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1 Big Man, Little Man
For a brief time in Cleveland, I was the man of power. I had what no black man in this country has had before: direct control of the government of a predominantly white population. That power came to me because I seized a situation that had made me seem like a savior to men who ordinarily look on blacks as an alien and vaguely dangerous force. Most of what you hear about the power structure is so much easy talk. We feel the vague presence of a monolith out there, some well-defined but hidden body with an organization that can act for it. But the monolith is a myth. There were no times in the country when certain men, the great captains of industry, could command what they wanted; they could bring together the resources of a community by the overwhelming presence of their personal wealth, power, and control over others, and perhaps our notions about the power derive from those times. In the spring of 1966, I was re-elected to my third term as a state legislator. I had been the first black democrat ever elected to the Ohio General Assembly, and in 1965 I had lost, by an excruciatingly narrow margin, my first run to be mayor of Cleveland. My brother Louis, and I had a law firm of five black lawyers on Public Square, but I was dedicated to politics, I didn't
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love the practice of law the way Louis did. No white law firm accepted black lawyers in those days. Very few do now. So, like other young black lawyers in those days, no matter how talented, I was a jailhouse lawyer--a little real-estate business, some divorce work, and the kind of criminal defense cases you pick up by hanging around the municipal courts in the morning. One day about 9 A.M., the secretary buzzed me on the intercom and said, "Mr. Cyrus Eaton wants to speak with you." "Sure," I said back, "and you're Jackie Kennedy." "Seriously," she said, "it's Cyrus Eaton." "You get back on the phone and ask him which Cyrus Eaton." After a minute she called back and said, "He says he is the Cyrus Eaton who is chairman of the board of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad." I agreed to get on the phone, fully expecting a joke and fully expecting to take it out of her or somebody else's hide. Then on the other end of the wire is this crisp, fine old English-sounding voice with a slight quaver, just too authentic not to be true, saying, "Mr. Stokes, my name is Cyrus Eaton. I wanted to talk to you about representing me in a lawsuit, and I was wondering when you would be able to see me." Now, in a situation like that, it is very important to stay cool. "Are you kidding?" I blurted. He was not kidding. Within the hour I was standing in the vestibule of his office. Before me was a legendary figure, one of the world's wealthiest men -- a capitalist who had long fought for peaceful coexistence and trade within the communist countries. Finely combed silver hair, skin a healthy red color, he was dressed as he usually dresses, in a dark double-breasted suit, a crisp white shirt with no wrinkles in the collar, and a navy-blue tie with small polka dots. He walked briskly out of his office and said, "Mr. Stokes, thank you so much for being willing to come and see me," and then escorted me back into the office. Inside Eaton's offices, it is difficult to remember you are in the citadel of an international operation. Silent people seemed to
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glide in and out of rooms. No hurry or frenzy, no ringing phones. The pace was so easy it felt like a private home. We talked. For the next five years we talked, through the time I worked with him on the Cleveland Trust Company lawsuit, and on through my years as mayor, as Eaton became a trusted friend and adviser. In that first talk, Eaton told me the Cleveland Trust had filed a suit asking the court to order Eaton to desist making his public charges against the bank's practices. Eaton had been telling anybody who would listen that the bank's board of directors was voting its own trust-held shares of stock, which was prohibited by Ohio law. He asked me to defend his former administrative assistant, Gordon Watson, whom he wanted to join him in the lawsuit. I would be working alongside Eaton's personal lawyer. And so began my education in the byways of the power of big business. Patiently, in session after session, Eaton and his aides explored the growth and life of the Cleveland Trust empire for my benefit. I began to see how over the years its president, George Gund, had amassed a pyramid of trust holdings that gave him and his hand-picked board of directors voting control over the very economic life of northern Ohio. Eaton understood it as a man who had been part of it, and that is the best understanding there is. Before the stock market crash of 1929, Eaton had been on Cleveland Trust's board of directors. After the crash, Eaton was forced to liquidate his stock in the trust company, and Gund used that to force Eaton out. Gund rightly saw Eaton as the main threat to his own continuity as the dominant force at Cleveland Trust. Eaton never forgot; the feud between the two men was as personal as it was financial. In this case, Eaton had what he felt was a clear-cut case overriding his personal motivations; that is why he brought Gordon Watson into it. Behind the legalities, though, was Eaton's desire to see Gund's carefully built empire torn away. Gund at the peak of his power ruled over the largest trust holding operation in Ohio and one of the largest in the country, an accumulation of $2 billion shares of stock. At one time he
