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The President could never understand why the poor were not angrier. "In England," he remarked to me one spring day in 1963, "the unemployment rate goes to two per cent, and they march on Parliament. Here it moves toward six, and no one seems to mind."- Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at p.447-48.
...[Robert Kennedy's] concern about poverty had deep sources. Richard Boone attributed it to his compulsive exploration of social reality. "Bobby best understood things by feeling and touching them, " he said. "He did feel and he did touch and he came to believe and to understand." Leonard Duhl of the National Institute of Mental Health...thought the clue lay in Robert Kennedy's personal history - in his "notion of what an extended family is, and how a family works, and the mutual relationships between a family. When Dave Hackett started taking him around...to visit the ghettos," he responded both because he felt so keenly the misfortune of children denied the nourishment of family and because his extended family embraced all children in distress.
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[President] Kennedy took his negotiating credo from Liddell Hart, whose book Deterrent or Defense he reviewed that year: "Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes - so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil - nothing is so self-blinding."- at p. 451
At home, [President] Kennedy went on a speaking tour to vindicate the idea of negotiation against those Americans, like Acheson, who considered it stupidity, or, like Goldwater, treason. As long as we understood our vital interests, Kennedy declared in November of 1961, “we have nothing to fear from negotiations at the appropriate time, and nothing to gain by refusing to take part in them.” He condemned “those who urge upon us what I regard to be the pathway to war: equating negotiations with appeasement, and substituting rigidity for firmness.” He concluded with deep feeling: “If their view had prevailed, we would be at war today, and in more than one place.”- at p. 465
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The President could never understand why the poor were not angrier. "In England," he remarked to me one spring day in 1963, "the unemployment rate goes to two per cent, and they march on Parliament. Here it moves toward six, and no one seems to mind."
The answer to this interests me, but I'm not willing to spend the time it will take to find it. Is it explored further in the book? Does it have to do with any perceptions being on the dole might generate?
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Is it explored further in the book? Does it have to do with any perceptions being on the dole might generate?
It's not explored as far as I read, the question is just posed rhetorically. Your guess is undoubtedly part of the explanation, though. And I suppose it's also part of the same reason why England has universal healthcare, and the US doesn't. I haven't worked it out myself, but I think it's something to do with different conceptions of individual worth and what pulling one's own weight entails, and the sense in many Americans that everyone's place in life is entirely a function of their own effort or lack thereof. So the poor/unemployed are perhaps too ashamed and feel too powerless to get angry and organize, while the better off aren't inclined to get upset on someone else's behalf.