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8 The "Real" Estate
My advisers and I had a wonderful time the next few weeks building plans on the void of our ignorance. I rented a suite in the Sheraton Cleveland Hotel, and we would all go over there in the afternoons and talk through our position papers on various operations within city government. But only two of us -- Joe McManamon, my safety director, and Councilman George Forbes -- even knew where the departments were housed. We went into those sessions with wild-eyed dreams of the reforms we would wreak on this corrupt machine, only to discover we didn't even know where the buttons were. There were two reasons for this, one of them part of the local design of a city government, and the other endemic to a democratic political system. In Cleveland the mayor-elect is inaugurated the Monday after he is elected. That gives him only six days to try to put together a group of people to take over and to try to understand the workings of the machine he is supposed to control. This in the nation's eighth largest city, with over 825,000 people. The other reasons is built into the political process. Politics is a difficult, demanding, exhausting, sometimes exhilarating arena in which gladiators win and lose. But a city is a business -- a non-profit service corporation. In Cleveland, when I took over, it did
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an annual business of $76 million a year, and three years later it had grown to more than $100 million. As a politician, a man learns what the social issues are and what services he thinks government out to provide, and he makes of his understanding political issues, campaign issues. But that understanding is an understanding of his society, not of management practices. I had never employed more than three people in my life, and now I found myself in charge of ten thousand. It was not longer a matter of standing in a public lot and saying "elect me and houses will spring up here." Now I have this foreman standing in front of me saying that seven of his trucks are broken down, and should he double up on the work crews or send the men home. The trouble with the strong-mayor form of government in a big city is that the mayor is administrator, chief political officer and chief ceremonial office for the entire city; everything flows to him directly. If he tried to directly handle all these duties, he becomes immobilized. This is a good argument for the city-manager form of government. However, I attempted something similar by naming an executive secretary, John C. Little. The first days of our administration were awkward, to say the least. I was trying to be the administrator, take care of my responsibilities to the press (which were legion -- my unprecedented victory had made me an international celebrity, and reporters from all over the country were descending on our office asking for interviews), run around making luncheon speeches, and tend to the political problems that were created by our victory over both parties. But every time a hard detail came up, or somebody else dropped the ball, John would say, "I'll take care of it soon." Soon he was in his office every day from eight in the morning until after midnight. The constant ruck of phone calls and visits was in itself overwhelming. Everybody wanted to talk to me, to see me, touch me. So many people who had spent their lives feeling disenfranchised by the system now felt that I was their mayor. They wanted to come in and talk. Every minister wanted to come in and be
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recognized, all the old neighborhood guys, old school friends. One day the Reverend John T. Weeden called and said he would like to see me. Figuring I would find a few minutes to stop by his office the next day, I suggested I would be glad to do that. "Oh, no, Carl, I don't want to trouble you. I'll be there tomorrow morning at nine-thirty." There is no way you can say not to a treasured friend like the Reverend Weeden, so the next morning he comes over and you have to drop whatever you are doing. You sit down with him in your office and chat for forty-five minutes. But you don't have forty-five minutes, so you'll have to tack it on the end of the day somehow. When these people came in I had to talk to them, the civic leaders and the people I had gone to for help in the campaign. I couldn't refuse. I had said in the campaign I would have an open-door policy. But I had no idea what I was saying. For those first seven months the entire city was caught in an epidemic of euphoria. My election was certainly no mandate. Only fifteen percent of the white voters had chosen me; my tiny margin of victory was the product of the massive, concerted effort of the black community. But the white mentality, and its ability to wrench self-congratulation out of the simple maintenance of its old, predictable ways, quickly created the myth, faithfully repeated in the national media, that Cleveland was a liberal city, committed to reform. Fortunately for us, at least then, the people who would normally be hostile and suspicious were swept along in the jubilant mood, or at least intimidated by it, and we were able to create and successfully promote highly innovative, often paragovernmental programs that would have outraged a normally circumspect Cleveland populace. The news media were having a field day. The reporters loves us, since things were happening so fast that we were feeding them stories every day. There was always a new appointment, a new program. We were a journalistic feast. But it took its toll. The pace was incredible. We had so much to learn, we had to find people to take the key jobs, and we had to do it right. Everything had to be right because everything we did was in the limelight. Celebrity is a two-edged sword. It was
