COLUMN ONE : Times Get Harder for the Poor : With current political campaigns dwelling on the travails of the middle class, the 33.6 million stuck at the bottom may be the forgotten Americans.

By JONATHAN PETERSON

March 16, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DUNKLIN COUNTY, Mo. —

Ever since he was “out of diapers,” Bruce Harris has eked out his survival on cotton farms, chopping crabgrass, helping in the gin, pulling down $200 in a prime week. In winter, he says, “You’re lucky to make a few bucks at all. . . . What else can you expect?”

A few miles north in Tallapoosa, Glenn A. Rheinschmidt lives in a storage shed. Things are looking up for the unemployed truck driver, however. He’s getting electricity from a cord plugged in next door and plans a vegetable garden “so I can afford to eat in the wintertime.”

Head toward the river near Lilbourn and there’s Ruth Robbins, doing her best to raise two kids in a little white cabin. She used to cook part-time at the county jail, but now scrapes by on welfare. After taking care of the baby sitter and insurance, such low-wage work “just don’t pay,” she says sadly.

In a season of political homage to the middle class, meet the most beleaguered class of all: workers whose wages don’t boost them over the poverty line, people who have tumbled out of jobs and landed, often bewildered, on welfare, victims of a thousand misfortunes that have the same result--poverty.

Today more than one in eight Americans--33.6 million people--are officially poor, living in households in which the annual income is below the federal threshold of $13,359 for a family of four. For children, the figure is one in five, 13.4 million.

And contrary to much of the period since World War II, the poor appear to be losing ground. Hanging over their future are powerful economic forces, evident long before the current recession, that are eroding income and opportunity for millions on the bottom. Simply put, the pay for basic, unskilled work typically is not enough anymore to support a family.

Yet something has happened since the days when America’s leaders declared a war on poverty and put the quest high on the national agenda. For much of the public, attitudes toward the long-term poor are tangled up in distaste for the welfare system, frustration with costly programs and, for some, bias against minorities, polls have found. In state capitals, welfare benefits are being cut amid a widespread budget crisis.

On the presidential campaign trail, meanwhile, it is the vast middle class that candidates court most fervently. That long has been the emphasis of Republican candidates. Among the Democrats, only former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. places a major emphasis on the plight of the dispossessed--and few expect him to be his party’s nominee. Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas prescribes a growing economy as the cure for the poor, rather than any new programs. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton touts middle-class tax relief as one of the foundations of his campaign.

Many voters appear to agree with the emphasis. In recession-weary New Hampshire, for instance, a Los Angeles Times exit poll during the state’s February primary showed that only 3% of Democratic voters and 2% of Republicans ranked poverty as an important issue when they cast their ballots.

The chronically poor, in a sense, have become forgotten Americans, increasingly overlooked by a public preoccupied with its own hard struggles and by the political system that once set out to save them.

“A war on poverty--to phrase it like that--wouldn’t have broad-based political appeal” any more, contends Tom W. Smith a survey researcher with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. “My impression is the poor are seen as less deserving than they were 30 years ago.”

Once, perhaps, the national image of poverty was a hungry family in Appalachia or a desperate refugee from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Now, if America has a shared image of poverty, it looks something like the Ida B. Wells public housing project in Chicago, a dreary cluster of 138 buildings south of downtown, near a freeway and the stadium where the White Sox play baseball. Last year, police recorded 722 robberies and assaults in the neighborhood; welfare pays most people’s rent.

The reality there, however, is more sympathetic than the image. It includes people like Richard Trice, 19 and unemployed--but not for lack of effort. Recently laid off as a restaurant cashier, he does odd jobs such as baby sitting and house cleaning. “There are no jobs in the city; you have to go the suburbs or out-of-state,” he says.

But Trice, who lives with his sister--a security guard--and her unemployed husband, is far from discouraged. He aims to go to trade school, if he can get financial aid, and he remains convinced that he can achieve that goal. “All it takes is determination,” said the high school graduate.

