Stop Me Before I Crusade Again
Gaines, Thomas A.
Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl. —Ambrose Bierce I f zeal is the essential ingredient of the crusader, I'll...
...They would find them out, they said, by breaking into homes to see what books were there...
...When I later retested, I was able to make reservations for both Bernstein and Painter-Jones...
...It was ignored, and we went public with an ad announcing the challenge in the Norwalk Hour, a local daily...
...I took petitions door to door...
...I asked real estate people to search out a house for the Robinsons...
...The president, with marvelous irrelevance, referred the newsman to the libel laws...
...Did the Jackie Robinson case raise some doubts that integration hurts property values...
...When my conscience experiences guilt overload, I become a fire-eater, a dragon slayer, a veritable St...
...Not, that is, until I gathered the sneaker set together to challenge the VFW to a debate on the Bill of Rights...
...My primal juices flow intermittently, with long quiescent periods during which the world stumbles along without benefit of my counsel...
...I strode into this caldron waving telegrams denying a room to a Mr...
...I am, in short, a sometime crusader...
...Not a squeak of opposition was heard...
...There was, for instance, the Jackie Robinson caper...
...I enlisted the local ministers and invoked the names of town leaders...
...Richard Simon, wife of the publisher...
...Ambrose Bierce I f zeal is the essential ingredient of the crusader, I'll never be one of the best...
...2) little hope of remedy...
...This is where the crusade took on a life of its own...
...the people are conservative—high collars...
...Things had gone so smoothly, it was enough to make a self-respecting knight-errant seek another line of work...
...Simon brought the Robinsons to Stamford, and they purchased a house where they lived for many years...
...In the face of universal opprobrium, the National Americanism Chairman of the VFW disavowed the whole thing...
...I look longingly upon naturalists who are content to observe wildlife, not save it...
...If you don't have doors slammed in your face, you're not involved in a genuine crusade...
...My motion to cease this discriminatory policy was met with the suggestion that I be ushered from the room...
...Did the Norwalk witch-hunt help a tad in the demise of McCarthyism...
...To qualify as a crusade, a cause must have three elements: 1) A glaring injustice...
...We do-gooders are ever fearful that our goals will be reached without us...
...Did any of these campaigns have a wider impact, a long-term effect than their immediate missions...
...and 3) potential leverage—an impact broader than the immediate goal...
...And this day, the stockholders were exercised over a rumor that the dividend might be passed...
...The local VFW chairman looked into the camera and, without a blink, proclaimed to forty million viewers that he could recognize a Communist by the expression on his face...
...The board room is conservative—walnut paneling...
...The campaign lasted for weeks with much uninformed clatter about property values...
...If you can get a perpetrator to deny malfeasance, he will stop doing it...
...George...
...One day, I received a phone call from Mrs...
...Realtors told him, "You wouldn't be happy here...
...While reading through a railroad company's annual report, I found that I was a part owner of its subsidiary, the Split Rock Lodge...
...but the truth is that most of my crusades didn't fly...
...It was then that I learned a fact essential to serious crusading...
...At a news conference, President Eisenhower was asked his opinion of the "Norwalk Witch-hunt...
...Ed Murrow brought his CBS television crew to cover the story...
...249 After resting a while, I took a firm grip on my lance and was off again...
...anthropologists who study race, not racism...
...The last person they wanted to hear from was a young malcontent complaining about one of their profitable holdings...
...You haven't experienced conservative ambience until you have attended a railroad gathering...
...Was the railroad meeting of long ago a tiny step toward the present-day shareholders' movement to influence corporate social policy...
...The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) chapter in our neighboring town of Norwalk announced a campaign to search out and bring to bay all the Communists in town...
...I put them to work contacting the Robinsons who, by this time discouraged, had not responded to overtures from a broker...
...I resolved to redress this inequity and charged off to the annual stockholders' meeting in Philadelphia...
...Neighbors who once worried about resale values couldn't wait to invite them to dinner...
...those whose chest cavities contain unbleeding hearts...
...She had novelist Laura Hobson (Gentlemen's Agreement) on the extension, and these worthy ladies lit into me for not including them in my effort...
...Though I prefer the state of apathy, I am capable of feeling outrage, and outrage is the requisite emotion of the crusader...
...One can only hope...
...Mrs...
...This one would have repercussions all the way to the White House...
...Fear in those days was almost palpable...
...In the ensuing discussion, the president insisted that discrimination was not practiced, and my motion was overwhelmingly defeated...
...I envy those who feel no need to improve society: the ambitious who want to make it, but not make it right...
...It was the first entry in my crusading resume...
...Angered that this could happen in my own town, I went into my crusader mode...
...WHAT OF A CRUSADE'S THIRD ESSENTIAL ELEMENT, leverage...
...the drinks are conservative—unboozed punch...
...Of dozens contacted, only two cooperated...
...It was in the middle 1950s at the height of the McCarthy period...
...A story about our challenge appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and, within days, it was news all over the country...
...An effort like this must gain a kicky title or it doesn't wash as a crusade...
...This famous Pennsylvania resort hostelry was noted for its refusal to accept Jews...
...I choose to dwell on the few that had a beginning, a middle, and an end, preferably a favorable end...
...Painter-Jones (also me...
...It all started when a local newspaper reported that houses for sale in Stamford were inaccessible to the famous ballplayer because he was black...
...My first youthful crusade was a model of the type...
...Bernstein (me), then reserving one for a Mr...
...The Split Rock Lodge policy had been quietly changed...
...The Norwalk patriots then denied there had ever been a campaign and retreated in disarray...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
