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7 Taking Over
Cleveland has been a city in which "caretaker" mayors, men like Ralph S. Locher, Anthony J. Celebrezze and Frank J. Lausche, could respond mainly to the public relations and ignore the gut issues. They were able to survive in Cleveland for a quarter of a century, until the years of neglect created problems so obvious, so threatening to that sense of order everyone wanted to protect that the very people and institutions that created the conditions turned savagely on Locher and caused his defeat. Over the years, the newspapers, the business community and the electorate, comprised primarily of lower-middle-income blue-collar whites, had successfully resisted taxes and spending in areas vital to the basic health of the city. After World War II, when the deterioration of our cities became apparent, there was a complete failure to respond. City government was praised when it could show itself to be frugal. Nobody cared that it wasn't providing health services, wasn't enforcing housing and building codes, wasn't adequately collecting garbage and rubbish or building recreation areas. When I say nobody, I include the newspapers. And those same attitudes toward money were causing the collapse of our school system. The mayors before Locher understood the mentality of the people to whom then felt accountable: the Middle and Eastern
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European immigrant who inherited a traditional dislike of government; heads of newspapers, who merely reflected the failings of most newspaper editors around the country in their conservatism and insensitivity to the changes going on around them; the business leaders, who, beyond their opposition to taxes, were waging their own internal wars which militated against their heading toward even routine innovations. And in the government itself these mayors were responding to a thirty-three man City Council, with its ward system and it parochialism, a Council that fought any issue that might benefit blacks, even if whites would benefit at the same time. Locher, a mayor by default, tried to perpetuate those attitudes under a crisis conditions. Cleveland wandered into the late 1960's surrounded by its failures and fearful of its future. Ralph Locher could hardly be expected to respond to the situation; he had nothing in his background to help him understand urban problems or take a principled stand on an issue as important as racial conflict. The newspapers weren't about to force Locher to face his problems. They had themselves partly create and them supported Cleveland's petty political situation in which a mayor could make himself look good by waging a phony battle against a public utility asking for a rate increase. They had themselves not noticed that a third of the people were being systematically excluded from business and from cultural and governmental institutions. They couldn't notice it. They were excluding those people themselves. In the summer of 1966, Ralph Locher was walking blindly along, tied to this monster. In July it turned on him. Fittingly enough, it happened in the Hough area, once Cleveland's proudest neighborhood, which had been turned over to the Jews when the rich moved out and then turned over to the blacks when it was completely sapped. In four days of rioting, four persons were killed and ten wounded. There had been more than a million dollars in damages. It ended only after Locher, indecisive from the beginning, finally called for the National Guard. The Hough riot had been preceded by a number of smaller incidents that
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would have alerted any reasonable viewer to the desperate situation: roving gangs of white youths beating up blacks, abuse of blacks by whites adults, and police who allowed and sometimes participated in the act. The entire black community had been enraged when Cleveland's police chief, Richard R. Wagner, told a committee of the state legislature that the state should keep the death penalty as a defense against growing black nationalism. To Wagner, the death penalty was all that stood between the black menace and defenseless whites. (Not defenseless himself, Wagner roamed the streets of Cleveland during the Hough riot armed with a deer rifle.) The statement seemed to call for an explanation from Wagner's boss, the mayor. The United Freedom Movement, a group formed during a bitter school integration fight the year before, sent a delegation of ministers to see Locher. He had them thrown into jail. Sit-ins and picketing at City Hall drew no response, nor did similar activities at Locher's home. The mayor's position was that certain "channels' had to be gone through before the mayor would see anybody, and, besides, the mayor could choose which persons he would allow to see him. By January of 1967 Locher had become everybody's target; the man was being destroyed. At the turn of the year the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cut off all aid to the city's chaotic urban renewal program. Locher had picked as his urban renewal director a television newsman, Barton R. Clausen, with no experience in administration or government, but who wrote bitter and critical editorials about the city's failures, and the urban-renewal program was soon in the same kind of shape as the dilapidated buildings it was supposed to replace. So HUD cut off ten million dollars in urban renewal funds. Businessmen organized a Little Hoover Commission to study various aspects of city government after the Hough riot, and by the turn of the year they were beginning to issue their reports. The commission's devastated just about every phase of the city administration. Most of the problems went back long before Locher, but he was the mayor and had to wear the
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jacket. After these business leaders went after him, the real jackals, the newspapers, began to tear him to bits. The Plain Dealer devoted half the paper and a full editorial page to detailing Locher's failures. The Press, preferring to prolong the agony, ran daily criticism in the form of front-page editorials with the running headline, "Promises, Promises," Nationally, it became popular to send reporters to Cleveland to wrote about the urban mess. The mourners began their search for a candidate to defeat Locher. He had been rejected, and a replacement was needed. The mood of the city was a mixture of futility and fear-futility at not being able to get the city moving, and fear of the niggers. Curiously enough, that made me obviously the most desirable candidate. I had legitimized myself as a politician in the 1965 campaign, especially in the debates, and the closeness of the election and the subsequent recount kept me in the news. I was better known than any politician in the county. The businessmen could look at my record and see that I was out there fighting for their and Jim Rhodes's pork barrel. Clearly, I was a "safe" candidate. In the backs of their minds, those white men believed that if they put me out front they would by buying off the ghetto. Lois Hays, who headed up the finance committee in my 1965 campaign, introduced me to Bernard A. Towell, a managing partner in one of the large investment firms and a member of an old established WASP family. It is an index to the desperation of such people that a man like Towell, who had voted for Goldwater in 1964, now felt he needed me. He told me that a number of businessmen were ready to support me for mayor, and he wanted me to meet them. Towell, Lois and I began to set up lunches with small groups of these leading bankers, businessmen, and industrialists.
