|
9 Two Bulls
Cleveland's City Council is an anachronism in the second half of the twentieth century. No other major city in the country has such an unwieldy legislative body. Unwieldy isn't the word, it is corruptive, it is crippling. For quite honorable and well-intentioned, even liberal reasons, the city fathers in the first part of the century redesigned Cleveland's Council to give clear representation to the multitude of ethnic communities. One of the first of the major industrial cities in the Midwest, Cleveland grew most during the time when the Eastern European countries were the source of most of America's immigrants. As a result, the city became a quilt of extremely distinct neighborhoods, almost enclaves, each with its own ethnic character. The Council was set up to have thirty-three representatives for the city's 800,000 persons, each councilman elected from a ward. Needless to say, the ward lines, drawn by the councilmen themselves, neatly marked off like-voting neighborhoods. This reached a point of absurdity in the decade before the U.S. Supreme Court's one-man, one-vote rulings went into real effect in 1970. Cleveland's thirty-three wards were so gerrymandered that some wards were more than twice the size of others. Now if this large body of councilmen served to mediate the city's ethnic
|
|
|
|
pluralism in the first half of the century, that function was certainly wrenched out of shape by the advent of a significantly large minority of blacks. When more than half of the councilmen are elected by small ethnic strongholds, each with its own neighborhood isolationism, and when they choose a strong leader as their president, it is easy to see what they can do to what the textbooks would call a strong-mayor form of government. So what I faced was a government of negative capability, which may be fine for a poet but is hell for an activist politician. Had I been satisfied to be a mere administrator or caretaker, as for twenty-five years the mayors who preceded me were, there would have been no trouble. But I wasn't satisfied with that and that was the trouble. The suburbanites would read the headlines about our feuds at City Hall and moan that if only Carl Stokes or Jim Stanton could get along, this city could really move ahead, that Stokes was blowing a great opportunity. How hopelessly naïve! For a mayor to govern, actually govern, he has to have political power over the councilmen. He has to be able to have some effect on whether they can get elected or re-elected, to grant or to withhold substantive favors, such things as new playgrounds and street paving. I was caught in a double bind. I had to use the limited patronage of City Hall to keep the black councilmen loyal to me and independent of the Council's own favor system. But, since most of the councilmen were elected from a small, ethnic, not to say racist base that I couldn't undermine, there was simply nothing I could hold over their heads. The Democratic Party apparatus certainly wasn't about to help. I had never fully realized how much power those men had. I had never wanted to be a councilman and I never understood why anyone else would. In all my campaigning -- and I believe I had more than the usual candidate's understanding of the issues -- I never pointed my finger at the Council. I accused the mayors. I was following in the tradition of others who also had failed to explain the role of the Council in the decline of Cleveland. I don't recall any mayor ever admitting the extraordinary power of the Council. With a strong leader who can further his own
|
|
|
|
interests by providing a measure of profit or political security, the Council becomes formidable. James V. Stanton was such a man. In 1963, when Stanton was elected to his second term as councilman, the leadership of the Council, President Jack P. Russell and Council Clerk Thad Fusco, were under attack by Press Editor Louis Seltzer. It was clear that Russell's machine was falling apart. Until Stanton came along, the white West Side councilmen were not organized. Stanton stepped into the power vacuum and put them together. Then he began a campaign of constant harassment at Russell from the floor of the Council. He forced a vote on every issues that could embarrass Russell. He was very effective, and he stood out in a body where the level or performance is routinely dismal. Stanton was greatly helped by a young Italian, Paul J. DeGrandis, a former councilman with keen organizational mind and sure knowledge of the tough byways of politics. But De Grandis had cast a vote against the Fair Housing Ordinance in 1961, and the black vote in his ward, though small, had been enough to defeat him and elect Michael Fatica. I had advised him against voting that way. I had known both men well. DeGrandis and I roomed together at a National Young Democrat