... As a historian — and one who has taught and written about the history of poverty in the United States — I should not have been surprised [that the interest in poverty petered out weeks after Katrina struck] ... (although I was). With the immediate crisis over, and many of the victims of Katrina and Rita scattered around the region and beyond, it was entirely foreseeable that the spotlight of public attention would shift to other issues and locales. Those whose homes and jobs disappeared inevitably become absorbed in the tedious, slow, painful task of rebuilding their lives, while elsewhere men and women of good will — however moved by the initial events, and perhaps after writing a check or two — go about their business.

But the problem runs deeper. Disasters and crises in American history have, in fact, rarely produced any fundamental changes in economic or social policy. Natural disasters, like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and fire, are invariably local events, leaving too much of the nation unscathed to generate any broad-gauged shift in understanding or ideology. Moreover, the most readily adopted policy changes have involved technical issues, like the approval or revision of fire codes, the earthquake-proofing of new buildings, and the raising of the height of levees. The most far-reaching policy decision after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was to flood the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley to guarantee San Francisco a more reliable source of water.

Poverty, however, is not a technical issue, but a deep, structural problem that implicates our values, our economic institutions, and our conception of the proper role of the state. There are fixes, but no quick fixes — and no fixes that will not cost something to at least some other members of our society. Understandably, thus, there has always been resistance to government actions, such as increasing the minimum wage, that might aid the poor; and that resistance has long been grounded both in self-interest and in willful blindness of a type that does not succumb to relatively brief crises.

Nowhere is that more evident — or more relevant — than in the history of responses to the panics and depressions that have been a prominent feature of American economic life for almost two centuries. (We called them "panics" until the early 20th century, when widespread recognition that capitalist economies had business cycles led to the use of more reassuring words like "depression," "downturn," and, still later, "recession.")

As American society grew more industrial and urban in the 19th century, and as markets increasingly shaped the ability of its populace to earn a living, the impact of business-cycle downturns broadened and deepened. The long post-Civil War downturn of the 1870s, for example, toppled millions of people into destitution or near-destitution; arguably the first depression of the industrial era, it created widespread distress that prompted pioneering efforts to count the unemployed, while also contributing to outbursts of working-class violence in 1877. Less than a decade later (1884-86), the country lived through another downturn, followed in the 1890s by the most severe depression of the 19th century. The Panic of 1893 (which lasted until 1897) sharply lowered wages, while making jobs exceedingly scarce in many industries. It also prompted the first major protest march on Washington, a national movement of the unemployed led by Ohio's populist leader Jacob S. Coxey.

Yet many, if not most, Americans resisted the notion that millions of their fellow citizens were genuinely in need of aid. New York's distinguished Protestant cleric Henry Ward Beecher famously commented in 1877 that a man could easily support a family of eight on a dollar a day: "Is not a dollar a day enough to buy bread with? Water costs nothing; and a man who cannot live on bread is not fit to live." In the spring of 1894, after the dreadful winter that sparked the formation of Coxey's Army, Daniel B. Wesson, of Smith and Wesson, observed that "I don't think there was much suffering last winter." Others insisted that if men and women were destitute, it was because they were improvident or they drank: "Keep the people sober that ask for relief, and you will have no relief asked for," said Henry Faxon, a businessman from Quincy, Mass. Even Carroll D. Wright, who supervised the first count of the unemployed in American history in 1878 (and a few years later became the first head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), expressed the view that most of the men who lacked jobs did not "really want employment."

Private charities, as well as what were called "overseers of the poor" (overseers? the language itself is telling), did, of course, provide some relief to the victims of economic crisis. Yet they did so grudgingly and warily, often insisting that recipients perform physical labor in return for food and fuel, while also (particularly with women) conducting home interviews to verify that applicants for aid were of good moral character. In many states, the sole legislative response to the depressions of the late 19th century was the passage of "anti-tramp" laws that made it illegal for poor workers to travel from place to place in search of work.

Over time, to be sure, the recurrence of panics, coupled with the learning gradually acquired by charity officials and dedicated antipoverty activists like settlement-house workers, did contribute to more-hospitable attitudes toward the poor. They also gave birth to new policy ideas (like unemployment insurance) that might help alleviate the problem of poverty. Such ideas, which began to gain a bit of traction in the early 20th century, were grounded in the supposition that American society had a responsibility to help not only the destitute, but also the poor: the millions of men and women who worked hard, and as steadily as they could, but lived in substandard conditions, a short distance from dire, material need.

Resistance to such proposals, however, did not vanish overnight: Suspicions that the poor were "unworthy" persisted, as did a reluctance to expand the role of government. Of equal importance, crisis conditions (as business-cycle theorists pointed out) did come to an end, lessening the visible urgency of the problem. That was particularly true during the first three, sharp depressions of the 20th century, in 1907-8, 1913-14, and 1920-22. The second of those led to the drafting of unemployment-insurance bills in several states, but by the time the bills were ready for legislative action, the economy was picking up, and interest had ebbed. In 1921 a charming, eccentric organizer named Urbain Ledoux put together sensational anti-unemployment demonstrations in both New York City and Boston, including mock auctions of unemployed "slaves" on the Boston Common. He garnered enough front-page attention to earn a meeting with President Warren G. Harding and an invitation to attend the President's Conference on Unemployment — which turned out to be a bureaucratic vehicle that effectively delayed action long enough for the economic crisis to come to an end, with no new policies put into place.

The Great Depression and the New Deal, of course, constitute the most dramatic and far-reaching exception to the pattern of a crisis causing (and revealing) poverty while yielding no basic changes in policy. As always, the exception sheds some light on the dynamics that produce the rule. The Great Depression gave rise to significant shifts in policy not just because the downturn was severe but also — and more important — because of its unprecedented length. There were few innovations in public responses to poverty and unemployment during the early years of the 1930s (no one, after all, knew that this depression would turn out to be the Great Depression), and the era's most durable, systematic legislation came more than two years after Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. The Social Security Act (with its provisions for unemployment and old-age insurance) and the Wagner Act (which strengthened the right of workers to join unions) were passed only in 1935, the same year that the pioneering work-relief programs of the Works Progress Administration were launched; the Fair Labor Standards Act, mandating a federal minimum wage, was not enacted until 1938, nearly a decade after the stock-market crash.

The greatest economic crisis in American history, thus, did not produce a quick turnaround in antipoverty policy, even though the ideas eventually put into effect had been circulating among progressives for decades. The recognition that millions of people were suffering (inescapable as early as 1931) was not enough to produce action. What was also needed was time for political movements to build and to generate a leadership with the political will to take action.

That involved not just the election of Roosevelt in 1932 (which was primarily a repudiation of Herbert Hoover) but also the Share-the-Wealth movement of Louisiana's own Huey P. Long, the election of many left-leaning Democrats to Congress in 1934, and Roosevelt's overwhelming re-election in 1936. It was at his second inaugural, in January 1937, that Roosevelt famously referred to "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished" and committed his administration to dealing with the "tens of millions" of citizens "who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life."...