o crumble, victim in part of the assault on welfare rules launched by the civil-liberties movement. The disappearance of such standards transformed the projects into outposts of high-density poverty, populated by welfare mothers and their children, ruled over by gang members, and notable for the absence of working-age males.
Public housing was not the only program launched with noble intentions which worsened the conditions it was intended to alleviate. Indeed, Lemann devotes a long and thoroughly fascinating chapter to a history of the War on Poverty, a program which he attacks not for the standard reason that it resulted in a waste of money but rather for its role in exacerbating the isolation of blacks from the rest of America.
By its very concept, Lemann contends, the War on Poverty discouraged integration. On the political level, the stress on the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in the administration of local antipoverty agencies was preordained to create enemies among local officials like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Nor was this an unforeseen consequence. The idea—preposterous in retrospect—of using federal money to stimulate an alternative and presumably radical inner-city political leadership was deliberately built into the program by its Left-liberal architects.
Lemann shows how the community-action approach fit in with the racial atmosphere of the 60’s, dominated by urban disorders, the rise of militancy, the Black-Is-Beautiful movement, and the practically unchallengeable idea that “ghetto society was not in any way weak or flawed or in need of middle-class outsiders to take it by the hand.” In the public discussion of race, no event was more crucial than the furious response to the Moynihan Report, with its prescient warning about the looming crisis of black female-headed families. Instead of helping to point the way toward a government strategy, the report, called by Lemann “the most refuted document in history,” earned its author a torrent of vituperation, which in turn chilled the intellectual atmosphere for a generation to come.
If Lemann agrees with the Moynihan Report’s intellectual thrust, he nonetheless is harsh in his judgment of Moynihan, whom he accuses of intellectual opportunism and of lacking the courage to defend his conclusions. Indeed, Lemann’s treatment of Moynihan is much rougher than his assessment of the anti-poverty officials who blithely doled out federal money to Chicago street gangs, liberals who declined to support Lyndon Johnson’s racial initiatives because of their antiwar views, and black leaders whose hysterical chastisement of America at a time of unprecedented opportunity contributed to a general disillusionment over civil-rights issues. Lemann seems to believe that, had alternative ideas prevailed in the shaping of the War on Poverty, the result would have been much greater progress in reducing black poverty. In fact, however, once the riots began, rational and honest debate on race relations was foreclosed.
Nicholas Lemann is an integrationist. Although he recognizes the futility of coercive, government-mandated policies like busing, and can be scathing on schemes for the political or economic empowerment of the inner city, or for a drastic overhaul of the welfare system, he believes that the federal government still has a major role to play in ending black isolation. In particular he makes a strong case for a federal jobs policy which would give blacks the resources to get out of the inner city, now rendered beyond renewal by the pervasive violence and general deterioration of businesses, schools, and other institutions.
It is all the more regrettable, then, that Lemann does not subject his own policy ideas to the same degree of rigorous analysis he devotes to competing proposals. For leaving aside the cost of a policy revolving around federally-funded jobs for the inner-city poor (extremely high, one would imagine), and the total absence of political support for such a policy, there are serious doubts as to how much of the underclass would be reached by it. On