Beyond Civil Rights

The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy

Daniel Geary

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812223910
• eBook ISBN: 9780812291520
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Shortly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored a government report titled The Negro Family: A Case for National Action that captured the attention of President Lyndon Johnson. Responding to the demands of African American activists that the United States go beyond civil rights to secure economic justice, Moynihan thought his analysis of black families highlighted socioeconomic inequality. However, the report's central argument that poor families headed by single mothers inhibited African American progress touched off a heated controversy. The long-running dispute over Moynihan's conclusions changed how Americans talk about race, the family, and poverty.Fifty years after its publication, the Moynihan Report remains a touchstone in contemporary racial politics, cited by President Barack Obama and Congressman Paul Ryan among others. Beyond Civil Rights offers the definitive history of the Moynihan Report controversy. Focusing on competing interpretations of the report from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, Geary demonstrates its significance for liberals, conservatives, neoconservatives, civil rights leaders, Black Power activists, and feminists. He also illustrates the pitfalls of discussing racial inequality primarily in terms of family structure. Beyond Civil Rights captures a watershed moment in American history that reveals the roots of current political divisions and the stakes of a public debate that has extended for decades.

CHAPTER 1

The Liberal Mindset

Could anyone have imagined that Daniel Patrick Moynihan would make his name with a report about black families? He had no long-standing interest in the subject. He was not an acknowledged expert on race; paradoxically, writing the report made him one. He worked for the U.S. Department of Labor, an agency hardly associated with research on race or the family.

Until the civil rights movement forced African American inequality onto the national agenda, it was not a central issue for Moynihan or many other Northern liberals. Yet, when the civil rights movement’s cresting tide pushed policy-makers to address racial inequality, Moynihan felt he understood the issue in ways other Johnson officials did not. His childhood experience of economic insecurity was unusual in elite policy-making circles. Moynihan felt his “personal history” of being raised in a “broken family” with economic hardship allowed him to understand African Americans who came from “mostly the same world” as he did.¹ His Catholicism further led him to see economic inequality as a social injustice and prompted his belief that “family interests were perhaps the central objective . . . of social policy.”² Moynihan’s particularly strong commitment to the male breadwinner family model led him to view its absence as a crucial marker of social inequality.

The Moynihan Report reflected its author’s distinctive perspective. It also embodied a broader liberal mindset. Moynihan brought to the report typical postwar liberal assumptions about employment, family, individual achievement, social expertise, and poverty. The report’s heavy use of statistics suggested a technocratic faith in the ability of elites to engineer solutions to social problems. The major problem identified—the lack of African American male breadwinners—pointed to a pervasive liberal commitment to providing men a family wage so that mothers of young children could avoid wage labor. This gender ideal was integral, not incidental, to mid-century liberalism.

While other liberals shared Moynihan’s concern with poverty, Moynihan feared that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty lacked the jobs and income redistribution programs needed to truly combat economic inequality. By writing his report, Moynihan sought to capitalize on the rising political salience of African American inequality to persuade Johnson to expand his antipoverty policies. However, Moynihan’s concern with economic inequality clashed with another intellectual strand present in the report: the framework of race relations he developed working with influential sociologist Nathan Glazer on Beyond the Melting Pot that suggested that American ethnic groups’ success owed to deeply rooted cultural institutions such as family structure. Here deviation from the nuclear family norm was a cause of economic inequality rather than an effect, casting doubt on whether government action could improve African Americans’ economic standing and implying instead the need for racial self-help. The tension between this cultural explanation for racial inequality and Moynihan’s desire to extend the family wage to African Americans produced the report’s inherent ambiguity.

Moynihan of the Moynihan Report

“I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. My father was a drunk. I know what this life is like.” So Moynihan told the New York Times shortly after controversy over his report exploded.³ Moynihan claimed that his personal background offered him insight into lower-class African American families that civil rights leaders from secure middle-class families lacked. Sympathetic press accounts related certain facts of Moynihan’s background to enhance his intellectual authority on African American families: he had risen out of poverty, been raised by a single mother, and understood discrimination as an Irish Catholic. According to Life, “Moynihan knows firsthand about poverty, minority groups, and broken families. His grandfather was an Irish immigrant, and his father left their New York City home when Pat was a boy.” Moynihan’s early years were often fitted into a classic American rags-to-riches tale of how he “pulled himself out of the ghetto.”⁴ The New York Times Magazine, for example, profiled “Moynihan of the Moynihan Report” in a 1966 article. “Some contemporary Horatio Alger,” it declared, “could scarcely have concocted a more classic up-from-poverty story than that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.” The article recounted his father’s abandonment of his mother and their children; moves with his family to “every slum neighborhood in Manhattan”; shining shoes as a boy in Times Square; and college matriculation after Moynihan realized that university education was not just for (in his words) “sissy rich kids.” To affirm comparisons between Moynihan and poor African Americans, the newspaper ran a photograph alongside its profile of Moynihan. It depicted a black shoeshine boy working at the corner of Forty-Third and Broadway where, it claimed, “Moynihan [once] plied the same trade.”⁵