convention. Fatica was an assistant prosecutor the same time I was. DeGrandis had first won for Council in 1957 when Lowell Henry won. We shared campaign tips during that time and expanded our friendship. Henry had confided to me that he and some others had received five hundred dollars for their vote for president of City Council in 1958. That was not new. A favorite City Hall story was about the councilman who had been so tricky he had taken five hundred dollars from both sides; since it was a secret ballot, he figured neither side would know just how he voted. But neither side trusted him, and the agreed that each would have someone sit beside the councilman and make him expose his vote. It worked. One side got its money back, but didn't get his vote. Nothing's worse, the story goes, than a councilman who won't stay bought. In November 1963 Michael Fatica made the public charge
|
|
|
|
that Stanton had offered him a thousand dollars for his vote for the presidency in Stanton's struggle with Russell. The charges and Stanton's denial were front-page news. In December, Stanton's long time friend and fellow West Side Irishman, John T. Corrigan, the county prosecutor, subpoenaed Stanton to appear before the grand jury. On Christmas Eve the grand jury cleared Stanton of the bribery charge. He defeated Jack Russell and in January of 1964 was sworn in as president of the City Council. In February 1964 Michael Fatica was charged with soliciting and accepting a bribe in a liquor license transaction. Corrigan sent Fatica's case to the grand jury, and he was indicted. In December of that year he was found guilty of the charge. Later, I'll discuss Prosecutor Corrigan in greater detail. For a long time I was unable to understand how a West Side Irish kid could be as street-wise as Jim Stanton at such a young age-he was only thirty when he became council president. He had a sure political sense. He was shrewd and hard and he knew how to count votes; I mean he knew when not to call for a vote that would show any lack of support. Later, as mayor dealing with the Safety Department, I came to see the light. Jim Stanton was the son of a firemen. Police and firemen are good politicians who know how to take care of themselves. They learn how to deal for their own interests in the same way a professional politician does, and they have a similar view of the world. Stanton had also learned from James M. Carney, the developer, who had earlier served in the state legislature. Carney never lost his interest in politics. Stanton had been greatly helped by Carney in his bid for a Council seat and later for Council President. Stanton grew quickly into an effective and strong leader. He had the toughness that you need when you are trying to hold together a number of men, each with his own little fiefdom, and he quickly found the glue needed to hold the pieces together. He developed good relations with the media, both the editorial offices and the working press. He had a kind of bullying good humor and ebullience that appealed to reporters, and he had a black toady, Jack Oliver, who took the reporters out and fed |
|
|
|
them and bought them drinks. Stanton worked politics, he spread his base. He gave some black councilmen the same deals that Russell had given, and then he went one step further. He made Leo Jackson, for instance, chairman of the Urban Renewal Committee, giving him more power to negotiate with white business interests. Doing things like that brought Stanton enormous benefits; some people even thought of him as a liberal. It was a marvelous trade-off, because it was widely felt that Leo Jackson desperately wanted white approval. Meanwhile, Stanton's approach to legislation proved to be as anti-civil rights and conservative as that of previous Council presidents. Before the 1960s, such things weren't tested. But with the advent of the civil-rights movement, open-housing laws, gun-control laws, and equal-employment opportunity laws, the old white politics was shown up for what it was. In 1961, Stanton vote against a Cleveland Fair-housing ordinance. When fair-housing laws were being considered at the state level, and when the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Acts were pending in Congress, Stanton refused to allow the Council to pass resolutions memorializing Congress or the state legislature to pass them. The Council was forever passing resolutions on Birdfeed Day, Like Your Dog Day and all sorts of nonsense, but as soon as a civil-rights issue came up he would have it referred to committee to die and never be heard of again. In this respect Stanton was worse than any other white Council president had been -- because he was brighter and knew how to do it better. As we began to prepare for the 1965 campaign, it was clear that for the first time Stanton's interests and mine were on a collision course. Stanton wanted to run for mayor. But he couldn't convince his backers to support such a move. Carney and the other men behind the Democratic Party in Cleveland liked having him in the Council and running the deal. In his two years as president he had solidified his leadership, and he was useful as a whip over Locher. The big guys wanted to keep him where he was. Later, after he found he could not put it together and I was in the race, he withdrew and supported Locher. This was
