Women and the ’88 Elections

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 1-3

What role will women play in the ’88 elections? Will the “gender gap” resurface? Will it affect the outcome of the presidential race?

These are questions that candidates and political analysts might well be pondering in the next several wasks, as Super Tuesday–the March 8 date when primaries and caucuses will be held in twenty states, mostly in the South–looms large on the horizon.

To help focus their attention, the National Women’s Political Caucus gathered representatives from the presidential campaigns, political consultants, pollsters and journalists for a day-long conference in Atlanta in December.

The purpose of the meeting, according to NWPC chair Irene Natividad, was to “underscore the obvious”–the fact that women make up a majority of voters in this country. In 1988, ten million more women than men will be eligible to vote.

Women’s groups worry that these numbers are being either overlooked or deliberately ignored by the candidates.

“They act like they’re afraid of the ‘w’ word–women,” says Natividad. “The omission of women from campaign rhetoric so far has been the norm rather than the exception. Why don’t they target the largest clump of voters? Why is something so obvious being so intensely ignored?”

The silence is particularly evident in Super Tuesday states, she notes, where candidates seem to be focusing instead on “Rhett Butler–the white male in the South.”

This is not a winning strategy, according to participants at the Atlanta meeting. They contend that the key to Super Tuesday is to find a message that will resonate

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among women and minorities.

To bolster the point, presenters at the conference deluged the audience with statistics on voting patterns in the ’80, ’84 end ’86 elections. For example:

• In 1980, for the first time since women won the right to vote in 1920, the same percentage of women voted as men (59 percent). Because more women than men are eligible to vote (since women live longer and form a larger percentage of the population), this meant that six million more women than men voted.
• Also in 1980, polling data revealed that women were thinking and voting differently from men on a wide range of issues including national security, the economy, the environment and education, as well as women’s rights issues. The “gender gap” was born, and has continued to manifest itself during subsequent elections and polling on a variety of issue areas.
• By 1984, leaders of seventy-six national women’s organizations had banded together for a registration, education and get-out-the-vote drive. The Women’s Vote Project aimed to register one and a half million new women voters from among the thirty million eligible but unregistered female population. The goal was exceeded, with more than 1.8 million women registered, and the post-election Census Bureau report confirmed a significant increase: 61 percent of all eligible women voted–a 2 percent increase from 1980 and 2 percent higher than men, whose level remained at 59 percent. Seven million more women than men voted.
• In 1986, women’s votes (in combination with votes by minorities in some cases) provided the winning edge in nine key Senate races–five of these in Southern states. The beneficiaries were all Democrats and include John Breaux (L Louisiana), Wyche Fowler (Georgia), Bob Graham (Florida), Terry Sanford (North Carolina) and Richard Shelby (Alabama). Women voted in greater numbers than men in all twenty Super Tuesday states.

While these statistics point to potential political clout for women, the operative word here is potential. Some political pundits are still inclined to write off the gender gap, pointing out that it failed to defeat Ronald Reagan in ’84.

Activist women’s groups acknowledge that the women’s vote is not monolithic. Race, age, income and education level are among the factors other than sex that figure into voting patterns. Still, they bristle at being labeled a “special interest” group.

“We are here to remind the candidates that we are not a special interest; we are more than half the population,” said Missouri Lt. Gov. Harriett Woods, echoing the sentiments of many at the NWPC gathering in Atlanta.

Woods attended the meeting both as an NWPC member and as a representative of Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt (she is co-chair of the campaign for her fellow Missourian). All six Democratic candidates sent stand-ins, though only Bob Dole was represented on the Republican side. And each, in turn, was given an opportunity to make a pitch for her candidate.

In addition, the NWPC’s Democratic and Republican task forces released reports on the candidates, covering not only where they stand on such issues as ERA, choice, child care and pay equity, but also data on how many women are on their campaign staffs and what their positions and I salaries are. “Equal opportunity cannot begin after the election,” said Ann Lewis, chair of the Democratic task force and former executive director of Americans for Democratic Action.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic candidates all ranked considerably better than their Republican counterparts on support of the issues, with Jesse Jackson, Michael Dukakis and Paul Simon rated as the strongest backers of women’s rights in the task force reports.

Perhaps surprisingly, women are well-represented on the campaign and office staffs of nearly all the candidates (information on Pat Robertson and Alexander Haig was not available for the reports). Women hold close to half of the positions overall and their salaries are competitive with men on the staffs.

The highest ranking woman is Susan Estrich, Dukakis’s campaign manager. She is the first woman in history to run a major presidential campaign. Women in the Dukakis campaign hold twenty-seven of the top forty-nine paid positions.

“We’re running the darn thing,” Deputy Political Director Alice Travis, an active NWPC member, told her colleagues in Atlanta. “We’re in charge at last and how sweet it is.”

The Democratic task force report also notes endorsements from prominent women. Again Dukakis fares particularly well, with support from Gov. Madeleine Kunin of Vermont, Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy of Massachusetts, Secretary of State Elaine Baxter of Iowa, former New York City’ councilperson Carol Bellamy, and more than one hundred

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female state legislators from twenty-two states.

While endorsements and the placement of women on their staffs may help candidates attract women to their campaigns, neither is necessarily enough in itself

“It’a great to have women in high positions, but what about the rest of us?” asked a Florida NWPC member who had recently attended her state Democratic convention. “I went to each candidate there and not one had a piece of literature with them that spoke to women’s issues.”

Harriett Woods, co-chair for Gephardt, defends the candidates from the charge that they are not speaking to women.

“In the debates so far, no one has asked the right questions,” she says. “The dialogue has been controlled by the interviewers.”

Still, she acknowledges a need to get the candidates to put forth such issues as child care–which polls show to be an overwhelming concern among women.

The candidates will receive more than a little nudge in this direction in January. First, U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder will launch a “Great American Family Tour” on the 1 7th with funds raised during her exploratory campaign for president. Along with pediatrician-author T. Berry Brazelton and “Family Ties” producer Gary David Goldberg, she will travel to Portsmouth, N.H., four Southern cities, and Iowa to talk about the parental leave bill which she is currently sponsoring in Congress.

Schroeder’s aim is to get this and other “family issues” into the forefront of political debate.

“Everything we used to call women’s issues are really family issues,” she notes. “If you’re shortchanging women, you’re shortchanging everybody.”

Next, from Jan. 22-24, more than thirty women’s organizations will sponsor a “Women’s Agenda Conference” in Des Moines, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. The presidential candidates have been invited to speak on child care, pay equity and other issues. The conference was initiated by the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW), a group that has rarely been involved in national politics.

Executive director Linda C. Dorian describes BPW as “a sleeping elephant that’s getting roused up”–an interesting metaphor since 54 percent of the group’s members identify themselves as Republicans.

Another road show–the “Feminization of Power Campaign” run by Eleanor Smeal, former president of the National Organization for Women–will continue on its nationwide tour with stops in Georgia and Florida planned for early ’88. Launched last October, the tour has already traveled to Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Raleigh, drumming up feminist candidates to run for office at all levels.

A special feature of the tour’s rallies is a request for each person in attendance to take a pledge “not to work for, nor support with my vote, money or time, any candidate who does not support and work for women’s rights and feminist principles.”

To help evaluate candidates, the Fund for the Feminist Majority, which is sponsoring the Feminization of Power tour, has created a pamphlet outlining “The National Feminist Agenda.” The agenda is an updated and condensed form of the “Plan of Action” drawn up at the 1977 National Women’s Conference held in Houston.

At the NWPC meeting in Atlanta there was also talk of putting together a women’s agenda to submit to the Democratic National Committee in response to Chairman Paul Kirk’s proposal for a shortened party platform for ’88.

Women at the meeting viewed the proposal as yet another attempt to sidestep issues.

“It’s the same thing he has been doing all along, which is to dance away from what he considers the special interest issues that have hurt the Democratic Party,” said Irene Natividad. “It’s unfortunate because I think this election is the Democrats’ to win or lose.”