Trice’s quest is a personal one--scrambling for a job, surviving this world of violence, drugs and pessimism--that seems remote from political programs or the national drama of an election year.

“Politics,” explains the broad-shouldered young man, in soft, even tones, “isn’t a strong thing right here in the projects.”

Contrary to stereotypes of welfare queens or urban hoodlums, the realities of poverty are varied and complex, encompassing the travails of unskilled laborers and laid-off supervisors, single mothers and displaced farm families, residents of rural trailer parks and Skid Row hotels. Overall, the have-nots of the 1990s work more frequently, are more geographically dispersed and ethnically diverse than is commonly recognized, experts on poverty say.

“I give a lot of talks on poverty, and when I say the majority of the poor are white, people don’t believe me,” says Rebecca M. Blank, an economist at Northwestern University.

Of those living below the poverty line, 66.5% are white, 29.3% are black, according to the 1990 census. About 42% live in the city, 31% in suburbs and 27% outside metropolitan areas. Even in the city, only a minority of the poor live in neighborhoods that are considered ghettos, according to poverty researchers.

Yet for all their diversity, the poor often cite a common set of yearnings when asked about their future: to be paid a living wage for their toil--one that covers the rising costs of health and child care; to have access to training and education; to have any job at all.

The many sides to the story are evident in the “bootheel” of Southeast Missouri, a patchwork of farmland and small towns nestled in the northern Mississippi River delta between Arkansas and Tennessee. This gritty appendage to a Midwestern state is really a northern outpost of the South, bonded to a past of share-cropping, rural industry and isolation. Memphis, the nearest big city, is two hours away. In 1980--the latest year for which local figures are available--poverty rates in much of the six-county region exceeded 25%.

For the successful farmers, business and professional people, it is a comfortable life, where just a few dollars commands a first-rate barbecue dinner and where in Kennett, Mo.--a regional center of 11,000 residents--white-collar workers toss down a couple of beers inside a gas station affectionately known as “The Lodge” before heading home.

But as in most of the nation, the economy is stacked against those who lack education. The area also suffers from a chronic lack of manufacturing jobs to fill the vacuum created by labor-saving farm equipment. That problem was aggravated by recent cutbacks of several hundred jobs at the Brown Shoe Co., long one of the area’s leading employers.

Visits with a cross-section of struggling residents here reveal a sense of being cut off from the nation’s would-be leaders.

“I don’t think (politicians) understand how it is, because they’ve never been there,” said Bobby Bramlett Jr., a bootheel resident whose adult life has been an up-and-down struggle of cutting grass at a golf course, preparing barbecue in a grocery store, scrambling for construction work and snaring temporary welding jobs.

“Most of the people in public office, they’ve had everything handed to them,” Bramlett added. “They had money to go to college. I think if one of them lived here for a year and changed their lifestyle to be my lifestyle, then things would be different.”

Bramlett, 25, recalls being an ambitious kid, hustling used tires to gas stations and even selling used newspapers if there were buyers. He graduated from high school and was trained to be a machinist, but found few jobs open. Last year, the hours ran out on his welding job, and Bramlett’s options for supporting his wife and 7-year-old daughter were reduced to one.

“We had to sign up on welfare at the time, because if we hadn’t we wouldn’t have had food to eat,” says Bramlett, a brown-haired man in brown coveralls. “We didn’t want to, but we didn’t have a choice.”

To his surprise, the welding shop called him back to work a couple weeks ago. But gnawing worries are a familiar part of life: “Who’s to say how long it’s going to last?”

These are the dramas of the poor: Deciding whether to seek welfare, which even the recipients often hold in contempt (28.4% of those below the poverty line get no public aid, according to the census); wondering whether this month’s food stamps will last until the next batch comes through; choosing between fixing the leak or seeing the doctor (29% of the poor have no health insurance).

An accurate portrait of many such families belies broad-brush portrayals. In six of every 10 households below the poverty line, one member works at least part of the time, the census reports, and there is a full-time worker in one poor family out of five.