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sat on the boards of fifty-two different corporations. Sitting there, representing, say fourteen percent of the firm's stock, Gund pulled the levers. Gund had Cleveland's economy by the neck. You don't have to be a high school graduate to see that when a man or his representative sits on the boards of three competing coal companies, as Gund did, there is not going to be much competition. He also determined which firms got which contracts. The beneficiary of all these associations was not likely to be the consumer. Nor was the consumer going to benefit when Gund controlled affairs for two of the city's largest department stores. The list is long. It was just the sort of situation you would expect a newspaper to investigate. Unfortunately, controlling interest in the Plain Dealer, the largest morning newspaper in the state, was held by Cleveland Trust. Gund was an extraordinarily conservative man; the effect this had on the use of risk capital in Cleveland is only too clear. The old industries were carefully protected from any new, competing interests that wanted to come in from outside. Young businessmen within the city with ideas for new development found that venture capital was held intractably within Gund's marmoreal fist. At a time when Cleveland should have been growing and shifting away from its old, fat, but increasingly impotent interests; these men drew closer together, ignoring the need for vigorous competition. This is a form of dry rot. And so it turned out that the only man who both understood the situation and was willing to fight it was Cyrus Eaton, himself one of the great entrepreneurs. Eaton had been devoting a considerable amount of his time trying to alert people to the dangers of this concentration of power; he was talking not only to his own associates but to congressmen, senators, and state legislators. That was what prompted the trust company to file suit against him. They wanted to shut him up. This evidence of their fear of Eaton is a startling thing by itself, and I would come across it again and again later when I was running for mayor. These powerful men, who can play many trump cards the public
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never sees when the game goes against them, were afraid one man, fighting alone, but -- and this is important -- fighting in public. Watch the game. The case was tried in July 1967. Gund died during the trial; he was succeeded as president by George Karch (who has since liberalized and loosened most of those old ties, making Cleveland Trust a more responsible institution). Judge John V. Corrigan ruled in our favor, and Karch immediately announced he would appeal. By the time the case reached appellate court, I had been elected mayor and my brother Louis argued the case. The appellate court eventually reversed Corrigan's ruling, but meanwhile a much more fascinating struggle was going on in the state legislature. From under the tables and out of sleeves, new cards were beginning to appear. Even before the case actually went to trial, the Cleveland Trust Company, through it lobbyists and friendly legislators, was moving to amend the state law to make its voting practices legal. During this time I was reelected to my third term as a legislator, in November 1966. Then occurred a graphic lesson in the protection of special interests. I had a good working relationship with Republican Governor James A. Rhodes and with Roger Cloud, leader of the Republican majority and Speaker of the House of Representatives. I went to Cloud to talk about my new committee appointments. He said, "Carl, you can have any committee you want with the exception of banking." I asked, "Because of Cyrus Eaton and the Cleveland Trust fight?" "That's right," Cloud said. When the amendment was introduced in the legislature, I went to see Rhodes. I wanted to explain to him why it was wrong for Cleveland Trust to vote it's trust-held shares. "Carl, Cyrus Eaton is one man," he said, "There are a hundred banks in this state that will be affected. One man never beat a hundred. That's all" So the legislature did amend the law and made our issue moot. The members of the banking committee that passed the legislation
