Robert W. Patterson is editor of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy, www.familyinamerica.org.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans nearly six years ago, leaving tens of thousands of African Americans struggling for survival, the aftermath revealed a reality that was ignored at time and continues to be overlooked by Republicans and Democrats alike.
No, it’s not the “history of racism” or the “legacy of inequality” that then-President George W. Bush blamed for the violence, disorder, and dire conditions in the Big Easy at the time. Nor is about the material needs of “low-income families,” a euphemism that obscures the nature of the crisis.
Rather, it’s about a city and a nation underwater socially, or falling behind in metrics that really matter: marriage and family formation. As television coverage revealed, the vast majority of victims who were trying to escape New Orleans were mothers and children who lacked a social necessity -- husbands and married fathers. Where were the men, the natural protectors and providers? Reports showed that more than a few young males, instead of aiding women and children, were preying on the victims, stealing, looting, and even shooting the rescuers.
America has seen social chaos like this before. It was not uncommon among the first generation of Irish immigrants to New York City and other Americans who flocked to mining camps and cow towns on the Western frontier in the 19thcentury.
Although he wrote before Katrina, historian David Courtwright connects the dots between the frontier and today’s inner city in his 1996 book, “Violent Land.” Then as now, poverty, crime, violence -- as well as a shortage of husbands and married fathers and an abundance of young men without meaningful bonds to women and children -- were the rule, not the exception. Courtwright blames today’s urban blight on “the decline of stable two-parent families and the institution of marriage in the context of an entrenched culture of poverty in an isolated, youth subsociety with diminishing employment opportunities and a chronically low gender ratio.”
According to his calculus, the disorder in New Orleans was not due to poverty or racial inequality as the political class imagined, but to the retreat from marriage and family life that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about forty years earlier.
Indeed, the National Center for Health Statistics reports that 77 percent of all African-American births in Louisiana in the year Katrina hit were to unmarried mothers. Moreover, Census Bureau data indicates that unwed mother-led households with dependent children outnumber their married-coupled peers in New Orleans, as they do in Baltimore City and in the District of Columbia.
Had rates of marriage and family formation not fallen so precipitously since the 1970s, Americans would have seen a very different New Orleans, as well as less material disadvantage elsewhere. Researchers at the liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation agree. Isabel Sawhill of Brookings claims that virtually all of the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s can be attributed to family breakdown. Her colleague Ron Haskins estimates that had marriage rates remained unchanged from 1980, child poverty today would be reduced almost 30 percent. Robert Rector of Heritage claims child poverty today would be reduced by more than 80 percent if marriage rates had remained what they were in 1960.
Ironically, those who claim to care most about the poor -- the civil-rights establishment, the partisans of the Great Society, the “means-tested” welfare-social services complex, the legal establishment, and the professional feminists -- ignore these social realities. Moreover, these voices are largely responsible for this “unmarriage revolution” as author Kay Hymowitz terms it. Consequently, their cherished War on Poverty, even with the much-touted GOP-led reforms of 1996, has lowered the prospects of the poor by displacing marriage and fathers from families, leaving the underclass less self-reliant and more welfare-dependent than when LBJ launched the initiative in 1964.
The lesson: The War on Poverty, which has left men, women, and children socially impoverished, has been no friend of the poor. But marriage -- because it connects men to women, husbands to wives, and fathers to their children -- is absolutely indispensable to helping them. The sooner we retreat from the former, and restore the flourishing family system that the Great Society displaced, the better.
