Maggie's Farm

The New York senator was right—and not only about black families.

It was more black families 50 years ago, now the decay has expanded.

The goal of the Moynihan Report, he said, had been to begin a serious national conversation about the implications of those sizable numbers of out-of-wedlock births and what they said about the condition of the family and marriage. His fellow liberals believed that the social and cultural pathologies Moynihan had identified could be effectively addressed by an historic expansion of the federal government. President Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched in 1964, was defined in part by a series of programs that would intervene against family and marriage breakdown, helping to arrest, reverse, and eventually eradicate the problems that Moynihan had identified.

But Moynihan was skeptical. Government could not tuck a child into bed at night; government could not save a marriage; government could not help a broken family fall in love again. These were, he said, primarily cultural problems and not economic or political ones—a bold assertion at a time when trust in big government was embraced by members of both parties.