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on to the floor were persons who the lobbyists had determined were either neutral to their interests or on their side. The people are not really represented when the work of government is being done. The day-to-day business of a legislature is to pass laws that affect the fundamental economic life of their state or, in the case of Congress, the nation itself. The men who really do the work on those laws, working on language construction and persuading legislators, represent special interests. The people's lobby is supposed to be the legislature itself, but the men elected to it almost never are specifically knowledgeable about the industries and interests they are asked to pass judgement on. And, when these men want information, the only people they have to turn to are lobbyists and others with vested interests. I learned a lot from my contact with Cyrus Eaton and the power structure's fear of him. In the spring and summer of 1967, when the same power structure was grooming me as the man to back in the mayor's race, I was invited to the most exclusive clubs in Cleveland to talk to them about myself and what I hoped to do for Cleveland. It became clear after a couple of these lunches that these men had two things on their minds -- the fear of another riot and the possibility of an alliance between Stokes and Cyrus Eaton. At one of these luncheons, I was talking to five men who would have to be numbered among the very top bankers and industrialists in the state. Now, when you have men like these in that kind of corner, the thing you do for the sake of frankness and fun is drive them up a wall. I decided to get the thing out in the open, the way Eaton would. Here is approximately what I told them on several occasions, until my advisers told me I'd better cut it out: "I can't understand you. From the outside, you fellows represent the brilliant leaders in business and industry. You are powerful men and you represent powerful men. But you are almost saying that if Cyrus Eaton becomes involved at all in city government, there would be nothing you powerful men could do." Oh, my. They almost trampled each other to be first to deny
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they had any fear of Eaton. It was just that Eaton was not the "kind of person" they wanted involved in city government. I had to ask them what in the world they thought Cyrus Eaton would want with the city of Cleveland. What did we have that he could be interested in? Of course I knew perfectly well that it was a simple fear, born, in many cases, of the talk of their fathers. The fear came out of the old family transactions in Cleveland, in the baronial days when there were no rules, regulations or laws and it was always a question of who was the strongest, smartest, most powerful man. Far too often for their comfort, Cyrus Eaton had won. One of the main things I learned from Eaton was their rule -- unwritten but as rigid as a fist -- against getting involved publicly on issues. That is the rule for the power structure, the business community, those very private men at the tops of our businesses and industries. They couldn't afford to fight Eaton in the public arena because they do too many things the public must not know; their deceptions, their intrigues, their dealings with each other must stay private. They considered Eaton a traitor: he knew all this only too well and yet went on to expose them. Eaton is a confirmation of my belief that a man's knowledge of right and wrong is the child of his experience. If you want to judge about right or wrong you have to have been there yourself, taken your own risks and positions. This is an awkward truth for a father to pass on to his children, perhaps, but that is why it is an important one -- awkward, brittle, dangerous. As my talks with Eaton drew on, my own life was changing; by the summer of 1967 I knew City Hall was mine for the taking. Eventually, I would have to take positions that flew in the face of public opinion, I would have to make people learn things they wanted to ignore, I would have to make them understand what had to be done and the price they would have to pay. Eaton's example was a help to me. Out of our relationship grew a confidence that a man can take an independent position and win. But also that castigation and vilification will come to any man
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who tries to do something that he thinks is important but that is inconsistent with what powerful special interests want. It was a curious chemistry and an odd luck that brought Eaton and me together at that important time in my life; although the worlds we moved in were vastly different, he was my kind of guy. But I have always moved easily across social lines that usually divide people and keep them from each other. I was formed by many forces. If I have been a lawyer, politician and TV anchorman, I am still a kid from the public housing projects and never forget it. I learned important lessons from Eaton, even through his cool, Europeanized sophistication and crisp grooming. But twenty years earlier, when I was twenty-one, I had the honor of learning about the realities of politics from John O. Holly, a greasy haired, short, very black, homely man from Alabama who had successfully practiced confrontation politics in Cleveland a generation before anybody ever heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Holly was one of the most remarkable men I have known. His fame never went beyond Ohio, but he was a hero to our black community in the late 1930's when I was a kid growing up. They didn't call it black pride then, but if there was ever black consciousness and pride in Cleveland, it came through John Holly. It is hard for people now to appreciate how extraordinary a phenomenon he was. He came along at a time when Negroes completely rejected any leadership from within. To be black-complexioned even minimized your mobility within the ghetto; the Negro community, with its churches and social groups, was as strictly hieratic as the brahmin structure of Boston. The black politicians of that time -- and this is still true for most -- learned only to get themselves insinuated into the white party apparatus. They had political expertise, but they never questioned their minority status, nor did they question being mere beneficiaries of the system rather than entrepreneurs in their own right. Other than Holly, none of them had that extra dimension it took to understand a mass politics that ignores ward lines. Even later,