Press profiles gave the misimpression that Moynihan was raised in poverty, when in fact he hailed from a comfortably middle-class family that fell on hard times during the final years of the Great Depression. Daniel Patrick, best known as “Pat,” was born on March 16, 1927, to Margaret and John Moynihan. John was the son of an Irish immigrant from County Kerry, but Margaret came from a German American Protestant family. She converted to Catholicism to marry John. Throughout his life, Pat accentuated his Irish identity and barely mentioned his German roots. For he and other whites of his generation, ethnic identity was partly a matter of choice; not so for African Americans, for whom racial identity was ascribed. Though Moynihan did help his mother run a bar in the rough Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1940s, he was not raised there, as the New York Times reported. In fact, shortly after Moynihan’s birth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the family settled in a pleasant New Jersey suburb when John Moynihan took a position as an advertising writer in New York City. The public image of Moynihan forged during the controversy over The Negro Family elided such details and falsely equated his experience to those of poor African Americans.

Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Moynihan’s concern for African American families emerged from his traumatic childhood experience of economic and family insecurity. One can trace the report’s focus on “family instability” to the pivotal event of Moynihan’s childhood: his father, an alcoholic, abandoned his family in 1937. Pat never saw him again. Without the father’s income, the family fell out of the middle class. Moving to successively poorer areas in New York City, Moynihan and his brother shined shoes to earn money. Moynihan transferred from parochial school to public school. This experience of economic decline later enabled Moynihan to empathize with African Americans whose families, he claimed, were broken up by poverty. Ironically, the policy he advocated in The Negro Family—creating jobs so that men could serve as breadwinners—would not have helped his family in the late 1930s. Moynihan experienced economic insecurity because his family depended so much on his father’s income that his absence was catastrophic.⁶

How Moynihan and his family recovered from this trauma left him with an enduring faith in the ability of government to offer possibilities for social advancement. As Moynihan recalled in 1964, “the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was the Second World War.”⁷ The war lifted the nation out of the Great Depression and the Moynihan family out of poverty. Margaret Moynihan, after a brief and unsuccessful second marriage motivated by the need to find another male provider, found work as a chief nurse in a war production plant. She was one of millions of American women who landed well-paid jobs during the war. After graduating first in his high school class in 1942, Pat worked on the docks as a stevedore. He attended City College of New York for a year before enlisting in naval officer training school in March 1944. As Moynihan recollected, he owed his college education to the fact that “the U.S. Navy needed officers and was willing to pay to educate them.”⁸ He received his B.N.S. in 1946 from Tufts University through the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. Moynihan served actively in the navy until 1947 and in the reserves for several years thereafter; he achieved the rank of lieutenant. His experience left him certain that military service could advance the opportunities of young men.

Moynihan’s support for the liberal welfare state tracked national support for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during a foundational period for twentieth-century American liberalism. His demographic characteristics perfectly embodied the New Deal coalition: urban, Catholic, ethnic, and economically insecure. At age ten, Moynihan distributed pamphlets for Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection. Roosevelt campaigned that year on the success of his New Deal reforms, which had installed new financial regulations, established a social security system of old age pensions and unemployment insurance, and provided jobs for unemployed Americans through public works programs. He targeted the nation’s financial elites who resisted his programs as “economic royalists” and won in a landslide. From an early age, Moynihan strongly backed labor unions, whose membership grew rapidly during the years of his adolescence and which provided crucial political support for New Deal reforms. He later recalled that for a young man of his generation “the most attractive, personally satisfying, and useful job he could hold would be to work for a union.”⁹ For a brief time as a young man, Moynihan was even attracted to socialist ideas that surpassed New Deal reforms. He later claimed to have voted for Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas.¹⁰ Moynihan’s high-school yearbook lampooned his political sentiments. In a feature that pretended to glimpse graduates’ future, a fortune-teller prophesied: “Now I see Pat Moynihan. He is president of a bank. He is cussing out the labor unions and the durn radicals.”¹¹