Bruce Harris, born just “a hop and skip” away from the bootheel in Arkansas 54 years ago, knows all about the work ethic. He picked cotton before the mechanical picker took that job away in the 1950s, and has since toiled at plenty of other field jobs--clearing brush, hauling wood, you name it.

“If it’s a dime out there somewhere that I know I can make, I’m going to go get it,” he says as he sits in a room dominated by a wood burning stove, the shack’s source of heat. Firewood is stacked nearby, and a black felt poster of the Golden Gate Bridge, a trolley car and other San Francisco images hangs near a boarded-up window.

Dubbed “Wild Bill” by the boys in the cotton gin after he let his gray hair grow to his shoulders, Harris is the model of self-sufficiency, hustling for what he can, riding out the hard times with his wife and her two grandsons, counting little on far-off decision-makers in Washington to make a difference in his life. “We’re the underdog and we have to take what they dish down,” he says. “It’s the truth--it ain’t no lie.”

Since the early 1970s, the economy has been dishing down lower wages for those without marketable skills. One government study found that among white male high school dropouts, annual earnings fell from $20,128 in 1973 to $15,922 in 1987.

There are various explanations for this trend, including heightened business competition--globally and at home--which keeps costs on a tight rein; changing technology that has automated much of the workplace; a proliferation of minimum-wage service jobs and the declining clout of organized labor.

The trend clearly is jeopardizing the future for those on the bottom who once found the economic ladder easier to scale: A new congressional study finds that the least affluent two-parent households suffered a 3.9% drop in family income during the 1980s; middle-income families gained modestly (largely due to the efforts of working wives.)

Today, the growing number of U.S. families that rely on marginal jobs with little benefits or security “are literally one broken finger away from complete and utter ruin,” says David T. Ellwood, a poverty expert at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “This is where the American dream is breaking down.”

An accident of fate, dumb luck, one wrong move and there goes everything. Like the time last year when Glenn Rheinschmidt was driving toward Chicago in an 18-wheeler packed with stereo equipment. He was in Kansas, trying to avoid some bad weather he’d heard about farther south. “They say when a tornado comes, it’s supposed to sound like a freight train,” says Rheinschmidt, 44.

He didn’t hear a thing. Instead, he woke up in a hospital. Unable to drive because of an injured back, he soon had no job. His safety net has been an on-and-off combination of worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, food stamps and help from churches, none of it exceeding the poverty line.

“I went 12 weeks without a dime,” recalls Rheinschmidt, a Wisconsin native whose coat size shrank from 42 to 38 in the process. “Believe me, that’s no picnic.”

Home now is a storage shed in a neighborhood of run-down houses and trailers in Tallapoosa, on a lot he’s trying to buy for $1,500 if he can scrape up the money. A pair of five-gallon jugs are his water supply. An orange extension cord brings electricity from a home next door, so he doesn’t need kerosene lanterns any more and can watch television. He’s even adding on two new rooms.

Rheinschmidt gazes one afternoon at this unlikely residence, a lone figure who hasn’t shaved in days, talking about plans for a better roof and real flooring. Maybe he’ll become a typist if his back lets him sit still long enough; the future remains hazy. “I think your life is what you make it,” he says, “if you’re able to make it.”

Many who wish to make it without government help say that the costs of baby sitting and health care are towering barriers. Single-parent families, which accounted for much of the growth in the poverty rate to 13.5% in 1990 from 12.8% in 1989 now occupy a perilous intersection of social behavior and economic reality: One breadwinner, taking home minimum pay, doesn’t earn enough to keep most families out of poverty.

The official poverty line for a household of three is $10,419; a full year of 40-hour weeks at the minimum wage of $4.25 per hour leaves the family more than $1,500 under the line. Not surprisingly, single-parent families accounted for 58% of all families below the poverty line in 1990, according to the census.

“Unless you get a full-time job that pays $6, $7, $8 an hour and provides health insurance, your best option is welfare,” Harvard’s Ellwood says of such families.

