Power and the Poor
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union POWER AND THE POOR BY RICHARD J.MARGOLIS Iwant to tell you about Paul Well-stone's remarkable narrative, How the Rural Poor Got Power (University of Massachusetts Press, 227...
...Olivia," I said, "explain this to me...
...But the pandemonium continued...
...In the center of the ballroom I spotted an acquaintance, Olivia, a black woman from Rochester, New York...
...Some came to meeting after meeting to speak out, though the [OEO] forum guaranteed failure...
...the county welfare office, the local community action program, the public housing authority...
...Then, while we were spooning our individual fruit compotes, Shriver mounted the podium, flashed his gleaming white cuffs and began to speak...
...they even promised to install chairs for the elderly in distribution centers...
...but when finally they pulled themselves together and struck back, the response of the Great Society was to cave in instantly...
...It had to keep winning in order to keep growing-an impossible treadmill...
...It was at this disappointing juncture (1966) that the late Walter Reuther, ever the optimist, pried loose $1 million from the United Auto Workers treasury and used it to indulge an old ambition-the piecing together of a national coalition consisting of well-intentioned liberals and ill-used poor people...
...Well-stone, a young, ebullient political scientist at Carleton College in North-field, Minnesota, has found some red-hot embers beneath the ashes of the Great Society...
...Not even the Chamber of Commerce could be expected to win all its battles, much less a scraggly, underfinanced coalition of poor people and local do-gooders...
...Their first real opportunity came in late 1972, when the county commissioners had to decide whether to continue the commodities food program they were administering or switch to food stamps...
...they were outwaited by a system in possession of all the weaponry: the press, the law, the bureaucracy...
...Some were just looking for encouragement and support to survive a cruel and disappointing life...
...This was an enormous victory," notes Wellstone...
...OBRC used the occasion to publicly scold the commission for the way it was running its commodities program: The food was inadquate and there was only one distribution center for the entire county...
...Thirty cents, Lord," my table-mate stage-whispered...
...It is the story of an Alinsky-style group of white poor people in southern Minnesota, who for a few brief moments managed to get their hands on the right bureaucratic levers-levers that governed the flow of food stamps and welfare payments...
...Someone else cried, "Hey, Sarge, how come you killed CDGM...
...Lord," he pleaded, "look kindly upon your suffering children in the fields, who are forced to chop cotton for only 60 cents an hour...
...Smiling, she surveyed the madding crowd...
...and the word came down from the White House that the party was over: Henceforth the War Against Poverty would genuflect to power while giving only a reflexive nod to MFP...
...The OBRC is no more...
...That is why the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) kept doling out a shiny new commodity called Maximum Feasible Participation (MFP), Federal jargon for allowing the poor a voice in politicial decisions affecting their welfare...
...What the early War Against Poverty did-with yeoman help from Saul Alinsky, Cesar Chavez, Myles Hor-ton, and Martin Luther King Jr.-was give poor people the courage and wherewithal to challenge smugly repressive local establishments: Headstart parents had a chance to assess, and berate, local educators...
...People began to let their memberships lapse...
...With a small grant from the national United Church of Christ, Well-stone and four others (a welfare mother, a Headstart mother and two college students) started blowing on embers...
...by 1970-or 1975 at the very latest-all poverty in America would be banished...
...The organization fought back as best it could...
...The tots ran amok, squealing delightedly and smearing jam on desks and walls Oam today for a change...
...The poor came fully prepared to participate in a maximally feasible manner...
...Yet, as Wellstone points out, success was also the organization's Achilles heel...
...What's happening here...
...It took place in Washington at the International Inn, a hotel with a plastic-domed swimming pool shadowing the circular driveway out front...
...but to poor people in the mid-'60s initials like MFP and OEO carried their own talismanic magic: They were open sesames to the good life...
...Members staged a "five o'clock raid" on the welfare office, unleashing their children on the astonished bureaucrats...
...Nothing builds confidence like success...
...She just wanted to set the record straight...
...Worse, as the conflict escalated, the Establishment grew more skillful at suppression...
...But give me a moment first to sift those ashes...
...Poor people...
...Someone shouted, "What about the grant you just cancelled in Buffalo...
...It was clearly an uncomfortable moment for those sitting in local saddles...
...By the time they got done with us, Reuther's dream lay in rubble and few of the middle-class reformers present would ever again sentimentalize their notions of the poor...
