ellectual 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. One may question, for instance, whether such an undertaking would appeal to the crucial population of unemployed black males, young men who have often disdained employment opportunities during periods of high growth and low unemployment. Lemann does not linger on the subject, but The Promised Land is replete with examples of male irresponsibility toward work and family. While one can certainly envision some energetic mothers pulling themselves out of the welfare system by working as, say, school paraprofessionals, the idea that such jobs would draw inner-city men into the work force will strike many as too optimistic, to put it mildly.
Another objection is that blacks are already overly dependent on government employment, an apprehension reinforced by statistics in this book regarding the heavy reliance of blacks, particularly college graduates, on government jobs. And to those engaged directly in government work should be added those who owe their employment to private-sector affirmative-action plans, another indication of the thoroughly unhealthy degree to which the employment situation of black Americans depends on the political mood of the country.
Finally, Lemann’s abiding faith in the ability of the federal government to stimulate the massive transformation he calls for is open to serious question. His assessment of the War on Poverty can easily be read as a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of the most idealistically motivated state initiative. The jobs approach favored by Lemann was by his own reckoning hardly considered, nor was it pressed even by the civil-rights lobby. And had the Johnson administration launched such a massive jobs program, one can easily imagine how it would have been subverted through the piling-on of rights, the inevitable clamors for inclusion by other “oppressed minorities,” and demands for more and more expenditures as the program was seen to be failing its goals.
If Lemann’s policy prescriptions are not always convincing, however, he does challenge those with alter