I told them that the issue was Cleveland's problems, not whether the mayor was black or white, that the city could not survive another man who didn't understand the town, all of its people and their concerns. I made it clear that I wanted their support, but that they shouldn't support me as an insurance
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policy against violence from the black community. Riots are the product of unresponsive and repressive societies, I said, and they will come whether the mayor is black or white if the people feel desperate enough. I told them also that even when a government tries to change there can be no guarantee against the expression of frustrations that have been building for generations. I got their support. Slowly the movement built, and when I formally threw my hat into the ring I had two leading business executives playing major roles in the campaign. There was another thing going for me. As early as 1961, I had been invited to the White House for conferences. In the years since, I had been repeatedly invited to Presidential conferences and dinners, and it had become clear to the sort of people who watch such things what electing me might help the city by bringing us into favor with President Johnson's administration. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey called me after my candidacy was official and offered to help me in any way he could. "I'll come to Cleveland and praise you, or I'll come in and denounce you, whatever you think will help," he said. It is understanding like that that endears me to the man. But I don't believe in having anyone come in from outside to participate in my campaigns; I believe that if I can't put it together for myself, an outsider certainly can't do it for me. I declined his offer. However, Locher's loss of federal funds gave us a chance to attack him at a most vulnerable point. When those attacks were coupled with frequent and visible trips to Washington, it began to seem to people that President Johnson wanted Carl Stokes to be mayor of Cleveland. They were right. And it was certainly true that the national Democratic Party wanted a black Democrat as mayor of a major city to solidify its support from black voters. Meanwhile, I was reassembling my organization. The Stokes machine was a portable model. Unlike other politicians, I never allowed my campaign organizations to live beyond election day. I knew where the people were, and I knew how to bring them together when I needed them. Black politicians who had been able to sit out my 1965 campaign
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realized they had better get behind me or get out of the way. And a group of black legislators, who owed their jobs to the reapportionment I had helped pass, were out working for me. The two groups that any regular politician, any regular Democrat that is, thinks he can't live without are the party and organized labor. Both these groups informed me they were supporting Locher and would give me no help. I was not surprised. But I was surprised by the newspapers. I was surprised at each of them, for opposite reasons. The Press, the afternoon paper, had, under the stewardship of Louis Seltzer, been the most powerful political force in town. The paper addressed itself in its idea of Cleveland's "little man," the ethnic blue-collar worker and his family, a man of inadequate education and marginal income. The Press and the Plain Dealer had been roasting Locher continuously. I felt I had a chance to get their endorsement. Just months before Louis Seltzer had retired from the paper, and Thomas Boardman, who had been Seltzer's chief editorial writer, had taken over as editor. Boardman is a man of good instincts and goodwill, but a weak administrator. He told me that he intended to run the paper differently, that he didn't feel the paper should play the power role it had under Seltzer. It was only later that I began to understand and believe him. The Plain Dealer, run by Thomas Vail, a patrician, is more subdued, more articulate, and much more establishment-conscious than the Press. I asked Vail for the endorsement, but I knew I had to depend upon my businessmen supporters to swing him. They did. It was becoming clear that both newspapers were anguishing over their endorsements. We passed the first of September and there had still been no endorsement. The primary election was only three weeks away. They wanted to endorse a winner, to preserve the illusion of their power, but a black man-how do you endorse a black man? On September 3 the Plain Dealer carried its editorial endorsement of Carl Stokes at the top of page one. I wish now I had
