Liberals Could Not Take Action On Facts They Wouldn't Accept

The following are excerpts from Daniel P. Moynihan's analysis of the coming of age of the civil rights movement. The original appears in this month's COMMENTARY as "The President and the Negro: The Moment Lost."

The "bold beginning" was President Johnson's speech at Howard University on June 4, 1965. Johnson focused on the problem of Negro family disintegration; Moynihan calls the speech unprecedented for an American President. That speech was the result of Moynihan's report for the Labor Department, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

[The Howard speech] was a bold beginning. The speech seemed to attract more attention as time passed, and indeed is almost certain to find a place in the history of Presidential papers. Yet before half-a-year had passed the initiative was in ruins, and after a year-and-a-half it is settled that nothing whatever came of it.

Why? The reasons vary, Within weeks of the speech the President was caught up in the series of decisions that led to the large-scale introduction of ground forces into Vietnam later that summer. The address at Howard was in a sense his last peacetime speech. Thereafter, one would assume, his mind was increasingly pre-occupied with war in Asia. This did not entail any backtracking on the commitment "To Fulfill These Rights," but it did mean that the White House was not going to think up a program to do so. The energies of that tiny group at the apex of government were now directed else-where. If a program was to be forth-coming, it would have to be the work of the civil-rights movement, with whatever assistance it could master in government departments and universities. There was no reason to assume that the movement would fail in this, but in fact it did so: totally. The civil-rights movement had no program for going beyond the traditional and relatively easy issues of segregation and discrimination, and could not organize itself to produce one within the life of the 89th Congress. And in any event it did not do so because it allowed the question of developing a program to be superseded by a preposterous and fruitless controversy over a Department of Labor report which had been the original precipitant of the Howard speech.

The report was entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. It was written by me (I was then Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning and Research), with the assistance of Paul Barton and Ellen Broderick of the Policy Planning Staff. It was an internal document entirely: intended for the Secretary of Labor, the President, and the members of their staffs who would accept or reject its proposals and implications. A hundred copies were produced, but with on expectation of using even that few. The objectives of the report were twofold. First: to argue the need for seizing the opportunity of the moment to make the kind of commitment the President did in fact subsequently make. Second: to urge consideration of a new and different kind of policy, in addition to the more familiar ones--namely, a national family policy....

A series of recommendations was at first included, then left out. It would have got in the way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it. The program response was anyhow obvious enough: guaranteed full employment, birth control, adoption services, etc. But first of all a family allowance. The United States is the only industrial democracy in the world without a system of automatic income supplements for people living with their children. It is the simplest and possibly the most effective of all social-welfare arrangements, not least because its administration involves no judgments as to whether or not the recipients are worthy and entitled to assistance. If the children are alive, the allowance is paid. The United States has, of course, a family allowance for broken families, the AFDC program. It was past time we came to our senses on the subject, and stopped penalizing families with a father in the home. In that far-off spring of 1965 it appeared we might. It was absurd to think that such a precious moment of legislative opportunity would pass without some measure of income redistribution. A family allowance was surely the most promising candidate. It would have cost $5 to $10 billion per year according to the scheme adopted but we had the money. To have enacted it would have been a first step in the necessary movement from the "civil-rights" phase--the phase involving legal equality for Negroes--into the phase of "equality as a fact and as a result."

The report was sent to the President by Secretary of Labor Wirtz on May 4th, along with a nine-point program. On May 30th, the White House asked for a draft of a speech at Howard to put forward its thesis. On the night of June 3rd, the draft was re-written and after being read in the morning to Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Martin Luther King, was delivered without further ado that afternoon.

Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey have written a book about the con-controversy that ensured [The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, M.I.T. Press (forthcoming)] and much that here follows draws on them. Predictably, albeit unbeknown to the White House, trouble began within the permanent government, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls the civil-service bureaucracies. The report and the speech were wholly the product of the Presidential government. The welfare bureaucracy knew nothing of either, but as closer inquiry put the two together it was instantly perceived that the adequacy of the welfare bureaucracy's efforts and even the integrity of its view of events had been roundly condemned. The civil service is in an untenable position in this area: they know well enough the inadequacy of the programs they administer, and they ways in which Negroes are discriminated against even within the context of inadequate programs. Rainwater and Yancey write:

Over many years one of the most important ways of coping with this difficult situation has been to try to fuzz it over. Under the guise of civil libertarian reasoning, welfare organizations, both national and local, have tried to "wish away" race as a category, and this has had the latent function of concealing the extent to which discrimination continues. One of the early civil-rights activities of the Kennedy administration was to try to reverse this trend so that at least the government could be informed about the extent to which Negroes were disadvantaged. Having this "color blind" point of view built into their ideology, it was relatively easy for welfare personnel to find Moynihan's intransigent emphasis on color reactionary rather than radical.

Word began to flow forth from the recesses of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare that I was a "subtle racists," that the Negro people had been insulted, and further that the facts were wrong. The Children's Bureau awoke from its torpor to join this effort with singularly feline earnestness....

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It is plain enough that anyone seeking to discredit a political initiative based on as sensitive a subject as family structure, particularly that of Negroes, will have no difficulty devising arguments. For generations, Negroes have labored under the attribution of genetic inferiority; to raise the question of a "deviant subculture" is to invite the charge of raising the same old canard of innate differences in a more respectable guise. The subject of family introduces the subject of sex, in this instance Negro sex, an issue of intense and not always acknowledged sensitivity for all parties. The subject of broken families raises the specter of welfare cheating charges, an issue to which Newburgh, New York, gave its name, but which Governor Reagan has brought to a point of high political style. Further, Negro leaders and activists are apt themselves to come from the most solid, even rigid family backgrounds and probably have real difficulty pecreiving or acknowledging the realities of lower-class life. And so on, down a long line of reasons, any one of which is sufficient to explain why, even when the subject is broached, as in the Howard speech, it barely makes its way into the press accounts, being an issue, as the Economist noted at the time, that liberals prefer to "skirt."

The attack, as is usual in such cases, came from the outside, in the form of a paper prepared early in the fall by a member of CORE, William Ryan (not the Manhattan congressman) and published in the Nation. Ryan, a psychologist, was a consultant to the Massachusetts Committee on Children and Youth, whose head is a former director of the Children's Bureau. He charged the report with providing grounds for a massive white "cop out" by means of "a new form of subtle racism that might be termed 'Savage Discovery,' and seduces the reader into believing that it is not racism and discrimination but the weaknesses and defects of the Negro himself that account for the present status of inequality...." One recalls the character in a Disraeli novel said to have been "distinguished for ignorance, in that he had but one idea and that was wrong." Ryan's one idea was that I was obsessed with illegitimacy; I should never have raised the subject, he said, and moreover was inaccurate in my facts. He may have been right about the first allegation, but he was wrong about the statistics. For illegitimacy--which Myrdal judged the best measure of family stability--is a serious problem for Negroes (and increasingly for whites as well). A quarter of all non-white births and almost half of first births (and in one large city for which data are available, near to two-thirds of first births) are out of wedlock. The illegitimate first child (the non-white rate rose from 39.5 per cent in 1955, to 47.4 per cent in 1964) seems a particularly poignant problem, as it almost certainly decimates the bargaining power of a young Negro girl with the world around her. Illegitimacy is a painful subject, but one is surprised in this age of the Foul Speech Movement to find that it is also thought to be a dirty word....

