Cuyahoga Politics Today
Cleveland's Crumbling Political Order
The
emergence of "dark money" in this year's mayoral campaign is a harsh
but illuminating case study on how the intersection of race, power and
privilege in Cleveland retards the region's redevelopment into a first class
twenty-first century metropolis.
Ironically,
this object lesson of primitive politics is on display front and center this
week as Cleveland hosts not one but two national conferences focused on smart
cities and intelligent planning for urban communities.
We will
have more to say about our national visitors in a companion post, but suffice it
to say here that they are some of the brightest minds currently operating on
the cutting edge of technology, urban planning and intelligent design. Stepping
outside their conference headquarters to experience our downtown vibrancy, the
more attuned can hear disturbing echoes from the local corridors of power
emanating from our airwaves, unlike the soothing welcomes they are receiving
from official local representatives.
Like most big cities, a status Cleveland now
holds more in memory, longing and pretense, our direction and pace are largely
set by the interplay between our business and civic leaders. In healthy
communities, these forces are complementary competitors. Like Howard and
Hampton, two of the nation’s best historically black universities, they battle
fiercely but enjoy both a mutual respect with the understanding that beyond the
struggle on the playing field, they each share a common interest in the other's
prosperity and well-being.
More than
a century ago, Cleveland was at the national forefront of municipal leadership.
We had nearly one million residents within our borders. We had a progressive
mayor, Tom Johnson, who left a successful business career to run for public
office in service to his community — not just to his class. While Johnson is
justly celebrated today for his bold, visionary and courageous leadership — his
statue adorns our Public Square — his former business associates at the time
vilified him for daring to represent the public interest at the expense of
their immediate profits.
Mostly
since then, it seems that our business community has made it a cardinal
principle to ensure that organic leadership in the public interest would never
reemerge. The dominance of that first principle has coincided with Cleveland's
steady decline ever since 1930.
Cleveland's population growth was fueled first by middle and
Eastern European immigrants who came to toil in the filthy factories, foundries
and refineries that forged the area's wealth. The unhealthiness of those
sweatshops and the griminess of the teeming masses in their ethnic central city
enclaves led people with means to seek greener pastures. Even Millionaires Row did
not escape the exodus as wealthy Clevelanders moved outward to create some of
the world's first and finest modern suburbs: Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights,
East Cleveland.
In so
doing, they had to abandon direct control of city politics. By and large, good
government forces refocused on emerging suburban city halls, replaced in
Cleveland City Hall by waves of competing ethnic politicians sent downtown from
their respective enclaves — Little Italy, Slavic Village, Collinwood,
Clark-Fulton, and so forth — to gain public power to improve their
neighborhood's and living conditions.
A tacit
bargain was struck between the business community and the ethnics. The latter
could run the city politically but would not interfere with the city's powerful
money making apparatus, which was slowly becoming more corporate, with the
attendant development of powerful legal and financial service muscle centers.
Cleveland
ethnics developed a unique and powerful "Cosmopolitan" political
machine, best exemplified by Frank Lausche, who blazed a trail to stunning
success as judge, mayor, governor, and ultimately US Senator. (George
Voinovich would follow Lausche's Cosmo path a generation later, but even though
he took some of his rough and tumble homies along to ride shotgun, his
saddlebags always carried a corporate agenda.)
Black people, eventually to become the area's largest and most
indigestible ethnic group, were initially barely a blip on Cleveland's
municipal radar. Restricted initially to the city's Central neighborhood, they
were only a minor irritant in the civic arena until a modest immigrant from
Alabama, John O. Holly, began agitating for equity in 1935. Seemingly overnight
he organized 10,000 working class black to support his contention that black
lives mattered. Under the banner of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”, his
Future Outlook League forced dozens of businesses in the central area and then
downtown, to begin desegregating their workforces by hiring Negroes.
Holly's
intrusion into how the city did business had political overtones and fostered
the business community's resort to gatekeepers, respectable black people whose primary
chore was to keep their unwashed and rebellious kinfolk under control.
