THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM

This paper was delivered at the Chicago Literary Club

on January 13, 1986, by its author,

Hugh J. Schwartzberg

THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM

“Well you can’t solve problems by throwing money at them;” said the young person, “The Kennedy-Johnson era proved that.” She was a former Chair of the Civil Rights Committee of the Chicago Bar Association, which would have made her remark heresy, in a less tolerant time. Kennedy was only History to her, which is always shocking to one of my tender years. And History, as she had so forcibly reminded me, is that accumulation of agreed fictions which passes as popular knowledge, in the absence of shared experience. History is that fiction on which we have chosen to agree. I have seldom agreed just to be agreeable. She was wrong. Money is the most fungible form of power, and power is a force which results in change, turning our old problems into new ones.

Not to act is to bless the present as preferable to any of its doable alternatives. It is the past which teaches us to analyze our objectives. Not to discuss the past is to doom the present to ignorance, misunderstanding, miasma and pleasant social discourse. So let’s talk about my personal past; let’s talk about John Fitzgerald Kennedy; let’s talk about politics.

What should a young man with a taste for politics and a brand-new law degree do? Thomas Corcoran (FDR’s “Tommy the Cork”) was very clear: Go become a prosecutor in some rural area; get some attention-grabbing headlines out of some big prosecutions; then, run for office. Establishing a rural base sounded as if it might have drawbacks.

My father arranged a job offer from Thomas E. Dewey, to join his large prominent Manhatten law firm, although the only Republican Presidential candidate for whom my father had ever cast his vote was Wendell Willkie. New York sounded possible.

Judge Jerome Frank, of fame and the Second Circuit, arranged an interview with former Attorney General Thurman Arnold. Judge Arnold offered a job in Washington, D.C. His advice came separate. Unless one brought along clients of one’s own, one would probably end up his wage-slave, at the firm of Arnold, Fortas and Porter. If one had roots, one should return to them. My own inclination was to return to Chicago in order to help slay the last of the dinosaurs, the Chicago Democratic Machine. So at last, having heard the advice which one wanted to hear, it was followed.

Senator Paul Douglas suggested joining the Democratic Party and the Independent Voters of Illinois; a tiny, insurgent, anti-machine crew. That very young man found it easier to take such advice as coincided with his own inclinations. The IVI got a new member, but not the Party. There was a new member of ACLU, and of all of the conventional liberal alphabet soup; one who began to plot the demise of this city’s Democratic Organization.

My mother grew up in Chicago, and was a product of its public schools, as was I, as my son was later to become. In those days, we feared for the future of the city. Even today, there is some reason for such fears.

A city is a collection of neighborhoods, dependant on you and me, on the social .fabric which binds us. A successful social fabric can allow for those amenities which are seldom possible except in urban areas: the existence of legitimate theaters, the presence of second-hand bookstores, the flourishing of those real specialty shops of the kind which depend on highly-depreciated property, the kind which cannot survive in suburban shopping malls. It may sound somewhat preachy to remind that civilization and city and citizen all come from the same Latin root.

In the latter part of the 1950s, in the early part of the 1960s, the very concept of City, of urban culture, seemed threatened. Pressured by the fear of crime, and drawn by the suburban dream, the city’s life-blood, people and industries and taxes, flowed out through President Eisenhower’s new arteries. Already, some of us were afraid that the central cities would become black holes of anomie in a white suburban donut. We strove to prevent or modify that process. It is still not clear that we have won that war, here or elsewhere. Many of my generation also believed that the great Democratic Machines were inadequate to deal with the nation’s tasks: integration, massive aid to education, the prevention of a lumpen proletariat, the preservation of an urban middle class. It is perhaps less clear now that the political alternatives to the Chicago Machine will do any better.

Manhattan is a small island. The pressure of its rivers, and the general growth of the nation’s population, will eventually squeeze New York’s poverty outside of that island, and probably drive out most of its permanent residents, as well.

The increasing centralization which faces the capitol of any federation will eventually squeeze poverty out of Washington, D.C.

But Chicago and Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis -- the cities of our old industrial might--will remain up for grabs, for your lifetime and mine.

The year of my return to this city was 1957. The artists had already come to Old Town, and had not yet left in substantial numbers. Cheap rents and a local sense of Bohemia may be necessary prerequisites for the beginning of that process by which any city is continually renewed; old neighborhoods dying, other neighborhoods burgeoning once again.

