Cause Without A Rebel
July, 1972
the question for "common cause" is: can you save the country without getting your hands dirty?
It isn't the apocalyptic sales pitch that guarantees success. It's the aroma of something special--a kind of sweatless sincerity--that exudes from the salesman. Your ordinary evangelist may say the same thing, but he just doesn't get the results that Billy Graham commands when he shouts, "Today the whole world is on fire! ... The flames are licking all around our world--the roof is about to cave in ..." etc. And when Ralph Nader warns, "This is not the time to fool around, wasting countless hours watching television or chitchatting ... not when the future of civilization is at stake," he draws a much more universal and much more profound response than virtually the same admonition does when it comes from Lester Maddox.
Whatever singular quality it is that accounts for the difference, John W. Gardner certainly has it. If he had been an actor back in the days when Hollywood considered a potted palm in a hotel lobby the height of elegance, Gardner would have been cast as a don, an Episcopal minister or a banker. His voice and manner are right. And even though the idea packaged by his voice and manner may be stunningly naïve ("Why, the peace movement alone is as hard a political force as the oil lobby!"), the people believe in him.
So he is a first-rate apocalyptic salesman. "The nation is in deep trouble," he intoned in 1970, and nearly a quarter of a million people trembled and began sending in their $15 to join his organization, Common Cause--called a people's lobby and dedicated to promoting "housing, employment, education, health, consumer protection, environment, law enforcement, administration of justice [and the] reordering of national priorities and Governmental reform." A pretty big order for Common Cause's two full-time professional lobbyists to handle, you must admit, but for the moment let's not talk critically.
Common Cause is remarkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, its size. Even if nothing great emerges from it, Gardner will have put his tidy mark on history, for in slightly more than a year he pulled together an organization exceeded in size by only two dozen labor unions. Each person who paid his $15 hoped that it would be used to save his Government's soul, and the fact that even one 800th of the citizenry--fresh from five years of L. B. J. and four years of R. M. N.--believed salvation possible is also truly remarkable.
The third remarkable thing about Common Cause is that despite its many absurdities it's still quite appealing. Common Cause propagandists are uncommonly pious and windy and boastful about their work, and they are also quite inaccurate. They claim to have done much more than they really have done; they claim to be much more powerful than they really are; they offer as their very own ideas that were old long before Common Cause came into existence. In short, like all politico-evangelistic movements, Common Cause has its share of quackery and deceit. Yet, on balance, the nation is better (continued on page 202)Cause Without A Rebel(continued from page 109) off because Gardner goes around chanting his doleful quasi sermons, and it's probably also accurate to say that Common Cause has girded the loins of the timid taxpaying citizen in a fashion no other organization has done in recent years.
The worst mistake that one could possibly make would be to think of Gardner as a radical reformer. His philosophy has received the seal of approval of Reader's Digest, where nine of his speeches and essays have appeared in the past decade--seven more times than J. Edgar Hoover was chosen--and of Fortune magazine, which once admiringly published excerpts from two Gardner books it quite accurately described as "moral tracts."
The idea that the public should seize certain corporations horrifies him. Having been kept by the largess of the Carnegie riches for 19 years, Gardner puts much trust in America's "great families." He apparently believes in spreading political power evenly over the people (although he once said of the political process, "It is not essential that everyone participate. As a matter of fact, if everyone suddenly did, the society would fly apart!") as long as democracy is not equated with a more equitable distribution of money. When I suggested to him that the most necessary reform needed in this country is a redistribution of wealth, he became quite angry, ridiculed this as "one of those big round phrases that sound great" and eventually broke off our discussion by calling me "arrogant--and, if you don't mind my saying so, snotty."
One of Gardner's aides later explained that Gardner avoids talking about redistribution of wealth because "it does scare off some people who aren't sure if it's their wealth you're talking about."
There are certain people of considerable wealth whom he has indeed taken great pains not to frighten away, for they have helped keep him in business as a modest reformer since 1968. The two major do-gooding operations Gardner has headed are the Urban Coalition (along with its lobbying counterpart, the Urban Coalition Action Council) and Common Cause.
