Thanks to Ron Sakolsky I got interested in the community control of schools. As a result of that interest I met Lin Dodge and he became one of my main teachers.
At the time I bumped into him he was teaching math in a community controlled school in Manhattan. Lin and others had taken huge bolt cutters, broken into the public school and opened it up for the surrounding community. Lin was an older man, slight in build, very clear in his thinking and uncompromising. I think he was a Connecticut blue blood guy who didn’t get along with the American system. He spoke in a sharp nasal twang.
Lin was a World War II draft resister and pacifist. He was in jail with Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam. Lin didn’t go along with the segregated prison system. He would always line up with the Black prisoners at meal time so the guards would send him to solitary. When they let him out, he would go back into the “wrong” line again. Lin spent most of WWII in solitary confinement.
It turned out that Lin was a friend of my main Professor at NYU, Herman Berkman, even though I never took a class from Herman. Herman had some grant money to do a study of citizen participation. It was a new and exciting concept then. Something that had come out of the War on Poverty’s language about “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in their own programs. The question was what is feasible and how it should work. My other friend Cary Hershey was working on this with Herman and Herman hired Lin to staff the study.
Lin would be in and out of 4 Washington Square North as a result of his work with Herman. Lin was also very present at demonstrations at NYU and during my time there demonstrations were a dime a dozen. I’d often see Lin dressed in a drab grey suit walking between the protestors and the cops acting like a neutral observer.
We protested the war or ROTC or military recruiters. We supported the Black Panthers, demanded freedom for the Panther 21, rallied with SDS, took over buildings, protested Professor Frank Trager’s work for the CIA in support of the war in Vietnam.
One time students took over the Courant Institute at NYU. We held it for several days and there were lengthy debates in the auditorium about what to do with the federal computer on the second floor. This was apparently the main reason we were in the building and federal marshals with long batons were outside waiting for us to exit.
Our demand was to end the Vietnam war and free the Panther 21 or we would do something with the federal computer.
The debate in the auditorium was about the computer. Lin was there and he was arguing to make use of the computer. Of course, few of us knew anything about computers, but Lin did. He lost the argument that day, but people like Lin won the argument in NYU’s Kimball Hall which had also been occupied. That building housed the printing press and students held that building for two weeks. It became a national movement printing press. It was one of my earliest lessons in the old movement adage – transform existing resources into power instruments.
The decision in the Courant Institute auditorium was to blow the computer up and, as we were leaving the building, people attempted to do just that. Lucky for all of us outside this all glass building, the attempt failed. Years, decades later, I was doing research for the OHOP mutual light company near Eatonville, Washington, on whether or not the Washington Public Power Supply System, a municipal corporation, could file for bankruptcy under Chapter Nine of the Federal Bankruptcy Code. There were only three experts in the country and I had talked to two of them.
The third expert was a law professor at New York University. I called him up, but he could not help me because he represented investment firms who might be damaged by a Chapter Nine filing. As we were talking, the Courant Institute came up. I remembered that as we were leaving the building there were people pushing past us to get in. This guy had been one of them. He had raced to the second floor and de-commissioned whatever fuses were lit because he had his student research on that computer. Small world.
I followed Lin around quite a bit. I don’t know if he was the one who introduced me to all the Anarchist literature, but I started reading it. Anarchist thinking was prevalent in the New Left along with notions of a vanguard party to lead the working class stuff and the Black Panthers’ idea or mobilizing the lumpen proletariat.
I couldn’t go along with the Vanguard party. The leaders seemed to be haughty, elite white kids, who wanted the working class to follow them. But, at the same time, they hated workers and condemned them for being racist and bigoted. While I felt bad about the white working class’ bigotry and racism, both characteristics of my family, I would rather be with them than with these elite snobs. Plus they never produced a working class following.
There was a P.O. Box in Florida that was a source of anarchist literature. I started sending money to it and receiving booklets written by Murray Bookchin such as Listen, Marxist and Liberatory Technology. Murray believed that modern technology could overcome the difficulties that had plagued small scale communities. With “liberatory technology” you could have self-sufficient, off the grid communities that would be small enough to allow the face to face interaction critical to a non-representative democracy that anarchists called for.
Many of his little booklets became a book called, Post- Scarcity Anarchism. When I got to Cornell years later, I invited him to our program. He seemed to be a Post Relevant Alcoholic. It’s funny, though. I used one of Murray’s books when Stephanie Guilloud and I taught a course on Anarchism and the New Global Order in the summer of 2001 at Evergreen. He still had a good rap on him arguing that anarchism always had a social critique and was not just a new word for American individualism.