The article was a blow to the Howard initiative, but not yet a deadly one. Roy Wilkins wrote to say he had not known the NAACP was reprinting it: "My opinion of the Ryan piece and of similiar reasoning is well known to my immediate associate here....It is a silly and sinister distortion to classify as racist this inevitable discussion of a recognized phase of our so-called race problem." Wilkins's attitude was shared by other Negro leaders. During the summer, Whitney Young, Jr. several times noted, properly, that he had for years been writing about just such questions. In October in a speech in Westchester, Martin Luther King, Jr. summed up a general position:

As public awareness [of the break-down of the Negro family] increases there will be dangers and opportunities. The opportunity will be to deal fully rather than haphazardly with the problem as a whole--to see it as a social catastrophe and meet it as other disasters are met, with an adequacy of resources. The danger will be that problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.

Just so. The Howard speech was playing for high stakes.

The fact was that the civil-rights movement was beginning to think in these terms....

In other circumstances, the Howard speech and even the report might have served to give direction to this developing attitude. Yet just the opposite, occurred. The reasons are no doubt many, but an important one seems to have been the war in Vietnam. The political Left that had been associated with and indeed was part of the movement now began turning on the President and all his works. Thus, Ramparts published an editorial written by Marcus Raskin, evincing great concern that I seemed to think more Negroes should be in the armed forces (I do); and indicting me further as a lackey of the "social welfare monopolicy--with its cop and spying attributes" that now proposed to force decent proletarian Negroes to live like the white bourgeoisie and to "torture" them with birth control. I had become a most suspect person indeed in the ranks of SNCC and CORE, and the Presidential initiative suffered accordingly.

The real blow was Watts. It threw the civil-rights movement entirely off balance. Until then, theirs had been the aggrieved, the just, the righteous cause. In the South and old game had been going on with a new rule, imperfectly understood by whites, that the first side to resort to violence--lost Now in the North the Negroes had resorted to violence, in a wild destructive explosion that shattered, probably forever, the image of nonviolent suffering. And within hours of the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The same new rule applied. The civil-rights movement could not explain Watts, and could not justify it. Then, of a sudden, the report on the Negro family was being used to do so. Watts made the report a public issue, and gave it a name. Or rather the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak did in their column of August 18, which began:

Weeksbefore the Negro ghetto of los Angeles erupted in violence, intense debate over how to handle such racial powder kegs was under way deep inside the Johnson administration.

The pivot of this debate: the Moynihan report a much suppressed, much leaked Labor Department document that strips away usual equivocations and exposes the ugly truth about the big city Negro's plight.

The report, said they, had raised, as indeed it had, the explosive question of preferential treatment, "a solution far afield from the American dream."

I had by this time left Washington for New York politics and was not at all involved with what was then going on in the capital, but it does appear that after Watts the report gained no oriety as an explanation of the internal problems revealed by the riots, and in that measure angered and repelled just those Negro leaders who had been on the point of turning to just such problems. Before long I was being denounced, for example, by James Farmer, in terms not at all consistent with his staff memorandum of April 3: "We are sick unto death," he wrote in a syndicated column, "of being analyzed, mesmerized, brought, sold, and slobbered over....Moynihan has provided a massive academic copout for the white conscience and clearly implied that Negroes in this nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we stop sleeping with our wife's sister and buying Cadillacs instead of bread....Nowhere does Moynihan suggest that the proper answer to a shattered family is an open job market where the 'frustrated' Negro male can get an honest day's work." (The gist of the report was, if I may, that full employment, while indispensable, was no longer enough.)

No Moynihan

Watts also threw off the White House, which found the moment for the conference "To Fulfill These Rights" almost upon it, but with no adequate preparations for a full-scale meeting. It was decided to hold first a small planning session. This met in November in an atmosphere of near frenzy over the report, which was all the militants seemed able to think of: indeed, at one of the plenary sessions the secretary to the conference felt called on to announce, "There is no such person as Daniel P. Moynihan."

