Blaming the Poor

Susan D. Greenbaum

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813574158
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1965, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—then a high-ranking official in the Department of Labor—sparked a firestorm when he released his report “The Negro Family, ” which came to be regarded by both supporters and detractors as an indictment of African American culture. Blaming the Poor examines the regrettably durable impact of the Moynihan Report for race relations and social policy in America, challenging the humiliating image the report cast on poor black families and its misleading explanation of the causes of poverty.   A leading authority on poverty and racism in the United States, Susan D. Greenbaum dismantles Moynihan’s main thesis—that the so called matriarchal structure of the African American family “feminized” black men, making them inadequate workers and absent fathers, and resulting in what he called a tangle of pathology that led to a host of ills, from teen pregnancy to adult crime. Drawing on extensive scholarship, Greenbaum highlights the flaws in Moynihan’s analysis. She reveals how his questionable ideas have been used to redirect blame for substandard schools, low wages, and the scarcity of jobs away from the societal forces that cause these problems, while simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes about African Americans. Greenbaum also critiques current policy issues that are directly affected by the tangle of pathology mindset—the demonization and destruction of public housing; the criminalization of black youth; and the continued humiliation of the poor by entrepreneurs who become rich consulting to teachers, non-profits, and social service personnel.     A half century later, Moynihan’s thesis remains for many a convenient justification for punitive measures and stingy indifference to the poor. Blaming the Poor debunks this infamous thesis, proposing instead more productive and humane policies to address the enormous problems facing us today.  

1

Introduction

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.

—D. P. Moynihan, “A Family Policy for the Nation,” America, Sept. 18, 1965

On August 11, 1965, the predominantly African American Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded in violence that lasted three days, claiming thirty-four lives and injuring more than one thousand people. Coincidentally, a publication of the US Department of Labor report titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action had just been leaked to the press.1 Written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary for policy planning and research in the Department of Labor, the report set off a flurry of news articles that blamed the violence in Watts on defects in African American families and culture. Moynihan’s contribution to the debate on civil rights, race, and poverty came at a very pregnant moment—on the exact date that the Voting Rights Act was finally passed, and in the wake of a fateful decision to greatly expand the War in Vietnam at the expense of the War on Poverty. This report and the debate it ignited arguably helped alter the direction of social justice in the United States, not in a good way.

This book examines the regrettably durable impact of Moynihan’s legacy for race relations and social policy in the US, with an emphasis on the humiliating image the report cast of poor black families and the misleading explanation for where poverty comes from. In particular, the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan alluded to in the above quotation, and spelled out at length in his report, still is considered by many politicians and policy researchers to be the root cause of poverty. This idea redirects blame for substandard schools, low wages, and scarcity of jobs away from the structural forces that caused these problems while simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes about African American families. His association between female-headed families and violent black males seemingly confirmed the widespread belief that black men are raised to be dangerous.

In early 1964 President Lyndon Johnson had fully embraced the Civil Rights movement and declared war on poverty in the United States. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was created in August 1964, one month after passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act. A raft of important new social programs—Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, Legal Services—had been put into place. In the background, however, the guns of war were growing louder, and a succession of black urban uprisings were threatening popular support for the Civil Rights movement. Moynihan’s report reflected the liberal end of a growing backlash against increasingly belligerent protest and unease with a revolution against traditional thinking about racial differences and the alleged deficiencies of poor people. Framed as a policy document to help uplift poor black families and correct the effects of past discrimination, it came to be regarded by both supporters and detractors as an indictment of African American culture, a pessimistic warning that legal rights and safety net programs would not be enough.

The report was seventy-eight pages of somewhat unconventional prose and a blizzard of charts, tables, and graphs. It was assembled fairly hastily in the winter and early spring of 1965. The introduction recounted in florid language the moral case for African American equality contrasted with the political realities of racist resistance. In the preface, the author explained that despite political progress, the economic condition of black people in the United States was actually getting worse. He then got right to the heart of his argument: “The fundamental problem . . . is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. . . . So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.”

It was unguarded language for a government report and a peculiar topic to come from the Labor Department, which was nominally in charge of employment, not family well-being. There was indirect attention to the problems of employment discrimination and the high rate of black male unemployment, but this was presented within the context of what were described as fragile families. The connection between joblessness and black family dissolution was demonstrated with reference to writing by the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier about adjustment problems of southern migrants in northern cities, supplemented with census data on the correspondence between rates of unemployment and divorce and other correlated conditions. Although Moynihan did assert that joblessness was the major problem facing African Americans, his focus was not on measures to expand employment, but on the psychological effects of male unemployment. A man without a job was not a breadwinner, and his masculinity was undermined by the inability to fulfill that vital role. That conundrum sowed the seed of what he labeled a tangle of pathology, encapsulating all the alleged ills of lower-class African American culture—teen pregnancy, unmarried parenthood, absent fathers, “matriarchal” dominance of family life, educational failure, juvenile delinquency, and adult crime.2 Boys raised in such families set their feet early on a path to failure as workers and as fathers, in a cycle that continued across generations.