Various polls show that the Democratic Party holds a slight edge among women. According to a “Southern Primary Poll” conducted for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 56 percent of those intending to vote in the Democratic primary are women.

But polls also show that women, in greater numbers than men, are still window-shopping when it comes to the presidential race.

“If the candidates’ melanges are on the mark,” asks Natividad, “why are most women voters voting for a candidate called ‘undecided’?”

Sharron Hannon is a Georgia-based freelance writer, whose work has appeared in numerous publications. For the past four years, she has edited Southern Feminist, a newspaper covering women’s rights issues.

In South Africa–The Politics of an Inquiry for Change

By Francis Wilson

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 4, 6-8

It is very difficult to be balanced when one talks about South Africa On the one hand one can make it too horrendous for words. On the other hand one can oversimplify and say, ‘Well, you know it’s not so bad.’ The difficult thing to convey about South Africa is that it is both realities are true. South Africa is horrible beyond belief in terms of the destruction of the rule of law, yet it remains an extraordinarily vibrant society, a beautiful place to live, with a lot of laughter and humor.

I find I can communicate something about the ambiguities of living in South Africa to people from Eastern Europe very easily. They understand. I suspect that Americans who have lived in the South and have been through the exhilarating and scary days of the civil rights movement also will understand, in a way that the rest of the United States does not.

Our problem is simple to frame, but incredibly difficult to answer. It is this: What can one do to contribute effectively to meaningful change in South Africa?

Coming of age in the sixties as I did, when we compared the African South with the American South we shared a shameful history of slavery and racism. But by 1964 you were on the move. The Brown decision of 1954 had put the law firmly on your side. Membership in the wider Union usually put the federal government on your side, resulting in the Civil Rights Act and voter registration drives. You also had press freedom and the power of television.

I have been fascinated reading in a new biography of Martin Luther King of the strategies that were being used–the enormous importance of using television, using the federal government. In South Africa we do not have that. It is a very different ball game.

In South Africa at the same time there was the massive crackdown of 1960 and the Rivonia trial of 1964 which effectively closed down moat political activity for a decade. African leaders were all jailed or exiled. Govan Mbeki emerged recently–twenty-three years later–an old man. Nelson Mandela and the other political leaders of the ANC, the PAC and other organizations are still incarcerated. The rule of law has been systematically abrogated–detention without trial, literally dozens of people killed in jail, widespread reports of torture, television and radio under the total control of the state, press freedom systematically eroded.

So many people feel that the only thing to do is to leave the country and join the liberation army. That strategy is certainly pursued by many South Africans, particularly black South Africans. I make no judgment about that; I am simply reporting it. I live in South Africa and I am simply telling you what I perceive. We also need to note as we struggle with strategies that no strategy of the last twenty-five years has been effective; change has not taken place. We have to live with this. We are all wrestling–those in exile and those who live inside the country–with ‘What do we do? How does change come about?’

It is in that context that I want to look at the Carnegie Inquiry. I don’t see it as the answer–far from it–to change in South Africa, but it does contribute.

As we started thinking about this inquiry into poverty in South Africa the realities of state power hit us immediately–the state could bar all access to information.

They could simply say, ‘Look nobody is going to move around and get that information. ‘They could have cut off all funds from the United States. They could have banned the organizers, and banning is a very effective weapon; there simply is a decree by the Minister, who signs a little piece of paper that says for the next five years you may not meet more than one other person at any time of the day or night; nothing that you say may be published; you may attend no meetings; and you may not move outside a certain rigid geographical boundary. That has happened to lots of friends of mine. Research workers can be harassed. Informants, those who talk, can be harassed by the state. Of course, the state can refuse all radio and television dissemination of the inquiry’s results. Those are the realities of state power when one starts talking about a research program.

At the same time, the integrity of the inquiry required that those who were poor and their leaders, and that means primarily black South Africans, did not perceive this inquiry to be by a bunch of strange, hostile outsiders. We needed an inquiry that was independent, yes, but not an inquiry that was on the side of the rich. So we had a lot of hard questions to answer. How will this inquiry actually benefit the poor? Why all this American money? What are the motives behind that? What are the political credentials of the inquiry? On whose authority is it being conducted?

With these two sets of pressures

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you can see that the inquiry was going to have a tough time. That process took us something like two years. It all began with a conversation which happened to take place in my office in January 1980 when the International Director of the Carnegie Corporation of New York breezed in and we started talking about research in South Africa, that maybe the time was ripe for another inquiry into poverty. Why another inquiry? When old Andrew Carnegie died he decreed in his will that 10 percent of the income of the Carnegie Corporation of New York should be spent in what was, when he died, the British Empire because, as you know, he was a Scot. Lawyers studied this will and decided that no matter what had happened subsequently to South Africa it was still part of the British Empire as far as the Carnegie Corporation or the will was concerned. So Carnegie down the years has spent money in South Africa on libraries and other philanthropies, including the Carnegie Commission, a study on poverty in 1928-32. Being South Africa and being in 1930, this commission managed an inquiry into poverty that focused entirely and exclusively on whites. Poverty among whites was, of course, a major problem. Large numbers of white, primarily Afrikaans-speaking South Africans had been pushed off the land by drought and–a picture you’re familiar with–and were coming into the cities. The Carnegie Corporation put up the money and there was a famous inquiry which is still a model of social inquiry into poverty.

That inquiry made a major impact. But the very fact of excluding the blacks, quite apart from immorality, had distorted the consequences of that inquiry. The commission thought about anything that could be done to raise whites out of poverty. There was never any thought that the steps being proposed might be at the expense of people who were even poorer but who happened to be black. One aspect of apartheid that you must understand is that there is a strong working-class component–white South Africans just emerging out of poverty, using the state to protect and get themselves out of poverty, at the expense of black South Africans.

However, we could use the fact of the first Carnegie inquiry because that name had cachet with the government. As an Afrikaaner, you could not bash a Carnegie inquiry into poverty. It was like bashing motherhood. That inquiry had been very important in the emergence of white South Africans from poverty with the vehicle of the National party.

While looking at the possibility of an inquiry, I started talking to people in the highways and byways of South Africa. By and large white South Africans responded that an inquiry into poverty was a great idea, and they patted me on the head and sent me on my way. When I tried this out on black South Africans, they looked at me very sadly and said, ‘Listen chum, if you are going to spend one single dollar discovering that there is poverty in South Africa, forget it. Well tell you now for free. There is poverty. It’s bad. What we are interested in is action. Unless there is going to be action out of this thing it’s a waste of time.’ That is tough thinking for academics, that we are not just doing research to write nice books, that the poor are going to say, ‘That is worthwhile. We are prepared that you spend all those dollars if this is going to be helpful to us.’

Then there came this subtle political process of insuring that the inquiry–and I am not saying we succeeded–was not a bunch of rich, white, urban-based liberals looking at a problem, saying how serious and sad it is, and writing analytical reports about it. The inquiry had to be scientific and objective, but it needed empathy with the poor themselves and they with it. That is a more subtle process. The poverty is essentially experienced by blacks. It was important to create an inquiry that had a black center of gravity.

That is a tough and tall order in the South African context of the 1980s.

It took us a long time. I am summarizing two years in an instant. The model we used was not a commission. We were going to involve as many people as we possibily [sic] could. We based it at one of the open universities–open in the sense of nonracial. The Univeraity of Cape Town is such. Twenty percent of our student body is black. It should be eighty percent but twenty percent is a lot better than naught which is what it used to be. We also tried to involve all the other universities, however, the university communities also tend to be a bunch of urban white liberals.

To try and get around that problem we established working groups of professional people. We invited people like Fikile Bam, a lawyer in the eastern cape who was on Robben Island for ten years. We asked him to head a working group of lawyers to think as lawyers about the problem of poverty. Take the facts as given: we know there is poverty; start thinking about strategies and what you as lawyers need to do about it. We also asked educationists; John Samuel, one of the senior black educationists in South Africa, chaired that working committee. And Allan Boesak chaired the working party on church and poverty.

