Senator Moynihan: A Social Conscience - 04 April 2003

One morning last week I woke up and we saw to our sorrow and relief that a great man had died.

Sorrow that a brilliant and eccentric statesman should ever die - or particularly at the age of 76; relief that a man stricken with a mortal illness, which can stretch into a long painful ending, should have been spared that fate.

I don't suppose I have to tell many listeners of a custom that has come in in the past 20 years or more of shunning the old good word memorial, in memory of, and turning all memorial services into what they call "celebrations".

Well if ever there was a life to hold in memory memoriam it was the life of the former senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Last Sunday he was given a funeral mass in Washington's oldest Catholic church and as becomes a veteran navy gunner, he was buried to a salute of guns in Arlington - the national military cemetery.

How to give a true picture of Senator Moynihan that does not give away at once what surprised everyone who met him for the first time?

Physically he looked like a typical, possibly distinguished, upper crust member of the Eastern liberal establishment.

A round, boyish, ruddy face, round tortoiseshell glasses, tweedy - well cut tweeds - button-down shirt and his trademark - a spotted bow tie: the confident exterior of a young country squire, probably Hotchkiss or Groton and Harvard.

Wrong. He was the son of a more-often-than-not drunken Irish newspaper man, who kept his wife and three children in bare comfort in a modest New York apartment. Until one day he took off and left his family for good.

Without him young Pat, aged 10, found himself, his mother, brother and sister, suddenly members of the Irish slum establishment.

While at school he worked as a shoeshine boy in Times Square and after school became a stevedore, so that when the rowdy troubles about corruption and the longshoremen's union set in, a decade or more later, he saw a complex two-sided conflict where his fellow liberals tended to see only the oppressed working man.

Patrick Moynihan had one year in a modest city college and went into the navy but he was no sooner trained when it became necessary to go back to upkeeping the family.

And he became a bartender in Hell's Kitchen, the malodorous West Side haunt of honest labourers, truck drivers, pimps, shore-leave sailors and their pick ups.

Here again he learned what he would never learn from his fellow Democrats in Congress - he learned about the poor, not as a composite victim of the money interests but as a very varied society of the good and needy, the cunning, decent, fraudulent, the salt of the earth and the essence of thuggery.

This background was very common to many immigrants. The truth is that Patrick Moynihan was never a type, and it blurs the picture of him to say simply he was for 40 years in government a liberal Democrat.

He was a scholar from boyhood on, an historian of government, a scholar with a mania for statistics.

Once a fine bill had been passed he took his time, he waited and watched, to see how a bill worked out in practice.

The most flaming example of how this gift could ignite anger and controversy in his own party was the case of a pamphlet he wrote when he was 40 and serving in President Johnson's administration as assistant secretary of labour.

Eleven years had gone by since the Supreme Court had written a unanimous opinion on the case that transformed American society like nothing since the Civil War: Brown vs Board of Education.

A little, eight-year-old black girl who's had to cross a railroad track every day and walk two miles to go to her all-black school, whereas her father maintained it was unjust that she couldn't attend the nearby all-white school.

On this simple plea the court was asked to rule again on a fundamental convention of American society.

The last Supreme Court judgement had said that in all public facilities - buses, schools, theatres, swimming pools et cetera, et cetera - Negroes, as we properly called them then, must have equal but separate accommodation.

It became plain, first to Roosevelt liberals and soon to many more Americans that schools, for instance, were separate but the services, the accommodations, were very rarely equal.

In May 1954 the court ruled that henceforth all public services, from a public lavatory to a judgeship on a federal court, should be open to blacks and whites alike.

And we've been living ever since in the freshening, sometimes gusty wind of Brown vs Board of Education.

Much resistance to the new integration law went on through the 1960s but the Democrats clung to their conviction that the new law was absolute and would transform and rejuvenate the status and the opportunities of the blacks.

However, for 10 years Moynihan studied the figures on where and how the new law was working.

The Democrats and liberal Republicans, indeed most people of good conscience, had come to believe after a decade of often forced integration - by bussing for instance to schools - that the poverty of the blacks would be in time eradicated by the fact, the practice, of integration.

Then Mr Moynihan wrote his little book called The Negro Family - the Case for National Action.

The first thing he noticed, although the figures of black unemployment were dropping, the number of blacks going on to welfare was rising alarmingly.

Why? Moynihan asked. And why were so many young blacks deserting their families so that the single mother, in theory deprived of the breadwinner, could get more welfare?

Integration, he decided, would not in itself grant political or social equality, the root problem was Negro poverty and the breakdown of the black family.

The cancer was the great proportion of illegitimate children and struggling single mothers.

Integration alone and the passage of civil rights bills would solve nothing until equality of jobs and education was a reality.

Senator Moynihan was roundly denounced by both parties for picking the black mother as a culprit and not a victim.

Another favourite American legend, he called it a shibboleth, of Democrats and Republicans alike, was the myth of the big cities considered as melting pots.

The notion, he put it, that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups was soon to blend into homogeneous end product.

He believed the strength and imagination of American life was enlivened by the exercise of its ethnic variety, not by, as in his case, converting a tasty Irish stew into a tasteless pate.

Need I say he got into nationwide trouble for that one, just when the doctrine was rising of a great multiculture that would obliterate native strains and produce a nation of lookalike, thinkalike all-Americans.

It must be plain from this that he was not the favourite senator of any party leader.

Partisanship he regarded as an essential machine for passing laws wanted by the majority but his allegiance was to social causes, not party slogans.

He had one overriding cause: he believed with Aristotle that the family was the model of a stable republic and that the raising up of the poor should be its first concern.

What made him unique in either party and a chronic nuisance to his own was his unremitting habit of picking up a fine, humane bill, once it had been passed, and then submitting it to an economic and a statistical analysis.

One time this habit brought him not scorn but ridicule. In the late 1970s he looked into the economy of all the Soviet republics and examined the interesting fact that the overall mortality figure was rising spectacularly.

At the end of his study he announced in the Senate that the Soviets were a sickening society and would collapse in the next decade.

Gales of laughter roared through the Senate at this wishful thinker. Nine years later it happened.

To sum him up what most made him an original and a constant suspect to his own Democratic party was his concern for the social roots of any issue, not for its recent cure in a statute.

He chastised his own Democrats for thinking they'd done the job once they passed what he called a liberal piety - forced bussing for mixed schooling, affirmative action, the legalisation of abortion.

He rebuked the Republican conservatives for their steady concern with not rocking the boat, but he applauded and embraced them for their concern over broken marriage and widespread illegitimacy.

At the end, he never said it but I believe if it had been put to him he would have agreed, that all the mischief and most of the wars in the world are caused by bigots - that is to say by people who maintain a fixed loyalty to the right or the left.

An English magazine has best summarised his 40-year achievement in government, that he dragged his left-drifting party back towards what he regarded as the vital centre.

Whether it will ever stay there is doubtful or that any political party will live by James Madison's three principles: compromise, compromise, compromise.

The practice of compromise is neither so thrilling nor dramatic as the thunder and eventually the blood of the left and the right.

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