Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land

...Here the material is a good deal more familiar: for example, several pages are devoted to documenting the mutual disdain between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, something which, at this late date, hardly qualifies as news...

...By the end of the narrative, his principal informants exemplify the contradictory trends shaping black Chicago in the post civil rights period...

...He then follows his subjects to Chicago, the "Promised Land," where their hopes for high paying jobs and racial equality are soon dashed by the 600 • DISSENT Books realities of the ghetto...

...Yet the notion that sharecropper folkways shape an urban "culture of poverty" remains a crucial part of his argument that "black sharecropper society was the equivalent of big city ghetto society today in many ways," including leading the nation in illegitimacy and violent crime...

...After losing several of her children to drugs and one to madness and suicide, she returns to Mississippi...

...It is also seen as the source of an ethos of "getting over," meaning "running some kind of hustle, especially on white people, in the hopes of coming out ahead in a game you couldn't possibly win by following the rules...

...Lemann ends his book with the pronouncement that America's festering racial sores can be healed by renewing the nation's sense of moral urgency...

...Although the story Lemann tells has the feel of truth, one is never sure whether or not it is the whole truth...

...Lemann presents this history through the life stories of several black Mississippians, all of whom spent their early years in the cotton fields around Clarksdale in the heart of the Delta...

...That such a program lacks popular support does not bother him...

...one is often unsure of what Lemann sees as a national trend and what is an idiosyncrasy of Chicago history...

...He is far more concerned with description than with theory, and he is understandably frustrated by the elaborate "intellectual pirouetting" that characterizes much of the current debate over the "underclass...

...Today the issue of race is so widely associated with the problems of northern cities that the very word "urban" (as in phrases such as "the urban crisis" or even "urban dance music") is often a euphemism for black...

...Much of the material in these sections first appeared in 1986 in the Atlantic, where Lemann suggested that many of the problems of the ghetto "underclass" were traceable to a culture of dependence initially fostered by the sharecropping system...

...One woman endures two decades in the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the most violent of Chicago's massive high rise housing projects and very possibly the worst place to live in America...

...q 602 • DISSENT...

...This history is well known, yet rarely has it been told in such compelling detail...

...He consistently points to the traditions of the southern past rather than the opportunity structure of the northern present to explain the lives of contemporary African Americans...

...The result, however, is a work that is long on detail and short on intellectual rigor...

...Embedding these stories in a rich description of the region, Lemann evokes the often violent world in which black sharecroppers and farmers struggled to make a living...

...Racial justice," he writes, "has almost never been a popular or populist cause...

...At first reading, this struck me as merely politically naive...

...By asserting that all we really need is honesty, compassion, and commitment, Lemann ignores the profound difficulties liberals now face over the issue of race (for example, the problems presented by Thomas and Mary Edsall in their recent Atlantic cover story...

...Confronting the problems of poverty also requires the patience to deal with social and political complexity...

...Yet at the same time growing black political power helped give birth to a new black middle class...

...More problematic than these issues of style, however, is Lemann's tendency to see government policy as almost entirely the result of the personalities of Washington insiders...

...Lemann is particularly successful in giving clear human faces to those he writes about...

...The movement of the majority of the black population into the northern cities was one of the most profound sociological shifts in America during this century...

...It is, of course, not Lemann's style to stake out theoretical positions...

...Yet if the failures, and the successes, of the War on Poverty prove anything, it is that moral certainty is not enough...

...Further, when Lemann does refer to findings that contradict this thesis, he merely acknowledges them...

...Once his focus shifts to Washington, he pays less attention to the influence of the broad societal shifts taking place in the 1960s and concentrates on the ins and outs of a small elite of public officials and policy oriented intellectuals...

...In helping to call the nation's attention to one of its profound moral failures, Nicholas Lemann has performed a valuable service...

...As such, it must be looked at in a different light, one that reveals not only the book's substantial strengths but also its serious flaws...

...During the same period a fellow Clarksdalian gradually works his way up to the civil service ladder and eventually achieves solid middle class status as a housing project manager...

...The author's flair for detail also seems a bit more FALL • 1991 • 601 Books contrived here: is it really necessary to know how Walter Heller, the head of Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors, furnished his Minnesota home...

