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About the Author

Nicholas Lemann, a native of New Orleans, developed an interest in journalism during his teenage years. This eagerness to write was coupled with a keen interest in United States history and literature. He pooled his curiosities, earning a degree in American literature and history from Harvard show more University in 1976. Journalism became Lemann's main occupation, as he built his writing career through working for the Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, and the Washington Post. In 1983, he joined the Atlantic Monthly staff. His love for American history peaked with the publication of his commentary on the African-American migration to Chicago in search of jobs and a better life. Lemann's book, The Promised Land, captured the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in journalism. His articles span many interests, from book reviews and political topics to travel stories about the Catskill Mountains and other natural wonders. He contributes many articles, not only to the Atlantic Monthly but to several other magazines as well. Nicholas Lemann, his wife Dominique Browning, and their two sons live in New York City. (Bowker Author Biography) Nicholas Lemann was born in New Orleans in 1954. He has been a journalist for more than twenty years. His last book was the prizewinning The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. He lives in Pelham, New York. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Includes the name: Lemann Nicholas

Image credit: Nicholas Lemann at the 2006 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, United States. Lemann won the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for his book The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1318868

Works by Nicholas Lemann

Associated Works

The Best American Magazine Writing 2005 (2005) — Introduction — 54 copies
The Best American Political Writing 2004 (2004) — Contributor — 41 copies
The Best American Political Writing 2002 (2002) — Contributor — 27 copies
Inside the system; a Washington monthly book (1971) — Editor, some editions — 15 copies

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A nifty and readable piece of journalism and social history.
 
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Mark_Feltskog | 2 other reviews | Dec 23, 2023 |
Boring book. He promises a lot. but does not deliver. He writes up people including A.A. Berle, Mike Jensen and Reid Hoffman.
 
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annbury | Jun 10, 2020 |
Another of the older titles that has been on my reading list too long. Some of this history is important to consider again, as the SATs were in theory going to be revamped again in 2019 before public backlash put the kibosh on the planned "adversity score" that test takers would also get. You can learn from this title that this feature was first devised in the middle 20th century! And some of what feels backwards about standardized testing as a student or a teacher did make more sense with detailed background about its inception. Still, it was a bit too fussy about including a play-by-play of the ETS Corporation when we didn't need that to get the overall point.… (more)
½
 
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jonerthon | Jun 5, 2020 |
Bill Kauffman turns the meaning of lib ral and conservative upside down in [b:America First: Its History Culture and Politics|885267|Counterculture Green The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (CultureAmerica)|Andrew G. Kirk|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179182237s/885267.jpg|870531]. He suggests that an examination of the history of isolationist and non-interventionist movements reveals them to be closely tied to the much maligned voice of the populists, a voice he says reveals the true nature of the" silent majority", a movement that owes much to George Washington and the founding fathers who desperately feared "foreign entanglements;" the messianic impulse to save the world being a creation of the Wall Street financiers and militarists who profited mightily from the wars ("a small war might take the people's minds off our economic problems," wrote one in 1898. Barely can one predict the impact of new inventions. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made possible the production of cheap cotton which led to the need for cheap labor to harvest it which led to an increased justification for slavery. The mass production of the cotton harvester in 1944, spurred on by high cotton prices and a shortage of labor, virtually eliminated the need for cheap labor and caused the migration of thousands of b lacks seeking jobs in the industrial north.

The impact of this movement and race relations in general are explored in Promised Land: The Great Black. Migration and How It Changed America by Nicholas Lemann. Labor supply in the south was intimately tie d to race. Segregatio n reinforced the share-cropper system created after the Civil War as a substitute for slavery. It prevented upward mobility of blacks, perpetuating cheap labor.

The sharecroppin system, devised by white plantation owners to trap their labor supply into a system of virtual peonage, left a society that by 1945 resembled a big city ghetto: high illegitimacy (with no AFDC), female-headed households, a miserable educational system, and a very high rate of violent crime. Home brewed-whiskey was "more physically perilous than crack cocaine is today."

In 1940, "rural south" was almost synonymous with "black, but by 1970 the euphemism had changed; now urban was synonymous with poor black.
By then race relations could no longer be ignored, except of course, by while, rural, Republicans to their discredit. The" decoupling of race from cotton [has influenced:] popular culture, presidential politics, urban geography, education, justice, [and:] social welfare." But urban liberals didn't get it either as they supported urban renewal which merely resulted in land developers and high-rise builders enriching their own pockets. Herbet Gans wrote in The Urban Villagers, "the low-income population was in effect subsidizing its own removal for the benefit of the wealthy."

Lemann's description of how the anti-poverty programs came to be is enlightening. Ironically, JFK had not formulated any serious plans for eliminating poverty, but he had several aides, including Walter Heller, who were captivated by the idea. After Kennedy's death, his supporters made a conscious effort to paint Kennedy as being much more liberal than he really was. Johnson visualized himself as more liberal than Kennedy, and he wanted an issue to call his own to carry him through the next presidential election. Many of the antipoverty plans made him uncomfortable because, being a pragmatist, he was looking for measurable solutions and programs that worked. The plans that were being foisted on him as Kennedy's legacy had not been tried; they were mere academic speculations. Yet he was forced to adopt many of them or look like he was abandoning the martyred president's legacy, something he politically could not afford to do. The assumption behind the war on poverty was that poverty was cultural in nature. This idea came from social anthropologists, and it meant that if parents could not acculturate their children to the bourgeois society, then government could. The rural migrants to the urban north fit the mold perfectly as guinea pigs for the great experiment.

The other side of the argument maintained that poverty was political and resulted from a lack of political power. The Irish, for example, struggled into the middle class by gaining control of the political structure. These two ideologies were to clash constantly. And the problem was that any program that offended white middle class sensibilities was doomed to failure from the start.

Contrary to current popular opinion, the War on Poverty, was not a failure. The huge numbers of jobs that were created to implement the programs went primarily to blacks and that, in effect, created a black middle class that promptly moved out of the ghettos leaving them in much worse shape because the motivated folks who got the jobs had provided the strength and structure to those communities.

Lemann discusses the failure of housing projects at some length. Apparently they have worked quite well in areas where the original rules and goals were adhered to, i.e. tenants were carefully screened using several criteria including the requirement that the tenant have a job and be part of a two parent household. In Chicago, those rules were discarded for two reasons: the ACLU filed suit claiming the rules were arbitrarily discriminatory (surely true, but another example of good intentions causing unintended results) and the lack of people meeting the criteria. It became essential for the politicians to prove the projects were a success but they were not filling the buildings fast enough so screening went out the window.

Lemann's analysis of the political maneuvering that went on in Washington and his descriptions of the hidden and not-so-secret agendas of all the groups is fascinating and ought to be required reading for everyone.
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ecw0647 | 2 other reviews | Sep 30, 2013 |

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