ture, when semi-skilled unionized jobs were readily available and blacks were being hired in unprecedented numbers, that America was informed that its inner cities were seething with fury and economic despair.
Still, Lemann hardly restricts himself to economic factors in explaining the dire straits of the black poor. He is keenly sensitive to so-called cultural factors, including family structure, in the growth of the black underclass and of the devastating phenomenon he labels black racial isolation. Nor, in analyzing the dynamics of that isolation, does Lemann stress white prejudice. Instead, he emphasizes a series of political decisions taken both by those resisting any change in the black condition and, paradoxically, by liberals who saw themselves as radical advocates of black progress.
Exhibit A is federally sponsored low-income housing. In Chicago, high-rise housing projects were not initially perceived as a program exclusively for blacks; it was only after a series of violent confrontations over extremely modest attempts at neighborhood integration that a decision was made to limit construction to the ghetto. Yet few people objected to this policy, least of all the prospective black tenants, who saw the new buildings as offering a quality of life beyond their wildest imaginings. Ruby Haynes, who had lived in a series of slum buildings since moving to Chicago, recalls the day in 1962 when she moved into a newly-built project as one of the happiest in her life.
The enthusiasm for the projects was not unjustified, for up until that time low-income housing was a government program that seemed to work. This was owing in no small part to the scrupulous attention paid to the screening of tenant applicants in order to keep the projects free of criminals and the unruly. To gain approval for her application, Ruby Haynes actually married her common-law husband because of a regulation barring the admission of unwed mothers. But it was precisely at this time that the standards for admission and tenant behavior began to 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 int