Southern Changes. Volume 4, Number 4-5, 1982 – Southern Changes

Daddy’s Missile: Shaping the South’s Pre-war Economy

Tom Schlesinger — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:01 +0000

Daddy’s Missile: Shaping the South’s Pre-war Economy

By Tom Schlesinger

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 1-2, 23-30

In mid-May 1982, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs co-sponsored a meeting about the dangers of prospective budget cuts. “As other, non-military, government spending is reduced,” wrote the conference organizers, “and deficits run high, the proposed increases in military spending are beginning to face resistance. The cuts that may result may be of the sort that hamper long-term political policies designed to strengthen the defense industrial base.” Convened by Cambridge lawyer Antonia Chayes, Undersecretary of the Air Force during the Carter Administration, and featuring representatives from the Pentagon, academic, corporate and political communities, the Harvard conference tried to outmaneuver the resistance by breathing life into a lie.

Already, that lie–the assertion that America’s defense industrial base is “eroding” and in desperate need of money, deregulation and other forms of resuscitation in order to be war-ready–had been promoted relentlessly for the last two years by a bloc of military-industrial partners. Appreciating Harvard’s justly famous capacity for organizing consensus among elites, the industrial mobilization lobby humbly described its gathering as an attempt to “arrive at the boundaries within which reasonable people can be expected to disagree.” 1

While the American Academy’s declaration of war concluded with a scheduled “sherry and sandwich on the run,” the state of North Carolina was serving barbecue at a related military-industrial get-together on the campus of North Carolina State University. The Raleigh conference highlighted Governor Jim Hunt’s celebration of Small Business Week by bringing together contract office-

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ers from the Defense Department and state military installations, buyers from major defense contractors and a raft of small business owners eager to learn more about–if not jump into–the only part of the economy that’s expanding. The Raleigh conference also disproved the lie being fashioned at Harvard that day. Not that the conference’s agenda included truth-telling, it just provided a backdrop for some truth to out. But first we need to fathom the depth and origins of the lie.

Since 1979, elements of the Department of Defense and Congress have portrayed America’s defense industries as abandoned by small business suppliers, desperately short of machine shops and titanium forges, critically lacking a future supply of engineering talent and skilled labor, over-reliant on “unpredictable” foreign sources for hard goods and strategic minerals and generally unable to mobilize. “Industrial preparedness” issues have been magnified by the Defense Science Board (a Pentagon-directed team of executives from major war contractors), the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Small Business Committee and mounting publicity from such beacons of corporate liberalism as Business Week, whose shrill and misleading “Why We Can’t Rearm Fast,” published in early 1980, remains a movement landmark.

Like all good, heavily invested lies, this one contains some half-truths. America’s military does rely on U.S. transnationals like Texas Instruments which have exported their military production facilities at a dizzying pace. Hence the Pentagon does have a “foreign” producer problem–at least eighty-five percent of all military semiconductors, for example, are made in Southeast Asia by the rabidly anti-union Texas Instruments and other U.S. firms which steadfastly refuse to repatriate their manufacturing facilities. 2

The half-truths and genuine whoppers animating the industrial preparedness movement rest upon the pursuit of more fundamental questions: prepare for what? mobilize for what? The answer reveals a shift in American strategic thinking. Throughout most of the 1970’s, military spending was guided by the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and lessons gleaned from other recent conflicts. Military scenarists assumed that the next war would be a short one, with the antagonists quickly spending their war resources and just as quickly devastating the other side’s In the late 1970’s, however, segments of the defense establishment began to question the “short war” assumption.

On the day after Christmas in 1979, a Wall Street Journal essay elaborated: “Because of budget stringencies over many years, our military stockpiles today could support a major conventional war for only a couple of months or so. This puts our planners in a quandary: either they have to assume a short war or envisage fighting a war without supplies. Understandably they choose to ‘plan a short war.'”

The writer of that essay was Fred C. Ikle, head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Ford administration and a prominent member of the Committee for the Present Danger. Today, the Swiss-born Ikle is Caspar Weinberger’s Undersecretary for Policy, one of the half-dozen most senior positions at the Pentagon. Once in power, Ikle, Weinberger and company extended their supposition about the industrial base’s inability to refight World War II. They tethered U.S. military policy to the expectation of protracted conventional war. The Pentagon’s 1970’s preparations to fight one-and-a-half wars turned to a 1980’s vision of unparalleled destruction in any number of theaters. One of the vision’s chief effects is making almost any defense industrial base look indequate.

Some members of the industrial preparedness movement, like Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich, candidly explained its centrality to shifting from a “war-deterrence to a war-winning philosophy.” But the Pentagon contends that long-war reindustrialization will actually deter that war by sending adversaries signals that we have every contingency covered, including a replay of World War II. DOD’s long-war logic implies a deeper sort of wishful thinking as well. If superpowers continue committing ever greater portions of their productive capacity to conventional warfare (where ninety percent of U.S. military spending currently goes) those powers will feel obliged to use up that capacity before resorting to nuclear holocaust. In essence, the long-war hypothesis assumes that each human actor and technical element in the world’s arsenal of fifty thousand nuclear warheads can be held in “non-escalatory restraint”; that warring nations will not even turn to nuclear weapons when one side is clearly winning and the other losing. If money weren’t a consideration, one might lay the motivation of Ikle and his team to simple nostalgia for U.S. industrialism’s “Audie Murphy” phase. “Looking back at those years,” Ikle rhapsodized in the Wall Street Journal, “it seems we were almost ten feet tall.” 3

With the mutually supporting rationalizations of long war and industrial “erosion” incorporated into policy and

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public consciousness, the lobbyists moved to secure goldmine incentives for DOD’s supply-side. Marked by signals like a thirty-one point memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci in April 1981, they pushed such contracting nuggets as multi-year acquisitions, guaranteed return on investments (twenty percent is a figure bandied about) and training and automation subsidies.

All this activity, proceeding though it does from deranged assumptions, contrasts with the lack of activity on most civilian economic fronts. That contrast has energized the states to effectively reinforce DOD’s attempts to broaden its constituency and find new places to spend its bottomless budget. Instead of battling over federal taxes, General Accounting Office procurement policies or the arcane of grant formulas, state governments have increasingly shifted their attention to the only area of federal spending which will grow in the foreseeable future–military construction, military payroll and associated funding transfers. Moreover, defense industries have become the coin of the economic development realm. Events like North Carolina’s procurement conference are set up, said organizer Al Calloway, the state’s assistant director for Business Assistance, because “last year we knew that by the first quarter of 1982 we’d actually see trickling down to smaller businesses . . . [here Calloway paused to reassess his choice of verb] . . . we’d see hard money coming in from DOD.”

Hard money also brought in three hundred or so curious business owners to North Carolina State’s McKimmon Center to buttonhole defense prime contractors like Western Electric (which takes in a quarter of all North Carolina’s military contracting dollars) and Teledyne (which operates the South’s biggest titanium forge–in Jesse Helms’s hometown of Monroe). “We’ve seen machine

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shops come out of the woodwork like I’ve never seen before,” said Allen Trippeer of the Defense Contract Administration Services Atlanta office. “They’ve read in the paper about DOD getting all this money. There’s definitely an increase in interested contractors.”

If the North Carolina conference is any guide, DOD is busily compiling waiting lists of suppliers. With economists, nutritionists, custom glassblowers. flagpole repairmen–and one soul trying to merchandise a “space device” which detonates land mines from orbit–prowling contractors’ and supply directorates’ booths, DOD also has a willing reserve to meet its most esoteric needs. As Bill Page, one of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base’s contract officers said, “As far as competition and availability go. for what we need at Seymour Johnson we don’t have any problems. I think there’s a good base out there to supply DOD. Just about every time a small business fails a new one takes its place.”

Members of Congress and military installation chiefs have all been throwing procurement conferences for decades. Nor is North Carolina now alone in the South in intensifying its pressure on businesses and communities to buy into DOD’s brand of support and obligation. Georgia has made major additions in the past three years to its aerospace economy, including a Boeing plant in Macon. a United Technologies facility in Columbus, and Atlanta’s Rockwell International plant which makes the GBU-15 winged bomb. But in 1981, the state joined forces with the city of Warner Robins and Robins AFB for an industrial development campaign the intensity of which eclipsed those earlier efforts.

The campaign began when Maj. Gen. John Paulk took command of Robins AFB in 1980. A native of Willacoochee. Ga., Paulk hit the ceiling upon learning of the relatively small portion of Robins’ two billion dollar boodle which went to in-state contractors. According to Robins contract officer Bob Beckmann. Paulk relayed his dissatisfaction to Governor George Busbee and other industrial development figures. Within months. Beckmann. Georgia Industry and Trade Department official Emmett Mann, and a leader of (Georgia’s state Chamber of Commerce. Penn Worden, had concocted a statewide series of meetings on the glories of sub-contracting for Robins. “We kind of brought the mountain to Mohammed.” says Beckmann. Officials of the Small Business Administration and CS Bank, Georgia’s largest, pitched in with financing and administrative help. In the space of twelve months, 1,229 firms signed up to do business with Robins AFB. In-state procurement for the base rose from thirty-nine million dollars in fiscal 1980 to seventy-nine million dollars in fiscal 1981.

Tennessee’s Economic and Community Development (ECD) Office explicitly targets military contracting at the head of its recruiting priority list. “Right now I’m on

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top of every defense contract that’s let,” says the state’s top industrial recruiter, Assistant ECD Commissioner Bill Long. Long’s research staff combs Commerce Business Daily and the Pentagon’s Defense Marketing Service listings for recruiting or expansion opportunities. But, due to their boss’s background, they also go an extra mile.

Although Long rents out a farm and co-owns a couple of east Kentucky strip mines, he acquired most of his business experience during a twenty-eight year stretch in the Marines.

Long’s assignments included three years in the White House honor guard and duty as the first Marine liaison officer to Congress before mustering out in the mid-seventies. “I’ve got contacts,” Long volunteers, “and I’m trying to renew contacts. But it’s all above board. They wouldn’t even talk to me if it wasn’t. I get the same information as everyone else. But I might get it a little bit earlier.”

With his informational edge, Lang says, “we feel we have a good shot at getting a lot of component parts to weapons systems, so that’s what we’re going after. We’ve gotten into everything from consoles [for tracking systems–a potential $25 million investment] to radar systems. I was in Washington last week and met with six contractors. We have a shot at getting them. We got a letter last week, 155mm launching tubes for guns. Laser homing devices, air-delivered clusters of mines, visual tracking systems. We haven’t culled anything out.”

“Erosion” alarms may not serve the truth but they do serve to conceal the defense reindustrialization campaign’s political content. Military industries remain alive and well but they sometimes don’t happen to be what or where interested parties want them to be.

Jacqueline Mazza’s office in the U.S. House of Representatives Annex Building in Washington is festooned with collaged advertisements from New York magazine. The wail resembles a graduate student’s efforts to hang on to some sense of humor during the degree grind. Ray Gillen’s cubbyhole, just around the corner, is decorated by a single photograph of a long-dead South Carolina senator named Burnet Rhett Maybank. Graduate student analogies come easy because Mazza and Gillen are as young, friendly and manifestly privileged as the dozens of other people who work with them at the NortheastMidwest Institute, an organization which supplies sectional lobbying ammunition to more than two hundred members of Congress.

Jackie Mazza spends her time pasting together the “Frostbelt” lobby’s plea for more military bucks. In 1980 she authored The Unprotected Flank, an Institute book which details how few defense dollars flow into Northern states relative to their share of the country’s population and tax burden. It also argues, among other notions, that more American troops should be training in climates that approximate those of Western Europe–like upper New York State. “A lot of Congressmen from the North have been anti-defense,” she says. “They wouldn’t go near those committees. But they woke up all of a sudden when their economies were doing poorly.”

Mazza and company have certainly rung the alarms for an awakening which has made Northern Congressmen with liberal and moderate credentials a decisive force behind the further militarization of the U.S. economy. In 1981 she arranged a meeting between Defense Secretary Weinberger and a Northeast-Midwest delegation that her co-workers label “historic.” “Weinberger as much as said he had to establish a better regional balance if he wants to keep a defense consensus in this country,”

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Mazza says. The Unprotected Flank joins the industrial base debate by alleging that defense production has migrated South to the point of “giving an opponent an ‘easy target’ end rendering the U.S. more vulnerable to attack.” The Frostbelt lobby’s problem is not just that the defense industrial base is eroding, but that it is allegedly no longer in the Frostbelt. That’s where Ray Gillen and H.R. 5540 come in.

Gillen has labored to undo the handiwork of Burnett Rhett Maybank, a Charleston aristocrat who amended the 1953 Defense Appropriations Bill to prevent military monies from being targeted for depressed areas. Routinely protected by Southern seniority, the Maybank Amendment was added to Defense appropriations bills thereafter. In the late 1970’s it became a focus for the Northeast-Midwest attempts to load funding formulas in their favor. The “Sunbelt” lobby, including the Southern Growth Policies Board and the Southern Governors Association, used armed services committee clout to preserve the status quo. (A regionalism as equally spurious as that of the “Frostbelt,” Sunbeltology is the self-interested science of connecting Tuscon’s suburbs to Letcher County, Kentucky.)

The Sunbelters argued that using defense procurements as an “urban policy tool” would court inflation. Procurement spending annually amounts to thirty to forty percent of DOD’s budget. Jackie Mazza and the Northeast-Midwest strategists see procurements–as opposed to military payroll or construction–as the most pragmatic route to increasing the North’s share of the Pentagon’s pie. In 1981, after a four-year battle, the Frostbelt forces finally rounded up enough non-Frostbelters whose districts included “labor surplus areas,” the current euphemism for areas of high unemployent, and repealed the Maybank Amendment. The winning coalition enacted a substitute which allowed the Defense Logistics Agency to make preferential awards to non-weapons contractors in distressed areas.