A part of Lincoln Park was already on the way up. The Old Town Triangle Association had already been formed, and the Lincoln Park Conservation Association was already at work. Except for the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association (a merchant group), and the North-State-Astor Association (which seemed largely a one-man show), the process of community organization was less well advanced in the Near North area than in Lincoln Park. Division Street was almost the dividing line between the two, which also served as a rough divider between the 42^nd and 43^rd wards. The area of my immediate political interest lay largely between the lake and the river, between the Loop and Fullerton Parkway.

A young man named Frank Fisher, who had been a couple of years ahead at Harvard (and who later returned to become one of its Deans) challenged Paddy Bauler to an aldermanic contest, in the 43^rd ward, in 1957. Paddy proved his pronunciamento that “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”

Meanwhile, that same year, we were looking for an apartment. Joanne, my wife, was transferring to Northwestern Medical School from Yale. She had uprooted herself to help fulfill her husband’s ambitions.

We looked for housing on the Near North Side because that was where the medical school was. Rents were still relatively cheap, so long as one stayed away from Lake Shore Drive. We lived first on Bellevue Place. It was mostly three-story buildings, human-size, except at the end of the block. That was the pattern of most of the nearby streets which paralleled it. My mother looked up and down the mailboxes, searching for a familiar name from the world of West Rogers Park, which she owned. “Don’t worry,” she was assured, “They’ll all follow.”

A crime problem arose at 33 East Bellevue Place. The building was soon organized to meet it. Strangers became recognizable. People started to say hello to each other in the elevator. The Schwartzbergs worked the local precinct, and upset the local captain, because many of the voters started to split their ballots. The captain offered Joanne residency at Cook County Hospital. She did not accept. Later, in an unrelated venture, we did manage to get County Hospital reorganized.

The City decided to rebuild Lake Shore Drive in a way that would have blocked Bellevue’s view of the lake. It would have meant a sort of Chinese wall. The local area was organized, and everyone was recruited to help, even the Mayor’s dentist. After some struggle, the City found a different way to go. In the process, some of the neighbors got to know each other a little better. That’s called increasing the density of the social fabric.

The trade-skills of how to seek public office had to be self-taught; eventually, something of that was taught to others. In the 1950s, the Practicalities of Campaigning were not yet a fit subject for academic consideration, at least in most institutions. Like science-fiction, Practical Politics came into full professorial swing only in later years. Of course, identifying and bringing out a vote, rather than trying to make converts, was already conventional. The Art of the Coffee Party was a subject learned through experience just shortly before one began to teach it-in formal lectures to fellow activists. My best pupil may have emerged from that Academy too soon.

By the close of 1959, we were ready to tackle our first battle within the Democratic Primary. The apparent object was a seat in the General Assembly, then held by the Majority Leader, Joseph Delacour, and by his then little known running-mate, George Dunn. (George inherited the Party much later.) Joe had voted against increased funds for public education in the same session in which he had voted for more money for horse-breeding. We found that troubling. The candidate knew that he was to be the lamb of sacrifice in that Spring of 1960; I understood my role. A downstate legislator named Paul Simon came up to help (twenty-four years before he was to become United States Senator), and while Alderman Leon Despres (the lone liberal in the City Council) would have preferred someone slightly more experienced to be running, he also helped. We came out of that campaign with the beginnings of an organization. My wife kept the hand-written records which formed the basis for what was to become the liberal enclave on the North side. In the closing days of that campaign, Len O’Connor (a popular newscaster) foresaw my own defeat and the eventual triumph of those independent insurgents who would follow.

There were earnest discussions about where we were going to put the political headquarters for that campaign. Putting the office at the corner of North and Wells, where the Town Shoppe now is, was worrisome. We worried about the safety of young women volunteers having to go that far West at night. What we all know as Wells Street came very soon afterwards.

If you run a political campaign for some purpose other than winning, you have to keep reminding yourself why your boots squish out through the slush, why the hand goes forth, why the smile goes on. We had resolved to win particular issues in the act of losing that election. Bills were posted which urged such things as establishing district public health centers; which shrilled: “Clean up the police force.” That last shaft found its target. In the aftermath of my defeat, Mayor Richard J. Daley appointed one O. W. Wilson to remake the Chicago Police Force.

Losing was expected; a reasonable amount of vote fraud was expected. After all, we had lectured our watchers on how a chain ballot was run, and what a “short pencil” was. But those highly visible pay-offs in the early, dawn light had not been expected. It had not been expected that in the old Capitol Hotel on Clark Street, at 3:00 A.M., an election judge would plaintively wail that they always used to sort of weigh the ballots, and that was why it was taking so long to count them. To this day, the official record from that precinct shows more votes cast for Mr. Delacour and Mr. Dunne than there were applications to vote in that primary.