The Urban Coalition was generously bank-rolled by corporations such as those whose executives have served on the Urban Coalition board: Litton Industries, the Aluminum Company of America, the Chase Manhattan Bank, A. T. & T., Boise Cascade Corporation, General Motors Corporation.
And when he started Common Cause, he tapped the same kind of personal and corporate pockets--John D. Rockefeller III, John Hay Whitney, Arthur Krim, Sol Linowitz, the Watsons of IBM, Time Inc., Ford Motor Company, Norton Simon.
Like the true reformer, Gardner thinks he has a stronger character and purer heart than other men. He has said that politicians who seek an "alliance with the masses" may be just "power-hungry men"; but of course he wouldn't misuse Common Cause's mass alliance. Likewise, though he believes the corporate dollar corrupts politics, he also believes Common Cause is immune from such corruption. I asked how he can be so sure, but he didn't like the question. And when I asked if he did not in fact represent "the establishment," he became so irritated he refused to discuss it.
Of course he does represent the establishment. He's sort of the lay chaplain of Fortune's 500. "Businessmen respect him, especially big businessmen," a close friend of Gardner's once said. "Maybe it's because the bigger the businessman is, the more idealistic he's apt to be." Maybe. And maybe they like him because they are convinced Gardner will never let his reform movement get out of hand. After all, he has always mingled easily and worked closely and sympathetically with the corporate world. He has served as a consultant to the Pentagon, helped put together the Rand Corporation's nonprofit System Development Corporation, served on the board of directors of such corporations as Shell Oil, American Airlines, Time Inc. and the New York Telephone Company.
Understandably, Time considered Gardner's sentiments worthy of being published as an essay in 1969 when he wrote of the Top People: "Contemporary critics often appear to believe that the smothering of individuality is a consequence of intentional decisions by people at the top. Right-wingers blame Government leaders, left-wingers blame corporate leaders. But the modern leader is always in some measure caught in the system. To a considerable degree, the system determines how and when he will exercise power. The queen bee is as much a prisoner of the system as is any other in the hive."
It wasn't clear, as is often the case with Gardner's essays and speeches, just what he was getting at. What system outside Government and the corporate world did he have in mind as the villain? Could it be some mysterious system originating with the Lower Classes?
If one were to judge Common Cause only from the list of "sample" members distributed by the organization's publicity office, one would have to conclude that nobody can get in unless his name has appeared frequently on the front page, society page, movie page or financial page. Everyone on the list is somebody: Mrs. Dean Acheson, Winthrop Aldrich, Hugh Auchincloss, Ralph Bellamy, S. I. Hayakawa, Fredric March, Gregory Peck, Dr. Jonas Salk. Well, you get the idea.
And from some of the names, one might wonder just how common a cause can get. There is Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, for example, one of Washington's best wheeler-dealer lobbyists, whose career reached a high point of sorts a few years back when a Congressional committee investigated the way he went about getting a natural-gas rate increase through the Federal Power Commission. And there is the gentleman so well remembered at Attica prison, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose idea of democracy is sometimes illustrated by running a highway through your front room and sometimes by withholding money from needy insane asylums. And there is Robert McNamara, whose efforts on behalf of international peace need no explanation here. (Remember, please, the officials of Common Cause--not I--have singled out these names for your special attention.)
But in fact the membership, like the hierarchy, is a mixture of the middle class and up. Balancing chairman Gardner at the top is president Jack Conway, an assistant to Walter Reuther for many years, an old labor organizer and a crafty lobbyist. And if the establishment-oriented membership is not exactly balanced by honest progressives, at least it is diluted, as will be shown later on.
No effort is made to disguise the elitist atmosphere that surrounds Gardner, an atmosphere to which he contributes with little anecdotes, such as one he told an admiring audience in Washington. It started out like this: "I remember once when I was walking down the waterfront in San Francisco--not something I normally do--and a limousine [not just a plain car] coming in my direction slowed down and a lady stuck her head out the window and said, 'Keep up the good work, Mr. Gardner!'"
Nice members appreciate those subtle assurances of good taste.
