Word: lemann
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...Nicholas Lemann...
...Nicholas Lemann, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, tries to fathom the course of that great surge by linking the personal experiences of a few migrants to a tale of big-city politicking in Chicago, one of their chief destinations. He frames that story within an account of how three successive White House administrations, from Kennedy through Nixon, were consumed by a debate over federal antipoverty efforts -- a Washington policy war that combined the worst features of academic detachment and fang-baring political ambition. His heroes are the migrants who managed to clamber into the middle class, mostly...
...Lemann deals directly with the messy question of whether the sharecropper culture the migrants left behind helped lead them into the trap of ghetto poverty. He sides with those who believe that a high number of unwed mothers, female-headed households and short-lived marriages were characteristics of sharecropper life that were reproduced in the Northern slums. But he stops short of the conclusion that often follows: broken families or a "culture of ^ poverty" created the disaster of the ghettos. He puts the blame instead on the disappearance of unskilled manufacturing jobs, a problem misguided federal policies did little...
...book's sharpest commentary is reserved for Washington. In the city Lemann describes, the real corridors of power are the margins of agency memos, where bureaucrats fight a war of ideas in scribbled asides. The Promised Land is indispensable for understanding how the War on Poverty advanced along the wrong front, favoring panaceas like community action and higher welfare payments while devoting too little attention to job creation. In the end, Lemann insists, the federal effort had its greatest impact by employing ghetto blacks in antipoverty agencies. For many that government paycheck was their ticket out of the ghetto...
...implicit indictment of the North and the redemption of the South contained in this black to-and-fro. "What's unusual is that they were immigrants to another country in a real sense, and ordinarily, immigrants don't go back to the old country to stay," says Lemann...