Fifty years ago today, Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society goals. They were massively successful. But of late, we hear conservatives complain about the Great Society programs. And here is the logic, “If you exclude all the gains of the Great Society programs, the poor are no better off than they were before!” This is like saying that your car doesn’t go any further after filling it up with gas if you exclude the gas you just put in. I know what they’re trying to say: that the poverty programs should have lifted people out of poverty. They should be successful now. You know: teach a man to fish… But these very same conservatives are against programs to help the poor help themselves. They are against raising the minimum wage. And Fox News has spent the last two years complaining about the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Since I’m on the subject of the poor, can I make a request: let’s stop using the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Bootstraps a little cloth or leather loops at the top of boots (actually, even my tennis shoes have them) to allow the wearer to pull them on. The original meaning of the phrase was something that is impossible to do, not something that is difficult to do but which can be accomplished with good old fashioned American pluck. So no more encouraging people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and no more claims to have done it.
The phrase has a vague beginning in an episode of that 18th century classic, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In it, he falls into a swamp but is able to pull himself out by his pigtail. The first known use of the bootstrap maneuver was in 1834. And it remained the tall tale that it is for about a century—like Paul Bunyan batting down cannonballs during the Revolutionary War. In the early 20th century, people began to use it as something that is hard to do, but possible. It is not surprising that a phrase that for so long was considered ludicrous and therefore funny, became “encouraging” advice following Horatio Alger and the robber barons.
What’s especially sad about the metaphor, however, is that today the phrase is pretty much true—but not in the way that most people think. Our country does provide about as much help to the poor as a couple of bootstraps. If you are born poor, you will almost certainly die poor. If you are born rich, you will almost certainly die rich. And those who manage to upset this overwhelmingly consistent fact of American life are either extremely lucky or extremely unlucky. But of course, no one ever means that the poor are screwed when they admonish them to get pulling on those bootstraps. They mean to say that it isn’t all that bad and that the poor have options.
The idea of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, is distinctly American. It sucks to to be poor in Europe, just as it does here. But there, poverty is generally seen as something bad that happened to you. In America, in addition to the many and varied ways it sucks to be poor, we add the social disapproval that the only reason one would be poor is that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He isn’t pulling hard enough on those bootstraps. But America is now pretty much the world you see in Gosford Park. There are those who have their boots pulled on for them and there are those who have no boots at all.