|
|
|
|
a facility Stanton had that I always marveled at. He would frequently, out of either design or impetuosity, throw out the bitter and personal criticisms of others in public life, get all the benefit from it, and then reverse his field and support the same men without even generating a public discussion of his perfidy. He was very effective on Locher's behalf with councilmen and in speaking to groups on the West Side. He even put together a group of most of the black councilmen against me. By the end of the campaign, Stanton and I emerged as the two young politicians obviously on their way somewhere. We had the opposite philosophies of government: he represented the traditional politics, and I represented those fighting for change. Later he was to become the symbol and voice of the white community in its reaction to my stewardship of the city's affairs. It is in that light that our one-on-one conflicts must be understood. Our personal conflict was incidental to the greater function he served. In January of 1967, Stanton made the unequivocal declaration that he could not support Ralph Locher for mayor. He began cutting Locher right and left for the failures of the administration, many of which were as much due to the City Council's stalling on legislation as they were to Locher's slack administration. I was watching him -- he and I understand each other perffectly. I had a two-way shot. I was still guiding my lawsuit through appeal, hoping to have the congressional district redrawn so that I could run for Congress, but I was also keeping my options open to run for mayor. Stanton was busy generating stores in the newspaper about his interest in running for mayor, stories in which he was glowingly referred to as an example of the fresh, young Kennedy-style politician. He had copied the Kennedy speech mannerisms and the finger-pointing style. But finally it had to be a question of who had the guts, and that was Stanton's continuing failure in dealing with me. He would get himself into a position that had to lead to a confrontation, yet at the final moment he was unable to take the final step. He filed to run for mayor. The day he filed I made the remark
|
|
|
|
that there were only two major candidates, Ralph Locher and me. Stanton told a reporter, "Stokes is right. There are only two candidates." Two days later he withdrew. That meant two things to me. It meant he was going to throw his weight behind Locher, and it meant that he didn't have the guts to go out there and try to win the white base, take it away from Locher and beat me. Under the veneer and the gloss, he was thinking timidly like the rest of them. He wouldn't gamble the loss of his Council presidency for the big job. So he missed his chance. And it was a great chance. Most of the white votes I got would certainly have gone to Stanton. They came to me because Locher was so patently unacceptable. I didn't need that margin running against Locker and the inept Frank Celeste, but against a really tough candidate like Stanton it would have been a different ball game. He would have gotten the newspaper endorsements, the Democratic Party and would have been more vigorous, the political workers within organized labor would have been much more zealous. I won because Locher was such a hopeless cause that nobody could whip up a strong anti-Stokes movement. Stanton was a tough guy, but he didn't have that final measure of guts. After the election, he came to my office. "Mayor," he began (he always called me "Mayor"), "I want to cooperate. I don't want to be mayor, I like being president of City Council." I came back to him with the same bullshit. I told him that, working together, we could turn the town around. And, frankly, we could have. I had a considerable degree of latitude at that time, and no Council president in recent memory had the extraordinary control of his membership that Jim Stanton had. For the first six or seven months, everything was fine. It was the honeymoon period when everybody was excited about what they were doing. Nobody was sniping, the media were giving us great support for everything, there was a fine spirit of cooperation all across the city. I had just put together a group of businessmen to take a look at the city's finances, and appointed James Carney as it chairman.