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waited to get that paper at home in the morning. As it happened, I picked it up the night before in the lobby of the Sheraton-Cleveland, and a reporter for the paper was there. When I saw the endorsement, I impetuously said, "Hot dog, now we're legitimate." He reported it. Nothing wrong with that, but later, when I was having continuing battles with both papers, any time I attacked the Plain Dealer, Bob McGruder, the City Hall reporter, would drag that quote out again. I often accuse newsmen of having short memories. I learned to wish that were particularly true in his case. I knew when I saw that editorial we had the election in our hands. An endorsement of me from the Plain Dealer would calm the fears of the average white voter. It would not make him come out and vote for me, but he would be less likely to feel the urgency to come out and vote against me. Next came the Press, with a sniveling, weaseling non-endorsement of Locher that said nothing. They endorsed no one. What a departure from the hard, strong line laid down by Louis Seltzer for thirty years. At lest if they had endorsed another candidate I could have denounced government by newspaper. Now I couldn't even do that. But it didn't matter. I had put my black base together solidly. Reverend Milan Brenkus, a white West Side minister, and Reverend John T. Weeden, head of the black Baptist Ministerial Alliance, headed up an interdenominational group of ministers who had put together a massive voter registration drive throughout the black, Puerto Rican and Appalachian communities, and by the time of the election blacks were registered more solidly than whites. The Ford Foundation also gave CORE $175,000 to put together a voter registration effort. Mrs. Coretta Scott King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has since claimed that the SCLC spent $500,000 in a registration drive in Cleveland. Our entire election campaign didn't spend half that amount. Cleveland's SCLC's director, Reverend A. A. Sampson, reported having spent $27,899.40. SCLC should run an audit. If their records claim a half-million dollars was spent in Cleveland, it has to be the biggest rip-off of all time.
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With my base intact, my success with business, my exposure to white voters, I could see all the pieces fitting together. You learn to expect the unexpected in politics, you even try to plan for it. But how could I have ever dreamed that suddenly a threat to all my plans, my attempt to put black people in power in the eighth largest city in the country, would appear in the form of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most honored black leader in America? I had put together a delicate, not to say precarious, structure. No one outside my campaign organization, and few on the inside, understood quite how it worked. The principles were elegantly simple. I had on paper what was out there, where the votes were, both for and against us. And I had in my head the things I knew had to be done to protect the votes for me and neutralize the votes against me. The delicacy of the structure lay in the proportion of my base vote; or, taken the other way, I had to keep the sixty-two percent white population from using its strength against me. In 1967, Dr. King's great career was at a low point. He had just come out of Cicero, Illinois, with great disappointments, discovering just how profound are the white man's hatred and prejudice. He desperately needed a victory. The near-success we had in Cleveland in 1965 had swept the nation, and in 1967 all the national political writers were covering the Cleveland mayoral race. They wrote articles on our organization, the use of the business community, the registration drives. It began to look like we would win. Dr King let us know he wanted to come. We had been through it before. In the late spring the so-called Big Six, the major civil rights figures, had announced they were coming to Cleveland that summer to register every black voter and energize the black community. Well, we already had black community organized, mobilized and energized. If the Big Six came to Cleveland with the various rhetorics, they would create an energy that would in turn create an opposite and probably more than equal counter-energy. Dr. Clement and I had flown to New York and met with those men in a motel right
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at La Guardia Airport. We had explained to them that they could only bring problems for us. We were juggling a delicate situation that could, with the slightest wrong move, come down around our heads. We had asked them not to come. We had understood why they wanted to come. Cleveland was where the action was, at the focus of the eyes of the black world. Remember that at the same time Richard Hatcher was running for mayor of Gary, Indiana; but Gary was predominantly black. A victory in Gary was inevitable, therefore comparatively dull. The real action was in Cleveland. But fortunately we had managed to head off the move. When Dr. King made his decision, Dr. Clement tried to talk to some of his aides, to convince them that we already had a winner, but that it could be lost if black pride started prodding white fears. Dr. Clement told them that we had for the first time the opportunity to seize real power by winning a city hall. Dr. King's coming would only release the haters and the persons looking for an issue to excite racist reaction to what we were doing. He was not successful. Dr. King came to town. W. O. Walker arranged a meeting between Dr. King and me in his Call & Post office. I had