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Overview
The Newark Frontier shows how, during the Great Society, urban liberalism adapted and grew, defining itself less by centralized programs and ideals than by administrative innovation and the small-scale, personal interactions generated by community action programs, investigative commissions, and police-community relations projects. Paying particular attention to the fine-grained experiences of Newark residents, Krasovic reveals that this liberalism was rooted in an ethic of experimentation and local knowledge. He illustrates this with stories of innovation within government offices, the dynamic encounters between local activists and state agencies, and the unlikely alliances among nominal enemies. Krasovic makes clear that postwar liberalism’s eventual fate had as much to do with the experiments waged in Newark as it did with the violence that rocked the city in the summer of 1967.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226352824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2016 |
| Series: | Historical Studies of Urban America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Newark Frontier
Community Action in the Great Society
By Mark Krasovic
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-35282-4
CHAPTER 1
The Construction of Community Action in the Great Society
What sparked President John F. Kennedy's initial interest in American poverty was not a politically powerful constituency of the hardcore poor but some disturbing reading. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, several public intellectuals and journalists — chief among them John Kenneth Galbraith, Leon Keyserling, Michael Harrington, Harry Caudill, and Homer Bigart — rediscovered American poverty and hauled its ugly visage before the American public. Poverty had largely been a partisan Democratic issue — Senator Paul Douglass of Illinois, for example, had repeatedly led the charge for area redevelopment legislation in the 1950s — and Kennedy had made poverty and unemployment a significant theme during his West Virginia primary campaign. But the broader message of the campaign, the one he deployed regardless of where he stumped, was that the Republican Party had done very little to foster national economic growth. Once in office, then, his number one domestic priority was to pass a tax cut and get more capital circulating, a Keynesian ploy promoted most stridently by the head of his Council of Economic Advisors, Walter Heller. Once the tax cut was passed, Kennedy turned to Heller in late 1962 and asked him to investigate the claims about which he had been reading: that postwar conventional wisdom (as Galbraith called it) was beset by gaping holes in our national self-perception, that the golden age of American affluence was in fact run through with stubborn strands of poverty.
Though Kennedy maintained a public optimism that, as he would put it almost a year later, "a rising tide would lift all boats," Heller and other presidential staffers furiously searched for ideas well into the fall of 1963.They established a process that now appears, looking back, a good model of what was to become the Great Society's attention to community action. Their search began in the established halls of power, collecting ideas from the old-line federal departments, but soon reached out beyond them, pulling new actors and new ideas into the process. Eventually, that process spiraled out beyond bureaucratic places and ways of knowing and incorporated ideas from academia, private foundations, and, crucially, local communities of impoverished Americans and brought those ideas back into the administration. In the end, the process itself proved the answer to Kennedy's question about how to deal with the contradictions of growth liberalism. If the solution could not be found in the tide and the state actions that lifted it, maybe the administration had to look beyond the state. The story of how this was done, then, begins with the president, but it soon leaves him behind to follow the administrative routes by which new ideas about how to confront poverty were found and brought into the workings of the state.
During the summer of 1963, the Council of Economic Advisors convened an informal working group of staff from several cabinet departments and executive agencies to consider the problem of poverty, which was, Walter Heller came to believe, even more widespread and intractable than first anticipated. They met every few weeks on Saturdays and discussed both broad diagnostic issues (how is poverty defined? how is it measured?) and specific program proposals. They spoke not only of economics but of politics and race. The results were discouraging. The existing bureaucracy, it turned out, had little imagination. Many of the proposals involved little more than money for existing programs. None conjured as comprehensive and experimental an approach as the problem of poverty demanded. "It was quickly clear," one council staffer later recalled, "that we were getting old categorical program ideas warmed over."
Heller extended the council's search into the fall of 1963 and, with Kennedy's blessing, established a formal task force on poverty. The president's closest advisors were canvassing for program ideas that would take them into the 1964 campaign season, and Heller was determined that a broad antipoverty effort be on their list. The task force issued a formal call for proposals, but the results were no better than the summer's products. "I got back, predictably, garbage," the head of the task force said. "People went into their file drawers and pulled out old programs that they had been floating around or that they had been trying to float before." There were lots of bits and pieces but no overarching theme. Even worse, several departments began to resent this new, annoyingly picky task force and to assert their deeply rooted bureaucratic interests. The Department of Labor insisted on a jobs program, while the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare advocated programs in the fields of health, education, and welfare.
The youthful energy and idealism of Kennedy's closest advisors had been slowed by the tangled bureaucratic morass of the mainline federal agencies. Those in the Bureau of the Budget were particularly disgusted. In the 1930s, Congress had moved the bureau from the Treasury Department to the newly created Executive Office of the President. With the bureau nearby, proponents of the move argued, the administrator in chief would be free of contending bureaucratic interests and would have direct access to the best organization and management research available. It was practically designed to ruffle bureaucratic feathers, and the bureau quickly garnered a reputation as a hotbed of administrative experimentation. When he interviewed for the job with the president-elect, Kennedy's eventual budget director insisted that the bureau was meant to be the strongest arm of the executive with oversight of all other departments and agencies. Under him, he promised, the bureau would be particularly active.
