The Promised Land

...the intriguing confluence of inter332: Commonweal ests that made Daniel Patrick Moynihan the favorite social theorist of President Richard Nixon...

...The Promised Land is not a perfect book---what book is...

...Nixon, Lemann says, believed blacks were inherently inferior to whites, but nevertheless made some important contributions to ameliorating the situation of those in the ghettos...

...And in India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul at last attempts to give India its due...

...free market policies have reinforced selfseeking and may have speeded the disintegration of society...

...The book is full of such information...

...Similarly, he argues, it is now clear that, like Ronald Reagan, George Bush supports "traditional values" in only symbolic ways...

...Naipaul has traveled exhaustively throughout India, conducting in-depth interviews, generally through interpreters...

...America, which was so radically changed by the black migration, can neither return to the way it was nor settle into comfortable middle-classness...

...Another lives the life of a member of Chicago's substantial black middle class on the South Side...

...My favorite is the account of the Dravidian Progressive Movement, a political party in Tamil Nadu whose history is far more compelling than I had realized just having read newspaper accounts of its activities...

...But no one--not even that great Democratic hope Mario Cuomo---seems to have any idea how to restore a sense of community to the nation...

...The only problem is that a vital spirit of community, a sense of a social contract that obligates each of us as our brother's keeper, would seem a prerequisite for healing the ghettos...

...India was now a country of a million little mutinies...

...All the disturbing qualities of modem politics, however, strengthen Dionne's case: ff speech and argument are our best---or only--hope for a revitalized civic life, there is every reason to seek words strong enough to challenge the dorn~ inations and powers of the time...

...Dionne argues that the Democrats need their own version of"fusionism," a coalition of liberals and "populists," still committed to state regulation of the economy, but adopting some of populism's concern for family, community, and civic obligation...

...Among its many pressing problems is an underclass about which something must be done...

...For the most part, The Promised Land is good, solid history...

...After we had been in India about a year he said he hated to admit it, but Naipaul might have been right...

...Without hesitation he told the owner he would be there Monday, and now he was a resident of Chicago instead of a visitor...

...In fact, Dionne holds, the conservative movement is now exhausted...

...Naipaul, not even born in India but in Trinidad, and whose two earlier books on his ancestral land (An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization) were fiercely critical of the country's rigid, caste-based politics, along with its filth, squalor, and poverty, was doubly offensive...

...Lemann is at his best when he is describing--life in the South under segregation and the sharecropping regime...

...Johnson's program was undone not solely by the diversion of money and mental energy to the war in Vietnam, but also, 334: Commonweal Lemann says, by a critical policy mistake...

...For Dionne, the real lesson of the Republican victory in 1988--1ike that of the GOP's defeat in 1976--is that conservatives can win only when they can mn against liberalism's weakened past (or when, as in the Iraq crisis, liberals themselves insist on reminding tlS...

...It was through Robert Kennedy's interest in the problem of juvenile delinquency that his brother's administration became involved in the problems of the ghettos, the worlds the migrants made in America's segregated cities...

...His job in Clarksdale paid less than a quarter of that...

...the man handed the phone over to Uless, who found himself being offered a job as a dishwasher by the owner...

...No doubt it will be--or would be...

...And it ran the poverty program afoul of powerful and politically important local leaders like Chicago's Mayor Daley...

...So it was at first--and then something happened...

...They were so all encompassing it was nearly impossible to see anything else...

...Just possibly, Nicholas Lemann's fine book may help us discover what that something ought to be...

...Conservatism won with Ronald Reagan because it assembled a majority which, in radically diverse ways, agreed in its dissatisfaction with the liberal version of the welfare state...

...The resulting tendency toward a fearful, serf-protective privatism works against any positive use of public authority and runs parallel to conservatism's mainstream...

...He was a fierce atheist and a dedicated political worker...

...He was the antiGandhi...

...Modem politics, baffling and full of technicalities, is bound to make us feel stupid...

...So it was for the Europeans who, over many decades, came in waves to American shores...

...Fortunately, such clangorously false notes are few...

...Independence brought about a "liberation of spirit...that could not come as release alone...

...Rather, it's that there is a wistful, vaguely naive quality in the way he addresses the issue...

...in his personal life and in his political program, he was his absolute opposite...

...Moreover, even if the right is as "exhausted" as Dionne believes, it draws strength from the structural, longer-term reasons that, beyond his argument, contribute to the public's growing distaste for politics...

...He pursued that inspiration brilliantly, and the result is a powerful, absorbing book, so well-researched and well-written that it reads at times like a good novel...

...it probably was unworkable...

...It's not that what he proposes is foolish or off-base...