The Common Cause staff contributes its share to this atmosphere. In a press release about the visit of Wheelock Whitney, a prominent liberal Republican from Minnesota, to the Washington offices, the note of noblesse oblige was right on top: "[Whitney] was tremendously impressed. He did not have an appointment with Mr. Gardner, but Mr. Gardner met him and even gave him a personal tour of the office."
Until Gardner joined the Johnson Administration in 1965, he had led an almost cloistered life, broken only by a hitch behind a Marine Corps OSS desk during World War Two. For several years before the war he had worked quite happily in what he later described as "fine girls' colleges in sylvan glens"--Connecticut College for Women and Mount Holyoke College. Books were his favored entry to life. During his undergraduate days at Stanford University he dropped out with plans to become a fiction writer, but at the end of a year he decided he needed to understand people better in order to write about them. Others might think the best way to do this would be to travel or get the right kind of job or in some other way arrange to mix with people. Not Gardner; his solution was to return to Stanford's books and switch his major to psychology.
In 1946 he became an official and in 1955 the president of the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. This was the life of a theoretician devoted to guessing what esoteric teaching projects deserved how much moola. For backing such ventures as the new math and the Russian Research Center at Harvard, Gardner was hailed by The New York Times as "the most powerful behind-the-scenes figure in American education."
If the reputation was deserved, it was obtained at a bargain price. As with most foundations, the benevolence of the Carnegie Corporation was marked by stinginess; it was worth more than $330,000,000, but under Gardner it was giving away only $12,000,000 of its tax-free dollars, or less than four percent, a year.
A foundation officer's ideas of the immediate problems of education are not necessarily related to the outside world. There is no indication that Gardner was much interested in using the Carnegie power and prestige during the period when it was his to command--which spanned the era between the Supreme Court's Brown decision in 1954 and the first major civil rights legislation of the Johnson regime--to promote desegregated education.
In 1963, when 97.5 percent of the black children in the South still attended wholly segregated schools, Gardner spoke at the University of Georgia. Only two years before, two blacks had needed police protection to register there, and feelings were still inflammatory. Gardner urged the Georgia students to "keep your horizons wide," to "develop your potentialities," to "risk failure"--all admirable advice, no doubt, but nowhere in the speech (as preserved in Reader's Digest) does one find him alluding even vaguely to the most critical problem then confronting the students: racism. "If you want to get back to the source of your own vitality," Gardner counseled the Georgians, "to be refreshed and renewed, cut through the false fronts of life and try to understand which are the things that you really believe in and can put your heart into." Like white supremacy?
One must sympathize with his terrible isolation during this period. Even as late as 1965 he could write as though he were making a great discovery that "young people find that the moral precepts their parents have to offer are no longer relevant in a rapidly changing world." Gosh.
For 19 years Gardner was in the foundation icebox and then one day he was miraculously rescued by President Johnson, who pulled him out and made him his Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. It was a time of enormous growth in the department, with L. B. J. grinding another social-welfare or education program through Congress every other day and depositing it on Gardner's doorstep for implementation, and at least Gardner carried out his duties with dignity under great stress.
But once again it was a period in his life unmarked by exceptional leadership in the delicate area of race relations, although, of course, his education agency was expected to exert a pivotal influence. As his stay at HEW neared its end, he admitted, "If we had taken literally the language of the Civil Rights Act, which instructs us not to give Federal money to anyone who discriminates, we would have cut off a far greater number of school districts than we actually did." At the time he made that declaration of obvious lawlessness, HEW was withholding Federal funds from only 34 districts of the literally thousands that were refusing to comply with the civil rights law.
Gardner was in his early 50s (he'll be 60 next October) before he even went into the street, which is pretty late to get started and may partly account for his subsequent erratic course.
Today, like so many of the men who happily served L. B. J., Gardner denounces the war as the worst blight on our existence. As a result of it, he says, "the erosion of the spirit that we have experienced is beyond calculation." No such remarks were heard from him during the great escalation. He knew the kind of Administration he was coming into; the build-up had already started in Southeast Asia when he joined HEW.
