Who is daniel moynihan

A political scientist, a lawyer, an ambassador, a presidential cabinet member, and a U. The elder Moynihan was briefly a reporter for the Tulsa Tribune , but the family moved within three years of Pat Moynihan's birth, and he was raised in Indiana and New York City.

Moynihan's many positions included service as U. He served in the cabinet or subcabinet of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Items that are security classified or otherwise restricted under the Act and regulations have been removed and placed in a closed file. A Document Withdrawal Record GSA Form with a description of each restricted document has been inserted at the beginning of each folder from which materials have been removed.

A Document Control Record marks the original position of the withdrawn item. Employees of the National Archives will review periodically the unclassified portions of closed materials for the purpose of opening those which no longer require restriction.

Certain classified documents may be declassified under authority of Executive Order in response to a Mandatory Review Request NA Form submitted by the researcher. At the age of six Dr. He served on active duty with the navy from — and was the gunnery officer onboard the U. After being discharged from the navy, Dr. Moynihan returned to Tufts University and received a B. In , Dr. He remained in Great Britain until He received his Ph. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is best known for his work in academia and politics.

However, in his youth he also worked as a shoe shiner, longshoreman and bartender. In he worked on W. Moynihan served in the administrations of four United States presidents. He remained in this position into the early years of the Johnson Administration working primarily on national policy with regards to poverty. He left the Johnson Administration in and remained out of politics until when as a Democrat he joined the Nixon Administration as Counselor to the President for Urban Affairs.

He was in this position until December of and focused on welfare reform through his Family Assistance Plan. In President Nixon appointed Dr. Moynihan as United States Ambassador to India in which he remained until In , President Ford appointed Dr. As a senator, Dr. He won re-election to the senate for three additional terms and retired in In , President Clinton awarded Dr.

Moynihan the Medal of Freedom. He relocated to Syracuse University to complete his P. After leaving the Johnson administration in , Dr. After leaving the Nixon administration in , Dr. Moynihan returned to Harvard as a professor in the Department of Government and shifted his interests from domestic policy to foreign affairs.

Moynihan was the author of 19 books. Some of his works include:. In May , Dr. They had three children Timothy, Maura and John as well as two grandchildren. Daniel Patrick Moynihan died on March 26, at the age of 76, after complications from a ruptured appendix. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The materials in this collection reflect Dr.

The correspondence series contains documents, in which Dr. Moynihan tries to utilize members of the academic community, particularly his fellow faculty members at Harvard, to offer assistance on developing policy, recruiting for government positions, and dealing with student unrest.

There are also a number of internal memoranda to other staff members of the administration including H. The meetings files series consist of speeches, speech drafts and agendas from a number of meetings and conferences that Moynihan attended throughout the country. The materials in the subject files series relate to Dr.

Poverty was a major area of interest for Dr. Moynihan and there are numerous materials on the Family Assistance Plan FAP , a plan which would replace certain federal programs with a direct cash payment to those who qualified.

Materials include documents on the development of FAP, letters to members of Congress and governors to support the program, internal memorandum to respond to criticism, statistical documentation and press releases. In additions to FAP, the collection contains other materials relating to poverty including items on housing, jobs, education, race, and nutrition. In this situation, the Negro family made but little progress toward the middle-class pattern of the present time.

When the family breaks down — as it does under slavery, under certain forms of indentured labor and serfdom, in periods of extreme social unrest during wars, revolutions, famines, and epidemics, or in periods of abrupt transition from one type of economy to another — this delicate line of transmission is broken. Men may founder badly in these periods, during which the primary unit may again become mother and child, the biologically given, and the special conditions under which man has held his social traditions in trust are violated and distorted.

Country life and city life are profoundly different. The gradual shift of American society from a rural to an urban basis over the past century and a half has caused abundant strains, many of which are still much in evidence. When this shift occurs suddenly, drastically, in one or two generations, the effect is immensely disruptive of traditional social patterns. It was this abrupt transition that produced the wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Northeast.