...And, like my husband, I can certainly understand...

...Not only did community action not work...

...Naipaul...

...It is, however, the stories which are the 17May 1991:335...

...he was twenty-five years old and he went just to visit a sister...

...So it was at first for the AfricanAmericans who, during the middle decades of this century, streamed out of the rural South with its racial oppression to the urban North and its relative freedom...

...Relatives and friends who had gone there would return periodically sporting new cars, new clothes, and stories of abundant jobs paying unheard of sums...

...As far as the segregated black serfs of the South were concerned, this device hadthe opposite effect of Eli Whitney's cotton gin a century earlier...

...the mechanical picker, each copy of which could do the work of fifty people, made it superfluous...

...In Punjab alone there were over four thousand politically motivated killings last year...

...For humanitarians, India is a problem...

...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Lemann's book is that he follows his migrant subjects to the end...

...For liberals, moral outrage is often more comfortable than intellectual stimulation and simple curiosity...

...To treat it as an interesting, lively place, sparkling with debate, controversy, and brilliant ideas seems elitist and paradoxical...

...But, in fact, to do anything less is to miss the magic and delight of the country...

...His ideas are pretty much the standard litany of unreconstructed poverty warriors...

...But if the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon years were "uniquely difficult," it would be interesting to learn what time and what political conditions Lemann would consider more propitious...

...support for a positive American role in foreign affairs, and so on...

...Many migrants, in Lemann's view, exemplified the old saying, that "You can take the boy (or man o/' woman) out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy...

...But within an hour of arriving at his sister's kitchenette apartment in a South Side building, Uless's plans changed...

...The failure of John Silber's abrasive version last year in Massachusetts is instructive...

...Moynihan, suspicious of certain pernicious tendencies in the nation's liberal elites, nevertheless nudged Nixon steadily in a liberal direction on social policy...

...They live in a subsidized housing development operated by a black man who got his start in the federal poverty program...

...Three states are in the midst of civil war as increasingly violent secessionists press for their demands...

...Even the most star-crossed, a woman named Ruby Lee Daniels, seemed to possess a certain innate ambition, even though she frequently was awash in a sea of troubles...

...Naipaul Viking, $24.95,520 pp...

...But even at its best and most active, the Kennedy administration devoted only minimal time and attention to the ghettos...

...One of the women in the building told him her boyfriend had a good job in a restaurant that was looking for more help," Lemann writes...

...Where previously they had had to compete with Northern labor recruiters to retain black labor, they suddenly had to be concerned with getting rid of blacks who, without employment, would be a threat to social peace in the region...

...It begins, appropriately, in the Delta, with a discourse on the invention and introduction into wide use of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s...

...It had to come as disturbance, as rage and revolt...

...Two of them, Ruby Lee Daniels (now Ruby Haynes) and Uless Carter, eventually moved back south to Clarksdale...

...Certainly one of the most interesting parts of Lemann's book is the discussion ol ~ the Nixon-Moynihan relationship and its effect on the course of the nation's social policy...

...a family policy that--upholding the equality of the sexes in the workplace and the home--regards the two-parent family as the standard for policy...

...No two places illustrate more vividly how the black migration changed America, North and South, for better and for worse...

...Johnson embraced "community action," an idea cooked up by the Kennedy team, as the central precept of the war on poverty...

...the machinations of Chicago politicians like Richard J. Daley or William (Big Bill) Dawson...

...The faceless, swarming masses which alarmed him so on previous trips have been reduced to manageably small groups...

...i NAIPAUL LOOKS AGAIN INDIA A Million Mutinies Now V.S...

...No place in the South contributed more eager participants than the Mississippi Delta, that vast, richly fertile area where cotton truly was king...

...His thesis is that the modern underclass was present incipiently even in the earliest days of the black migration, because the underclass culture of poverty is essentially the same as the sharecropper culture of the South...

...Now the owner.., was telling him he could come to work on Monday morning and make $25 a week...

...As with most visitors to postindependence India, Naipaul's attention was captured entirely by the difficulties of life there...

...We meet an aging astrologer, a struggling film writer, the editor of a popular women's magazine, and a host of others, all with their own complicated stories...

...a tougher stance on law enforcement, and a recognition that "neighborhood" is not simply a code word for racism...

...That, as Dionne suggests, is why the broad programmatic failure of the Reagan revolution has been essential to its continued political success: without the existence of the liberal state, the conservative coalition would lose its raison d'etre...

...Even with the best will in the world, it's hard not to have strongly negative reactions to the sadness India seems to specialize in...

...It also forced the Southern white elites to turn on a dime...

...Fortunately there was the industrial North...