The failure of a marriage or a spouse who withholds child support can tip a hard-working head of household from self-sufficiency to desperation.

After Ruth Robbins’ husband vanished a few years ago, she tried to support herself and two kids. She did some housecleaning and got a job cooking in the New Madrid County jail three days a week. Her employment choices were limited, however. When it comes to reading, “I’d probably miss five words out of 10,” admits Robbins, 30, a heavy-set woman with a kindly face.

But she was smart enough to know the arithmetic didn’t add up: Her job barely paid for the baby sitter and other necessities. Most importantly, she didn’t have health insurance for her two children. But welfare provided benefits through Medicaid, the government’s health care program for the poor.

Today, she lives in a little white cabin with her son, 5, and daughter, 4. A few left-over Christmas decorations and a “Home Sweet Home” wall ornament give a dash of cheer, but the exterior paint is peeling and water from the kitchen sink sloshes into the back yard. The threesome survive on about $265 a month in welfare and $250 worth of food stamps.

“I felt better about myself when I was out working,” she says. But she adds, “I figured I needed the medical card for my kids more than I did for myself to be out working.”

Robbins takes little comfort in the election-year debate over the economy. She says of the candidates, “They might say on TV that they care about people like me, but I don’t think they do because they’ve never had to live like that. If they go to Wal-Mart, and see something they like, they can buy it. I can’t.”

Over the years, many have departed the small-town, rural poverty that Robbins endures in search of greater chances in the big city. Those whose quests didn’t succeed often ended up in crowded, high-crime neighborhoods that have come to represent the government’s most disastrous defeats in the battle with poverty.

Lucille Lusk, a Mississippi native who now resides in Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing project is a witness to the ongoing struggle. Now 75 and a widow, Lusk smiles as she tells of two sons who own their own homes, one employed at a chewing gum factory, another the head cook in a hospital. Two grandchildren--a nurse and teacher--graduated from college. A third, she acknowledges, is “a wino.”

Lusk worked as a short order cook; her late husband in an equipment factory. “I made a better life for myself and my children,” says the church-going woman, who gets by on a $696 monthly Social Security check.

Yet tragedy also has touched her: One night 10 years ago, in the same apartment Lusk now shares with her Persian cat, a man viciously attacked her invalid, 31-year-old daughter. “I took two Anacin and laid down to go to sleep, and he raped her while I was asleep,” Lusk recalls. Her daughter later died from the assault.

To get to her apartment these days, she must pass gang members who hang around outside; at night, she often hears their guns and avoids the window in case of stray bullets. “When my children came along it wasn’t like it is now,” says Lusk, who spends her time at home watching soap operas and listening to blues albums by B.B. King and Little Milton. “I’m glad I don’t have any right now, because I couldn’t handle it.”

The odds of ending up in a place like Wells remain much higher for certain minorities than for whites, despite the fact that a majority of the nation’s poor are white. The poverty rate in 1990 was 31.9% for blacks and 28.1% for Latinos, compared to a national rate of 13.5%. The figure was 10.7% for whites and 12.2% for Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.

“Blacks have been much more hard hit by the recent economic restructuring in our society than other groups,” maintains William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. The prevalence of one-parent families, discrimination in hiring and the lack of a jobs grapevine in the most impoverished neighborhoods all make it harder for minorities to get ahead, he says.

Wilson could be speaking of someone like Edgar Jones, a 23-year-old Wells project resident who has washed dishes in a nursing home, assembled storm windows in an aluminum factory and bagged groceries. Jones has tried to avoid trouble, despite having “no father-figure when I needed it.”

He also has faced discrimination, recounting without bitterness the time a restaurant filled its dishwasher vacancy with a white applicant who, unlike Jones, had no experience. Jones, who is engaged, currently gets by on about $900 a month working on the staff of an advocacy office for Wells’ tenants.

The job is a far cry from his childhood fantasy of becoming a famous fashion designer. Still, he envisions making it in business one day, maybe selling clothes wholesale. “If you’ve got a dream, you’ve got to be really conscious that this is a dream you insist on having,” he says. “You got to wake up with this dream. You got to have lunch with this dream.”