met Dr. King at various national conferences since 1965, but we had never worked together. I felt a towering respect for the man, even awe. Facing down the bigots in Cleveland is one thing, but I knew I would never have had the nerve to walk across that Selma bridge or lead the people against Birmingham's Bull Connor. King's courage was of a different order from mine, suitable to different places, different actions. In our meeting, I explained to Dr. King that I had carefully put this whole campaign together. I had worked to get actual white votes. I couldn't afford to do anything to aggravate the white voter. There was too much at stake. We had everything together, and if nothing foreign was introduced we knew how to handle the situation. "Martin," I told him, "if you come in here with these marches and what not, you can just see what the reaction will be. You
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saw it in Cicero and other northern towns. We have got to win a political victory here. This is our chance to take over a power that is just unprecedented among black people. But I'm very concerned that if you come here you're going to upset the balance we've created. You're going to create problems that we do not have now and may not be able to handle. I would rather that you not stay." How on earth can any black American say that to Martin Luther King? I can tell you it was hard. But I knew I had my own way to make it hard for whites to live with their own prejudices. I knew that Dr. King and I wanted the same things. Finally, I knew my own situation, my own town, and I knew I had it in my hand. Once I got it, I knew I could do things that no civil-rights march ever did. "Carl, I know just what you mean," he said. "We discussed this at SCLC headquarters before I come out here. But I am responding to the invitation of the United Pastors." The United Pastors was a group of about a dozen ministers who were in an internal struggle with other ministers and were bidding to establish their own community leadership. "I understand that, Dr. King, but they're thinking about promoting their group, while the question here is whether or not a black man takes over audacious power." He listened to me, but I could see that he was going to stay. He needed to be on the scene of a victory. "I will have to stay," he said, "but I promise you there will be nothing inflammatory. We'll try to do a job here and our people will get in touch with your people, and any time that you feel there is something harmful to your overall campaign, just let me know." Dr. King did limit his visits and he did conduct his activities in a very restrained manner. He helped a great deal in not creating a more problems than those posed by his mere presence. And those problems were real. Letters with the signature of the Democratic Party county Chairman, Albert S. Porter, went out, saying that the election of Carl Stokes would mean turning over
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the city to Martin Luther King, a calamity that was meant to sound on the order of turning over a daughter or sister. Ever since Dr. King's death, I had had to grapple with the problem of dealing with a small group of black leaders who grew out of the SCLC movement, because they knew of my not wanting Dr. King here. Asking Dr. King not to stay was one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make. It was a confrontation with a man whose recorded words I turn to for solace and inspiration at moments of depression. But it came down to the hard game of politics -- whether we wanted a cause or a victory. I wanted to win. Our people needed me to win. I had been the architect for a unique assembly of interests, and I knew with one wrong move it would be just another house of cards. In the September 28 primary my margin was more than eighteen thousand votes. I arrive at the Rockefeller Building headquarters at seven-thirty, about an hour after the polls closed. A few minutes later, I walked to the podium and declared myself the winner by more than ten thousand votes. The reporters were flabbergasted. No other vote projection system was giving me a win. But nobody else had Marvin Chernoff. Chernoff had a small business selling office machines. He came into our camp early in the campaign. By election day, he was volunteering more than full-time labors to organize our volunteer workers and had become himself one of our most invaluable organizers. On election day he put togerther a system of four thousand volunteers, with a minimum of three people working at each polling place. Chernoff was able to monitor every precinct in the city at two-hour intervals. An hour after the election he was able to have dependable counts from the precincts he wanted, and could predict our victory. Even so, his estimate was conservative. It was a remarkable performance. Now I had to face the general election and one of the oldest and most prestigious names in Ohio politics. I had gone into the primary as a Democrat when everybody thought I would avoid it and run as an independent to force a three-way race. I had proved I could meet a white candidate head on and beat him.
