Why Lowenstein Lost: Ethnics, Crooks, and Carpetbaggers
Davis, Lanny J.
Why Lowenstein Lost: Ethnics, Crooks, and Carpetbaggers by Lanny J. Davis For all its new politics, the Democratic Party seems obsessed with its old coalition, with how to win back the...
...There is Italian, working-class, conservative Carroll Gardens and JewishWASP, radical-chic Brooklyn Heights...
...Even the most battle-seasoned veterans of past voter fraud experiences were amazed at what happened throughout the district on election day...
...It happens,” he said, “that Mr...
...NO, I do not,” said Lowenstein simply, to a chorus of boos...
...numerous voters were turned away because their “buff cards”-registration identification cardswere mysteriously missing, even though they had voted in the same place many times before, and delays and harassments were common...
...This deprived the organization of the “outsider” issue...
...There were so many outsiders that when a volunteer introduced himself one night as being “from right here in the 14th Congressional District of Brooklyn,” he got a standing ovation...
...After the meeting was held, Lowenstein put together an investigation team that came up with as many as 14,000 reported irregularities and over 4,000 cases of fraud-such as finagling the machine totals and obstructing people from voting...
...Italian Bushwick and black, or Puerto Rican Bushwick...
...A few days earlier, Kathleen Kennedy had appeared in the same place on behalf of McGovern, and Lowenstein had been barred from the platform...
...Although McGovern had a few kind words for Lowenstein, Lowenstein was later amazed to learn that McGovern had indicated to the press that he was “neutral” between Lowenstein and Rooney-“neutral” in a race between the man who had founded the Dump Johnson movement and organized the campuses against the war and one of the most militant hawks in the Congress, “neutral” between a man who supported McGovern himself for President, and a man who supported Wilbur Mills...
...There was much consternation among the McGovern-supporting Lowen’stein staff when news of McGovern’s neutrality arrived, but many could see the political sense to it...
...From Italian BushwickLowenstein 38, Rooney 255...
...Other than humanity, it is hard to find much common ground between Lowenstein and Rooney...
...Pesce ran strongly in liberal Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill neighborhoods...
...Moreover, the organization had diverted its resources to the LowensteinRooney contest...
...In any case, although Holtzman ran well among some traditional voters, the bulk of her support came from liberalreformist voters...
...The voting patterns in the EikenberryRooney contest highlighted the stark political divisions of the district...
...and I seen my share in the old days...
...But, after a Republican-controlled gerrymander which added Republican conservatives and subtracted liberal Democrats, in 1970 he lost to Norman Lent by less than 10,000...
...Thus, McGovern had no impact on the values or power relationships of the people in Lowenstein’s district, but at least he won a few delegates...
...In 1968 he moved to Long Island and was elected to Congress from the Fifth Congressional District...
...In all my 40 years of politics,” said a Pole from Greenpoint, “I ain’t never seen vote stealin’ like this...
...Lowenstein had done better in the liberal areas then Eikenberry...
...I want to get people to work together across religious and racial lines to get what they want and need...
...He distributed literature discussing purely local issues (such as a hospital which needed renovating), and had it translated into Italian, Polish and Yiddish...
...Eikenberry had lived in Brooklyn for a number of years, but he too had been called an “outsider” in 1970...
...Low-Esteem,’’ he would call his opponent) as “a boid who flies from Manhattan to run in Long Beach and then, when the voters reject him there, flies to Brooklyn to run against me...
...McGovern’s delegates, as things inevitably turned out, ran ahead of Lowenstein in the ethnic neighborhoods...
...Lowenstein attempted to counter these charges by resorting to some of the more traditional old politics techniques...
...Lowenstein tried to turn the outsider issue to his advantage by emphasizing Rooney’s absence from the district for most of the 28 years he had been in Congress...
...The term referred to more than Lowenstein’s place of residence...