This quasi-colonial
system has been in place ever since, with continuous refinements that extend
until the present day. Its use was instrumental in the undermining of the
opposition to the Q deal, and can now be seen in the ferocious effort to derail
the populist challenge to City Hall that threatens to put neighborhood native
son Zack Reed from sitting in the mayor's seat.
What
Cleveland’s civic leaders continually fail to understand its that its adherence
to a post-colonial reliance upon a gatekeeper mentality retards our entire
community, keeps us in a defensive stance, limits our attractiveness to
immigration from anywhere, makes us wholly ill-equipped to compete for Amazon
HQ2, and ultimately undermines our most earnest efforts to enter world class
competition even at the middleweight level, notwithstanding our enormous public
assets.
We approach
today the 50th anniversary of the election of Carl Stokes as mayor. We are
right to celebrate that achievement: Cleveland was the FIRST big city in
America to elect a black man as mayor.
(Richard Hatcher was elected mayor in Gary, Indiana the same night in November 1967; however, Gary barely registered on the roster
of the city’s larger cities, Its 178,000 citizens ranked it #70 in 1960, while
Cleveland came in as the nation’s 8th largest city, with a population of
876,000.
Today, Cleveland has shrunk to a ranking outside the top fifty cities,
with a population of about 385,000, placing it below such lustrous venues as
Tulsa OK, Arlington TX, Colorado Springs CO, and Mesa AZ.)
The
Stokes era at City Hall, 1967-1971, busted open the old order. Black people,
confined almost exclusively to the overcrowded neighborhoods of Cedar-Central,
Hough, Glenville, and Mt. Pleasant, used their concentrated mass to break down
decades of exclusion, and to bring a measure of meritocracy to the public
space. The establishment, which had long resisted such a development, embraced
it in the wake of Stokes’ near-election in 1965, and in fear of the tumultuous
conditions erupting nationwide in places like Newark, Watts, and Detroit.
Those
were exhilarating years for black people in Cleveland. Doors were kicked open on
every front as black people found new opportunities in employment, housing, and
the civic space. There was opposition all along the way, but led by Carl and
his brother Lou, who became Ohio’s first black Congressman in 1968, the black
community stuck together and persevered.
While the
Stokes years at City Hall led to unquestioned improvement in the quality of
civic life for all Clevelanders, certain problems, most notably in the justice
and public education systems, proved intractable even as significant progress
was made in other arenas. Hardcore resistance to public school integration was
tolerated and even supported by key elements of the business community, and the
promise of the Stokes years quickly waned. And when an ambitious, audacious
inner city ethnic westside kid named Dennis Kucinich rode the unrest into City
Hall, all hell broke loose.
Kucinich
was mayor for only two years, every day of which seemed as tumultuous as what
we currently observe in the White House. The business community found George
Voinovich, a Cosmo Republican, retook control of City Hall and community
politics, and found complicit partners it could control with a multifaceted
system of financial controls in the form of salaries, grants, contracts, and
other more nefarious fiscal tools.
Today,
Frank Jackson sits in City Hall as the embodiment of that system. A good man,
conscientious, diligent, he is the virtual embodiment of a political metronome.
Super dependable, predictable to a fault, he can be counted upon to support
almost every business community initiative, irrespective of its merit or the
disproportionate aspects of its benefits and burdens.
Jackson
has done a lot of good during his unsurpassed twelve years as mayor, but almost
everybody knows and believes the baton should be passed.
And
therein lies the problem: the natural stream of selection has been corrupted,
choked with pesticides, and clogged, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless
primarily as a direct consequence of the gatekeeper system that restricts
access, development and advancement of talent, ambition, and potential in the
civic, commercial and cultural spaces that matter in Greater Cleveland.
In
tomorrow’s post, we will talk more about the gatekeepers. We’re likely even to
name at least a couple of the most obvious ones.
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