Moynihan described these conditions as a self-perpetuating force that was immune to normal social intervention. Although he conceded that correlations between female-headed families and poverty, “illegitimacy,” crime, school dropout rates, and other social problems could not distinguish cause from effect, he claimed he had found a single statistic that made his case. During the early years of the 1960s, black male unemployment declined and welfare enrollment by black women increased. Popularly known as “Moynihan’s scissors,” this inverse correlation was deemed to offer proof that jobs alone would not cure dependency on welfare. He claimed that this discovery established that self-perpetuation of poverty already had taken hold.3 Thus his conviction that the only path to true equality lay in somehow fixing the deficient family structure of African Americans. “Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural dislocations in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.”4

Moynihan attributed what he called “matriarchal” tendencies among African Americans to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. A long history, possibly even traceable to Africa, was responsible for this flaw in the social structure of African Americans and was most prevalent among those who were poor. Some had managed to assimilate conventional values favoring nuclear families, and they formed the emerging black middle class; but for the struggling masses, poverty and family “disorganization” were destined to be entwined. Unlike other minorities who suffered from discrimination, such as Jews who were ultimately able to find success in the American economy, African Americans appeared to be doomed to failure by internal flaws in their ethnic social structure.

The background and context of Moynihan’s thinking about these matters is important. He was not trained as a social scientist or a researcher. Although he had finished college and earned an MA, it was many years earlier (1949). He had begun, but long postponed, work on a PhD. His entree into academics came by way of his involvement with the political career of Averell Harriman, then governor of New York. When Harriman lost his bid for reelection in 1958, Moynihan was commissioned to write the history of his administration, which included a faculty position at Syracuse University. While there he completed his PhD in International Relations from Tufts in 1961. His dissertation concerned international labor organizations. This topic later formed the basis for his appointment in 1963 in the Department of Labor, during the Kennedy administration, on whose campaign he had worked. Moynihan was a prolific writer who authored a series of magazine articles for the Reporter, edited by Irving Kristol. The Reporter was a widely circulated, mostly liberal, publication. Moynihan’s articles about transportation and automobile safety brought both praise and notice. Kristol, who several years later would become disenchanted with liberal ideas and ultimately come to be known as the “godfather of neoconservatism,” introduced him to Nathan Glazer, a well-known sociologist who was writing a book about ethnicity in New York.

Glazer commissioned Moynihan to write a chapter on the Irish, and he also wrote much of the conclusion, earning credit as second author.5 Beyond the Melting Pot drew instant acclaim. It won the 1964 Anisfeld-Wolf Award in Race Relations and was trumpeted as a new direction in the study of race and ethnicity. The book contained chapters on each of the major ethnic groups in New York City—“the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish.” It was designed both to describe and compare the origins and accomplishments of these various groups. Glazer wrote all the group chapters, except for the one on the Irish, and Moynihan wrote most of the final chapter. The substance of the descriptions was about culture and history, and the varying achievements of groups who shared the same political and geographic landscape. Comparisons were drawn that can only be described as invidious. The authors offered a modified apology for what they feared might be regarded as “harsh” judgments, and wrote, “we ask understanding of those who will be offended.”6 Although this book was widely cited and praised when it came out, it has not weathered the test of time. The chapters on African Americans and Puerto Ricans are mainly negative, containing assertions that were arguable at the time, and are even more contentious in light of contemporary scholarship. Family structure and educational attainment were major themes and points of comparison; Puerto Ricans and African Americans were found wanting in both aspects.

Involvement with this project established Moynihan’s credentials as an expert on race and urban problems, and his association with Glazer, whose chapter on “Negroes” strongly emphasized female-headed families and “broken homes,” surely helped shape Moynihan’s perspective on these issues. In April 1964, shortly after Beyond the Melting Pot came out, Moynihan was invited to attend a conference sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to plan a major study titled “The Negro in America.” He was one of seventeen scholars at this initial event to define the research agenda, not one of whom was black.7 As part of the Department of Labor, Moynihan emphasized the problems of unemployment and offered the idea that African Americans should receive special treatment by the government in overcoming the obstacles they faced in securing adequate jobs and wages. This suggestion failed to resonate with others in attendance, many of whom feared it might stir a backlash or appear patronizing. An unnamed professor offered the following concern: “Thus we could be presented as the white liberals of the American Academy who are engaged in rationalizing not the status quo, but the future status [quo].” The white liberals in attendance, however, were not shy about discussing problems of black families that presumably led to assorted collective failures. This incident was cited by Lee Rainwater and William Yancey in their compendium on the Moynihan Report and the controversy surrounding it, where they also surmised that this conference, following so soon after Moynihan’s involvement with the Melting Pot, reinforced his emergent assessment that family structure was the central problem hindering African American progress. They added that Moynihan himself had grown up in a fatherless household, speculating that he could personally relate to problems caused by this condition.8