...He spent many days walking the streets of the neighborhoods, handing out “Lowenstein for Congress” red-white-andblue shopping bags (he ultimately gave out more than 100,000 during the campaign) and attending countless block parties and meetings...
...The liberals, blacks, and Puerto Ricans gave large majorities to Eikenberry, but the turn-out in many neighborhoods was light...
...The special difficulties which Lowenstein experienced, however, and the success of Reform candidate Mike Pesce over the organization candidate for the State Assembly nomination, suggest a possible fourth alternative: run a reform politician who comes out of the white ethnic-working class constituency...
...votes...
...Since then, he has been elected chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and has organized the most effective registration drive undertaken since 18-yearolds received the vote...
...A third possible strategy is the one that Lowenstein chose, an amalgam of new and old politics, aimed both at the white ethnics and the reform coalitions, and also aimed at putting ideas and local politics to the test of confrontation...
...But he was not...
...It is lucky for our international reputation that we didn’t invite any South Vietnamese professors over to monitor the Lowenstein election...
...But he also showed significant strength in Italian Carroll Gardens, despite his liberal views and his allegiance to the anti-organization cause...
...Most of Lowenstein’s advisers urged him to concentrate in the areas where he could expect the most support-where Eikenberry had run strongest in 1970 but where the turn-out was lightest (primarily the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods...
...To promise it would is to play with your fears without giving you any solution...
...Rooney, however, shrugs off such criticism (“one of those liberal ‘boids’ flyin’ around again,” he says), just as he dismissed the Lowenstein candidacy (“Mr...
...Fair elections,” Buckley continued, “like precautions against accidental wars, are in everybody’s interest...
...When Lowenstein launched his primary campaign in the spring of 1972, he wondered whether he could win in a way which would not exacerbate the divisions or, more accurately, which would re-draw the linesnot between whites ,and blacks, liberals and conservatives, but between those who were fighting over crumbs and those, who owned the cake...
...Like the two candidates, the various neighborhoods to which Rooney and Lowenstein would appeal for votes did not seem to belong in the same place at the same time...
...the clannish esprit of the volunteers who had come in from far places-were fine if Lowenstein was content with waging a classic new versus old, liberal versus conservative campaign...
...Rooney’s literature stressed simply that Lowenstein was an “outsider...
...Thus, while Lowenstein failed to make significant inroads into the white ethnic neighborhoods, he probably could have won-even with the irregularities occurringhad he devoted more efforts to insure a greater turn-out in the liberal areas...
...Rooney put out his own mailing to Catholics stressing the abortion and aid-to-parochial schools issues...
...if possible, to cooperate with, or at least end-run the local Party structure...
...As the primary campaign entered its final weeks, leaders of the local Party organization, with powerful Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito at the helm, began to realize that Lowenstein was making inroads and things were beginning to get out of control...
...While people in pro-Rooney areas were being hustled in and out of the polls, there were waiting lines of up to four hours in places like Cadman Plaza, an upperincome apartment complex with lots of Lowenstein supporters...
...Liberal-activist Allard Lowenstein faced both of these questions when he planned his Brooklyn congressional race against conservative Representative John J. Rooney...
...All of these aspects of the Lowenstein campaign, in which he and his staff gloriedthe national new politics happening...
...Lowenstein frantically tried to answer the attacks in his own letters and literature...
...Evidently the fear that Lowenstein’s heavy campaigning in those neighborhoods would only stir up the organization’s efforts and anti-Lowenstein feelings had proven correct...
...That can be done...
...Why Lowenstein Lost: Ethnics, Crooks, and Carpetbaggers by Lanny J. Davis For all its new politics, the Democratic Party seems obsessed with its old coalition, with how to win back the housewife from Dayton, how to woo Archie Bunker and the rest of the white ethnics left on the assembly line of the dying political machines, So far, the controversy has revolved mainly around tactics, with the regulars saying that you have to coddle the George Meanys and Mayor Daleys to get the white ethnic vote, and the reformers believing that you can by-pass power brokers and gain direct support through media, charisma and massive volunteer efforts, as Robert Kennedy did in Indiana in 1968, and George McGovern did in some of the primaries...