...The strategy was to build an organization around conflict issues," and to choose fights that the fledgling group stood a fair chance of winning...
...The "one good thing about being poor," an elderly OBRC member tells Wellstone, is that "you can't be sued-So you might as well speak up...
...It is easy to mock MFP in retrospect, as Daniel P. Moynihan did a few years ago-coolly and, I think cruelly-In Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding...
...These turned out to be the agencies entrusted by a relatively affluent citizenry to keep the poor in their place-that is, out ot sight...
...Unaccustomed to criticism from the poor, the commissioners muttered and demurred, but ultimately gave in to all demands...
...The welfare board, meanwhile, launched a series of midnight raids on welfare clients with OBRC connections...
...People in the back of the room began to laugh...
...Dead and grimy as they are, they once were flaming dreams...
...The idea was less to redistribute wealth than to redistribute power...
...they feared retaliation...
...It happened at the ballroom luncheon, where Sargent Shriver, still the War Against Poverty's dapper general, was scheduled to deliver what the conference leadership was pleased to call "a major address...
...It wasn't long before everyone was shouting at once...
...The waiting time for food was sometimes six hours...
...welfare mothers learned how to bone up on the law and then to demand their rights...
...They were never really defeated...
...it was a collection of poor rural citizens who for a brief moment in the '70s summoned the courage and optimism to challenge their "betters...
...But let Patti Fritz, an OBRC member whom Wellstone calls "the resident cynic," have the final word: "This shit about putting the power back in the hands of the people-that is ridiculous because they do have it...
...the welfare director promised to call off his midnight raids...
...They have to be told they have it, to see it and use it...
...community action leaders found the strength to press city and state officials for a broad array of previously withheld services, from health care to housing...
...I knew early on that something was not quite right when the woman sitting next to me-a black sharecropper from Alabama -audibly corrected the minister midway through his invocation...
...an all-black Head Start program in Mississippi...
...Like so many of its predecessors in the '60s, OBRC was never a solid institution...
...At the outset of the War Against Poverty, helping poor people to speak up was close to the heart of the matter...
...The local newspaper, having initially made a tactical error by airing all OBRC grievances, soon imposed what amounted to a news blackout...
...The thing is to get the fear out of little people...
...Congress passed hasty amendments giving mayors and governors veto power over certain high-flying, MFP-winged antipoverty projects, including OEO's crucial legal assistance program...
...She was standing in her stocking feet atop a table loaded with goblets and dishes...
...I attended that conference, along with dozens of other reporters, hundreds of bureaucrats and thousands of poor people...
...Poor Shriver...
...Some stopped coming to meetings altogether...
...In Rice County, Minnesota, a few years ago the folk again got loose...
...They have always had it...
...had forced the county welfare board into positive reform of the food commodity program...
...Its message is that the brave hopes we poverty warriors kindled in the hearts of poor people during the '60s continue to glow in the '70s...
...It's very simple," she answered...
...who where disillusioned with the OEO program...
...Their visible enemies, as always, were the people...
...The folk got loose...
...there was much milling and yelling...
...tight-lipped and red-faced, he departed with his retinue...
...We won't understand the achievement of the Organization for a Better Rice County (OBRQ-that fragile institution to which Wellstone has played both Moses and Boswell-without facing up to the failure of John F. Kennedy's War Against Poverty, continued by Lyndon B. Johnson...
...I milled, too, taking notes as I wandered...
...Somewhere along the way it lost its momentum and mystique-Its ability both to enlist the poor and to frighten the affluent...
...States of the Union POWER AND THE POOR BY RICHARD J.MARGOLIS Iwant to tell you about Paul Well-stone's remarkable narrative, How the Rural Poor Got Power (University of Massachusetts Press, 227 pp., $12.50...
...Invariably, the enemies of the poor have world enough and time...
...As Wellstone tells it, there was "a core of poor people...
...Some were aides in various service programs, paid less than poverty wages by the antipoverty agency...
...There would be several more successes, and with each triumph the organization would attract new members...
...The great war was going splendidly, he assured us...
...Some were welfare mothers seeking relief from harassment by the county welfare department...
...Reuther and his deputies, most of them recent refugees from the OEO, named their invention the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty (CCAP), and after a year of desultory tuning up they got around to calling a national conference...
Vol. 61 • May 1978 • No. 11