In order to help people with such dreams, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, setting the stage for costly new federal efforts to improve income, housing, education, nutrition and health care of the poor. The quest quickly became controversial, as local community action groups--set up to assist the effort--clashed with elected officials. More controversy followed as the federal spending soared. And many in the public, including some scholars, came to blame welfare for taking away the recipients’ incentive to work.

Now, almost three decades after Johnson’s effort began, with poverty far from eliminated and untold billions of tax revenues spent, what do Americans believe about helping the poor?

By some important measures, they retain a lot of sympathy. A Los Angeles Times Poll earlier this year found that 69% of Americans support spending more on poverty programs than the government does already, a finding that is 10 percentage points higher than when the same question was asked in 1985. The public consistently supports aid for children, the elderly and others unable to help themselves.

“People believe that this safety net--these major programs that constitute the welfare state--should stay in place,” says Fay Lomax Cook, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University who recently completed a book on the subject.

Yet other attitudes also influence the national debate and the current crop of presidential candidates. Given the very real struggle of so many middle-class families to hold onto what they have--often forcing both parents into the workplace, some straining at more than one job--a substantial number of Americans loathe the notion of aiding able-bodied adults. When pollsters ask the public about their views on spending specifically for “welfare,” support for the poor typically plunges 30 percentage points or even more.

Given these cross-currents in public opinion, today’s candidates try to “never use the word welfare,” says Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at New York’s Columbia University. “It just conjures up too many images that are not helpful politically.”

When they do voice the “W” word, it often is in the context favored by Clinton--emphasizing work requirements for beneficiaries.

Despite these prevailing political realities, the middle-class emphasis of the presidential campaign could rebound to the benefit of the poor, some contend, if it translates into new measures to help struggling families with the costs of raising children and other financial pressures. Certainly, the poor are no different from others in their wish for affordable child care, better schools, job opportunities and safe neighborhoods.

There remains a need, says sociologist Wilson, for “a public rhetoric that unites people rather than divides them.”

That might sound a bit abstract to Peggy Carlson, 22, and Jeffrey F. Blankenship, 23. Blankenship, who likes to sketch pastel chalk images of cartoon characters, hasn’t had a steady job in months. “Maybe I’ll take up auto mechanics,” says the brown-haired young man who has worked as a roofer, welder and warehouse employee. “Maybe I’ll become a firefighter.”

Peggy, who is expecting their child in April, talks of becoming a teacher, because “I feel that I’m good working with kids.”

The couple recently were living in a homeless shelter on the West Side of Chicago, in a room with two twin beds pulled together and a leftover classroom chair for furniture--not exactly what they dreamed of when they met a few years back on a blind date at a high school ROTC dance.

Both come from working-class backgrounds. They say they had little choice but to move into the shelter when their money ran out after Jeffrey was laid off from his warehouse job. Peggy is estranged from her family, and Jeffrey’s parents were not in a position to help.

The homeless high school graduates prefer to discuss their future in the timeless, can-do spirit of America, far removed from the changing fashions of politics and policy: “It’s something that we’re going to have to fix,” says Peggy, determinedly. “I’m not going to blame it on anybody. We fell down. Now we’ve got to pick up the pieces and move on.”

Portrait of the Poor

More than one in eight Americans--13.5% of the nation’s population, or 33.6 million people--are officially poor, living in households in which the annual income is below the federal threshold of $13,359 for a family of four. Here is a look at who they are and where they live:

Male: 14,211,000

Female: 19,373,000

White: 66.5%

Black: 29.3%

Asian-American: 2.6%

Latino: 17.9%

(Numbers exceed 100% because Latinos are also counted as black or white)

Percentage of poor among all whites: 10.7%

Among all blacks: 31.9%

Among all Asian-Americans: 12.2%

Among all Latinos: 28.1%

Under 18 years old: 40% (13,431,000)