...His insistence on also winning white ethnic voters produced a strategic schizophrenia which was difficult to resolve...
...Lowenstein had gained national fame for his leadership of the Dump Johnson movement in 1967 and his one-man mobilization of the nation’s colleges against the Vietnam war...
...Reunited in Brooklyn, the two factions of the old Spanish underground came to the center of the room and embraced while 250 Lowenstein supporters cheered in the background...
...This was, essentially, the strategy pursued by Eikenberry and recommended to Lowenstein by his staff...
...And he also succeeded in convincing several people from the white ethnic neighborhoods to run with him on the Reform slate-Mike Pesce from Carroll Gardens, a candidate for State Assembly, and Mike Calandrillo and Stella Kastava, who were challenging the regular organization candidates for Assembly District Leader...
...Here are a few samples of election precinct results: From Italian Carroll GardensLowenstein 65, Rooney 160...
...It may also help bridge a gap between working class constituents wary of political innovation, and liberal campaigners wary of any idea or concern-however validadvanced by white ethnic constituents...
...Holtzman was a native of her Brooklyn district, and her family was well-known in the community...
...Inherent in this strategy is accepting the fact that, in a given election, it may be a losing one...
...Instead, he tried to directly challenge the local power structure and value system...
...This was also the effect of the hundreds of young people from distant places who canvassed in the neighborhoods...
...But the turn-out in these areas was light...
...In an adjoining district, Elizabeth Holtzman, a young reformer benefitting from the absence of the kinds of tactics used against Lowenstein, narrowly defeated Representative Emmanuel Celler...
...Lowenstein responded to this issue directly and honestly before hostile audiences...
...He set up highly visible storefront headquarters, providing jobs for local residents and keeping a number of people on the payroll even though they did little work...
...The line-up is similar to other urban centers in the country: on one side the blue-collar enclaves, left behind in the wake of the white middle-class flight to the suburbs, tightly knit, suspicious of outsiders, insecure about the future, loyal to the old-line political machine which has served them two or three generations...
...The turnout was expected to be small, especially since it rained during the morning, but over 300 people from all the major neighborhoods showed up...
...Hemingway in Brooklyn ~~ - One Sunday, Jose Torres was campaigning in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods, Mrs...
...Governor John Gilligan...
...Pesce was born and raised in Carroll Gardens...
...He is now practicing law in Washington...
...Chauvinism and Smear While Lowenstein tried to emphasize what he regarded as important national issues, like Rooney’s support of the war and his opposition to tax reform, Rooney hit hardest on aid to parochial schools, an increasingly volatile question among ethnic Catholics in Brooklyn’s 14th District and elsewhere...
...Under hostile questioning, Lowenstein explained he favored a system of tax credits to help parents pay the cost of private school education...
...This was essentially the strategy which Senator McCovern followed in his Brooklyn primary race...
...Jose Torres, former boxing champion and newspaper columnist...
...Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito was so anxious to beat Lowenstein in the 14th District,” said a former National Committeeman from New York, “that he sent everyone out of Manny Celler’s district into Rooney’s to pull it out on election day and left Celler with little to work with...
...Rooney’s organization generated rumors and circulated literature associating Lowenstein with the hippies, flag burners, pornography lovers, and radicals...
...and the raising of scare issues...
...Lowenstein’s organization tried to prepare for this by recruiting and training 200-300 “poll-watchers’’ and “assistant attorneys general” to watch out for Lowenstein’s interests at the polls...
...Volunteers went through all 80,000 buff cards of registered Democrats and discovered among the many bogus votes that several of Rooney’s relatives had signed their cards twice-fairly conclusive evidence that they voted twice...
