There is a wonderfully written piece over at the American Spectator. I had come across the Cloward-Piven writings at some point in my earlier life. I had really thought that both of them were long gone. As is well-known by now, Glenn Beck gave Fran her second wind. I have posted a number of her recent vid rants. But who were these characters and what were their lives about? I can’t do the article justice by picking a few salient paragraphs, so if you are as curious as I.. take a spin and read the whole thing. Also dispelled is the notion that slavery caused the single parent black family.Here is a link to the Nation article that started this reincarnation.
From the Nation: Mobilizing the Jobless that Glenn Beck quoted. Here tis from the American Spectator:
To me it’s almost startling to find they are real people — just as Piven, who is now receiving death threats for her writings, must be astonished to find there are actually people out there paying attention to what she has to say.
n 1966 Cloward and Piven had married and moved on to write “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” the article in The Nation that 45 years later has captured Glenn Beck’s attention. Cloward and Piven suggested a simple, if cynical, strategy for “ending poverty.” The welfare law — the notorious AFDC (Aid to Financially Dependent Children) — was filled with special allowances for furniture, clothing, and back-to-school expenses that nobody ever claimed. Millions of people were eligible for welfare but never applied. All you had to do, after all, was have a baby out of wedlock. Many states refused to apply these laws while others kept them hidden from applicants. But a full-scale national effort to get everybody signed up for welfare would bankrupt the system, paving the way — in good Marxist fashion — for something much better. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” later expanded into Regulating the Poor (1971), became the foundation of the Welfare Rights Movement, which Cloward and Piven founded in 1968 and whose main accomplishment was to get millions of unwed mothers to apply for government assistance, so that the term “single-parent home” not only entered the lexicon but became a national phenomenon.
Here is an interesting factoid from the author of this piece from A.S…….Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and several other books that this pattern can be traced all the way back through slavery . Yet families do form. Eighty percent of the families in Gutman’s plantation records had two parents and the rate of two-parent families among African-Americans living in Harlem in the 1920s was close to 90 percent.
Full article here at the Spectator
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