It was a bureau staffer, then, who finally led the task force through the federal bureaucratic tangle and its unoriginal proposals. He knew David Hackett, who had recently led the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. "I knew Hackett and his crew were around and I thought they had some fresh ideas," the bureau staffer recalled. "At least they weren't the ideas coming in from the line agencies." In early November 1963, he asked Hackett to submit a memo outlining his ideas for the administration's proposed antipoverty program.
David Hackett was in his sophomore year at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts when Robert Kennedy entered the class one year ahead of him. Hackett considered himself something of a misfit at the school, more interested in hitting the athletic fields than the books. When John Knowles, who attended Milton rival Philips Exeter, later wrote his novel A Separate Peace, he modeled the character Phineas, who "considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction," on Hackett. He immediately befriended Kennedy, whom he regarded as a fellow oddball. And when, in the late 1950s, Bobby's older brother ran for president, Hackett worked on the nomination and then the general election campaign. He later commended the campaign's youth and ingenuity: while Senator Lyndon Johnson built his support by rallying his fellow senators, Hackett said, the Kennedy campaign built support state by state and from the ground up. "It proved perhaps the single most interesting thing," he said, "that this group, in effect, was smarter and had better political instincts" than its much older and more experienced competitors. They developed a different system and they won. When President-elect Kennedy named his younger brother attorney general, Hackett agreed to join the Department of Justice as his special assistant.
Before the inauguration, Robert Kennedy asked Hackett to begin studying up on juvenile delinquency. The problem had sparked a national moral panic in the 1950s, and that may have been enough to attract the attention of the soon-to-be attorney general. But Kennedy also knew of the problem from his older sister Eunice, who in the late 1940s, after their father funded the establishment of a delinquency bureau in the Justice Department, became the department's first executive secretary for juvenile delinquency. Then, in the early 1950s, Eunice — who was sometimes called "the conscience of the Kennedy family" — had gone to work at the Federal Penitentiary for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she encountered and befriended some of the nation's most notorious criminals, including Tokyo Rose and the queen of Washington, DC's, numbers game. Eunice's younger brother and his old prep-school friend had comparatively little experience with America's down-and-out, but they were eager to get some. "I think that he and I were quite similar in that we'd never been involved with close poverty before," Hackett later said, "and certainly never had been involved up-close with Negroes." In the early months of their work on delinquency and over the next year or so, they traveled around the country to see American poverty firsthand. The experience was eye-opening. They visited poor white mountaineers in Appalachia, Chicanos in East Los Angeles, and black Angelenos in Watts. Kennedy visited schools, playgrounds, and swimming pools in neighborhoods surrounding the capitol building in Washington.
The new attorney general hoped to keep these trips out of the public spotlight, but the press caught up with him in New York in March 1961. He and Hackett took a walk up Manhattan's East Side. The tour had been arranged by a contact at the New York Youth Board, who arranged several meetings between the nation's chief law enforcement officer and members of the Puerto Rican Viceroys and the Italian Redwings, some of them drug addicts and robbery suspects. Kennedy took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. When he asked the gang members about the problems they faced, some spoke about the lack of jobs and places to play. Others were more reluctant to engage the suspicious tousle-haired white guy with the Brahmin accent. "What do you want to know for?" they demanded. "What are you doing here?" Kennedy responded simply — "I'm interested, I'm the Attorney General" — and they spent over two hours talking.
Whatever the source of Kennedy's interest in juvenile delinquency, it was only that: an interest. There was no method yet, no ideas for how to address the problem. Hackett had been given no specific instructions, so he spent about six months traveling and talking to people, asking everyone he met what they would do if given $30 million to solve the problem of juvenile delinquency. First, he hit up federal agencies, including colleagues in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He later estimated that he found about ten people working on youth and youth programs in the entire federal government, "and what was very striking was the lack of coordination" between any of them. "That was true even within the Justice Department," he said, where "the Bureau of Prisons never talked to the FBI and vice versa." Hackett recommended, therefore, that the administration establish a new cabinet-level committee to address the problem, a body that would coordinate federal efforts rather than leave them scattered in the established departments.
While casting about for ideas, Hackett asked the head of youth affairs at the Ford Foundation if he knew anyone who could get a juvenile delinquency program up and running. The official turned to a recent foundation hire named Richard Boone, and Richard Boone suggested Lloyd Ohlin. Hackett had heard the name before, and on a subsequent visit to New York City he met Boone in a bar to learn more.