...This becomes most apparent over the issue of "sharecropper dependency," a theme running throughout the early sections of the book...

...The book lacks any comparative framework...

...In the middle of The Promised Land the narrative abruptly shifts to Washington D.C., where the "War on Poverty" is discussed...

...Well-written and compassionate, The Promised Land makes important contributions both as an account of a crucial chapter in recent American history and as a vivid depiction of the horrors faced by ghetto dwellers today...

...And although this phenomenon is hardly as unexamined as Lemann implies—one of the weaknesses of The Promised Land is his tendency to ignore most of the existing literature—previous writing on the subject has generally focused on the early years of the migration...

...He implicitly rejects William Julius Wilson's notion that the progress of the ghetto poor should be tied to a broadening of social entitlement for all Americans, and he makes no attempt to grapple with the question of how an increasingly suburban white working class can be convinced that racial justice should be part of its agenda...

...Yet one also senses in The Promised Land a consensus builder's fear of ideology or, for that matter, of complexity...

...Lemann certainly deserves credit for reminding us of the crucial role migration has played in shaping contemporary American race relations...

...It would be a greater service, however, if his articulateness and passion were matched by the sort of intellectual discipline and political savvy that the struggle for racial justice now requires...

...This notion came under instant attack, not surprisingly, as there is considerable evidence that refutes it...

...Lemann documents how, over the course of several decades, the declining industrial economy, overcrowding, misguided public policy, and rising crime devastated many black Chicago neighborhoods...

...Upon reflection, however, I think that there is something disturbingly elitist about Lemann's apolitical approach to politics...

...The Promised Land now not only contributes to the growing literature on poverty, but may come to define the issue...

...For another, Lemann did not then and does not now offer any real evidence that former sharecroppers were more likely than other blacks to end up in the "underclass...

...For one thing, studies consistently show that black poverty, rather than being associated with an extension of southern folkways, tends to increase with time in the North...

...As a result, while the book is persuasive in calling attention to the severity of the problems of poverty, it offers little more than a few hints as to how these problems might be addressed...

...It is, in some ways, a very good book...

...He does not generally make any attempt to adjust his position in light of these findings or, for that matter, to refute work inconsistent with his own...

...This admirable sentiment is unfortunately not accompanied by any notion of how this can be done...

...As a result, The Promised Land is best when at its most journalistic...

...It becomes possible, he argues, only when liberals and their black allies are able to "bring a recalcitrant public around to their views...

...Despite his critique of many aspects of the War on Poverty, one senses a nostalgia for a time when the "best and the brightest," unhindered by divisive ideology or bothersome facts, were ready to roll up their sleeves and get down to the business of remaking America...

...Instead, he simply moves on to make another point, seemingly unaware of any contradiction...

...It's probably unfair, but I would like Nicholas Lemann's account of the causes and consequences of the great black migration better if it were not so widely and extravagantly praised...

...Finally, although it is true that the cultural life of black Chicago is deeply intertwined with the regional culture of Mississippi, many of the problems of Chicago's socially isolated ghetto poor are equally present in cities like New York and Boston, where few Mississippians have moved and where most of the black migrants hail from regions in which sharecropping was far less common...

...Yet as recently as 1940 more than threefourths of African Americans still lived in the South, half of them in the rural South...

...In addition, while Lemann generally avoids taking specific theoretical stands about the causes of persistent poverty, his work is framed by an implicit bias in favor of cultural rather than structural explanations...

...Instead, Lemann advocates a vaguely defined assault on the specific problems of the black poor...

...Lemann, by contrast, looks at the much larger migrant wave after 1940, when the attraction of the North had already become less important than the economic shifts (principally the mechanization of agriculture) pushing people out of the South...

...In the current work Lemann acknowledges some of this evidence...

...He is also right in noting how academic research often obscures the profound moral issues that poverty raises...

...The stories he tells are so intriguing that one is initially inclined to forgive these lapses...

...Yet while the narrative style of The Promised Land accounts for much of the book's appeal, it is also one of its weaknesses...

...Yet the reception of the book all across the political spectrum and its long stay on the best-seller lists have made it something more...