Johnson used Gardner as a show horse in his Vietnam snow job, trotting him out to indicate that the Administration didn't really want to destroy Vietnam but to bring it health, education and welfare--as Gardner's presence was supposed to symbolize when, in February 1966, L. B. J. hauled him out of a sickbed and took him along for the meeting in Honolulu with South Vietnam's leaders. Apparently Gardner enjoyed being used in this fashion. His response to the trip was a breathless "God, it was exciting!"
When he left HEW in March 1968, there were speculations among his many journalist fans that he did so out of opposition to the L. B. J. war. But Gardner publicly denied it and he did not condemn the war until Johnson had left Washington.
Today one of Gardner's favorite themes is the disastrous callousness and unresponsiveness of the Federal Government. He pounds away at this in every speech. But when he was an important part of that same Government, he never made any such complaint. Early in 1971 he told The New Yorker, "What was borne in on me during my years in Washington is that we aren't going to solve any of our problems with the existing machinery." Later the same year he told me that his time at HEW had persuaded him how decayed some of our political institutions are.
One finds no trace in the printed record of his having felt this way at that time. As recently as 1969 he wrote condescendingly of dissenters who believe in the "old and naïve doctrine" that "corrupt and wicked institutions" have oppressed mankind.
The reason he has got by with this ad hoc hopping around without being caught is that he sticks to generalities-- the vaguest sort of generalities--and avoids specifics like poison.
Assuming that he is now really convinced the machinery of Government is decadent, surely he should be able to supply an example of the decadence from his two years and eight months at HEW--which, next to the Department of Defense, has the biggest budget and the biggest waste factor and the biggest employee mess in the Federal Government. I asked him for just one example, one specific example. His response was, "The unholy trinity among a bureau chief and a lobbyist and a member of the Appropriations Committee. There are hundreds of them all over town. Little threesomes. Fellows who have gone fishing together for years. Their wives have played bridge together. They are part of a permanent invisible Washington. Their names are not known. They rarely make the headlines. But they've seen Presidents come and go, they've seen Secretaries come and go, and they determine a great deal of what actually goes through Congress with respect to their field. This is roughly the kind of relationship you might have among, say, the head of vocational education in the Office of Education, the American Vocational Association and a member of the Senate or House Appropriations Committee."
That's a colorful and totally believable premise--sneaky little threesomes--but how about one concrete example of their destructiveness while he was at HEW?
"Gee," he said with an apologetic seizure in his throat, "I could have given you a lot of examples [once upon a time], but it's faded now."
Incredible? Not really. To Gardner, life has been an unanchored, unballasted, gaseous romanticism. Sometimes there has not been a single sandbag hanging from his balloon, and things down below in the solid world of specifics are just too small to make out. Excelsior. A Higher Calling. On his way up he admonishes us to have faith in "justice, liberty, equality of opportunity, the worth and dignity of the individual, brotherhood, individual responsibility," and then, as if sensing that maybe we had heard of those things somewhere before, he hurries on to concede that these have little meaning unless translated into "down-to-earth" programs. But when he is asked to point out exactly what he has in mind, he squints at the receding earth below and, waving vaguely, equates all those airy concepts with "a decent job for everyone who wants one."
Such is the typical view from a Gardner balloon: that the ultimate of the faith he had been preaching, the purest expression of human existence, the highest aim of all his exhortations against "sterile self-preoccupation," comes down finally to something that the Employment Act of 1946, if enforced, could provide.
But a man with that outlook is highly valued in some quarters. So in 1968, with Detroit and Newark still smoking and with the powers that be afraid that this time the blacks might really be out for theirs, the Urban Coalition was established and Gardner was put in charge of it. Concocted by big-city mayors, the standard labor leaders, the standard civil rights organizations and a representative covey of big businessmen, the Urban Coalition was supposed to have a tranquilizing effect. It was supposed to "establish a dialog," as they say.
Gardner's concept of how to proceed was captured in a speech he made in 1969 that went like this: "Our problems today--poverty, racial conflict, urban decay, archaic Government institutions, inadequate education, inflation, crime, air and water pollution, snarled transportation, and so on--are more complex and deep-seated than most Americans wish to recognize. But I want to talk about them not as problems but as opportunities."