Hard on the heels of this win, Northeast-Midwest partisans began pushing a vastly more open-ended effort to raise their regions’ defense manufacturing stakes–this year’s H.R. 5540. Sixty-one representatives, nearly all from the North, co-sponsored the bill as a series of amendments to the Defense Production Act. That Act contains thirty year’s worth of ground rules for America’s military manufacture and serves as a catch-all for other boondoggles enacted in the name of security, like the Synfuels Corporation.

H.R. 5540 would dole out fifty billion dollars (fifty billion by some estimates) in outright loans, loan guarantees and purchase agreements to the “small and medium-sized” contractors that the defense establishment has designated at the really “deteriorating” tier of its supplier base. Fifty billion dollars represents two hundred Lockheed loans or several dozen Chrysler bailouts. But that’s not all 5540 offers. This is the bill that also defines “colleges, universities and other institutions of higher education” as “industrial facilities” in dire need of “updating equipment.” The Frostbelters have designed 5540 to close the American academy’s lab equipment window-of-vulnerability and to “provide incentive for faculty to remain in academia and encourage students to pursue higher degrees in a quality environment.” Finally, in pursuit of strategic minerals, 5540 proposes to further militarize America’s policies regarding the natural belt growth coalition than any Twentieth Century predecessor, ostensibly opposes 5540 as inferior to its brand of recovery-oriented “free market” military spending. Budget director David Stockman delivered an official statement of opposition by defending “the Defense buildup, tax reductions, improved depreciation schedules. . . and reduction of regulatory burdens” as “broad measures to strengthen the economy.”6 Within a few days 5540 is scheduled to go to the House floor for a vote. Despite the Administration’s public posture. Staffers from the bill’s parent Economic Stabilization Subcommittee say that its chances “look very good.”

By itself, the distribution of military production dollars can be a misleading issue–in fact, when pressed, regional lobbyists agree that procurement is spread pretty evenly. The important question is what do all these dollars buy? The answer reflects the South’s particular position within the defense industrial base. Again the trouble is hardly one of “erosion,” it’s one of too many socks.

Traditionally, the South has supplied DOD its textiles, tobacco, coal and food. The South has also supplied ships, C-130 airplanes and the fruits of the Army Missile Command. But even today Newport News, Marietta, Pascagoula, and Huntsville remain anomalies on the defense contracting landscape. Even when subcontracting is counted, most Southern states sell DOD comparatively little weaponry.

The Department of Defense estimates procurement spending to be its fastest fattening budget line.

Between fiscal 1981 and 1985, procurements are destined to expand sixteen percent a year in real terms while other military outlays will increase only five percent per year. From fiscal 1979 through fiscal 1981, the growth in procurement spending was concentrated on non-weapons purchases. Non-weapons contracts increased eighty-six percent during that period, twice as much as weapons contracts (unadjusted dollars). Non-weapons items grew from a quarter to a third of total procurements during the same years. But as the Reagan-Weinberger team reinforces choices made by Jimmy Carter and commences its weapons-buying binge, those procurement ratios will be reversed. Thus, the Northeast-Midwest Institute’s strategy of going after more Maybank-related spending in the short term and “geographically-distributed,” HR 5540-subsidized weapons spending in the long term. 7

As the Southern lobby defended its disproportionate share of Pentagon outlays, it unwillingly protected its lead in the types of spending (i.e., non-weapons) which have been more predictable and stable (both locally and regionally) than the weapons program roller-coaster. But the fact that traditional Southern defense industries have been a sub-set of traditional Southern industries has remained a largely uncounted–or unanalyzed–advantage. Now, it’s being counted less all the time because Southern development partisans increasingly believe that while their states can’t live without their traditional industries, they can’t live by them alone. Just like their Northern counterparts, these boosters see defense procurement as a vehicle for nourishing science-and technology-based industrial growth, hence an economic fix. But clearly, the Yankees got there first.

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“They’re calling it ‘The Route 128 Boom’,” says Sandra Kramer of the Sunbelt Council, combatively, referring to the electronics companies circling the Boston area. In 1981, Kramer, formerly the Southern Growth Policy Board and Southern Governors Association’s chief Washington lobbyist, helped former Alabama Congressman John Buchanan pull together the Sunbelt Council’s 119 congresspeople. In early 1982, Kramer reflected on the military budget and regional development. “We were just up in Maine for the holidays,” she said. “The Boston Globe ran a series on how this defense spending is going to hit them up there. You know they’re strong on high tech. And the South just doesn’t have high tech. That’s our problem . . . to get some mental expansion . . . not be the ones always supplying the foot soldiers but the brains, too.”

What the South does have is Tennessee’s Bill Long and a flock of other state development officials all desperate for jobs, tax base and quick fixes. Jim Cotham, Long’s former boss at Tennessee’s Economic and Community Development Department, says that defense “is a very large part” of the high tech recruiting campaign he and Governor Lamar Alexander committed the state to in 1981. The Tennessee efforts led to plans for a “technology corridor” modeled on North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park and based in Oak Ridge–the granddaddy of nuclear-type economic development. Florida, which already had the foundation for high-tech growth that Tennessee lacks, recently granted industrial development funds to woo the New York-based Moog, Incorporated, to the St. Petersburg-Clearwater area. There Moog intends to build a performance control equipment plant to supply the F-15, Trident and M-60 tank programs.

III

Desperation characterizes the states’ and regions’ raids on and imitations of one another and their scramble to hop aboard the next development train–regardless of destination. And the Reaganites’ apparent belief that pure desperation mobilizes consent better than 5540’s blandishments finds its surest measure in people like David Patterson, who don’t think of themselves as consenting at all.

Patterson, a TVA economist, was one of the Tennessee technology corridor’s earliest proponents and has, with the help of state Economic and Community Development officials, helped nurse it to its present stage. Patterson got into the development business from a background in civil defense. He wrote his dissertation for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, worked for the Institute for Defense Analysis, and upon arrival in Tennessee, consulted at Oak Ridge on civil defense “from an economic standpoint.”

“I remember when I was at Indiana when the movie Dr. Strangelove came out,” Patterson says. “I really went to pieces in that movie. I had just spent a year reading everything that had been written about the impact of that sort of thing in preparation for writing a dissertation proposal. Everybody else in the moviehouse was laughing. I was sitting there shaking.”

“I spent too much time in my life studying the so-called possibilities of recovery after a nuclear war. I got sort of burnt out on the area I guess. I learned too much about what it can do–nuclear war. And you sort of come to a point in your life whenever you get involved with something like that when you have to decide, ok–I give up. Or, I’ve really got to do something. And I couldn’t see where there was anything I could do.”

Being an economist as well as a refugee from the Armageddon wing of his profession, Patterson has some problems with military spending increases. “Justifying defense spending on the grounds of its potential spinoffs is like justifying death because it returns phosphorus and other needed chemicals to the soil,” he says. “Saying you’re going to put money into defense because it’ll stimulate the economy . . . you can do exactly the same thing, much more effectively by paying half the unemployed to dig holes and the other half to fill them up. It’s exactly the same thing. Because you’re buying nothing.”

If Patterson had his druthers, Tennessee’s technology corridor “would be looking for industries that had potential beyond defense or in addition to defense because military defense budgets come and go. In fact, I would be looking to industries that had primarily civilian-oriented market potential. ” At the same time, Patterson is trapped by the military mobilization imperatives that all South-

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environment and international trade. 4

HR 5540 takes its stand on regional development by amending the Defense Production Act’s “Declaration of Policy” to read, “It is the policy of the Congress to encourage the geographical dispersal of the industrial facilities of the U.S. in the interest of the national defense and to discourage the concentration of such productive facilities within limited geographical areas which are vulnerable to attack by an enemy of the United States.”

Thus 5540 seeks to trap the Pentagon. The bill offers valuable instruments for industrial constituency building and for reconciling differences between some national industries, union leaders and balky members of the financial community. At the same time it confronts the traditional power of Southern armed services committee chairmen with its statement of redistribution. Historically, DOD has been loathe to bite Southern hands that feed it. Richard DeLauer, a TRW executive now vacationing as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (he was also a member of the Defense Science Board’s “erosion” panel and a featured speaker at the May Harvard gathering), told Congress in 1981: “National defense is not and never has been intended as an income distribution mechanism or system providing equal allocation of funds to states, cities or countries . . . The purpose and goal of defense spending is to keep the American people alive and free–and in the process it is possible that defense spending will necessarily be unevenly distributed geographically.” 5

Moreover, this Administration, less tied to the Frostern development officials now labor under.

“You know if we got an opportunity to get a Lockheed plant located here, we’d probably bust our balls to get it,” he acknowledges. “I don’t think we’d do it because it was a defense industry per se. In fact there’d probably be some people saying, ‘Wait a minute, that’s a bummer. Let’s spend our efforts on something else.’ But others would say, ‘Look, it’s a bird in the hand. Get what you can.’ And I guess I’d be in that latter group.”

For sheer numbers of questing small business owners, phalanxes of corporate executives who run 95-507 Programs (federally mandating that all prime contractors prepare “small business plans”), and for overall spit, polish and hardware, nobody throws a procurement conference like the Army Missile Command (MICOM) at Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal. But then no place is quite like Huntsville, the Southeast’s longest-standing monument to aerospace high-tech and, in fiscal year 1981, the recipient of twenty-seven percent of Alabama’s total defense contracts.

At the outset of Huntsville’s most recent Small Business Opportunities Day, MICOM’s current commander, Major General Robert L. Moore, upheld the local corporatist-in-uniform tradition by welcoming his guests as “ladies, gentlemen and fellow businesspeople.” One week after the Harvard and North Carolina conferences, Huntsville’s modernistic Von Braun Civic Center had been transformed into a Casbah of hardware and hardsell by the six dozen military supply directorates and prime contractors invited to peddle to prospective small business partners. Raytheon buyers dispensed bright red, missile-decorated tote bags. Hughes representatives earnestly explained cutaways of their aircraft. Nearly every other prominent name in America’s military-industrial supply-side–Lockheed, Martin Marietta, General Dynamics–hawked away. The conference drew twelve hundred participants from thirty-six states, lured by fifteen thousand invitations.

In the midst of all this anxiety–the small business equivalent of five thousand unemployed people standing in line for one hundred jobs–Huntsville’s conference also offered glimpses of an eerie intimacy. Chatting with an equally young bank officer at the local Chamber of Commerce booth, Tom Stramiello, a Chamber researcher craned his neck and smiled at the sound of a Hawk missile” firing in the Raytheon promotional film across the aisle. “That’s my daddy’s missile!” Stramiello crowed. The man from People’s Bank nodded. The engineering generation of Stramiello the elder created the entrepreneural atmosphere in which its sons and daughters now orbit.

“It fluctuates,” said the banker in response to a question about Huntsville’s contracting cycles, “but overall it’s pretty steady. You’ll have a bad month and a good month but it’s not like a bad year and a good year. Bad times aren’t long enough to really damage somebody unless they’re kind of fragile to begin with.”

On the other side of the room, Fred Flores, a General Dyanmics buyer from the West Coast explained that his company had “ample” machine shop subcontractors. Nor did the assembled small businesses” lack of diversity trou-

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ble General Dynamics: “If they’re too unique you can’t use them,” Flores said. What about “erosion?” Flores waved his arm at the Von Braun Center crowd, “If you ask most people in these booths they’ll tell you they’ve been approached by numerous shops in desperate need of business.”

Ralph Autery, lead engineer for the new FOG-M (fiber optic guided) missile, held down one of MICOM’s numerous booths across from Flores. “They wanted to show that we still had the inhouse capability to do the FOG-M,” Autery said of MICOM’s command. “We’ve had other programs where you buy everything and do all the engineer-assembly and integration testing and you go out and fire one and it flies good and some company down the pike that you bought just the airframe from takes credit for it.” MICOM’s in-house capacity may also show that America’s missile complex has engineers to spare, not the impending shortage advertised by the erosion lobby. Does Autery think all this “deterioration” talk is a little overblown? Autery smiles, “Yeah, we have a lot of people that’re willing to work. Scheduling may be the problem more than being able to get something.”

Even if the “erosion” hysteria is a bit on the mendacious side, it ought to create jobs since small businesses will gain and everyone knows that small business generates most jobs–right? Well, maybe not. Listen to Bob Ingram, director of MICOM’s small business programs talk about “productivity” and mobilization. “You can ride up and down the highway and find small businesses that might be doing business with the government and you say, ‘Hey, can you handle any more?’ ‘Why absolutely we can handle more. We can have output three hundred percent of what we’re doing right now and wouldn’t have to hire another men.’ You’ll find that in many instances.”

Does this mean that building up the defense industry’s small business tiers may not boost employment at all? “Very definitely,” Ingram answers, “Let’s take an isolated situation. You got a little plant here, a man and his wife and three sons are running it. And they manage to pick up two or three contracts with DOD each year. Total work is, say, fifty thousand dollars. They have a lathe, they’ve got several drills, they’ve got grinders, welding capacity, this type of thing. I’m saying that in a lot of these kinds of cases you could pump $300,000 worth of work in there and they could handle that and never hire another man.”

Some economic development specialists see an important corollary to this–one the “erosion” lobby has ignored or downplayed. Military contracting’s ups and downs have left the industry drenched in excess capacity. Unlike gung-ho gyrene Bill Long of Tennessee’s Economic and Community Development office, Sandy Jordan, Assistant Commissioner of Georgia’s rival Industry and Trade Department, sees military producers expanding only moderately–despite Georgia’s success in luring aerospace companies. “Most of the companies that are looking for defense contracts,” says Jordan, “have a great deal of plant space, infrastructure and machinery in place. They’re not doing a great deal of site-searching because of contracts that have been awarded or anticipated. Because of cutbacks in previous years, they’ve got the facilities they need.”

