Toward a National Urban Policy
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
The Sham of the Cities Toward a National Urban Policy edited by Daniel P. Moynihan Basic Books, $7.95 Now as the responsible editor that I am, I must caution my fellow students against leaping...
...It is an admirable collection of essays embracing every aspect of urban life...
...Moynihan discusses the ambiguous patrimony of technology, which brings us more rapid personal transportation, more comfortable housing, dilated opportunity,..pollution...
...we are remarking on a social problem, or rather congeries of social problems...
...But the rub comes over what he is talking for...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Rainwater's vision has fixed on The Solution to poverty, and as he leads us through his essay his discussion evolves into an argument, thence a screed...
...Thankfully, Toward a National Urban Policy, edited by Daniel P. Moynihan, will acclimate students for Banfield...
...Dentler spies the answer to improved education: that is, the "gradual emergence of a national coalition pressing for a system of education with relatively uniform standards of excellence but with a high tolerance for different approaches to teaching and learning," which is to say a bureaucracy which does not act like a bureaucracy...
...When we lament poverty in America we are not-if we know what we are talking about-lamenting a social injustice...
...Several pages later Mr...
...Take Lee Rainwater's essay, "Poverty in the United States...
...bureaucracy-as the Russian communists and the British socialists have proven-is ignominiously inefficient...
...As always Nathan Glazer and Martin Meyerson are thoughtful and engaging...
...Bearing in mind the warm bath of platitude and fatuity which our professors have prepared for the discussion of social problems, an unconditioned reading of Banfield would be like a reckless plunge into icewater-it could place a perilous strain on one's system...
...Early in his essay Dentler states that some of the obstacles to better urban education have been bureaucracy and the inability of school systems to show tolerance for different approaches to teaching...
...Population trends, housing, crime and the problems of local government are but some of the subjects discussed in the book's twenty-five essays-though not all the essays are of symmetrical quality, and some are redundant...
...tt Tyrrell, Jr...
...At any rate this collection will give you a glimpse of an enormously complicated network of problems...
...Now as the British are dismantling their socialistic contraptions and the crafty Russians are quietly switching over to free enterprise, proponents of socialism have a difficult task...
...For what frustrates and perplexes the liberal and the Middle Americano is the lower-class individual's deviant behavior (crime, illegitimacy, disease...
...Another first-rate essay in this collection is that of James Q. Wilson, whose clinical analysis of urban crime will both silence the shrieks of those crime fighters whose comfort depends on evermore lush governmental subsidies, and agonize the thalidomide intellectuals, who from their sanctuaries at Berkeley or Ann Arbor or his own Harvard, are eternally confusing the criminal with the criminal's victim and playing make-believe with the lives of urban folk...
...Rather the author-like the saints -has beheld a revelation (this time concerning poverty) and is duty-bound to convert us to his brand of swamp root...
...And the rest live less well...
...As always Moynihan is provocative...
...Robert Dentler's "The Challenge of Urban Education in the United States...
...Further he exonerates American capitalism at least by implication in admitting that over the past twenty years the proportion of families who would be considered poor (in absolute terms) has been cut in half...
...He asserts that studies during the Depression found that families in which the husband was not a stable wage earner showed a high incidence of desertion and divorce...
...Clearly Rainwater knows what he is talking about...
...And if you doubt my claims to his intelligence, I refer you to The New York Review of Books, 5 November 1970, where his latest book (Varieties of Police Behavior, Atheneum) brought tears to the eyes and water to the pen of that iron-jowled realist, Mr...
...Oh well, perhaps Mr...
...which is to say that contrary to the fabulists of poverty, American poverty is a matter of relative deprivation not destitution...
...If nothing else it will give you an appreciation for the orneriness of urban problems and maybe a sympathy for those who have tried to deal with them in the past...
...Unfortunately I fear poverty is more difficult than Rainwater's spirits would have us believe...
...Murray Kempton...
...The only trouble is that some live a little more well, namely the politicians, bureaucrats and police...
...Moynihan, who writes poignantly about the hysterical rhetoric of "crisis," and the lingering "Themes in Urban Experience" of violence, migration, wealth (relatively speaking, everyone's), mobility, in tellectual disdain and ugliness...
...Now I cannot believe Rainwater is unfamiliar with such studies...
...But as I said at the outset, this collection has just enough cool revisionist thought to stimulate serious students, while its discussion of poverty, education, racism and economics is warmed by the familiar academic nonsense which suffuses so many classrooms and editorial tabernacles these days...
...Rainwater realizes that the greatest problem with a poverty of relative deprivation is not that babies are suffering the distended bellies of the Ibo, but that "the poor and near poor (lower class) live a life somewhat separated from that of the stable working-and middle-class members of the society...
...The Sham of the Cities Toward a National Urban Policy edited by Daniel P. Moynihan Basic Books, $7.95 Now as the responsible editor that I am, I must caution my fellow students against leaping impulsively into Banfield...
...Thus he concludes that impoverished families dissolve because of lack of income...
...And not surprisingly Rainwater's argument becomes a little tacky and even evasive towards the end...
...There is the ever-engaging Mr...
...In discussing the reality of American poverty, he admirably refrains from The New Republic editorialists' technique of going for the reader's funny bone, and instead intelligently concludes that "what is called poverty in the United States is a relative matter-relative to time and place and how well off the rest of the population is-and not a question of some absolute level of subsistence...
...Another essay in this collection whose rhetoric will have a familiar smack is Mr...
...The Solution to this separation is socioeconomic ' 'Togetherness "-variously called, in lands across the sea, "socialism and communism...
...But supposedly everyone lives equally well...
...Unfortunately more recent studies of slum life in New York discovered that when impoverished families enjoyed income accretions either from welfare or wages, the rate of desertion was even higher...
...He is about the soundest student of urban crime and crime prevention writing from the campuses today...
...He exhorts Americans to develop a "national urban policy," for "ought not the vast efforts to control the situation of the present, be at least informed by some sense of goals for the future...
...Wilson's essay is a masterful composition of profundity and compactness, eloquence and good sense...
...Dentler will find his beautiful beast atop the snowy reaches of the Himalayas...
...Sounding-in his preliminary essay-many of Banfield's contentions, Moynihan disagrees with Banfield on others...
Vol. 4 • December 1970 • No. 2