The italics are mine, but the rest is pure Gardner. Fortunately the ghetto blacks weren't paying any attention or they would probably have switched from gasoline to napalm. He was full of that sort of thing. The confrontation of the races, he said, "will be resolved only by patient, determined efforts on the part of the great, politically moderate majority of whites and blacks through programs of education, job training, health care and social services." God. After nearly three years in HEW did he still think a few rinky-dink programs could fix up a place like Bedford Stuyvesant? Did he really think that health care could offset a city full of the kind of apartment buildings in which the upstairs toilet leaks into the downstairs kitchen sink?
Today, when he's peddling a lobby to the middle class, his objective is to cut through apathy, and so he talks occasionally in a semi-quasi-revolutionary way about how the ballot will never get the job done, as the system now stands. "If you could increase by ten percent or even 15 percent the number of first-rate people in Congress, it would be spectacular," he says. But if you did, so what? For "there would still be the oil lobby, the Congressional-military-industrial complex." Good people, he suggests, are swallowed by the system; they disappear into its reeky conflict-of-interest bowels and are never seen again.
That's his line now, and it may be an accurate one. But if it's accurate for the middle-class whites, who aren't expected to react with more vigor than to reach into their wallets and produce $15 for a C. C. membership, why wasn't it also accurate for the rioting blacks of the late Sixties? Gardner didn't see it that way. In those days his line was that first among the "long-tested, well-established procedures of a free society," the chief means by which "citizens make their influence felt" was--the ballot. Put down that brick, darky.
The Urban Coalition of that era was a flop, but not necessarily because of any failure on Gardner's part. Perhaps the failure could be traced to the fact that by the time he left it, most whites were fed up with blackish organizations and blackish needs. Whether or not Gardner diagnosed his problem that way, it is clear that Common Cause was set up to appeal to another class, the white middle and upper-middle and even wealthy class--the people whose daughters he had got along with so well as a professor, the people he had spent Carnegie Corporation money on, the people for whom he had held HEW to a program of gradualism. They were back in business together.
It was a brilliant step to take, a perfect marriage of talent and interests. The middle class was in despair. Yet it is also the center of whatever clout the people might have. No serious effort had ever before been made to organize it. And Gardner was just the man to launch the organization with respect.
No effort is made to disguise the predominant color. At Common Cause headquarters I was repeatedly told that if I really wanted to get a feel for the interplay between Gardner and his followers I should attend one of the "town-hall-type" meetings he has been holding around the country. A few weeks later there was a meeting in the Daughters of the American Revolution auditorium in Washington. On several notable occasions in the past the D. A. R. has refused to let Negro and antiwar artists perform in their hall. The ladies would have been pleased with the people who used their hall that evening. At first swing I could not see a single black face in the 2000 or so on hand; in a city whose population is 72 percent black, an all-white crowd of that size is rather unusual. Then I saw two black men in the first balcony, just at the edge of the stage. Obviously they wanted to hear everything. But as it turned out, their interest was not personal: They were reporters for The Washington Post and the Washington Star, ordered to listen.
The color and class on display that night constitute the strength of the citizen lobby, some of its leaders feel. C. C. president Conway says, "The thing about our members is they are where labor people aren't. The peculiar thing about our members is they are right smack in the middle of where the power in this country now resides--that's the suburbs, the areas surrounding the cities, in the small towns. Middle America." He said he had no idea how many blacks were among the membership, but conceded the obvious, that "until we're on issues that have a direct appeal to the blacks and browns and Indians and poor folks where they can see it, they're not going to join."
Unfortunately, Gardner's brilliant conception has not yet brilliantly achieved. Considering the lobby's immaturity, however, it has done OK. Perhaps its biggest problem was that during the first year and a half, it usually joined an issue too late to really make much difference (although Common Cause newsletters convey an entirely different estimate of its impact).
