Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle over Black Family Life--from LBJ to Obama Book

I fully admit to having an almost pathological interest in the Moynihan report, the 1965 Department of Labor essay that warned about problems in lower-class black families that could undermine the civil rights advances of previous years. For me, after all, it was a conference on "The Moynihan Report Revisited" sponsored by Harvard in 2007, which I listened to by podcast and which I later read the essays from, that probably pushed me to a final break with my old liberalism. So when I read that James Patterson, notable poverty historian and Bancroft-prize winner, was going to put out a whole book on the report's reception over the past 40 years I knew I had to get it.

It's a fascinating and complicated piece of work: part biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, part history of welfare policy since the 60s, and part history of social science research on lower-class families. It is clear from the book that Patterson, like most of the authors he chronicles, is coming from an FDR liberal/social democratic perspective, but he also believes, again like his subjects, that serious problems in the lower-class black community, mainly out-of-wedlock births and crime, have been unfortunately ignored by liberals even as these issues have been used by conservatives and racists to devastate any attempt to assist this group. He presents a comprehensive history of research into this issue stretching back nearly 100 years, from both black and white researchers, from W.E.B. DuBois to William Julius Wilson, that demonstrates how serious these problems are, how they have gotten worse, and how they have to be faced in any attempt to fight black poverty. He also shows that while these researchers, including Moynihan, traced these problems to the legacy of slavery, white discrimination, and economic exclusion, they all understood that inner-city cultural and social issues separate from white racism had to be recognized and faced to solve them. In one sense, the book is a long lament on the suppression of the discussion of these problems and the unfortunate consequences of this for our anti-poverty efforts.

Admittedly there is not much that is new here. All of these elements have been told elsewhere, and the book shows some signs of haste (sloppy footnoting, unsourced quotes), yet no one else has brought so much of this history together in one sweeping book. I, of course, disagree with some of his conclusions about welfare and other liberal social policies (he obnoxiously puts the 1996 welfare "reform" in quotes throughout the book. Even if you don't like it, don't you have to at least admit it was a "reform"? Also, his own sources seem to indicate that even if welfare didn't encourage out-of-wedlock births, it did encourage poor fathers' desertion of lower-class females.) Yet, like Patterson, I continue to believe that inner-city black poverty is the most pressing social issue facing America, and that only by understanding the comprehensive history Patterson chronicles here can we hope to fight it.