My subject is the way Peter Bachrach addressed the question of poverty. But given that I was his student and research assistant and that I am a political scientist largely because of him, it is impossible to resist a few words about the experience of being in his classrooms. Peter was an inspiring teacher of politics. The substantive content of his courses was legendary, and he possessed an extraordinary capacity to elicit participation from classes of pre-feminists at our well-bred women's college. I know this cost him. Peter had an extra shirt in his Bryn Mawr office so that he could change out of the one he had sweated through during the considerable exertions of getting us to talk, let alone think.

His influence extended well beyond Bryn Mawr and Temple. As I was walking over to the commemorative APSA roundtable, Ken Shepsle, now a Harvard professor, told me how he and all the other William Riker students at Rochester read Bachrach and Baratz (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1962, Reference Bachrach and Baratz1963) on power and decision making. Ken was among a score of political scientists throughout the world who found Peter's views to be a welcome challenge to the prevailing hegemony of pluralism. At the memorial panel in Boston, we heard similar testimony from Turkish and Spanish scholars, and I recall the renowned German academic, Claus Offe, offering me the same sentiment in the early 1980s.

Others in this symposium discuss Peter Bachrach's contributions to the study of participation, power, inequality, and the law. All of these themes are present in his work on poverty. Indeed, for Peter the route to the alleviation of poverty was through changes in the structure of power and the quality of participation. This is evident in Power and Poverty, coauthored with Morton Baratz (Bachrach and Baratz Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970). Conceived and written well before The Wire made Baltimore—and its poverty—so infamous, it was largely researched in the hot summer of 1968, after the race riots of April in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Spiro Agnew was governor, and Lyndon Johnson was still president. The “War on Poverty” was winding down along with the emphasis on community organizing and “maximum feasible participation” that had dominated policies concerning the urban ghettos and central city rebuilding in the mid-1960s. Racial tension, never far below the surface, was on the rise. Peter was not one for academic or political fashion. He continued to emphasize the importance of active and confrontational participation as the only and surest way to break the poverty cycle.

I know whereof I speak. Rereading the book confirms this interpretation, and so does my experience in helping to produce it. As a Baltimore native and a research assistant on the project, I did many of the interviews recorded in the book. I also co-authored (with Bachrach and Baratz) one of the appendices, “The Political Significance of Citizen Participation,” which was my first publication.

The real contribution of Power and Poverty has to do with the first part of the book's title.Footnote ¹ In a period when policy proposals abounded, Peter Bachrach focused on empowerment and participation, his life-long themes. In the Baltimore book he was as concerned with the effects of enhancing the power of the poor as with the obstacles erected by institutions and elites. Investigating several important decisions in two different periods, Bachrach and Baratz find that “distributions of outcomes” occurred once “key decisions … were initiated and shaped by the exercise of power on the part of those who had been previously excluded from the political system” (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970, 103).

The book mirrored major work emerging at that time by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who emphasized mobilization, electorally and on the streets, as the means to change the structures of poverty (Reference Piven and Cloward1993, Reference Piven and Cloward1977). It raised some of the same issues as Michael Lipsky (Reference Lipsky1969, Reference Lipsky1968; Lipsky and Levi Reference Lipsky, Levi and Hahn1972), whose publications provided the foundational texts for the ongoing research program on political resources and opportunities. Peter's role in the academic division of labor was to change the agenda and transform the debate. It was for others to confirm his intuitions. The result of his efforts is a better political science that asks not only tougher questions but also the important questions.

Peter was an activist as well as a scholar. His interest in fighting poverty was not only academic; it extended to the situations in which he found himself. During World War II, the disabilities caused by his childhood polio prevented him from serving in combat. Instead he worked a desk job in San Francisco. There, he reconfirmed the benefits of union organizing for lifting the poverty-stricken out of poverty. He became friends with the famous Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and renowned for the organizing and bargaining that transformed “wharf rats into lords of the docks.” Prior to the successful coast-wide strike of 1934, longshore workers were itinerant, often homeless, men engaged in casual labor and the degrading shape up in which the boss used personalistic criteria to choose who would work that day. When I took the Harry Bridges Chair at the University of Washington, a chair endowed by the pensioners of the union, Peter wrote me the following letter:Footnote ²

I cherish this letter because of its information about Bridges, whom I also honor and whom I am currently studying, but I cherish it even more because it conveys Peter's voice more than any academic publication or even memorial can do

Peter's commitment to organizing as the route out of poverty was one of the reasons that he and Bryn Mawr parted ways. The president of the college, Katherine McBride, was furious at him for attempting to organize the maids and porters, the African American service workers who cleaned the students' rooms, served us meals, and provided all custodial services. Nearly every night, Peter played pool at his home with the senior porter, John Whittaker. Peter encouraged John to join a union, but John was resistant. Peter persisted. He sent me off to Philadelphia to enlist the aid of the hotel and restaurant workers' union, and I came back with cards for the employees to sign. John and the other maids and porters appeared receptive. They held a meeting to decide whether or not to unionize. Peter and I sat in the hallway outside the closed doors, optimistic that change was about to occur. When John exited and shook his head, we knew the change was still in the future. The plantation system prevailed at Bryn Mawr, and all the barriers to reform that Peter theorized about were in play. Peter was right that the route out of poverty is through empowerment, but even he sometimes failed to recognize the strength of the third face of power Steven Lukes emphasized (Reference Lukes1974).

Peter Bachrach leaves a legacy. The best way to honor him is to carry out what he started. In research, this means that we continue to investigate, both theoretically and empirically, the hidden dimensions of power. It requires that we persist in efforts to understand how to enhance the power of the powerless. As teachers, it demands rigorous attention to the subjects he loved, particularly the analysis of power and poverty, but it also obliges us to make classrooms locations where students learn to debate and participate thoughtfully and actively. As activists, it means ensuring that communities have voice and workers can organize. Unionization and mobilization are crucial prerequisites of empowerment. But also essential is the transformation of institutionsFootnote ³ that make it difficult to use voice. Empowering the poor remains, as Peter Bachrach instructed us, a key to eradicating poverty.