The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages

by Stephen Pimpare

During the economic boom of the 1990s, arguments about the moral failings of the poor were used to pass welfare reforms heralded as the solution to a system that had failed everyone. Yet, as historian Stephen Pimpare demonstrates in this revealing social history, remarkably similar arguments were used to disastrous effect in campaigns against aid to the poor in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In The New Victorians, Pimpare reveals the disturbing parallels between the anti-welfare propagandists of the nineteenth century and the elite actors and well-funded policy research organizations of today. Alarmingly, he shows how the New Victorians of today often invoke the rhetoric of their predecessors while ignoring the complete failure of nineteenth-century reforms. The New Victorians goes on to uncover the elite and grassroots resistance in the Gilded Age that paved the way for the counter-reforms of the Progressive Era, revealing urgent lessons toward renewing support for broader state defense of the poor today.

Genres: Politics

320 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2004

About the author

Stephen Pimpare is founder and director of the UNH Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership Program and a Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy; he has previously taught at Columbia University, NYU, Simmons University, and the City University of New York. His second book, A People's History of Poverty in America, received the Michael Harrington Award from the American Political Science Association “for demonstrating how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world.”

Pimpare previously served as a senior-level administrator of not-for-profit organizations addressing issues of poverty, hunger, and homelessness throughout New York City. One of the programs he helped to create, One City Café, New York’s first non-profit restaurant, was hailed by the New York Times as “the reinvention of the soup kitchen” and subsequently received the Victory Against Hunger Award from the U.S. Congressional Hunger Center.