15
Massachusetts Fair Share
It is a hot late June evening in Revere. A town meeting with the governor is to take place at the Lincoln Public School auditorium that seats 400 people. It is two months before the 1978 Democratic primary in which Governor Michael Dukakis is being challenged by the conservative, stiff-jawed Ed King. Dukakis is confident he will win. His advance people turn out their usual eighty to a hundred people. We turn out 3,000 people. Soon the auditorium is jammed—the Dukakis supporters and the curious, scattered among 300 Fair Share members. Buses roll up and out come people from Fall River and Lynn and Worcester and Chelsea and the various neighborhoods of Boston to form a picket line surrounding the school.
I pace around outside, getting reports from various organizers as to the numbers they have brought. Unlike so many demonstrations I have led, in this one, it’s Fair Share leaders who are in charge. Occasionally one of them checks in with me, but generally I am content to watch the action unfold.
We are there to demand that Dukakis support tax reform, which he adamantly opposes. He argues that the Commonwealth does not need the Fair Share “circuit breaker” bill, limiting property tax payments to a percentage of household income. Dukakis is determined that the $150,000,000 state surplus should go to local cities and towns to beef up their spending. None of it should go to the circuit breaker. He is an earnest, thoughtful liberal who wants to see more public sector spending—and is convinced he knows best.
The problem on this night is that we have brought 3,000 people who are struggling economically, who know there is a government surplus, who have seen their fuel costs skyrocket; their wages stay flat, and their taxes increase. They want tax reform and tax relief.
It starts to drizzle. The Red Sox are playing the hated Yankees. Yet there are thousands marching around the Lincoln School. Outside, we lead chants and confer with police to make sure nothing gets out of hand. Inside, while the audience fans themselves with Fair Share factsheets, Dukakis duels with Carolyn Lucas, a Boston “housewife” who had become an articulate Fair Share leader. The chants from outside keep penetrating the town meeting: “Sign our bill or get off the Hill.” “Tax relief now.” The people both outside and inside the school do not look anything like what protestors were thought to be. Most have never protested before. They are factory workers, housewives, senior citizens, store clerks, office workers, mothers on welfare. And they are mad.
I had been to California and seen what was happening with the right-wing tax revolt embodied in Proposition 13 that put caps on taxes, giving relief to businesses and the wealthy, as well as those hard pressed to pay their bills. That tax revolt will choke the public sector, and the wealthiest will get the most relief. Still for many low-income Massachusetts families, property taxes are too high and threaten their ability to hang on to their homes. We are determined to win progressive tax reform in Massachusetts. Only a progressive alternative will stop the wave of right-wing tax revolts from sweeping over our state next.
At the legislative hearings on our circuit breaker weeks before the Revere town hall, Mike Regan, a Fair Share leader from Chelsea, had testified before state legislators. Mike, a small, profoundly moral, longtime worker at the Shraft’s candy plant, warned, “Before we leave, we want you to know something. We want you to know … that we are just about ready to blow … our tops… . We are going to blow a fuse.” Then drawing himself up to his full height of 5’5”, he strode directly up to the chairman of the committee. As security guards moved forward, he reached into his pocket, placing two blown fuses on the table, followed by a procession of 200 other Fair Share activists who each deposited a fuse as the television lights glared and the cameras rolled.
To everyone’s surprise, we managed to get the circuit breaker into the budget that was passed by the House. But Dukakis still refused to support it. We demanded that he meet with a delegation to discuss tax reform. He refused.
Now, inside the school, the argument with Dukakis gets heated. Fair Share members shout at him. The governor lectures them. He knows what is best. He flatly refuses to discuss a circuit breaker or to meet with Fair Share leaders to negotiate.
Carolyn calls for all in the audience who support the circuit breaker to stand up and walk out. Eighty percent of the audience heads for the door. Someone starts a chant, “We put you in, we can put you out.” The crowd outside gets briefed by Carolyn and becomes angry. Everywhere cameras whirl; everywhere reporters are interviewing people, surprised by how much they know about the state budget, about the circuit breaker bill, about how unfair the tax system is. Reporters don’t expect protestors to be regular blue-collar folks, and to be so well informed. Dukakis quietly exits through a back door to avoid the crowd. He is angry. In the next few days, he makes huge political gaffes by publicly dismissing the need for tax reform. When asked about a California Prop 13–style threat to Massachusetts, he is quoted as saying that Massachusetts taxpayers are not stupid enough to support lower taxes. The press coverage of the town meeting and his statements about taxes dramatically hurt his campaign. King trounces him in the primary. “We put you in, we can put you out” becomes prophetic.
Starting in 1975, I devoted myself to Mass Fair Share. Brilliant campaigns and systematic organizing built an organization with greater name recognition and greater support than any organization or politician at that time in Massachusetts.
Mass Fair Share was everything I wanted to be doing. It mattered. It made a difference both in the lives of specific families but also in society at large. It had the potential to alter the politics of Massachusetts in a profound way. It was a large school of democracy, giving people the tools that they needed to become effective citizens and giving them a taste of what democratic action could accomplish when they combined and organized.
As executive director I spent my days in a myriad of ways: working on strategy for the organization, doing leadership training, raising money, hiring staff, managing senior staff, attending statewide leadership and issue meetings, raising more money. I was working ten- and twelve-hour days. I was getting paid a real salary, $35,000 a year. My days were a rush of meeting after meeting, punctuated by nonstop phone calls. Three or four evenings a week I would be out at a meeting in one part of the state or another. Often, I was in Worcester, a central location, for a meeting of one of the campaign committees, or a leadership training session or an executive committee meeting. I would try to drop into neighborhood meetings from time to time. I could not keep up with the Fair Share meetings—they were so numerous and constant. Each day was challenging and exciting, working to build an organization that was taking off, becoming a populist force.
Neighborhoods were changing. The economy was changing. The blue-collar manufacturing jobs of the last forty years were leaving. Energy prices were spiking. The old urban Democratic political machines were steadily withering. Women were no longer willing or able to stay at home and out of the work force. Still, for most people the mid-1970s was not a time when they felt compelled to step out of their day-to-day lives and take action at all costs. Fair Share was not riding a wave of social movement. Yet it was a remarkable example of how progressive populism could resonate with Americans. How creative strategy could win tangible victories against entrenched special interests. How deep and systematic organizing could build power and transform lives. How organizers and emerging leaders could build a powerful organization.
