Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday July 27, 2010
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FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle Over Black Family Life -- from LBJ to Obama
James T. Patterson
Basic
ISBN 978-0465013579
264 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Kevin Boyle
Shortly after the cataclysmic Watts riot in the summer of 1965, word spread around Washington that the Johnson administration had in its hands a secret report on the state of Black America. It had been written, said the rumors, by a little-known official in the Department of Labor: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And it was "a political atom bomb," according to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "which strips away usual equivocations and exposes the ugly truth about the big-city Negros' plight." What followed, as Brown University historian James T. Patterson makes clear in this fine-grained study, was one of the great tragedies of postwar policy making.
Moynihan drafted his report in hopes of advancing the nation's racial agenda. By early 1965 African-Americans had finally shattered the Southern system of segregation. But securing civil rights was only a first step, he argued. Now it was time to address the economic injustice that kept almost half the black population below the poverty line, to turn equality of opportunity into equality of outcome. To reach that extraordinary goal, though, the federal government had to confront what Moynihan believed to be the great plague sweeping through black ghettos: the disintegration of traditional family life. Much of the report was devoted to presenting the grim evidence of that disintegration: The divorce rate for blacks was 40 percent higher than for whites; a quarter of African-American babies were born to unwed mothers; 36 percent of black children were living with one parent or none at all. Unless those trends were reversed, Moynihan insisted -- and they could be with proper government action -- the cycle of poverty that trapped so many African-Americans would not be broken.
African-American scholars and activists had been making these same points for years. But in the aftermath of Watts, the message seemed to take on a more sinister tone. As soon as rumors of Moynihan's work began to circulate, liberals -- white and black -- condemned it as irresponsible, an attempt to blame African-Americans for their own victimization just as white fears of ghetto blacks were skyrocketing. Once the report was made public, the liberal attacks intensified: It was sensationalistic, simplistic, insensitive and inaccurate, critics charged, "one of those academic efforts to get our eyes off the prize," a model of "genteel racism." The backlash terrified the White House, which promptly disassociated itself from the report and its author. "I don't know what was in there," LBJ reportedly said, "but whatever it was, stay away from it."
The story of the Moynihan Report's demise has been told a number of times before. Patterson's key contribution is to show how the controversy that Moynihan triggered continued to warp public discussion of the concerns he raised long after the report itself had been filed away. The conflict so scarred liberals, Patterson says, that for almost 20 years they refused to acknowledge the crisis in inner-city family life. Only in the mid-1980s did they begin to change their minds, a transformation led by social scientists like William Julius Wilson, who wrote in his brilliant 1987 book, "The Truly Disadvantaged," that Moynihan's analysis had been "prophetic." But by then conservatives had taken control of the issue, trading on the image of the dysfunctional poor -- Ronald Reagan's famous "welfare queen" -- to hammer away at the liberal state Moynihan had intended to champion.
There the debate remains. In 1996 Bill Clinton signed a Republican-sponsored bill that abolished the nation's foremost welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, an action that enraged then-Sen. Moynihan. In the years since, there has been no attempt to revive the comprehensive governmental attack on poverty that had seemed possible in the mid-1960s. Instead, politicians across the ideological spectrum settle for lecturing poor African-Americans on their responsibilities. Even Barack Obama, who has written so movingly about the burdens of being raised in a fatherless home, seems more willing to criticize the poor for their behavior -- too many African-American fathers are "acting like boys instead of men," he said in a widely publicized speech in 2008 -- than to use federal power to address the tangle of problems that afflicts the inner cities.
Meanwhile, the situation Moynihan described 45 years ago has grown far, far worse. In 2008, 72 percent of African-American babies were born to single mothers, a rate almost one and a half times that of Hispanic-Americans, two and a half times that of non-Hispanic whites, and four and a half times that of Asian-Americans. If current patterns hold, half of those newborns will be raised in poverty. That's approximately a quarter-million African-American children, more than the entire population of Orlando, Fla., trapped on the bottom rung of the American social structure each year by the accident of birth. As Moynihan understood, that's an injustice that cannot be solved by jeremiads alone.
Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. He is the author of "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age," which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2004.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST: How Prosperity Evolves
Matt Ridley
Harper
ISBN 978-0061452055
438 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Wray Herbert
Early in this sprawling and ambitious volume, futurist Matt Ridley compares a modern computer mouse to a hand axe from the Middle Stone Age. Both artifacts have been designed to fit into a human hand, but there the similarities end. One is the product of a single person's ingenuity and labor -- and of a single substance -- while the other is a complex amalgam of materials and labor and strands of human cleverness. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse from scratch, yet it's as ordinary as that flint axe was half-a-million years ago. Ridley uses this example to illustrate the idea of the collective brain, a core concept in this rosy view of human progress. At some point in human pre-history, Ridley argues, people began to recognize the severe limitations of self-sufficiency. They started specializing their talents and efforts and swapping their services, creating a communal intellect that sparked innovation and progress. Indeed, that simple but profound shift in human sensibility has led to unprecedented prosperity, leisure, peace and liberty -- trends that will only accelerate in the century ahead.
At least that's what Ridley believes, and he bolsters this argument with an impressive tour of evolutionary biology, anthropology, economics, philosophy and world history. His intellectual heroes are Charles Darwin and Adam Smith. He believes that human society has evolved through natural selection -- not of genes but of ideas -- and through free trade in these ideas. Wherever he looks in the past, Ridley finds that unencumbered commerce has sparked innovation and betterment, while bureaucracy and regulation have stifled creativity and led to stagnation. He ranges nimbly from the excesses of the Ming Dynasty to Walmart merchandizing to the business strategies of sardine fishermen of southern India, and each lesson points him to exuberant optimism about where human society is heading.
If Ridley is sanguine about the future, he is equally as contemptuous of the past -- and of anyone who looks back with even a hint of nostalgia. To pick just one of many examples, the author at one point describes a family at the turn of the 19th century. The father is reading from the Bible while the mother prepares the evening's stew. The children are gathered around the hearth of their simple timber-framed house. Here is Ridley commenting on this peaceful scene: "Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow's milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window." Then Ridley pulls the old switcheroo, snidely mocking the idyllic tableau that he himself has just created. He grimly paints the reality of the earlier time -- the bronchitic coughs and pneumonia and smallpox that will cut short these lives; the foul-tasting water and gray, nutritionally bankrupt diet; the unwanted pregnancies and drunken husbands and hopeless lives of women; the isolated, uncultured lives; and so on and so on.
It's a cheap trick -- setting up a straw man just to tear it down. And it's a trick unworthy of this otherwise cogent and erudite social critic. Other, equally serious critics raise genuine concerns about the state of the planet and the unintended consequences of progress; they shouldn't be so glibly dismissed. And even yearning for a less hectic time is not as simple-minded as Ridley suggests. The urge to simplify is not the same as longing for raw sewage and wife-beating, and to twist it that way is insulting to serious-minded folks who would like a course correction. Ridley's snarkiness diminishes his analysis.
But a diminished masterful work is still a very good book. It's provocative to stake out such a position at this moment in history, with the world economy still reeling from the excesses of unregulated bankers. Ridley -- a former banker himself -- concedes as much, but he confidently predicts that market forces will pull the world out of the current crisis. He also believes these forces will meet any challenges brought about by global climate change. Climate pessimism is based on ignorance of future technologies, he argues. He is convinced that human ingenuity will cause new, planet-saving ideas to bubble up and avert climate disaster.
Maybe, maybe not. This rich analysis shouldn't properly be reviewed until 2110, because only then will we know if Ridley's confidence in human ingenuity is warranted. Futurists don't have a great track record, but let's hope that future generations will review this rose-tinted vision favorably.
Wray Herbert is the author of "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits," which will be published in September.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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