Gardner's lobby helped in the fight to change the Congressional seniority system, but as Richard Conlon, staff director of the House's Democratic Study Group, correctly recalled, "There was all kind of press to change the seniority system all year long--long before Common Cause got involved. They were not the prime movers. I think [the modest reform rules] would have gone through anyway, whether or not Common Cause had helped."
Common Cause lobbied against appropriations for the continued development of the supersonic transport (SST), and Senator William Proxmire, the ringleader of the opposition, has publicly given polite thanks. But staff members in Proxmire's office, to keep the credit in balance, point out that the critical vote to kill the SST occurred in December of 1970, at which time Common Cause wasn't even lobbying the issue. Gardner's crowd did recruit help for the vote in March 1971, which delivered the coup de grâce to the SST, but the momentum to that end had been building for a year--thanks to the lobbying drive of 15 public-interest organizations, coordinated at the end by Friends of the Earth. They, along with Proxmire, were the real heroes.
Unquestionably Common Cause was the most vigorous peace lobby in Washington throughout 1971, and although it failed (the vote was 254 to 158) to pass an amendment in the House to cut off funds for the Vietnam war by the end of the year, Gardner's lobbyists did win a number of unlikely converts among the ethnic hawks and established a more tangible antiwar mood than had ever before been created in the House.
Common Cause lawyers have been busy. In California they sued the state and forced it to let unmarried students vote where they were attending school rather than being required to vote at the home of their parents--a victory that helped one fifth of the nation's 18-to-21-year-old voters. And in the District of Columbia, Gardner's lawyers embarrassed both national parties by suing them to obey the campaign money laws.
A full and accurate appraisal of Common Cause's work to date, however, is impossible to make. For one thing, the lobby's bookkeeping is helter-skelter. It is a bit ironic. Gardner's standard theme is that "the two great weapons against the public interest are money and secrecy." He is constantly denouncing special interests for not telling the whole story about their lobbying activities. Yet the lobbying reports Common Cause files with the clerk of the House of Representatives, as required by law, leave much untold.
These reports show that Common Cause received $4,217,668.22 in dues and gifts in 1971 and spent $847,856.29. Does this mean the lobby came through the year with a surplus of more than $3,000,000? No, it only means this was all Common Cause spent to actually lobby on Federal legislation. Like all its public accounting, Common Cause's record of specific lobbying expenditures is spotty. Guessing from other known Common Cause executive salaries, David Cohen, the lobby's national field director--the fellow who pulls together any letter-writing campaign from the membership--must be earning at least $24,000, but the lobbying report shows that for the last three months of 1971 he was paid a total of only $1246 for his efforts to influence legislation at the Federal level.
A number of other key salaries either are also reported only in part or are ignored altogether. Common Cause president Conway's $45,000 salary is not listed. No salary is listed for Gardner and his aides say he doesn't receive one, surviving instead on income from lecturing and from stock-market profits. Andrew J. Glass, a reporter for the National Journal, reminded Gardner that his refusal to disclose the specific sources of his income "appeared inconsistent with his stand against financial secrecy in lobbying operations and exposed him to conflict-of-interest suspicions"; but Gardner still refused to open up.
Efforts to put together an accurate picture of the financial outlay through direct inquiries at Common Cause headquarters are equally frustrating. The young woman who--by her and her boss's estimate--researched all and wrote 90 percent of a leaflet on delegate selection to national party conventions told me that the editorial cost had been "less than $3000." But other officials at Common Cause, insisting that the cost of secretaries and proofreaders and rewrite editors should also be counted, put the cost at $15,000. The state director of another project testified before a Congressional committee that "the total cost to us in making this effort may be estimated to have been between $10,000 and $15,000." But higher officials at national headquarters told me that the director was wrong and that the actual cost was in the neighborhood of $75,000.