...Lemann is at his weakest when he is prescribing solutions to the dilemma of the urban underclass...

...At best, it will take superb rhetoric to construct Dionne's preferred coalition, the analog of Reagan's beguiling appeal to libertarians and cultural moralists...

...Although both groups had at least a nodding respect for the magisterial authority of government, they made it their first goal to stop what they took to be liberalism's damaging interventions, making "at least, do no harm" a first principle of social policy...

...Uless Carter, one of the migrants whose story Lemann tells, found that it was all true...

...Few things irritated him as much as Indians who sat in England or America enjoying its luxuries while criticizing India for its shortcomings...

...the building of the Chicago ghetto...

...Some of the stories are fascinating...

...No northern destination was more eagerly sought than Chicago, "City of the Big Shoulders...

...The man is also a poet of some note, and Naipaul provides an interesting aside on the differences between literary and street Marathi...

...I i NORTHERN BOUND THE PROMISED LAND The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America Nicholas Lemann Knopf, $24.95,416 pp...

...there has been no serious dent in crime...

...It is a sensible program, but one that asks liberals to moderate or shelve a number of cherished doctines, and before they are ready to do so, liberals may need another, more terrible dose of defeat...

...At another point, near the end of the chapter on how Washington responded in the 1960s and 1970s to the crisis in the ghettos, Lemann complains that, contrary to the claims of conservative critics of the war on poverty, "we hadn't tried everything" to cure persistent urban, i.e., black, poverty...

...It is through the particular and the specific that Naipaul now wishes to view India...

...The book offers many suggestions for such a program: politics aiming at full employment at socially adequate wages for all Americans (and with them, following William Julius Wilson, a de-emphasis on affirmative action...

...Five million blacks joined the northward trek between 1940 and 1970, making theirs the biggest migration in world history...

...The transformation of the erstwhile Soviet empire has already softened the old anticommunist glue and revived conservative isolationism...

...Many of the revolts are the result of a heightened consciousness--the women's movement, the organizing of untouchables, the rationalists--and while their presence makes life even more chaotic and unpredictable, they are, to Naipaul, the surest sign of growth, restoration...

...We were, in fact, sitting in America (enjoying the odd luxury) when he told me this...

...The real federal energy and commitment came with Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner who never did eliminate the term "nigger" from his lexicon but who, partly out of guilt and partly because of his personal philosophy of government, felt racial justice must be one of his highest priorities...

...All these intellectual currents were reinforced by resentments at the slowing of economic growth, the inflation-prodded rise of taxation, and the failed opportunity of Jimmy Carter's presidency...

...To most Delta blacks, including those from Clarksdale, Mississippi, the North mostly meant Chicago...

...We meet Namdeo Dhasal, the founder of the Dalit Panthers, a militant organization of "untouchables," formed on the lines of the Black Panthers...

...For example, he writes in the afterword that "if we can heal the ghettos, which are the part of the country most hurt by our current fragmentation, it will be a sign that we are on the way to a restoration of our spirit of community...

...In fact, some of the million mutinies are far from little...

...From the cacophony of voices that assailed him in the past, he is now able to identify separate individuals...

...inspired neoconservatism's doubts about the efficacy of state planning and its conviction that the bureaucratic "New Class" was undermining the civil and social decencies--a view shared, on the basis of rather different reasoning, by the religious right...

...All the federal efforts in the ghettos took place during a uniquely difficult time for liberal initiatives aimed at racial problems," he says...

...It was Nicholas Lemann's great inspiration that the best way to tell the story of this black migration would be by focusing on those two places and on a representative few actual migrants...

...She called her boyfriend over and made him phone the restaurant right then and there...

...The gin made black labor valuable in the cultivation and harvesting of cotton...

...Periyar, its "prophet," as he is referred to, was a contemporary of Gandhi and outlived him by many years...

...Jo McGowan hen my husband (who is from India) and I were courting and I was trying to learn all I could about his country, he told me not to bother with V.S...

...Don Wycliff ince the time of Abraham, migration has been an avenue to progress for those restless spirits who value the opportunity to advance over the comfort of familiar surroundings...

...He made the trip north in 1942...

...Getting beyond the sadness requires a hardening which can also be painful...

...It also calls attention to our vulnerability and lack of power, especially since, as Dionne notes, our more fragmented society means that we are more isolated and more likely to be addressed in essentially private terms...

...Interestingly, none of Lemann's subjects seems to exemplify that...

...Her children, raised in the North, were another matter, however...

...Not every migrant's story was as happy as Uless Carter's...

...Although Periyar is practically worshiped today in many parts of Tamil Nadu, he is all but unknown in the rest of India...