Gans, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who became an innovative sociologist in the U.S., explored the myths and misconceptions surrounding poverty, class, urban renewal, and suburban malaise. A longtime professor at Columbia University and former president of the American Sociological Association, Gans was an Ivy League academic, an advocate for liberal causes and a social critic, contributing essays to many publications. He aimed, he said, to connect his research with the lives of ordinary people, and to work toward answering a fundamental question: “What is a good society, and how can sociology help bring it about?” His writing covered Americana from the postwar years into the 2000s, exploring race relations, economic problems, highbrow and popular cultures, nostalgia for the rural past, and an assortment of provocative questions: Why do the poor get poorer and the rich richer? Can Jews and Italians get along in Canarsie? Is landmarks preservation elitist?
Gans served on the Kerner Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established in 1967 to investigate the cause of riots and unrest that had broken out in cities around the country. He helped draft the commission’s report, an indictment of White racism that warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.”
His first book, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962), was a vivid chronicle of an Italian American enclave that was displaced and leveled by urban renewal. Gans showed how the area was far from the slum that government officials had made it out to be, and argued that a middle-class bias had caused the low-rent neighborhood to be wrongly perceived as derelict and run-down. Gans wrote frequently about the poor and working classes, arguing for new anti-poverty measures in his 1995 book The War Against The Poor: The Underclass And Antipoverty Policy. As he saw it, the country’s least privileged had been stigmatized through terms like “underclass,” which contributed to a sense in which the poor were to be blamed for their condition, and ignored or punished rather than helped. An important article in this vein was his "The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All," (Social Policy, July/August 1971: pp. 20-24).