After the election, a position was offered in the local Democratic party. That offer might have been taken, except for the stench of vote fraud. But to accept that offer seemed disloyalty to supporters; and that was a strong deterrent. Vote Fraud seemed an Assault on the very Citadel of Democracy (and in those days, one thought much more often in those abstract words with initial caps). So instead, there was a resolve to spend some time cleaning up the stables myself. Those precinct captains who kept paper-ballot precincts eventually found life terribly uncomfortable, and stopped fighting their removal. That came much later.

My first and last run for public elective office was followed by a public cry of “vote fraud,” and the dogs were let loose. The County Sheriff, a Republican, was hounded for some months. So were the newspapers; so was the F.B.I. As a direct result, the Chicago Daily News ran a long series in that fall of 1960 on Chicago’s vote fraud history, and prepared for a grand expose in November of that year. On election day, a fleet of radio-equipped cars (much more of a rarity at that time) were held in readiness to pounce down on the Minions of Evil. Poll-watchers were inserted in the key precincts. We were to be astonished three ways.

First, there was no substantial vote fraud. Unlike the Spring Primary, the fall General Election was essentially clean.

Second, the night editor of the Daily News, apparently in desperation, faked his story, sending out false word of the fraud he (and we) had expected to find. The national wires picked up this phoney story, and blew it around the world. My education was soon further improved. A forum was arranged in which reporters talked, bravely and openly, about how their own stories had been rewritten and falsified. That got me my third surprise.

The correcting story never got covered. The legend had been born that Kennedy had beaten Nixon in 1960 by stealing the State of Illinois. History had been made.

The election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as President of these United States brought no early joy. Earlier that year, there had been a phone call from Professor John P. Mallan: Did you remember a certain off-the-record session of the Harvard Liberal Union, a decade earlier, when our local Cambridge Congressman had explained that Joe McCarthy really wasn’t that bad, and that there were certain things we had to do because we needed bases in Franco Spain. Mallan had called to discuss whether we didn’t have a moral obligation to go public with JFK’s “real” attitudes. How much had he changed in ten years, if at all? Silence was counseled, and silence there was. In the interim, Kennedy had certainly learned that one achieved nomination and leadership in the Democratic Party by espousing liberal slogans. The day-to-day activities of the Presidency might prove a different matter. In fact, shortly before his death a thousand days later, Kennedy was being regularly and publicly excoriated by the formal “liberal” leadership of A.D.A. (Americans for Democratic Action).

In no area was this clearer than in Civil Rights. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy lobbied to have the House Judiciary Committee water down the then pending civil rights bill by removing, among other things, the proposal for a national fair employment practices law. Apparently unable to find any other Northern Democrat willing to do his bidding, the Attorney General struck up a deal with Chicago’s Congressman Roland V. Libonati, widely reputed to be the Senator from the Syndicate.

The Kennedys were not opposed to Civil Rights as an abstract proposition, but they did not consider such legislation viable in the 1963 context. They feared that if they made war on the ground, their entire legislative program might go down in defeat. Someone caught a whiff of the Kennedy-Libonati arrangement. There was a call from Washington asking that one try to destroy that amendment. This time the Daily News listened. It was banner headlines by evening; the deal was buried in publicity and outcry.

All of which left a tough civil rights bill intact. So that following assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, the next year, could pass that same bill as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as a monument to our late, great President. Almost no one remembered what had happened the previous year. History is funny, sometime.

But we’re getting ahead of our story. Back to 1960, and the Spring of my defeat. With the loss, there appeared a series of low-pay or non-pay clients, the kind that today would find their way to the Legal Services Foundation, itself a product of the Kennedy-Johnson era. Take the Ranch Triangle Association, for example.

The Board of Directors of the Ranch Triangle Association was a collection of archetypes: a Methodist minister, a steel worker, a Catholic priest, an electrician, the local hardware dealer. One of the neighborhood’s absentee landlords let his building run down too far. Someone got the bright idea of picketing that landlord’s suburban home: “Here lives a slum landlord.” The response was a lawsuit, charging libel and slander. There was no insurance, of course. The officers soon learned that no one had ever bothered to incorporate. They were all individually liable, and each of the directors were named a party defendant.

Truth is a defense, but it not inexpensive.

The important thing was not just to win, but to win cheaply and quickly. The existence of the lawsuit might dissuade others from serving on that board. The geography was crucial: this was the poorest portion of Lincoln Park. So each of the property-owning defendants said their property had been damaged by this public nuisance which the absentee landlord had maintained. It worked. Within short order, the suburban plaintiff dropped his suit.

A few years later, a community organization on Cleveland faced the same problem, and I offered the same solution.