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Actually the primary had turned out to be a three-man race. Frank P. Celeste, the sixty-year-old former mayor of a western suburb, had been talked into running by his cronies -- and perhaps by a newspaper. His being in the race was a kind of added insurance that I would win, but it really wasn't important. I beat Locher by more votes than his and Celeste's combined. Beating Locher was a heady victory, but I realized that he was an already discredited mayor when he went into the race. Seth Taft would be different. The Taft family had given the nation a President who went on to become Chief Justice of the United States, A U. S. senator who carried the title "Mr. Republican," and would later send another Taft to the Senate. Periodically, the Taft family just seems to spin off one of its members out of Cincinnati and into national prominence. Seth Taft had moved to Cleveland in 1947. In 1967 he was forty-four, was a lawyer with the most prestigious law firm in town, had a fine home in the new, rich suburb of Pepper Pike, and had a good record of civic involvement and an impeccable reputation for honesty and integrity. He had no practical background in government and knew little about the political jungle. By moving into an apartment in Cleveland just before filing deadline, he acquired the label "carpetbagger." He had no vitality as a speaker and no personal strength in handshaking campaign situations. But he was a quick learner and developed into an effective campaigner and formidable debater. He had a family name that, big as it was in the rest of the state, was anathema to labor, and labor dominates Cleveland. But he was white. That ultimately became the major issue as the general election drew near. If it weren't for the race issue, I would have won an easier victory. But the drubbing I gave Locher had alerted the white voters, and I knew that, come November, there were going to be more Republican votes than there had been in more than a generation. The Plain Dealer's political writer, James M. Naughton, now political writer for the Washington Bureau of the New York Times, put it extremely, if pessimistically, when he wrote that "a white Mickey Mouse could beat a black Carl Stokes."
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The best move I made was to debate Taft. We debated four times. But in the second debate I made a serious blunder. It was held in the auditorium of a West Side high school in the heart of George Wallace country. I quoted the James Naughton line about the Mickey Mouse and immediately realized I had made a mistake. The hostility came back to me in a wave, as Taft piously disclaimed the presence of any race issue in the campaign. The other memorable moment for me was in the final debate, held at the City Club and carried live on all three television stations. I had been carrying a piece of paper with me for the entire campaign, waiting for the right moment. In all of my appearances, that moment had never come, but I always had that piece of paper with me, waiting. I debated Taft on that final Friday before the election. It still hadn't come up at the end of the formal debate. Then, during the question-and-answer period, someone asked about my poor attendance record in the state legislature. My position was that I had achieved more than most legislators by hard political work, and that not showing up for trivial votes was unimportant. That question had come up on occasion during the campaign, but never in quite the right way, and never with Taft standing next to me. This time I didn't have to give my position. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a letter that had been written to me a few months earlier. It was short and sweet. It said, "Dear Carl, the reports I hear of your performance in Columbus are excellent, and I congratulate you on the job." It was signed "Seth Taft" By the November 7th election day, it was clear to everybody that Taft and I were neck and neck. The Press's Richard Maher predicted I would win a narrow victory, but only if the turnout was low. On election night, Taft took and early lead as expected, but the lead held. At midnight he was still 21,000 votes ahead and there were only about 30,000 votes left to be counted. I would have to get almost ninety percent of those votes to beat him. At twelve-thirty I went down to the main room of campaign headquarters and talked to my people. The emotions were high and intense, and
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I felt that I had to prepare them for the possibility that we might lose. Many of those people were on the edge of a total rejection of what we call "the system." They had spent themselves, physically and spiritually, on my campaign, and I knew that, if I lost, the immediate impulse from some of them would be to run out and tear something up. I had to quiet them plead with them to have faith in the democratic process. It was a kind of talk I had to use on many occasions when I was mayor, handling the emotions of people, trying to keep things from getting out of hand. At 2 A.M., Dr. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy of SCLC joined me at the Rockefeller Building. At 2:30, It was announced that Taft was about to make his victory statement. A few minutes later, it became apparent that all the votes left to count were coming from the black community, and Taft was getting less than five percent of those votes. It was close to 4 A.M. when I passed him. The great-grandson of a slave ahd defeated the grandson of a U.S. President. Seth and his gracious wife, Fran, came to the hotel suite and congratulated me on my victory. Fran brought Shirley a beautiful spray of roses. When they went down to announce the victory, Al Ostrow, the campaign public relations man, was concerned about Dr. King's presence. After the speech, Ostrow came to me and said Dr. King was calling a press conference. He said I had to stop him or he would take all the credit. I told him Dr. King wouldn't do that, that he was one of the greatest men in the country and nobody was going to stop him from holding a press conference. I certainly wasn't going to make things embarrassing or awkward for Dr. King. I felt bad enough about the earlier situation. One more note. After the election, I publicly promised that for six months I would accept no outside speaking engagements. I broke that promise when Dr. King asked me to speak at a conference in Chicago. I went. The jubilation that followed my victory announcement is impossible to describe. Our workers and supporters literally danced in the street. There is a certain kind of winning that is more than a victory, it is a release. A man plays the numbers for years, every
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day the same number, and every day losing. Eventually he steels himself against the expected loss, wanting the win badly but afraid to let himself feel the want. One day the number comes in and he is set free. Set free.
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