Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 1927-2003

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Moynihan grew up in a poor neighborhood in New York City, shining shoes to earn money. He served on active duty as a gunnery officer on the USS Quirinus. He went on to graduate from Tufts University, receiving three graduate degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He was a Fulbright fellow at the London School of Economics. A member of Averell Harriman’s New York gubernatorial campaign in 1954, he served for four years on the governor’s staff and became a Kennedy delegate at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations he was an assistant secretary of labor and was influential in formulating national policy that came to be known as the War on Poverty.

In developing his views on the position of the black community in American society, Moynihan was influenced by Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), which argued that the dependency of black Americans on society was produced by slavery and that slavery had, like the Nazi concentration camps, produced a psychological infantilism. Moynihan supported the idea of affirmative action to counteract the historical legacy of slavery. Moynihan was impressed by the fact that, while unemployment was declining, more people were joining the welfare rolls, and these welfare recipients were typically families with children with a lone parent (invariably the mother).

In 1963 he coauthored Beyond the Melting Pot with Nathan Glazer, claiming that intermarriage was not common and that ethnic divisions were resulting not in a “melting pot” but a “salad bowl.” His internal memorandum with regard to black families was leaked to the press. Subsequently known as the Moynihan Report, it identified a “tangle of pathology” in the dysfunctional black family, resulting in welfare dependency. Critics saw the report as a case of “blaming the victim”—the title of William Ryan’s 1971 book taking issue with white liberalism in general and Moynihan in particular. Moynihan’s views were appropriated by racists who seized upon press coverage, focusing on the fact that many black children were being born out of wedlock. In the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, the “man out of the house rule” was said to encourage lone parents not to cohabit because otherwise their welfare entitlements would be jeopardized. Joining Richard Nixon’s White House staff, Moynihan supported Nixon’s commitment to a guaranteed annual income, which he discussed in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973). He became notorious for a memo to Nixon in 1969 recommending that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect” (DeWitt 2005). Moynihan’s critics have argued that his influence on the Nixon administration meant that the cause of black emancipation was curtailed by lack of attention to the social and economic issues confronting black Americans.

After a brief spell as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, he had major appointments as ambassador to India (1973–1975) and as U.S. representative to the United Nations. He controversially ensured that the UN Security Council took no action against the illegal annexation of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 on the grounds that Indonesia was a cold war ally of the United States.

Moynihan remained a controversial figure by opposing President Bill Clinton’s proposal to expand health care coverage to all American citizens. Moynihan took the view that there was no health care crisis, and he supported a ban on partial-birth abortions, which he saw as close to infanticide. Having chaired the Commission on Government Secrecy, he published Secrecy: The American Experience in 1998, arguing that suspicion and lack of information created unnecessary political schisms.

While the Almanac of American Politics described him in 1994 as “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the best politician among thinkers since Jefferson,” his critics have argued that his views on the black family had damaging consequences for black Americans, that his opposition to health care coverage was regressive, and that his strategy toward East Timor resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.

SEE ALSO Benign Neglect; Culture of Poverty; Glazer, Nathan; Moynihan Report

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Lucius Jefferson, Mack H. Jones, and Katherine Tate. 1999. African Americans and the American Political System. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

DeWitt, Larry. 2005. Moynihan, Welfare Reform, and the Myth of “Benign Neglect.” http://www.larrydewitt.net/Essays/Moynihan.htm.

Hodgson, Godfrey. 2000. The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Katzmann, Robert A., ed. 1998. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The Intellectual in Public Life. Washington DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and Nathan Glazer. 1963. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ryan, William. 1971. Blaming the Victim. New York: Pantheon.

Bryan S. Turner