While living on Schiller, we organized a Sandburg and East Area Council. By this time, the earlier phases of Sandburg Village had displaced the buildings, stinking of urine, which we had canvassed only shortly before. The City now threatened to tear down the rows of houses on Schiller and Burton (between Dearborn and Clark), to extirpate the Red Star Inn (a popular restaurant), to eliminate the Germania Club, and to rip out the small retail complex at North and Clark, which included what is now the Village movie theater. Members of the community filled the hearing room of the Department of Urban Renewal to overflowing. Before we were through that day, the Commissioners reversed each of the staff recommendations, without leaving the room.

With the help of the Congress, new guidelines came into existence, which meant that future projects would have to turn to rehabilitation rather than bulldozing. Those were the years when we lobbied for the tools with which to create the possibility of mixed-income buildings, citing Paris and Stockholm when even Paul Douglas had doubts. We defended “strip shopping” against those planners who had been prepared to roll up their sleeves and make the city look like suburbia.

When the State Rep race came round again we recruited John Kearney, Catholic, who had been with the Migration Commission of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. John seemed to fit the required ethnic mix a little better. Our percentage of the vote went up.

There had been some anonymous threats two years earlier. They didn’t seem very believable. For some years, there was a small rock on my desk which had once grazed my skull, when tossed from a hi-rise, and which was kept as a campaign souvenir. It was probably just some kid. But when John Kearney dragged us off to Hull House, to work out a state rep campaign for Florence Scala in the District to the south, it was more thought-provoking. That territory was plausibly reputed to be owned by the Mafia. Florence’s place did get bombed, but she stuck it out. Today, she runs a restaurant called “Florence” on Taylor Street, but most of her neighborhood has been replaced by the University of Illinois’ Circle Campus.

Threats to one’s life, a rock, a bomb - all that seems like part of a long-dead past,, some one else’s life. But trying to deal with the Corrections System-the problem of Juvenile Delinquency-that seems part of the main course of one’s own story.

Back in 1952, the problem of juvenile delinquency had seemed a political “grabber” to Senator Estes Kefauver, as he reached for a road to the White House. Now, just about a decade later, President Kennedy established a President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, and he put his brother, as Attorney General, in charge. This was the forerunner of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, which was to be declared in 1964, and of the Model Cities program which followed that. We started out trying to do something about juvenile delinquency. Preserving the central city was a strong secondary goal. Orthodox sociology said that if you wanted to do something about juvenile delinquency you had to do something about the multi-factorial causation which lay behind it. You had to deal with corrections, but you also had to deal with housing, education, discrimination, employment, health and the density of the social fabric.

The President’s Commission proposed that a number of cities compete for funding of experimental, juvenile delinquency control projects, in small localized areas. The competing entities were encouraged to be innovative, with relatively little concern for immediate economic costs. I suppose they were being encouraged to throw money at the problem. The guideline was maximum feasible community participation. The entities themselves were to be a public/private mix, with federal/state/local and citizen-volunteer participation. You may have heard something about New York’s experiments, Haryou and Mobilization for Youth. After it was all over, no one ever wanted to talk about Chicago’s part in the program. To claim success would have been to take the blame.

At the instigation of the Inter-Agency Committee (representing the private agencies) and the City’s Commission on Youth Welfare, it was proposed that Chicago’s target area be Near North-Lincoln Park was once a poverty area. From the City’s point of view, any substantial success in that area had a possible chance of spreading further North, along a widening cone. Lake Meadows/Prairie Shores had already shown that even successful islands might remain isolated from the greater city, so as to have little general effect. The City bureaucracy wanted a beachhead, from which to preserve the City itself.

Our new program became know as the Joint Youth Development Committee (JYDC). Because of federal strings, orthodox political controls were largely absent. Because of the requirements of community participation, opposition renegades such as Kearney and the Schwartzbergs were included in the process. Joanne was assigned to a health planning panel; Kearney drew Housing. The Corrections panel, which I soon chaired, included the Commander of the 18^th District, one or two regular Democratic captains, representatives of probation and parole, a youth officer, a couple of agency reps, the head of the Sisterhood at St. Michael’s, and one or two citizen-reps from Cabrini-Green.

Faced with “experts,” any lawyer’s tendency is to attempt to “cram” down a crash course in the immediate question. Every work in the field which could be found got gobbled. Most crime is juvenile crime. Burn-out usually occurs by 25; sometimes as late as 30. What remains is usually professional, and a small part of the whole. Attempts at turning prison sentencing into social assistance usually followed the course of Chicago’s pioneering Juvenile Court system, which ended up foundering in underfunded service resources. In those days, Chicago’s Youth Correction Center was St. Charles, so overcrowded that no one was kept more than six months; a revolving door which ran just long enough to turn an amateur into a professional.

