BOOKS

By Richard Lacayo

THE PROMISED LAND

by Nicholas Lemann

Knopf; 410 pages; $24.95

There were two great migrations that transformed America in this century. The first brought millions of arrivals through the gates of Ellis Island. The second, which began in the 1940s, saw more than 5 million blacks move from the farms and small towns of the South to the cities of the North. Because it took place entirely within U.S. borders, that second massive relocation slipped by with less notice than the first, until the nation woke to find itself transformed. By the time their numbers had tapered off, around 1970, many of the travelers were embarked upon another journey -- up the ladder of class advancement. But almost as many were rattling in the dungeons of the underclass, causing reverberations throughout American life.

Nicholas Lemann, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, tries to fathom the course of that great surge by linking the personal experiences of a few migrants to a tale of big-city politicking in Chicago, one of their chief destinations. He frames that story within an account of how three successive White House administrations, from Kennedy through Nixon, were consumed by a debate over federal antipoverty efforts -- a Washington policy war that combined the worst features of academic detachment and fang-baring political ambition. His heroes are the migrants who managed to clamber into the middle class, mostly on the narrow foothold of modest government jobs. His villains -- and there are more of those -- are the politicians and policymakers of both left and right who botched the War on Poverty.

Much of the book focuses on a few blacks from rural Clarksdale, Miss., some of the hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and their families who were forced off the fields of the Mississippi Delta after the widespread adoption of the mechanical cotton picker. Lured by the promise of decent pay in the North, they flowed upward along the lines of the Illinois Central Railroad, their ears ringing with the Bible accounts of the children of Israel making their way to the promised land.

Lemann deals directly with the messy question of whether the sharecropper culture the migrants left behind helped lead them into the trap of ghetto poverty. He sides with those who believe that a high number of unwed mothers, female-headed households and short-lived marriages were characteristics of sharecropper life that were reproduced in the Northern slums. But he stops short of the conclusion that often follows: broken families or a "culture of ^ poverty" created the disaster of the ghettos. He puts the blame instead on the disappearance of unskilled manufacturing jobs, a problem misguided federal policies did little to remedy.

The book's sharpest commentary is reserved for Washington. In the city Lemann describes, the real corridors of power are the margins of agency memos, where bureaucrats fight a war of ideas in scribbled asides. The Promised Land is indispensable for understanding how the War on Poverty advanced along the wrong front, favoring panaceas like community action and higher welfare payments while devoting too little attention to job creation. In the end, Lemann insists, the federal effort had its greatest impact by employing ghetto blacks in antipoverty agencies. For many that government paycheck was their ticket out of the ghetto.

Lemann concludes by arguing against the conservative truism that federal antipoverty programs are doomed to failure -- and by wondering how long it will be before the national will to defeat poverty can be summoned again. "In American life," he writes, "the underclass is stuck in the antechamber where policy issues rest until they become political crusades." Perhaps someday the great trek northward will at least have a monument like the one that stands at Ellis Island to commemorate the first great migration. Meanwhile, The Promised Land is an important cornerstone in the effort to understand why so many travelers in the second migration never reached the land of milk and honey.