To those small working groups, we said, ‘Spend these two years wrestling with strategies. How do we do something about the issue of poverty in the South Africa in which we live?’

It was also important to go beyond the boundaries of South Africa. The first commission drew the boundary around the white skin, as it were. There is a danger in South Africa in drawing the boundary around the nation-state. It is a great temptatation [sic] , of course. It makes a lot of sense. The way in which the South African economy has developed is that when the gold mines emerged in the 1880s labor was recruited from all over southern Africa. By the 1890s three-fifths of the labor for the gold mines on the Witswatersrand came from Mozambique. In the 1970s a third of a much bigger labor force still came from Mozambique. Those workers come a year or two years at a time and then go back. They are not allowed to bring their wives and children. In the course of a hundred years of developing the society on that basis, Mozambique moved from the production of food

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to the production of gold. They then imported their food. The difficulty is that Mozambicans are producing that gold outside the borders of Mozambique. They were building up the wealth of the southern African economy in which they participated but to which they did not have the right of access. There was a great danger that if we focused on poverty only inside South Africa itself we would make proposals that would be good for black South Africans but bad for Mozembicans.

The politics of this was incredibly delicate but important to get hold of. Over the last three years in southern Africa when Frelimo took Mozambique to independence, the South Africans unilaterally cut the number of migrant workers from 100,000 down to 45,000. Overnight those 55,000 jobs went to Transkeians. That was good strategy in terms of poverty inside South Africa but at the expense of people who are even poorer. It is enormously important as we think about poverty that we think about all the poor and not simply a chauvinistic version of ‘our’ poor, which could be poor whites although we laugh at that now. It is just as wrong to think about ‘our’ poor as just within our political boundary, particularly if the wealth within that boundary has been built up by people outside it.

We did not define poverty in advance. We wanted to find what poverty means for the poor themselves. We found things that I had never thought about.

For example, women in the rural areas will spend seven hours at a time two or three times a week carrying a hundred-pound bundle of wood five miles. On the way home they will walk under a power line. There you have poverty in a nutshell in South Africa–an old lady carrying a hundred-pound bundle of wood beneath a power line. South Africa produces sixty percent of the electricity in Africa. We have no shortage of energy. But over half of South Africa households have no access to electricity. If you are rural and have no money you must look for wood. As population grows the dead wood is cut down, then live trees are harvested, then the bushes. You walk further and further. The ecological consequences are devastating. Thus one of the things that poverty means in South Africa is that nobody has thought of energy distribution. We spend millions on unnecessary nuclear power plants and do nothing in terms of reforestation, solar energy and appropriate energy for those who really need it.

Poverty has many faces, and it is a great mistake to reduce poverty to a single number.

The second aspect of the inquiry was analysis, because you need understanding if you are to develop strategies. Also, the politics was important. People have different perceptions as to why there is poverty. Some blame apartheid, some capitalism, some socialism. Some will say it is because the poor have too many babies, some that the poor are too lazy. Some will say it is all of the above. People have their own favorite headline reasons for poverty.

We wanted to make people argue their case. Is population growth a problem? If so, how? People say, ‘Oh yes if only the poor people just wouldn’t have so many babies.’ That is a victim-blaming approach which the rich use because it removes them from responsibility. But the facts show that South African population growth is not terrible.

We felt that to have a big, open debate on the causes of poverty would ensure that nobody could accuse us of not listening to what the government thought were the reasons of poverty.

After that two-year process of thinking through and discussing with everybody how this should come together, we launched the inquiry in April 1982. We launched it very publicly because the moment we tried to do anything clandestine the state would have known instantly and would have shut us down. We made it an open thing in which everybody must be involved. We went to all the Sunday newspapers and even had a thirty-second appearance on the television news just after a snake bite in some small town. One of us was allowed to say something about the inquiry. This was the one and only time we were allowed near the television screen.

There were two years of research and writing, filming and photography, working groups and discussions. It was brought together in a conference in April of 1984 where we had far more participation than we ever expected. Three hundred papers were presented from all around southern Africa on poverty. Some were microstudies on what poverty wee in a little town in the middle of the Karoo. We had macrostudies about housing. We had political studies about many things. It was an astonishing range of papers. All those who had written papers came. We allowed no one else. We said, ‘no gawkers.’

We had a conference including a photographic exhibition. One of the nice things that had happened as a result of the public launching was that an old friend, Omar Badsha, read about it and phoned up from Durban. He said, ‘Listen man you can’t just do all of this stuff with words. Who ever reads words? What we need is some photographers.’ He took a little bit of money and got the beat photographers in South Africa and told them to come back with photographic essays about what poverty means. The striking thing wee that there was not one starving baby, not because we do not have starving babies in South Africa, but because the photographers were saying that the essence of poverty in South Africa is human dignity. That is the kind of thing I never would have thought about in advance. It came out of listening to people as to what they wanted to say.

We also produced twelve video films for the total of forty thousand rend, that is twenty thousand dollars. I think that is a world record when you know how much films cost to produce. We gave tiny sums of money to people who were interested in filming and said, ‘If you can make us a movie, that’s great but we can’t give you more than this amount of money.’ they went off end they did it.

Part of the politics of that was that in South Africa you may not produce movies without the permission of the censors. The way we were able to work through that was to bring all these videos to a workshop as unfinished productions, in order to have feedback so that the video producers could go and make their films better before they were finalized, so they could then go to the censors. I do not think they have ever been finalized.

We had a film festival from around the world on signs of hope including one on the TVA, “The Electric Valley.” [Southern Changes, August-September 1984] We looked at

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experiments and ideas in different parts of the world. This was important.

There was massive press coverage including the Afrikaans papers but not a second on television. Although we had a reporter from the broadcasting corporation who got very excited about the whole business and wrote up a long report and did interviews, she was spiked. Nothing appeared on the radio or television except one little controversy where somebody had said that they thought actually blacks in the homelands and reserves had been doing very well over the last ten years. That went on but nothing else.

We had a number of post-conference papers to fill gape and think about strategies. A book of photographs, The Cordoned Heart, was published. A couple of us wrote a report for Unicef on children in South Africa. We have four books coming out with edited papers and an overview book. And there are two films.

Is that adequate? Where do we go from there? The real question concerns strategies. We learned that in South Africa we must think about strategies in a short-run and in a long-run way.

In the long run we assume political change. What do we then do in terms of poverty? Once we assume that there is a democratic non-racial society in South Africa we then say, ‘and then?’ Do you want to nationalize the gold mines? What kind of land reform do you want? Do you want Israeli kibbutzim? How do we go on insuring that food is produced and yet maximize employment? How do we generate employment for everybody? How do we humanize the workplace? How do we democratize the economy? Those are the long range questions.

The short range questions are what can we do in the present that will make a difference right now, but is consistent with the long range? I am not so naive as to think that our strategies will bring change. I am talking about anticipating change and helping to prepare for change.

We find ourselves really talking about non-governmental organizations like the trade union movement and education bodies. We need to think through the whole process of structure building, which includes a good deal of luck (let us not underestimate the importance of luck in a society like South Africa–luck that you survive). We need strategic thinking where you say, ‘There does seem to be some space here that we can quietly can get together. It’s a gray area in terms of the law but we think we can move.’ In this way non-governmental bodies do begin to grow.

The trade unions are a superb example. Until 1973 the trade union movement had been smashed in South Africa by eighty years of state repression. In the last fourteen years the trade unions, playing superb politics, have been able to negotiate and work their way into a position where I do not think they can now be destroyed. That is part of the significance of this last strike of the mineworkers. It was, if you like, a dry run just to test the limits. The fact that the National Union of Mine Workers is alive–has not been smashed and is able to exist–is a major advance and a major shift in the political balance of power in South Africa.