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personally exhilarating, but the responsibility was a steamroller. I knew that I had to be, in that horrible racist phrase, "a credit to my race." That meant that I had to be more creative, more honest, more intelligent, more available, more witty, more thorough, than any other mayor in the country. Every move had to be exciting and a confirmation of everyone's confidence in me. I was their boy. That January, for the first time in my adult life, my health broke down and I had to take a rest. I went to the Virgin Islands for two weeks. During that time the press turned up an account of how Geraldine Williams, now my administrative assistant, was an officer in a club that served as a cheat spot. I did something that has haunted me since: over the long-distance telephone, I ordered her fired. I will tell that story in more detail later, but I throw it in here to point up the condition I was in to make such a terrible blunder. I needed so badly to be spotless that I threw Geraldine out without personally examining the real merits of the situation. It was during this time that I learned how valuable my choice of executive secretary had become. John Little's father was senior partner of the oldest and most prestigious law firm in town, and John had practiced corporate and tx law with one of the other major law firms. The Little family was old, established, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant security. John was a very scholarly, thorough strategist and had begun with us writing position papers. He would sit in our meetings, quiet for the most part, but always very solid in his suggestions. It took me some time to recognize how good he was because he was not flashy and aggressive. Every administration needs a man like John Little, a man you can trust to do the detailed work in your name, a man who keeps a low profile himself, and who is committed to your effort. John Little's loyalty was, simply a gift. Observers were unanimous in praise of his integrity. Getting men like that to work for you has to be done by feel. There is nothing in a job application that can tell you the important things, and there is no way an applicant can get it across by merely professing it. Trust and confidence aren't negotiable qualities. Shortly after my election, a local foundation put up $68,000
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to hire William A. Silverman's public-relations firm to assist us, and Bill went on to become close to me. He became, in fact, one of the handful of those I always called on to sit around and brainstorm when a particularly difficult situation arose. He, in turn, brought in Marc and Lois Wyse, who had their own advertising agency. The two of them brought invaluable perceptions to any discussion, and Lois, who is also a popular poet, brought a quickness and a clarity to whatever she wrote that I depended on in delicate situations. In April of 1971, when I decided not to run again, I called on Lois to draft, in simple language, the complex reasons for my decision not to run for reelection. It may seem at first glance curious that several of my most trusted advisers turned out to be white and engaged in either public relations or advertising. But the fact was simply that my greatest need for advice was in dealing with how public reaction to my conduct would be formed, since all of my actions would reach the pubic through the interpretative structure of the white media. I had learned to use the media as a campaigning politician, but campaigning and governing are very different functions, and actions are much more susceptible to interpretive reporting than speeches. So these people, all trained and highly sophisticated in the vagaries of the white print and television media, could tell me how they would react to specific acts of mine. It was a service that few people knew about during the years of my administration. I was often described as being impetuous, quick to anger, out there winging it alone and devil take the hindmost. That image couldn't have been further from the truth. I had to put a cabinet together. It wasn't as difficult as I had feared. We were deluged with applications from ambitious white liberals and from black people who hadn't been given chances elsewhere. Each department, with its own set of problems and importances and priorities, more or less determined what kind of man was needed. I had made a campaign pledge that I would fire the police chief. My first step was to appoint Joe McManamon, former cop then a lawyer, a West Side Irishman who had
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been one of the first on the side of the Cuyahoga River to open his house to me for campaign meetings, to be my safety director. In the rest of my appointments, none of which were promised, I admit I suffered from an excess of idealism. I was certainly determined not to give out important posts to political hacks, and I succeeded in that. But I also believed that if I chose real professionals I could just let them alone and let them produce. I remember telling each of my appointees, "You just do your job and leave the politics up to me." And the persons I chose for the most part didn't like politics anyway and liked that approach. But reality soon caught up with us. A councilman goes to a director and asks for a favor that that director isn't required to perform. But the politics of the situation demand that you do him the favor because he could be useful later when something you want comes before a committee of which he is a member. There is just no way to avoid politics. My next, and in many ways most important, appointment was law director. The director succeeds the mayor if he is incapacitated, and is acting mayor when the mayor is out of town. I had already made a public remark that I wasn't planning to name a black law director, yet I fully intended to do just that. Paul White had called me right after the election and confided that, if I wanted him, he would be available to serve as my law director. Paul was then serving as a municipal judge, a job Blanche Bolden, Al Sweeney and I had convinced him to run for and elected him to, and now he didn't like being a judge, didn't like the day-to-day decisions that had to be made. He had gained a great deal of weight. He as a big, strapping, very black guy, standing six foot three, and weighing more than two hundred pounds. When I appointed him, I received city-wide acclaim. Paul had served for years in the police prosecutor's office, where his extraordinary indecision was mistaken for patience. Everybody, and most importantly the police, liked Paul.
