 2008 recession, in other words, is proving to have been far worse than even the biggest pessimists realized.
It remains to be seen whether Republicans will cooperate with President Obama to address the situation or whether they figure that maintaining the status quo simply provides them with a winning hand in the next election. But since they’re not the ones suffering, I turn to an author who never forgot the plight of the poor.
George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian socialist, has a wonderful way of getting to the heart of poverty. Don’t propose sentimental nostrums, he writes in a number of his plays. Don’t talk about people having moral failings or failing to show initiative. Just give them jobs. Millionaire arms manufacturer Undershaft in Major Barbara (thanks to reader Carla Henson for reminding me of the play) scoffs at the work of the Salvation Army and asserts that a capitalist providing work will save more souls than any Christian charity:
UNDERSHAFT I saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.
BARBARA [bewildered] The seven deadly sins!
UNDERSHAFT Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers] Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.
CUSINS Do you call poverty a crime?
UNDERSHAFT The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! [turning on Barbara] you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative Party.
Shaw is being characteristically provocative by employing a ruthless capitalist to speak about the truth of poverty. To be sure, a current-day Undershaft would be far more compromised than Shaw’s character in that, as an arms manufacturer in our military-industrial complex, he would be funneling large payouts to lobbyists and politicians to keep governmental largesse flowing into his coffers. What our own millionaires don’t acknowledge is that businesses need a more equitable income distribution—not bigger tax breaks—if middle class Americans are to start purchasing from them again.
But what Undershaft gets right is that poverty is the worst of all crimes, and he is particularly perceptive when he says that poverty takes a toll on the wealthy as well as the poor. The rich in the United States may be getting richer as the income gap widens but, as Shaw notes, they must give up their own liberties in the process and turn to “unnatural cruelties” to keep the poor in their place.” Look at their cries of “class warfare” when taxes on millionaires are proposed, look at their hysterical fears about immigrants and lower income voters, look at their unhinged accusations of “socialist” and “tyrant” directed at a president who is, by any objective measure, fairly centrist–and then ask yourself how much happiness their wealth is buying them.
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