Drunkenness, crime, corruption, discrimination, family disorganization, juvenile delinquency were the routine of that era. In our own time, the same sudden transition has produced the Negro slum — different from, but hardly better than its predecessors, and fundamentally the result of the same process.

Negro families in the cities are more frequently headed by a woman than those in the country. The difference between the white and Negro proportions of families headed by a woman is greater in the city than in the country. The promise of the city has so far been denied the majority of Negro migrants, and most particularly the Negro family.

In , E. Striking contrasts in levels of civilization and economic well-being among these newcomers to modern civilization seem to baffle any attempt to discover order and direction in their mode of life. But, if these families have managed to preserve their integrity until they reach the northern city, poverty, ignorance, and color force them to seek homes in deteriorated slum areas from which practically all institutional life has disappeared. Hence, at the same time that these simple rural families are losing their internal cohesion, they are being freed from the controlling force of public opinion and communal institutions.

Family desertion among Negroes in cities appears, then, to be one of the inevitable consequences of the impact of urban life on the simple family organization and folk culture which the Negro has evolved in the rural South. The distribution of desertions in relation to the general economic and cultural organization of Negro communities that have grown up in our American cities shows in a striking manner the influence of selective factors in the process of adjustment to the urban environment.

Modern means of communication will break down the isolation of the world of the black folk, and, as long as the bankrupt system of southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of southern cities or make their way to northern cities where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity.

In every index of family pathology — divorce, separation, and desertion, female family head, children in broken homes, and illegitimacy — the contrast between the urban and rural environment for Negro families is unmistakable. Harlem, into which Negroes began to move early in this century, is the center and symbol of the urban life of the Negro American.

Conditions in Harlem are not worse, they are probably better than in most Negro ghettos. The social disorganization of central Harlem, comprising ten health areas, was thoroughly documented by the HARYOU report, save for the illegitimacy rates. There could hardly be a more dramatic demonstration of the crumbling — the breaking — of the family structure on the urban frontier. The impact of unemployment on the Negro family, and particularly on the Negro male, is the least understood of all the developments that have contributed to the present crisis.

There is little analysis because there has been almost no inquiry. Unemployment, for whites and nonwhites alike, has on the whole been treated as an economic phenomenon, with almost no attention paid for at least a quarter-century to social and personal consequences. In , Edward Wight Bakke described the effects of unemployment on family structure in terms of six stages of adjustment.

The first two stages end with the exhaustion of credit and the entry of the wife into the labor force. The father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful. The third stage is the critical one of commencing a new day-to-day existence. At this point two women are in charge:. His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office. If the family makes it through this stage Bakke finds that it is likely to survive, and the rest of the process is one of adjustment.

The critical element of adjustment was not welfare payments, but work. Work is precisely the one thing the Negro family head in such circumstances has not received over the past generation.

The fundamental, overwhelming fact is that Negro unemployment, with the exception of a few years during World War II and the Korean War, has continued at disaster levels for 35 years. Once again, this is particularly the case in the northern urban areas to which the Negro population has been moving. The Census taken in the spring, before the depression was in full swing showed Negro unemployment at 6. But taking out the South reversed the relationship: white 7.

By , the 2 to 1 white-Negro unemployment relationship that persists to this day had clearly emerged. Taking out the South again, whites were Since , the Negro worker has been tremendously affected by the movements of the business cycle and of employment. He has been hit worse by declines than whites, and proportionately helped more by recoveries. From to , the level of the Negro male unemployment was on a long-run rising trend, while at the same time following the short-run ups and downs of the business cycle.

During the same period, the number of broken families in the Negro world was also on a long-run rise, with intermediate ups and downs. A glance at the chart [not reproduced] on page 22 reveals that the series move in the same directions — up and down together, with a long-run rising trend — but that the peaks and troughs are 1 year out of phase.

