ABSTRACT
The historical continuity of disreputable poverty has been obscured by the obsessive shifting of terms. Disreputable poverty has gone under many names in the past two centuries. The disreputable poor are the people who remain unemployed, or casually and irregularly employed, even during periods approaching full employment and prosperity; for that reason, and others, they live in disrepute. Each conception is illuminating, but also obscuring, since each stresses certain elements of disreputable poverty at the expense of others. The core of disreputable poverty consists of dregs—persons spawned in poverty and belonging to families who have been left behind by otherwise mobile ethnic populations. In these families there is at least the beginning of some tradition of disreputable poverty. Numerically, newcomers are probably the largest component of the disreputable poor, but it is important to recall that except for a small proportion their collective destiny is eventually to enter reputable society.