MICOM’s Bob Ingram has a very military solution to the issue: redefine “excess.” “We’re not saying the (industrial) base has deteriorated,” Ingram claims, “we’re saying it should be a broader base, there should be more redundancy there. Rather than one shop that manufactures printed circuit boards, there are literally thousands of them around the country. And we should have them ready, willing and available to call on in the event we need them.”

But call on for what? The long war? Another scenario? And what about our nuclear arsenals, poised and aching to be used? “I wouldn’t get into that debate,” Ingram laughs. “If it’s a total nuclear war, mox nix on the industrial base. You’re not going to have time to do anything anyway. But if the powers can agree to say, ‘Well, let’s shoot at each other with conventional weapons,’ then yeah, you could have a need for it. So that’s a matter of philosophy. And philosophy means discussing something you don’t know anything about, so I steer away from it.”

Making the defense industrial debate less philosophical requires that “reasonable people” expand, not narrow, the boundaries of disagreement. We could start by disagreeing with the belief that a global war of annihilation will be good for jobs in the region, state or district. We could move on to scrutinize the extent to which development decisions drive or simply substitute for military policy. Or we could examine more useful brands of public works programs and industrial initiatives than those of

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the military-industrial community. The harder state governments try to square the Iron Triangle of Congress, Industry and Pentagon, then the more accessible the issues become in Raleigh, Nashville and Atlanta and all the communities affected by our public, but undemocratic, development bureaucracies.

A reasonable debate would also encompass the costs–human, environmental and financial–that military production exacts from workers and communities who supposedly benefit from Pentagon spending. A disproportionate share of those costs have been borne by have-not Southerners such as asbestosis victims in Tidewater shipyards or uranium-bullet factory workers and their neighbors exposed to radiation hazards in Appalachian Tennessee. The seemingly benign notion of “targeting contracts to distressed areas” in practice frequently means lending DOD’s authority to minimum wages, lethal workplace hazards, union busting and job insecurity.

The preponderance of non-weapons contracts in the South only hints at the Pentagon’s real domestic power–its unrivalled reach into every corner of our economic life. The Department of Defense provides eighteen thousand dollars for a rural sheriff’s department to drive past a Corps of Engineers Dam several times a week in Southwest Virginia. It furnishes $150,000 to prop up a marginal strip miner in East Kentucky. It sends along $200,000 to rent recruiter’s space in a failing hotel in a Tennessee town. The military reindustrialization campaign promises to extend DOD’s grass roots power. Unless we understand the web of Pentagon dependencies, we shouldn’t expect to change the shape of the South’s pre-war economy.

Tom Schlesinger is a carpenter and freelance writer living in Tennessee. He currently works with the Highlander Center’s Strategic Minerals and Defense Industry Project.

More Than Steel Mills Are Silent

Kelly Dowe — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:02 +0000

More Than Steel Mills Are Silent

By Kelly Dowe

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 3-5

Several times, thinking about it all, I’ve been taken back to the First Presbyterian Church in Montgomery.

It is a particular Sunday in the early 1960’s that I remember. I must have been eleven. I was waiting in our pew in the middle section of the cavernous sanctuary for services to begin, my family nested around me. My mother and my brother sat on one side, and two great-aunts, whose husbands, my uncles, were an elder and a deacon in the church, sat on the other. The air was cool and still, and in the enormous room with its high ceilings and dim light, where stained-glass and brass appointments forever needed polishing, I felt an abiding sense of security. That was when the commotion began.

Not much happened that I could see, but it centered on the main entrance behind us and sparked a crackling tension among the worshippers. Several heads swivelled toward the rear of the church, only to turn quickly around again. Several of the men strode with quiet purposefulness toward the rear doors. I could see nothing, but in a few minutes I knew the excitement had ended. The men returned to their seats. The organ prelude began on schedule. It was only after church, probably when we were driving home, that I learned what had happened: a small group of black people had tried to attend our Sunday service. They were turned away at the door. Someone, perhaps one of my uncles, had simply told them they were not welcome. They left without incident. Everyone seemed to think the situation had been handled masterfully. The church had behaved correctly and in the best possible taste.

That was twenty years ago. The incident re-emerged in my mind with startling clarity this spring, when I learned that Birmingham’s Downtown Rotary Club, one of the most exclusive organizations in the city, had quietly voted to continue its policy of excluding black members. Specifically, when Rotarian Angus McEachran, editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. asked the membership to remove the word “white” from the Constitution’s membership requirements–“Any white adult male person of good moral character”–he was voted down, one hundred twenty to ninety. It was the culmination of a three-year campaign McEachran had waged within the club to bring about the change. He resigned shortly afterward.

The club’s reaffirmation of its barrier against blacks, erected when the club was founded in 1913, made national headlines and prompted an outcry from Rotary International and Rotary clubs around the globe. On June 3, nearly a month after the original May 12 vote, the membership reversed itself and voted overwhelmingly to ask its board to reconsider the ban on black members. But when the Rotary board of directors met, it voted unanim-

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ously not to delete the word “white,” but to drop the club’s sixty-nine-year-old bylaws and to adopt the consitution of Rotary International which makes no mention of race.

Despite having their feet held to the fire, the Rotarians, like we Presbyterians years ago, had remained firmly in control and behaved correctly and in good taste. They could pretend the club had made no error, not even in basic practicality, and no one had to apologize or recant. They obfuscated the real issue–their decision, as an institution, to practice deliberate racial discrimination in choosing members. Many Rotarians later said they had not voted against having black members, but against overruling the board of directors. That, they said, was not how Rotary works.

The more I thought about the Rotary vote, the angrier I became. I was angry at the corporate board chairmen, the bank presidents, and the lawyers who recorded their bigotry. I was angry at all forms of institutional racism–the all-white country clubs with their columns and black footmen, the segregated churches, debutante societies and service guilds. I was especially angry at those Rotarians who knew better but were too complacent to speak out. Six are ministers or rabbis. One is president of a Baptist university. Did they feel no tearing sense of injustice? McEachran had already taken the lead. All they had to do was add their voices to his.

I was angry at the Rotarians for obliging all those people who think Birmingham is the national headquarters for racism. Many Rotarians do not even live in Birmingham, but in affluent, outlying communities. The run-of-the-mill Birmingham resident, who might live in an integrated neighborhood or send his kids to an integrated school, didn’t seem to deserve this new black eye. In the Birmingham school system, which is seventy-five percent black, test scores are at and above national averages and integrated PTA’s are strong. Through a network of ninety-three neighborhood organizations, blacks and whites have come to city government jointly with successful appeals for improved drainage, better lighting, and more recreational opportunities. Under Richard Arrington, the city’s first black mayor, the crime rate has dropped, the budget remains balanced, and the city has worked with developers and merchants to revitalize the downtown business district. Obviously the city has a long way to go in race relations, but it has come a long way since 1963.

After a while my anger gave way to cooler questions. Why had the Rotarians put their racist posture on paper, when they could just as easily keep blacks out by the exclusive nature of the club? “Extremely difficult” was one Rotarian’s description to me of the process of getting any new member into the club. “To get somebody in the Birmingham Rotary Club would take about six months.

You must have so many people to nominate you and so many people to second it. Some of these people pride being in the Downtown Rotary Club more than they pride being in a country club,” he said. And the chances of a black person’s admission by the current membership? “Practically impossible.”

Why would the likes of the head of the local Merrill Lynch office, I wondered, the president of the First Alabama Bank of Birmingham, and the president of the Alabama Power Company find it so difficult to have lunch alongside a black federal judge or a black insurance company executive? And in bad economic times, why would Rotarians jeopardize the city’s already shaky image with a written ban on black members? Unemployment now stands at thirteen percent. Did the members believe news of their vote would not get out? Displaying awesome faith in Rotarian discretion, eight former Rotary presidents mailed a joint letter to each club member a few days before the original vote, urging defeat of the proposed change. “As everyone knows, it is a very controversial and complicated subject . . . The fact that it is even coming before the entire membership is not only damaging to our club, but also our community,” they advised.

The scuttling about before the vote would have been funny, in retrospect, had the outcome not been so dismaying. One particularly prominent parson cornered McEachran at a cocktail party to wish him luck. “I wrote to the board for you. And I’m going to vote with you,” he said. McEachran replied, “I’m counting on you to do more than that.” The minister backpedaled. “Angus,” he said, “when you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll learn that in Birmingham you have to pick your fights.”

Even the image of Angus McEachran taking on Birmingham’s business upper crust is funny. McEachran, who constantly battles extra pounds, who routinely hangs up the telephone when kept on “hold” more than thirty seconds, whose reporters make fun of his stoop-shouldered gait and grunting speech, hardly seems like a wedge of social change. Deficient in the skills of small talk, impatient with diplomacy, he is apt to end prolonged debate by tossing a verbose dissident from his office. But in the Downtown Rotary Club, where acceptance of the business elite deterred the voice of objection for sixty-nine years, McEachran alone was willing to be consistently recognized as breaking rank.

You could name a dozen reasons why individual Rotarians might have wanted to retain their color ban. Many are elderly and longtime residents of the city where change has never come easy. The average age of the eight former presidents who mailed the letter, for example, was seventy-four. Many, with their executive positions, their homes in all-white suburbs like Vestavia and Mountain Brook, and their memberships in all-white country clubs and churches, probably expected to continue their racial isolation. Some, seeing the Downtown Rotary Club not as a service organization, but as an exclusive social club, perhaps saw no more reason to admit blacks to it than they would to their country club.

The phenomenon is not that a few, wealthy, conservative men are able to isolate themselves from the realities of a changing world and insist on systematic exclusion of

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non-whites. Southern history is full of affluent people who, while they didn’t ride in the night with torches and whips, urged on those who did with their voices of approval. James Armstrong, a black Birmingham barber who saw his entire family arrested in the 1960’s after attempts at integration, summed it up best. “The Klansman doesn’t always wear a hood. Sometimes he wears a tie,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize that.”

The depressing thing is that racists are allowed to prevail in 1982. That’s what makes me most uncomfortable of all. Because the people who allow it are not confined to Birmingham’s Downtown Rotary Club. They are all of us whites who fail to bring black families to our churches, who don’t ask black couples to consider buying the house next door, who don’t include blacks regularly in our socializing, for fear of offending our friends who are not so right-thinking as we.

“The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people but the silence of the good people.” Martin Luther King Jr. said it in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait. It still hits too close for comfort.

Kelly Dowe is a freelance writer living in Birmingham, Alabama.

Black Political Participation in the 1980’s: Challenged by Conservatism

Alex Willingham — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:03 +0000

Black Political Participation in the 1980’s: Challenged by Conservatism

By Alex Willingham

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 5-11

Assessing the state of black politics today requires a fundamentally different approach from what would have been appropriate even ten years ago. For one thing we have the administration of Ronald Reagan which seeks to curb federal policies designed to promote racial advancement. For another, there has been a significant increase in black political power throughout the country.

We are now confronted with new problems: the recruitment and staying power of black candidates; performance in public office; rates of participation among the general black population, and white response to the exercise of political authority by blacks. Where, in years past, American liberalism has pegged the quality of its racial commitment to its own ability to deliver (i.e., through appeals to the national conscience and through federal enforcement), now the vitality of American liberalism itself is dependent on the effective participation of this newly enfranchised group.

Nowhere has the change been more dramatic than in the American South, long the laboratory for creating structures to retard equal participation and still the symbol of white supremacy in politica. During the 1970’s, Atlanta, Memphis and Houston each sent blacks to Congress. In each case the election reflected successful coalitions and broke patterns that had prevailed since Reconstruction. From beyond these Southern cities came a further message. Important changes began to appear in the towns and rural places where hard-core opposition to black participation remains and where the appeal of white racial politics has been strongest.

Reagan’s Radicalism

The potential of black politics must be understood against an uncertain background in which levels of participation stand to be lowered by threats to the rules that are supposed to protect and reward participation. The Reagan Administration’s threats represent a single-minded effort to radically redirect the energies of government. Insofar as this effort succeeds, civil rights enforcement will suffer. Clearly, the President intends to lead the federal government out of its established role in promoting equal opportunity.

Reagan’s actions reverse a trend in executive behavior going back at least to Executive Order Number 8802–a wartime measure signed by Franklin Roosevelt prohibit-

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ing discriminatory hiring by federal defense contractors. Over the next four decades the role of the federal executive remained integral to the liberalization of race relations. It was a forceful complement to Congressional legislation and court decisions and resulted in a formidable array of orders, laws and decisions. Signed by Lyndon Johnson during his presidency, Executive Order Number 1124 updated and expanded the earlier Order and created the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). The first direct action on civil rights by the Reagan Administration was to weaken the OFCCP.

Characteristically, the New Right and the Reagan candidacy recognized the systematic forcefulness of civil rights protections. During the presidential campaign and the transition period, special attention was devoted to developing a nullification strategy which did not overlook the “civil rights establishment.” Consequently, there was a successful effort to place into key executive positions people who accepted the charge to dismantle the enforcement mechanism.

Is Ronald Reagan a Racist?

The retreat from enforcement is qualitatively different from the espousal of crude white race supremacy. The Administration claims that the status of American minorities is a by-product of the economy. Once formal assumption of biological equality is made, so the argument goes, no strictly racial attention is necessary. A troubled economy becomes the reason for citizen dissatisfaction. Salvation of that economy means less government activity. “Supply side” economics describes government activity as intrusive and burdensome. Because the growth of public agencies is seen as intrinsically negative, maintenance of adequate enforcement activity is inconsistent with the desired limited government. By this line of reasoning, matters of race decline in significance; racial preoccupation is made to seem juvenile. In black studies this is the familiar argument associated with Booker T. Washington and other New- South spokesmen who used it to rationalize their accommodation to the disfranchisement of black citizens at the turn of the century.