The structure of Illinois law prevented anyone being held and trained through burn-out, which is one of the solutions employed in other cultures. Changing the legal structure seemed an unlikely route. One of the Youth Commission staff suggested that we make sure that everyone who came close to the corrections-and-court system actually go through it, be fully tested, diagnosed, and supplied with the best possible treatment by his or her friendly neighborhood judge. In his private life, the staffer was an undercover radical of Eastern European persuasion, so maybe he had more faith in Abstract Government - or maybe he hoped to hasten the Glorious Revolution. Regrettably, we did not experiment with group enforcement of norms: youth advisory courts, for example, which are usually pretty rough on offenders, as well as having reinforcement effects which flow far beyond the immediate example.

What the panel finally worked out was the opposite of that Youth Worker’s dream: Keep kits away from the education that St. Charles offered as long as possible; Localize the complaint procedure; Encourage diversion of delinquents to existing social service institutions (the Y, the Church, etc.), and Lean on those same institutions to deal with those elements, rather than following the traditional pattern of pushing out those who were acting out. We suggested district legal assistance at the district police level, to help in such matters as drafting complaints. One of our more interesting ventures was to put all the probation, parole and youth officers in one room, so that it would be clear that there were a few problem families which were keeping everybody busy-and to spotlight the problem kids early. We moved to beef up the youth officer presence in and around schools. To encourage anonymous complaints. Our keystone was to expand a network of block-by=block volunteer/watchers, linked to the neighborhood organizations and trained to call in complaints, designed to serve as the Department’s real eyes and ears.

Years later, when that last suggestion received widespread publicity (as part of a more general implementation program), the Illinois Division of the ACLU screamed “police state.” All during the JYDC period, I had also been sitting on the ACLU Board, trying to cast votes consistent with those positions taken over at JYDC. Some people tolerated such careful distinctions; the secretary to the Executive Director of the ACLU seemed pleased to report that he was being driven wild.

Originally, all this was theory and planning. Yes, we were eventually funded, and yes, the reality was imperfect. The first police commander, reflective of the new O. W. Wilson regime, called in his men, and in the presence of civilians made it Crystal Clear that Rotten Apples would not be Protected. He lasted longer than we expected. Another, Commander Braasch, was an absolute enigma. He spoke four or five languages, was studying another, and ultimately went to prison for Command-scale graft.

With the turn-over of commanders, there arose scenarios something like this:

An elderly woman, living alone, would spot a group of strange adolescents gathered in her alley, where gang graffiti had recently been popping up. After a recent change in regime, she calls in to the police station.

:”Hello Police?”

“State your name and address, Lady.”

“I’d rather not.”

“We really have to have your name and address.”

“Look, there’s a group of kids in my alley right now...”

“Sometimes citizens have to stand up and be counted. Your name and address - “

After some minutes of this, she reluctantly supplies her name and address and the other necessary information. Forty minutes later, a blue-and-white squad car rolls up in front of her address, mars light blazing, throws a spotlight on her front door, and two uniformed cops march up, announcing to the world: “What’s the trouble, lady.” To the surprise of the new regime, all information sources would run dry within a one-month period.

The traditional law-enforcement figure, focusing on clearance-by-arrest and the-location-of-potential-witnesses, was essentially outranged by some of our innovations.

By the time we would hear of the change in Commanders, it would be coming from the block-watchers. An appointment would be made with the new commander, at his office. Armed only with gall, we would try to explain what had happened. The new Commander would explain the need for Court witnesses. We would explain that this was all part of a special federal/state/ local program, which accounted for the young counsel working in his outer office, and that we did things differently in Near North/Lincoln Park. And because the speaker appeared to have Power and Authority, they listened. The real joker was that I had neither. Even in the later stages, as Chairman of the Board, I was only chairman of an Advisory Board. My real “power” was nil. But power in the appearance of power; power is what someone also thinks you have. The innovations stuck, became routine; eventually, most of them became “the system.”

Joanne’s health panel was less lucky. The innovations they suggested, including extensive community “outreach” and even home-based delivery systems, were not funded. Their ideas were adopted in other states. Years later, some of those ideas entered Chicago’s west side as the “Mile Square” project. When, long afterwards, someone brought us the possibility of federal funding for a home health care provider, our family (together with one other, and with my father’s financing) established what was probably the first modern, viable home health care provider in the north. We went the route of a quasi-private but publicly-funded foundation (which soon became the national norm) in part because we didn’t want to go the slower and less certain route of grant solicitation which we had followed in the JYDC process. But we involved people like Dr. Hutcheson of Grant Hospital, and Pat Wade of Northwestern, who had both been part of that earlier Health Panel.