Thus unemployment peaks 1 year before broken families, and so on. By plotting these series in terms of deviation from trend, and moving the unemployment curve 1 year ahead, we see the clear relation of the two otherwise seemingly unrelated series of events; the cyclical swings in unemployment have their counterpart in increases and decreases in separations.

The effect of recession unemployment on divorces further illustrates the economic roots of the problem. The nonwhite divorce rates dipped slightly in high unemployment years like , , and See table 21 [not reproduced] on page Divorce is expensive: those without money resort to separation or desertion.

While divorce is not a desirable goal for a society, it recognizes the importance of marriage and family, and for children some family continuity and support is more likely when the institution of the family has been so recognized. The conclusion from these and similar data is difficult to avoid: During times when jobs were reasonably plentiful although at no time during this period, save perhaps the first 2 years, did the unemployment rate for Negro males drop to anything like a reasonable level the Negro family became stronger and more stable.

As jobs became more and more difficult to find, the stability of the family became more and more difficult to maintain. This relation is clearly seen in terms of the illegitimacy rates of census tracts in the District of Columbia compared with male unemployment rates in the same neighborhoods.

In , a prosperous year, Almost half of these men were out of work 15 weeks or more. The impact of poverty on Negro family structure is no less obvious, although again it may not be widely acknowledged. There would seem to be an American tradition, agrarian in its origins but reinforced by attitudes of urban immigrant groups, to the effect that family morality and stability decline as income and social position rise. Over the years this may have provided some consolation to the poor, but there is little evidence that it is true.

On the contrary, higher family incomes are unmistakably associated with greater family stability — which comes first may be a matter for conjecture, but the conjunction of the two characteristics is unmistakable. The Negro family is no exception. The American wage system is conspicuous in the degree to which it provides high incomes for individuals, but is rarely adjusted to insure that family, as well as individual needs are met.

American arrangements do not, save for income tax deductions. The resulting revision illustrated the significance of family size. Using these criteria, the number of poor families is smaller, but the number of large families who are poor increases, and the number of children in poverty rises by more than one-third — from 11 million to 15 million. A third of these children belong to families in which the father was not only present, but was employed the year round. In overall terms, median family income is lower for large families than for small families.

Families of six or more children have median incomes 24 percent below families with three. It may be added that 47 percent of young men who fail the Selective Service education test come from families of six or more. During the decade of heavy Negro migration to the cities of the North and West, the ratio of nonwhite to white family income in cities increased from 57 to 63 percent. Corresponding declines in the ratio in the rural nonfarm and farm areas kept the national ratio virtually unchanged.

But between and , median nonwhite family income slipped from 55 percent to 53 percent of white income. The drop occurred in three regions, with only the South, where a larger proportion of Negro families have more than one earner, showing a slight improvement. Because in general terms Negro families have the largest number of children and the lowest incomes, many Negro fathers literally cannot support their families.

Because the father is either not present, is unemployed, or makes such a low wage, the Negro woman goes to work. Fifty-six percent of Negro women, age 25 to 64, are in the work force, against 42 percent of white women. The dimensions of the problems of Negro Americans are compounded by the present extraordinary growth in Negro population. At the founding of the nation, and into the first decade of the 19th century, 1 American in 5 was a Negro.

Since , the Negro population has grown at a rate of 2. If this rate continues, in seven years 1 American in 8 will be nonwhite. These changes are the result of a declining Negro death rate, now approaching that of the nation generally, and a fertility rate that grew steadily during the postwar period. By , the ratio of white to nonwhite fertility rates reached Both the white and nonwhite fertility rates have declined since , but the differential has not narrowed.

Family size increased among nonwhite families between and — as much for those without fathers as for those with fathers. Average family size changed little among white families, with a slight increase in the size of husband-wife families balanced by a decline in the size of families without fathers. Negro women not only have more children, but have them earlier. Thus in , there were 1, children ever born per thousand ever-married nonwhite women 15 to 19 years of age, as against only among white women, a ratio of 1.