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But Paul quickly came to be the first example of a trait that pervaded many of my appointments. He wouldn't move without consulting me. I had to listen to every case, every issue that was pending in the Law Department. I would be in my office meeting with several people and in would walk this huge, imposing black man with the firmest grip of the world and a deep, resonant voice, and he would whisper some very ordinary problem in my car and ask me what he should do. When, in January, I went away to the Virgin Islands for two weeks to get some rest, the Geraldine Williams incident hit the papers, and he couldn't cope with the situation. He had never dreamed the intensity with which the media would concentrate on his actions. We had to find a replacement. I sat down with my brother and our former law partner, Norman Minor, to talk about Paul's successor. Minor was the dean of Cleveland's black lawyers and knew them all intimately. The one guy who kept surviving our eliminations was Clarence L. James, Jr. executive director of the Cleveland Legal Aid Services, whom everybody called "Buddy." He had in fact been my buddy, although I didn't even know him. In 1965, when I was running for mayor the first time, a short, fat, very homely girl had shown up in Buddy's Legal Aid office and contended that I was the father of her twenty month-old child. At that time, Buddy had worked with my brother on several committees, but he didn't know me at all. Buddy recorded her story, which varied each time she told it, and had her sign an affadavit to the one she said was the most accurate. She gave a license number for a car that I had supposedly used to pick her up. It checked out to a tile company in the heart of the ghetto. The interesting part of that incident was the fair play that not only Buddy showed me, a man he didn't know, but also the courts and a television news reporter showed. It was clear that Buddy didn't really believe her story, but he was forced to take her case to the courts, which were in turn supposed to automatically issue a warrant for my arrest. But it didn't happen. The State Highway Police checked out the license and the automobile involved. Sanford Sobul, the WJW-TV reporter, checked out the
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police findings and my own whereabouts the night in question. Sobul was a veteran police reporter. Buddy James collated all the findings, and the court refused to issue the warrant of arrest. Obviously, I would have won the case in court. But the very issuance of the warrant would have been irretrievably damaging. That girl showed up each election year, in 1967 and in 1969, but her story changed enough each time that the court could legitimately refuse her request for issuance of a warrant. I was extremely grateful to Buddy for the unsolicited fairness he had shown me. I approached Buddy about coming with the city and he said no. I finally converted him, though, about a month later when I convinced him he could accomplish more in two years at City Hall than he could in twenty years with Legal Aid. There were two departments, Health and Urban Renewal, that needed special help. The Urban Renewal Department was a scandal. Nobody knew what anyone else was doing. Cleveland had initiated the largest urban-renewal project in the country, and had failed just as grandly. By the time I took office, funds to the city had been cut off by the federal government because of its failures. The Health Department simply wasn't doing anything. It had been limping along with the little funds and providing almost no real services. It was housed in the basement of City Hall, and that was the position of priority it had with previous mayors. The men I wanted would have to be professionals. Professionals have to be paid. Neither of the two directorships at that time paid as much as $25,000 a year. I quickly discovered when I talked with Edward Logue, who was then regarded as the best urban-renewal man in the country, that we would need more money. Logue told me he was about to take a job in Boston, but offered to be a consultant, helping us to find a man, for a fee of $25,000. I had to tell him I didn't even have that much money to offer the man we would hire. I then went to the business community and laid out my problem. They agreed to help by forming a search committee if we would submit legislation raising the salary of the urban-renewal director.