We have to recognize the strategic importance of the trade unions and find out what can be done to support them. One simply cannot leave Cyril Ramaphosa standing alone. It is necessary to ask whether there is a second or a third level of leadership with the technical education and training to run a huge trade union under the political pressures that exist in South Africa.

At a personal level this is all very challenging. At first one might regret having been born in this generation of South Africana. “If only I had been born some years later after the political change, then I could get on with creative work,” a person might say. But then one may suddenly recognize that the foundations of the future have to be laid now. This is a very good time to be working. Although there is not a great deal of apace, the apace that exists is crucially important and one can use it. There is less apace now than there was two years ago but there is more space now than there was in 1965. It comes and goes.

We find ourselves at the end of an inquiry like this seeing that it is very important for South Africans to consider the long view. We need to think about the antipoverty strategies that will work once politics is not the problem that it now is. How do we overcome the legacy of three hundred years of conquest, a hundred years of this appallingly biased industrialization with the migrant labor system, and fifty years of apartheid? Those are tough questions in a society that does not have untold wealth. How do we bring about economic equality in what is the most unequal society in the world?

So we think about the long run, but also about the short run. We see that we could get this organization going, or that this organization needs strengthening. What about a children’s institute? That is the approach.

To conclude, Ed Elson in his introduction of John Lewis and Ray Marshall today made two points I think are important. First, he quoted Robert Kennedy, that when an individual stands up he may send forth ripples which will join with a million other ripples which ultimately will change everything. That famous statement by Kennedy was first made at the University of Cape Town. We all share the same dream. It is a common struggle in different ways. The second point that Ed Elson made when he was talking about Ray Marshall was that he plants trees. I thought that was a wonderful analogy. I can remember visiting Germany a year or two ago and standing in the forests where only a generation previously the Nazi bullets had been flying. To see this marvelous forest standing there and hear a friend of mine saying that, ‘Yea, we can cut these down now but we are going to need to replant because in Germany we think in terms of 150-year cycles. We plant for 150 years in Germany.’ That took me a little bit beyond planting wheat for next year.

Is that not exactly what we are doing? We may not live to harvest our trees but we certainly need to plant them now, to provide fruit and shelter for our children and our children’s children all over the world, but certainly in the two Souths.

Dr. Francis Wilson was the banquet speaker at the 1987 SRC annual meeting. A South African economist, Dr. Wilson is currently directing the Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, a study involving scores of participants. The Inquiry aims to give voice and leverage to South Africa’s “unheard voices,” the dispossessed black majority. Dr. Wilson’s edited and condensed remarks follow.

Scenes from the Office: I. “The Pitfalls Facing Management”

By Staff

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, p. 9

Editor’s note: The following memo was circulated by the corporate legal department of a large Atlanta business through all levels of management in 1987. The employee who provided Southern Changes a copy of this memo requested that neither his/her name nor that of the company be mentioned.

Procedure Where Labor Union Official Contacts Management Representative of [Company Name] for Recognition or Negotiation

Over the past several years, unions have made unsuccessful efforts to organize employees in several of our offices. Under the provisions of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley), employees have a legal right to organize if they wish, however, an employer is also guaranteed certain rights in connection with union organization attempts. In order to insure that our Company does not forfeit established legal rights, it is necessary and desirable that the following procedure be followed in the event a union representative or anyone claiming to speak for employees contacts one of our offices relative to recognition of a union, a group of employees, or for any other purpose.

1. As soon as you become aware of the slightest organizational activity among your employees, promptly leave your office and go where you can phone your Division Vice President privately who will then make immediate telephone contact with his officer in the Home Office. After consultation with the proper people, you will be advised of what you should and should not do.

2. If a union representative contacts you by telephone or personal visit, carefully listen to what he has to say and be able to report the conversation in detail, together with the name of the union representative and the organization which he purports to represent. Do not allow yourself to be drawn into any discussion of union representation, grievances, or any other phase of employee relations. Simply advise the union representative that you do not have authority to discuss these matters with him and that you will have to pass along his statements to higher authority in the Company and will communicate with him later. The conversation should be kept as brief as possible, and no agreements or commitments should be made with the union representative. Your attitude should be polite and businesslike, without being overly friendly or hostile. Report such calls at once so that the matter can be immediately brought to the attention of the Home Office.

A. Caution: A special danger area exists where the union agent offers to show Management cards allegedly signed by employees designating the union as representative. Under no circumstances should these cards be accepted, handled, examined, or counted by a Management representative, nor should there be any agreement to examine or count these cards at a later date. If the union agent proffers such cards, you should decline to accept them and tell him that you do not have any authority to examine the cards or to make any agreement for a card check, but that you will advise your superiors and will contact him within the next several days. (The Company has no sure way of knowing whether the signatures on the cards are authentic, whether the cards were legally obtained, or whether coercion or intimidation were used in obtaining the signature, and if you fail to follow the instructions above, your words or acts could deprive our employees and our Company of the right to challenge the validity of these cards or to have an election at a later date.)

3. If the union representative contacts you by letter, discuss it immediately with your Division Vice President who will immediately telephone the contents of the letter to the Home Office. You will receive instructions on how to handle the letter.

4. If a representative of the National Labor Relations Board calls by telephone or in person to state that a petition for representation has been filed by the union, or for any other purpose, tell him you have no authority in such matters and obtain his name, address, and listen politely and carefully to his statements as to the purpose of the call. Then advise him that you would appreciate his withholding his questions until you can communicate with your superiors and arrange for an appropriate person in the Company to communicate with him. Then immediately report such conversation by telephone to your Division Vice President and to the Home Office. If any written communication is received from the National Labor Relations Board, withhold a reply and promptly report the matter to your Division Vice President and to the Home Office by telephone. In either case, the Home Office will direct all responses to the NLRB representative.

5. If you learn of union or organizational activity from an employee, who comes to you to tell you about it, do a lot of listening and avoid any conversation on the pros and cons of unionism. On the other hand, if you are asked for your views, you must make a positive response to the employee who asks you. Your response should simply be that in your opinion a union is not needed in your office, that you feel strongly that we can solve our own problems without outsiders coming in, and that you feel a union would do far more harm than good. Confine your remarks to the individual who asked for your views. Do not make any speeches to any employee group. Remember, your first step is to alert your Division Vice President and then wait for advice and direction.

A. Caution: If a group of employees (more than one) asks to meet with you to discuss wages, hours, or working conditions decline to do so. You can agree to meet with each employee individually and listen to what each has to say. Afterwards, alert your Division Vice President and then wait for advice and direction.

There are many pitfalls facing members of Management during the initial stages of a union campaign. It is necessary that you follow the given instructions in order to insure that our handling of such matters is consistent with the laws and Company policies and procedures.

-Corporate Legal Department

Scenes from the Office: II. The Supervisor in the Computer

Interview by Rebecca Sharpless

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 10-11

Susan Lowe, age twenty-seven, works with 200 co-workers in the claims department of a large insurance firm in Atlanta. The claims department occupies an entire floor of a downtown high-rise office building. “Claims” employees pass their days filling in forms on video display terminals. Unlike office workers of the past, these workers’ pace is set by the computer’s capabilities as programmed by management. The supervisor is in the computer. Data, entered by workers at their terminal keyboards, must fit a standardized, regularized format. Workers have little discretion in performing the job, or in the speed with which they must move across the keyboard. As Susan Lowe describes her work, she talks about the monitoring of employees that is possible with computer supervision, including the counting of keystrokes, errors, and time.

SUSAN LOWE: The computer automatically checked the number of claims processed. Every day your manager would get a printout of what you had paid the previous day, and they would post that on a board so that everybody could see what everyone else had done.