All these years later, it is a challenge to convey exactly how popular, how large, how creative, and how successful Fair Share was. A quick search of the Boston Globe archives for the words “Mass Fair Share” for the time period 1975 to 1983 produces story after story, headline after headline, often as many as a dozen major news stories in a single month. That level of coverage was true for television and the other daily newspapers in the cities across the state. Stories about large public meetings, about creative protests, the release of muckraking reports, regulatory challenges to rate hikes, legislation filed, and legislation passed. Continuous reports of confrontations with elected officials, with regulators, with corporate CEOs. An endless stream of neighborhood issues. Victories, large and small: rate hikes stopped, rebates and tax abatements in the millions of dollars sent to working and low-income families, the release of previously secret information. Stop lights won. Parks cleaned up. Action to fix up abandoned buildings.
The scale of the organization was significant. By 1979, over 110,000 families in Massachusetts—10 percent of the households in the state—were members, paying dues of at least $15 per year and receiving the monthly newspaper, the Fair Fighter. By that year, other than on major holidays, each day of the year, all year long, somewhere in Massachusetts, there was a Fair Share meeting of between ten and 500 people.
The genius of Mass Fair Share was in combining deep, systematic, constant organizing with creative campaign strategies. There were concurrent or sequential campaigns on energy, taxes, insurance, toxic waste sites, plant closings, telephone rates and policies, banking, redlining, youth jobs, as well as continuous neighborhood-specific issues. Each campaign was carefully designed and meticulously researched. Always we were looking for who had authority that was not being used, what loophole could we find to give us leverage, how could popular power change the outcome. Each campaign used symbols that could capture the imagination: blown fuses, pennies, brown bag lunches, and the empty chair on the stage. There were always catchy names: the Dirty Dozen for tax delinquents, Lifeline Rates, Circuit Breaker, and of course, always the name Fair Share. Coming up with creative strategies took time, resources, and effort. We built a research and campaign team of the smartest people we could find. Jim Katz and Barry Margolin led a research team, while Mark Dyen led a campaign staff. They spent hours studying the issues that were being raised in the neighborhoods or that we thought might also be significant.
The research and campaign teams identified both long-term significant reforms, and potential smaller victories that we might achieve. We designed campaigns with local, municipal, and statewide “handles,” as we called them. We wanted campaigns where we could organize and win initial victories that would build confidence and strength.
While not an intentional part of our organizing methodology, repeatedly women stepped forward to lead the local organizations. Some were very poor, receiving welfare. Others were from solidly middle-income, blue-collar families. What they shared was intelligence and a passion for justice.
Both men and women leaders would over time confront and challenge the elites of business and politics. Our people would need to know more than the CEOs, elected officials, and bureaucrats that they were going up against. We invested heavily and continuously in leadership training. We taught organizing skills, how to lead productive meetings, how to think about strategy, and in-depth training on every issue the organization took on.
Many local leaders at first lacked the confidence that they could challenge those in authority. From their earliest days in school, in their families, in their churches, on sports teams, in the military, and for women, all too often, in their marriages, they had been trained to do what authority figures told them to do. It took courage for the “little people,” as they thought of themselves, to demand answers. When Fair Share leaders took on the elites, they discovered that often CEOs and elected officials didn’t have good answers, were less well informed than they were and were frequently caught lying. In those moments Fair Share leaders realized that they were just as smart as those in authority. Out of that experience came a new confidence. Ordinary people who had been deferential all their lives began to see that through organization and collective action, they could win victories. They could be part of something larger than themselves; they could fight for justice, fight for a fair share.
We were constantly blending outreach with “actions.” Actions could be as simple as a group meeting with a politician, a regulator, a bureaucrat, a landlord, or a corporate executive. While the meeting would always be respectful, the demands and questions would be formulated precisely, and the answers recorded and shared publicly. The decision makers were always put in a position where they had to answer the hard questions. Sometimes the action would be confronting one of the elites at their place of work or in their wealthy suburban neighborhood or even at their country club. Another action might be meeting with state legislators with hundreds of their voters back in the districts. It could be swamping a normally sparsely attended “public” hearing by the City of Lynn Water and Sewer Commission. Or it could be showing up in large numbers at a mayor’s office or at some obscure regulatory hearing that no one ever attended.
These actions and confrontations were always part of a careful effort to build campaigns, create a broader base of support, and win initial victories. Ongoing outreach was essential and continuous. The early victories often were winning release of information that had been kept secret. For example, information about large delinquent taxpayers or about a toxic waste site in a neighborhood. Forcing the release of information was a victory that fueled the next phase of the campaign.
We wanted campaigns to build to a peak, then subside, then build again. Wherever possible, we wanted to build from the local to the citywide to statewide, and then back into the local neighborhood. We looked for ways to attack where we were not expected and to go outside of the rules of the game whenever possible. We looked for ways that we could split the opposition (usually the business community).
Even when we lost, we regrouped and looked for new direction for the campaigns. Despite the flat rate referendum loss in 1976, we kept fighting. We took the fight directly to the utility companies. One day 300 Fair Share members showed up at the Boston Edison stockholders meeting—as stockholders. George Pillsbury, the crusading heir to part of the Pillsbury fortune, donated 300 shares of Boston Edison stock. We forced the normally routine shareholders meeting to be moved from the Edison cafeteria to Hynes Auditorium down the street. The Fair Share members dominated the meeting arguing for a drastic change in the rate structure.
We exposed that the utility companies had collected $32 million from customers for federal income taxes that the companies had never paid because of tax loopholes. We won. We stopped new rate hikes. Each battle brought new people into the organization and broadened our support. Each new report demonstrated that the energy companies were not to be trusted, and that the people who were supposed to regulate them were not doing their jobs. In the long run, the Department of Public Utilities put in place most of what we fought for but kept insisting that they were not doing what we had demanded. One result was a first-in-the-nation residential conservation program that has lasted over forty years. To this day Massachusetts spends more each year on retrofitting structures and promoting conservation than does the much larger conservation-oriented state of California.
One of the best examples of Fair Share’s many campaigns was our effort around tax reform. We designed a long-term, multifaceted campaign strategy that ultimately centered on the notion that not all tax cuts were the same. We posed two simple questions: Who pays? Who benefits?
The average family in Boston had experienced increases in their property taxes of 11 percent annually over the previous ten years, more than doubling. That was unsustainable. The average family making $10,500 (the median family income in 1975) paid over 14 percent of their income just on property taxes. Counting all local and state taxes, that figure rose to 19.3 percent—almost a fifth of the total family income. Wealthier people paid a diminishing percentage of their income on state and local taxes.
In certain neighborhoods we discovered that homeowners had been significantly over assessed. We researched the appeal and abatement process that existed but was rarely used. We organized large-scale group abatement filings. In those meetings we confronted city officials with compelling data and large numbers of irate homeowners. In 1975, Boston Fair Share filed 800 tax abatements and 675 were approved, returning $122,000 to those homeowners (over $700,000 in today’s dollars).
