In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was roundly criticized for predicting the violent, hopeless future millions of children from broken families now face.
Moynihan — a sociologist, diplomat and four-term Democratic senator from New York — was serving in President Lyndon Johnson’s Labor Department when he wrote his report on family and poverty.
With Johnson’s War on Poverty in full swing, Moynihan’s office was studying employment and poverty trends among Black Americans.
As he analyzed the data, he discovered an alarming shift: Black families were experiencing a significant rise in single-parent households.
The cause? Well-meaning federal welfare programs that penalized marriage and rewarded father absence. Such policies were weakening Black families — and if left unchecked, he warned, they would eventually erode families of every race.
Critics accused Moynihan of blaming the victim. They said the real problem was racism, redlining and job discrimination, which made life especially hard for Black families.
But he argued that the issue was not about race, but about the government’s destructive effect on family structure.
He could not have been more right.
In 1965, just 8 percent of children were born outside marriage — about 3 percent for white children and 24 percent for Black children. Hispanic children weren’t counted separately until the 1970 census.
Today, the figure has soared to 40 percent overall — nearly 30 percent for white children, about 50 percent for Hispanic children and more than 70 percent for Black children.
Today, roughly 24 percent of white children, 42 percent of Hispanic children and 64 percent of Black children live with only their mother.
Though mothers do heroic work, they cannot do the work of fathers alone. Children need both parents.
Strong, loving fathers are essential to daughters. A dad is often a girl’s first example of how a man should treat her. If she grows up with a caring, protective father, she’s less likely to seek approval from the wrong people later on.
Boys are in desperate need of guidance and discipline from a strong father figure — the only creature on earth capable of helping them properly channel their testosterone-fueled energy.
The absence of fathers is why the worst crimes — carjackings, armed robberies and murders — are mostly committed by males under 25, and why research shows children without dads are far more likely to drop out of school, abuse drugs or end up in prison.
The violent street crime that has sent the National Guard into Washington, D.C., is being driven by young men from fatherless homes.
Politicians and talking heads are furious about Guard troops patrolling the nation’s capital — but not so much about the crime itself.
Seasoned journalist Bill Steigerwald asks: Why aren’t they equally furious that, since 1995, roughly 150,000 Black males under 35 in America have been killed by other Black males? (See Steigerwald’s column at https://clips.substack.com.)
Why aren’t D.C. leaders furious that in the same span about 6,200 Black Washingtonians have been killed by other Blacks — and that in 2024 alone, nearly 200 were slain the same way?
If our so-called leaders truly wanted to end the carnage, they’d focus their grandstanding on solutions that get at the root cause of the problem. The one that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned us about 60 years ago.
Find Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos of his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.
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