About six months to a year after they installed the computer system they had a management consulting firm come in and do a little stopwatch timing on people for paying claims. Before that, you had your quota of fifty claims a day. When they did this little stopwatch study, they determined that certain claims were not really worth as much as other claims. And so they put a value on the different kinds of claims-for example, a drug bill. A drug bill is a pretty easy thing to pay; you put in the code, the date, the amount, and you paid it. And you always paid drug claims to the claimant, so it was a pretty simple claim to pay. You got a .4 for that. If it was a hospital bill, that could be a little bit more complicated because there could be ten pages worth of charges, and you get maybe 1.2 for that. So they had what they called work units.

For the first six months to a year after they went on this work unit thing, they didn’t tell us what a work unit was. They didn’t tell us that a drug claim was only worth .4 and a hospital bill was worth 1.2. They just said, instead of being the number of claims per day that we paid, the computer was now spitting out how many work units per day you’re doing. And there didn’t seem to be any correlation-we couldn’t figure it out, at any rate-any correlation between the number of claims you paid and the number that appeared on the sheet every day saying how much you worked the day before. And that in itself was kind of depressing, when you don’t know what it is that you’re doing or not doing that’s affecting your performance.

They also, when they went to this work unit system, went to a little different system of salary increases. Before, we were reviewed once a year and given basically a merit raise, and we were also given cost-of-living raises automatically. And on the new system they kind of did away with these; well, they didn’t do away completely with the cost-of-living raises, but what it was, was that every six months they would take your cumulative total of work units and determine how much you would get paid for that six-month period. And then at the end of six months you would be reviewed again and if your production went down, your salary would drop. If your production went up, your salary would increase.

You kind of were walking a fine line all the time as to how much you were going to get paid. You couldn’t really count on a salary. If you had to go out and buy a new car and you were making $425 a week, you couldn’t guarantee that in six months you’d still be making that. You might drop down to $375 a week. That fifty bucks might be-and some people live on the edge like that, too. So that was kind of a hairy situation.

A lot of people weren’t real happy with that. I know I wasn’t real happy with that, because I was scared. I never went down; I stayed exactly the same all the time. I was consistent. But to me it was real stressful, worrying, and to me, I would have been embarrassed if my salary dropped. To me, that would have been a horrible thing to have to happen. It happened to a number of people; maybe about one quarter of the people had that happen. You get pretty consistent; most people would stay about the same.

But some people would just knock themselves out for six months and they’d get this huge salary increase. They paid very well for the industry; we were the top-paid for the city of Atlanta in our industry. So that part of it was good. But again, you had to deal with this stress all the time of, okay, I did it for this six months, and you’d kill yourself to do it for that six months, and you just can’t keep that up. I couldn’t, and that’s why I never really did that. I never really tore into something and worked twice as long.

A lot of people used to come in early and pre-process claims so that when they started work for the day they’d just type. They’d be just basically typing; they wouldn’t be doing any decision-making during the day. And they allowed you to do that. If you wanted to come in early and sit at your desk and do whatever you wanted to do, you could do it.

[Piecework] is how I felt about it. I liked what I was doing; I liked paying claims and everything. I thought it was interesting. But I was just real stressed out in that kind of environment. And it set up like this competition, I mean the fact that they posted these things on the board every day; it set up this real cutthroat, to some people, competition. They would dig through claims and look for all the easy ones and shove this pile of crap back in the claims drawer. People picked through stuff and put it back and things like that. It affected the atmosphere of the office because of that.

The quota with work units was still basically the same, I think. It went up, but it went up to like sixty. You had to do sixty work units a day, which, come to think of it, that would have translated to about seventy, seventy-five claims a day. So it went up by half. So you did have to process more claims in order to stay at the level you were before.

I don’t think they ever fired anybody for not producing. Once they went onto that salary based on your work units, people just either left because they weren’t doing real well-and normally that’s what happened, because if you weren’t doing real well-the salary ranged from like $210 to like $425. There was this huge range depending on what your production was. And people who were in the lower ranges making around two hundred dollars a week could go elsewhere. And so they did. And so basically I don’t think they ever really fired anybody for not making their quota because they didn’t make very much money, and they left on their own.

One thing that I did a lot when I worked on that job that I could kick myself for doing, was that-and I think that it contributed worse to my stress-out, really-was that I would come in-we were on flex hour time [although the computer limited the amount of flex time]. And what I started doing was, I’d be there at seven o’clock in the morning and I’d stay there until five or after five at night. To me, when I stretched it out a little bit, I was basically doing the same amount of work, but I didn’t feel as pressured in as short a period of time. So to me, I’d come in and I’d pre-process a bunch of claims before I’d actually get on the system in the mornings. And I’d do my work and then at the end of the day I’d do that extra few more claims, just put in a little bit more before the end of the day so that I’d be sure that I’d have my quota for the day.

Like I said, I didn’t fluctuate wildly; I was consistent about the number of claims that I paid per day or the number of work units that I did per day so that at the end of the six- month period I didn’t have to try to play catch-up. I tried to consistently do the same amount each day. So at the end of the day I’d throw in a few more, for good measure, basically, just to make sure I wasn’t going to lose my salary when the six-month review came around.

So that was one of my coping devices; like I said, I don’t know if it helped things at all. It just felt to me like I was relieved a little bit more. But then again, I was spending an extra hour or more a day in this stress-out situation. So I really don’t think it helped, although it seemed to psychologically make me feel a little bit better that I wasn’t so wired when I was there.

Rebecca Sharpless is a student at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 11-12

The following is the second of a series of letters selected from the correspondence of Lillian Smith to appear in Southern Changes. This issue’s selection is from one of her letters to Glenn Rainey, retired English professor at Georgia Tech, and was copied from the original in the Glenn Rainey Collection at Emory University. Mr. Rainey and his wife Dorothy were close friends of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling. He was one of the initial sponsors of and a frequent contributor to their magazine.

Despite the often conflicting demands Smith faced as camp director, magazine editor, and novelist, correspondence from the late 1930s and early ’40s indicates a great deal of creative interaction between these seemingly different interests in her life. Her Laurel Falls Camp was an extraordinarily creative educational institution, known for its instruction in the arts, music, dramatics, and modern psychology. Through conversation and creative play, Smith helped campers and counselors question the world they lived in and begin to envision the possibility of change in that world The camp was also a laboratory for many of the ideas informing her analysis of political and cultural events in her published writing. It is not surprising that camp activities often reflected concerns similar to those expressed in her magazine. For example, one of the plays, “Behind the Drums,” written by Smith for her campers, explored 300 years of Afro-American history through music and dance and was published in the 1939 fall issue of North Georgia Review.

The following account of another camp play in the summer of 1940 demonstrates even more explicitly how current political events, specifically the anticipation of war, affected the creative activities of the camp and Smith’s perspective on her work as writer as well as camp director. She knew then that war, like other forms of human segregation, is most destructive to our minds and hearts.

September 19, 1940

We had a good summer, smooth as far as the mechanics of camp were concerned. Less encouraging to me as I watched War creep into our midst and twist feeling and thought. Our girls talked more about God, about hell, about believing every word of the Bible than in all my camp experience I have heard before. They were less tolerant of the Negro this summer (some holding bravely to their decency but others wavering) more inclined to defend the

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South…America…to hate Hitler and Germans…Even so, we had good talks, good evenings together…until I wrote a little play called 1940, A Play for a Young Girl. They wrote that play, not I,–I only put it down on paper. It came out of evenings when together we did not discuss war and peace, regimentation and death, but acted it out in singing and dance and impromptu chanting. Gathered together as we have done before in the library we spent several evenings doing this…first playing on the drums then beginning to talk about today, this year, what it meant to us,–election year–child refugees-Finland-propaganda– regimentation–then suddenly some one would get up and chant their feelings or dance them out. You would have felt the same thrill that I did, I believe, in seeing them express through their bodies, their feelings. And then one night, some girl spoke of conscription, of regimented youth camps and to my astonishment their feelings of fear and panic poured out. Then I wrote the play. We were to give it–the girls were thrilled–we went to its first reading and rough “walking through” of the scenes. And suddenly my counselors turned against me. The play was unpatriotic they told me. Furthermore, it was not the kind of thing young girls should hear about. A first-year callow young counselor told me that “it wasn’t good for children to hear about such things…they were too young.” In all of my experience I have never felt so much resentment against me, such a refusal to work with me on a project. I bowed my head to the storm and stopped work on the play. Not because I was afraid to give that play but because I was afraid of seeing all the other values of summer destroyed by dissension and suspicion. But I gathered my children up one night and we went to the library and Esther read it to them. [Esther Smith, Lillian Smith’s younger sister, taught dramatic arts at Western Maryland College, and was in charge of the camp’s theatrical productions for many summers.] In all her life she must not have read so beautifully and so movingly. The children were deeply touched and profoundly impressed. A few counselors had straggled in–I had invited none of them–and some told me afterward that they regretted that we had given up the idea of producing the play…But that was Esther’s magic, and they did not really believe what they said.