Lin Dodge taught me about anarchism, alternative education, living theater, printing presses, and the Quakers. He was part of the Alternative University near Union Square on 14th street. They had a full curriculum of courses. For many years, I had that curriculum because it was printed on the back of a large scale map of downtown Washington, D.C. It was with this map that anti-war protestors from all across the country found the traffic circles they were suppose to shut down in May 1970 when we tried to paralyze the nation’s capital.
Lin also took me to the Living Theater’s performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was Melina Mecuri group and they did radical things like break down the barrier between the stage and the audience. I was so glad we were in the balcony and they could not get to us when they came off that stage. I’ve been on the edge in my life, but generally a moderate edge.
He also taught me about 365 offset presses. When I was working for the Quakers in 1972 and 1973, Lin had formed “Come Unity Press.” It was housed in a building either owned by or rented by the Quakers. The press was open 24 hours per day and run on anarchist principles. If you wanted something printed, you were welcome to use the press. If you didn’t know how to use it, Lin would teach you. If there were no supplies for the press, you had to go get them. I learned to run that 365 offset press and I printed off numerous reports and flyers related to my community organizing efforts in Brooklyn.
The last time I saw Lin was in 1973. I had fallen asleep near the printing press and he woke me up by tweaking my nipple. “Oh, sensitive!”, he exclaimed. I awoke to find him in bright pink panties and nothing else. His body was so skinny I couldn’t figure out what held up those panties. Lin was in his out-gay phase or maybe he just was out to me. I remember talking to Herman about Lin. He said that at some point, Lin would be institutionalized. I hope that was not his fate. I knew, however, if he ever touched my nipple again he was going down, skinny runt or not.
Life as a graduate student at NYU was a good life. I was getting paid to organize my Brooklyn neighborhood, and all I had to do was read books and write papers in exchange. It was good for about four years and then I got tired of it. I even turned down more fellowship money at the end of my stay at NYU.
At the beginning, though, I didn’t know if I was cut out for graduate student life. I was, after all, a B student from a small university in Seattle. Yes, I was a returned Peace Corps volunteer so I had stories, but I wasn’t sure I had the intelligence required. My first epiphany was in an organizational theory class during my second semester. I was sitting next to this guy with a wonderful Jamaican accent who appeared to be very bright. I was hoping something might rub off on me. At one point during the lecture I turned to him and whispered, “You know, I don’t think I can do this graduate school stuff. I don’t understand a fucking word this professor is saying.” He turned to me with a somewhat shocked expression and said. “You mean him? He’s a fucking fool!” It had never crossed my mind that this was possible or that a student might be in a position to make such a judgment, but from then on I found graduate school to be relatively easy and enjoyable.
It was easy for me in relation to the other students because most of the other students were part time. They worked as New York city government employees or United Nations employees or employees of public authorities from around the metropolitan region. There was even a Secret Service employee who told me if we ever met on a demonstration he would invite me to a bar for a drink. A good Irishman.
I was full time and I could read all the assigned articles and books and generally did. In fact, I tore through them. Although I only thought of most of the reading as the dues I had to pay for my other life, I did in fact learn a lot about administrative systems, formal institutions and organizational behavior. This knowledge became increasingly handy as I became a community organizer confronting large scale systems.
During my initial year at NYU, I stayed close to my fellowship’s line of march, international and comparative public administration. The guy who got me to NYU was Professor Keith Henderson. He was a specialist on the Middle East and I began having thoughts of going with him on a research mission. I also took classes from Vera Micheles Dean, an institution all by herself, a former editor of Foreign Affairs and a confidant of Le Grand Charles de Gaulle. She never gave me an A. She always told me that I wrote like a journalist and should change my career choice. The only time I got an A from her was when I wrote a paper for someone else. That one got an A.
I did have notions of becoming an international civil servant and working for the United Nations. One of my student friends at NYU was a staffer for the Ethiopian mission to the UN and they would invite me to their apartment for dinner. I started going up to the U.N. on 42nd street every time I had a chance. I could sit in on Security Council sessions and listen to the simultaneous translation, then look at all the reports in the UN book store. I would have lunch in the UN restaurant and imagine myself sitting there discussing weighty international issues.
My political perspective was still at a “servant” level. One of my conclusions from the Peace Corps experience was that there was a need for culturally knowledgeable, impartial civil servants to administer the aid packages so that local interests would get their way. I kept this servant perspective for a short time until someone took me on a tour of some of New York City’s finer neighborhoods like the South Bronx, Harlem and Bedford Stuvestant in Brooklyn.
