Chronicler Without a Clue

...But it was a rare family that didn't have a teenage daughter or two who had their own children...

...preconceptions...

...Noting this stability under the more oppressive conditions of slavery, Lemann is forced to admit, "It is somewhat mysterious where the structure of the sharecropper family came from...

...In all my time there, I never saw a tenant farm run by a single woman...

...All this produces a life of constant humiliation—a fear of being dominated by women, a need to prove manhood by spectacular feats of crime and abandon, an intense intermale rivalry, a lack of concern about the future, and, as a result, a life expectancy lower than that of men in Bangladesh...

...Gutman's records show that young black women tended to have one or two pre-marital children and then settle down into long-term monogamous relationships...

...William Tucker CHRONICLER WITHOUT A CLUE Nicholas Lemann reports brilliantly on the great black migration from South to North in this century, only to stumble when trying to account for the disintegration of the black family that followed in its wake...

...Welfare does not "break up" black families...

...What happened when the black family moved north had nothing to do with whether blacks got government jobs or who moved to the suburbs...

...But at least the lines are drawn...

...They will demonstrate that the number of children on welfare actually fell during the 1970s while illegitimacy rates increased...

...T his is the point that liberals invari- 1 ably miss in their never-ending quest to prove that Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) has not caused the demise of the black family...

...And what a gap it was...

...Several of Lemann's raconteurs report the pride and excitement they felt in discovering thriving black neighborhoods filled with bustling stores and plentiful job opportunities...

...After all, it was 1968 and there were a lot of loopy ideas in the air...

...Well, so what...

...But how atypical was it...

...In both cases, the common thread is a strict system of rules, requirements, and high expectations of a kind that the projects, the public schools, and the social agencies have long since abandoned...

...Giving money to street gangs was probably worth trying once...

...Like all machine politicians, he offered a simple exchange: patronage for votes...

...ut the biggest flaw of The Prom1.13 ised Land is its unconvincing explanation of the breakdown of the black family...

...As Sam Bass Warner described it in Streetcar Suburbs, ethnic groups in Boston first formed tightly knit urban enclaves, then split apart as they moved to the suburbs, where ethnic identity blurred and self-separation took place by class...

...In April, Wayne Bryant, the Democratic majority leader of the New Jersey State Assembly, introduced legislation that would overhaul the welfare system by encouraging women to marry and denying them increased benefits after their first two children...

...Much as Lemann is willing to look at black life as it is, he is not much willing to give up his own 'Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95...

...Unmarried girls with children almost always remained with their natal families, which were able to support them (the children often being the same age as younger brothers and sisters...

...Expulsion for graffiti...

...The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America' is already being hailed as a seminal work...

...Only liberals have stubbornly insisted on seeing things through the prism of their own misconceptions (while maintaining their own comfortable distance as well...

...The pattern of early illegitimacies followed by a marital commitment makes some economic sense...

...Not on your life...

...As with Mayor Daley, there was a price to be paid...

...Other observers also noted what were considered high rates of illegitimacy...

...L emann interrupts the personal nar- ratives of Daniels and Carter in 1964, in favor of a ponderous third chapter (almost one-third of the book) entitled "Washington...

...Black preachers were put on the payroll for the promise of delivering their congregations for the machine...

...Prominent entertainers and legendary sports heroes like Joe Louis lived in the neighborhood and often walked the streets escorted by excited children...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...

...It keeps them from forming...

...The Rangers were given a $927,000 federal grant by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO...

...Certainly there was economic hardship and white prejudice, but there was a camaraderie among blacks that compensated in many ways...

...The world the former sharecroppers found, although equally segregated, was not chaotic...

...The road was well traveled...

...George Will praises it as "the definitive account of how the nation arrived at its current dangerous condition...

...The whole idea of the War on Poverty, from beginning to end, was to turn up "new leadership" in black communities...

...Then it was time for her to start supporting herself—which meant getting married...

...In the first place, he exaggerates the difference between slave and sharecropper families...

...The parents must come in every month and pick up the report card...

...For Lemann, as for all liberals, the great tragedy of the era—and the reason the War on Poverty didn't work—was the antagonism between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy...

...I don't think I evergrasped the nature of that effort until I read an anecdote in Ken Auletta's The Undarlass...

...But in their hearts, black men know that, in the end, their women can get along very well without them...

...The Chicago political machine took this influx in stride...

