Letting Sleeping Dragons Lie
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
Letting Sleeping Dragons Lie THE MOYNIHAN REPORT AND THE POLITICS OF CONTROVERSY By Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey MIT Press. 493 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Author of the...
...You could pay your money and take your choice," note the authors: "The President sought to encourage Negroes to pull up their socks and stop asking the government for so much money or he was building toward massive Federal programs . . . dealing with the social and economic plight of Negro citizens...
...They have interviewed 61 people "who seem to be the main participants in the controversy...
...Therefore, he was calling a special White House conference of scholars and experts to find a way to help American Negroes "move beyond opportunity to achievement...
...Whatever the reasons, the report appeared to have carried the day...
...In the Howard University speech, the authors remind us, liberty had been nearly achieved and the next struggle would be for equality...
...Rainwater and Yancey have fashioned a kind of socio-epic...
...On the whole this is good "instant history," and it deserves retelling, if only because it was so incredibly garbled the first time...
...If we grant all this, then we must seriously entertain the possibility, sad as it seems, that our civil rights triumphs are really hollow trophies...
...Citing various statistics on non-white illegitimate births, divorce rates, unemployment and welfare caseloads, Moynihan sought to prove that three centuries of pain had brought many low-income Negro families to the brink of ruin...
...They succeeded handsomely...
...Fathers without jobs wandered off...
...I have been reliably informed that no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists"—contains a measure of truth...
...The dialogue at the White House, one gathers, was distinctly upbeat...
...As a result, and with a hint of White House complicity, they quashed it...
...The President noted that the Negro was winning his freedom, but "freedom is not enough...
...Outside the winds will howl and the shutters will bang, to remind the children that mysterious forces, beyond the grace of reason, are astir in the night...
...In the end, the King turns his back on our hero and decides to let sleeping dragons lie...
...He said many Negroes were losing ground every day "in the battle for true equality," and he attributed his setback, by and large, to "the breakdown of the Negro family structure...
...Rainwater and Yancey think "the very positive feedback" that Moynihan got from White House officials was based on solid considerations...
...But Moynihan made it clear that the sins were those of a white society...
...He was escalating his rhetoric but not his program...
...The writers tell the story faithfully, if somewhat repetitiously...
...The report," they write, "gave the Administration...
...One understands that he may have meant well, but one expects him to recant just the same...
...Moynihan was using unpleasant examples commonly associated with racist propaganda: delinquency, illegitimacy and welfare...
...The President's Howard University speech, on June 4, 1965, was really a distillation of its main points...
...Any meaningful program to strengthen low-income Negro families would have to concentrate on more jobs, better housing and reforming the nation's welfare machinery which, through its program of Aid for Dependent Children, appeared to be perpetuating the very weaknesses Moynihan decried...
...The literature table was laden with pamphlets and papers rebutting the Moynihan report...
...To Fulfill These Rights" was to be both the theme and title of the conference...
...In other words, the Administration wished to lead, not follow, and the Moynihan report seemed to be just the ticket...
...In the beginning it was a confidential government document, primarily for White House consumption...
...My own national sampling of opinion, largely confined to fellow airplane passengers and strangers in hotel bars, confirms this...
...Moreover, many of them remain convinced—after more than a decade of putative soul-searching—that most Negroes are lazy, unintelligent and inclined to riot...
...First the welfare establishment struck back?mostly through "conversation, rumors and verbal analysis communicated where it would do the most good...
...They are nice to have around, but they do not lead to Negro equality...
...One interpretation stressed the importance of big, new Federal programs to strengthen Negro families...
...They sing of arms and the Moyni-han, wherein an intrepid reformer with friends at court goes forth to slay a dragon (Negro family instability), only to learn that the dragon has friends, too...
...With achievements like that, who needs failures...
...They claimed the report was unscientific...
...The other minimized the Federal responsibility and emphasized, of all things, Negro self-help...
...E. Franklin Frazier said most of it 30 years ago (Moynihan credits him), and Whitney Young, with his domestic Marshall Plan for the poor, has been saying something similar right along...
...Pat, I think you've got it," exclaimed one White House official...
...Had Moynihan buried his notions in a novel or written them from the point of view, let us say, of a man-child in Harlem, he would doubtless have been hailed as a sensitive chronicler of the lower depths...