The next year the campaign increased. About 1,500 people attended meetings across Dorchester alone, and 1,400 filled out abatement forms. A group of Boston Fair Share leaders descended on City Hall demanding to meet with Robert Ryan, the associate city tax assessor. The group brought enlarged photos. One photo was of Harvard Stadium. As Boston Fair Share leader, Al Mickiewicz explained, “See this photo? Harvard with all its property and its huge endowment, what does it pay in taxes? Nothing.” Then, pointing to another enlarged photograph, this one of a traditional three-decker, he said, “See this home in Dorchester? This home is assessed at forty percent of its market value. Now look at this”—another Fair Share member held up a large photo of the First National Bank Headquarters—“See this bank building? Guess what it is assessed at. Ten percent of its market value. Ten percent! No wonder our taxes are so high. Or look at this.” Another photo was held aloft, this time of an airplane taking off at Logan Airport. Al continued, “Logan Airport, Mass Port. They refuse to pay six million dollars in taxes. So, we the homeowners, have to pay more because these special interests don’t pay their fair share. We are sick and tired of it. This has to stop.” The TV lights illuminated the whole scene as reporters eagerly made sure that each photo was caught on camera as was the sweating Mr. Ryan who tried to explain that there were reasons that Harvard, First National, and Logan Airport paid or didn’t pay what Fair Share said.
There was increased urgency when, in 1976, Boston announced a 20 percent increase in the property tax as did other cities. Fair Share unleashed campaigns against large delinquent taxpayers, often slumlords and corporations, and against special loopholes and tax breaks.
Typical of the meetings held across the state was the one at St. Ambrose in Dorchester. It was a hot August evening. I came to observe and see the progress of the local chapter. These were the same streets where I had worked against the war and to dump Jerry Troy only a few years earlier. Then my organizing was seen as threatening and marginal by many of the longtime residents. Now 600 residents, many homeowners who had lived their entire lives in Dorchester, packed the parish hall to confront the city treasurer James Young. We released an eight-page fact sheet documenting who paid and who didn’t pay property taxes. The meeting started with a twenty-minute slideshow walking through the city’s tax structure and focusing on the abatement routinely doled out to businesses, especially the large ones. Irate taxpayers wanted to know why the Prudential Company was receiving a $100,000 abatement. Why other downtown commercial buildings were getting tax breaks. How much was being handed out and to whom. The Fair Share leaders demanded the city start closing loopholes. One after another, homeowners spoke up, saying, “I want to stay here, stay in my house, but with these tax increases, you are forcing me out of my home.” “Let’s go out and fight. Let’s not pay our taxes—they can’t put us all in jail,” said another.
The Fair Share leaders made specific demands on the treasurer and on the city assessor. Under pressure they agreed that within thirty days the city would release to Fair Share a list of all tax abatements of $10,000 or more made in the last three years, a complete list of all delinquent property owners who owed over $5,000 for six months or longer, and the terms of preconstruction tax agreements with developers. After the meeting the homeowners streamed out into the hot night, determined that once Fair Share got that information, they would press the fight.
Once released, the list of large delinquent taxpayers was explosive. In Boston, there were some marvelous names on the list, including the famous attorney F. Lee Bailey, the Catholic Archdiocese, a deputy mayor, and several major businesses. We then released lists of the “Dirty Dozen,” the most notorious delinquents in cities across the state. With great ceremony the organization delivered citizen tax bills to them with a deadline for them to pay up. The press went wild. New England Life paid $110,000 just before our “deadline” passed and notified us of that fact by hand-delivered letter. Action was producing results. Those on the list who did not pay before the deadline found themselves subject to repeated demonstrations—even at their country clubs—and an unrelenting barrage of public shaming.
In the Allston Brighton neighborhood Fair Share picketed the offices of Allyn Levy and Gerald Feinberg, two landlords who were delinquent on the taxes for seven large apartment buildings. Fair Share revealed that not only had they not paid their property taxes, but they also had used the increased taxes that they had not paid as the legal justification for a significant rent increase that their tenants had been paying. Fair Share held tenants’ meetings in homes and church halls across the community. With the base built and outrage growing, the local leaders acted. Fair Share protestors marched in front of the real estate office, the TV cameras whirred, and reporters asked for interviews. The protestors were clear: “There is no place in this community for landlords like you.” “Pay your fair share.” “Levy and Feinberg are tax cheats and swindlers!” The Fair Share protestors tried to go inside but were barred at the doors. A message was sent out: you can meet tomorrow with our lawyers. The next day the local leaders and the lawyers met. The lawyers proposed that the back taxes would be paid immediately, and the tenants would be sent checks totaling the $6,000 in rent increases so long as Fair Share agreed to call off the picketing. The agreement was reached. The taxes were paid. The tenants received their checks and joined Fair Share.
Across the state, Fair Share mounted campaigns targeting large tax delinquents. In Lynn we sued and finally won a court order that said the information on who was delinquent was public information and had to be turned over to us. Until then, mayors had resisted. In Revere, the requests for the list of delinquents produced a fight between the mayor and the tax collector, as the mayor tried to make the collector the fall guy. The mayor then proposed a shakeup that would consolidate all tax issues under the office of the city treasurer. The collector, Joe DiCarlo, then leaked that the mayor, William Reinstein, owed $4,000 in unpaid taxes. Betsy Tuttle, a local Fair Share leader, led a delegation to see the mayor and showed him the article in the local paper detailing the back taxes owed on his Sweeney Avenue home.1 The mayor “was so surprised his eyeballs were popping out,” Tuttle later reported. “He went storming down to DiCarlo’s office.” It took winning the court case and successful pressure on the state tax collector Owen Clark, before we won access to the lists. The fight in Revere, as in so many other cities, was so intense that the local newspaper, the Revere Journal, reported on Tuttle being elected to the statewide Fair Share executive board, as well as the progress made on the campaign to get the lists released.2
When we found a nursing home chain on the delinquent list in both Boston and Worcester, we worked with their employees who were seeking a union and decent wages. Across the state, Fair Share campaigns about tax breaks, delinquent slum landlords, overassessed neighborhoods, and underassessed commercial property built a strong base for tax reform.
That base was then mobilized around two statewide issues. The first was direct property tax relief through the circuit breaker, which created a rebate program based upon the percentage of income that was paid in property taxes. The second was a fight to deal with a court order for 100 percent revaluation, which would have shifted $265 million in tax burden from business and commercial property onto residential taxpayers—a bonanza for business interests.3
Local meetings pushing for the circuit breaker were held with state legislators, drawing anywhere from one hundred to 500 people in over eighty locations across the state. The legislature began to feel the pressure of angry taxpayers, including many who made up their electoral base and some who were their campaign volunteers. The circuit breaker would need to be part of the annual budget, always a fraught and complicated legislative process and almost always conducted behind closed doors.