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I went to City Council President James V. Stanton, who agreed to our raising the salaries. We were able to bring the salaries of the urban-renewal director and the director of public health up to $30,000. That way we were able to get for these two jobs Richard Green, a man who had worked under Logue, and Dr. E. Frank Ellis, a dedicated black physician who had given up his practice in middle age to do graduate work in public health service administration and to commit himself to the same issues I was interest in. My other cabinet appointments were made in more routine fashion, without the kind of elaborate search committees that we found necessary for health and urban renewal. It always turned out that one of my advisers or someone in the federal government knew of someone else who would be good for a certain job. But they were never political hacks. They were bright, well educated and committed to public service. The one thing most of them lacked was the political instinct. They were, almost to a man, politically naïve. But they were honest and proved to be incorruptible. Mayors and their cabinets come and go, but the men and women who really run City Hall, the commissioners, stay on and do their work. Finding good middle-management people is much harder than finding good directors, and getting rid of bad ones is harder than that, since they are all protected by civil service. I faced an army of commissioners throughout City Hall that had held their jobs so long that their control was impenetrable. But the had also held their jobs for so long that they were eligible for retirement. The unbroken string of ethnic workers, whose jobs were never challenged because they fit the purposes of one ethnic mayor as well as another. But they had been there so long that I had the opportunity of putting my own men in charge of departments and divisions simply through the retirement process. But it was also true that I assumed that all those old ethnic hands would be against me, and I treated them that way. It was up to them to prove to me that they could work with and for a
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black mayor. That was a bad approach. There were good men out there that I would have gotten more work out of it I had simply let them alone. In my naivete, I had believed that when the mayor speaks, things happen. Reality turned out to be somewhat less tractable. I remember trying time and time again to move out one of the typical old ethnic appointees, a Slovenian, Steve Suhajcik, commissioner of fiscal control in the Utilities Department. There were classic fights, and he beat us every time. Eventually, he came to be a strong supporter and one of our good guys. We could have had him sooner. I learned the hard way that commissioners are consummate politicians. They know exactly what a mayor's political weaknesses are, and they know how to exploit them. They can leak stories to the newspapers about bad operations at City Hall when they themselves are responsible for the conditions, knowing that the criticism comes down on the mayor, not them. Or they can do things poorly or excessively to irritate the public, knowing that the public is responding to its mayor, not the commissioner in charge. The wildest example of that in my term of office came early on in my administration, when we had our first heavy snowfall at night. The snow had started in early evening, and by the small hours of the next morning the city lay under several inches of fresh snow. The street crews were called out. It happened that Blanche Bolden, newly in charge of the crews, decided to make a tour of the city about 3 A.M. to see how they were doing. As she drove around the East Side, especially in the black communities, she was delighted to see that the streets had been plowed and cleaned better than they had ever been in the past. Then she crossed the bridge to the white West Side. Not one street had been plowed. Wow. When those West Siders had to fight that snow in the morning rush hour, they would be ready to string me up. It was a canny conspiracy to embarrass me. Fortunately, Blanche was out there doing her job. She started calling the bosses of the crews and made them get the men out on the streets. By the time the morning rush hour came, the crews had cleaned away all the snow, and my neck was saved. On other
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occasions I wasn't so lucky. All your fine and noble policy decisions don't mean a damn if the functionaries are against you. By the time I left City Hall four years later, I had managed to put black people in the policy and decision making positions in all departments of city government with the exception of the Police and Fire Departments. And I brought in black craftsmen. The crafts situation was politically interesting. Then unions had managed to enact a city ordinance requiring the city to pay the same scale as their hiring halls. This was a tremendous concession to the unions, won only because they and the City Council were in the same ethnic control. I told the unions we were going to hire craftsmen on our own, especially black craftsmen who had been systematically excluded by the unions. I told them that I knew perfectly well that I was going against city regulations, and I knew they could fight us, but I reminded them just how public such a fight would be. I knew they couldn't afford to have the light of public attention focused on their discriminatory practices. So they didn't fight us -- openly. Getting those middle management commissionerships took a lot longer. It took packing the Civil Service Commission with my own people. This had to be done because, other than retirement, the only way you get rid of commissioners opposed to you is to press charges and the Civil Service Commission has to be able to back you up when the man appeals his firing. I suffered a tremendous setback because of a police examination scandal, and it was two years before I could really make any moves freely. We did do it, eventually, with a packed Civil Service Commission working closely with my personnel director, Walter Burks, and we rewrote all the job descriptions and got black people jobs -- good important jobs -- all over the Hall. In the last months of my mayoralty in 1971 I issued two reports, called "The Stokes Years," in which I listed all the successes of the administration. The first was about the housing we had put up, the progress in urban renewal, all those good things. The second part was about how many black people were in important jobs