Yet for all of their diminution of the importance of race, the Reaganites operate with a definite view about the status of black citizens. They believe that white institutional leaders–including those in the South–have. cleansed themselves of prejudice and will hire, for example, qualified persons without regard to race. Reaganites also make a harsh distinction within the black population itself. They claim that we should be less concerned about race because of the number of successful blacks who are now gaining jobs, promotions and decision-making responsibility before whites with the same qualifications. That experience shows, they say, a perverse benefit black Americans now enjoy because of past racism. They are aware of the multitudes of poor blacks who have not cracked the elite world of work and play. But, they say, this results from slovenliness, poor work habits and lack of competitive drive–the legacies of slavery and of the false promises from the welfare state. To mount effective opposition to Administration policies it is important to recognize their deceptive mixture of half-truths and distortions. Reaganite rationales do not disturb white race supremacy but are disarming because they appear to be “non-racial.”

Reagan’s Plan of Attack

An administration so intent on taking government out of the business of race relations pursues a variety of tactics. In the past two years these have included budgetary cutbacks, deregulation, dismissal of seasoned civil rights officials, and the withholding of leadership. In responding to the Reagan challenge, I want to focus attention on three areas of domestic policy: revision of federal implementing regulations; weak or selective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, and extension of the block grant method of providing federal support to local government. The first of these–federal regulations–involves the classic role of the federal government in civil rights enforcement. The other two differ in that they have direct implications for the quality of participation at local levels. They are especially significant in our expectations about the future of black participation.

Implementing Federal Regulations. Immediately after the November 1980 election, the Reagan Administration suspended Carter-approved regulations in the Department of Labor that had been designed to strengthen the OFCCP’s affirmative hiring program. A “full review” of OFCCP regulations resulted in the not unpredictable conclusion that there was a need to reduce the compliance burden. In August 1981, Ellen M. Shong, Reagan’s appointee to head OFCCP, issued substitute regulations that were designed to weaken the agency’s power in civil rights work. During the first two years, the Administration, working through Shong, has held back on previously approved regulations and issued new ones in employment, child labor and rulemaking itself that if approved, would limit federal enforcement.

Perhaps the boldest move of the Administration was in January 1982, with its support of tax-exempt status for racially segregated education. This move reversed a twelve-year policy and demonstrated that traditional advocates of racial segregation (e.g., Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms) would have a strong voice

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on racial policy. The move was particularly disheartening to those Reagan apologists who had proclaimed him more innocent than mean on racial matters.

Along with the revision of existing regulations comes lax enforcement even when the regulations remain intact. At the U.S. Office of Revenue Sharing, for example, very effective regulations bar discrimination by local governments that receive revenue sharing money. These are nullified, however, by soft enforcement attitudes.

The revision of regulations not only shows the seriousness of the Reaganites–they leave no stone unturned–it dovetails well with so-called “racially neutral” de-regulation and thus avoids the more difficult task of acting directly to repeal civil rights legislation.

Selective Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. From the beginning months of the new Administration it appeared that New Right conservatives would make the Voting Rights extension a test of their effectiveness. Portions of the Act were scheduled to expire in 1982. What finally happened is illustrative of the politics of deception.

From the President on down there were early and forceful statements of support for the Act. Reagan himself was heard to support a simple ten-year extension. Parallel to these public statements of support was a well-defined move to take the teeth from the Act by opponents within the Administration and their allies. Three tactics were planned: calling for application of the Act nationwide, thereby creating an administrative nightmare; amending its Section Five to include an easy “bailout” provision to allow local governments to exempt themselves from the Act; and amending Section Two so that remedies to citizens suffering from discrimination in local government could only be provided if such victims could prove an intent in the action.

Passage of these amendments in any combination would have undermined the Act while allowing politicians to appear to support it. In time the President dropped his original position in favor of the more devious tactic.

These maneuverings failed to prevent extension of the Act. Early, persistent and generally unified lobbying action by civil rights groups, thorough hearings in the House, and key compromises by moderate Senators overcame the opposition. Reagan signed an extension into law that may make the Act more effective in removing racial barriers.

Extension of an amended Voting Rights Act kept in place the most crucial portion of civil rights legislation having to do with political participation. The problem has become one of selective enforcement. In several cases where local jurisdictions were charged with violations of the Act, the Justice Department has either abstained or actually supported the offending government. Take, for instance, the Mobile, Ala., case in which Senator Jeremiah Denton sought to censor the wording of the government’s position against the city. The Administration responded to Denton’s interference by making the changes he wanted.

In Edgefield County, South Carolina, where county commissioners changed to an at-large system of elections, the local blacks objected, saying the plan diluted black voting strength. The Justice Department agreed with these citizens and prepared to support them in federal court. Yet on the eve of the court appearance, the Department was ordered not to proceed with its case. This time in deference to Senator Thurmond.

Another situation involved Burke County, Georgia. Here, Justice was preparing to make a dramatic move. Both the federal district court and the appeals court had ruled that the at-large system in Burke was unconstitutional. The Justice Department had entered the case before the appeals court with extensive argument against the Burke system. The Burke County case reached the Supreme Court after the first Mobile decision. It attracted extraordinary attention as an occasion to get some clarification of the Court’s very divided opinion in Mobile. Between the appeals hearing (which was argued before Reagan took office), and the Supreme Court argument, Justice not only withdrew from the Burke case, but initiated efforts to present an argument in support of the county–a contradiction of its earlier position. Ultimately, Justice abstained from joining the case at the Supreme Court level.

Just where the Justice Department decides to place its support has enormous importance for the success of cases brought to challenge discrimination in the electoral process. Usually these cases pit local black civic groups against city or county officials. And even though local citizens do often get support from other groups–Legal Services, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or, less often, from the private bar–they never have the resources available to their adversaries who have direct access to the public dole. Because some measure of equity is brought when the Justice Department’s resources are involved, decisions not to support the victims of discrimination may result in the persistence of prejudicial systems.

Block Grants and New Federalism. If defeat of the Voting Rights Act would have resulted in less pressure upon local officials who discriminate, the block grant concept means more power to them. The central characteristic of the block grant system is the removal of oversight of how federal funds are spent by local governments. At present these proposals have not evolved into a coherent national policy. There are, however, five features in an emerging structure:

1) Block grants already approved by Congress. Although there is some confusion on the exact number of these, the programs are outlined in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 (Public Law 97-35). Examination of the Act shows that Congress has approved at least eight block grants.

2) Block grants selected for implementation by the states. States had a year in which to decide whether to choose any given block grant program.

3) The Primary Care Block Grant and the Education Block Grant scheduled to go into effect in fiscal 1983.

4) A new round of block grants proposed in the Reagan fiscal 1983 budget.

5) The whole “New Federalism” proposal initially outlined in the 1982 State of the Union speech. There has been some action on this proposal–including negotiations with local officials and hearings in the Senate–but the final outcome has not been settled.

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The civil rights implications of block grant proposals are several. Not only would block grants undercut the use of federal funds as an inducement to end discrimination in local communities, they would enhance the power of local politicians who continue to discriminate. A state by state, crazy-quilt pattern of administration will inevitably result, adding to the burden of community-based groups and weakening national advocacy groups who have been accustomed to centralized lobbying in the relatively friendly confines of Washington. These factors may well result in effective denial of benefits to eligible populations.

In general, block grants now in place are covered by the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which forbid discrimination in the use of federal funds. However there is really no “Block Grant Civil Rights Provision,” as such. Nondiscrimination provisions are included in the separate grants already approved with the exception of Social Services and Education. Yet in Title XVII of the Act, where there is general language governing all block grants (e.g., audit requirements, public hearings, state plans, certification), there is no nondiscrimination language–a troubling and perhaps telling oversight.

In proposing the 1982 New Federalism plan, the Administration indicated a willingness to funnel federal money through the Office of Revenue Sharing. That would subject funds to model civil rights provisions and an experienced investigative staff. Such a tactic would be important in addressing the problem of detailed enforcement procedures but would leave open the question of the adequacy of enforcement resources. Limited enforcement resources plague ORS already and would surely grow with the administrative changes under New Federalism.

Insofar as block grants are concerned, we are somewhere out in the stream between the fading categorical grant forms and a New Federalism on yonder shore. New Federalism avoids the appearance of meanness; it taps the rhetoric of pure democracy and engages our emotions about the beauties of local control. Yet the enhancement of a local authority which does not measure up to national standards of openness or of fairness in the delivery of services is irresponsible.

The Ghost of Federalism Past

New Right ideologues who decry the role of public expenditures should look at the way local governments have often used federal resources in violation of the spirit of the programs. Local communities receiving community development block grants or Farmers Home or Urban Development Act Grants (UDAG) have found ways to go about spending these monies without providing equal services to their constituencies. Sometimes this has entailed dubious participation schemes involving low-income blacks who had no real understanding of the programs or the process.

In one town I worked in, personal efforts to check the level of participation of black members listed on the town’s Community Development Block Grant Advisory Committee drew puzzled looks and blank responses. Yet an application had been made for the entitled money, it had been approved and nearly a half-million dollars had been spent. William Boone and I found a similar level of non-participation among minority “members” of multi-county planning and development (A-95 Review Agencies) throughout the Southeastern states.

If the track record is so bad in programs such as these where minority and low-income participation is mandated, it is only reasonable to expect the same or worse in block grant programs with a minimum of regulation. In General Revenue Sharing that, indeed, has been the case. Local governments have used this money for a variety of schemes of little benefit to their low-income citizens. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Office of Revenue Sharing had a 1981 backlog of over thirteen thousand complaints concerning misuse of money nationwide. The experience of the Revenue Sharing Enforcement Project of the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that the number of complaints would be substantially higher in Southern towns if the regulations were well-known among local groups.

The fact is that local governments have been beneficiaries of unrestricted funds for nearly a decade and have shown little real commitment to, or imagination for, using this money to redress accumulated inequalities.

The Southern Struggle for Political Equality

Recent events have had their effect upon slowing nearly fifteen years of steady political advancement by blacks. In Richmond, Va., the town’s first black mayor, Henry Marsh, has been engineered out of office by a downtown clique of white business people opposed to his local politics and national standing. They were aided by the national Republicans. In Atlanta, long the symbol of enlightened Southern attitudes, Andrew Young’s election to mayor exhibited a pattern of racial bloc voting that was disquieting both to that city’s official boosters and to some longtime black observers. In Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District (the Atlanta area), a large contiguous black population was recently ignored by white legislators in drawing voting lines. So blatant was this move that Reagan’s Justice Department objected under provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In New Orleans, incumbent Mayor Ernest Morial was returned to office by a record turnout and support from the black electorate. Yet, intensive opposition to the Morial reelection rose from the Governor’s office to former New Orleans Mayor and HUD Secretary “Moon” Landrieu.

The elections in both Atlanta and New Orleans turned out record numbers of black voters. In both cities, prominent blacks accepted the rumors that serious efforts were being made to “return” the cities to white mayoral leadership. After each election the cities’ media offered much somber analysis saying that no white could ever win a top office again.

In Houston, black voters joined a dynamic coalition there to elect the city’s first female mayor, Kathy Whitmire. She secured the appointment of a black, Lee Brown, to head the city’s notorious police department. Now that city is going through a familiar scene in which an entrenched white police element is arrayed against a black appointee and his affirmative action and reform efforts.

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Away from the cities, in the Southern small towns, not only has economic and political opportunity been slow to arrive, but whim and custom sometimes provide formidable obstacles even to the extension of modern marketplace principles. “Good business practices” alone compelled urban banks, for example, to at least moderate their racism, and treat customers according to their financial utility to the bank. The opponents of equal opportunity programs are correct in their argument that market rationalism had no small part to do with the affirmative hiring and training programs of corporations. That rationalism also enabled AP, Kroger, Safeway and many mom and pop stores to treat the food stamp as cash.

Such principles have been slow to reach the towns. In one case in Georgia, the locally owned bank simply refused to cash a government check for one black community group involved in political conflict. In another instance, in Arkansas, where a town had diverted revenue sharing money away from services in the black sections, the woman who exposed this situation backed out of her formal complaint when told that her unemployment check would be stopped. In Burke County, Georgia, it is still the custom for white creditors to stand prominently near the polls on election day.

But even these indirect forms of intimidation give way to more direct attacks. In Vienna, Gal, Tom Shaw has worked to bring change throughout his county. He filed an election suit against the county commission, the school board and called for official investigation into the local use of revenue sharing money. Over the years his actions led to desegregation of the school system, biracial membership on the school board and county commission and affirmative hiring plans for the county and its municipalities.

Tom Shaw never quite became a hero among some of his neighbors, however. Today he sits in the Dooly County Jail sentenced to thirty years.

Shaw’s jailing came because of a conviction for his role in a confrontation with a local police officer. Charged with aggravated assault (firing a pistol around an officer) and robbery (taking the pistol from the officer), he got a hung jury at his first trial. He argued that his involvement resulted from an effort to defuse a dangerous situation. When the second trial came, he had not been able to settle on legal counsel. The judge refused a continuation and appointed a local public defender who admitted that he had insufficient knowledge of the case. Shaw then tried to defend himself. This time, he was easily convicted and given a near maximum sentence of fifteen years for each charge. He was ordered to serve his time consecutively and has been denied bail bond while the appeal takes place. Needless to say, it was Tom Shaw’s political activities that caused his problems.