The collapse had been presaged just before the planning session met in November. A "Pre-White House Conference on Civil Rights" was convened in New York by the Office of Church and Race of the Protestant Council in cooperation with the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches. A distinguished group of religious leaders, including Catholics and Jews and a scattering of liberal professors, was in attendance. The key figures were Dr. Robert Spike, Executive Director of the Commission on Religion and Race which had been established in 1963 in the midst of the Birmingham crisis, and Dr. Benjamin F. Payton, a young Negro sociologist and minister, then with the New York Protestant Council, and who a month later succeeded Spike in the national post. The larger purpose of the meeting was to propose that an "Economic Development Budget for Equal Rights in America," to cost $32 billion per year, be placed on the agenda of the White House Conference. But the real heart of the gathering was in the demand "that the question of 'family stability' be stricken entirely from that agenda."

This demand was supported by a paper written by Dr. Payton analyzing the report....Dr. Payton's main assertion was that the report had declared that the employment and income gap between Negroes and whites was closing (where, in fact, the report had said exactly the opposite)....

In truth, the Payton paper bordered on the psychopathological. (Although perhaps not: it was broadcast by the hundreds at the time, and achieved its objective brilliantly. But when Rainwater and Yancey recently asked to reproduce it in their book, Payton declined.) Charles M. Silberman, author of Crisis in Black and White, called it "the most blatant distortion that I can remember seeing in a long time." In a letter to a Presbyterian minister he wrote:

Moynihan's whole emphasis is on the crucial role of unemployment in understanding all of the problems of Negro pathology: he presents one statistical correlation after another, showing that illegitimacy, desertion, and all the other symptoms show an unbelievably high correlation with changes in Negro unemployment: he marshals an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating--completely contrary to Payton's allegations throughout his essay--that Negro unemployment is very much more serious than the unemployment statistics indicate.

And so on. The Presidential assistant most directly responsible for civilrights matters, a devout Protestant layman, described Payton's paper as "the apotheosis of a big lie." But somehow a nerve had been touched in Liberal Protsetantism and there was no undoing the effects. Given the national prominence and the position of the persons who convened the Payton Spike meeting, and given the absence of any protest or correction from with in the church community, it had to be taken as the voice of American Protestantism. The issue of the Negro family was dead....

No Miracles

The Conference, when it met, was a lifeless affair. The Council submitted a long report of unflinching orthodoxy, that missed entirely the import of the Howard speech. It reflected throughout what Rainwater has called "the services strategy," as against an income strategy in dealing with problems of poverty. Thus, the section on public welfare proposed, "There should be a sharp reduction of the number of clients served by each case worker." This is a common enough American approach to social problems, but there is perhaps a special significance in this particular area: a quite disproportionate number of middle-class Negroes, and of whites involved in civil-rights activities, are themselves members of the service professions. It is too much to expect that such persons will be oblivious to the advantages that might accrue to them from bidding up the demand for their services. A more cynical person might describe the strategy as one of feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses. The Education section proposed that public expenditure per pupil be increased from $532 to $1000. This would reflect an increase of tax outlay per Negro family of $104, or 37.5 per cent of average Negro family income. But almost every last penny of this increase would go to middle-class persons whose salaries are already well above the poverty level. The thought of giving the money directly to the Negro family in the form of a family allowance is not even suggested in the report, a document in any event destined for instant obscurity. The delegates were bored from the outset, and contented themselves with passing resolutions of no greater political realism than the report itself: "That J. Edgar Hoover be fired," "That the President ask for $2 billion to enforce Civil Rights laws." The President spoke briefly and warned his hearers not to expect miracles....

The administration was, and is, as much committed to the goals of the Howard speech as when it was delivered. But it lacked the resources of time and political capital to force the issue. (Remember that at this point, the civil-rights militants, Negro and white, were also bitterly attacking the war in Vietnam. The White House had to placate them, and in this instance all that was asked, ironically, was that it not move forward on the report it had committed itself.) The most that could be hoped for was that the businessmen and liberal leaders on the President's new Council should stick by the Howard thesis and press the matter. They did nothing of the sort. In retrospect it is clear that civil rights had become for them a cause that could no longer stimulate or inspire them to take any grave risks. Their strategy now consisted of appearing to take an "ad