Boone had first met Ohlin in the 1950s at the University of Chicago, where Boone had worked on a project tracking felons who were released into the Illinois Selective Service. Upon leaving the university, he worked at the Illinois State Reformatory during the Adlai Stevenson administration, and when one of his Chicago faculty members became the sheriff of Cook County, Boone became a captain in the county juvenile bureau. While there, he served as a consultant to the Chicago YMCA's "detached worker" program, which recruited community residents to work closely with gang members. Boone quickly came to believe that social welfare professionals — especially psychiatric caseworkers — were frauds with little ability to help delinquents. In seeking alternative personnel for the program, he experimented with hiring the gang members themselves. They rose to the task, Boone found, with impressive results, and he decided to toss the professional caseworkers out of the program altogether. Since the predominant approach toward delinquency was at that point psychiatric, the program's initial funding had come from the National Institute of Mental Health. But after his successful experiment with hiring gang members, Boone poured his new ideas into a funding application that he sent to the Ford Foundation.
While working on the detached worker program, Boone frequently sought Lloyd Ohlin's advice. Ohlin and his Columbia University colleague Richard Cloward had devised a theory that turned conventional thinking about delinquency on its head. They argued that delinquency was the product of a systemic rather than personal pathology and that delinquents, rather than pursuing lives of crime, would take advantage of better (and legal) opportunities if their communities provided them. The individual delinquent, therefore, was not a deviant who needed to adjust (or be adjusted) to the system. Rather, the system was dysfunctional and had to be reformed. Furthermore, rather than unilaterally swooping down with some social science derring-do to rescue the denizens of impoverished neighborhoods, Ohlin and Cloward insisted that residents themselves participate in that reformation.
Ohlin's ideas received their first real tryout on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a multiracial neighborhood marked by high unemployment rates and increasing youth crime. In 1958, after a local businessman offered the neighborhood's Henry Street Settlement seed money to begin planning a delinquency program, the esteemed and long-standing social service agency submitted a grant application to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a project they called Mobilization for Youth (MFY). The plan was to mobilize existing agencies and saturate the area with social services. But the NIMH rejected this initial proposal and insisted that the project engage more with community organizing (rather than organizing among the local social-service agencies), with local institutions like the schools, and with current social science research.
That is where Ohlin and Cloward came in. The application of their research fulfilled the NIMH's demand for a more modern and scholarly approach. Together, they advocated the organizing of residents to advocate on their own behalf, not by incorporating them into existing power structures — which, after all, did not seem to be doing much for them — but by challenging them directly. While reworking MFY's funding application, Ohlin went to see Saul Alinsky and came away "enormously impressed" with the veteran organizer's vision of social conflict. But because he thought MFY's reliance on federal funds made it unwise to foster such conflict, Ohlin insisted the project pursue a middle course between conflict and cooptation: community participation.
When the NIMH approved the revised grant in 1959, the contrast between the social-service and community-organizing approaches had not been completely worked out in some people's mind, so the two simply existed side by side. The president of the Henry Street Settlement told theNew York Times, for example, that the project would "emphasize all-out community organization" but that efforts would also be made "to strengthen many of the services now being carried on in the lower East Side community." Other project leaders took care not to perturb existing neighborhood agencies, so they emphasized that MFY would not replace but only supplement them. Nonetheless, MFY generated anxiety and tension among existing social service agencies. A local Catholic priest wondered if his mission's explicitly religious approach to local delinquents — "we tell them frankly that we're interested in their souls" — would clash with MFY's more secular aims. On the other hand, he also wondered if the project's "service saturation" approach wasn't really just a stopgap. "Maybe we should think in terms of a genuine people's movement in the area," he suggested. "A parish cannot successfully operate in a neighborhood like this until its power structure can challenge the other existing power structures — the real estate operators, the housing authority, the police." Perhaps that was the answer to the neighborhood's problems, he concluded, "rather than the manipulation of people by professional social workers."
Hackett later described Ohlin, who was brought onto the newly formed President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD), as "the key architect of both the bill and the philosophy behind the program." The committee's proposed legislation authorizing the distribution of funds for demonstration projects combating delinquency passed Congress in September 1961. Mobilization for Youth was among the first organizations to win a grant the following spring. It proposed a range of antidelinquency work in its effort to transform the local opportunity structure on the Lower East Side: neighborhood service centers, a Boys Adventure Corps, a preschool program, Homework Helpers, and youth cultural centers housed in local coffee shops. But tucked among such proposals was a participatory element that elevated the program beyond the original plan to saturate the area with social services: a "community development program which will seek to organize the unaffiliated to take a greater part in civic affairs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Newark Frontier by Mark Krasovic. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Plotting the Great Society and the Urban Crisis in NewarkPart I: The Rise of Community Action
One / The Construction of Community Action in the Great Society
Two / Community Action Comes to Newark
Three / Convergence
Four / The Newark Police Department’s Great Society
Interlude: The Riots
Part II: The Commission Response to Rioting
Five / The Kerner Commission
Six / The Governor’s Commission
Seven / The PBA Commission
Part III: New Directions for Community Action
Eight / Law and Order
Nine / Departures
Ten / Control
Conclusion: Community Action and the Hollow Prize
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in Notes
Notes
Index