...Thus, candidates like Lowenstein, committed to a “new politics” and determined to reconstruct the liberal-minorities-blue collar coalition on a platform of social, economic and political change, may have to be willing to stand aside and let someone from the white ethnic neighborhood district run instead...
...Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark has called Rooney one of the greatest “blights” on the Justice Department in history...
...In the white ethnic areas there seemed to be plenty of machines, but throughout the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods there was an acute shortage...
...It also suggests possible alternative strategies that might produce both white ethnic votes and grassroots political changes...
...As one surveys the vote in the various neighborhoods, the totals show a clear-cut division among liberals, blacks, and Puerto Ricans, on the one hand, and white ethnic, blue-collar people on the other...
...Lowenstein’s involvement with national issues, as well as his close personal relationships with liberal and civil rights leaders across the country, led to a dizzying array of famous national political figures arriving in Brooklyn to campaign for him...
...There were certain exceptions which indicate that, at least in some places, Lowenstein had broken through...
...The McGovern organization made little effort to educate them any further...
...But whenever his close friend J. Edgar Hoover put in a money request, it was granted automatically...
...More than 300 students from 30 states ultimately arrived in Brooklyn to work for Lowensteinranging from Juneau, Alaska, and Houston to Shawnee, Kansas, Washington, D. C., and Boston...
...Certainly few knew anything about his position on aid to parochial schools or abortion...
...But Lowenstein insisted that he could win both the liberals and the white ethnics in the same campaign...
...Given these political realities-the wide disparities in attitudes between the ethnics and the liberals and the ability of the locally based regular organization to exacerbate these conflicts and stir up old fears and suspicions-the outlook for putting together the old coalition must remai9 bleak...
...On the Sunday after the election, a meeting was called for the people who had witnessed or experienced election day irregularities...
...They controlled the Board of Elections, and their people were the chief polling place officials...
...Martin Luther King...
...They strained to understand each others’ accents, often without success, but it didn’t matter, since the stories were so similar and so redundant that everybody understood...
...In the one and only debate for which Rooney showed up-held at a Catholic church in Greenpoint-Rooney attacked Lowenstein as a “radical and subversive” who would “close down your parochial schools and permit abortions of your children...
...These areas, they urged, should receive the highest priority for personal campaigning, local organization, literature distribution, and financial resources...
...If he had abandoned the white ethnics and concentrated on the liberal vote, Lowenstein probably would have won the Democratic nomination...
...The evidence was so overwhelming that even William F. Buckley was impressed...
...From Polish Greenpoint-Lowenstein 60, Rooney 284...
...The overall feeling was, however, that Lowenstein had a chance to win by a landslide and that it would be very difficult for the organization to manipulate the totals sufficiently to affect the result...
...Puerto Rican Williamsburg and conservative, Hassidic Jewish Williamsburg...
...Polish-GermanCatholic Greenpoint and black Fort Greene...
...versus growing numbers of blacks and Puerto Ricans, living in poverty and politically powerless but, bolstered by white liberal-reformers who live in comfortable neighborhoods nearby, beginning to organize...
...But one questioner persisted, “Do you favor a constitutional amendment permitting direct aid-answer yes or no...
...The struggle for direction and control of the Democratic Party has left two important and unanswered questions...
...his family is large enough, with enough relatives from the same town in Italy, to constitute a political base in itself...
...The Pesce strategy may offer the best hope for reaching local voters through ethnic ties and liberal organizers through ideological ties...
...Congressman Ron Dellums...
...former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton...
...In the process of trying to pass such an amendment, moreover, there would be great religious divisions in the country...
...On the day before the election, an Archdiocese School Association mailed letters to all the priests in the district asking them to endorse Rooney from the pulpit...
...Then, in late morning, Congressman Paul McCloskey walked in, fresh from his own primary victory in California...
...Congressman Herman Badillo...
...Whether they are willing to do that, and whether their supporters agree to work for someone outside their own political and social circles, remains to be seen...