If there's confusion about how the citizens' lobby spends its money, there's even more confusion about where the lobby is going and what it hopes to achieve next--confusion that was generated at the end of 1971 when, just as it seemed Gardner and his top honchos had settled on a plan of operation, there was, without warning, an upheaval and a regrouping. Some of the more successful operations were killed and a few of the C. C. executives with the best reputations were let go. The Capitol Hill lobbying staff was cut in half. Even though they'd just begun to learn how to concentrate pressure at the Federal level, suddenly there was the announcement that "from now on we intend to put more emphasis on state issues and state legislatures." A Common Cause lawyer had been cooking up a suit to force Nixon to roll back milk prices on the grounds that the G. O. P. had been bought off by the milk lobby--just the sort of lawsuit it seemed Gardner should have loved--but at the critical moment the lawyer was cut from the payroll. (So Ralph Nader stepped in and hired him, filed the lawsuit and reaped front-page publicity in The New York Times, The Washington Post and papers all around the country--publicity from which Common Cause could have dearly profited.)
Why the nervous reorganization? It was widely believed around town that Gardner had panicked. If there is any one thing that has been his specialty in the world of real people, it has been raising money--and suddenly, alarmingly, it seemed that he was losing his touch. Common Cause had launched itself, as one of Nader's aides put it, "on nothing but a good idea and John Gardner's good name." As 1971 slumped to an end, it seemed that these were still its main, or only, assets in the public's mind. The organization's activist role in Washington had been admirable but not impressive. And the public seemed to be losing interest.
The return on the lobby's direct-mail recruiting had fallen from a high of two and a half percent--far better than the average return for direct-mail solicitation--to one percent, which is barely acceptable. (For a comparison, Nader's direct-mail solicitation has sometimes had as high as a three-and-a-half-percent return and has never had less than two and a half percent.) In the fall of 1970, full-page ads in The New York Times had a fantastic response, pulling more than 7000 members into Common Cause. But a $10,000 full-page ad in the Times in November 1971 brought in only 300 members. Gardner and his advisors decided the ad route was washed out.
This is not to suggest that Common Cause is dying or that its executives feel defeated. Conway predicts the outfit will continue to grow at the rate of 15 percent a year. But it is to suggest that by spending about $1,500,000 a year in membership drives--over one third its income--the C. C. hierarchy is forced to be too concerned with what that money returns. Thus, if Federal lobbying seems to lose its sales appeal, pump more into the state level and see if that catches on better.
This is a danger Common Cause leaders seem to realize. They say they will spend much less to recruit in 1972. The experiences of 1971 had a dampening effect on some workers. At the first meeting of the Illinois state steering committee after Gardner's decision to change C. C.'s focus, one who was there recalls, "The feeling was that the Washington offices were so screwed up that no one quite knew how to approach the whole thing, that it was a mistake to switch the focus to local and state issues, since we already have the IVI [Independent Voters of Illinois], BGA [Better Government Association], etc., for that type of lobbying, and that Common Cause ought to be a national--that is, Federal Government--lobby. There was also the feeling that Common Cause was concentrating so much on membership drives and fund raising that it might possibly become simply a self-perpetuating organization, losing sight of its original goals."
Whether or not the refocusing on the states was wise, it was understandable, in a way. Aside from a couple of lawsuits, Common Cause had only one socko trophy to point to at the end of 1971: the Colorado Project. This project was so well conceived and executed--on so little money--that it was normal for Gardner to hold it in awe and to dream of duplicating it elsewhere, even if the effort ripped apart the original concept of Common Cause.
The pillars of the Colorado Project/Common Cause are a couple of exciting public-interest adventurers named David Mixner and Craig S. Barnes. Mixner, who grew up in the Seven Mountains area of Appalachia in a coalmining family "that had been ripped off for years by the Rockefellers," as he put it, dropped out of college to join the peace movement, drifted West and in 1970 went to work trying to elect Barnes to Congress.
Barnes's background is posher. Son of a Denver civil engineer, he graduated from Stanford University in 1958 and from its law school in 1962. He joined a large Denver law firm. Part of his duties included lobbying for industry's position on pollution matters. But, says he, "I decided I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life," and his rebellion quickly evolved to the point that he became the lawyer in a celebrated Denver school-integration case. Having cut the ties in this way, he took the next step by running as a peace candidate against the 20-year incumbent, Congressman Byron Rogers. Barnes defeated Rogers by 30 votes in the primary, but lost in the general election for two reasons: He was considered too pro-integration and he made a public statement, which he never withdrew, that he would go to jail rather than serve in Vietnam.