Well… I confess that I was awed by the incident. It has always been so simple and easy to hold the group in the “hollow of one’s hand,” so to speak, to win them over to almost any kind of project. But War’s beat me. I had no more influence during that brief dissension when my loyal staff turned into a war mob than if I had been the cook.

But…I quickly got our minds on fun again–on the banquet and the barbecue and the children’s surprise for the counselors–and so the summer ended in peace. I suppose you’d call it my appeasement policy. The children went home saying it was their happiest and best summer; the counselors went home saying the same. And believing it. But the director saw them all off feeling sadder than ever in her life she had felt about a summer…

Sometimes I feel so distressed, so perturbed about what is ahead of us that it is difficult to hold on to those values one cherishes. It is not the physical part of war that sickens me as it is what is happening to our minds and feelings.

Rose Gladney is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

Remembering ‘Bud’ Garrett

By Tom Rankin and Elizabeth Peterson

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 12, 14-15

Robert “Bud” Garrett died on November 24,1987. Perhaps appropriately, he suffered a heart attack during his third game of the folk marble game “rolley hole” the day before Thanksgiving.

Rolley hole has been a tradition in Garrett’s home of Clay County, Tennessee, and the adjoining counties of the Eastern Highland Rim for over a century. Through his love of the competition and the fellowship of the game Garrett encouraged its cultural survival. Like many males in his community of Free Hill, a rural black community whose families have been free and landowning since before the Civil War, Garrett learned to play rolley hole as a boy. His involvement in the game continued into his seventy-first year, when he collapsed on the marble yard he had built next to his house in Free Hill.

Characteristic of Clay County is an

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abundance of flint, easily gathered in stream banks and road cuts. Garrett and young men like him gathered chunks of this stone, filed the chunks into rough, ball-like shapes, and placed them beneath water falls so the constant water motion could smooth the flint into round spheres for marble playing. Although effective, this method took weeks–even if one were lucky and didn’t lose the marbles to the current. Imagining an easier way, Bud Garrett built a portable machine which could turn out perfectly round marbles in a short time. Unlike the marbles of old, Garrett’s could be produced quickly. He offered them for sale with a guarantee: “If your marble breaks, send me the pieces and I’ll send you a brand new one free of charge.”

For many serious players in and around Clay County, Garrett’s beautiful spheres became the marble of choice for play in the many marble yards which dot the landscape. For all the marbles he sold to players, Garrett probably sold more to his admirers at the folklife festivals he was invited to attend, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife in 1986.

Marble making was just one of Garrett’s specialties. Some will remember him for his guitar playing and singing, others for his gifts as a raconteur, or his ability to resurrect dead cars. Bud Garrett did a little of everything.

Born in 1916 in Free Hill near Celina, Tenn., he was known to many in the area through his junkyard business, but his occupational history is as extensive and varied as the stories and anecdotes he told. At various times, he ran his own taxi service, carrying passengers from Free Hill to Louisville and Indianapolis, where many Free Hill natives migrated. He also delivered ice, drove a school bus, operated a cafe and juke joint, ran a record store, worked for a live bait company and served as a notary public. In recent years, he spent most of his time working on cars, making marbles, trading, and entertaining customers and visitors with his music and stories.

Music was a very large part of Bud Garrett’s life. The son of a fiddle player, Garrett began playing guitar as a young boy. He recalls Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” and the common fiddle tune “Boil That Cabbage Down” as two of the first songs he heard as a child. Both songs are emblematic of his musical influences: he absorbed as much from the fiddle and banjo tunes and minstrel songs played at square dances for blacks and whites in the area as he did from the blues he heard in juke joints and on the radio. He performed solo most of his life, usually at parties or at the cafe he once owned in Free Hill. In the mid-fifties he cut a 45-rpm record for the Excello record label in Nashville (“Quit My Drinking” b/w “Do Remember”).

Garrett came to favor many post-war blues standards by bluesmen such as T-Bone Walker and Little Milton, and

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white country standards by Merle Haggard and Don Williams, which he often reworked into a slow twelve or sixteen bar blues. His “I Got a Little Place in Free Hill,” an original talking blues improvisation about his homeplace and life in Free Hill, appears on the Tennessee Folklore Society LP, Free Hill: A Sound Portrait of a Rural Afro-American Community (available from the Tennessee Folklore Society, Box 201 Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37212). Garrett performed at such festivals as the Grassroots Festival in Nashville, the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, the Brandywine Festival in Delaware, and the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C.

Bud Garrett will be missed.

Tom Rankin is a folklorist and photographer and currently teaches photography at Emory University. Elizabeth Peterson works with the Texas Folklife Resources in Austin, Texas. Bob Fulcher of the Tennessee State’ Parks also contributed to this piece.

When ‘Justice Rose Like Water’

By Septima Poinsette Clark

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, p. 15

Educator and activist Septima Clark, whose long, productive career placed her in the front lines of civil rights activities for six decades, died on December 15, 1987, in a nursing home on Johns Island, S.C. The next issue of Southern Changes will include excerpts from a lengthy 1983 interview conducted with Clark by the Southern Regional Council. Meanwhile, as ceremonies nationwide during January honor Martin Luther King, Jr., here is the text of a speech Clark gave at a King birthday celebration in Charleston in 1980:

I was born in 1898, and as a girl in Charleston, South Carolina, the church was very powerful. In the sanctuaries, Christians rejoiced. There they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. The church is often the arch supporter of the status quo. If it does not recapture that sacrificial spirit, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th Century.

My thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr. for recapturing that sacrificial spirit and giving his life for what he believed. He also recaptured the American Dream. Not that he lived by the Bible, he also called his country to live by the Constitution. When he preached, the prophets came alive, and justice rose like water. When he walked, the feet of millions of Americans fell in line and followed across the country and into the nation’s capitol.

His was no middle-class campaign for civil rights. It was a Movement that took the people into the streets to confront clubs, hoses, horses and dogs…to face the oppressors while armed only with the almighty power of love. To turn the cheek, not to avoid the present pain. But to see the true nation, and new order of the future that God was already making.

His peace was not any cozy rally, but in reordering of our national priorities, from military power to that of human empowerment. He did not stop with the right to vote, and eat with white folk. Already living in God’s Kingdom, where all people live in dignity and love. The Nobel Peace Prize maker spoke out against the war in Asia because its bombs took breads from the tables of the poor in America.

Born in an economic depression in 1929, he died in a time of spiritual depression in 1968. He was killed, like his Lord, ahead of his time. Some say his dream died on a motel balcony. I think I speak for many Americans when I say that he is the greatest American of our century, and his Lord is our greatest hope for the next century. Racism, poverty and warfare remain, yet our hearts retain the righteous dream of God’s revolutionary kingdom.

You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity. Your highest loyalty is to God and not to the nation. If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. Preserve the values of the faith for children yet unborn. The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, p. 16

A powerful white Southern politician who for years has helped many black people, including this writer, sought last week to end an outrageous debate with a brother-in-law by asking me if I thought he (the politician) was racist. My prompt response was, “Yes.”