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at City Hall. A liberal newspaper reporter told me he was surprised that I would put out a report like that. He had evidently assumed I would try to keep it quiet. What was I supposed to do, issue a report on how many white people I had hired? When Paul Briggs, the white school superintendent, made a report about how many black people were in the school system he was applauded for his liberalism, his compassion. When I did the same thing, they said, "Aha, it's just as we feared." It is a sad thing that even with black people at the top and black people doing the work, many of the old ways at City Hall hung in. Nowhere was this truer than in the Streets Department. I had a black director, Ralph Tyler, and he had a black executive assistant, Blanche Bolden, and the work force itself, which is mainly made up of unskilled laborers, was predominantly black. Yet generally we couldn't get the crews to give the same service to the poor areas of the city that they did to the rest of the town. It's just a truism; black or white, the poor come last. Part of the problem was with Tyler himself, who was a nice guy but no administrator. The night Blanche Bolden discovered that the crews had plowed the East Side but not the West Side, I had earlier called Ralph. I said, "How are the snow crews doing?" "Fine," he said. "How do you know?" I asked. "Somebody would have called me if they weren't," he said. Thank God for Blanche. The same thing was true in the Recreation Department: the parks in the middle class areas of town were well kept and the ones in the ghetto looked like battlegrounds. This was no strictly a racial bias. The parks in the poor-white and Puerto Rican areas of the near West Side were also in shoddy repair.` I was never fully able to get the bureaucratic machinery in motion to change those old ways. It's curious how you can come up with exciting new programs and catch the imagination of the community, but the basic services, which depend on workers who have been doing their job in one way for years, are intractable to renewal. Ben Stefanski, my utilities director, came up
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with the idea of putting weighted curtains in Lake Erie, to create large pockets of water at the beaches that could be sanitized enough for swimming. The pollution in the lake had long since reached the point of making swimming a dangerous health hazard. We put up two of these structures, one on each side of town, and they were a complete success. We had people visit from other cities to find out how we had accomplished those "pools." But most of the city's recreation was run by John Nagy, a canny West Side Hungarian, who allowed the traditional inequities in park maintenance to continue. Another area in which I hoped to crack down was slum-landlordism. I figured I would send out housing inspectors out to find violations of the housing code, and we could then cite them, fin them or send them to jail if they didn't keep the houses up. The record on the major slumlords' land ownership turned out to be so involute that prosecution was piecemeal at best. But, worse than that, I was informed by my urban-renewal director, Richard Green, that he lacked enough inspectors he could trust to do this work who were not on the payrolls of the large operators of slum properties. We did move forcefully on demolition of old abandoned buildings, doubling the number of torn down in any one past year. Vigorous enforcement of the housing authority building code added millions of dollars to the tax duplicate and cleaned up some of the worst eyesores and safety hazards in the poorer neighborhoods. Over $224 million in new building of Classic Greek design that keynoted our insistence on good architecture in new construction. In 1970, Norman Krumholtz, the city planning director I had brought from Pittsburgh, dusted off a forty-year-old plan for redeveloping the lakefront harbor area at the foot of East Ninth Street. I got the Nixon Administration to approve the potential $100 million plan to authorize $6 million in planning funds. But the City Council blocked final authorization until it could name the developers. Over a year after I left office, the legislation was still stuck there in a committee box.
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It had never occurred to me how many roadblocks the road to progress is strewn with. I did learn to move some of them, and I will tell more about a couple shortly, but there was one that defied all my efforts. Cleveland had the largest urban-renewal program in the nation and had demonstrated the least progress. Beginning under Mayor Celebrezze, some six thousand acres of land were committed to renewal and federal funds poured in to strip them down. That was accomplished with dispatch, rendering thousands of people homeless and putting hundreds of small businesses out of business. The city officials understood demolition very well. They did not understand the relocation of people and businesses at all, and they related not at all to the vast rebuilding that was vital. Cleveland was not the only city in the country to discover it didn't understand relocation and rebuilding needs, but it was the most dramatic example. Even worse, in 1966 when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings in Cleveland, Mayor Locher's Urban Renewal commissioner, James Friedman, testified that the policy of the Locher administration was to permit housing in urban-renewal areas to deteriorate so that it would be cheaper to acquire for clearance purposes.
In January 1967, the compounding of these failures caused the federal government to cut off all HUD funds, including $10 million in downtown development funds previously authorized. With the aid of the first black man to serve in the cabinet of a U.S. President, Dr. Robert Weaver, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, I was able to lift that ban and get the $10 million restored. The revitalization of downtown with its jobs and tax base was clearly vital to the city. But a problem remained. A Columbus, Ohio, developer, John W. Galbreath, had put up the first building in Cleveland's prime downtown area, called Erieview. He still owned several major parcels and was talking about, at different times, either an apartment complex or a hotel, sometimes both. But that was in the early 1960's. After 1964, his public announcements of plans for Erieview became ver seldom things. It had become clear that he was sitting on his hands.