...The stupefying levels of violence and purely biological behavior that have become the norm among today's black underclass are the result...

...We discover, for example, that Shriver wasn't a "real Kennedy," but was a little more Catholic and a lot more concerned about the poor, which is why he was the only family member able to bridge the gap between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations...

...In fact, most of the evidence points in the opposite direction...

...Washington Post Book World "Innovative blueprint for the transformation of black America...

...We have a waiting list of over a thousand, and the more we bear down, the longer the list gets...

...Hod-ding Carter III, himself an old Southern progressive, calls it a "heartfelt and brilliant achievement, which, if we are lucky, will force the complex questions of race and class back to the top of the national agenda...

...Rural people have been migrating to cities in large numbers since at least the seventeenth century, yet none have ever experienced anything comparable...

...For a while it was kept under control by middle-class blacks...

...Lemann may be one of the first liberals to describe lower-class black life as it is: the tawdriness, the casual subjection to drugs, the easy illegitimacies, the almost complete inability to plan or sustain any effort toward future goals...

...And there are the poverty programs themselves, which Lemann admits never did much for the poor, but provided upward mobility for educated blacks...

...Men and women who had worked for a dollar a day picking cotton were soon making more than a dollar an hour cleaning offices and working in factories...

...Lemann follows Ruby Daniels, Uless Carter, and several of their friends and offspring as they migrate north in the 1940s and '50s and witness (in some instances embody) the disintegration of the Chicago black community in the 1960s and '70s...

...An eight-hour day...

...In the 1920s, E. Franklin Frazier found that 15 percent of black births in Cook County Hospital were illegitimate...

...The proposal received guarded support from both Democrats and Republicans, but was immediately opposed by the ACLU, several Legal Aid organizations, and other leftover sixties trash...

...Rather, a system of family formation with its own internal instabilities collided head-on with a welfare system that encouraged women not to marry...

...The story of liberal intervention in the affairs of blacks is one long history of miscalculation...

...And you thought I was kidding...

...Single-motherhood was widespread in the South before the great migration...

...Daley, who could do nothing if not count heads, saw that the burgeoning black population would have to be brought into the system in the traditional way...

...As a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964, I met a woman who, after telling me her family's story through several generations, concluded: "What I've never been able to understand is this: How come the colored people been working so hard all these years and still got nothing to show for it...

...Total silence in the lunchroom and throughout the building...

...Does this sound far-fetched...

...Welfare has served as an economic alternative to marriage, intervening in a young black woman's life at precisely the moment when she would ordinarily marry—after she has had her second or third illegitimate child...

...Lemann's theory rests primarily on Charles S. Johnson's study Shadow of the Plantation (1934), which found 152 of 612 rural black families (25 percent) to be headed by single women...

...Indeed, the book is well reported, carefully detailed, and exquisite in its efforts to capture the heroic struggles of black people this century...

...They will show that illegitimacy rates have always been high among blacks...

...But when these stable families finally cracked the suburbs in the 1960s, the remaining poor were left with no role models...

...He does not mention the white bureaucrats who thrived on the War on Poverty as well...

...What made the experience of American blacks different...

...Does that make Lemann a conservative...

...Black America will probably not begin pulling itself back together until the day when black men start burning down welfare offices and reclaiming their women from the bureaucracy...

...Now that one writer is willing to admit the truth, is that such a cause for celebration...

...The book's very structure suggests the liberals' first principle: that what happens in Washington is central to every social issue, that everyone's fate lies with the federal government...

...The disintegration has been going on for twenty-five years...

...Who was right...

...The pattern was still clearly observable when I was in the South in the 1960s...

...RETHINKING THE AMERICAN RACE PROBLEM ROY L. BROOKS "A complex, often unorthodox foray...

...For both practical and moral reasons, the institution by far best suited to the task is the federal government...

...They quickly noted that teenage girls who became pregnant were being ostracized by the community...

...The narrative eventually returns to Mississippi, where a few of his subjects find solace...

...Not for nothing do blacks refer to each other as "brothers" and "sisters...

...They set up a program to aid teenage mothers and, not incidentally, to reform the community's intolerance of teenage pregnancy...

...Here's the way Lemann explains the situation: Blacks living on tenant farms in the rural South already lived lives of family disorganization that were similar if not identical to lower-class black lives today...

...A twelve-month school year...