In Tchula, Miss., Eddie Carthan, the properly elected black mayor, found himself in a similar situation. He and six others (the Tchula Seven) face three-year terms in Parchman penitentiary resulting from an incident provoked by the refusal of a white police chief to step down for a Carthan appointee. Efforts to enforce his orders led to physical confrontation and assault charges against the mayor. Carthan was also charged with forgery in applying for federal aid and has been indicted for conspiracy in the mysterious death of Roosevelt Granderson, a black town councilman and a Carthan opponent. Carthan’s election as mayor of this majority-black town spurred intense opposition from the traditional white rulers and resulted in the series of harassing actions that left him under a cloud of politically motivated indictments and too dispirited to offer for re-election. The town has been restored to white political leadership.

In Greenwood, also in Mississippi, David Jordan was fired by the school board for canvassing on election day. It seems that Jordan, a high school math teacher and president of the Leflore County Voters League, had not agreed to ask his group to endorse the favorite candidate of the school board members.

In Albany, Gal, both John White, a member of the state General Assembly, and Don Cutler, a member of the county board of commissioners, are facing school board regulations that seek to force them to discontinue their jobs as a condition for holding elected political office.

In Pickens County, Alabama, two elderly black women–Maggie Bozeman and Julia Wilder–were sentenced to state prison terms for violations during a voter registration campaign among elderly black voters. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference led protests in support of the women and drew national attention by pointing to the harsh sentences given these women and the refusal of state executives to give a pardon.

By far the most aggressive attempt to retard affirmative community work in the rural South was the year-long fight between the Federation of Southern Cooperatives ,(FSC) and numerous government agencies, including the

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General Accounting Office, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney and federal grand jury in Birmingham. The investigation resulted from complaints made by political adversaries in Sumter County, site of the Federation’s Rural Training Center. The conflict took place over a two-year period, including more than a year of formal proceedings before the grand jury. In a classic “fishing expedition,” the authorities, claiming to be investigating misuse of federal money, demanded to look at nearly all of the FSC’s files. Numerous, sometimes antagonistic appearances before the grand jury required extensive time of FSC employees and counsel. In the end no formal charges were brought and the case was dropped.

The ease with which official institutions can harass political opponents is made possible by the continuing domination in elected office of traditional white elites resentful of bi-racial governance. Black groups in Black Belt counties continue to find it difficult to turn their majorities or near majorities into effective political clout. In only one of the nearly twenty-five majority black counties in Georgia, for instance, is there a black sheriff.

In part, this state of affairs results from a continuation of past habits. The voter registration and turnout rates by race in these places continue to show wide disparities to the detriment of black candidates. But the situation is also maintained by electoral chicanery. While physical intimidation is not usually employed, registration officials have declined to adopt measures to encourage registration among under-participating populations. Flexible registration hours, scatter site or neighborhood registration and deputy registrars have not been widely adopted.

In Edgefield County, South Carolina, there are no black elected county officials. This is due to the change to at-large elections mentioned above. In Alabama, the old tactic of a challenge and purge system has been reinstated through a process called “re-identification.” Registration of all voters in selected counties is suspended until they have “re-identified” themselves. This local legislation passed the state legislature under the sponsorship of white lawmakers. It is widely acknowledged to have a disproportionate effect on black political activity. In Brunswick, Ga., a city-county consolidation system would create a new jurisdiction just at the stage when black voting strength has improved in the city.

From the Atlantic seaboard to Delta Mississippi, expensive counsel has been retained by counties, school boards and townships to defend all-white governments that make public policy in communities of bi-racial population. Losing at one level, these attorneys continue to appeal. After the Burke County, Gal, County Commissioners lost their round in U.S. Appeals Court and announced their intention to carry the case further, one lawyer took the news in stride: “If they lose in the Supreme Court, they’ll probably request an opinion from the House of Lords.”

The Changing Prospects for Change

In spite of the obstacles we have surveyed, active advocacy survives. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives was exonerated in its battle. A multi-million dollar law suit against the Port Gibson, Miss., NAACP was reversed. Court action has saved other jobs and initiatives.

But the problem confronting black participation in the South today is whether such victories may be merely hollow when weighed against the longer campaigns of resistance which delay, deflect and retard. That, after all was the agenda of the old Southern segregationists: to buy time, to deny full equality as long as possible. If this assessment is correct, then advocates of democratic reform will be tested until the final vestige of privilege is removed.

If we lament the intransigence of the white power clique in Burke County, we should also note that in Wayneboro, the county seat, the town’s white mayor led the way to a negotiated settlement that did away with the at-large system and resulted in the election of blacks to the town council. In Greene County, Alabama, a black slate has governed since 1968 holding all of the county commission and board of education seats and pursuing personnel and administrative policies of their own.

And there have been other cases of exemplary advances. In the Fourth Congressional District in Mississippi, Wayne Dowdy pulled together a winning coalition of Democrats, labor, blacks and small-town whites. In his campaign, Dowdy took unequivocal positions on labor, extension of the Voting Rights Act and Legal Services.

Finally, another positive sign comes from the potential for changing the make-up of government officials at the local level. Non-traditional groups–women, blacks, labor, educational and environmental activists–are moving to contest directly for political office. Although the South Carolina Senate remains a conspicuous exception, there have been dramatic increases of blacks in Southern legislatures. Final reapportionment under the 1980 population figures should increase the number even more. Parallel to the increase in elected officials has been an increase in the number and status of blacks in the states’ administrative bureaucracies.

The Challenge of Conservatism

Starting with the social programs of the New Deal and continuing into the present, government’s “safety-valve” function has attempted to resolve social ills that private business and industry either would not or could not handle. The clients of the “welfare state” have included white middle-Americans, but have been disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities. Having limited resources, these latter groups turned to the government for improvements in education, jobs, housing, health and so on.

In one sense, particularly striking after the mid-1960’s urban rebellions when black people lost their legendary “invisible” status, one of the half-truths of the New Right was confirmed. The government did become, however limited, a vehicle for advancement. Yet, even during these years, some progressive social critics thought this change in black status seemed too one-dimensional–resulting in the dependency of too many middle- and low-income blacks on public works and federal services. There was skepticism as to whether such developments, positive in an immediate sense, would actually lead to the structural changes needed for full democratization.

Frankly, this “safety-valve” strategy for change reflected a belief by an ascending liberalism that the race

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problem required a concentrated public investment as a precondition for final systemic integration. In this, liberalism was reformist, not visionary, and betrayed its wont to design social change without regard to new forms of dependency, or to the extra-racial inequities intrinsic to market relations in modern capitalism.

So two decades of New Frontier and Great Society programs from model cities to community and urban development became as crucial to the advancement of minorities as the more familiar judicial and administrative measures we readily associate with racial progress. Those programs did their jobs. At the highest national level they gave us a number of individuals to command bureaucratic posts once limited to whites. In small and medium-sized places, blacks who have any professional executive experience often obtained it as head of a federal program or of the local department handling federal money.

The New Right conservatives–such as George Gilder, Martin Anderson or Thomas Sowell–who have discovered these relationships are Johnnie-come-latelies. Not only do they miss the historical intention of corporate state strategy, they also find- themselves in the classic contradiction of American conservatives who–living in a nation of historic, expansive, rapacious, change have to argue, in the name of that nation, to stop all change. Specifically, with regard to black people–whom they accept as the typical victims of American democracy–they are caught in the hyprocrisy of celebrating a new middle class created by the use of government resources while decrying the mechanism that created it; they celebrate the end-product of liberal policy while repudiating liberalism; they acknowledge the concrete benefits of these programs but say they cannot be helpful to lower income blacks, who remain victims, to native Americans or newly arriving immigrants. They fear that realization of the need to completely emancipate America’s black population will shatter the illusions that sustain an unspoken tolerance of suffering as a feature of national life. Thus they point to success as a reason to eliminate the public’s role in equal opportunity! This programmatic ambiguity reflects a moral bankruptcy in American conservatism that has never been more plain than today–at the hour when its influence on the national agenda is greater than at any time since the Great Depression.

Notes on Sources

The philosophical perspectives of the New Right and their racial implications may be found in George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981) and Thomas Sowell, Black Education (New York: McKay, 1972) or Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

Statements of the government’s role in protecting the rights of minorities and the opportunities created are in E. Richard Larson and Laughlin McDonald The Rights of Racial Minorities (New York: Avon, 1980); and Larson, Sue Your Boss (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981).

Conservative strategies to reverse the enforcement mechanism are discussed in Charles L. Heatherly, (ed.) Mandate for Leadership (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1980). After a year in power, conservative evaluation of its efforts were mildly enthusiastic. See Richard N. Holwill (ed.) A Mandate for Leadership: The First Year (Washington, D.C.: 1982), and Chester E. Finn, Jr. “‘Affirmative Action’ Under Reagan,” Commentary (April, 1982).

The role of the federal executive in civil rights is reviewed extensively in two congressional reports taking opposite views of the matter. A positive attitude is in “Report on Affirmative Action and the Federal Enforcement of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws,” a report of the House Subcommittee on Employment Opportunities (February, 1982). The negative view is in “Committee Analysis of Executive Order 11246,” by the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources (April, 1982).

Efforts to document and counter the declining enforcement have been numerous. See Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Without Justice: A Report on the Conduct of the Justice Department in Civil Rights. 1981-1982 February, 1982); Affirmative Action in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, November, 1981); “Statement of Principles on Affirmative Action,: adopted by the Congressional Forum on Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action (February 1982).

Two very different modes of harassment are represented in the Bozeman-Wilder incident and with the ordeal of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. See Thomas W. Ottenad, “Stiff Sentenees in Alabama Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch May 14, 1982; Kelly Dowe, “Paying the Price in Pickens County,” Southern Changes, June/July, 1982,and Thomas N. Bethell, Sumter County Blues (Washington D.C.: National Committee in Support of Community Based Organizations, 1982).

Problems of political participation are discussed in Voting Rights in the South: Ten Years of Litigation Challenging Continuing Discrimination Against Minorities (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1982); Frank R. Parker and Barbara Y. Phillips, The Justice Department and Voting Rights Enforcement: Political Interference and Retreat (Washington, D.C.: Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, 1982); The Voting Rights Act Unfulfilled Goals (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1981) Voting Rights in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina (State Advisory Committees, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1982); Raymond Brown, The State of Voting Rights in Georgia in 1982 (Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1982).

Alex Willingham has been Director of the Revenue Sharing Enforcement Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. He will begin teaching political science at Dillard University in New Orleans in the fall. He is editor of SPECTRUM, a forthcoming publication of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

A Few Proposals: From Black Agenda To National Policy

Monte Piliawsky — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:04 +0000

A Few Proposals: From Black Agenda To National Policy

By Monte Piliawsky

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 11-16

Upon initial consideration, the offering of policy proposals which grow out of a “black agenda” might appear to be a futile exercise. Given the prevailing conservative mood in the United States, black political leaders currently exert insignificant influence in the formulation of national public policy. Congress, for instance, totally ignored the 1983 counter-budget offered by the Black Congressional Caucus.

New Right ideologues recently have attempted to hold

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on to the white lower middle and working classes, whose support was decisive in the election of both Carter and Reagan, through the elaboration of a full-blown conspiracy theory. This thesis posits an alliance between the “new class” of what William Rusher calls a “liberal verbalist elite”–leaders in the educational establishment, media and governmental bureaucracies, and “a semi-permanent, welfare constituency, all coexisting happily in a state of mutually sustaining symbiosis.” The argument is particularly persuasive, for, as David Edgar points out, it combines “in one acceptable construct the radical instincts of the vast middle layers of society (those instincts of hatred and resentment directed at the rich above them) with a rationale for retaining their superiority over the masses of the poor below them.”

Black leaders are clearly on the defensive in combating this appeal from the right. The white lower middle class, concerned that real take-home income is eroding, is inclined to accept the underlying premise of Reaganomics: that the only way to rescue the national economy is to reduce the federal budget by sacrificing social programs. Given this context, black spokespersons appear to be representing only a narrow-interest group.

However, an opportunity exists for blacks to press their public policy demands, if they can persuade their potential white allies that these policies are in the latter’s self-interest. Rightwing demagoguery can be countered with a populism of the left, in which blacks form coalitions with other minorities and with whites who are also feeling the pinch. As Vernon E. Jordan Jr. expresses it, “Reagan’s programs won’t work for us, but they also are not going to work for a lot of white people, and I think there will be a mutuality of interest, even absent brotherhood and love.” This coalition-building strategy is supported by Barbara Williams-Skinner, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus:

The Caucus has got to come across as representing the interests of black Americans by showing white Americans how their interests coincide with those of black Americans, instead of winning over white Americans based on the concerns of black Americans. You’ve got to win people based on their interests, based on a common struggle.

The current prospect for coalition building is promising, given the falling relative incomes for the lower middle class. In the decade of the 1970’s, the share of total income going to the poorest twenty percent of American households remained essentially constant at 4.2 percent; however, the next lowest forty percent of households witnessed their share of total income decline from 28.5 to 27.2 percent. MIT economist Lester Thurow suggests that as the earnings of the lower middle class fall, relative to the groups above them, “what may also be canceled is the social tolerance of low- and middle-income groups for the large income gaps that have always marked the American distribution of income.”

Without doubt, Reaganomics has jeopardized much of the President’s initial support among the lower middle class. Duped in 1980 by candidate Reagan’s slogan, “Get the government off our back,” many working people have come to resent President Reagan’s favoritism to the wealthy. Black leaders must graphically point out to those four whites for every black who feel the impact of Reaganomics, exactly how they are being victimized. As Williams-Skinner puts it, “We’ve got to develop better research on the impact of the Reagan budget on non-black, non-poor small business people, which is the majority of what Nixon used to term the ‘silent majority’ voter.”