...In turn, the Lowenstein campaign workers could speculate whether they were fighting Rooney, the Greek generals, or the Spanish Civil War...
...he even visited Catholic churches during mass time on the Sunday before election...
...Another possible strategy, also based on pragmatism, might be to write off the white ethnic ceighborhoods entirely...
...His experience offers important insights into the difficulties that other liberal candidates who choose that course can expect...
...It is hardly an exaggeration to compare a drive through Brooklyn’s 14th District to a drive through a series of European citystates...
...However, these arguments had little force in the white ethnic neighborhoods...
...To do so, he decided to use new politics techniques to reach old politics voters, techniques like the massive use of student volunteers, many of whom came from outside the district...
...But such a strategy, while it might win an election, would eliminate the opportunity for a real exchange of ideas between the liberal candidate and ethnic voters, leaving the candidate in the traps of condescension and misunderstanding, and the voters with their attitudes unchallenged...
...next door to liberal Brooklyn Heights-Lowenstein 241, Rooney 70...
...The voters in what was nominally a local election might have wondered if Lowenstein was running for Congress, for governor of Alabama, or for the New York Mets...
...At the time of this writing, the state court case is being tried...
...Some heads in the audience nodded at that last line, but for the most part the listeners seemed unconvinced...
...Since Brooklyn boss Esposito had endorsed McGovern, McGovern decided he did not need to identify with the liberal reform challenges in Brooklyn...
...Is it worth making Archie Bunker a reluctant member of the liberalminoritieslabor front without affecting what he thinks, or the way his neighborhood is run...
...Even Buckley Was Impressed If the use of scare tactics were not effective enough, the regulars were prepared to manipulate the results on election day...
...and such an amendment couldn’t possibly succeed...
...They feared that any great effort in the ethnic neighborhoods would stir up the Regulars to turn out a larger Rooney vote-as well as drain away resources from Lowenstein strongholds...
...In these areas (according to affidavits collected by Lowenstein), various polls opened several hours late...
...It also accused Lowenstein of living among his “friends” the blacks and Puerto Ricans, who were regarded as the most dangerous “outsiders” of all...
...He Could Have Won What does Lowenstein’s experience in Brooklyn tell us about the chances of “new politics” candidates winning substantial support from white ethnic working people, where the issues and the challenge to the local power structure in the campaign are clearly perceived by the voters...
...He was with a group of people and said, “We want to canvass for Al...
...He established “community service desks” to deal with personal problems-emulating the patronage apparatus on which the old-line political organizations were based...
...next door to Puerto Rican Greenpoint -Lowenstein 173, Rooney 41...
...King in the black neighborhoods, and Jim Bouton in the white ethnic areas...
...Throughout the day, hundreds of people refused to vote in an endurance contest and left in disgust...
...I personally know more than 100 people who were qualified to vote and were turned away,” said one black...
...In the past, the separation of liberal candidates from ethnic voters has resulted not only in lost elections, but also wild misjudgments on stock liberal stands like opposition to aid to parochial schools, while valid counterarguments generated from districts like Rooney’s go ignored...
...and Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy...
...Thus, Lowenstein would say, with some seriousness, “I’ve spent more time on the streets of this district during the last 30 days than John Rooney has during the last 30 years...
...When McGovern came to Lowenstein’s district to campaign, Lowenstein was permitted to introduce McGovern only after a great deal of haggling with McCovern’s New York organization...
...McGovern can win the allegiance of white ethnic voters in a way that also brings changes in attitudes and shifts in power at the local level...
...to black and Puerto Rican Bushwick-almost across the street-Lowenstein 174, Rooney 35...
...Aaron Henry, the black chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party...
...The white ethnic neighborhoods voted heavily for Rooney...
...Lowensteinwasconvinced that he would have won the election by a margin exceeding 2,500 votes, if it had been run fairly...