...The report itself was not in evidence...
...It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who unintentionally proved it...
...After that, according to Rainwater and Yancey, it was downhill all the way...
...Now, by year's end, the quest for equality had also been achieved, leaving us to meet the challenge of true fraternity...
...a specific means to measure the effectiveness of existing or new programs aimed at the pathologies of the urban slums...
...Moynihan's message never did reach the general public...
...It might help them to shed their dear delusions of race...
...Berl Bernhard's quip to civil rights leaders who were meeting at the White House in the fall of 1965...
...Moynihan never recanted, and he was more or less drummed out of the corps at the White House civil rights planning conference that fall and at the big White House conference?To Fulfill These Rights" —the following spring...
...Later, as Rainwater and Yancey make clear, the White House leaked parts of it in a way that guaranteed general confusion...
...And now the President seemed to be telling Negroes to clean up their own mess...
...If so, a really thorough airing of the Moynihan report might interest them...
...One could understand why...
...The people who attended these conferences came to bury Moynihan, not to praise him...
...Maybe so, but the reader gets a quite different impression—namely, that the White House was looking more for a gimmick than a solution...
...And they have had the good sense to reprint all pertinent documents, including the Moynihan report and President Johnson's Howard University speech, which was largely based on the report and which Moynihan helped to write...
...That is something like a Russian writer being accused by Pravda of espousing a subtle capitalism...
...And since, in our society, the family unit was held to be the main source of all blessings—spiritual as well as financial—it followed that millions of Negroes were condemned to permanent deprivation...
...The single most important social fact of the United States," Moynihan wrote, was the "massive deterioration" of Negro society and its institutions...
...The press meanwhile, in summarizing the report, usually compounded the confusion by omitting Moynihan's causal connection between white brutality and Negro inequality...
...With ill-concealed bitterness, Rainwater and Yancey quote a St...
...What we need are not more empty chalices of liberty but a solid, massive, Federally sponsored campaign to put Negro families together again...
...By the time the full report was made public, nearly everyone in the civil rights establishment had already concluded it was a menace to the cause...
...In short, their suffering had rendered them powerless to seize the new day of freedom which civil rights victories had presumably inaugurated...
...Actually, as Rainwater and Yancey observe, there was little that was new in the Moynihan report...
...In any case, the Administration bought the Moynihan thesis—rather casually, it seems, and without profound deliberation...
...Surely this was an Administration achievement of the first order: the struggle for equality had been won in only six months...
...The Administration apparently wanted to "leap-frog" the civil rights movement by coming up with a program which the movement had not yet thought of demanding...
...It was not long before civil rights leaders, who knew only what they read in the newspapers, began to hear in the still "secret" Moynihan report the sour echoes of racism...
...As it was, he was accused by civil rights leaders of promulgating "a subtle racism...
...Louis Post Dispatch report on the President's state of mind in December 1965: ". . . in the struggle for civil rights, the quest for liberty and equality has ended and the much more difficult search for true fraternity has started...
...And: "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family...
...It was Peter Finley Dunne who pointed out that "No wan cares to hear . . . th' short an' simple scandals iv th' poor...
...The report has never enjoyed such an airing...
...children without fathers gave up...
...Early in 1965 Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor, submitted to the White House a confidential report on "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action...
...mothers without husbands endured...
...I take these casual acquaint-ences, who speak with passable precision and prefer their martinis dry, to be roughly representative of upper-middle class America...
...Reviewed by RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Author of the forthcoming, "Something to Build On" This is a tale which sociologists will doubtless repeat to their children on dark, stormy nights...
...The Negro bore only the mark of oppression, not the mark of Cain...
...The notion that some Negroes were born damned was probably as close to a doctrine of original sin as a modern sociologist could get...
...Few of the travelers I chat with have heard about either Moynihan or his "famous" report...
...While Moynihan did not spell out the substance of such a campaign, the implications were plain enough...
...Soon after the fall planning conference it became pathetically plain that the President was no longer interested in "leap-frogging" the civil rights movement...
...That was the high point of Moynihan's efforts to influence national policy...
...In it he argued that many of the Negro poor were different from you and me: They not only had less money, they had more handicaps, and these handicaps effectively barred them from achieving real equality...
...At the same time White House sources were leaking contradictory interpretations of both the report and the President's speech...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 13