...Conversely, Lemann discovers that it is the despised traditional institutions—the church and the military—that are now offering blacks the only real opportunity...

...I don'tthink I ever completely understood the answer to her question until reading this first chapter of Lemann's book...

...Often as not, the black farmers were informed at the "settle" that they had accumulated unspecified debts and owed the owner money...

...None of this is confronted in Lemann's book...

...currency...

...In his second chapter, "Chicago," Lemann describes the odyssey of Southern blacks as they migrated to the northern cities`the promised land...

...Visa & MasterCard only...

...Jack Kemp's talk of "empowerment" and encouraging independence among the underclass, however good-hearted, doesn't approach the root of the problem, either...

...After stealing a good bit of the money and committing various rapes and murders, most members ended up in Illinois prisons, where they ran massive drug operations...

...LBJ, with his gargantuan appetite for admiration (and devious nature), who nevertheless could get things done...

...Charles Percy...

...Mostly illiterate and perpetually shackled by a strict and brutal system of racial segregation, the tenant farmers remained virtual prisoners to a system that offered them little more than a place to live and a portion of the crop...

...But what took so long...

...Lemann is wrong on several counts...

...In an ironic twist (which Lemann does not particularly emphasize), it was the breakdown of suburban housing barriers that ultimately led to the disintegration of family life in urban neighborhoods...

...When rural blacks moved north, this disarray came with them...

...Bryant, who is black and represents Camden, one of the nation's most godforsaken ghettos, commented: "I've been thinking about the welfare system for ten years...

...Daley constructed a vast network of public housing that both kept blacks in their own neighborhoods and concentrated votes, so that the projects often delivered nearly unanimous majorities for the machine candidates...

...In fact, it was hard to fmd a young woman over age 20 who didn't already have one illegitimate child...

...Lemann has been feted by the Manhattan Institute and seems to be winning support among conservatives on the principle that any liberal willing to admit that not every black teenager is a budding rocket scientist held back by racial prejudice must have achieved enlightenment...

...Until the riots of the mid-sixties, Mayor Daley was actually losing favor with his white constituents, who perceived him as pro-black...

...The volume merits attention for its carefully wrought indictment of national policy, and for its efforts to chart a fresh, politically viable path out of our current racial crisis...

...There is the ACLU's diligent undermining of tenant-selection in public housing, which turned the projects over to the most destructive, crime-oriented residents...

...Nevertheless, he concludes, "It is clear that whatever the cause of its differences, black sharecropper society on the eve of the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker was the equivalent of big-city ghetto society today in many ways...

...There is only one problem with this explanation: it can't be supported...

...As one black man in Newark told Bill Moyers on his TV special, "Those women are more married to the welfare than they are to the guy who's sleeping in bed with them at night...

...If the black experience was different, it was only because middle-class blacks, penned in by housing discrimination in the suburbs, were forced to remain in their ethnic enclaves long after they had become middle-class...

...The opening chapter is the most beautifully realized in the book...

...The problem was that the natural leaders—the preachers, schoolteachers, politicians—had already been co-opted by the system...

...There is Senator Edward Brooke's 1969 bill that set public housing rents at no more than one-quarter the tenants' income, thus ruining the finances of the public housing authorities...

...They even attended President Richard Nixon's 1969 Inaugural Ball as guests of Sen...

...It is not that the welfare grant encourages black women to have babies...

...What is lost is the role men play in socializing young boys and girls—in creating a civilization...

...Instead of following the heroic progress of Southern migrants, we are suddenly set amidst decades-old gossip about Sargent Shriver and Hubert Humphrey...

...They will argue that there is no correlation between the birth rate among black teenagers and the rise and fall of welfare grants...

...Although Lemann does not acknowledge it, what he is describing in this chapter is the urban transformation every ethnic group has experienced...

...Rather than pursue the implications of his own text, he wants another War on Poverty—only this time without the Lyndon/Bobby melodrama messing the whole thing up: Given the poverty and dispiritedness in the slums, it is unlikely that their residents will suddenly mobilize around some new figure who preaches moderation and bourgeois values...

...Lemann's call for one more round at the War-on-Poverty Bar and Grill is almost irrelevant...

...But frankly, I can't see that it will change much...

...Always tenuously bound to the family due to the traditionof economic independence among black women (again traceable to West Africa), the lower-class black man has now become a completely useless appendage...

...Publishers Weekly $24.95 cloth At bookstores or order toll-free 1-800-822-6657...