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At least as interesting as Galbreath's reluctance to move was why he was the main developer in the first place. Why wasn't Cleveland's urban renewal in the hands of Cleveland developers? The answer lay in George Gund's firm grip. It was virtually impossible to obtain any sizable chunk of investment capital in Cleveland that didn't involve Gund and his Cleveland Trust Company. And Gund, who was extremely conservative, simply wouldn't allow that kind of money loose for that kind of purpose. So when the urban-renewal plan reached the stage of needing a developer, it had to go to Galbreath, who could raise his capital elsewhere. They made it impossible for Galbreath to refuse, by making the land available at a ridiculously low price -- around six dollars a square foot. I told Dick Green, my urban-renewal director, to approach Galbreath and tell him that he would have to start developing his remaining parcel or we would revoke the agreement giving him option to the land. It didn't take long for me to discover that although the power to do it was ostensibly in my hands, the effective conspiracy of the business and newspaper interests tied my hands. First, a prominent bank president came to see me. He explained how much it had meant to Cleveland to get Galbreath to come in and put up the first Erieview tower, and how if we moved to revoke the city's agreement with Galbreath there would undoubtedly be a lengthy and costly court suit, during which time there wouldn't, of course, be any further development of Erieview. He threw in a few more intellectual exercises, but his main mission was clear enough. He was telling me not to move against Galbreath. Next, when I went to the editors of both newspapers, explained what I wanted to do and asked for their support, they kept trying to change the subject. They would bring in the names of other developers in other states who might be interested in developing other parcels in Erieview. They made it clear enough simply by not addressing the issue, that I would not have their support.
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Council President Jim Stanton came to visit. He suggested that it wouldn't be wise to move against Galbreath unless we had a developer to replace him. But you couldn't even talk to another developer until Galbreath was out of the picture. Finally, James Davis, a prominent Cleveland lawyer whose firm monopolizes bond counseling for nearly every city in Ohio, came over to suggest that it really wouldn't be wise to move against Galbreath and to try to work things out. We did in fact have several meetings with the Galbreath people. To no avail. Here was prime land, in the heart of the city, lying fallow while construction went up all around it. The value of the land had soared and was going higher all the time. I have every right, through the city's contract with HUD, to revoke the agreement with Galbreath. But I came to realize that although nobody could stop me, doing it without the support of the business community would produce nothing. So I decided, as the old joke goes, not to sidestep the issue but to rise above it. We turned our eyes elsewhere. And we found housing. Some people may recall that HUD cut off all of Cleveland's funds again in 1971, my last year in office. But the reasons were different. I engineered that one myself. All of the federal projects in HUD grants in Cleveland totaled more the $206 million at that time. Only part of it was for housing the poor and the elderly. Housing was ostensibly under the control of the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority, and five member body on which I had a minority of two votes. But a pending HUD agreement with CMHA on how many housing units would be built had to have the approval of Cleveland's City Council. Once that agreement had passed, the Council would lose control over housing. And the councilmen didn't want to lose control, because they knew perfectly well that we would continue our aggressive building of housing for the poor in middle-class neighborhoods. They
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had fought such housing in their neighborhoods, and they refused to approve the agreement. I wasn't going to be able to get them to approve the new agreement through persuasion. I was going to have to make their opposition too costly for them to continue. I went to Chicago to talk to the regional director of HUD, Frank Fischer. I explained the problem and what I wanted to do. He agreed to come into the city, to go before the councilmen and tell them with great air of finality that unless the housing agreement was passed forthwith, all federal funds for all the projects in the city would be cut off. The reality of losing $206 million was an effective persuading force, and they eventually passed the agreement. HUD restored our funding. Housing was one of my true and lasting achievements. When I took office there had been no new public housing built in five years and there was none under contract. When I left office four years later we had built 5,496 units of low and moderate income housing at a cost of more than $102 million. No city in the country had a record like that. A project that vigorous was bound to be highly visible, and, just as naturally, to cause a good deal of opposition in neighborhoods where no low-income housing had gone before. This was especially true in the middle-class neighborhoods where we erected housing for the poor. The opposition was not solely a racial matter. it also reflected class hostility. We faced the same bright-red angers in Lee-Seville, a middle-class black neighborhood, as we did in the white southwest side of Cleveland. But, although we were blocked in some cases -- Lee Seville was the most dramatic -- we were successful in the overall project. I had to pick up a club, too, to force Cleveland's banks to be more liberal in giving small business loans to black entrepreneurs. My finance director, Phil Dearborn, set up a dinner with the leading bankers in town. At the dinner I explained to them that their policies toward loans for beginning businessmen worked against the growth of black capitalism. I recognized that potential black entrepreneurs are without the training or experience
