Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Born March 6, 1927

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Died March 26, 2003

Washington, D.C.

Social scientist and U.S. senator

"Religion and race define the next stage in the evolution of the American peoples."

D aniel Patrick Moynihan had two careers: the first as a professor and sociologist, and the second as a public servant and U.S. senator from New York. As a sociologist, Moynihan created a stir in 1963 when he and coauthor Nathan Glazer (1923–) published Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, challenging the idea that as different nationalities came to the United States, they melded together to create a new "American" identity.

As a politician, Moynihan was a Democrat, but he held positions under both Democratic and Republican presidents. He often used his academic work in trying to solve difficult social problems, such as the endurance of poverty among African Americans. As a result, Moynihan was difficult to pin down as a conservative or a liberal. A conservative has a political philosophy of limited government influence and supports conventional social values. A liberal is someone who favors active government influence and is more open to new ideas and individual rights.

Early life in New York

Moynihan's best known academic work was about New York City, where Moynihan spent much of his childhood. He was born, however, far from New York: in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father, John Henry Moynihan, was a journalist and his mother, Margaret Ann Phipps, was a painter and sculptor. His father moved his family, which in addition to Daniel Patrick included a younger brother and a sister, from job to job, sometimes working in advertising. In 1937, Moynihan's father abandoned the family.

The sudden disappearance of Moynihan's father forced his mother to scramble to earn a living. She and her children moved from a middle-class suburb into Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, a rough neighborhood near the docks of the Hudson River. As a boy, Moynihan sometimes shined shoes in Times Square to earn money. Later, he worked unloading and loading ships. His mother at one point owned a bar, where Moynihan also worked occasionally.

Living and working in Manhattan gave Moynihan a very different perspective on American society than he might have gotten had his family remained in a city like Tulsa. For one thing, New York had a much greater variety of ethnic groups, or people who maintained their sense of being part of a group of people who had emigrated from a particular country in Europe, than most Midwestern or southern cities. New York in the 1930s and 1940s remained largely a city of immigrants; as late as 1960, half the city's population had been born outside the United States.

Moynihan attended a variety of schools in New York, both Catholic and public, and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School. He started attending City College of New York, and after a year joined the Navy Reserve, which sent him to Middlebury College in Vermont for a year to train as an officer, and then to Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts, where Moynihan earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in 1949. Moynihan started working on a doctorate in sociology, but he did not finish his doctoral degree (Ph.D.) until 1961.

Moynihan as public servant

After first serving in the military, which had financed his college education, Moynihan began what proved to be a half-century career that mixed politics with academics. In the mid-1950s Moynihan plunged into the politics of New York City, which with a population of about seven million was the nation's largest city. It was also traditionally the major point of entry for immigrants of all sorts. In the 1950s, the city had large populations of African Americans, who had come (or whose parents had come) from the American South, as well as Puerto Ricans from the U.S. territory in the Caribbean. In politics, Irish Americans often competed with Jewish Americans for dominance in city government.

The Melting Pot

"The Melting Pot" is a phrase borrowed from a play of the same name by an English playwright, Israel Zangwill (1864–1926). The play, which was a hit in New York when it opened in 1908, is about the coming together of various nationalities in the United States—in the form of a love story. U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–9) was said to have loved the play when he saw it, shouting to the author, "Bully, Mr. Zangwill! Bully!"—an expression of the time meaning excellent or first rate.

Long after Zangwill's play was forgotten, the image persisted of the United States as a place where old hostilities and differences that separated emigrants when they lived in Europe would disappear. The expression "melting pot" was taken from industrial processing: the image was of different types of metal being poured into a pot, where they would melt (in the heat of passion in the case of Zangwill's play) and come together as an alloy, a kind of new metal that would be superior to any of the individual ingredients. The key notion was that different nationalities would enter the United States and merge into a new nationality: the American.

The sentiment was especially popular with Jewish immigrants in the United States, who had long been excluded from full participation in the European societies from which they came. In the United States, freedom to practice one's own religion was guaranteed and discrimination based on religion was to be banned. It was also an idea popularly taught in public schools for most of the twentieth century as part of an effort by the government to avoid conflicts between immigrant groups and to promote national unity, especially when the United States found itself going to war against the very countries (such as Italy) which had been home to many immigrants or their immediate ancestors.

Moynihan began his political career as a volunteer in the New York City mayoral campaign of Robert F. Wagner Jr. (1910–1991) in 1953. The experience was important since New York City politics was strongly influenced by the various national groups that still lived in the same neighborhoods of the city, much as they had when their ancestors arrived from Europe.