In Housing, anonymous complaints were followed up by court-watchers. Shortly before her death last year, Sarah Sess, the court-watcher from the Ranch Triangle Association, could still be found in Housing Court, well past her eightieth year. In the JYDC period, code enforcement was the front line of neighborhood preservation, but is occasionally had other uses. In one case, a heroin drop-point was giving us immense trouble. After a long series of housing complaints, the owner (who had nothing to do with the drug exchanges) caused the building to be razed. The problem moved elsewhere.

A housing entity called the Near North Housing Corporation was established for William Moorhead. It eventually created some carefully-managed, black sponsored, publicly-subsidized housing in the area between Cabrini-Green and what were once known as the Marshall Field apartments, over on Sedgwick. Bill may manage it yet.

The over-all changes in the neighborhood were the real motive force behind the changes in its housing. Rows of newly-constructed town-houses started appearing within the city limits for the first time in years.

Sam Culbertson, President of Murine, resigned as Chairman of the JYDC Board, and in a snap election which came as a surprise to me and upsetting news to the Mayor, your speaker was elected Sam’s successor. Mayor Daley apparently turned the same shade of royal purple which the combination of his apoplexy and my presence had produced on an earlier occasion. The title of Chairman was never officially recognized. Years later, on retirement, there was a fancy plaque from the city. The plaque reads “Acting Chairman.” That made it a real treasure.

“The squeaky axle gets the grease,” Jane Addams once noted, in a very similar context. Take the visible presence of Police cars. That was partially dependent on the statistics of complaint. Our neighborhood was now an organized group of complainers. We got the cars. So the public resources (even the unprogrammed ones) flowed in.

The employment panel struggled to bring the Illinois State Employment Service (ISES) down to a useful level. Its sharpest focus came in connection with a public feeding situation, about which more in a moment.

The Schools panel, despite a sympathetic ear at the local level, ran into a brick wall named Ben Willis at the Superintendent’s level. Many of the community reps were regularly engaged in public confrontation with Superintendent Willis throughout the JYDC process. It was often the effect of his style. Once, in Washington, a group of us were trying to extract more monies from the Congress, and we met to try to coordinate strategy. “We should just tell them what we want;” Willis said. “We’re the experts.”

The greatest source of public/private confrontation was on a question of Community Organization. Community organizers were not yet subject to academic certification in those darker ages. Public resources for Community Organization were anathema to the political power structure. But most of every panel felt that money for such organization was the key. We discouraged Sal Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation from getting into the act, perhaps because we wanted to emerge with the sense of one community, including the existing organizations. Eventually, we worked out a partial way around the problem. A new private foundation, the Committee on Community Organization (or COCO), was established in order to seek funds for that purpose, with the help of Mrs. Adlai Stevenson III, and others. This helped in the establishment of such southern-area groups as The United Friends (or TUF). COCO’s rather limited progeny seem to have vanished, by this date. Most of the other community groups appear to have thrived.

Community organization in Cabrini-Green was and operation for Sisyphus. Only greater resources than we were able to secure might possibly have kept any structure in place for very long. With few exceptions, the best leadership fled “the projects.” Since my re-entry into the city, it had proved possible to move in and out of the projects at all hours, and alone. This astonished some. Our earliest forays had been part of an effort to seek the transfer of political power from absentee white captains to resident blacks.

For historical purposes, it may be important to note that JYDC did not attempt to deal in any way with the problem of integration of the public house area. (One of the inhabitants of Green became the second black resident of Park Forest, with some assistance, but that was a different kind of a matter.) In the late 1950s, Cabrini still had a few tenants, who were desperate to leave, and for good reason. One of them was a man who once apologized for his coming late to a gathering in my home, and for his wife’s absence, by explaining that his wife had just been raped. Years later, at that man’s wake, his widow declared his greatest accomplishment: “Stanley got us out of the projects.” Integration of Cabrini-Green did not seem to be do-able in the 1960s.

Even prior to JYDC, there had been an attempt to beef up a system of tenant councils in the “projects,” building by building. Through these activities we learned that the principal concern in the projects was just what one would expect: they wanted better police protection.

We were able to hold JYDC meetings within the public housing hearing project area, at night, without reported incident, although we did not do this as a regular practice. Some time after the mid-60s, residents warned that it was no longer safe for me to be visiting the projects by my lonesome. The process stopped.

The JYDC program had some short-term, but highly important influence on violence in the public housing project arena. At one point, for example, a gang of young bloods was able to move an entire cache of fire-arms into Cabrini-Green. With the help of local resident Fred Carson, it was possible to arrange to have the police remove that cache, without any loss of life. Fred is gone now. The big baseball field next to Cabrini bears his name, as well it should. He was a brave guy.