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the bankers like to see, that sometimes they have poor credit records, and finally that they seldom have sufficient collateral to secure a business loan. I suggested to these bankers that to maintain their strict rules on these issues would be to keep black people from becoming employers who participate in profits, not just wages. The bankers were sympathetic but said that they just didn't have the ability to relax their policies though they understood the problems Negroes have and felt great compassion for them. The next morning I called Dearborn in and asked him how much money the city of Cleveland had on deposit in the banks in Cleveland. It turned out to be a total of about $50 million. I suggest to Phil that we should pull our money out of the five big banks that traditionally held the city's funds and spread the money around in some of the smaller banks. Phil put that plan into motion, and it took only a couple of days before the bankers called and asked could we have another meeting. We had a very fine session that time, and they told me they had been thinking about the good sense I had made at that dinner, and they now felt they could work this thing out. And they did. Over the next thirty months, Cleveland banks lent some $6 million to black businessmen. The rate of default on the loans was about fourteen percent; the national rate on such loans is twenty percent. We kept many young black businessmen and professionals in business by using them as suppliers to the city itself. Every Wednesday morning, the Board of Control held its required public meeting in the Tapestry Room, adjacent to my office. The board consisted entirely of members of my cabinet. I presided as chairman. All expenditures for capital improvements and purchasing of supplies, goods and services had to be authorized by the City Council, but the actual spending of over $100 million a year was, by law, the prerogative of the Board of Control. Awards were made on the basis of the lowest and best bidder. Able and highly qualified black professional firms like the brothers Julian and Robert Madison found they were no longer excluded from city business because of their race. From the city
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contracts they received the Madisons were able to expand their architectural firm from six to twenty-six professionals, to create an engineering firm with a comparable number of technicians, and to open New York and Washington offices. Black realtors were awarded appraisal contracts, a black lawyer was hired to represent the city in an $80 million rate case involving the telephone utility, and minority producers and manufacturers were actively sought out and encouraged to make bids on city contracts. I deliberately included the black businessmen in every aspect of the award and hiring process, just as they had been deliberately excluded before. My actions drew reprisal. White concessionaires and suppliers who had enjoyed the former monopoly circulated rumors that the blacks were getting jobs because they were paying off. The rumors, though false, fell on receptive white ears, and the reporters and councilmen missed no opportunity to repeat them. As mayor, I found that the race issues worked in strange ways. I was able to achieve some great things for my people through some of my blackjack methods and through legislative maneuverings that produced such things as our Equal Employment Opportunity Ordinance. But I also did things for people all over the city. At times this amazed the white councilmen. I remember one time when Michael Zone, a white West Side councilman, stood up on the floor of the Council and said, "They're paving streets in my ward!" He just couldn't believe it. Why was the black mayor providing his opposition with real services? Naturally, I was giving the best service I could muster to own loyal councilmen, but I never did it at the expense of other areas of the city. However, even though I had provided, as no Cleveland mayor in recent history had, substantially equal service to people throughout the city, it did not make me more popular among the whites. Those white councilmen could sit on their hands for an entire term, but when it came to election time all my favors were out the window. They could still play off the racism against me and get votes just by sound off against us.
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Here is a pretty expensive example. We agree with the Cleveland Board of Education to share the costs of erecting six new recreation centers, each to be connected to an existing school building. The centers cost about $1 million each. It was decided to put the first one on the far West Side, in the ward of George Blaha, an old Council veteran and a loyal tool of Jim Stanton. We broke ground for that center shortly after I announced I was running for reelection in 1969. I chose a day for the groundbreaking that would coincide with a ward club meeting in Blaha's ward. I wanted to get as much political benefit from the recreation center as I could. Blaha was there for all the hoopla and the photographers when we broke ground for the center, and the Press dutifully carried a nice picture that included both of us, smiling away. That night I took my campaign to the West Side. We went to George Blaha's ward club meeting. I had with me Helen Lyons, the clerk of courts, who was very strong on the West Side, and Richard Maher, the political reporter for the Press. We were informed at the door that there would be no speakers. I asked to speak to George. He was found after an exhaustive search. Suddenly, this man who had been so ebullient and effusive in the morning was awfully restrained. He told me that he was sorry, but there wouldn't be any speakers that night. "That's all right, George. I don't want to make a speech," I said. "I just want to meet the people. Why don't you go around with me and introduce me?" "George explained in a number of labyrinthine ways that he wasn't free just then to go around with me, but I should feel free to go around and introduce myself. "I know they would be happy to see me, George," I said, "because we just gave them a million-dollar recreation center today. Before I leave I want to say a few words, but right now I think I'll just go around and shake some hands." There were about three hundred people in the hall. I went from table to table all around that room. Some people received me enthusiastically and openly. Others just sat there and waited
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for me to introduce myself. With some, the hostility was patent and unremitting. But I allowed no one to refuse to shake my hand. I just held it out there and waited. Some of them sweated blood before they took that black hand, but they all did, and, oh, didn't I smile and remind them I was running and I certainly would appreciate their consideration. Sometimes they just mumbled after I said that, but I didn't let them off easy. "After I finished off the hall, I headed for the door. I ran into Blaha and he asked then whether I wanted to say a few words, I said no, I thought I had met everybody in the room, it wasn't necessary. Just as my group approached the door, Jim Stanton arrived with his entourage of Irishmen. He nodded to me, but didn't say anything. We passed through the door into the hallway outside. The three of us stood there a moment, just outside the open door of the meeting. Then I hear Jim Stanton call in a loud voice, "What did you let that nigger in here for?" I heard Blaha explain that he hadn't introduced me and hadn't let me speak. Helen Lyons turned to me and said, "Did you hear that?" I said, "It isn't important that I heard it, it's important that Dick Maher heard it." He heard it. But the Press didn't print it.