Such was the atmosphere surrounding the initiation of the report Moynihan designed the following winter, a turbulent time when President Kennedy had been assassinated and his successor (LBJ) was promising an aggressive stance on equal rights and economic justice. Two factors in the public imagination, and the halls of academia, during that period heightened attention to the role of family structure in explaining poverty.

First was a controversy already in motion over the “culture of poverty.” Oscar Lewis, a well-known Marxist anthropologist, had published articles and monographs about Mexican peasants and impoverished Puerto Ricans that described distinctive beliefs, customs, and values he said were nurtured by poverty and passed from parents to children in the same fashion as more functional types of enculturation among other classes. Michael Harrington’s very popular book on stubborn pockets of poverty in the midst of growing prosperity, The Other America, picked up on Lewis’s slogan and offered a more qualified observation that dysfunctional ways of life in poor communities impeded members from seeking opportunities or envisioning possibilities for self-improvement. The crucible of culture is the family, and the upbringing of poor children was increasingly the focus of explanations for the tenacity of their unfortunate circumstances.9

Freudian-influenced psychology was another factor that amplified the importance attached to family structure during this period. Two psychologists at the Academy of Arts and Sciences conference (Erik Erikson and Thomas Pettigrew) articulated the importance of distorted gender roles and developmental factors in explaining what they considered were ineffective black responses to societal prejudice. The notion of the strong father figure as critical to the development of children, especially males, was firmly ensconced in both academic and popular thought of that era. The majority of middle-class wives did not work outside the home, a pattern that was deemed important for the proper socialization of children. Departures from legally married nuclear families with clearly defined gender roles were viewed as deviant and potentially destructive. Additionally, most recognized African American scholars also decried the disparate pattern of female-headed households and nonmarital child rearing in low-income black communities. In addition to Frazier, who was mentioned earlier, Kenneth Clark, St. Clair Drake, and even W.E.B. Du Bois had written about this issue and the problems they attributed to it.10 So, as the young Pat Moynihan formulated his plan to write a groundbreaking policy study about the cycle of black poverty, he surely felt he was standing on solid ground.

However, when the report came out, initially as a leak to newspaper columnists, it ignited a firestorm. Based largely on the report, Newsweek prominently featured a four-page article about troubled black families only days before the outbreak of the August 11 Watts uprising. Less than a week after Watts, the well-connected columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak wrote a fairly lurid piece about the report in the Wall Street Journal, for the first time labeling it the “Moynihan Report.” They characterized it as “the much-suppressed, much leaked Labor Department document which strips away the usual equivocations and exposes the ugly truth about the big-city Negro’s plight.”11 According to James Patterson in his 2010 book about the report, in singling out the usually nameless bureaucrat who wrote it (Moynihan’s name was in the headline), Evans and Novak made him “something of a household name.”12 They also stated that Moynihan was motivated directly by urban riots: “The report stems from the big city Negro riots last summer [1964]. The violence was deeply disturbing to Daniel P. (Pat) Moynihan, the liberal intellectual and politician who was then Assistant Secretary of Labor (he resigned last month to run for president of the New York City Council).”13

Continuing coverage of Watts and an outpouring of commentators’ rhetoric about the dangers it revealed further elevated Moynihan’s reputation as the author of a supposedly scientific justification for racist ideas about the uprising. Meanwhile, as the article indicated, in what might be construed as a plug, Moynihan had resigned from the Labor Department to run for a seat on the New York City Council. He lost in the primary, however, possibly due to the negative publicity that followed not long after he entered. Although he was not elected, he was offered an academic post at Wesleyan University, where he taught a seminar on “racial issues.”

As Moynihan settled into his new faculty post and began a speaking tour based on his presumed expertise as a scholar of racial matters, an explosion of both criticism and praise surrounded him. Through the month of August, news coverage of the report continued to build, always connected to Watts and the notion that African Americans were a pathological group. A popular quote from the report was repeatedly printed in these pieces: “The very essence of the male animal from the bantam rooster to the four-star general is to strut. Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The ‘sa...