The Negro fertility rate overall is now 1. This population growth must inevitably lead to an unconcealable crisis in Negro unemployment. The most conspicuous failure of the American social system in the past 10 years has been its inadequacy in providing jobs for Negro youth. Thus, in January the unemployment rate for Negro teenagers stood at 29 percent. This problem will now become steadily more serious.

The nonwhite labor force will correspondingly increase 20 percent in the next 6 years, double the rate of increase in the nonwhite labor force of the past decade. As with the population as a whole, there is much evidence that children are being born most rapidly in those Negro families with the least financial resources.

This is an ancient pattern, but because the needs of children are greater today it is very possible that the education and opportunity gap between the offspring of these families and those of stable middle-class unions is not closing, but is growing wider.

A cycle is at work; too many children too early make it most difficult for the parents to finish school. In February, , 38 percent of the white girls who dropped out of school did so because of marriage or pregnancy, as against 49 percent of nonwhite girls. Low education levels in turn produce low income levels, which deprive children of many opportunities, and so the cycle repeats itself.

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary — a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people.

But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries. In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another.

This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

Here an earlier word of caution should be repeated. These is much evidence that a considerable number of Negro families have managed to break out of the tangle of pathology and to establish themselves as stable, effective units, living according to patterns of American society in general.

Franklin Frazier has suggested that the middle-class Negro American family is, if anything, more patriarchal and protective of its children than the general run of such families. They need no help from anyone, and ask none. While this phenomenon is not easily measured, one index is that middle-class Negroes have even fewer children than middle-class whites, indicating a desire to conserve the advances they have made and to insure that their children do as well or better.

Negro women who marry early to uneducated laborers have more children than white women in the same situation; Negro women who marry at the common age for the middle class to educated men doing technical or professional work have only four-fifths as many children as their white counterparts. It might be estimated that as much as half of the Negro community falls into the middle class. However, the remaining half is in desperate and deteriorating circumstances.

Moreover, because of housing segregation it is immensely difficult for the stable half to escape from the cultural influences of the unstable one. The children of middle-class Negroes often as not must grow up in, or next to the slums, an experience almost unknown to white middle-class children. They are therefore constantly exposed to the pathology of the disturbed group and constantly in danger of being drawn into it. It is for this reason that the propositions put forth in this study may be thought of as having a more or less general application.

In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro. Obviously, not every instance of social pathology afflicting the Negro community can be traced to the weakness of family structure.

If, for example, organized crime in the Negro community were not largely controlled by whites, there would be more capital accumulation among Negroes, and therefore probably more Negro business enterprises. If it were not for the hostility and fear many whites exhibit toward Negroes, they in turn would be less afflicted by hostility and fear and so on. There is no one Negro community. There is no one Negro problem. There is no one solution.

Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.

It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people. Although that will has reasserted itself in our time, it is a resurgence doomed to frustration unless the viability of the Negro family is restored. A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife. Robert O. Blood, Jr. The matriarchal pattern of so many Negro families reinforces itself over the generations.

This process begins with education. Although the gap appears to be closing at the moment, for a long while, Negro females were better educated than Negro males, and this remains true today for the Negro population as a whole. The difference in educational attainment between nonwhite men and women in the labor force is even greater; men lag 1.

The disparity in educational attainment of male and female youth 16 to 21 who were out of school in February , is striking. Among the nonwhite males, A similar difference existed at the college level, with 4. The poorer performance of the male in school exists from the very beginning, and the magnitude of the difference was documented by the Census in statistics on the number of children who have fallen one or more grades below the typical grade for children of the same age.

The boys have more frequently fallen behind at every age level. White boys also lag behind white girls, but at a differential of 1 to 6 percentage points. In , 39 percent of all white persons 25 years of age and over who had completed 4 or more years of college were women. Fifty-three percent of the nonwhites who had attained this level were women. However, the gap is closing. By October , there were slightly more Negro men in college than women. Among whites there were almost twice as many men as women enrolled.

There is much evidence that Negro females are better students than their male counterparts. Daniel Thompson of Dillard University, in a private communication on January 9, , writes:.

