Community organizing project runs

afoul of competing aims, deindustrializaton

by Roger Bybee

As Christopher Lasch noted in The Agony of the American Left, US progressives have been cursed with the absence of a continuous tradition that has permitted collective experience to be passed on from one generation to the next. Instead, there have been relatively disconnected periods of essentially spontaneous upsurge without the institutions to preserve and pass on lessons about ideology, strategy and tactics. Thus, activists of the 1960’s and 70’s were cut off from the lessons of the 1930’s labor and Left upsurge during the New Deal years.

Some of these lessons would have been valuable to New Leftists as we attempted to spread off-campus through efforts like Milwaukee’s East Side Housing Action Committee, launched in 1972 to achieve both the building of deep roots in working-class communities and the spread of democratic socialist consciousness.

Special credit in is due for two remarkably charismatic figures who were critical to the founding of ESHAC and its sister organization East Side Focus: sociology TA and factory worker Art Williams and Episcopal priest Bill Coats. They were unquestionably the driving forces behind the notion of a non-sectarian successor to the anti-war movement that was explicit in advocating democratic socialism (Focus) and an organizing project that would build support and consciousness among large numbers of people (ESHAC). While markedly different in style, they each contributed  unique blends of creativity and determination without which neither organization would have ever been launched, in my view. They are two very special heroes.

A s someone who played a small role in the founding of ESHAC in 1972 as a 21-year-old anti-war activist and grad student in Urban Affairs at UWM, I will be glad to contribute copies of some of the papers I wrote about ESHAC, as well as my master’s thesis on the decline of working-class institutions in Riverwest (however inadequate they appear in retrospect.

SOME REFLECTIONS Jesse Jackson has frequently identified two types of activists: the “tree-shakers” who knock loose the fruit of social change and the “jelly-makers” who gather the fallen fruit and convert it into institutional form. 

ESHAC went through a number of phases, but initially started out in a distinctly “tree-shaking” mode, seeking to mobilize tenants against predatory landlords like Daniel Giwosky of Fox Bay Realty (ultimately to gain notoriety for murdering his wife and intentionally setting off the explosion that destroyed the magnificent landmark Century Hall on Farwell Ave. on April 24, 1988.) ESHAC also participated in existing mass organizations like Milwaukee East Organizations Congress, successfully persuading a group focused on narrow stop-sign and neighbhorhood clean-up issues to adopt a strong anti-Vietnam War resolution. 

But in terms of ESHAC’s founding vision,  tenants proved to be an ephemeral and mercurial constituency, preventing the building of permanent units of the envisioned “tenants union” structures that had been built in other large cities. Milwaukee‘s housing market was simply not as tight as New York or San Francisco‘s, and tenants typically chose to move rather than fight abusive landlords and to collectively push for more reasonable rents. 

Eventually, this produced both a geographic and strategic shift. ESHAC’s focus moved from the East Side, with its high population of left-wing but transitory residents, to the Riverwest area with a declining but still stable working-class population. At the same time, ESHAC moved decisively into the institution-building or “jelly-making” phase, with Gordon Park Food Co-op  a primary focus. As Jim Godsil has noted on his Milwaukee Renaissance website,  the struggle against the widening of Locust St. produced a critical victory and broadened ESHAC’s coalitional reach.  

Unfortunately, discussion about the future direction of ESHAC from the mid to late 1970’s was distorted by the sectarian tone of the Left. Ironically, even as the national political backdrop became much more conservative (as exemplified by corporations’ intensifying class war against unions and the battle over the Panama Canal Treaty), progressives of all stripes fantasized themselves as far more influential than they were. In this cocoon-like environment where revolutionary change was imagined possible in the near future, every difference over strategy and tactics took on absurdly immense weight.  

Doctrines of the past–whether learned from the pages of the non-ideological Saul Alinsky or VI Lenin–clouded the realities of life in an increasingly de-industrializing and socially-fragmenting Riverwest in the later 1970’s. The hard task of both building new institutions and a higher level of progressive consciousness–which were increasingly counterposed rather than seen as inextricably linked–became ever more difficult as mindsets became frozen.

While some groups opted for sectarian preaching and the clumsy injection of caricatured class consciousness from the outside, ESHAC seemed to drift into an embrace of Alinksy’s dictum of “taking the people where they are”—and leaving their consciousness, except of collective action, unchanged.  By far, the ESHAC choice allowed for more authentic contact with working people. But in retrospect and with the luxury of 30 years hindsight, it seems apparent now we –those in and around ESHAC—missed out on some important opportunities. First, the chance to develop a new model of organizing that began with “where the people are” but then dared to elevate that consciousness in a non-rhetorical way toward a broader understanding of corporate power operating both in Riverwest and the nation as a whole.

Second, the ongoing de-industrialization of Riverwest created a potential opening for raising that big-picture awareness about corporate power and its corrosive effects on working families and their neighborhoods. Admittedly, the union movement was caught off-guard and passively watched major area employers like Square D, Johnson Controls, and American Motors eliminate thousands of jobs. But perhaps some strategic outreach headed up by priests and other trusted community leaders might have been able to produce a community-labor alliance in Riverwest. Ultimately, this could have linked up with movements in other neighborhoods facing the same outflow of jobs to the Sunbelt, Mexico, and now China. 

Essentially, the industrial spinal column of Milwaukee’s North Side—from Briggs & Stratton and AO Smith further west to Chrysler and Johnson Controls in Riverwest—has been sliced out, leaving many areas to flop about helplessly. Economist and activist Michael Rosen and others have worked hard to develop innovative strategies to retain industrial work in Riverwest, but the tide of the global economy is rushing out in the opposite direction.

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