The Real Problem With ACORN
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I found myself glued to the television last week as Fox
broadcast its special investigation of ACORN. It was a terrific
piece of journalism — something worthy of 60
Minutes in its heyday.
But the real fascination for me was personal. Wade Rathke,
the 61-year-old founder of ACORN, is exactly my age and vintage
(he went to Williams, I went to Amherst). He even looks like me.
Moreover, he started the organization after going South to work
in the Welfare Rights Movement in 1970. I was working for Welfare
Rights in Clark County, Alabama in 1970. (I remember noticing
there were a lot of redheads in the movement at the time.)
But that’s where the similarity ends. I ended up feeling a
little ambivalent about “The Movement” and came back and started
a newspaper career. Rathke says he liked community organizing so
much he started his own group in Little Rock after Welfare Rights
ran out of steam. He built the organization into an incredible,
multi-million-dollar octopus with tentacles almost everywhere. He
finally had to resign when it was discovered he covered up his
brother’s million-dollar embezzlement from the organization. The
interview with Fox was the first he has ever granted.
Welfare Rights at the time was a second generation of the
Civil Rights Movement. I was in Mississippi in 1964 and that was
the first generation. We were in danger of our lives — and of
course three volunteers, Michael Schwerner, James Cheney and
Andrew Goodman, were murdered.
It was also an effort of which any American should be
proud. When we started about 1 percent of the African-American
population was registered to vote. Today Mississippi has the
highest number of black elected officials in the nation.
In Holly Springs, the town where I worked, there was a
bright 16-year-old named Roy DeBerry who became the subject of
many accounts of Freedom Summer. A couple of the volunteers got
him into Brandeis and he was later featured on the cover of a
book called Don’t Shoot, We Are Your Children,
by Anthony Lukas, who was chronicling the stories of 1960s
rebels. Roy went on to become Secretary of Education of
Mississippi, county executive of Hinds County (Jackson) and is
now vice president of Jackson State University. My son visited
Holly Springs a year ago (he’s trying to make a movie of the era)
and Roy’s brother is now the mayor! My son got a kind of hero’s
welcome.
About that much I feel proud. When I went back in 1970,
“The Movement” had pretty much achieved its political goals and
Welfare Rights had taken its place. Things had changed
completely. The threat of extreme violence was gone, although
there were still little incidents. Things weren’t friendly but
civilized. The old Southern caste system that had kept blacks
bowing and scraping before white overlords had been overthrown in
a way no one had ever thought possible.
And so we set to work trying to get single mothers and
older people on welfare. The mothers were not hard to find. In
almost every household, there was a daughter in her late teens
who was raising a baby. It was the way of the world — and in
fact the local people refused to believe that the young white
women in our group didn’t have babies waiting for them back home
as well.
We had varying success. At the county offices, the women
welfare workers sat in stony silence while we went through the
interviews. One woman finally exploded in a tirade about “having
illegitimate children and expecting the state to take care of
them,” but to me that was just bad form. The law was on our side,
plain as day. We were helping unfortunates and bringing money
into the community.
It was later, when welfare became a national issue in the
1980s, that the pieces began to fall in place. The debate was
between liberals who argued welfare mothers were merely
unfortunates abandoned by their boyfriends and conservatives who
argued that welfare was
encouraging
teenagers to have illegitimate children. I realized the
truth fell about halfway in between. Among the African-American I
had met, it was a social custom for girls to have one or two
children before getting married. Their parents would support
them. Then by the time the third child came along their parents
would be too old and tired and the young woman would get married.
Most marriages in the community had been formed that way.
I read Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom and found the pattern stretched back
into slavery. In fact you could trace it all the way to Africa,
where men have much weaker paternal rights and women commonly
have one or two “children of fortune” before choosing a husband.
This produced a kind of lottery, where men surrendered some
paternal claims for the chance to sow their own “children of
fortune.” It also allowed girls to prove their
fertility, an important thing
in a fairly monogamous society.
All this made it clear why the American welfare system had
had such a disastrous effect on black family formation.
Traditionally, women had had one or two children and
then married. The welfare system intervened
precisely at the point where they married.
Instead of marrying the father of their child, they married the
state. The result was something unprecedented in human history –
a culture in which single motherhood became the norm
I wrote this up several times for The American
Spectator, particularly in a review of Nicholas
Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How
It Changed America, published in 1991. Lemann
had gone down to the same Alabama neighborhood I had been in to
find out what was causing single parenthood. He met some people
in the towns who informed him that single motherhood had always
been the norm “in the rural,” meaning the tenant farms outside of
town. The rural migrants had carried the custom north, he
posited, from whence it spread across America. Welfare had
nothing to do with it. The book won several prizes.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t my experience with single
mothers that made me begin to doubt the virtue of my efforts. It
was a visit I made one day to an elderly couple. I’ve told this
story many times but still consider it the starting point of my
migration over to conservatism.
The elderly couple owned a small property near the edge of
town where they had farmed for many years. They were in their 80s
but still working the land. Some people in town had told me about
them and I went out to make my pitch. I met them working in their
fields. They stood listening for a few minutes in that way
Southern blacks had, politely nodding their heads while I told
them about the wonders of the welfare system. They were old
enough, they were sure to qualify, it would be a nice check every
month.
As I carried on I suddenly realized the man had tears in
his eyes. It came across me in a rush. They had worked on this
land all their lives, feeding themselves, raising children,
fending off god knows what kind of adversity — and now I was
telling them they could become dependent on the government. I
finally apologized and left. I left that field thinking, “I
wonder if I’m doing the right thing down here.”
Eventually I soured on welfare in a number of ways. Even
with the women it was doing no good. They had no sense of
self-sufficiency. It was just a sophisticated form of begging.
They would develop a sense of entitlement so that “getting ahead”
simply meant making more and more strident demands on more and
more people.
And that’s what Wade Rathke seems to have picked up on. He
said on the Fox show that when funding ran out for welfare rights
he moved to Little Rock to start his own community organizing
effort, based on that same sense of endless grievance. ACORN
became skilled at moral gangsterism, shaking down governments and
corporations for larger and larger amounts, making ever more
ridiculous demands. (A former worker said on the show she became
disillusioned when she realized ACORN was asking Sherwin-Williams
for $1 billion as reparations for having manufactured lead-based
paint. The money, of course, would go into ACORN’s
coffers.)
And that’s where ACORN did itself in. It wasn’t just an
accident that the women in ACORN offices were willing to hand out
advice on how to set up a brothel and dodge income taxes by
claiming underage Central American prostitutes as dependents.
ACORN simply doesn’t produced good citizens. The organization is
saturated with the sense that the world is one big shakedown and
that anything you do to increase your share is justified.
At the end of the show, Rathke said he isn’t discouraged.
He’s gone abroad to found ACORN chapters in Latin America, the
Philippines and India. I hope the rest of the world is ready for
this kind of gangster politics. And I hope Rathke is prepared to
discover that in the big wide world out there he may not have the
monopoly on moral cynicism.