While the white lower middle class is the group most susceptible to the wooing calls for coalition, some support seems likely from disaffected portions of the middle class. A Newsweek poll in early 1982 revealed that by overwhelming three-to-one margins, Americans want federal spending to be increased in the following areas: aid to education/college loans, medical and health care, aid to states and cities, and job training. The same poll also showed that a fifty-two percent majority of Americans’ express fear that their own financial situations will decline because of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies.

In the following few pages I offer several policy positions primarily for consideration in a national agenda. This agenda and its particular suggestions must be seen as complementary to strategies aimed at other levels of power. At every level, coalition-building faces substantial obstacles: entrenched interests and enmities of class, race and sex.

One limitation to my agenda is that it does not touch

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specifically on roles which black Americans must play in enhancing their own lives. Even as they direct attention to broad advocacies, blacks need to plan actions which stress self-sufficiency and independence. Blacks should organize to take control of local resources. In the rural South the focus should be on securing control of county governments and their spending authorities, as well as local institutions such as rural electrical cooperatives. In urban areas, blacks should seek to control neighborhood institutions by having some of the powers exercised by the city, such as in the areas of education, housing, employment and health, transferred to a neighborhood corporation. Also promising are current economic campaigns, backed by the potential of boycotts, which negotiate jobs, training and re-investment from corporations doing business with blacks. As we have learned, exclusive reliance on national remedy leaves blacks vulnerable to the vicissitudes of shifting popular majorities in American politics.

Increase Political Participation

Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks have dramatically demonstrated their voting strength. The number of black elected officials in the U.S. has increased in that time from fewer than five hundred to 5,038 by July of 1981. In addition, when there is a high black voter turnout, coalitions of blacks and whites have elected progressive candidates in the South even in constituencies where blacks are a numerical minority.

In August 1981, a huge black turnout provided the razor-thin margin of victory (50.6 percent) for Democratic candidate Wayne Dowdy in Mississippi’s fourth congressional district, a seat held by Republicans since 1972. In March 1982, a black turnout of seventy-five percent–higher than the white turnout–re-elected New Orleans’ black mayor Ernest Morial. Referring to Virginia’s November 1981 gubernatorial election, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote: “That an upsurge of black voting has so materially aided the gubernatorial victory of Charles Robb in what has been the South’s most solidly conservative state does argue that the elements of the old liberal coalition can be re-invigorated in the right circumstances.”

However, many barriers impede the forging of populist voting coalitions. For one thing, extralegal obstacles to full black political participation still exist in the South. In 1974, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported: “Acts of violence against blacks involved in the political process still occur often enough in Mississippi that the atmosphere of intimidation and fear has not cleared.” In the companion essay to this one, Alex Willingham has outlined the continuing practices of Southwide resistance at the local level through both direct and indirect intimidation. Although blacks comprise popular majorities in over one hundred counties in the South, they effectively control only ten, often because of ingenious gerrymandering. In addition, a factor such as low educational opportunity is generally associated with a high sense of political powerlessness.

Both the black and white poor have reacted to generations of politicians’ unkept promises by developing considerable alienation. Nor does the election of black mayors in Southern cities, such as Tuskegee, Alabama, and New Orleans–to cite two particularly revealing instances–necessarily translate into an improved quality of life. As Julian Bond notes, “these mayors and aldermen and commissioners often remain accessories beside the fact of actual governance of their towns counties and states.” Perhaps reflective of such cumulative reasons for disaffection, the percentage of eligible Southern blacks who were registered to vote declined from 63.1 percent in 1976 to 57.7 percent in 1980.

Although they do not directly address deeper patterns of disinterest, long habits of powerlessness and the corrupting influence of private money in campaigns, structural changes in voting laws coupled with intensive registration drives can increase voter turnout. Citizens are required to register before they can cast a vote. This aspect of the American electoral system is unusual, for in most democratic countries the government assumes responsibility for enrolling all citizens on the permanent nationwide electoral register. Indeed in this country, registration is often more difficult than voting, for as Steven Rosenstone and Raymond Wolfinger note, “it may require a longer journey, at a less convenient hour, to complete a more complicated procedure–and at a time when interest in the campaign is far from its peak.”

The weightiest structural impediments to voter turnout are early deadlines for registration and limited registration office hours. Allowing citizens to register up until the election day itself and adopting the practice of having the registration office open in the evenings after normal working hours and on weekends would raise voter turnout among working people considerably. An even more helpful change would be to permit citizens to vote without registering in advance. In 1976, the four states

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which utilized election-day registration showed presidential turnouts of nearly seventy percent, well above the national average of only fifty-four percent.

Congress ought to pass legislation providing for nationwide election-day registration. Bills to this effect were introduced five times since 1971, culminating with President Carter’s unsuccessful 1977 attempt. All of these bills foundered on opposition by Republicans and Southern Democrats, who argue that liberalizing the registration laws would increase proportionately the turnout of low-income and less educated citizens, resulting in a windfall of votes for the Democratic party.

Also, Presidential and Congressional election days should be declared national holidays. State and local elections should be moved from Tuesdays to weekends. Based upon available empirical evidence, these electoral reforms would result in a significantly enlarged electorate, more representative of the entire American population. For example, 85.9 percent of those registered cast ballots in the 1981 runoff French presidential election which was held on Sunday, an enormous turnout by American standards. Voter turnouts of over seventy percent are routine in those U.S. elections, such as the Democratic party primaries in Louisiana, which are conducted on Saturdays.

Combat the Assault on Public Education

The United States has always considered public education to be the primary means of achieving its commitment to equal opportunity. The critical function of education was forcefully articulated in the Brown v. Board of Education decision:

In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

Perhaps the greatest social calamity being perpetuated by the Reagan Administration on black and working class white youth is the federal government’s abandonment of its commitment to adequate, free and equal public education. Simply put, school systems are going broke due to drastic reductions in federal aid. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell has openly declared that the federal government intends to totally withdraw support of public education, stating that “education should be to state governments what defense is to the national government.”

The federal government’s retrenchment from education is especially painful in light of the encouraging progress made by black public school children during the past decade. The gap between blacks and whites in educational achievement test scores narrowed from an eighteen percent differential in 1970 to only thirteen percent in 1980. Many experts credit the improvement to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, designed to support compensatory education programs. Nevertheless, the Reagan Administration cut Title I’s funds in 1982 by six hundred million dollars; his 1983 budget proposes an additional reduction of four hundred million dollars, or forty-five percent.

Equally devastating is the President’s proposal to provide tuition tax credits to private schools, a scheme which would cost $1.5 billion by 1987. Senator Ernest Hollings’s critique of the plan is on the mark:

The tuition tax cut proposal would turn our nation’s educational policy on its head, benefit the few at the expense of the many, proliferate substandard segregationist academies, add a sea of red ink to the federal deficit, violate the clear meaning of the First Amendment of the Constitution, and destroy the genius and diversity of our system of public education.

The drastic reductions in federal financial aid for college students proposed in the Reagan Administration’s 1983 budget, which include a forty percent cut in the Basic Equal Opportunity Grant, imperil the future of U.S. higher education. The students who stand to suffer the worst, of course, are low-income students, who are disproportionately black. It is estimated that enrollment in the traditionally black private colleges will be halved if the administration’s plans are fully implemented.

Blacks and the poor must demand that education regain is rightful place on the national policy agenda. A critical legal struggle should be made to reverse the Supreme Court’s five to four decision in 1973 (San Antanio School District v. Rodriguez) which permits school districts to spend widely discrepant sums for public education. Indeed, the inequitable system of financing public education makes a mockery of the intent of the Brown decision: to assure equal expenditures for educational purposes for all pupils regardless of race.

Implement Work Program

In mid-1982, eighteen percent of adult blacks and fifty-three percent of black teenagers are unemployed, more than double the percentage for their white counterparts. According to the National Urban League’s total unemployment index, which includes the discouraged unemployed who have stopped their job seeking, black unemployment equals the highest national unemployment level during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when one-quarter of all Americans were out of work. To address this crisis, two government programs should be implemented immediately: a public works program and employment vouchers.

During the Depression, the national government put three million people to work building roads and public buildings that are still in use. The present depressed condition requires a comparable solution. Ideally, a public works program to provide jobs for the unemployed would be structured to rebuild the decaying sections of cities. Program costs could be offset by the savings of ten billion dollars in federal services now spent for every percentage point of unemployment. One component of the public works program should be a public service work corps offering a more socially constructive alternative to military service.

Public works should be supplemented with a long-term system of employment vouchers. As envisioned by Harvard economist Robert B. Reich, unemployed (and low-skilled) workers would receive federal vouchers that they could cash in for on-the-job training. The companies that accept the vouchers would have half their training costs paid by the government, for up to three years. Workers who develop skills as machinists, computer pro-

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grammers and operators would obtain permanent jobs, while industries would secure workers with needed skills. However, any system of providing industry with government subsidized workers would have to be accompanied by requirements that companies remain in present locations and maintain present work forces, rather than write off their old plant and equipment and move.

Expose the “New Federalism”

The program of “New Federalism” outlined by President Reagan in his 1982 State of the Union message is hoax. It is little more than an ideological veneer to package an assault on social programs, as well as a callous abandonment of the practice of the federal government, since the New Deal, of providing grants-in-aid to equalize resources among the states. These budget cuts hit the needy hardest; and the needy are disproportionately black.

Blacks and the poor are victimized by both the taxing and spending policies associated with New Federalism. The Administration’s twenty-five percent cut in federal taxes for fiscal 1982 was exclusively a reduction in corporate and personal income taxes, the only progressive taxes in the entire governmental taxing schedule. These shower-the-rich tax cuts are projected at $442 billion over three years.

As state and local governments now decide whether they will assume some of the axed federal programs, they must also decide whether to increase their taxes to offset the loss in federal revenue. With property owners resisting increases in property taxes, any new local taxes will likely be higher sales taxes. For example, in May 1982, New Orleans’ voters, with blacks providing the margin of victory, chose to raise the city sales tax to a whopping eight percent in order to keep the transit service in operation.

Whether by the curtailment of services or by the burden of replacing progressive federal taxes with regressive local ones, blacks and the poor suffer. In mobilizing public support against New Federalism, black leaders should expose the reality of this seemingly benign concept. As Nick Kotz puts it, “The new federalism represents an extension of the strategy of the budget cuts: shrink federal social welfare and then place responsibility with the states, where it is certain to shrink further.”

Unionize the Unorganized

In the anti-union South where the majority of blacks live, union members make significantly higher wages than their nonunion counterparts. In New Orleans, for instance, black (union) bus drivers have higher incomes than white (nonunion) police officers. One of the most dramatic examples of the benefits of union representation is found among clerical workers in Atlanta. In 1981, Southern Bell Telephone’s unionized clerical workers earned from $7.57 to $9.39 an hour after forty-eight months on the job; their counterparts in Atlanta’s nonunionized firms brought home $4.18 to $6.67 per hour–forty-five percent less.

Significantly, black workers benefit from union representation even more than whites. In 1974, the last year for which such information is available, all groups of workers–black, white, male and female–gained financially as union members. In the South, black men profited the most, earning thirty to fifty percent more, while black women earned seventeen to twenty-four percent more than nonunion workers of the same race and sex; white men gained fifteen to nineteen percent, with white women slightly higher at sixteen to twenty percent.

Labor unions presently protect many middle class workers. In addition to higher wages, union members receive job security, a grievance procedure, seniority rights, health insurance, and generally improved respect and personal dignity. According to Leslie W. Dunbar:

The case for unions that could bring self-defense, and self-reliance, to the poor and powerless is overwhelming. . . There is simply no other expectable way in our economy for these bottom-rung workers to become self-sustaining except through collective bargaining.

Especially in the South where business and government conspire to oppose and obstruct organization, we need laws which encourage unionization. In addition, we must support Southern black and white workers’ efforts to organize their own hospital, food service and clerical unions. Here again, endemic racism looms as one of the basic obstacles to organizing the un-organized. A recent study by Herbert Hill, former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Education Fund, concludes that the AFLCIO leadership has “refused to accept the perspective of interracial unionism,” a factor which has contributed significantly to the nationwide decline in workforce unionization from thirty-six percent in 1955 to only twenty-one percent today.

Question Pentagon Spending

While the Reagan Administration has drastically reduced the federal government’s commitment to social services, it has concomitantly reversed a twenty-year trend of gradual decline in the military proportion of the budget. For fiscal 1982, military spending was increased by $28 billion, to $199 billion, the largest peacetime one-year increase in absolute dollars in U.S. history. Reagan’s program for an accelerated military buildup calls for a total of $ 1.6 trillion over the next five years! Black leaders must question the dire economic consequences of military spending of this magnitude.

Even the political aims of military policy require a sound and healthy domestic economy. A report released in 1982 by Employment Research Associates of Lansing, Michigan, shows the contrary to long-held and popular belief, military spending is not good for the economy, for it

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inhibits economic growth and actually generates unemployment. According to the study, defense spending–because it produces no socially useful goods or services, and because it is peculiarly capital intensive–leads to more loss of employment and more inflation than any other category of government spending. The net loss of jobs disproportionately affects black Americans, because they are overwhelmingly involved in the production of durable goods, services and state and local government–three of the hardest-hit categories of the economy when military spending is high. Specifically, the study finds that every one billion dollars spent in the Pentagon budget results in fourteen thousand fewer jobs than if the money had been spent in the private sector, and a net loss of thirty-thousand jobs as compared with spending the money in the state and local government sector. The report concludes:

The deep problems of the American economy cannot be ameliorated until the military budget is cut and the money either is left in the hands of citizens through tax cuts or spent on economically productive activities by the government–federal, state or local.

