Slumlord; Pat Moynihan has done some great things - but betraying the poverty warriors isn't one of them

Washington Monthly, May, 1991 by Nicholas Lemann

Slumlord

In the summer of 1965, the Watts riot and the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam destroyed the mood of triumphant liberal comity that was supposed to be the foundation on which the solution to the crisis in the urban ghettos would be built. The first sign that something had gone profoundly wrong came in the weeks following Watts, when the White House released a report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Moynihan, Lyndon Johnson's assistant secretary of labor for policy, had practically invented the role of the social welfare intellectual in government--his job had no operating responsibilities, so he could devote all his energies to generating new ideas. As a thinker, he was not so much profoundly original as he was nimble. He had extraordinary radar that enabled him to pluck significant bits of information out of government reports or scholarly journals and an ability to dramatize his findings in a way that would get the attention of high government officials.

The roots of Moynihan's report lay in a book called Slavery, published in 1959 by a young historian named Stanley Elkins. During the years after World War II, historians were just beginning to portray slavery as brutal, rather than benign and paternalistic. Elkins, working in the long shadow of the seminal work in this line, Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution, wanted to darken the picture of slavery even further by showing that it had so devastated African-Americans as to have reduced them to a state of dependency. His evidence was that slaveholders among the Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had portrayed slaves as being childlike, but he didn't really try to prove this assertion, only to offer an explanation supporting it; even the most liberal white historians of the day believed that there had been no such thing as a genuine, strong, African-American slave culture. Elkins compared the effect of slavery on blacks to the infantilization that Bruno Bettelheim had noted in the Jewish inmates of Nazi concentration camps.

When Slavery was published, it got respectable reviews and sold at a rate of 400 copies a year. After four years, it abruptly started to catch on. Nathan Glazer, Moynihan's friend and co-author, reviewed Slavery in Commentary and then gave Moynihan a copy; it became one of Moynihan's discoveries, and he began to pass it around Washington. Besides having the appeal that a dramatic new argument always had for Moynihan, Slavery served his political need to justify new social programs run by the Labor Department. "Why?" asks Elkins. "It provided a historical formula that was attractive to northern liberals: Our was a particularly harsh form of slavery; we had a responsibility to correct it." It was especially important at that moment for liberals to drive home Elkins's point. All through the civil rights movement, liberals were able to argue that although they were supporting a lot of legislation aimed at helping blacks, the overall goal was simply to provide blacks with the same legal rights as everyone else; the second wave of racial reforms, aimed at the North--not just the war on poverty, but also affirmative action--had to be justified on the grounds that blacks deserved help from the government above and beyond what everyone else got.

Moynihan had already, with "One-Third of a Nation"--a report on the growing number of young people who couldn't pass the armed forces induction test--written one sensational document based on what he knew about the problems of the ghettos, and it had failed to loose an avalanche of social programs. He needed new ammunition. Also, he was involved in complex career machinations that a stunning new report might serve. In the fall of 1964, he had campaigned for Robert Kennedy in New York, and Lyndon Johnson, who hated Kennedy, had become predictably furious. Some masterstroke might repair Moynihan's relations with the White House. At the same time, Moynihan was contemplating a run for the presidency of the New York City Council in the fall of 1965; being known as the author of a great liberal call to arms might help his chances there.

Too Pat

During the Christmas season of 1964, Moynihan called in his chief assistant, Paul Barton, one morning. "Pat said, 'We just have to do something,'" Barton says. "'We have to be different. We're not going to get attention to this problem because of the low unemployment rate. We're going to do a report.'" Moynihan told Barton he wanted to concentrate on the parlous state of the black family. Black out-of-wedlock childbearing had always been very high, and now it appeared to be rising even higher: Nearly a quarter of all black children were now born to single mothers. The standard explanation of this, laid out most convincingly by E. Franklin Frazier and now given additional punch by Elkins, was that slavery had loosened the family bonds of African-Americans. More recently, high unemployment among black men and the welfare system's provision of benefits only to single mothers were making the male economically irrelevant to the poor black family, and more illegitimacy was the result. In Dark Ghetto, Kenneth Clark had a gloomy chapter on the deteriorating family structure and social fabric in the black slums, called "The Pathology of the Ghetto"; Moynihan picked up on this, too, and had a chapter in his report called "The Tangle of Pathology."