'The Spike' -- 80 years later
Paul Kennedy

This is a story about the underbelly of American society today, but it begins by reference to an essay written a long time ago. It is called "The Spike," and it was written by that great English novelist and essayist George Orwell, and published in 1931. This was one in a series of famous investigative works composed by Orwell about life among the desperately poor and underprivileged classes in his native England. While exposing the harsh face of British colonialism abroad (see, for example, his essay "Shooting an Elephant"), he also sought to detail the grim life of the lumpenproletariat back home. The result was a number of extraordinarily powerful social observations with a political sting to them: "The Spike," "Hop-Picking," "Down the Mine" and "Common Lodging Houses," which he wrote alongside his books "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier."

Despite his great capacity for irony and self-control, Orwell could not really disguise his loathing of the social inequities which were caused, he thought, by the class from which he had come -- he was, after all, partly educated at Eton, the poshest of the English private schools. Now he was going to be at one with the workers. To his chagrin, the tall, angular Etonian could never disguise the fact that he was "not one of us." The gateman at the door of the Spike -- a gaunt overnight hostel for men who on entering had to strip and scrub before falling onto their cots -- immediately recognizes Orwell as a distressed gentleman and treats him with respect. And when, as a "hop-picker," he spends his lunch break reading a battered French novel under an apple tree in Kent, his fellow workers are instantly curious: Isn't it a dirty book (as all books in French were supposed to be)? What does it say? Still, Orwell brilliantly captures the mix of defeatism, curiosity, comradeship and occasional flare-ups of anger and violence in the groups he studies, even if he can only be an outside observer of events.

Is the desperation he describes merely a part of our past? Does it have no equivalence in our far more prosperous 21st-century world? More specifically, has a permanent underclass disappeared in today's America, a land full of loud-mouthed politicians proclaiming that this is "the best country in the world"? Alas, I fear not.

In the middle of New Haven, Connecticut, the city in which I reside, on the fringes of Yale University, where I have taught for 28 years, there are overnight doss-houses and daily soup kitchens, in one of which I have served, also for 28 years. We offer a warm, filling meal, a place to sit in dignity at a table, a place to escape from the cold. When the doors of the St. Thomas More soup kitchen open at 11:30 a.m., our guests pour in, hundreds of them, people hurt by poverty and poor health, some chronically sick, some not knowing where they will stay that night, and, by the end of the month (when the food stamps are all spent and the energy bills overdue), some mothers with young children. A few have been coming as long as I have worked there; many more are new to all this, bewildered victims of our present awful recession. I sometimes wonder what an Orwell essay on "In the Soup Kitchen" would look like.

On the final Wednesday of October this year, our system came close to buckling under the weight of serving 434 meals. The lines were enormous, the crush of bodies at the front door rather frightening. For a short while a confused fight broke out, until the main pugilists -- two women, actually -- were persuaded to leave, and then the tensions fell away. It was pointless to allocate blame for that fight: When people without hope feel threatened, even accidentally bumped into, they tend to swing a random fist. A few have come close to my ear.

Orwell's "Spike" is alive and well (or alive and awful) in today's America, and in many other so-called rich countries. There are 46 million people in America under the official poverty line. "Stimulus dollars" will help very few of them, due to their sicknesses, weakness and complete lack of work skills. Absolutely none of the harebrained policies proposed by the Rick Perrys and Herman Cains and Mitt Romneys of this country will do anything for these fate-stricken people -- except to reduce any existing skimpy benefits further. Here is an assault upon human decency that should make any fair-minded person weep. Little wonder that a few of the more literate of our soup-kitchen guests can be seen, after taking their lunch, quietly reading the Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which Christ repeatedly promises that it is the poor of this earth who shall first enter the Kingdom. (Curious readers can check, also via Matthew's gospel, what Christ promises for the uncaring rich.)

At the end of the day, you might argue, it doesn't really matter politically, because none of these folks vote, they possess no lobbyists, they have never been introduced to their senator at the country club. They don't know what a country club is.

So who cares? And who cared about Orwell's essays some 80 years ago? Weren't they, like this author's weekly work in the More House soup kitchen, merely the limp attempts by a conscience-stricken member of the middle class to experience how the other half lives? Orwell was angry that so few other members of his class felt any passion for those two key concepts, "fairness" and "decency." In turn, I remain amazed at the complacency of the vast majority of voting Americans about the moral and social scandal in their midst (or, perhaps, not in their leafy suburban midst, but safely downtown).

Is there a smart solution here that we are simply overlooking? I doubt it. Socialism never really helped the hopeless poor without doing severe damage elsewhere. Social liberalism tried, but retired defeated, except perhaps in Scandinavia, Canada and New Zealand. Free-market conservatism as presently being preached simply doesn't care about the poor.

Really, it is no fun being a powerless entrant to a Spike these days. But, then, it never was.