NEW AMERICAN BLUES: The Private Life of the Poor.<i> By Earl Shorris</i> .<i> W.W. Norton & Co.: 412 pp., $29.95</i> : CIVIC IDEALS: Conflicting Views of Citizenship in U.S. Public Law.<i> By Rogers M. Smith</i> . <i> Yale University Press: 672 pp., $35</i>

Thanks to a recent act of Congress, if and when Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh is carried from the federal death house in Terre Haute, Ind., he will not be buried in a national cemetery. No one, however, has suggested stripping McVeigh of his citizenship. So long as you are born here or are fortunate enough to become naturalized, American citizenship clings to you like an additional layer of skin. The most law-abiding resident alien remains less American than the bloodiest killer in the nation’s history.

Citizenship is a powerful force. It defines a nation, identifies a people’s place in the world, entitles the individual to rights and protections. All Americans, especially the descendants of colonists, slaves and immigrants, know that American citizenship has been and remains the most desired form of citizenship that exists.

It has long been so. “Citizenship is the American ideal,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in the early part of this century. He was referring to a particular form of citizenship that has meaning to those who already have it and to those who desperately want it. It is a citizenship based on the principles upon which the nation was founded. “It is the theory of equality,” Chesterton wrote. “It is the pure classic conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man shall endure to be anything less.” Such citizenship means that all rights, all opportunities and all protections apply to everyone. Never mind the myth that says American-born citizens are somehow superior to naturalized ones; in either case, unless it’s obtained illegally or renounced while abroad or in time of war, citizenship is yours to keep. It is a legal right, not some random gift bestowed by chance on the basis of one’s lineage, the color of one’s skin or the riches in one’s pocket.

Two new books make the radical suggestion that Americans ought to live up to that ideal. One is a loopy screed on welfare reform, and the other is a scholarly review of immigration laws, yet both pursue the same unabashedly liberal goal: to extend full, equal and meaningful American citizenship to more people. Straining hard against current political winds, the books form a liberal response to current public policy toward the poor and immigrant population.

In “New American Blues,” Earl Shorris argues that American citizenship is worthless to many Americans. These include addicts, criminals, strippers, welfare recipients, the unemployed and a host of others whom Shorris labels as “the poor.” Because citizenship means nothing to these people, they do not behave like Americans: “When the residents of Watts or Detroit riot in their own neighborhoods, it is because they are not citizens of Watts or Detroit or the United States.” Instead, they are prisoners who “live within a surround of forces, a situation in which political life may be all but impossible for most people--a fragmenting, panicking situation that requires acts of constant courage and character merely to survive, and something like a miracle to escape.”

Shorris defines no fewer than 25 factors that keep the poor down and out in American society, but he concedes that there may be more. Some are obvious (hunger, drugs, racism, guns); some are surprising (feudalism, luck, people who give to charity); others are downright obscure (“meanness,” “hurrying and pressure” and the pushiness of salesmen). But they are all aspects of the same beast: modern capitalism, which Shorris detests. It creates inequalities among Americans and then adds insult to injury by making Americans feel good about the inequalities created by the myth promising economic security and social mobility if only one works hard enough: “The United States may have been founded in a political revolution, but the central myth of America is economic. All Americans, rich and poor alike, subscribe to it. But the poor are ill-served by the myth, while the rich are made to feel morally comfortable.”

Jobs are not the answer to the economic inequity of this society, writes Shorris in a chapter titled “The Fallacy of Work” (“Work itself has no moral influence,” he argues), and government assistance is no longer a viable option. Republicans loathe the poor, and President Clinton sold them out for a lump of middle-class support by signing the Welfare Reform Act in 1996.

The answer, Shorris argues, rests in the minds of the poor themselves. Combining a lifelong study of classical history and philosophy with memories of growing up in the protective bosom of Chicago’s Democratic machine during the Roosevelt administration, back when the poor believed they had a role to play in the political process, Shorris proposes “radical humanism as an answer to long-term poverty.” The poor can become Americans only when they start thinking like Athenians. Teach the poor how to reflect on their problems, teach them Plato, throw in a little Kant, and they will fight for their own freedom and become full-fledged American citizens, the kind who do not burn down their own neighborhoods. “To call for the study of humanities now as an answer to the problem of poverty in the United States contravenes the views of both left and the right,” Shorris concedes, but it is the only way to “catapult [the poor] into the public world, where power resides.”