Moynihan’s experiences after leaving the navy affirmed his belief in liberal government programs. In addition to offering favorable home and business loans, the 1944 GI Bill provided veterans such as Moynihan with free university educations. After finishing his B.A. in 1948, he pursued a Ph.D. at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where students trained primarily for careers in government. In 1950, Moynihan received a Fulbright grant to study at the London School of Economics. He told a friend that between his GI Bill benefits and the Fulbright grant, he would make about 21 British pounds a week, three times the average weekly earnings of a British worker. The opportunity, he knew, was “unbelievably good.”¹² Moynihan’s time in England deepened his commitment to liberal welfare policies, which he saw executed on a broader scale than in the United States. He praised the British Labour Party for constructing a substantial public welfare system following the war. For example, it established the National Health Service to provide free universal health care. Moynihan reported to an American correspondent, “I have been hugely impressed by the socialist movement [which] has brought real democracy to the English people.”¹³

Though Moynihan hoped to bolster the U.S. welfare state, his ambitions were tempered by his embrace of the postwar U.S. social order from which he had received tangible benefits. Despite his youthful flirtation with socialism, Moynihan disliked left-wing radicalism and strongly supported the Cold War fight against Communism. While in England, he defended the American war effort in Korea in an exchange with venerable British socialist G. D. H. Cole, a leader of the Labour Party’s left wing. In a 1951 letter to the socialist magazine New Statesman and Nation, Moynihan asserted the fundamentally positive role of American influence in the world, ridiculing Cole’s “assumption that the United States offers no more hope to the world than does Soviet Russia.”¹⁴

Moynihan’s sentiments reflected Cold War liberalism’s shift to the center. In 1948, New Dealer Henry Wallace ran a third-party campaign to challenge incumbent president Harry Truman and his Cold War policies. A group of Cold War liberals successfully rallied to reelect Truman and discredit Wallace, forming the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which became a key intellectual organ of postwar liberalism. Moynihan would become a member. ADA leader Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., redefined liberalism as a “vital center.” While committed to further reforms in the New Deal tradition, ADA liberals disassociated themselves from more radical policies earlier entertained by New Dealers who challenged corporate capitalism more directly. The postwar Red Scare placed intense pressure on left-leaning liberals and Cold War critics to distance themselves from any positions that reeked of radicalism.¹⁵

Moynihan’s doctoral dissertation, which he initially came to England to research, reflected his embrace of this “vital center” liberalism. Temperamentally, Moynihan proved better suited to politics and intellectual journalism than to traditional academic scholarship. He seems to have lost interest in his dissertation, not completing it until 1960. Friends reported finding that note cards in Moynihan’s dissertation file contained cocktail recipes. Nevertheless, his thesis, a dry historical account with only a few rhetorical flourishes that later characterized Moynihan’s writing style, offers insight into the development of his liberal mindset.¹⁶ Moynihan traced American involvement with the International Labour Organization (ILO), a social reform organization that promoted international labor standards. His celebration of the ILO reflected his advocacy not only of liberal internationalist institutions such as the United Nations, of which the ILO was a forerunner, but also of a regulated form of capitalism: “In essence the idea of international labor legislation is one of reform as against revolution. It proceeds from the assumption of the legitimacy of capitalist concern with competition.”¹⁷

Having lost interest in his academic work, Moynihan became involved in New York state politics after returning to the United States in 1953. After serving in Averill Harriman’s 1954 campaign for the New York governorship, Moynihan joined his administration, eventually becoming Harriman’s executive secretary. Moynihan married one of Harriman’s aides, Elizabeth Brennan, in 1955. They had three children together. Moynihan’s pride in his ability to provide for his family, as his own father had failed to do, likely led him to sympathize with African American men unable to do the same.

When Harriman lost his bid for reelection in 1958, Moynihan was appointed assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.¹⁸ There he began writing for major journals of opinio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. Crisis of Equality
• Chapter 1. The Liberal Mindset
• Chapter 2. Negro Equality—Dream or Delusion?
• Chapter 3. The New Racism
• Chapter 4. The Death of White Sociology
• Chapter 5. Feminism and the Nuclear Family Norm
• Chapter 6. From National Action to Benign Neglect
• Epilogue. A Mixed Legacy
• Notes
• Archival Collections Consulted
• Index
• Acknowledgments