|
|
|
|
In 1966 the Council had enacted a one-half percent income tax that enabled me, the next year, to run on a campaign pledge of no new taxes. When I got to the Hall and found out how ignorant I had been about the city's true fiscal condition, I did what I had to do. I didn't mind shifting my position on the tax issue. I had known the city was in trouble, but had thought we would be able to make it for a while before I would have to go for an increase in the tax. I found, however, that things were worse than I had feared. We needed the money right away. Jim Carney, once he discovered the true needs of the city, went to Stanton for me and asked him to support me and get the Council to pass a half percent increase. By state law, the Council had the authority to take it up to a full one percent. And Stanton was very helpful. When he anted something to get through the Council, it got through. When he didn't, it didn't. A few days after Carney talked to him, Stanton cornered me in an alcove just off my office. He said, "Listen, I've got this ordinance I'd like to take through Monday night under suspension, providing for an increase in the taxicab fares." I said, "Well, gee, Jim, I don't know, you better let me take a look at it." "Well, what you're going to find," he said, "is that Cleveland's fare are lower than other cities," and he went on to name a few cities, "and unless we do this, they're going to have to cut out some of the areas we serve." Now, as I'm listening to him, what I'm trying to figure out is Stanton's relationship to McBride, the man who owns the cab company. And I have to think about my own need to get the income tax increase passed. Finally, I had a repugnance to any fare increase, because one of the things I had planned to attack was the cab company's monopoly. As Stanton is talking to me, giving his version of the cab company's needs, these things are going through my head. The upshot was that I said, "Okay Jim, go ahead." It always happened like that. I would sit down with Jim and talk about the things we needed for the city's welfare, the substantive
|
|
|
|
things, and Jim would sit there agreeing. Any time I came up with important legislation, important enough for me to talk to him about it, he would come back within a day or two with some small, specific piece of legislation that would help some special interest of his. Well, that's politics, and we moved along. People said, "why don't Carl Stokes and Jim Stanton get along?" We did get along. Stanton's law practice grew and the city got needed legislation. At this point I should note the occurrence of a calamitous event, the details of which I will discuss more fully at a later time. On Tuesday, July 23,1968, in the northeast area of Cleveland called Glenville, a band of young, black self-styled revolutionaries under the leadership of Fred Ahmed Evans, engaged in a shoot-out with members of the Cleveland Police Department. During the course of that evening, three white policemen and six black civilians were killed by gunfire --three of the blacks were termed suspects in the shoot-out by the police. Twelve policemen, most of them white, were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. The aftermath of that night was to haunt and color every aspect of my administration the next three years. Glenville killed much of my public support and gave the non-supporters a chance to emerge from the woodwork. This was especially true in the City Council. The criticism of the administration escalated immediately after the shot-out. Jim Stanton came down on us for not consulting him when we made out decision to keep the white policemen out of the area. The fact was, Stanton was around all day as we were trying to decide whether to pull out the white policemen. He was in our offices twice. He would go over to one of my aides and say, "Well, I guess everything is under control. Anything I can do, let me know," and then he would walk out. He never asked to see me. Now, I understand what he was doing. He'd come over and do that and then walk back over to the City Council side of the building and raise hell about how we were ruining the town. His face livid with rage, he's curse and cast about in a manner to suggest he was almost out of control of his senses, Of course
|
|
|
|
I had seen him several times like that, when he came over to the outer office of the administration. Somehow, that side of Jim Stanton never was presented to the public by the media. It was after Glenville that Jim Stanton turned the councilmen loose. We had to face them every Monday night, when the Council meets. The meetings are televised live on educational television, and the mayor and the entire cabinet attend. The administrative branch has the right to attend, not the responsibility, but there has grown a tradition that the mayor and the cabinet members would respond to questions from the councilmen. After Stanton turned them loose, those councilmen began to use that public meeting to indulge in vitriolic and malicious attacks. These attacks became so bitter and demeaning that I ultimately broke with tradition, rules and the media's delight with the weekly spectacle, and ordered my cabinet members not to attend council meetings. Through the fall and into 1969, Stanton and I battled each other over every major issue that came up. One columnist described us as two young bulls with the city as the herd. I was trying to put together seventeen councilmen for a majority and couldn't do it. He was trying to put together twenty-two councilmen for a two-thirds majority vote that could override my veto, and he couldn't do it. I had an unshakable block of eight Democratic votes, plus four Republicans, plus an occasional extra vote when either conviction or a favor brought someone into the fold. The effect was a legislative situation that blocked all progress. If I didn't approve of a Stanton bill, I could veto it, know he could not muster the twenty-two votes to override me. But I couldn't work up a seventeen-vote majority to pass the bill he didn't like. We both had purely negative capabilities. In this manner was the city governed. The single most important legislative accomplishment of my four years as mayor was enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Ordinance. That law required any firm doing business with the city to prove to our satisfaction that it had an active and specific program for recruiting, hiring, and upgrading
