![]() Moynihan believed that unemployment, specifically male unemployment, was the biggest impediment to the social mobility of the poor. Fathers should be supported by public policy, in the form of jobs funded by the government. He believed that the initiative should be run through an established societal institution: the patriarchal family. Johnson’s administration, but became increasingly disillusioned with Johnson’s War on Poverty. Moynihan stayed on at the Labor Department during Lyndon B. “All manner of later experiences in politics were to test this youthful faith.” As the historian James Patterson writes in Freedom Is Not Enough, his book about Moynihan, he was possessed by “the optimism of youth.” He believed in the marriage of government and social science to formulate policy. A cultured civil servant not to the manor born, Moynihan-witty, colorful, loquacious-charmed the Washington elite, moving easily among congressional aides, politicians, and journalists. In London, he’d cultivated a love of wine, fine cheeses, tailored suits, and the mannerisms of an English aristocrat. ![]() His fear of being taken for a “sissy kid” had diminished. Moynihan was, by then, an anticommunist liberal with a strong belief in the power of government to both study and solve social problems. Kennedy as president, in 1960, gave Moynihan a chance to put his broad curiosity to practical use he was hired as an aide in the Department of Labor. In 1959, Moynihan began writing for Irving Kristol’s magazine The Reporter, covering everything from organized crime to auto safety. He stayed for a master’s degree and then started a doctorate program, which took him to the London School of Economics, where he did research. In 1943, he tested into the City College of New York, walking into the examination room with a longshoreman’s loading hook in his back pocket so that he would not “be mistaken for any sissy kid.” After a year at CCNY, he enlisted in the Navy, which paid for him to go to Tufts University for a bachelor’s degree. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father-They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes-of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies-the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”Īs a teenager, Moynihan divided his time between his studies and working at the docks in Manhattan to help out his family. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. Moynihan’s childhood-a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood-contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. ![]() Patterson’s book is deeply sympathetic to Moynihan in ways that I don’t quite agree with, but I found it invaluable for understanding Moynihan as a human. James Patterson’s Freedom Is Not Enough furnished much of the biographical information in this section. “lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”īy his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. ![]()
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