Moynihan worked for New York governor Averill Harriman (1891–1986) from 1955 to 1958, during which time he attracted notice with a study of automobile accidents. Whereas most studies of car accidents treated the subject as one related to driving and focused on safer cars and better highway design, Moynihan viewed car accidents as a public health problem that involved issues far removed from cars and highways, issues like alcohol, exhaustion, and social stress. Moynihan then worked for the New York State Democratic Committee for two years, and was a delegate to the Democratic convention in 1960. The convention saw the nomination of U.S. senator John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) of Massachusetts, who became the first Catholic of Irish ancestry to be elected president.

In 1959, Moynihan started work as director of a New York state government research project at Syracuse University, where he later was also an assistant professor of political science for two years (1961–62). With the election of Kennedy, Moynihan moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an assistant to the secretary of labor from 1961 to 1963. Moynihan tried his hand at electoral politics, running (but losing) in the party primary for president of the New York City Council in 1965. He then worked for the mayoral campaign of Abraham Beame (1906–2001) in 1965.

The next year he taught at Wesley University, then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at the Joint Center for Urban Studies run by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he stayed until 1977. During this period, he was also a professor of government at Harvard and was appointed to several key posts in the administration of President Richard Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74). These positions included counselor to the president and executive secretary of Urban Affairs Council (1969–70), ambassador to India (1973–75), and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1975–76).

Beyond the Melting Pot

Although Moynihan wrote extensively, the work that brought him to fame initially was Beyond the Melting Pot, written with his fellow professor Nathan Glazer (1923–) and published in 1963. The book's subtitle was The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Moynihan and Glazer studied the habits and attitudes of five of New York's largest groups and concluded that "the point about the melting pot … is that it did not happen." Instead, members of national groups have continued to identify themselves as belonging to a group within American society. This attitude, expressed as "I'm Irish" or "I'm Italian," showed up in many different ways in New York: in where people lived in the city, what jobs they held, what food they ate, and the people with whom they associated.

The authors found nothing surprising in the persistence of national identities. Rather than fading over time, they discovered that national identities sometimes grew stronger with succeeding generations. Although the children of immigrants might have once felt embarrassed about the "old country" ways of their parents, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants often felt just the opposite: proud to be "Irish," or "Italian," even if they had never visited their ancestral land and could not speak the language of their ancestral land.

The Moynihan-Glazer study found that such attitudes were not shared by all ethnic groups. Descendants from the earliest English settlers, for example, did not think of themselves as anything but Americans. Many descendants of German immigrants no longer identified with their ancestral land, partly because German immigrants had shared many traits with the English settlers who preceded them and partly because Germany's roles in World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45), when the United States and Germany fought one another, may have diminished the inclination to loudly identify with a country perceived to have started both conflicts.

For many other nationalities, however, "ethnicity is more than an influence on events," the authors concluded. "It is commonly the source of events. Social and political institutions do not merely respond to ethnic interests; a great number of institutions exist for the specific purpose of serving ethnic interests. This in turn tends to perpetuate them."

Moynihan and Glazer identified two other aspects of a person's identity that also served to keep apart different groups of Americans: race and religion. They noted, for example, that among African Americans, Protestant clergymen often played a prominent role in the politics of the black community, which would be extremely

Senator Moynihan

In his role as presidential advisor, Moynihan continued to bring the sensibility of a professor to government. Many politicians tended to assess government policy in terms of how it might impact the economic well-being of different groups, but Moynihan made a reputation as someone who wanted to study facts before reaching any conclusions about how government could best help individuals or groups of individuals. In the case of African Americans, for example, Moynihan concluded that racial discrimination might not be the most important reason for the persistent poverty that plagues black people in America. He suggested instead that the breakdown in African American families (for example, the high frequency of single-parent families) might be a more important reason that black Americans have, overall, not kept pace economically with whites. Such views did not always make Moynihan popular among his fellow Democrats, especially when they were expressed as an advisor to Republican presidents like Richard Nixon.

In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the Senate, representing New York, where he remained for the next twenty-four years. Just as he had done as a professor and advisor to presidents, Moynihan continued to urge innovative solutions to social problems, based on close study of the facts rather than on standard political philosophy.

Moynihan retired from the Senate in 2000 and returned to Syracuse University to teach. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (1947–) succeeded Moynihan following her victory in the November election. Moynihan died in March 2003.

—James L. Outman

For More Information

Books

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Harvard University Press, 1962.

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds. Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

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

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

Moynihan, Daniel P. Loyalties. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

Schoen, Douglas E. Pat: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

Periodicals

Alter, Jonathan. "A Man of Ideas in the Arena: Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1927–2003." Newsweek (April 7, 2003): p. 63.

Heilbrunn, Jacob. "The Moynihan Enigma." The American Prospect (July-August 1997): p. 18.

Nuechterlein, James. "The Moynihan Years." Commentary (October 2000): p. 29.

Roberts, Sam. "Melting Pot: A Look Back and Beyond." New York Times (May 17, 1990): p. A24.

Web Sites

"Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 1927–2003." Congressional Biography.http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M001054 (accessed on March 21, 2004).