It's not fair for me to say that I was one of only a handful of people who cared about Cleveland and understood the fight we were in for survival. Trapped in a process that was grinding me down, I often felt that I was alone and that most of the people didn't give a damn whether the city lived or died and certainly didn't care if the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, the sick, all those who needed help, lived or died. But then there was "Cleveland: NOW!" Cleveland: NOW! was an extraordinary demonstration of how people can really respond at the maximum and the best that is within them. I never deluded myself that it could be a level at
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which people could continually respond, but when the program began I had the confidence that they could rise to a level where they wanted to respond to problems that human beings have in our society, while setting aside their prejudices and hostilities. I felt that if people can be brought to that level and persuaded to act, you can make considerable gain which will sustain you when the pendulum swings the other way and people return to their normal lack of concern, or when it goes to the opposite extreme and there is active antagonism toward the less fortunate and members of minority groups. The program began immediately following the April 4 death of Martin Luther King, when the black community and its leadership so magnificently kept the peace and enabled Cleveland to avoid the eruptions of violence in other cities that followed the assassination. I knew that because we had been able to keep the city quiet after King's death, the community was at a high level of appreciation and receptivity. The issue was, how do we take advantage of this in a way that will help the city? The idea cam from Irving Kriegsfeld, director of the PATH association, a non-profit housing group, who later became director of the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority. His idea was to get the community together on the issue of financial support for housing and other areas of social concern. I asked him to head a group of people in formulating a program to take to the community leadership. He drafted it in very broad terms with input from members of my cabinet. I took it to the leaders of the business community, the heads of the media and small groups of community people. Everyone was excited about the program. To insure the integrity of the fund raising and raise the bulk of the money, prominent businessmen took leading roles -- men like Thomas F. Patton, president of Republic Steel, George S. Divey, president of Harris-Intertype, George Grabner, president of Weatherhead, and John Sherwin, a retired and highly respected banker. The three television stations combined their efforts to do a film that would show the problems we planned to attack. The only real difficulty I had was with the two newspapers, whose
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editors fought over who would break the story. We wanted to do it in the Plain Dealer. Tom Boardman of the Press finally agreed and then it broke the story anyway. Our goal was to raise $11.5 million from the business community and the general public. This was to generate $165.75 million in state, federal and foundation funds for projects ranging from new housing to job training to recreation centers. The program was to last eighteen months, but that was to be merely the beginning of a $1.5 billion effort over a period of ten to twelve years to rebuild our city. The response was fantastic. Money came in from elementary school children in nickels and dimes and from a man named Leland Schubert who gave $1 million. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be part of this effort to begin the rebuilding of the city. We actually raised and spent over $5.5 million and generated several millions in federal and other assistance. Cleveland: NOW! was instrumental in building housing, creating jobs, building day-care and recreational activities, new drug-treatment centers, and a number of other positive things. But the really important achievement was in solving a problem no other city had been able to solve, that of getting people totally involved in an effort to do something for their city. There was a lot about the program that was pure public relations. Everything positive that happened over that eighteen-month period was announced as a Cleveland:NOW! achievement. Obviously that was not always true. But people had to have a feeling that the building they saw, the progress in evidence around them, was the result of their effort and determination to see their city move. The program did not do all we hoped, and by now the spirit that moved it is dead; but for a moment, Cleveland -- a city that is the butt of so many jokes, and sometimes deservedly -- felt involvement, achievement, and pride.
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