[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 141 (Monday, October 18, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12796-S12798]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ON THE LIFE OF EDWARD C. BANFIELD
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, Edward C. Banfield has died. This
had to come. He was 83. Yet little were those who loved him prepared.
Or ready, you might say.
He held, of course, Henry Lee Shattuck Chair in Government at Harvard
and, as Richard Bernstein notes in his fine obituary in The Times, was
most active in the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard
in the 1960s and 1970s. For part of that time I was chairman of the
Joint Center and so came to know him at the peak of his long,
comparably brilliant and yet understated career. In 1970, he published
The Unheavenly City, which stands to this day as the most salient and,
well, heart-wrenching exposition of the intractable nature of so many
urban problems. He had been there before. As early as 1955 he wrote,
with Martin Meyerson, Politics, Planning and the Public Interest which
argued that the near religious zeal for high-rise public housing then
current in Chicago, and across the land, would be a disaster. One notes
it has taken Chicago the better part of thirty-five years to realize
this, and start dynamiting the projects, as they came to be known. Just
so was the seminal, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, a study of a
small village in Southern Italy, which he wrote with Laura Fasano-
Banfield, his radiantly intelligent wife and companion of sixty-odd
years.
Now of course, none of this work was welcome, especially in academe.
Not least because it made too much sense to be rejected. James Q.
Wilson, once his student, now his heir, got this just right in a
memorial that appeared in last week's Weekly Standard entitled ``The
Man Who Knew Too Much, Edward C. Banfield, 1916-1999.'' He was onto The
Mob, inside The Agency, privy to The Plan. And yet they never got him.
He was, as he would say, a ``swamp Yankee,'' a tough breed.
He was also a great teacher, something Robert J. Samuelson writes
about so wonderfully well in The Washington Post. Above all he taught
his students to pursue the truth, ``no matter how inconvenient,
unpopular, unfashionable or discomforting.'' The greatest gift a great
teacher can give.
He could be indulgent if the case seemed hopeless. I went to see him
at the time I was thinking of running for the Senate. What would he
advise? ``Well,'' he said, ``you could do that. Who knows, you might
make a good Senator.'' Those words are with me to this moment.
I ask that the obituary from The Times, the article from The Weekly
Standard, and the column from The Washington Post be included in the
Record.
The articles follow.
[From the New York Times, Oct. 8, 1999]
E.C. Banfield, 83, Maverick On Urban Policy Issues, Dies
(By Richard Bernstein)
Edward C. Banfield, a professor emeritus of government at
Harvard University whose work on urban policy and the causes
of poverty gave him a reputation as a brilliant maverick,
died Sept. 30 at his summer home in Vermont. He was 83 and
lived in Cambridge, Mass.
Mr. Banfield, born on a farm in Bloomfield, Conn., held
Harvard's Henry Lee Shattuck Chair in Government for many
years. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Harvard-
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Center for Urban
Studies in the 1960's and 70's, when the problems of cities
were prominent on the national political agenda.
His books and articles had a sharp contrarian edge. He was
a critic of almost every mainstream liberal idea in domestic
policy, especially the use of Federal aid to help relieve
urban poverty. Mr. Banfield argued that at best Government
programs would fail because they aimed at the wrong problems;
at worst they would make the problems worse. He fostered
generations of graduate students, some of whom became leading
figures in American intellectual life. They included James Q.
Wilson, who succeeded him in his chair at Harvard, and
Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise
Institute in Washington.
Mr. Banfield received his B.A. in English for the
University of Connecticut in 1938 and went to work for the
United States Forest Service. After jobs with the New
Hampshire Farm Bureau and the United States Farm Security
Administration in Washington and California, he went to the
University of Chicago to work on his doctorate in political
science. Chicago at that time, under the influence of figures
like Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss, was a bastion of
Laissez-faire politics, a cause that Mr. Banfield later
promoted in his own work.
He served briefly on the faculty in Chicago, moving to
Harvard in 1959. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania
before returning to Harvard at the end of his career.
In 1955 Mr. Banfield and Mr. Meyerson collaborated on
``Politics, Planning and the Public Interest,'' which
examined Chicago's public housing projects. That book was one
of several in which Mr. Banfield found Government programs to
be foiled by a law of unintended consequences. In the Chicago
case he predicted that creating tall institutional buildings
full of small apartments would have the unintended effect of
racially isolating the urban poor. A major theme of Mr.
Banfield's work on poverty, which was often angrily
criticized in liberal circles, is that culture plays a more
important role than factors like discrimination or lack of
education in impeding a person's economic progress.