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when younger men with supposedly new understanding came along, they too saw politics as an arena for personal aggrandizement and ended up in the same kind of subordinate status within the party system that choked off their predecessors. Curiously, the Democrats and the Republicans were quite different in the way they worked their Negroes. A black Democratic councilman, for instance, was convinced by the party leaders that he could not go beyond the ward lines of his black neighborhood. The Republicans had a different discipline, for, I think, three reasons. For one thing, Republicans tended to function at a higher level, intellectually, than Democrats. And, being an elitist and therefore minority party, they hung together more easily. Finally, the Republicans were the ones who owned things in town, they determined what was going to happen, so they were not threatened by having Negroes on countywide tickets. From the late 1880's until 1962, when I was elected to the General Assembly, there was almost always a black Republican legislator from Cuyahoga County, but no black Democrats, even though most Negroes are Democrats. There were those ironic effects. In 1959, a man named Clarence Sharpe, a Republican, ran for county commissioner. He carried the vote in prosperous white suburbs like Shaker Heights and Lakewood and lost in the black ghetto. His own people defeated him, not because they didn't like him, but because he was a Republican. In such a system a man like John Holly was almost unthinkable. Though lacking in formal education and ignorant of history, Holly understood that real power was in the hands of the man who could put the people together. In the 1930's he organized sit-ins and boycotts and took over an absolute leadership that had all the recognized black leaders following him. Holly took on the local giants, the utility companies, and won. He put together the little guys, the Negro masses, for an exercise in confrontation politics and had clout. He raised the consciousness of Clevelanders about rights and the sheer wrongness of men and women paying utility bills to companies where they couldn't get jobs. Holly not only accomplished that, he formed a virtual union of the
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employed Negroes. It was called the Future Outlook League. It worked simply enough. Holly went to every store owner. The owner was told to hire Negroes or else he would be boycotted. Then whenever a black man got a job in that store, he had to belong to the Future Outlook League. So throughout the black community by 1940 every place had someone black working in it, and all these workers were dues-paying members of the league. So Holly was supported by his own people, and that made him independent. That was the single most important ingredient: self-sufficiency. Nobody could touch him. When John Holly put it all together, the black aristocracy, the lawyers and doctors and schoolteachers, had no choice but to follow him. The white and black politicians and anyone else who depended on Negroes had to follow. It is a good thing the flush of victory brought with it so much pride, because it is disconsoling to realize that he had to force those black leaders to come up as much as he forced the whites to back down. It used to be marvelous to go into Holly's office and see those old newspaper clippings on his wall. There was one with a picture taken after Holly was released from jail -- he'd been arrested during a sit-in -- and it shows Holly, Call & Post editor William O. Walker and City Councilman Lawrence Payne standing on the steps of the jail. What you see in their faces is pride. It's the same kind of feeling some of the black councilmen in Cleveland had after my victory as mayor. For those four years I was in office, the councilmen and other elected black officials had an independence from the party machinery they had never contemplated. It was not until 1948 that I really got to know Holly and learn some lessons from him. I was twenty-one I'd been in the Army during the days immediately after the war and then returned to finish high school and graduated in 1947. I got involved with the Young Progressives, the young people's group of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party. At that same time I had become friends with a man named Bert Washington, who had been thrown out of his post-office job for alleged involvement with the Communist Party. Bert was a local casualty of the Senator Joe