The budget was being passed in the context of the heated primary between Governor Dukakis and King, a probusiness, prolife Catholic, supportive of offshore oil drilling, and in favor of cutting back regulation. King had run Mass Port, and our East Boston leaders had fought him over airport expansion. We had no love for King.
Dukakis, however, was out of touch with the economic pain of a significant portion of the Democratic vote. Winning the governor’s office had reinforced a certain arrogance that he knew what was best for people, even when they were telling him something quite different.
In the House, the chair of ways and means, John J. Finnegan, made his opposition to the circuit breaker known early. His counterpart in the Senate, the ways and means chair Jim Kelly, was also an old-line Democratic leader who occasionally lined his own pockets. (Kelly would eventually be charged and convicted of extorting payment for state contracts.)4 Plump, dressed in gray suits, Kelly always seemed like the middle-aged former certified public accountant from the small town of Oxford, Massachusetts, that he was. Surprisingly, Kelly became a partner with us working to pass the circuit breaker.
On May 5, 1978, the Massachusetts House went into a marathon session on the budget starting at 10 a.m. The galleries were packed with Fair Share members. In the halls, small groups of Fair Share members chased down their state representatives as they took breaks from the heated debate on the House floor. The key issue holding up the budget was what to do with a $150 million surplus. We wanted most of that to pay for the circuit breaker. Finnegan, urged on by Kelly, agreed to offer a token $10 million for a pilot circuit breaker in a $4.78 billion budget. We rejected it and fought for a $130 million line item to fund the circuit breaker. Under our plan there would be rebates of up to $500 for any household with incomes of less than $30,000 and property taxes of more than 8 percent of their income. For those who rented, tenants could count 25 percent of their rent as tax payments and the same formula applied. Dukakis, Speaker Thomas McGee, and the Senate president, Kevin B. Harrington, all made it clear they opposed us.
The debate on the house floor went on, hour after hour, as Finnegan kept counting votes and making deals. The hours dragged on. The Fair Share members stayed. They continued to buttonhole reps and remind them of the meetings that they had attended back in the districts. Dinner came and went. Still the budget was not brought to a final vote. It was clear something unusual was happening. Finnegan and Speaker McGee were twisting arms but were having trouble getting everyone in line. Ten p.m. came and went without a budget. The tired Fair Share members crowding the balcony galleries refused to leave. Midnight came. Finally, Finnegan and McGee allowed a vote on the amendment allocating the $130 million for the circuit breaker. Shockingly it passed 139 to 84.5 The Fair Share members in the galleries stood, hollered, cheered, high-fived, and hugged. Even many of the reps clapped and cheered. Everyone was stunned.
Our victory was short lived. Senate President Harrington made it crystal clear that he would only allow the circuit breaker to be in the Senate version of the budget if we secured support from Dukakis. That led to Revere.
In the end Senator Kelly did manage to enact a small “pilot” circuit breaker that is still in effect for seniors in Massachusetts.
We had hopes that in future years we could expand the pilot. But there was a more urgent issue facing us: the tax burden in Massachusetts was about to become even more unfair. A court had issued an order that would have resulted in even larger increases in residential property taxes and reductions for industrial and commercial property. Fair Share responded by proposing a referendum campaign that would allow municipalities to set different tax rates according to the classification of the property by use: residential, commercial, agricultural.
We had learned the lesson from the failed flat electric rate referendum. There the progressive forces were isolated and faced an extremely broad, united coalition of the wealthy, corporations, and small businesses. We needed to change that dynamic. To pass our classification referendum, we wanted to build a broad coalition of cities, public sector unions, human service groups, churches, and others. The key to that coalition was first to get the cities to join us. The key to the cities was the mercurial mayor of Boston, Kevin White. If White could be persuaded, other mayors would jump in. While it was clearly in the interest of the city to join us, there was a real question as to whether we could convince the mayor to cooperate with the very organization that his operatives were fighting month after month in Boston.
Fair Share had battled his administration on everything from its failure to place stop signs at dangerous locations to forcing rebates for over-assessed neighborhoods. White saw us as a constant threat. Repeatedly delegations of angry Fair Share members made it to the mayor’s outer office in City Hall. There they would always be told that the mayor was not in. Many times, the harried and furious aide sent out to deflect the protest was none other than my old adversary from the Robert McNamara demonstration at Harvard, Barney Frank. Out he would come, rumpled and disheveled, disbelieving that once again protestors were challenging the decisions of his boss. We took aim at White in other ways as well. One spring evening, even as we were preparing for the referendum campaign, White held a $1,000 a couple fundraising event, a poorly named “Salute to the Neighborhoods” held in a downtown citadel of elite power, the First National Bank Building. Outside Carolyn Lucas led hundreds of protestors unhappy with White’s policies on bank closings and tax concessions to the banks. The Fair Share members all had paper plates and bags of peanuts for their “peanut-a-plate” dinner—all they could afford in contrast with the fat cats dining inside.
As we fought and competed with them, we got to know White’s people. Frank was always furious with us, and we were glad to see him leave City Hall for the State Legislature and the start of a career as an elected official that would, over time, take him to Congress and a powerful national role. With others on White’s team, mutual respect, and even, occasionally, friendship, slowly evolved. I had gotten personally close with fellow Dorchester resident Kirk O’Donnell, one of White’s top political people. Fred Salvucci had worked closely with the Maverick Street Mothers in opposition to the airport and then had become a member of White’s team. Perhaps the closest to the mayor was a young Cuban American woman, Micho Spring, who was open to our arguments about classification.6 We went to see each of them and laid out our case.
White agreed to meet but only with me and only in secret. I was summoned to a late-night meeting with the mayor at the Parkman House, the nineteenth-century National Historic Landmark townhouse on Beacon Hill. I was carefully instructed not to come to the front door, but instead to ring the bell at the back door in the small alley. In this meeting and those that followed, it was always just the two of us, always very late at night, always at the Parkman House, always through the alley.
I found it hard to follow a lot of what the mayor said. His mind seemed to slip and jump. Yet it was clear that White was remarkably shrewd. And that he was deeply enamored of conspiracy and secrecy.
He took great delight in explaining to me how politics in Massachusetts really worked.
“So,” he said, “you failed to get the circuit breaker. If you had come to me, I could have told you how to pass that bill. You shoulda come to me.”
“What would you have told me?”
“Well, I would’ve told you that to pass a bill you need to have the support of a guy who is not in the legislature. Not Tommy and not Kevin and not Bill. For Chrissakes, you gotta know the guy you need to call. Do you know the guy you gotta call?”
It was obvious that I didn’t, so I said nothing.
“Well, you need to call my good buddy Bobby Crane. You know why?”
White stopped, he cocked his head to the side, grinned and paused.
I knew Crane was the state treasurer. I didn’t know, however, that he was close with White. And I had no idea where White was going with this.