The politician was flabbergasted.

Years ago, this same fella said to me, “Look, everyone knows this is a democracy and all people are supposed to be created equal, created by God and all that jazz, but do you blacks have to go around believing all that pie-in-the-sky? You’re pushing too hard for your equality and it will backlash. Knock it off before we are forced to really get rough with you.”

My politician friend reminded me that it was twenty-five years ago when he uttered that statement. I reminded him that twenty-five years ago he claimed he was not racist.

I did add, however, that my friend’s racism has always been more of the northern variety. In the North, there were almost no lynchings, church bombings and legalized segregation. Thus, northerners suffered from the delusion that they were less racist than the white South.

But, with the advent of the civil rights movement and blacks aggressively challenging white power, northern whites suddenly realized they didn’t like blacks any more than their white southern brothers.

Northern whites, however, had to find a convenient rationalization for their newly discovered bigotry. And, along came Governor George C. Wallace speaking forcefully and deliberately to what was really on white hearts in Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis and other northern cities.

In effect, Wallace’s message was, “Look, I’m a white man and you’re white folks and if there is one thing on which we can agree, it is that we have to get together and atop these blacks before they take over our neighborhoods and marry our daughters.”

Thousands of northern whites said to each other: “Now here’s one white man who makes sense. Let’s go with Wallace and maybe he’ll stop these black radicals.”

Northern editorial writers wanted to say Wallace was right, but did not want to admit that northern whites were no different than their counterparts in the South. They s arched for a gimmick which would expiate long-hidden guilt feelings but permit them to openly indulge in racist politics.

The gimmick they invented was the ‘backlash.” By claiming a backlash they were saying they had never really disliked blacks and were simply reacting–or ‘recoiling’–to blacks being so pushy. If blacks stopped being so pushy, northern whites would atop reacting and voting for Wallace or Barry Goldwater.

Of course, that was not a backlash. It was a frontlash. The racism had been there all the time.

My politician friend is quite northern in his racism. I have always known that.

He fooled himself; not me.

Peace.

J.L. Chestnut Jr. is an Alabama trial lawyer and writer.

Women and the Constitution

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 1-3

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote husband John, importuning him to “remember the Ladies” in drafting the code of laws of the new nation.

However, the “ladies” were not remembered by the founding fathers. Eleven years after Abigail Adams’s letter, the framers of the Constitution drafted a document beginning, “We the people.” What they meant was, “We the men.” In 1787, women were not considered even three-fifths of a person, as male slaves were. Women were disfranchised and largely invisible in public life. It would take more than a hundred years of struggle to get the U.S. Constitution amended to allow women to vote; an amendment stating that women have equal rights with men has yet to be added, despite more than sixty years of trying.

In the fall of 1986, as preparations got underway for celebrating the bicentennial of the Constitution, a group of women approached former first lady Rosalynn Carter with the idea for a symposium that would “remember the ladies.” She lent her support and so, in February 1988, an overflow crowd of 1,500 women from every state and ten foreign countries gathered in Atlanta to study and discuss and call attention to the founding fathers’ omissions.

“Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective” was sponsored by the Carter Center of Emory University in conjunction with the Carter Presidential Library and Georgia State University. Rosalynn Carter asked three former first ladies-Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford and Pat Nixon-to join her as convenors of the symposium. All agreed, although health problems prevented the latter two from actually attending the conference.

Nancy Reagan was also invited to be a convenor. She declined-understandably. For while attempts were

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made to keep the conference scholarly and non-partisan, there was no way to avoid comparisons of women’s generally forward progress during preceding administrations and the retrenchment that has followed during the Reagan years. It was similarly impossible not to wonder what a change in White House tenants may mean for the future of issues like the Equal Rights Amendment, which was defeated three states short of ratification in 1982.

“We’ve become comfortable with our prejudices,” noted Rosalynn Carter in a pre-symposium press conference. “We need to be inspired to make our country better. I hope that’s something the next election can do.”

Though none of the presidential candidates attended the symposium (being busy campaigning in New Hampshire at the time), the organizers no doubt hoped to catch their attention by scheduling the event less than a month before Super Tuesday. They at least caught the attention of the media: 150 reporters and radio and TV people swarmed around the hotel where the conference was held-a surprisingly large number for a conference on women.

But then there were some big drawing cards: Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Vice-Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Their presence drew attention to how far women have come since 1870, when Myra Bradwell was denied a license to practice law because she was a woman, and 1872, when Susan B. Anthony was arrested for trying to vote.

Women still have a long way to go, however. As Coretta Scott King noted in her address to conference participants, if black women were represented in Congress in proportion to their numbers in the general population, there would be

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thirty black women in the U.S. House of Representatives and seven Senators. Instead, there is only one black woman in Congress: Rep. Cardiss Collins of Illinois.

Many conference speakers pushed for women’s increased involvement in politics, both as voters and candidates. “If you don’t run, you can’t win,” was the theme of Ferraro’s speech.

Former U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug had a unique idea for speeding up women’s access to political power. “Let’s ask both parties to commit all open seats to women until some measure of equity is reached,” she suggested during the closing plenary. “Let’s ask that one Senator of the two from each state be female. Why not?”

Other speakers looked at the judicial system as an arena for advancing women’s rights, pointing out that it wasn’t until 1971 that the Supreme Court used the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to find sex discrimination unconstitutional. Since then, more than fifty cases have been heard by the Court relating to hiring, promotions, maternity leave, disability insurance, pension rights and seniority.

“Not all such challenges have been successful,” noted Justice O’Connor in her keynote speech. “But there is no question that the Court has now made clear that it will no longer view as benign archaic and stereotypic notions concerning the roles and abilities of males and females.”

In the l980s, however, the number of sex discrimination cases being heard has declined. “There are not a lot of Fourteenth Amendment cases left to bring,” said Isabelle Pinzler, director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, in a panel discussion with other attorneys on the role of advocacy in promoting women’s rights. “Without the ERA, there won’t be much change.”

Another drawback to progress through the courts was raised by former EEOC chair Eleanor Holmes Norton: “We must depend on the generosity of a largely male judiciary.”

This is especially true of federal courts. Since 1981, President Reagan has filled 334 seats on the federal bench-and only twenty-seven of his appointees have been female.

So what about the Equal Rights Amendment? It was the topic of both a mini-plenary (“ERA: Was It Worth It?”) and a panel discussion (“Putting Women in the Constitution: The Future of the ERA”), and it was obvious from both sessions that there is no consensus on the future of the struggle for ratification.

There is not even consensus on the past. Some regard the 1972-1982 period of national focus on the ERA as the finest hour of the women’s movement.

“Never have women learned so much and moved so fast,” said panelist Erma Bombeck, who spent a year traveling with former White House Press Secretary Liz Carpenter to lobby in unratified states.

Others, however, resented what political scientist Janet Bowles termed the “artificial consensus” to make the ERA the centerpiece of the women’s movement. “The demise of the ERA gave feminists freedom to reassess other goals,” she said.

Eleanor Smeal, who as president of the National Organization for Women was the strategist behind the ERA Countdown Campaign, was unwilling to pause to argue the past.

“We must go forward,” she said. “The drive for total equality is still so needed. Statutes can be reversed. Executive orders overturned. What we knew then intellectually, we now know through experience-we need a constitutional guarantee.”

NOW, in fact, has already launched a drive for “the new ERA” and activists were busy circulating petitions among the conference participants. It was the only active organizing visible-a fact that troubled some.

“It doesn’t make sense to spend these resources and gather this talent without using it as a stepping stone,” said Margie Pitts Hames, an Atlanta attorney who argued Doe v. Bolton, the companion case to Roe v. Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973. “I see no agenda, no plan, no direction. We’ll go back to our various places without mobilizing the energy I feel here.”

