[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.

                          ____________________