Thus free to do better things than serve in Congress, Barnes and Mixner looked around to see what they could do for Colorado. "We started out to discover why the average Coloradan feels that his government is corrupt," says Barnes. "Here's a progressive state with progressive leadership on both sides of the aisle, good men in the legislature, a legislature that has sporadically kicked up progressive legislation on abortion law and a children's code and things like that. Nevertheless, the typical citizen in the state thinks that all politics is corrupt, that the government somehow doesn't reflect his interest and that he's tuned out. We felt if we could find out what was wrong and what to do about it in a microcosm like Colorado, then we'd know the answer to the whole national malaise."
When the Public Service Company of Colorado--the biggest utility (gas and electricity) in the state--asked for an annual $11,300,000 rate increase, Barnes and Mixner decided that this was the test case they had been waiting for. First they pulled together data showing P. S. C.'s paralyzing hold on the state: interlocking officials in half of Denver's biggest banks, on 28 Colorado government commissions, in 19 chambers of commerce, 19 civic organizations (such as Red Cross), 32 business and professional organizations, six country clubs and eight universities and colleges.
"We sent out fact sheets to thousands of Common Cause members," says Barnes, "to tell them what was at stake here: the country clubs we were financing through our electric bills, the political movies we were financing through our electric bills, the inflationary salary increases we were financing; the failure of the company to do anything about pollution control at the same time it spent nearly $3,000,000 a year on advertising for a monopoly it didn't need to advertise. We sent all that information out to the public, and wow, they weren't apathetic at all. They came streaming in."
Indeed they did. It was the largest public participation in a rate hearing in the state's history. Barnes and Mixner had welded together a coalition that would have made the ghosts of the old Populists give a cheer. Every Steel-workers local in Colorado joined. The women's auxiliaries of the Steelworkers joined. The National Farmers Union came in. So did the environmentalists and the peace people. Mixner calls it "a 'coalition of the exploited,' to use Senator Fred Harris' phrase. These are the people who are getting together, who have been divided by the wealthy in this country. The people in our coalition, why, they weren't even talking to each other a year ago."
The public showing in the rate hearings was so overwhelming that the utilities commission, notoriously in the pocket of the industry, decided that the safest thing to do was whack $3,900,000 off the $11,300,000 rate-increase request. And in their appeal from this ruling the Public Service Company lawyers were reduced to complaining that--and these are their very words--the Colorado Project leaders had injected an "emotional element" into the hearing and that this was "improper." Nobody can whine like a corporation lawyer when he's been trounced.
Moving from Gardner to Barnes/Mixner, one moves to an entirely different altitude. Here the air is crisp and biting. No sludgy Reader's Digest wishfulness. No tips of the hat to Rockefeller, Whitney, Ford and company. "We are gearing up to the day when we can force the states to require different criteria for chartering corporations so that corporations will have their public responsibilities as well as profit motives," says Barnes. "Isn't it Saul Alinsky who says what we need is an American form of communism? That we need a fairer way to restrain corporate power and the profit ethic, but something that just isn't as unethical as Marxist communism? I would agree with that. I think this is a political movement. I think the climate is right to have another progressive revolution. The facts are right. The 30-year period of consolidation of corporate power is almost complete, so that the President can deal with 500 corporations and feel that he's got the problem under control. Mintz and Cohen say [in America, Inc.] there are only 200 corporations that you have to worry about, standing astride the economy of the country. Well, the time has come, and those of us who are involved are at the genesis of a movement to do something about the subversion of the democratic process by corporate power."
The point in quoting so extensively from these two Colorado chaps is to show one potential of Common Cause. Both in the Federal capital and out in the states it has surfaced a number of tough do-gooders like Barnes and Mixner, and occasionally the money raised by Gardner trickles down to them and they do marvelous things with it. Maybe the trickling will increase.
Meanwhile, what more could you ask from $15 than the surprise of finding yourself lobbying hand in hand with Jack Valenti and Arlene Francis?
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