“You need to call Bob because then he calls Tommy, he calls Kevin, see. And they want to help Bob. Right? And you know why they want to help Bob? The jobs, it’s all about the jobs. You know—cousins, nephews, friends. Jobs. The jobs. You understand?”
Again, it was obvious to both of us that I knew nothing.
“Come on, Bob has the jobs. You are a rep and you want to be able to get your people jobs. It’s about jobs. Bob controls more non–civil service patronage positions than anyone else in Massachusetts. The lottery. You know. The lottery. You want to get something done, let me call Bob. That’s how it works. I can call him right now if you want.”
Of course, White was right. Crane hired huge numbers of friends and family members of the legislators to work for the lottery and as a result, the legislature for years gave Crane what he asked for.
White finally decided he was all in on the classification campaign. The city needed to win on the issue. White and his team became an important part of the coalition we were building. With his support, other mayors signed on. The public sector unions joined. On the local level we organized churches to join. The human services agencies all jumped in, then private sector unions. We thought it would be diplomatic to have someone outside of Fair Share as the coalition campaign manager. We hired John Sasso, a young staffer for Congressman Gerry Studds.
For the classification referendum, we developed reinforcing messages delivered by people voters trusted. Stop a massive tax increase. For once let business pay its fair share. Classification is fair and works. They would hear from their mayor, and their local priest or clergy, and then from Fair Share—each saying how important it was to pass classification. We had enough money to hire political message experts like Dan Payne and John Martilla. Fair Share was spearheading its usual grassroots efforts and now because of the coalition that we had assembled, we could buy ads and send persuasion mail. We even had a barnstorming train that toured the state holding rallies at every stop.7 Despite the best efforts of the business community to defeat it, the referendum won with 66 percent of the votes.8
(As important as the classification victory was, without the circuit breaker we could not stop the conservative tax cap referendum that came a few years later. Furious about rising taxes that outpaced stagnant incomes, many Democratic voters were hearing the appeals of a right-wing campaign that argued not to shift the burden of taxes but simply to cut them across the board, providing large windfalls for the wealthy and the corporations and strangling public revenues.)
One day a few months after the referendum victory, I received a call from Dukakis, asking to meet with me. Heartbroken by his loss to King, he wanted advice in advance of an attempt to run again. As soon as he sat down in my office on Boylston Street in Boston’s Back Bay, he launched immediately into why he had come. “Yes, I know. I was wrong about the way I handled tax reform. But I think it reflected a larger problem. I didn’t understand that I needed to build a coalition of constituencies. I wasn’t in touch enough. Talk to me about what you saw as our mistakes.”
At the end of an hour-long discussion, he asked me, “If I want to hire one person to help me put together the coalition that I will need to reclaim the governor’s office, who would you suggest?”
Without hesitation I responded, “You can do no better than to hire John Sasso, he would be perfect.”
Dukakis hired Sasso, and for years John was his essential partner guiding Dukakis through his successful reelection to the governor’s office, then throughout his two terms, and finally, almost making it to the White House.
Fair Share won significant campaign after campaign.
The phone company attempted to raise rates. We countered with a proposal for “Lifeline Phone Rates” where the initial small amount of usage was less expensive and then as usage increased, the rates increased. We fought and won to keep payphones, used disproportionally by the poor, to a dime—pricing that would stand for more than thirty years.
The organization fought for and won massive changes in how auto insurance rates were set, and equally massive rebate checks. In 1977 insurance companies were given the ability to set their own rates. Auto insurance companies set rates in part based on the overall accident rates in communities—not the performance of the individual driver. Then they overlaid community rates with personal rates using gender, age, and marital status. The result was that drivers in urban areas were paying dramatically inflated insurance bills. In dense places like East Boston, with all the traffic going to and from the airport, it was not uncommon for a family to pay more than $2,000 a year to insure one old car. At the same time, the companies abused the “high risk pool,” placing sound drivers with good records in a pool designed for drivers with a history of poor driving. Fair Share swung into action, pressuring the governor, the insurance commissioner, and the legislature. As a result of that first Fair Share insurance campaign, the legislature passed a bill ordering the companies to refund $55 million to 800,000 motorists.9
The legislation also gave the insurance commissioner new, broader powers to determine how rates were set. Commissioner Jim Stone, extraordinarily smart and progressive, was delighted to have Fair Share pressure him to make drastic changes in how insurance companies set rates. Under public pressure from Fair Share, Stone ruled that there would be one uniform rate setting for all companies. Several days after Christmas, 1978, Stone announced a statewide drop in rates of 12 percent and in urban areas two and three times that.10 It was clear that the decrease came from the Fair Share campaign.
There is nothing like winning to boost support for an organization. Thousands of people received checks from our campaigns. We joked that the only thing that could have been better was if the checks had said on them “Brought to you by Mass Fair Share.” Still, it was clear to most recipients why they had gotten the money and reductions in rates, and loyalty to Fair Share grew dramatically.
One evening I was again in Worcester, this time for a meeting of our statewide leadership team working on the auto insurance campaign. In reaction, really overreaction, to the wild ideological excesses of the late sixties (in a moment of complete foolishness I had once told a Boston Globe reporter in 1969 that I was a “democratic communist”), now I focused firmly on “self-interest.” We wanted the organization’s appeal to be “specific, immediate, realizable and rooted in self-interest.” However, I was beginning to sense that we were selling our leaders short and failing to articulate the values that motivated them.
After the meeting, several leaders approached me, needing rides to get home as they had come with organizers who had left early for another meeting. In getting rides sorted out, I realized that several leaders such as the indefatigable Mike Regan did not own a car.
Surprised, I asked, “You don’t own a car? Then why are you here working on auto insurance reform?”
Mike answered simply, “Because I want justice.” I turned to the other people still in the room.
“Why are you here?”
Answer: “I want fair play.”
These and so many Fair Share leaders gave of their time not primarily out of a narrowly defined self-interest; they were in it for justice, for fairness. Even though they would never have used the words, they believed in social solidarity. I left the meeting convinced that the organization needed to start using more explicit exploration of values in our leadership development and training programs. From then on, we wove values and vision into the work. We still focused on victories that would benefit people, but we edged away from a narrative based on a narrow definition of self-interest.
The list of campaigns and successes stretched on and on. Of course there were defeats. Still, each year, Fair Share members and the public could see the impact of the organization, the impact of direct citizen action. Sometimes those victories were highly local neighborhood issues. For example, the Chelsea Street Bridge, an old drawbridge that was one of two connecting East Boston to Chelsea, was opened for a tanker and became stuck in the upright position. Traffic became snarled, accidents common. Yet the bridge went unfixed for months, with the residents of East Boston getting more and more furious. There was federal money for new bridge construction but not for repair of old ones. More months went by. Then East Boston Fair Share took it on, targeting Congressional House speaker Tip O’Neill, he of the famous quote “all politics is local.” His district included East Boston. Marches and protests demanding that O’Neill free up funds resulted quickly in the bridge finally being fixed.