Hames and others had hoped the conference might at least generate some resolutions. And they were further disappointed by what they perceived as a decision to avoid issues like abortion rights, homelessness and the feminization of poverty, which were not directly addressed in any of the thirty-one panels or five mini-plenaries.

But the goals of the conference were academic, not activist; focused, not broad. What the organizers aimed to produce was not resolutions and a plan of action, but some serious scholarship on the conference topic which will be disseminated through various professional journals and through a secondary school curriculum being developed in conjunction with the Carter Center.

The research generated by the conference as well as audio and video tapes of the proceedings will be maintained by the Carter Center and the National Archives. Georgia Public Television is also putting together a documentary on the conference which will be shown on PBS stations nationwide.

For most conference participants, the best part was just being there-in one place at one time-with women who have been Cabinet members and served in Congress, who have argued or been plaintiffs in landmark court cases, who are deans of law schools and college presidents.

“It was a real high to literally rub elbows with so many incredible women,” said Heather Kleiner, who is working to revitalize the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Georgia.

It was impossible to come away from such a gathering not feeling empowered and energized. “This conference is a kind of political chicken soup,” noted Bella Abzug. “It helps you get out of bed in the morning and say, ‘I can conquer the day.'”.

Sharron Hannon is a Georgia-based freelancer who writes frequently on women’s rights issues.

Talking Down Reform: Filibustering Campaign Reform

By Ann McBride

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 4-5

During February, the cots were back in the United States Capitol. For the first time in years, the Senate was involved in an extended round-the-clock filibuster-endless debate to thwart the will of the majority.

The bill under discussion was S.2-the Senatorial Election Campaign Act. This measure, introduced in 1987 on the first day of the 100th Congress, is a comprehensive campaign finance reform bill, designed to fundamentally transform congressional campaign financing. And while S.2 has fifty-two Senate co-sponsors and broad support in the country, a minority of Senators has blocked the bill.

There can be little debate that the present campaign financing system is in desperate need of reform. Unlimited campaign spending, in the words of Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D-W.V.), threatens to make Congress “a part-time legislature because we must be full-time fund-raisers.” Congressional campaign costs have increased fivefold since 1974, totaling $373 million in the 1986 elections. An average Senate seat now costs $3 million, requiring candidates to raise the equivalent of about $10,000 every week during a six-year term. The average cost of a House seat has also soared-from $87,000 in 1976 to $329,000 in 1986.

With these costs, only those who are personally wealthy, or those willing and able to raise large sums from special interests, can even consider seeking congressional office. This system of unlimited spending creates an arms race mentality in Congress-candidates faced with an unlimited spending system seek huge and ever-growing sums of money to run their campaigns.

Freshman Senator John Breaux (D-La.), elected in 1986, says: “MY first task in considering whether I would have the opportunity one day to serve in the U.S. Senate was not whether I was old enough, constitutionally, or whether I was smart enough to handle the job … whether I had any ability to legislate, which is the duty of this very august body. The first question I had to decide was how I was going to raise enough money…. How much of my life and family life was I going to have to commit to raising enough money before I would be able to have the opportunity to exercise any talent or ability or education to be a good member of the U.S. Senate.”

And retiring Senate President Pro Tem John Stennis (D-Miss.), first elected in 1947, said, “The amount and sources of money spent in Senate campaigns is an embarrassment to our country and it is a blot on the integrity of the Senate because of the appearance of impropriety.”

With the increase in campaign costs, congressional candidates have increasingly gone hat-in-hand to the special interest political action committees (PACs). In 1974, PACs gave $12.5 million to congressional candidates. By 1986, PAC giving exceeded $130 million. As a result, the 100th Congress came into office more indebted to special interest PACs than any other in history.

PAC money, far from being even-handed, heavily favors incumbents over challengers. In the 1986 election cycle, PACs gave $90.7 million to Senate and House incumbents and only $19.4 million to challengers. In the same election, according to a Common Cause study, one-third of all PACs gave 80 percent or more of their contributions to Senate and House incumbents.

PAC money is money given for a legislative purpose-it is contributed to provide special access and special influence for special interest groups on Capitol Hill. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) put it most bluntly: “We are the only human beings in the world who are expected to take thousands of dollars from perfect strangers on important matters and not be affected by it.”

To be sure, PAC contributions do not necessarily guarantee votes or support; PACs do not always win. But the influx of special interest money is eroding public confidence in our elected officials and creating the image-if not always the reality-that PACs are buying access, influence and results in the United States Congress. Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.) has said, “The average citizen feels that public officials are beholden to special interests. This sense of alienation, this feeling that the electoral system is no longer their system, is responsible for much of the cynicism and lack of participation by citizens in politics today.”

S.2 squarely addressed the fundamental problems of the current system-unlimited spending and ever-increasing dependence on PAC dollars.

First, S.2 would establish a system of spending limits for Senate elections; the individual limits would be based on the population of each state. In return for agreeing to

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spending limits, Senate candidates would receive public benefits, such as reduced mailing costs for their campaigns. No direct public financing is provided as long as both candidates agree to abide by spending limits. If one candidate decides not to participate, and raises funds or makes campaign expenditures in excess of the spending limit, then public money would be provided to his or her opponent.

Second, S.2 would limit the growing dependence on PAC dollars by establishing an overall limit on the amount of PAC contributions a candidate may accept. For House candidates, the limit is $100,000; the Senate limits are based on the population of each state. If the S.2 limits had been in effect in 1986, PAC contributions to Senate candidates would have been cut by two-thirds-from $45 million to $16 million.

S.2 received strong support within Congress. Fifty-two Senators co-sponsored the bill-the first time since Watergate that a Senate majority has gone on record in support of a comprehensive reform bill. But Senate action on S.2 was blocked during the 1987 filibuster.

S.2 moved to the Senate floor in June 1987, and Majority Leader Byrd tried a record seven times to limit debate. While fifty-five Senators were willing, invoking cloture requires the support of sixty Senators-and the debate droned on.

The Senate returned to S.2 in February 1988 and again the obstructionist minority turned to a filibuster. Sen. Byrd scheduled round-the-clock sessions in an effort to break the filibuster and took an eighth cloture vote. But the minority prevailed once again. And S.2 was set aside.

During debate on S.2, opponents raised a number of false claims. “It will cost hundreds of millions,” they argued. In reality, if both candidates in a Senate race agreed to spending limits, no direct public funds would be provided.

“S.2 doesn’t do anything about PACs,” opponents claimed, ignoring the fact that the aggregate PAC limits established by the bill, had they been in effect during the 1986 campaign, would have cut PAC contributions to Senate candidates by two-thirds.

“S.2 will protect incumbents,” they argued, ignoring the tremendous advantages enjoyed by incumbents under the present campaign financing system.

“S.2 will prevent Republicans from winning in the South,” they argued. Yet this claim ignored the recent experience in the South. In 1980, for instance, four Southern Republican Senate candidates-all non-incumbents-won election while spending less than the limits in S.2. In 1986, three of these four candidates sought re-election as incumbents. Each Senator spent more than the S.2 limits, and each Senator lost.

This issue will not go away. Efforts to reform the system will continue.

Millions of citizens will be involved in the fight. More than seventy national organizations have joined the coalition in support of S.2. Included are traditional allies within the public interest community, but also joining the coalition are such diverse organizations as the American Association of School Administrators, the American Jewish Committee, the American Public Health Association, the American Public Power Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Farmers Organization, and the National Farmers Union.

In addition, more than 270 newspapers nationwide have supported the bill. The Washington Post, for instance, has called the current campaign financing system “fundamentally corrupt. Every citizen knows it. So does every legislator.”

As former Watergate Special Prosecutor and Common Cause Chairman Archibald Cox has noted, most scandals involve broken laws. In the case of the campaign financing scandal, the laws themselves are the scandal and they must be changed.

Ann McBride is the Senior Vice President of Common Cause.