For example, I have examined the honor rolls in Negro high schools for about 10 years. As a rule, from 75 to 90 percent of all Negro honor students are girls. Thompson reports that 70 percent of all applications for the National Achievement Scholarship Program financed by the Ford Foundation for outstanding Negro high school graduates are girls, despite special efforts by high school principals to submit the names of boys.

The finalists for this new program for outstanding Negro students were recently announced. Based on an inspection of the names, only about 43 percent of all the finalists were male. However, in the regular National Merit Scholarship program, males received 67 percent of the scholarship awards.

Inevitably, these disparities have carried over to the area of employment and income. In 1 out of 4 Negro families where the husband is present, is an earner, and someone else in the family works, the husband is not the principal earner. The comparable figure for whites is 18 percent. More important, it is clear that Negro females have established a strong position for themselves in white collar and professional employment, precisely the areas of the economy which are growing most rapidly, and to which the highest prestige is accorded.

Yet Negro males represent only 1. Negro males represent 1. Again, in technician occupations, Negro males represent 2. It would appear therefore that there are proportionately 4 times as many Negro females in significant white collar jobs than Negro males.

This is substantially similar to the rate of all females in such jobs. Approximately 7 out of every Negro females are in technician jobs. This exceeds the proportion of all females in technician jobs — approximately 5 out of every Nine out of every Negro males are in skilled occupations while 21 out of of all males are in such jobs.

This pattern is to be seen in the Federal government, where special efforts have been made recently to insure equal employment opportunity for Negroes. These efforts have been notably successful in Departments such as Labor, where some 19 percent of employees are now Negro.

A not disproportionate percentage, given the composition of the work force in the areas where the main Department offices are located. However, it may well be that these efforts have redounded mostly to the benefit of Negro women, and may even have accentuated the comparative disadvantage of Negro men.

Seventy percent of the Negro employees of the Department of Labor are women, as contrasted with only 42 percent of the white employees. Among nonprofessional Labor Department employees — where the most employment opportunities exist for all groups — Negro women outnumber Negro men 4 to 1, and average almost one grade higher in classification.

The testimony to the effects of these patterns in Negro family structure is wide-spread, and hardly to be doubted. Both as a husband and as a father the Negro male is made to feel inadequate, not because he is unlovable or unaffectionate, lacks intelligence or even a gray flannel suit. To this situation he may react with withdrawal, bitterness toward society, aggression both within the family and racial group, self-hatred, or crime.

Or he may escape through a number of avenues that help him to lose himself in fantasy or to compensate for his low status through a variety of exploits. Embittered by their experiences with men, many Negro mothers often act to perpetuate the mother-centered pattern by taking a greater interest in their daughters than their sons. Duncan M. The Negro statistics are symtomatic [sic] of some old socioeconomic problems, not the least of which are under-employment among Negro men and compensating higher labor force propensity among Negro women.

In the meantime, higher Negro birth rates are increasing the nonwhite population, while migration into cities like Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D. Robin M. Williams, Jr. Of the 93 unmarried Negro youths interviewed, 22 percent did not have their mother living in the home with them, and 42 percent reported that their father was not living in their home. Forty percent of the youths said that they had brothers and sisters living in other communities: another 40 percent reported relatives living in their home who were not parents, siblings, or grandparent.

The white family, despite many variants, remains a powerful agency not only for transmitting property from one generation to the next, but also for transmitting no less valuable contracts with the world of education and work. In an earlier age, the Carpenters, Wainwrights, Weavers, Mercers, Farmers, Smiths acquired their names as well as their trades from their fathers and grandfathers.

Children today still learn the patterns of work from their fathers even though they may no longer go into the same jobs. White children without fathers at least perceive all about them the pattern of men working. Not always, to be sure.

The Negro community produces its share, very possibly more than its share, of young people who have the something extra that carries them over the worst obstacles. But such persons are always a minority. The common run of young people in a group facing serious obstacles to success do not succeed.