When the riots came with the death of Martin Luther King, I waited to see whether all we had built would seem to go up in smoke, there as elsewhere. Cabrini-Green, unlike nearly all comparable areas, did not blow. I do not pretend to know whether our project made the difference.

JYDC was not a cure for what we have misleadingly termed “public housing.” There are those of us who preached against the form long before Cabrini-Green was erected. The ultimate cure may be to pay the price of razing and replacing all except the low-rise portions.

To the surprise of some, the Acting Chairman tried to make certain that everyone, official or volunteer, independent or regular or even Republican, had an equal shot at activity roles, and a chance to earn leadership roles as activity demonstrated. We tried to encourage everyone’s ideas, heretical or otherwise, while still voting that peculiar, and largely unnoticed, ACLU/JYDC line. It just wasn’t always possible to do so.

Take the woman who was convinced that pornography was the real key to most of the area’s problems. Her subcommittee reported out her recommendations, and firmly urged that the Chairman of the Advisory Board sit down with the principal supplier of most of the area’s smut, who also happened to be the chief distributor of most of its periodical and paperback reading matter. Feeling certain that the First Amendment, coupled with a sense of commercial profit, would render any such action useless, the Chairman did the Committee’s bidding. When counsel for the distributor proposed that we designate just what magazines and what publications should be allowed within the Near North/Lincoln Park area, and started to assure us of the Distributor’s cooperation, the Chairman cut that very cordial meeting very short, backpedaling very quickly. Everything was hastily reassigned back to the sub-committee, trusting that it would all die through somebody else’s error. For whatever reason, the possibility of that special arrangement soon disappeared, and the Chairman breathed a bit easier.

Local delivery of services was our watchword; multi-service centers our chosen instrument. Government service was to be only a short walk away from one’s door. We tried to coordinate city operational divisions with local organizational boundaries wherever possible. Every so often some city department would come up with a new definition of a neighborhood, and we would barge in and try to get people back on the same track. This story was told to someone last month who explained that as of last year that process has a name. It’s now called: “co-terminalization.” Well, it wasn’t even an idea until some two decades back, let alone a fancy new 17-letter word like “co-terminalization.”

We tended to ignore the newspaper, and except for some early warfare between the Machine and the Community Reps, they ignored us. Late in our game, one of the town’s newspapers ran a public series on “Hunger in Chicago.” Somehow, a nerve was struck. Substantial resources were put into what may have been the first government program providing hot food for immediate consumption since the soup kitchens of the Great Depression. We opened a place for the serving of meals within the community, free to anyone who asked. In effect, this became an intake unit for our job-finding and other social services. Strictly speaking, it was Socialized Food. The newspapers never noticed, and similar programs have been used elsewhere from time to time, without exciting any public (which is to say, Newsmedia) notice.

There was no local State Rep election in 1964. George Dunne had been in charge of working out a legislative compromise on redistricting. It didn’t seem possible that he would let all of the state’s legislators run at large. But they did. That was the year of the bed-sheet ballot. Adlai Stevenson came out on top, and all of the factions in our little project probably agreed on that one. Indeed, we had tried to keep it a secret when Ad contributed to that first state rep campaign, lest to kill off his own political future. So when Ad was offered the regular party endorsement for our district in the next to-round, the insurgents figured that they’d won a piece of a victory. The next aldermanic contest was a different matter. Paddy Bauler had largely ignored the JVDC process, while George Dunne from the 42^nd had effectively competed within that structure, using his own captains. Now Paddy announced as his candidate for Alderman a guy who was widely believed to have served as a local bagman for the forces of darkness.

A somewhat weak “independent” type had already filed. The Republicans had put up a candidate who seemed eminently respectable, a long-time mathematics teacher at Francis Parker. The Schwartzbergs were living a block north of the ward, and thus outside both the 42^nd and the 43^rd, although just inside the JYDC area. Our second child had been born hearing-impaired, and the old McCormick Seminary area, with its five-block unit of private streets, had seemed a better place in which to raise a deaf daughter. With that move, a seal had been placed on the death of my personal political ambitions. There was no other way. Parenting is more important than politics.

Faced with the foolishness of Paddy’s candidate, City Hall was advised that the Chairman had just resigned from JYDC. “Look,” I said, “I’ve put too much effort into keeping this thing politically clean to do it any other way.” Re-entry into the political wars was open and obvious. Besides, if the process we’d started wasn’t self-sustaining by now, it never would be. That quotation from Debs kept running through my head: “If I was a Moses to lead you out of this wilderness, someone also would be able to lead you back in.”