To fully understand Mass Fair Share and its impact, repeat that story over and over again in sixty low-income neighborhoods across the state. Instead of a broken bridge, it might be a missing stop light. A dangerous abandoned building. A vacant lot infested with garbage and rats. A toxic waste dump. A park that needed cleaning up. The last bank leaving a neighborhood. A rash of uninvestigated arson. Redlining. Block busting. Story after story of citizens demanding that the government work for them for a change and making sure it did.
At Fair Share we were committed to an old dream: an interracial movement. It was not easy in Boston, where the virulent racist populism of the antibusing movement was prevalent in the white working-class neighborhoods. We insisted on a direct approach to residents in those neighborhoods. Our message was: “We are not asking that you love Black folk, but we are asking that you work together to win on issues that matter to you and to them. There is no way you or they will win economic justice if you allow the elites to divide you. Their game is all divide and conquer. Our response must be to work together and win.”
We didn’t shy away from hard campaigns. We tackled issues of redlining and block busting. We stressed building a multiracial effort. The failure to focus exclusively on organizing around specific needs of Black people as Black people, caused unrelenting criticism from Black leaders like Chuck Turner and even sometimes from my old friend Mel King. How could we think an organization led by white people could seriously organize in Black communities? How could we think it was proper to mobilize around common issues when Black people had been oppressed so severely and specifically for hundreds of years?
While the attacks from the antibusing leaders were strident, attacks from Black leaders in Boston were more painful. Mostly we were running up against a different strategy from thoughtful leaders. They saw the need to organize Black people around their identity as Black people and to press for demands that were unique to them.
We did not oppose that strategy. We felt something else was needed as well—our multiracial populism. In those days, Boston was a very white city. Black families made up only 16 percent of the city.11 We felt the need for a multiracial populism precisely because of the power of the antibusing movement and its racist populism, the extreme tribalism, and segregation that plagued the city.
The response to Fair Share from Black families, particularly Black women, was enthusiastic. They wanted to be part of an organization that fought for economic justice and fought for their neighborhood.
We did struggle to hire and train Black organizers. There were precious few talented younger Black people who wanted to take up organizing with Fair Share. In part that was because new corporate and professional opportunities were opening up quickly for well-educated, talented young members of the first generation to benefit from the civil rights gains. It was hard for us to compete with banks, law schools, investment companies, and so many other better-paying employers wooing the “best and brightest” of Black college graduates. And those who were looking for a different path were often leery of coming into an organization whose staff was overwhelmingly white. We were determined to recruit young Black organizers to train, and to search across the country to find Black senior staff.
Our search finally turned up an unlikely pair who brought exactly what we needed. I got a call from a Bill Thompson who said that he had heard that we were looking for senior organizers. He had heard of Fair Share and was interested. He and a close friend, Richard Montgomery, would be open to coming up to Boston from Pennsylvania to interview us to see if we fit what they were looking for. I asked about his organizing experience and was impressed by the long list of organizations he had worked with.
Bill and Richard soon arrived, and we spent the next several days in nonstop conversation. Bill was not a large man in physical size, but he felt large, large in spirit, large in generosity, large in humor, poetry, and song, always filling the room. After talking with him at length, I thought Bill was as close to a Black analog to me as was possible within the mirror of the American racial divide. He came from blue-collar Pennsylvania, had been fired up with hope by the Civil Rights Movement, plunged into it, then radicalized by the war and Richard Nixon, worked against the war, joined the Black Panthers, and was as militant as anyone. However, he came to see the failings in his militancy and slowly found his way back to a belief in serious grassroots organizing. He thought Fair Share was the model for what he wanted to build. He wanted to play a senior role with us and then some day, return to Pennsylvania and build a similar organization based in Reading and Allentown, where he had grown up.
He was accompanied by his close friend Richard, who had been a serious basketball prospect before becoming radicalized and converting to Islam. Richard exuded passion and a warm heart with a clear affinity for the verbal patter of Muhammad Ali. The two made a formidable pair. I was thrilled to hire them.
For two years, they led our organizing efforts in Boston’s Black communities and started training younger organizers. All seemed to be going well. Bill and I took to working out together at the rather seedy gym down the street from our offices. One day he stayed after I returned to the Fair Share office. I received a frantic call from the gym: Bill had collapsed from some kind of stroke. He was rushed to the hospital. I immediately went there, and the first reports were promising; the stroke was not that serious and was treatable. He and I talked; he was eager to recover and get back to work. Later that night he suffered a horrible reaction to the medicine given to him, a reaction that was confined to an exceedingly small percentage of patients, all African American. And he was gone. Then a long, numbingly sad ride on the train to Pennsylvania to bring his body back to his grieving family. That experience shook me. On that ride to Pennsylvania, as I sat and listened to the steady rhythm of the train on the tracks, I heard the blood beating in my veins in a way I never had before.
In some ways we never recovered from Bill’s death. Richard stayed on but was not the same without Bill. We managed to keep some of the organizers they were training and even attract a few more talented young Black trainees who became good organizers. But we never found that senior replacement to fill Bill’s shoes. Our young white organizers were always welcomed on Black blocks, but we had wanted to build senior organizing leadership of color. We failed to do that.
Despite that failure, we did build an interracial organization in Boston and in other cities around the state. We built deep organizations in the Black neighborhoods of Boston. While two African American men, Art Shephard and George Huggins, rose to be statewide leaders, on the ground in those neighborhoods, it was amazing Black women who took the lead. Women like Vernice Gabriel, Bernice Smith, Cheryl Harris, Inez Wilkins, Dottie Sellman, and so many more, who had deep networks, devoted themselves to caring for their families, friends, and community. They were active in their churches, active on their blocks and could move others to action.
In one campaign, Boston Fair Share took on bus transportation, specifically in the Black neighborhoods. Fair Share charged the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) with clear racial discrimination for maintaining inferior service, a poorly maintained Dudley Station, a lack of bus shelters on routes serving the Black community, and poor scheduling. The Boston Globe headlined: “Citizen Group Charges Racial Bias in T Service.”12 The chapters in the other white neighborhoods joined in and supported the African American Fair Share leaders who won changes in bus services, bus shelters, and investment in improved maintenance.
In 1980 at the annual convention of several thousand Fair Share members, Art Shephard lead an effort to pass a resolution condemning racism and endorsing the Fair Share “Covenant of Racial Justice and Harmony.” The motion passed unanimously. Sitting in the hall and voting for it were some white Fair Share members who had supported the antibusing movement only six years earlier.