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McCarthy witch hunts of the time. We in the Young Progressives spent long hours with Bert Washington arguing the comparative merits of socialism and capitalism. And we'd all go to all the political meetings, especially when a speaker for Wallace or for Harry Truman would appear. We'd go to those meetings and harass the speakers for Truman and generally raise hell or get into intense discussions with the young people who were for Truman. It was through Bert Washington I met Paul Robeson. Paul made several trips into Cleveland campaigning for Wallace. After the rally, a small group would meet with Robeson at Bert's. There was this tall, imposing and yet gentle man, who filled the room with his presence, would talk at length of the nationwide effort to rally the workingman behind Wallace. He softly talked about the long labor struggle, the deaths, imprisonment and economic and social ostracism of those committed to raising the level of the working poor. Paul Robeson's lessons and example heavily influenced my philosophy of government and the positions I later took with organized labor. At the same time I was going through the exhilaration of this more intellectual approach to government, I was learning the hard basics of politics from John Holly. Holly was travelling around Ohio putting together the Federated County Democrats of Ohio for Lausche. Frank J Lausche was running fore his second term as governor. Holly's job was to organize the black Democrats for his campaign. I went to Holly for a job, and he said, "I need somebody to drive my car." So Wallace Connors, a friend of mine, and I drove Holly around the state. As we'd go down the highway, I'd be asking Holly all sorts of questions. Holly loved to talk, anyway, and he was more than happy to show off his know-how, which was considerable. How do you get to the people of Steubenville? He would tell of such-and-such a leader there he knew about, and about a woman in town whom Holly had known for fifteen years and who was close to the leader, and a man who working in the Highway Department who got his job during Lausche's first term as governor. It was like that with any town. And then when we'd get into
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a town, Connors and I would serve them while they were meeting. If we didn't bring liquor with us, we'd go out and get liquor and some setups and then serve them. So we would always be in the room where they were talking. We heard the details of how to put together a local chapter of a campaign organization: who should go for the money, who would see to it that they got a storefront for headquarters, whom you should watch out for in town, who was for you, and who only seemed to be with who was working against you. This was an approach he could take in a town like Dayton, for instance, where he was working with C. J. McLin, Sr., an old, established black politician. It was different in a town like Lima, smaller and more rural, where there was no established leadership and no organization. He would have to put it together, and in those cases you would hear a lot of threats, telling people who had low-level jobs in local government they would lose their jobs, and telling others they could get a job if they worked on the campaign. All this time I would be asking Holly who was so-and-so and how had he gotten to be this and that. Holly's responses and the actual experience of being with him as he put together a state-wide political machine were my primary-level education in politics. These cumulative experiences taught me to be a hardheaded realist in most ways; as one who took to politics as a duck does to water, I quickly developed a sure eye and an ability to sense the other man's bottom line. Such things are necessary for political success. And yet that success is hollow without commitment to some social goal that carries a man beyond his own petty concerns. This is the paradox of political reality: the mainstream (what most people do most of the time) is a flowing system for mediating petty concerns, and the man who tampers with it does so at his peril; whenever he tries to divert its energies for the purposes of the disenfranchised, the poor, he finds himself on the wrong side of the floodgates. Underneath all the high talk, the campaign promises, the idealist theories, politicians are mostly interested in perpetuating their privileged positions. No matter how well a man
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understands this, no matter how hard he is, if he fights for the have-nots he will find himself alienated from most of his fellows, and they will do their level best to wear them down, to break him. He may, if he is good enough or sharp enough or powerful enough, win some particular and even important victories. But eventually, he will be driven out. Cyrus Eaton may have an empire of his own, but to his colleagues he is a pariah. When the energies of the Future Outlook League began to dissipate, Holly's independence began to crumble. The traditional politicians were able to break him and bring him into their fold. Robeson left the country. I am writing this book.
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