From Boston Review Books
After America’s Midlife Crisis
“Using plain but deft language, longtime community organizer Gecan (Going Public) diagnoses the range of problems threatening the country, community by community, as our institutions grow unreliable and corrupt . . . . [He] makes it clear that the fleecing of the American worker is a problem comparable in scope, ethics and injustice to American slavery.”—Publishers Weekly
Excerpt:
During three summers in the late 1960s, I worked for the Contract Buyers League of Lawndale, led by the late great Monsignor Jack Egan and a determined Jesuit seminarian named Jack Macnamara. Paid ten dollars a week as a junior member of a large and talented staff, I did hundreds upon hundreds of title searches, poring over the plats and maps at Chicago Title and Trust and going half-blind staring at microfilm records.
My colleagues and I read the story of the dismantling of a major part of the city. White families, panicked by real estate speculators, sold low. The speculators’ pitch was not subtle. Each night, sometimes in the middle of the night, the phone would ring, and a real estate representative would describe how the coming black buyers would destroy the neighborhood. Often, the caller literally spoke your language—in the case of my family, Croatian.
Once the whites had left, the real estate sharks turned around and sold the same homes at much higher prices to working-class black families. There was a catch, of course: the early version of the adjustable-rate mortgage. Black families, denied normal mortgages by any bank because of their race, had to buy their homes on contract. They had no equity until they made the very last payment. Equity was not earned month-by-month, year-by-year, as in a normal mortgage, but only as a “bonus” at the end of twenty years of faithful and timely payments. Any late payment or short payment meant that they lost everything.
Ruth Wells and Clyde Ross were just two of the thousands of people who faced this real estate gauntlet. They, like other Lawndale homeowners, went to work no matter how sick, no matter how pressed, no matter how worried they were about their teenage kids, because they could not miss a single payment. And because they eventually would, they would find a sheriff on the porch, waiting to evict them. When they met Egan and Macnamara, Wells and Ross emerged as leaders of the group of contract buyers that decided to push back. They picketed the banks that held the mortgages of the sleazy real estate operators. They recruited a top legal team to represent them. They analyzed and documented every transaction in an entire section of the city and proved that there was a clear pattern of abuse and exploitation. Before RICO, they exposed a real estate racket and flushed out the racketeers. They won in court and forced the mortgage companies to reimburse them for their losses.
But the victory, against great odds, was too little and too late. In dozens of other neighborhoods, the racketeers, or their unindicted sons and daughters, went back to work. They kept scamming both the whites who fled and the blacks who came. The dollars that could have gone into home maintenance, home improvement, tutoring for the kids, went to hustlers who worked with the blessing and protection of the Democratic machine. Before long, block after block was bled dry. About half of the neighborhoods of the city started to die.
I remember Lincoln’s description, in his second inaugural address, of how “all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk.” The longer the evil was tolerated, or ignored, or worked around, the greater the price to be paid by the entire nation: “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” The modern Lawndale version was not slavery, not total, not horrific, not enforced by the lash, but it was marked by relentless toil and modest wages that gave way to slowly losing—seeing stolen—most of what you worked so hard to earn. Your toil was not unrequited when you did your work. It was unrequited over time.
I responded to these experiences and many others like them by becoming an organizer. I have worked for more than 30 years with colleagues in the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) as we found and developed local leaders who sought to build and sustain their communities. When I began, there was still some sense that governmental solutions with a liberal bent could solve many of society’s seemingly intractable problems. But that sense was already fading and was swept off the stage by President Reagan’s government-is-the-enemy creed and a quarter-century of prayers and incense-burning at the altar of the market. Today, both temples lie in ruins. And, once again, people are watching their lifetimes of work reduced to dust.
Meanwhile, in what Peter Drucker called the “third sector” and what others refer to as civil society, my colleagues and I have carried out many experiments in citizen organizing and social problem solving—some very large in scale, some more local; some clearly successful, some not; and some in too early a stage to evaluate. These are experiments, often undertaken in partnership with local government, that neither the governmental sector nor the market could or would conduct alone. These experiments have already transformed parts of cities and counties and regions. As conditions for working people continue to deteriorate and as traditional responses keep coming up short, these experiments command greater study.
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About the Author
Michael Gecan is on the national staff of the Industrial Areas Foundation and is author of Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action.
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