This certainly did not mean that Fair Share successfully drove out racism. It was always there, simmering, and real. But we were able to witness changes in some white families who had supported the antibusing movement but through the experience of working in a multiracial organization, grew out of their virulent racism. As had the great union organizing drives of the 1930s, the experience of being in Fair Share, in fighting alongside Black families changed those white working-class families.
Fair Share was in some ways two organizations. There were the chapters based in the blue-collar and low-income major urban neighborhoods, as well as in the smaller cities across the state. The chapters were organizer intensive. At our height there were close to one hundred paid staff, including full-time organizers, trainees, interns, and paid Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) working in the chapter areas.
In addition to the neighborhood organizers, Fair Share employed a new form of outreach staff—paid door-to-door canvassers.
In the year before the merger, the original Fair Share team had contracted with Marc Anderson to run a door-to-door canvassing operation. Marc was a Vietnam vet and passionate environmentalist. In Chicago he founded Citizens for a Better Environment, hiring young people to go door to door, asking people to sign a petition, and to make a donation. It worked. Marc was willing to bring his operation to Massachusetts for Fair Share and to other organizations around the country.
From the start, the canvass was successful. However, having it run from long distance proved problematic. We decided the arrangement with Marc was unsustainable. I was delegated the job of breaking the contract and bringing the canvass under our control with all of its staff becoming Mass Fair Share employees. Marc was remarkably accommodating and generous.
We ran our own canvass at a time when there were no other door-to-door efforts in the state. Every year we knocked on more than 400,000 doors. In the summers, the canvassing staff grew to over 300 boisterous, excited, idealistic college students. In the winter, it kept going with a smaller number of college graduates and dropouts. The canvass raised funds, while it also allowed us to garner statewide support. It produced a flow of lawsuits as wealthy towns attempted to keep us out (we always won). While successful, the canvass was never extremely profitable, as most of the funds went to pay the salaries of the canvassers, their trainers, and managers. Still, in the early years it netted 10 to 15 percent and was a powerful outreach effort that brought Fair Share to the doors of thousands of people each month.
Twice a year I insisted that every staff member go out with the canvass teams to experience the work they were doing. That, of course, meant I had to do it as well. There was a lot of pressure on me to do well. The first time, I drove with a team of canvassers to the North Shore, was dropped off on a street with very large and well-appointed homes. The first several houses I visited, I came up empty and was starting to worry. It would be embarrassing if I failed to meet the quota we asked every canvasser to raise. I rang the doorbell of the next home. I could see lights on, so I knew someone was there. No one came to the door. I rang again. Finally, a disheveled young woman, who looked to me to be in her late teens, opened the door, standing there among toys strewn about. She was attempting to quickly button her untucked blouse. I had the distinct impression I was interrupting something, but since she did not ask me to leave, I explained why I was there. She told me to wait. After a few minutes, an even more unkempt middle-aged man, appeared at the door, obviously flustered. I started my pitch and he cut me off: “Yes, yes Fair Share, yes… . Here take this and please go away.” He emptied his wallet of cash, and I walked away with $140. That meant I was already over quota for the night and still had two hours to go. The fact that I beat quota by so much enhanced my reputation with the canvassers. I refrained from explaining to anyone that I thought that I probably caught a father having illicit sex with the babysitter.
Many organizers, especially those working in low-income communities, feel conflicted about asking for money. When I first organized in Dorchester with TPF, I thought the people there were too strapped to be asked to contribute anything. In our storefront, someone, most definitely not one of the organizers, put out a huge blue water bottle and attached a hand-lettered sign: Support TPF—Remove Troy. People started dropping change and dollar bills into it. As time went on people would stop in at the storefront just to drop a few dollars into that big blue bottle.
One time I mentioned my initial reluctance to ask for donations. The response was unequivocal: “What, you don’t think we would want to pay our own way? Hell, nothing in this world is free. For Chrissake if you don’t allow some of us to make contributions, you’re blocking us from participating. I thought you were here to help us participate more!”
At Fair Share, I was all about raising money to scale up the organization. Since money was essential to organizing, we developed a multifaceted fundraising program. Membership dues were $15 per year. We had membership drives in the neighborhoods. The canvass sold memberships and collected donations: no donation too small. Observing what churches did, we organized Las Vegas Nights—one night of legal gambling in a local church hall made possible by our nonprofit status. We also used our nonprofit tax status to bring in carnivals. Our ability to access public space enabled carnival operators to bring their rides to densely populated areas—paying a substantial fee to us. We also raised money from foundations and wealthy donors.
The budget of the organization increased rapidly, growing from under $200,000 in that first year to more than $3 million in less than six years. We were proud that 90 percent of our funds were raised organizationally. I was always pushing for new ways to raise more. Money was the key to sustaining a large and ever-growing organization. And raising it ourselves meant we were only accountable to the members.
I am sure that outbound phone fundraising would have been invented sooner or later, but as far as I know, Fair Share was the first organization, at least in the Northeast, to use a dedicated phone bank of paid outbound callers to raise significant sums of money. Telethons from Jerry Lewis to public television had been doing phone campaigns for years where viewers urged on by TV called into a toll-free number to donate. Throughout the 1970s public radio was doing very successful on-air drives.
We had more than 100,000 households who, when a stranger knocked on their door and explained that they were collecting memberships and donations for Mass Fair Share, would give $15, $25, and $50. A year later they would give again. I kept mulling over ways to get them to give again sooner, to give more, and how to lower the cost of getting their donation.
One day, an old friend called looking for a job. Sandy Sokoloff was a talented artist, a painter who annoyed me enormously for decades by squandering his substantial talent. I had not heard from Sandy in several years when he called me and then came by. He was desperate for a job. He had been working multiple short-term jobs, including for the census and for WGBH, our local public television station, answering the phone for their pledge drives.
I asked him if he thought calling our canvass donors, especially ones who had given $15 or more, might work. Sandy was eager to try it. I told him, “Okay. You are hired to design a phone campaign calling the donors from the door-to-door canvass six months from the date of their last donation. We will do a very small test: you personally will call for a couple of days. If it goes well, you will call for several weeks. If that goes well, we will build a small team of callers, and you will train and direct them as well as make calls yourself.”
The first call Sandy made was a success. The man on the other end of the phone said he would be delighted to give again to support Fair Share. “Given how much Fair Share has saved me, this is a bargain.”
The calling went spectacularly well. Within several months, Sandy had a small team making calls and creating systems for sending out pledge packages and processing the checks that came back. Over a short time, the net funds raised by the phone canvass were over a half a million dollars a year.