Among his most influential books was ``The Moral Basis of a
Backward Society,'' a study of a small village in southern
Italy, researched in collaboration with his wife, the former
Laura Fasano. Mr. Banfield's thesis, summed up in a term he
coined, ``amoral familism,'' was that the narrow focus on
family relations prevented people from cooperating with those
outside the family or village.
He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Laura Banfield
Hoguet, a lawyer; a son, Elliott A. Banfield, an illustrator,
and four grandchildren.
Mr. Banfield's emphasis on culture as the basic element in
poverty drew accusations that he was promoting a ``blame the
victim'' attitude. In his 1970 book ``The Unheavenly City,''
and in various papers that he published in the late 60's, he
recognized the existence and harm of racism but propounded
the view that economic class and not race was the essential
ingredient in poverty.
In that book Mr. Banfield constructed a sociological
portrait of what he called ``the lower-class individual'' as
someone who was very different from the middle-class
professionals who sought ways to solve his problems. ``The
lower-class individual lives moment to moment,'' he wrote.
``Impulse governs his behavior either because he cannot
discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future
satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is
therefore radically improvident.''
Mr. Banfield's role as an adviser to President Richard M.
Nixon and chairman of his Model Cities Task force gave his
published views an extra measure of controversy. During the
Reagan Administration he served on a task force seeking ways
to increase public support for the arts. But his subsequent
book, ``the Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public
Interest,'' argued that Federal support of the arts was
neither justified by the Constitution nor useful in practice.
``Affording enjoyment to people is not a proper function of
organizations serving the common good,'' he wrote in that
book.
____
[From the Weekly Standard, Oct. 18, 1999]
The Man Who Knew Too Much--Edward C. Banfield, 1916-1999
(By James Q. Wilson)
In the increasingly dull, narrow, methodologically obscure
world of the social sciences, it is hard to find a mind that
speaks not only to its students but to its nation. Most
scholars can't write, many can't think. Ed Banfield could
write and think.
When he died a few days ago, his life gave new meaning to
the old saw about being a prophet without honor in your own
country. Almost everything he wrote was criticized at the
time it appeared for being wrongheaded. In 1955 he and Martin
Meyerson published an account of how Chicago built public
housing projects in which they explained how mischievous
these projects were likely to be: tall, institutional
buildings filled with tiny
[[Page S12797]]
apartments built in areas that guaranteed racial segregation.
All this was to be done on the basis of the federal Housing
Act of 1949, which said little about what goals housing was
to achieve or why other ways of financing it--housing
vouchers, for example--should not be available. This was
heresy to the authors of the law and to most right-thinking
planners.
Within two decades, high-rise public housing was widely
viewed as a huge mistake and efforts were made to create
vouchers so that poor families could afford to rent housing
in the existing market. Local authorities in St. Louis had
dynamited a big housing project there after describing it as
a hopeless failure. It is not likely that Ed and Martin's
book received much credit for having pointed the way.
In 1958, Ed, with the assistance of his wife, Laura,
explained why a backward area in southern Italy was poor. The
reason was not government neglect or poor education but
culture. In this area of Italy, the Banfields said in The
Moral Basis of a Backward Society, people would not cooperate
outside the boundaries of their immediate families. These
``amoral familists'' were the product of a high death rate, a
defective system for owning land, and the absence of any
extended families. By contrast, in a town of about the same
size located in an equally forbidding part of southern Utah,
the residents published a local newspaper and had a
remarkable variety of associates, each busily involved in
improving the life of the community. In southern Italy,
people would not cooperate; in southern Utah, they scarcely
did anything else.
Foreign aid programs ignored this finding and went about
persuading other nations to accept large grants to build new
projects. Few of these projects created sustained economic
growth. Where growth did occur, as in Singapore, Hong Kong,
and South Korea, there was little foreign aid and what
existed made little difference.
Today, David S. Landes, in his magisterial book that
explains why some nations become wealthy while others remain
poor, offers a one-word explanation: culture. He is right,
but the Banfield book written forty years earlier is not
mentioned.
In 1970, Ed published his best-known and most controversial
work, The Unheavenly City. In it he argued that the ``urban
crisis'' was misunderstood. Many aspects of the so-called
crisis, such as congestion or the business flight to the
suburbs, are not really problems at all; some that are modest
problems, such as transportation, could be managed rather
well by putting high peak-hour tolls on key roads and
staggering working hours; and many of the greatest problems,
such as crime, poverty, and racial injustice, are things
that we shall find it exceptionally difficult to manage.
