ABSTRACT
Americans have long believed that one awful consequence of urbanization was a residue of urban poor. Sociological literature has always been affected by urban reform tendencies and by a concern for the lot of the poor. Without question, sociologists today are deeply involved, in various ways, in the ongoing, persistent dialogue about how to interpret poverty on the American scene. Those who study cities in Africa and South America are, of course, centrally concerned with urban poverty there in its relation to underdeveloped societies. The resulting combination of rural domesticity, farm work, and a country environment was bound to counteract the evils of the child's previous "street" life. A certain block, called "Misery Row" in Tenth Avenue, was the main seed-bed of crime and poverty in the quarter and was also invariably a "fever-nest." The allusion to the sociology of knowledge is haunting because of considerations related to the semantics of the phrase "culture of poverty."