I saw poverty in those neighborhoods that I had never seen in Turkey. I mean this was New York City, the wealth capital of the world. I got mad. I’m still mad. What was I doing in Turkey? The problem seemed to be here. I shifted my focus to Urban Poverty and Urban Social Policy, especially since my possible trip to the Middle East didn’t pan out and I had wasted our meager savings taking Arabic classes at Berlitz.
I started reading every book there was on Urban Poverty and there were lots of them. This was the time that “administrative” studies were being shifted to “policy studies” and there was plenty of federal funds around to study poverty policy. We even demanded a course on Urban Poverty as part of the Public Administration curriculum and we had to take over the Dean’s office to make it possible. The argument against it was that administration – the implementation of policy – had nothing to do with poverty.
We got our course and I took it. The problem with this course and all the books we read was that they were purely descriptive. Absolute poverty – no housing, no health care, no jobs, no education, no this and no that. How to change this situation was not in the literature. From then on, however, I wanted to learn about inequality, not poverty.
I read Chomsky and G. William Dumhoff during this time. Chomsky wrote about the “new mandarins” – the ones that studied poor people in order to control them better. Dumhoff wondered why there were no public research projects on something as big as Standard Oil, one of the largest enterprises in the world. A rule came up for me. If you ever ask people about themselves, you have to give them back the information they gave you and not give it to their oppressors in a research paper. I didn’t want to study a poor people’s movement to control them but to figure how they could get more power. I don’t know where I got the idea that I wanted to be a community organizer. I know that when I got to New York I began contacting Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation based in Chicago looking for ways to become a professional community organizer. Maybe it was from people who came into our classes talking about community organizing. One of them was Rev. Lucius Walker from a newly created group called the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). I remember his talk about the world as two groups: the rich and the poor. About ten years later I would work closely with Lucius to create a new, national political party called the Citizens Party. And, when I got to Olympia, one of our close friends, Rick Fellows, would be working for Lucius driving buses to Cuba and Central America. It is amazing how connections you make can continue for a lifetime.
I was getting interested in social movements and their infrastructure. I studied the tenants rights movement in New York city; its organizer Jesse Grey and his rent strike in Harlem. I started going up to Harlem to work with Monsieur Fox and help rehabilitate broken down houses. I went up to Harlem when King was killed and walked in the streets and into a park for a memorial. I was scared. I stood there listening to the talks, wondering what a white boy was doing in Harlem. Then this hand from a large Black man reached down and took mine. Then, I knew what I was doing in Harlem. I was crossing that race line. The one that runs down the center of this country.
One of the movements I was interested in was the Welfare Rights Movement. It was strong in New York City. It was led by a woman named Beulah Sanders. She and her members would confront police on horseback in the city streets and take over welfare offices demanding rights and payment. At the same time, it looked like this movement was gaining a national focus through the organizing efforts of a former CORE staffer from Syracuse, a dashiki-wearing Black man named George Wiley.
I liked this movement because it intersected with my administrative studies. There was this theory of administrative overload proposed by two Columbia University faculty named Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. You would build a social movement to demand all the rights available to all the eligible people. In doing so, you would overload the system, break it down and create an opportunity for something better.
Although Cloward and Piven didn’t believe that poor people’s power could be mobilized through formal organization, George Wiley did. First he formed the Poverty Rights Action Center and, from there, he created a national organization of welfare recipients called the National Welfare Rights Organization. He established an office in Washington, D.C. where he intended to lobby Congress for legislative improvements as his various chapters mobilized direct action campaigns.
I went down to Washington, D.C. and into their office. Tim Sampson was there and he must have been the bureaucrat that kept all the organizational records in the file cabinets in the back office. There was also a Xerox machine and I xeroxed these files and brought them back to our Brooklyn brownstone.
Marge and I had moved from our furnished apartment in Flatbush to the second floor of a brownstone on 14th Street at 8th Avenue in the Park Slope neighborhood. The “slope” was from Prospect Park West going down the hill toward the Gowanus canal. Our apartment was a studio, one very long room with a kitchen and bathroom. We had our dining room table at one end and our bed at the end facing 14th street. Next to our bed was my desk, a big wooden one. It was here that I was supposed to write my dissertation.
Marge was now finished with her two year Masters in Social Work program and was working for Children’s Aid Society in Manhattan. It was another hard job for low pay. I was still on my NDEA Title IV fellowship or my Robert Marshall Dissertation Fellowship. I wanted to get my dissertation done, but I was also facing the draft. Up above my desk was my induction order, my invitation from “Uncle Sam” to go kill Vietnamese or get killed by Vietnamese. The draft system had eliminated student deferments and I had received my induction order. Vietnam became the center of my world, my thinking and my political development.