...Revolt of the Crumb-Eaters In 1970, a young, white attorney, Peter Eikenberry, who had been active in the local reform movement, challenged Rooney for the Democratic congressional nomination and came within 1,500 votes of defeating him, even though there was some dissension in the reform ranks during the campaign...
...Lowenstein filed two lawsuits, one in federal and one in state court, documenting the fraud and seeking to be declared the election winner, or at least that a new election be ordered...
...From neighborhood to neighborhoodin many instances, from block to block- t he scenery changes, languages change, religions change, race changes, cultures change...
...There are more people in public schools in this country than private and parochial schools...
...Where there were strong local organizations in these neighborhoods the vote was substantially higher...
...The official results of the election showed Rooney ahead by 801 votes out of almost 30,OOOcast...
...From Puerto Rican WilliamsburgLowenstein 173, Rooney 41 ; next door to Hassidic Williamsburg-Lowenstein 49, Rooney 293...
...few people knew much about him, except that “Meade” had flown to California and had some nice words for him...
...Lowenstein backs enthusiastically almost every mistaken political idea that ever issued out of the social imagination of man, but that isn’t the point, any more so than when us good guys sat around in 1964 worrying how many votes would be stolen from Barry Goldwater by the Democratic poll tenders...
...A study of the election district results-even discounting for distortions caused by fraud-still dramatically highlight how little progress Lowenstein made, after all his effort, in winning support of the white ethnics...
...The second is whether national candidates like Lanny Davis was Allard Lowenstein’s campaign coordinator...
...So they set into motion the two major weapons which had protected them from various insurgencies in years past: stirring up neighborhood and ethnic chauvinism through smear and innuendo...
...the famous celebrities...
...By 2 a.m., they were still lined up at Cadman and other liberal areas, and campaign workers were sent to convince people to stay and vote, since the election appeared to be close...
...The explanation for the delays was simple: the Board of Elections had violated the law that requires at least two voting machines in districts with more than 750-800 registered voters...
...These included Mrs...
...Lowenstein staff meetings always began with the ritual of each person in the room identifying himself and where he was from...
...As chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee, he has blocked funds for progressive programs of all kinds...
...Clearly the word “outsider” was used more in a cultural than a geographic sense...
...Perhaps the most pragmatic strategy in the short run is for liberal candidates to blur over controversial issues...
...Moreover, the white ethnics turned out in much larger numbers for Rooney against Lowenstein than they had in the 1970 contest...
...The first is whether liberal candidates ought to try for blue-collar support, or instead write off Middle America and concentrate on strengthening the coalition of young people, women, the elite, and the minorities...
...It was probable that the Poles in Greenpoint and the Italians in Carroll Gardens would hardly be impressed by the appearances of Mrs...
...He was given a stack of canvass cards and off he went...
...In a number of election districts in Greenpoint, Lowenstein had even run considerably behind Eikenberry’s totals...
...Rooney, 74 years old, is a 28-year incumbent...
...One of the community strategy meetings turned into a reenactment of For Whom the Bell Tolls when an old Franco-fighter named Carlos Zayas, who had been in and out of jail since the fascist triumph and was periodically aided by Lowenstein, discovered that another old Francofighter, a member of the Abe Lincoln brigade, was in the same room...
...and hope, once elected, to push for the changes they avoided talking about during the campaign...
...King in black neighborhoods or Jose Torres among Puerto Ricans or even Kathleen Kennedy, whose father many of them greatly admired...
...McGovern was a fresh face...
...For the first 26 years (until Eikenberry’s primary challenge in 1970), Rooney had no local office and rarely came back to Brooklyn...
...In fact, they would be reminded by the appearance of these visitors that Lowenstein was more concerned about national issues than their own day-to-day problems...
...In the final days, while storefronts in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods were begging for more manpower to help out on election day, extra volunteers were allocated to Greenpoint and Hassidic Williamsburg to try to counter the last minute smears by Rooney and the party regulars...
Vol. 4 • September 1972 • No. 7