...You can't leave the campus...

...This pattern has clear antecedents in West Africa, where marriage is a very different institution and where men have far weaker paternal Our nation's civil rights laws and policies have actually aggravated the plight of African Americans...

...Lemann quotes the black priest/principal of a successful Catholic elementary school: We bear down hard on basics...

...Particularly nettlesome for Lemann is Herbert Gutman's monumental The Black Family Under Slaver), and Freedom, which found that, even during slavery, most black women ended up in long-term marital relationships...

...When Jesse Jackson first aptimollksutailinhhou.,,111 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 peared before Daley in the 1960s, reports Lemann, the Mayor offered him a job as a toll-taker on the Illinois Tollway...

...The presumption of both LBJ and Robert Kennedy was the same: Government is the source of all beneficence and social progress for blacks...

...Or Bobby, with his Irish charm (and devious nature), who almost brought us all together for one vast national orgy of common purpose...

...Like all good liberals, Lemann can't quite make up his mind (although he does have his bete noire, the sinister Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is always undermining one program or other in pursuit of some personal agenda...

...Here's our constituency...

...The story begins in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a sultry Delta town where blacks make up more than half the population and where the civil rights movement eventually took root...

...Under tenant farming—the system that replaced, and in many ways perpetuated, nineteenth-century slavery—black families living in isolated wooden shacks would contract with white farmers to raise a crop, then "settle" at the end of the fall harvest...

...As a result, Shriver and his minions bypassed Daley's Chicago machine and handed over the keys of federal patronage to the Blackstone Rangers, Chicago's most notorious street gang...

...According to Lemann, the emergence of hyperviolent underclass life in the cities was a natural outgrowth of the Southern experience...

...It is that welfare encourages women not to get married...

...So how can the situation ever im- prove...

...The worst consequence, of course, is that poor black men have become irrelevant to the family...

...To my mind, it is all irrelevant...

...Only when the daughter had her second or third child did she become a burden...

...Lemann uses as a central metaphor the mechanized cotton picker, a primitive bit of machinery in-troduced in the 1940s that doomed the tenant farm...

...He can catch on with an independent welfare mother and prove his importance through infidelities and sexual exploits (I hear about them all the time on the subway...

...Hard work, sacrifice, dedication...

...It is the only institution we know that is designed to destroy the family...

...The frustrations of one black family trying to leave the ghetto was the subject of Lorraine Hansberry's famous play, Raisin in the Sun...

...White sharecroppers did only marginally better...

...UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES NEW YORK OXFORD THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 15 claims on their children than they do in Europe and Asia...

...When Martin Luther King first visited Mississippi in the 1960s, he encountered tenant farmers who had never seen U.S...

...In the1930s, Gunnar Myrdal discovered 16 percent of Southern black children to have been born out of wedlock—eight times the white rate...

...Let the struggle begin...

...The only way to understand the War on Poverty is from the bureaucrats' point of view...

...she is a woman who has one or two children in her early years and then settles down to a life of relative stability with her welfare check...

...William Tucker, our New York correspondent, is a writer for Forbes...

...Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land...

...Ahal" they said...

...Auletta describes a troop of federal bureaucrats arriving in a small Mississippi town to set up a poverty program...

...But that is not the point...

...At one point in the 1950s, 2,200 Southern blacks would arrive at Chicago's Illinois Central station every week...

...Any planned undertaking that would have a chance of affecting the ghettos substantially would have to be of enormous scope...

...Very heavy emphasis on moral pride...

...T he Promised Land is divided into 1 five lengthy chapters, beginning with a portrayal of life in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and '40s...

...Yet there is no doubt that, using their usual access to the judiciary, these modern scalawags could easily frustrate any legislative effort at reform...

...Honest journalists and scholars have described it hundreds of times, and millions of people have acknowledged it by moving as far away from black neighborhoods as possible...

...Lemann brushes it off by concluding: "In the history of OEO, there was no grant that was as complete a failure...

...Yet, however much these numbers departed from traditional standards, they were light-years away from today's rates of 50 percent female-headed households and 60-80 percent illegitimacy...

...The typical welfare mother is not a matriarch with seven children by five different men...

...Mayor Richard Daley, although eventually branded a racist, was willing to incorporate blacks into the system...

...Such an arrangement would have been virtually impossible, since farming was backbreaking work undertaken only by men...