Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy by Daniel Geary (review)

Daniel Geary has written an important history on both the inception of the Moynihan Report and its reception by academics and pundits. Rarely, if at all, does a government study receive much attention from individuals outside of the federal bureaucracy. Yet the Moynihan Report—even decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, wrote the report in March 1965 as an internal document—engaged the public in a way government studies rarely do. While the use of phrases such as “tangle of pathology” no doubt partially explains the public interest in the Moynihan Report, Geary also points to the elasticity of the document’s argument itself. The underlying meaning of the Moynihan Report differed depending on the reader, with liberals seeing the study as a call for jobs programs as a means to strengthen the black family, conservatives construing the report as a plea for African Americans to put their own houses in order, both literally and figuratively, rather than depend on government assistance, and African Americans looking at the report as an appeal to their people to make family a priority. Geary blames these “disparate reactions” on the report’s “internal contradictions that reflected those of 1960s liberalism and because of its contentious assumptions about race, family, poverty, and government” (3).

In fact, Geary shows that the same “internal contradictions” that troubled liberalism in the 1960s existed within Moynihan. Coming of age during the New Deal, Moynihan felt it was the duty of the federal government to provide its citizens with a job, an idea that became less popular by the early 1960s. Employment mattered to Moynihan, moreover, because it would allow males to provide for their families, which conformed to the liberal defense of the “family wage” whereby a male breadwinner earned enough so that his wife could stay at home and raise the children. However, a “subtle but significant shift” in Moynihan’s thinking about the black family and unemployment occurred (70). Whereas Moynihan had originally pointed to the latter as the reason for the unusual makeup of the former, by the time he published The Negro Family Moynihan reversed his argument so that the female-led African American family became the reason for black poverty and unemployment. Geary suggests that by emphasizing “racially different family structures” Moynihan ignored other explanations for the economic plight of African Americans (71). As a result of Moynihan’s new perspective on the black family, readers, too, took from the report differing understandings of the problems of black economic inequality. Thus, Geary contends, it is not surprising that the Moynihan Report received both acclaim and derision from within liberal and conservative camps.

What makes Geary’s work truly enjoyable is how, by tracing Moynihan’s own intellectual transformation, he shows the similarly changing responses to the Moynihan Report. Yet, whether criticism or support for the study’s findings came from feminists, conservatives, or African American sociologists, the family became the main topic of debate. Ironically, to give just one example, black sociologists, Geary argues, “fought on the terrain defined by the Moynihan Report” by keeping alive the focus on the family, and thus, unintentionally, the arguments over pathology and the black family (138). In the process, discussion of socioeconomic factors fell to the wayside. Thus, Geary’s history of the Moynihan Report serves as a guide to the changing rhetoric of American politics that accompanied the conservative turn away from big government.