12/20/2023 0 Comments Black power and the black masses“Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father-They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes-of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies-the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”Īs a teenager, Moynihan divided his time between his studies and working at the docks in Manhattan to help out his family. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. Moynihan’s childhood-a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood-contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. Patterson’s book is deeply sympathetic to Moynihan in ways that I don’t quite agree with, but I found it invaluable for understanding Moynihan as a human. James Patterson’s Freedom Is Not Enough furnished much of the biographical information in this section. “lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”īy his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family.
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