Another unexpected source of financial support for Mass Fair Share came from the federal government. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Sam Brown as the head of ACTION, the agency that housed the Peace Corps and VISTA. I had a long history with Sam. He had been the appalled spokesperson for the National Student Association during the Ramparts exposé of CIA funding. Then he got his first taste of organizing as a volunteer with Vietnam Summer which led him to become the youth coordinator for Gene McCarthy’s challenge to Lyndon B. Johnson. While at the Harvard Divinity School, he was one of the coordinators for the Moratorium. After a stint as state treasurer of Colorado, Carter chose Sam to head ACTION where he brought in two other people I had long known and admired, John Lewis of SNCC and Marge Tabankin. Marge had been an antiwar activist and then the first woman trained by the Saul Alinsky network, before becoming the head of a nonprofit, The Youth Project, that had been a source of funding for many organizing efforts. Together they reshaped VISTA so that community organizing was an approved role for the volunteers. Fair Share received a first batch of twenty and eventually as many as forty paid VISTA volunteer positions, allowing us to dramatically increase the number of organizers and organizer trainees.
While at Fair Share, I studied populist movements, in particular the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota. I was struck by how they had created an economic infrastructure to support their political movement. They had established cooperatives and even banks. We wanted to emulate the populists of those movements.13 But if were to do so, we would need some help from people with a very different skill set than our organizers. We brought in Josh Posner to figure out how we might use the membership and name recognition of Fair Share to launch cooperatives that would provide tangible benefits for members, deepening their ties to the organization. Josh had been a student activist at Brown, a community organizer in Brockton, and then worked on low-income housing.
Josh set out to build an economic development arm. The first venture was a successful home heating oil cooperative. Bringing together hundreds of members to negotiate group contracts with oil companies, we were able to get significantly better prices than any individual could. From an oil co-op it was not a huge leap to energy conservation audits.
We created a new legal entity, the Fair Share Development Corporation, which outlasted Mass Fair Share. Over time, it became the Conservation Services Group led by Mark Dyen, Steve Cowell, and Adam Parker. They built it into a massive energy conservation services effort that, over thirty years, grew to operate in twenty-three states and employ 800 people. They would contract with utility companies and governments to run large-scale conservation efforts, doing home energy audits, weatherizing, and making improvements that would reduce energy use. The result was that energy companies would not have to build costly new plants and homeowners reduced their energy bills.
As Fair Share grew, we grappled with how to be part of something national. We knew that only a national effort could address the root causes of the economic dislocation all around us. Increasingly we looked for a path forward to build national power. We were not interested in another national effort that did not have a deep base of support in the states and communities. Our challenge was to build more state level organizations that could then band together.
Our first attempt was a national strategy around energy, led by Heather Booth. Heather convinced William Winpisinger, the head of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), to create a coalition focused on a progressive energy policy. The coalition would be composed of labor unions and citizens, community, senior, and consumer organizations around the country. The IAM had 920,000 members back then. Heather convinced the unions—still wary of the movements of the 1960s—to work with our community groups, the National Council of Senior Citizens, and churches to form a Citizen Labor Energy Coalition (CLEC). Most of the financial support for CLEC came from the union. CLEC launched national campaigns around the energy crisis of the seventies that allowed groups such as Fair Share to participate on the national stage. Mark became the New England coordinator.
In Massachusetts, with CLEC joining us, Fair Share won the fight for unitary taxation of oil companies. The oil companies created many corporate entities in different states and countries. They made sure most of the profits were placed in the subsidiary in the lowest tax areas. Massachusetts was only taxing a fraction of the real economic activity and profits taking place in the state. Under the unitary method we passed, all the entities were combined, and the Massachusetts tax was based on a fair evaluation. Arcane stuff, but we found ways to simplify and make it clear that it was time for the oil companies to start paying their fair share.
Organizers in other states were starting new organizations like Fair Share. In Oregon, an organizer named Kim Clerc founded Oregon Fair Share. In Connecticut, Toby Moffet and Ralph Nader had created an organization in 1970 to work on consumer and environmental issues, the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG). In 1975 CCAG started a door-to-door canvass, as well as deployed organizers to cities and communities. In early 1979 CCAG, however, was in turmoil. Marc Caplan, the director, knew he needed help, and we at Fair Share were the nearest source. The only person I thought capable of leading a successful turnaround was the best organizer we had, Miles Rapoport. With some trepidation I suggested that Miles become their new director. We thought that it would only be for a short period; however, Miles forged a lifelong political partnership with Marc. Under his leadership, CCAG not only righted itself but rapidly grew and became a significant force in Connecticut politics.14
As we groped for a national strategy, the Midwest Academy became central to our efforts. Started by Heather Booth and employing another old SDS leader Steve Max, the Midwest Academy offered intensive training sessions for organizers. It provided an important development process for organizing talent and became the place where organizers could share their craft.
There was growth in new state organizations, many related to the Midwest Academy, that while working on the same issues as Mass Fair Share, approached the work differently. These organizations combined door-to-door canvasses with a coalition approach that brought together unions, senior citizen organizations, and some community-based organizations. These included the Illinois Public Action Coalition (IPAC), Indiana Citizen Action, and the Ohio Public Interest Campaign started by my old organizing pal, Ira Arlook.
In 1979 Heather, Miles, Bob Creamer of IPAC, and I convened a series of meetings to explore how to create a national organization. Too many of the decisions that would wipe out neighborhoods, close workplace after workplace, determine the cost of living, and shape the economy were made at a national level. To be serious about our organizing we needed a national strategy and organization. We agreed that the participating state organizations did not need to be uniform, that we would allow for state variation especially as we were all still testing and learning. With Ira as the executive director and Heather as the president, we launched Citizen Action.
Soon there were organizations in New York, Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and even Idaho. Within three years, Citizen Action grew to include twenty state organizations
Citizen Action tackled economic issues: rate hikes and the price of energy, plant closings, tax reform, and a variety of state issues. Its retreats brought together hundreds of organizers and leaders to share ideas and strategies.
As the decade drew to a close, we appeared to be on the cusp of creating a national effort that was rooted in state organizations. We thought we were ready to become a force in national politics. The growth of Citizen Action was running against the national political tide. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 ushered in a new conservative dominance. His success among “Reagan Democrats” made the compelling case that if there was not a populism of the left, there would be ever-increasing success for a right-wing populism that appealed to those left behind. Globalization was beginning to empty out factories and communities as corporations raced to find the labor markets with the lowest cost. Unions and liberal organizations were reeling. Despite the rising tide of reactionary politics, it seemed as if Fair Share could alter what was possible in Massachusetts and perhaps Citizen Action could develop a successful national progressive populism.
At home we had welcomed a second daughter, Meg, who had arrived in a hurry that August of 1979. I missed the moment of her birth, frantically scurrying after a meeting in Worcester to find that she had been born within eight minutes of Amy arriving at the hospital. Two delightful daughters, leading a powerful statewide organization and helping form a new national organization. Life was full. I felt I was again at the center of a historic fight.
I was personally exhausted, however. Shortly, and way too soon, the bottom would drop out for me and for Fair Share.