|
|
|
|
persons from minority groups. Of course that meant mainly Negroes and Puerto Ricans. The new law meant over $3 million for minorities in jobs previously denied them. Getting such a law passed by our racist City Council was, on the surface, a noble undertaking. In fact, though, it depended on the curious coming together of one man's naïve idealism, another's hustle, and my eye for the latter's greed. It was just before Christmas 1969. I had just been reelected, and all the fine rhetoric of the campaign had gone to the media's collective head; just about everybody thought Stanton and I were getting along. We were facing the last Council meeting before the winter recess. This is a kind of wastebasket session, in which a multitude of pending bills are rushed through, more less without examination. A perfect time to get through a bill that you don't care to have your opponents scrutinize too closely. And Stanton had his own little pet, which we knew perfectly well. For some months, he had been trying to engineer a zoning change in an area that had once been the city's prize park. Called Euclid Beach Park and fronting on Lake Erie at the city's far eastern tip, the property had held a well-built amusement complex of rides, gazebos, kiosks and concessions, as well as a tree-filled picnic area and promenade along the beach. The park complex had deteriorated over the years and was clearly ready for a new purpose. Stanton had one. He had been trying to get the land rezoned to permit high-rise apartments to be built. We didn't know, in the administration, specifically how Stanton was connected to this potential development, but it hardly made sense for him as a West Side councilman to take such concern in rezoning land in an eastern ward represented by another councilman. I had the Zoning Board disapprove it. This stopped the project cold. To reverse the decision of the Zoning Board, he'd have to get twenty-two votes in the Council. He couldn't get them. I had the lever I needed against him. About a week before the pre-Christmas Council meeting, I told all my cabinet members to pick out pending bills whose passage they felt was vital to city needs, We ended up with a
|
|
|
|
list of twelve priority bills that had been hidden in various Council committees. The list of twelve bills included one truly controversial issue, gun control, but most of the others had not provoked much public discussion. I looked the list over and it seemed all right. "is that it?" I asked. "What about EEO, Mr. Mayor?" It was a question from my law director, Clarence "Buddy" James. Buddy was no politician. It never occurred to him that an equal-employment-opportunity law was a hopeless cause in our situation. I knew, and just about everybody around me knew, that we had no way of getting such a bill passed. But Buddy didn't know it and he had had it drawn up and submitted to the Council, where it had stuck. I looked at Buddy then and I thought of all that and I thought of what I knew Stanton wanted. "Damn right," I said. Clearly it was trading time. I called Stanton, and we agreed to have dinner at Marie Schreiber's Tavern. I told him I could get my councilmen to vote for his Euclid Beach Park rezoning if he could get his majority to pass my thirteen bills. He looked the list over. Gun control stopped him. His leadership was strong over the Council majority, possibly the strongest in the town's history, but it wasn't that strong. He said he would need time to present a gun-control issue. I agreed to that. He committed himself to passage of the remaining bills. I then explained to my councilmen, before the meeting, that they were to vote for the Euclid Beach legislation even though I had had the Zoning Board disapprove it. I told them what we were getting in the bargain. At the Council meeting that night, our EEO bill and the other legislation passed into law unanimously. I would be willing to bet that not one of those white councilmen voting for it had even read it. It is said that ours is a government of laws, not of men. I'll buy that. In the spring, Jack Russell told me that as long as the councilmen who supported me kept attending the Democratic caucus
|
|
|
|