Considering that “New American Blues” is a book about poverty, it is surprising that the author never quite makes clear what he means by “the poor.” He argues that they should define themselves (“Perhaps the best way to define poverty is to listen to people who consider themselves poor”) but concedes “there are no types among the poor; no culture made them poor or holds them captive. The poor are neither a class nor an underclass.” Shorris is also not terribly clear as to whom he means by “the rich.” He refers to the son of a postal worker as being rich, which may come as a surprise to the postal worker, and describes the rich as those who attended prestigious universities, which means lots of successful people are poor but don’t know it.

Part Norman Mailer, part Studs Terkel, Shorris wants us to know he is no academic sissy: He dismisses Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” as a “prissy diatribe” and accuses Bloom of trying to keep classical works out of the hands of the poor in order to maintain the political status quo. Like many of the white males he so admired, Bloom is dead and can’t defend himself, yet it is hard to understand why the proponent of the Western canon would be accused of seeking to limit its readership. No economist, Shorris ignores the role of market theory or economic forces on poverty and relies instead on the fact that he has actually met poor people, talked to them, tried to teach them. His whole approach to welfare reform is based on anecdotal contacts, the quality and quantity of which are anyone’s guess. “This book is based on conversations with about eight hundred people, perhaps a few more, even as many as a thousand,” Shorris writes, adding that he “is no statistician and keeps no such records, as anyone who has read this far will no doubt have discovered.” One cannot accuse Shorris of playing fast and loose with facts; indeed, one can’t be sure Shorris is even playing with facts.

Rogers M. Smith’s “Civic Ideals” is based on more solid (if arid) evidence. Analyzing the history of American public laws relating to citizenship from colonial times to the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, Smith considers how and why American elites--lawmakers, government officials, judges--decided who became American citizens and who did not. Smith seeks to settle an ongoing academic debate over the intellectual underpinnings of American citizenship, namely, whether the nation’s laws regarding citizenship have been a product of “a privatized, atomistic liberal society” or “a more communitarian participatory republican one.”

Californians who have lived through Proposition 187, the initiative that blocks state assistance to illegal immigrants and that was passed by a surprisingly wide margin in 1994, instinctively understand that effete concepts such as liberalism and republicanism give way to less sophisticated forces when the issue is who gets American citizenship. Smith’s dense historical review confirms what Californians already know: Citizenship laws are the product of a variety of often contradictory impulses, some good, many bad, which have nothing to do with intellectual theory. Impulses toward inclusion, fueled by economic growth or the need for labor, have sometimes steered policy toward liberal laws. At other times, during national crises or economic upheaval, reactionary forces have carried the day and closed the door to citizenship. Always, the battle to determine who gets to become an American has been a highly charged political struggle.

Smith argues effectively that the result of this ever-changing battle of self-definition is a body of laws that undermines the ideal of a citizenship based on equality. “Rather than stressing protection of individual rights for all in liberal fashion, or participation in common civic institutions in republican fashion, American law had long been shot through with forms of second-class citizenship, denying personal liberties and opportunities to most of the adult population on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and even religion,” he writes. Liberal and republican notions were used to justify these inequalities, but “many of the restrictions on immigration, naturalization and equal citizenship seemed to express views of American civic identity that did not feature either individual rights or membership in a republic.” Rather than being based on notions of equality, American citizenship has often been based on notions of exclusion, xenophobia, racial hatreds and intolerance.

Like Shorris, Smith proposes a radical solution to the inequality of American citizenship based on educating the citizenry. “The first task is to debunk myths about America’s past and present when those support unjust inequalities or simply foster complacency in the face of them,” he argues. Next, American leaders must stop the demagoguery when it comes to citizenship laws. Victories won through demonizing others are pyrrhic: They undermine the cohesion and power of the very community that the winning politician has to lead.

Finally, Smith concludes, Americans must define citizenship actively, not as a series of protections from government interference but as an obligation. American leaders should encourage citizens to participate in civic life, to become fully integrated members of their communities and to see citizenship not merely as a right to exclude others but as a duty to serve the largest number and the greatest good.

Shorris’ and Smith’s perspectives are different. Shorris views American citizenship from the bottom up; Smith considers it from the top down. Yet both reach the same conclusion: The worthy ideal of citizenship based on a notion of equality has never been more than an ideal. Indeed, for impoverished Americans and for those who wish to become Americans, it has not even been that; the ideal of equality is so far from the reality of their lives that it has become a mocking hoax. The authors graphically describe the actualities opposed to the ideal: the economic and social inequalities that keep poor Americans from being fully integrated into American society and the racist and exclusionary impulses that have kept others from becoming Americans. Yet both reaffirm their belief in the value of the ideal by challenging Americans to make the ideal into a reality. They haven’t done the nation any harm by doing so.