A significant and growing constituency does not believe that the rapidly escalating military budget buys extra security for the U.S. Already the grass-roots movement for arms control and nuclear disarmament has forced even the bellicose Reagan Administration to consider negotiations on strategic weapons. The political climate in now ripe for blacks and the poor to take the lead in integrating anti-nuclear sentiment into a unified opposition to the buildup of military weapons. In challenging the Pentagon’s budget, we must deal with specific items by always raising the question: Does spending for this particular weapon advance a valid concept of national security, or does it represent, like the B-1 bomber, waste and “overkill”?

Extend Democracy

Present supply-side economic policies have enabled the wealthy to luxuriate in tax cuts or stash them in shelters, while corporations have used their windfalls to bid against and buy up one another. Instead, the national government should be encouraging private investment in new and modernized production capacity and placing public investment into the rebuilding of cities and the development of skills. Long-term gains can accrue through government investment in education and job training to both revitalize basic industries and pursue high technologies.

Finally, however, a fairer distribution of social wealth is essential. The major problem is that of controlling the arrogance and ruthlessness of trans-national corporations. Recent proposals for economic democracy and for greater worker control include the requiring of public shareholders in major corporations, encouraging employee-owned businesses, using union pension funds to achieve labor influence in corporate decisions and restricting corporate mergers.

To date, the most comprehensive working class alternative program to the current climate of accommodation and “givebacks” by labor unions in which workers sacrifice wages and benefits for so-called job protection, is the “Campaign for Corporate Concessions” spearheaded by former Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union vice president Tony Mazzocchi. The underlying assumption of the Mazzocchi plan is that workers must assume responsibility for the management of the national wealth themselves by having unions demand bargaining power over corporate investment, plant location, supervisory staffing, etc. Specifically, Mazzocchi’s program calls for a three-year freeze on the following: overseas corporate investment; unilateral investment decisions by management; further reductions in workers” incomes; increases in management compensation; the hiring of more supervisors; and a freeze on unnecessary mergers and on speculations.

As Mark Green, former head of Ralph Nader’s Congress-watch, states, the fundamental issue of the 1980’s is “how to generate and distribute wealth in a new era.” The other face of the continued growth of corporate wealth and power is the significant growth in poverty rates. A minimum of fourteen percent, or thirty-two million people, are now impoverished in the United States. More than sixty percent of the poor are black or Hispanic and more than half are children. There is no more compelling agenda for the politics of the coming years than to reduce the upward trend in misery.

Suggested Bibliography

Ackerman, Frank. Reaganomics: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Boston South End Press, 1982.

Auletta, Ken. The Underclass. New York: Random House, 1982.

Ferguson, Thomas, and Rogers, Joel (eds.). Hidden Election: Politics Economics in the 1980 Presidential Election. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Gill, Gerald R. Meanness Mania, The Changed Mood. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980.

Green, Mark J. Winning Back America: Alternatives to Reaganomics. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Hayden, Tom. The American Future: New Visions Beyond the Reagan Administration. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1982.

Lekachman, Robert. Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Cloward, Richard A. The New Class War. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Preston, Michael B., et al. (eds.). The New Black Politics, The Search for Political Power. New York: Longman, Inc., 1982.

Wolfe, Alan. America’s Impasse. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Monte Piliawsky is an associate professor of political science at Dillard University. He is author of Exit 13: Oppression and Racism in Academia.

Laying By

Brooks Hays — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:05 +0000

Laying By

Brooks Hays: 1898-1981

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 17-18

My grandfather was a Republican. To some this may not sound like an arresting statement, but to one born in 1898 in the impregnable Democratic South, and destined to spend a lifetime in politics, the fact was of profound significance.

I made my first race for governor of Arkansas in 1928, when Civil War memories were still emotion-charged factors in politics. I had not realized what a handicap I was under until I arrived at Mammoth Spring for a speaking engagement one hot August afternoon, and was greeted by a worried chairman: “Brooks, our opposition is claiming that your grandfather was a Republican! It’s not true, is it?” I admitted it was true, and in my speech I met the difficulty head-on: “My friends, I hear there is a rumor going around that my grandfather was a Republican and a carpetbagger. He was indeed a Republican. And it is unfortunately a fact that he and Grandmother Hays did not get to Arkansas till 1879. They came here seeking a better opportunity in life; and I am sure that when they packed their few belongings to journey halfway across the continent in response to the warm welcome that Arkansas promised to those who would come here to settle and help build the state, they never dreamed that fifty years later it would be said that their grandson should not hold public office because his grandfather did not reach the state till 1879!” Thereafter the Hays family’s Pennsylvania background was no issue.

My mother’s father, Dr. William Butler, a native of west Tennessee, was so opposed to slavery and secession that he took the hard and unpopular course of changing his party. And I am no prouder of my great-great-grandfather, who apparently fought in Washington’s army, than I am of this simple country doctor and Baptist preacher who acted in accordance with the dictates of his conscience. In 1873 Dr. Butler moved into Arkansas with his wife, my grandmother, and settled in Logan County. Some ten years later he unsuccessfully ran for the Arkansas state senate.

* * *

During the period of my grandfather’s moderate political activity in the 1880’s, when he ran for the state senate, there was not much interest in politics. People were occupied with routine tasks and political decisions did not appear important. There was no serious challenge to the state Democratic party, partly because the opposition had bungled its chance to produce an attractive alternative to Democratic rule. Still, that Republican opposition did not deserve the imprecations heaped upon it. The outstanding Reconstruction governor Isaac Murphy had, as a representative from Madison County, opposed secession, and was responsible for some splendid progressive measures, some of which were beneficial to both the white and black races. (Madison County produced another governor, Orval E. Faubus, nearly a hundred years later.) Public schools received the first serious attention of state political leaders and, if race feeling had not obstructed progress, the Republicans might have laid the basis for a long political tenure. But power brought a form of intoxication. Their excesses in expenditures and the downright corruption of some officials, coupled with failure to plan a constructive participation by the emancipated Negroes in political life, led to disfavor and a long political drought.

There is no sadder chapter in the history of Southern politics than the cruel and highly effective measures adopted by the white majority around the turn of the century to close the door to the Negro’s political participation. The principal mechanisms adopted for this purpose were the poll tax, a complicated ballot, and the white primary. The Republican and Populist opposition to these measures was feeble or altogether lacking, so the Democrats were gleeful. They were not to atone for this mistreatment of the black community for another half century. True, there were sensitive white leaders who knew that what was happening was wrong, but there were not enough of them to provide resistance.

State government under the Democrats, like the federal government under the Republicans, was a sort of noblesse oblige–mild aids to farm production, but never bearing the impress of radical change in marketing, credit, or land tenure policies that were essential to any substantial improvement of conditions.

And organized religion. as I have intimated, was too absorbed in unrelated and irrelevant questions to help the distraught lower classes–small farmer and town laborer. The plight of the black people did not appear to trouble the white Christian conscience very much. “The panic” (mid-nineties word for depression) therefore caused much suffering. Radical Populists offered nostrums of a questionable kind. The historic social ethics of the churches could have helped, but, again, their intellectual energies were being dissipated in meaningless dissertations. A debate between the favorite orators of the Baptist and Methodist churches and those of the new and burgeoning Disciples of Christ would always draw a crowd. The subjects most often adopted were: “Is baptism essential to salvation?”; “Is foot-washing a biblically required ordinance of the Church?”; “Is security of the saints taught in the New Testament?”; “Can a saved person fall from grace?” The “doctrine of hell” was a common subject of discussions, and grave decisions were known to rest on individual beliefs on the subjects. The following somewhat familiar story originated in this period. An

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engaged daughter said, “But, Mother, I can’t marry George; he doesn’t believe there’s a hell.”

“Well,” said Mama, “You go ahead and marry him, and between the two of us, we’ll show him that there is.”

* * *

The word welfare was not in the political vocabulary of the 1880’s. Family responsibility was, however, a basic virtue among the frontiersmen, and neighborliness was often expressed in volunteer nursing for the sick or needy and in providing food for them. Quilting and barn raisings were not only a part of the community’s sense of concern for its members but provided outlets for the festive spirit that craved a temporary escape from individual labors in favor of group assemblying.

Only the poor families had to have outside help when serious misfortunes struck. There were simple patterns of social security that the bread winners were expected to follow. The maiden aunts, for example, never secure in the modern sense. rarely lacked a place to live. My Grandfather Butler doubtless gave his sister Tabitha every evidence that she was as much a part of the family circle as when he and she were growing up together in Tennessee. And Aunt Bitha carried her part of the routine work of the household.

The new opportunities for women in our century are certainly a vast improvement over this type of security, but the affection which the Aunt Bithas received in the earlier period was a compensating factor. In turn she exuded a love and devotion for the family that adopted her.

There is an obscure passage in Albert Beveridge’s volume on Abraham Lincoln’s youth that celebrates this aspect of pioneer life. Tom Lincoln was able to provide only a crude shelter for his family in the Indiana wilderness, and when Nancy Hanks was stricken, Abe and his sister nursed her with only the-help that their nearest neighbor, a kind-hearted woman, could give them. She trudged through the snow two miles daily on her missions of mercy. It was frontier life at its best.

Today, such sacrifices are not required, but it seems to me that society has yet to extol properly the compassion that is reflected in the elaborate and professional aids which every level of government provides for ailing people. The Indiana wilderness has vanished, but doubtless there are people in trouble today in the same spot where, Abe Lincoln tried to make his mother comfortable in he’ last illness. Today the visiting nurses and welfare workers have become symbols of a corporate compassion, just as the Lincoln neighbor symbolized an individual kindness upon which the Nineteenth Century society had to depend.

Sorrow had often struck the Ellsworth community, the well-to-do and the poor alike. Eight of my mother’s sisters and brothers died in infancy or early childhood, most of them victims of epidemics. Diphtheria was the chief enemy. Mother’s story of the passing of her younger brother and of her twin sisters when they were just six years old strongly affected my feelings about the desperate health needs of rural Arkansas. It also gave me an insight into the power of religious comfort in the presence of death. The Bible may be, for some, a mere talisman, but its truths became a buttress for me. I was old enough to appreciate the comforting elements in these truths long before I discovered that the Bible is also a prod to give comfort as well as receive it. The Old Testament was as comforting as the New. The poetry and philosophic depths of both buoyed me in the sorrow which my mother’s story of her family’s suffering induced.

* * *

Thus the forming of a matrix of my political, social, and religious philosophy began in western Arkansas nearly a century ago. An observer of the Washington political scene during my service there viewed with mild criticism some provincial aspects of my philosophy, but he credited “Mr. Hays” with advancing far beyond the culture of the rural South “which nurtured him.” This was in the context of early civil rights struggles, and my part in those struggles did not obscure the deep sentiments that I feel for the people and the places which are identified with my life and career. It was obvious that my opinions on the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957-1958 were “an advance” over the conventional views of my constituents, but just as obvious, I hope, is my appreciation of the genuinely admirable things about the ways of life of Arkansas village and farm people.

However, I must concede that the rural South has lagged in erecting adequate educational standards, that the rural South has held on to a dubious theology, and that the rural South has a paucity of practices calculated to improve the total society; in short, that there is in certain areas a shocking mediocrity. My hope for the South is based not on blindness to these facts, but on an underlying faith in the South’s actual and potential goodness–in its aspirations, as distinguished from its achievements, and in the toughness of mind as well as of body of the sons of the soil and their women folks.

I trust that my story reflects an authentic hope for triumph by them over adversity; also that their respect for moral and legal authority, entertained in the face of many affronts by political establishments to their human dignity and pride, will be maintained.

“Laying By” is an occasional feature of Southern Changes which commemorates special lives and labors. Laying by signals no shuffling off of memory nor casting off of purpose. In the South it means that time, late in summer, when folk pause from their work, consider what has gone before, and anticipate a harvest.

This article is adapted from Mr. Hays’s autobiography Politics Is My Parish, published in 1981 by the Louisiana State University Press, and reprinted here with permission.

Biting the Budget At Legal Services

Ginny Looney — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:06 +0000

Biting the Budget At Legal Services

By Ginny Looney

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 19-22

In the first budget that Ronald Reagan proposed as President, he recommended the elimination of the Legal Services Corporation. Reagan wanted legal aid for the poor provided through block grants and voluntary efforts of private attorneys. Michael Horowitz, counsel for policy analysis and law at the Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview with the New York Times, “The bar has a fundamental responsibility to undertake that which its own set of ethics imposes. And we think it somewhat troublesome that a bar whose members’ total gross income now substantially exceeds $20 billion year needs to lobby for a wholly federally funded program in order to exercise its own admitted responsibility to represent the poor.”

While unsuccessful in abolishing Legal Services, the Reagan Administration has struck devastating blows. Funding cutbacks, proposed restrictions on program activities and appointment of some members to the board of directors who are hostile to the program’s purpose have left the Corporation suffering.

That Reagan was unable to end Legal Services was due to strong support for the program in Congress. In rejecting the view of Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah that Legal Services attorneys spend “millions of dollars in what we call lawyer activism for liberal social programs instead of working for the common needs of the poor,” Congress voted to appropriate $241 million to the Corporation in 1982. Defenders argued that the program was needed to provide a basic right to those unable to afford it and to prevent more violent resolution of disagreements. “True constitutional conservatives support legal services for the poor because they believe that where government is based on laws rather than the edict of a few men, there must be access for all to the applications of those laws to resolve conflicts,” said Representative Neal Smith of Iowa. Representative M. Caldwell Butler, a key Republican supporter from Virginia, said, “I think the question is if you believe in the rule of law, in reasonable access to the legal system.”

The 1982 appropriation represented a twenty-five percent cut for Legal Services from the previous year, while opponents had proposed appropriations from zero to one hundred million dollars. For 1983, the House Appropriations Committee has recommended that the Corporation’s budget remain the same.