Consider racial injustice. Racism is quite real, though
much diminished in recent years, and it has a powerful
effect. But the central problem for black Americans is not
racism but poverty. And poverty is in part the result of
where blacks live and what opportunities confront them. When
they live in areas with many unskilled workers and few jobs
for unskilled people, they will suffer. When they grow up in
families that do not own small businesses, they will find it
harder to move into jobs available to them or to meet people
who can tell them about jobs elsewhere. That whites treat
blacks differently than they treat other whites is obviously
true, but ``much of what appears . . . as race prejudice is
really class prejudice.''
In 1987 William Julius Wilson, a black scholar, published
his widely acclaimed book, The Truly Disadvantaged. In it he
says that, while racism remains a powerful force, it cannot
explain the plight of inner-city blacks. The problem is
poverty--social class--and that poverty flows from the
material conditions of black neighborhoods. Banfield's book
is mentioned in Wilson's bibliography, but his argument is
mentioned only in passing.
Both Wilson and Banfield explain the core urban problems as
ones that flow from social class. To Wilson, an
``underclass'' has emerged, made up of people who lack
skills, experience long-term unemployment, engage in street
crime, and are part of families with prolonged welfare
dependency. Banfield would have agreed. But to Wilson, the
underclass suffers from a shortage of jobs and available
fathers, while for Banfield it suffers from a defective
culture.
Wilson argued that changing the economic condition of
underclass blacks would change their underclass culture;
Banfield argued that unless the underclass culture was first
changed (and he doubted much could be done in that regard),
the economic condition of poor blacks would not improve. The
central urban problem of modern America is to discover which
theory is correct.
Banfield had some ideas to help address the culture (though
he thought no government would adopt them): Keep the
unemployment rate low, repeal minimum-wage laws, lower the
school-leaving age, provide a negative income tax (that is, a
cash benefit) to the ``competent poor,'' supply intensive
birth-control guidance to the ``incompetent poor,'' and pay
problem families to send their children to decent day-care
programs.
The Unheavenly City sold well but was bitterly attacked by
academics and book reviewers; Wilson's book was widely
praised by the same critics. But on the central facts, both
books say the same thing, and on the unknown facts--What will
work?--neither book can (of necessity) offer much evidence.
Ed Banfield's work would probably have benefited from a
quality he was incapable of supplying. If it had been written
in the dreary style of modern sociology or, worse, if he had
produced articles filled with game-theoretic models and
endless regression equations, he might have been taken more
seriously. But Ed was a journalist before he was a scholar,
and his commitment to clear, forceful writing was unshakable.
He was more than a clear writer with a Ph.D.; everything he
wrote was embedded in a powerful theoretical overview of the
subject. ``Theory,'' to him, meant clarifying how people can
think about a difficulty, and the theories he produced--on
social planning, political influence, economic backwardness,
and urban problems--are short masterpieces of incisive prose.
His remarkable mind was deeply rooted in Western philosophy
as well as social science. To read his books is to be carried
along by extraordinary prose in which you learn about David
Hume and John Stuart Mill as well as about pressing human
issues. To him, the central human problem was cooperation:
How can society induce people to work together in informal
groups--Edmund Burke's ``little platoon''--to manage their
common problems? No one has ever thought through this issue
more lucidly, and hence no one I can think of has done more
to illuminate the human condition of the modern world.
A few months ago, a group of Ed's former students and
colleagues met for two days to discuss his work. Our fondness
for this amusing and gregarious man was manifest, as were our
memories of the tortures through which he put us as he taught
us to think and write. Rereading his work as a whole reminded
us that we had been privileged to know one of the best minds
we had ever encountered, a person whose rigorous intellect
and extraordinary knowledge created a standard to which all
of us aspired but which none of us attained.
____
[From the Washington Post, Oct. 14, 1999]
The Gift of a Great Teacher
(By Robert J. Samuelson)
If you are lucky in life, you will have at least one great
teacher. More than three decades ago, I had Ed Banfield, a
political scientist who taught mainly at the University of
Chicago and Harvard University. Ed's recent death at 83
saddened me (which was expected) and left me with a real
sense of loss (which wasn't). Although we had stayed in
touch, we were never intimate friends or intellectual soul-
mates. The gap between us in intellectual candlepower was too
great. But he had loomed large in my life, and I have been
puzzling why his death has so affected me.