We used the newspapers to kill Paddy’s candidate. By the time he dropped out of the race it was too late for anyone else to file. Paddy didn’t want to let the Insurgency win under any circumstances. He publicly supported the Republicans.

We still came close, but Paddy and the Republican teacher won. During his term, the new alderman got involved in the unfortunate personal scandal, and that was the end of the local Republican dream. We figured that all that was left was picking up the chips. The next aldermanic was won by the Insurgency, whose horse was a young kid lawyer, name of Billy Singer. The ethnic mix had charged in that interim.

From that day to this, the independent Democratic candidate has always won the aldermanic in the 43^rd ward. The insurgents could always claim one state rep from the area, until we went to single-member districts. One of my original precinct workers, Dawn Netsch, has been State Senator from the area, for a long time.

The politics of it all may even have been a mistake. As a reformist movement, the insurgency unfortunately found its slogans in structural change rather than aid-to-the-poor. To me, the “party of change” has usually seemed preferable to the “party-of-status-quo” precisely because of its implicit commitment to clothing the naked, and housing the homeless, and feeding the hungry. Isaiah and I remain unreconstructed liberals. Back in 1975, one of our local insurgent Democratic State Representatives was reported in the newspapers as having supported his insurgent Democratic Governor by voting against, more money for the schools. All the newspapers reported that my son led a local delegation to meet with our local independent Democratic State Representative, back when my son was in eighth grade. Honest, injun, it was all his idea. But when the regular organization came by in those years, and asked help in drafting the Regular State Democratic Party Platform, it seemed a reasonable thing to do.

These days, my non-existent influence gets offered for trade in exchange for specific public policies. And there are a bunch of office-holders (insurgents and regulars) who claim to have been taught something about achieving public office. Nowadays the youngsters show up on the doorstep and ask to be “mentored.” That word wasn’t around in 1957.

Was the JYDC program wrong? Was it a success or a failure? Withe shift from President Kennedy’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency to President Johnson’s War on Poverty there had been a charge in the declared objectives. That change caught us in the switches, and we had failed to realize it. While the Kennedy objective had been reducing crime, the declared objective in Johnson’s program was to overcome Poverty. True, both objectives might require dealing with employment, health, education, housing, discrimination and corrections, and strengthening the social fabric. The trouble was that it didn’t make sense to try to meet Johnson’s objectives in only one portion of a large city. On the other hand, it was possible to meet John Kennedy’s objectives on that smaller field. Let’s look at that a little more closely.

Nobody much noticed when some of the national anti-delinquency experiments failed. Now look what happened in our case, where one of them succeeded, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. If you really get a hold of a few pieces out of that package of corrections, health, housing, education, employment, and discrimination, let alone the strengthening of the social fabric, in any one portion of any one city, the result is predictable. Hell, everybody wants to live in that spot. And the normal economic process of supply-and-demand predictably drives out the poor.

With rare exceptions, other than “the project area,” and a handful of mixed-income buildings, and a few subsidized low-rises, that is-of course-just what happed. Any remaining, unsolved problems gradually went elsewhere. With those same exceptions, only those of the poor who kept or acquired marginal housing in the earliest stages could afford to stick around. And if they did, they were probably no longer poor. Not if they held onto any land when prices started to soar. Everybody wanted to live in my neighborhood. We had invented another new, fancy 14-letter word. We just didn’t know its name at the time. Later, we all learned that word.. The word is “gentrification.” It is a swear word, for nearly everybody.

Except maybe for me. I have no doubts. I remember Detroit.

Well, maybe we won something, anyway. A crowd of legitimate theaters (Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens, Body Politic, Goodmen Studio and more), a horde of used bookstores, a riot of restaurants, the small specialty stores which my daughter learned to love-all the things which make an urban area citified and civilized, have gathered near my door. One pop novelist, Robert Anton Wilson has suggested that the very center of the Universe is to be found a few hundred feet West of Halsted, Lincoln and Fullerton-which just happens to be where we live.

Some time after my retirement from JYDC, I became the neighborhood hermit.

A few months ago, my most local neighborhood organization was looking for old-timer photographs. Two women came to the door to collect some. “Why don’t you become active in the neighborhood?” asked one; and the other, who did remember me, looked at her in some horror, because of this presumed faux pas. It was the first woman who had been absolutely right. We always taught people that: “If you want volunteers you have to ask for them.” But the fact remains that for almost twenty years, my immediate neighborhood hasn’t really needed me any more. And just maybe, that’s because I once had a chance to throw some money at its problem.