Sounder Of Alarms

Once again, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is sounding the alarm. While other politicians talk moderately of reform, the Democratic Senator from New York wants to scrap the basic federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). That system, established 50 years ago to provide temporary relief for widows, was never meant to address the long-term problem of poor children in broken homes, he argues, and it certainly has proved incapable of coping with the "changed reality" of a country with 3.8 million poor, single-parent families.

As the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that deals with welfare, Moynihan has launched hearings on ways to replace the system. The former Harvard professor is an astute analyst of demographic trends, and these days he is frightened by what he sees: the nation's median family income is hovering at the same level it was 17 years ago, the stable two-parent family is becoming the exception rather than the norm, and 12 million children are growing up in poverty and with inadequate training for the job market. If the U.S. does not take drastic action soon, he warns, "then we will have demonstrated an incapacity which could weaken American society in a way that nothing else ever could."

After three decades as an architect of social policy, the erudite and garrulous Senator with an impish face and patrician accent has attained a reputation for prescience. Back in 1965, when he was serving as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, he wrote a report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, that provoked a searing controversy. Using the work of Black Sociologists Kenneth Clark and E. Franklin Frazier, Moynihan contended that the growing number of one-parent families living on welfare was preventing blacks from achieving true equality in American society. If the trend did not stop, he charged, the triumphs of the civil rights movement might be dissipated. The Moynihan report became a lightning rod for ideological fury. Critics faulted the study's methods, but they seemed most upset by the author's use of provocative expressions like a "tangle of pathology" to describe the black family breakdown.

As the deterioration of family structure among poor blacks worsened through the 1970s, social theorists began to take a second, and more respectful, look at Moynihan's work. In his 1986 book on welfare policy, Family and Nation, the Senator proudly wrote, "At the end of two decades, it was at some level accepted, as if a proposition in science had bested competing hypotheses." Although he has upset liberals with his iconoclastic approach to social programs, Moynihan also opposes conservative theorists like Charles Murray who argue that the Great Society programs of the '60s have worsened poverty in America. Charges Moynihan: "What Charles Murray seems to be saying is that the reason we are having problems is that we tried to do something about them."

Moynihan speaks of replacing AFDC with a "national family policy" to promote the preservation of two-parent households. Such a program would force fathers to support their children and compel able-bodied mothers with children over age three to work. It would also establish a national minimum standard of living; federal aid would be provided to families that could not achieve the minimum through earnings or child-support payments. The Senator is confident that sooner or later the nation will find new ways to approach the dilemma of its impoverished families. "Americans will say, 'Enough!' " declares Moynihan. " 'We can't let this happen to our children!' "