I think the answer--and the reason for writing about
something so personal--goes to the heart of what it means to
be a great teacher. By teacher, I am not referring primarily
to classroom instructors, because learning in life occurs
mainly outside of schools. I first encountered Ed in a
lecture hall, but his greatness did not lie in giving good
lectures (which he did). It lay instead in somehow
transmitting life-changing lessons. If I had not known him, I
would be a different person. He helped me become who I am
and, more important, who I want to be.
When you lose someone like that, there is a hole. It is a
smaller hole than losing a parent, a child or close friend.
But it is still a hole, because great teachers are so rare. I
have, for example, worked for some very talented editors. A
few have earned my lasting gratitude for improving my
reporting or writing. But none has been a great teacher; none
has changed my life.
What gave Ed this power was, first, his ideas. He made me
see new things or old things in new ways. The political
scientist James Q. Wilson--first Ed's student, then his
collaborator--has called Banfield ``the most profound student
of American politics in this century.'' Although arguable,
this is surely plausible.
Americans take democracy, freedom and political stability
for granted. Ed was more wary. These great things do not
exist in isolation. They must somehow fuse into a political
system that fulfills certain essential social functions: to
protect the nation; to provide some continuity in government
and policy; to maintain order and modulate society's most
passionate conflicts. The trouble, Ed believed, is that
democracies have self-destructive tendencies and that, in
modern America, these had intensified.
On the whole, he regretted the disappearance after World
War II of a political system based on big-city machines
(whose supporters were rewarded with patronage jobs and
contracts) and on party ``bosses'' (who dictated political
candidates from city council to Congress and, often, the
White House). It was not that he favored patronage,
corruption or bosses for their own sake. But in cities, they
created popular support for government and gave it the power
to accomplish things. And they emphasized material gain over
ideological fervor.
Postwar suburbanization and party ``reforms''--weakening
bosses and machines--destroyed this system. Its replacement,
Ed feared, was inferior. ``Whereas the old system had
promised personal rewards,'' he wrote, ``the new one
promises social reform.'' Politicians would now
merchandise themselves by selling false solutions to
exaggerated problems. ``The politician, like the TV news
commentator, must always have something to say even when
nothing urgently needs to be said,'' he wrote in 1970. By
some
[[Page S12798]]
years, this anticipated the term ``talking head.'' People
would lose respect for government because many
``solutions'' would fail. Here, too, he anticipated.
Later, polls showed dropping pubic confidence in national
leaders. Ed was not surprised.
He taught that you had to understand the world as it is,
not as you wished it to be. This was sound advice for an
aspiring reporter. And Ed practiced it. In 1954 and 1955, he
and his wife, Laura (they would ultimately be married 61
years), spent time in a poor Italian village to explain its
poverty. The resulting book--``The Moral Basis of a Backward
Society''--remains a classic. Families in the village, it
argued, so distrusted each other that they could not
cooperate to promote common prosperity. The larger point
(still missed by many economists) is that local culture, not
just ``markets,'' determines economic growth.
What brought Ed fleeting prominence--notoriety, really--was
``The Unheavenly City.'' Published in 1970. Prosperity,
government programs and less racial discrimination might lift
some from poverty, he said. But the worst problems of poverty
and the cities would remain. They resulted from a ``lower
class'' whose members were so impulsive and ``present
oriented'' that they attached ``no value to work, sacrifice,
self-improvement, or service to family, friends or
community.'' They dropped out of school, had illegitimate
children and were unemployed. Government couldn't easily
alter their behavior.
For this message, Ed was reviled as a reactionary. He
repeatedly said that most black Americans didn't belong to
the ``lower class'' and that it contained many whites. Still,
many dismissed him as a racist. Over time his theories gained
some respectability from the weight of experience. Poverty
defied government assaults; his ``lower class'' was relabeled
``the underclass.'' But when he wrote, Ed was assailing
prevailing opinion. He knew he would be harshly, even
viciously, attacked. He wrote anyway and endured the
consequences.
This was the deeper and more important lesson. Perhaps all
great teachers--whether parents, bosses, professors or
whoever--ultimately convey some moral code. Ed surely did.
What he was saying in the 1960s was not what everyone else
was saying. I felt uneasy with the reigning orthodoxy. But I
didn't know why. Ed helped me understand my doubts and made
me feel that it was important to give them expression. The
truth had to be pursued, no matter how inconvenient,
unpopular; unfashionable or discomforting. Ed did not teach
that; he lived it. This was his code, and it was--for anyone
willing to receive it--an immeasurable gift.
____________________