meetings, Stanton had a club over them. The unit rule bound them to vote with the majority. There were twenty-seven Democrats, and the eight who comprised my bloc were always going to be outvoted by the Stanton people. Russell said that there only way I was going to be able to keep my base was to pull my councilmen out of the Stanton machine, where they were getting chewed up, and sustain them with the administration's sources -- patronage jobs they could spread around, street paving, extra care for their playgrounds, etc. This sort of thing had to be done once they pulled out of the Democratic caucus they would no longer be able to pull off the normal Council-dominated ventures, such as spot zoning changes. Russell know how this worked because Stanton had done it to him in 1963 when the young councilman formed his own rebel caucus as a prelude to taking the leadership away from Russell. But in that case, Stanton's caucus and the majority caucus were both white, and Stanton faced no danger in having the administration go after services in his ward because Mayor Locher too was white. The differences these men were having were "merely" political; it was in-group fighting that had no meaning to the community at large. But when I pulled my rebel caucus out, it was seen as a purely racial move, and Stanton was able to convincingly say I was polarizing the city. The city was polarized already, and there aren't degrees of polarization any more than there are degrees of pregnancy. In either case you either are or you are not, and it doesn't help the situation to try to blame men who show up long after the deed is done. My pulling out the rebel caucus only made visible the war that had been going on in the closed caucus meetings. Stanton would visit the newspaper editorial offices and deplore the terrible situation I was causing by this open opposition. It was impossible to fight against this sort of thing; there was never an issue to get your hands on, never a specific and public action on his part. He was engaging in a kind of political sniper fire. You keep getting wounded, but nobody can see where the shots are coming from. In any case, the eight members of the Stokes bloc pulled out and were immediately
|
|
|
|
labeled by the media as the "rebel caucus," and by one City Hall lawyer as the "Chicago Eight." At this point I began to maneuver legislation whenever I could, to require a two-thirds vote. I wanted to put off voting on legislation which would put me in a highly publicized position, until it meant a major test of Stanton's strength. So, when I could have the Planning Commission or some such administrative agency disapprove a bill on technical grounds, I would do it, because then the bill required two-thirds vote, which I knew Stanton could not put together. Most of these votes never came to the floor, but the people who were concerned knew they were there. As the months went by, Stanton's leadership was generally being chipped away. It was not that he did not have solid control of the majority; he certainly did. But when you have a certain power you reach a point where what you don't have becomes more important than what you do have. Stanton had his power, but we began to force people to focus on the power he didn't have-twenty-two votes. And the confidence in him began to wane. Finally, in October, less than a month before Stanton's certain election to Congress, I pulled it off. I had been waiting for, amount other things, the perfect legislation. I called a press conference and announced that for the first time since my election I was going to use my powers of veto. I knocked down three pieces of legislation and refused to sign two others. Of the three I vetoed, two were Council attempts to rezone areas to block public housing scheduled for Stanton's own ward and another West Side ward. His interests were clearly at stake. The third bill was an attempt by the Council to insert itself into the Board of Control, which made up of the mayor and his cabinet and which awards contracts once approval for the expenditures is given by the Council. Stanton had the worst tactical position possible. He was faced with issues that generated intense feelings, especially among his own constituents. He had to try to override my veto. Everybody knew what the issues between us were, and here we had obviously the test of his leadership. And
|
|
|
|
he knew perfectly well there was no way he could get twenty-two votes. He did what he had to do. He brought the issues up on the floor of Council. We did what we had been waiting to do. We voted them down. He lost. He couldn't get the votes. After that, a whole handful of men who had hoped to succeed him as Council president started sniping at him in the caucus meetings, and his internal control disintegrated rapidly. A point needs to be made about the war between us, The community at large, spurred on by the newspapers, adopted simple-minded interpretation that if only we would put our personalities and our vanities in the background and get along, the city could move ahead. The newspapers -- and I think particularly of the Plain Dealer's simplistically-minded Tom Vail, who in his "Publishers Column" harped on this theme and encouraged his readers to focus on the city's problems as the product of the personal feud between Stanton and me. This is typical of the establishment's refusal to accept responsibility for its own social barbarism. It doesn't take much intelligence to examine the issues over which Stanton and I fought and discover that each involved substantive, basic attempts on my part to bring reforms to provide services to the people who needed them most, the poor and the elderly. Stanton's position on these issues was inevitably to present the most reactionary opposition. I wanted public housing for the elderly and for poor people, black and white. Stanton fought me. I wanted a gun-control law to help us stop the weekly carnage that goes on in Cleveland. Stanton fought me. I wanted to use the actual and potential resources of the city of Cleveland to provide jobs for people who didn't have them. Stanton fought me. Even had we liked each other, as long as he chose to represent the interests of the haves while I was fighting for the need of the have-nots, we were doomed to collide.
|
|
Previous Chapter | CONTENTS | Next Chapter |
|