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

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

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."

The work on the report was an all-consuming task in Moynihan's office. All through January and February 1965, Barton and Ellen Broderick, another of Moynihan's assistants, were in the office seven days a week, meeting at the end of every day with Moynihan to apprise him of their progress. Toward the end of the job, they came across a statistic that seemed to encapsulate their theory perfectly: The unemployment rate and the number of new welfare cases, which previously had moved up and down in perfect lockstep, had begun to "disaggregate"--unemployment was falling, but welfare cases were rising. (Moynihan, a great reviser of his own history, now says it was the discovery of this statistic that prompted the report--"the numbers went blooey on me," as he puts it.) Finally Moynihan took a detailed outline from his assistants, wrote the report himself, and brought it to his boss, Willard Wirtz, the secretary of labor.

"I remember the almost physical excitement of reading it," Wirtz says. "I said, 'Pat, let's not use this until we can suggest what to do about it.' It was very long on detail about the problem and very short on what to do. He was reluctant--impatient with my suggestions. He wanted to get it out." Moynihan had ideas about how to solve the problems of the black family--for example, reinstituting twice-a-day mail delivery and thereby creating thousands of new jobs for men at the Post Office, that bastion of black working-class employment. He persuaded Wirtz, though, that proposing any specific policies in the report would only diffuse its impact.

A hundred numbered copies of the report were printed and distributed on a confidential basis around the upper reaches of the government. Richard Goodwin, a bright young man of the Kennedy administration who had stayed on after the assassination to become a speechwriter for Johnson, read it and included a passage about the black family in Johnson's commencement address at Howard University, delivered in June 1965. Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young of the Urban League read the address and conferred their blessings on it before it was delivered. Moynihan insists that the report's general release, after Watts, came completely on the initiative of the White House, which needed to satisfy a press corps that was clamoring for some explanation of the riot. But everyone else involved in the report sees the fine hand of Moynihan in its becoming public.

More than most government officials, Moynihan had a pride of authorship and of intellectual discovery that would have made it painful for him to know that he was not getting full credit for an important breakthrough. Just as Johnson needed to pass legislation to prove his own worth, Moynihan needed to be known as an original thinker. Because he was too impatient for the grind of academic research, his oeuvre at that point was quite thin; his chapter on the Irish in Beyond the Melting Pot was by far his best-known work, and the report on the black family was the kind of major statement that could establish his place in the first rank of American intellectuals. Well before the release of the Moynihan Report, a lengthy, respectful description of it, obviously written with a copy in hand, appeared in The New York Times, the publication most widely circulated in the audience that mattered to Moynihan.

Victimizing the blamer

The press coverage of the Moynihan Report was, in general, exactly what Moynihan had in mind. He was suddenly famous as a racial seer--almost the predictor of the Watts riot. It wasn't until October that it became clear that in black America the report was regarded as a grave insult. The notion of...