Local programs have responded variously to the cutbacks. Some have closed offices; others have limited the types of cases they handle. Staff have been laid off, positions left unfilled, eligibility requirements changed and efforts increased to involve private attorneys in the representation of poor people. In Georgia, two offices were closed and the staff statewide was reduced by seventy-five people, says John Cromartie, executive director of Georgia Legal Services. Now two hundred and fifty persons are on the payroll, which includes every office in the state except the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

Since some state’s programs had surpluses from previous years to enable them to complete cases if funding ended, their financial problems will become more acute next year. In Mississippi, Michael Raff, director of that state’s Legal Services Coalition, says “there has been so much expansion of Legal Services with four new programs just getting built up that the cutbacks haven’t had as drastic effect as they will. In 1983 I see more staff going and more selection in the types of cases to be handled.”

Because of the reduction in funding and the stiffening of eligibility requirements in other social programs, the limitations forced upon legal aid have come at a time when the need is greatest. As Laurence M. Lavin, director of a South Carolina program, said in January, “When you have people who are going to have their food stamps or their Aid to Families with Dependent Children reduced, then the number eligible for our services is going to increase. At the same time, our resources are being cut back.” Cromartie cites the elimination of people with mental health disabilities from Social Security benefits as one example of increased need. “For this year and next we have set public assistance benefits as a major priority. This has been a confusing year for clients and there is a lot of fear,” he says. “We have generally viewed our role as helping clients find out what their rights are.”

Not only federal budget cuts and program changes have increased the demand for legal aid, but high unemployment has brought more clients seeking help. These clients–what one attorney called the “new poor”–present problems like unpaid hospital bills and house foreclosures which are different because “the established poor never had enough money to buy a house,” says Imogene Walker, a staff attorney in Georgia. “We also have more calls on how to get disability, not because the person can’t work, but because they can’t get the kind of work they need.”

Except for divorce, Walker’s office is still handling the same types of cases it did a year ago: health care, housing, social security, consumer complaints, public assistance benefits, unemployment compensation and civil rights cases. “We have tried to figure out what kinds of cases clients can’t handle for themselves,” she says.

But Walker points out that many besides the poor look to Legal Services for help. “The program has been so simplified in people’s minds to mean free legal advice,”‘ she says. In talking with potential clients on the telephone, she quickly finds out whether they are financially eligible for the program–income for a family of four must be below the federal poverty level of $9,300 a year. When the caller’s income is too high, she does not hang up, but tries to respond to their problem.

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Congressional Restrictions

Budget cuts have presented the most immediate problem for Legal Services programs. Next year, however, the Corporation may have to cope with further prohibitions placed on representing the poor. Although bipartisan support in Congress has prevented the complete dismantling of the program, even the strongest defenders concede that many of the restrictions proposed in House Resolution 3480 must be passed for funding to continue. While a bill reauthorizing the Legal Services Corporation is not likely to pass this session because Senate backers Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and Thomas Eagleton of Missouri are busy with reelection campaigns, the limitations proposed are expected to become effective in the next year, probably by being attached to a resolution for continuing funding.

The most damaging provisions of HR 3480 curtail lobbying, class action lawsuits against government, and representation of known illegal aliens, such as Haitians and Cubans. Legal Services attorneys are already prohibited from handling criminal or fee-producing cases and from seeking desegregation or “nontherapeutic” abortions on behalf of clients.

“At the moment that state legislatures are enacting new regulations to enforce block grants and decide how to appropriate the money under them, that is the moment Legal Services is no longer being able to represent clients before the state legislatures,” Bernard Veney, executive director of the National Clients Council, said at the July convention of the National Bar Association in Atlanta. The proposed restriction on lobbying allows Legal Services staff to give information only when specifically requested by a lawmaker. “Anyone familiar with the legislative process knows that just doesn’t happen,” says Jim Martin, former legislative advocate for Georgia Legal Services. “Legislators want and expect to hear from the affected parties and if they don’t, they asume there is no problem with the bill.”

In anticipation of the policy prohibiting lobbying, Legal Services in Georgia stopped its legislative program in January. As a result, says Martin, legislative representation of the poor has suffered. During the regular session of the Georgia General Assembly, for example, a bill passed which reduced in half, to seven days, the time a landlord must wait between serving an eviction notice and putting a tenant’s belongings on the street. “After the bill was introduced,” Martin explains, “there were not sufficient legislative requests for information that would have allowed us to explain all the reasons the bill was bad. What we would have done in the past is contact the author and committee members and members of the House and explained the consequences of the bill. All we could do this time is respond to the author of the bill and members at the committee meeting.”

Equally onerous is the proposed provision in HR 3480 which prohibits class action lawsuits against government. agencies. Class action suits, less than one percent of the cases filed by Legal Services, are important because they allow relief at once to large numbers of people rather than forcing attorneys to return to court again and again to enforce the same right for each individual. Class action suits in California blocking the importation of Mexican workers and $210 million cuts in Medicaid led then Governor Reagan in 1970 to attempt to block federal funding for legal representation of the poor. Similarly, class action suits against the state of Georgia in the mid-seventies caused the General Assembly to end funding for Legal Services. The program had just won a case establishing that a self-employed painter who broke both legs while working and a diabetic woman who was not able to work were both entitled to benefits under the Vocational Rehabilitation Act. Georgia Legal Services had also sued the state to end co-payments required of Medicaid recipients.

In an interview with the New York Times, a former president of the Corporation explained the necessity of suing the government. “Legal Services lawyers don’t sue to increase benefits,” said Thomas Ehrlich. “They bring suit to insure that poor people get what they are entitled to under the law. When a legal aid lawyer is successful in such cases, it means that a public official has not been doing his or her job the way he or she should.”

The Reagan Board

When the Congressional restrictions are passed, they will be enforced by a Reagan-appointed board of directors. Because they were appointed while Congress was in recess–a move questioned as illegal by 133 House members in a letter to the President–the nominees do not have to be confirmed for a year. However, the White House agreed to submit their names to the Senate. Eight have been approved by committee and await only a vote of

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the full Senate. The ninth, George Paras, a former California judge, has not been considered because of an Administration request. Once, in a letter to the former director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Program, Paras wrote, “You must ever champion the ‘oppressed,’ meaning those who so designate themselves, such as criminals, handicapped, welfare recipients, demonstrators, minorities and miscellaneous other have- lots . . . Your problem is that you feel it is your obligation to be a professional Mexican rather than a lawyer.” Only one Carter appointee remains on the board, a client representitive.

As in many of Reagan’s nominations in other departments of government, he has named people to the Legal Services board who in the past have opposed the program. William Olson, who received an eight-to-seven committee confirmation vote, was head of the Reagan transition team on Legal Services which reportedly advocated the abolition of the Corporation. Such appointments violate the legislative mandate that nominees should be “fully committed to the role of legal assistance attorneys and support the underlying principle of this legislation that it is in the national interest that the poor have full access under law to comprehensive and effective legal services.”

Not only the philosophy of a few new board members but the timing of their appointments has caused ill will. Seven were appointed on the last day of 1981, in time for a board meeting and a vote to stop 1982 grants until they could be reviewed. Their vote came too late, however, since the funds to local programs had been awarded and the contracts already mailed.

In deciding how to implement Congressional restric-

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tions. the Reagan board w ill no doubt take a more narrow view of what Legal Services programs can do. It may also seek to provide legal aid to the poor in ways other than the present predominant use of staff attorneys. During the 1981 funding battle, Reagan aide Edward Meese suggested that law school clinical programs should be used to counsel the poor while public funds served as seed money to encourage innovative programs.

In fact, a shift to more involvement of private attorneys in representing the poor has already begun. Last year the board mandated that ten percent of each program’s funds were to be used to provide opportunities for private attorneys to assist the poor through such means as organized pro bono programs, contracts with specific attorneys, partial compensation through a judicare system or lawyer referral services. The amount of the set-aside could be raised.

Local programs already work with private attorneys in some communities. In the Douglasville. Georgia. regional office just west of Atlanta. persons seeking help who are not eligible for services are referred to three attorneys in private practice. A questionnaire was mailed last year to lawyers in the ten counties served by the office to determine who would take referrals and what kinds. “Now that they are getting inundated with calls from poor people. some have asked to be taken off our list.” Walker says. “Basically we’re talking about pro bono work because our clients are so poor that they can only pay $10 or $16 a month. If they can pay the filing fee and court cost. then the lawyer is doing the work for free.”

“This is a period of slow change for Legal Services.” says state director Cromartie of Georgia. “It is obvious that the new board is not of the same philosophic bent as the old but it also is not yet clear that the extreme right wing hold the balance. Several new members are moderates: there’s a school of thought that they are fair-minded people. If so. we won’t see shocking changes.” Mississippi’s Raff agrees: “There are members who are sincere and sensitive and looking to be educated about Legal Services.”

The shifting political climate is having a restraining effect on Legal Services as the program accommodates itself to limited resources and anticipated guidelines. Legal Services’ staff speak cautiously about changes which have taken place in the past twenty months and are reluctant to predict actions of the new national board–no need to provide further ammunition for damaging the program. The deputy director of the Atlanta office said she had to check with the public affairs office in Washington before speaking for publication because they were trying to “coordinate press relations.” A report on voting rights contracted by Georgia Legal Services was issued publicly without any information identifying it with the organization. Legal Services supporters are making compromises and concessions in order, as Representative’ Barney Frank of Massachusetts said last year, to “keep this alive for a better day.”

Both Raff and Cromartie are confident that the Legal Services Corporation will survive. “I think Congress has spoken: Legal Services is here to stay,” Raff says. Yet, as advocate Martin of Georgia points out, Congress has been making major changes in federal programs through the larger debate on the budget without allowing votes on individual programs. He says Legal Services could get eliminated in this squeeze, even though deleting its small appropriation would have little effect on balancing the overall US budget. If no bill passes this session of Congress, the fight to reauthorize Legal Services must begin again next year. A Presidential veto is also possible.

Rather than outright elimination, however, Raff is concerned about the toll on staff and clients caused by the reduction in resources and restrictions on activities. “What clients will be represented? What cases won’t be taken? Who stays on the staff and who goes? I’m more worried about that than whether we will survive.” But, he might as easily have asked, at what point do the cutbacks and prohibitions on representation ultimately disable the work of Legal Services?

Ginny Looney is a writer and researcher living in Atlanta. She is the author of Preparing Students for Work: An Evaluation of Co-op Programs in Georgia, available from the Southern Regional Council for four dollars plus handling and postage.

Laments on the Demise of Tom Turnipseed

Frye Gaillard — Sun, 01 Aug 1982 04:00:07 +0000

Laments on the Demise of Tom Turnipseed

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, p. 31

I hated to see it a few weeks ago when ole Tom Turnipseed went up in flames. Turnipseed, of course, was a candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina, who lost a primary runoff to Mike Daniel.

Daniel may make a terrific lieutenant governor. Turnipseed might have been a disaster. But it seems to me that his demise–and there are those who predict this was his last campaign–is part of the depressing homogenization of modern politics.

In both North and South Carolina, we’ve always had our mavericks. Today, they’re still around in the form of Thurmond, Helms and East, but the color and the flair are not what they could be.

Helms and East are mostly just peculiar–stodgy ideologues with kamikaze instincts.

Thurmond may still be wrestling with Reconstruction–a quaint anachronism in 1982–but he’s gotten so pragmatic about it that he even voted to extend the Voting Rights Act.

Turnipseed is different. As a South Carolina state senator in the late 1970’s, he was dapper and charming, outrageous and impolite–affronting his legislative colleagues by, among other things, appearing with a couple of disc jockey buddies on the floor of the Senate and singing country songs about rising gas prices.

He was a brilliant rock-thrower with some self-destructive tendencies–declaring a war he couldn’t win on special interest groups, particularly utilities, and on a semi-corrupt system of legislative seniority.

But it seems to me that Turnipseed’s importance goes beyond the dash and color of his quixotic crusades. He made, I think, an ideological pilgrimage that’s not uncommon in the South.

As it happened, he grew up on the same street that I did. He was older, and I didn’t know him until later. But when you’re from Mobile, Ala., raised in privilege in the dappled shade of live oaks, amid people who regret the outcome of the Civil War, you’re apt to see the world in strange colorations.

You’ll have a strong sense of privilege, of your own special place near the center of things. And unless you’re extremely lucky, blessed with a quirky and aberrational understanding of fairness, you’ll also be a racist.

It’s easy and natural for sons of the Old South, and neither Turnipseed nor I escaped the maladies of our birthright. But chances are also strong that one day it will hit you, often with a shattering suddenness, that you’re hideously wrong about the things that you believe.

A way of life that seemed easy and genteel and supremely civilized becomes abruptly horrifying, and you develop a tendency toward reverse social climbing–toward a compensatory identification with the underdogs around you.

I became a newspaper reporter with a righteous impulse to write about injustice. Turnipseed became a populist politician, a champion of have-nots, whose stridency, in the end, was his undoing.

He was once the campaign manager for Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace. But the truth finally hit him in South Carolina and he tried to build a coalition of blacks and whites–of ordinary people victimized by the institutions around them.

He campaigned against the death penalty, rising utility prices and legislative apportionment plans that effectively excluded blacks. None of those causes are easy ones to win, and Turnipseed’s ratio of success was not impressive.

He was angry and shrill, and even some of the people who agreed with him finally wished he’d go away. He tried to change his style for his last campaign, but it was apparently too late.

So he lost.

That’s a shame, however, because politics can do with a little more passion. And particularly so when that sense of being right comes, as Turnipseed’s did, from a deeply felt knowledge of what it means to be wrong.

Frye Gaillard is an editorial page writer for the Charlotte Observer, where this article originally appeared.