Chapter 34

I’M ALL RIGHT, JACK

WHILE BALTIMORE’S CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS and business leaders became more prominent as urban policymakers in the 1950s, the old party organizations faltered. Their mostly white constituents decamped for the suburbs, one jump ahead of a growing African American population. In West Baltimore’s Fourth District, where Jack Pollack had exercised nearly absolute control for a generation, a black Republican candidate for city council, Harry Cole, came close to unseating one of Pollack’s stalwarts in 1953. Cole later defeated a Pollack man for a seat in the state senate, and another black Republican, Emory H. Cole (no relation), defeated a Pollack candidate for the house of delegates. Pollack was already giving ground. In the 1954 general election, he threw his support behind Truly Hatchett, a black candidate for delegate who had survived the Democratic primary without Pollack’s endorsement. Hatchett got Pollack’s support in the general election and joined the Coles in the General Assembly.¹

Pollack wasted no time in trying to rebuild his barony. Since his Fourth District base was crumbling, he tried to colonize other districts. In the 1954 Democratic primary, Pollack slated candidates for the state senate, not just in the Fourth, but also in the Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth Districts. His objective was to elect four of the six state senators from the city. Had his strategy succeeded, he would have been able to control the flow of state patronage from Annapolis to Baltimore. Longstanding tradition gave senators veto power over gubernatorial appointments in their districts, and a majority of Baltimore’s six senators would have the final say on state appointments to citywide offices such as the board of elections. Two of Pollack’s colonizing candidates succeeded. If he had been able to elect a state senator in his own Fourth District, he would have commanded at least half of Baltimore’s delegation in the state senate. But Harry Cole’s victory on Pollack’s home ground left the boss short of his objective.²

In 1957, Pollack mounted another offensive. As the black population of the Fourth District grew, many of his former constituents moved to Northwest Baltimore’s predominantly Jewish Fifth District. Two loyalists from Pollack’s Trenton Democratic Club followed them, and they founded the Fifth District’s Town and Country Democratic Club a year in advance of the 1958 election. The move was risky. The Fifth District already had a Democratic club—the Fifth District Organization for Better Government. Its leader was Irvin Kovens, owner of a furniture store and several bars. Kovens had been propelled into politics by his irritation at a state sales tax instituted under Governor William Preston Lane in the 1940s. His furniture store’s 35 collection agents gave him a readymade political organization. They fanned out across the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods to collect weekly installments on sofas and dining room sets. They began collecting political adherents, too.³

Baltimore’s councilmanic districts in 1954. Courtesy of Baltimore City Department of Legislative Reference

When Pollack mounted his assault on the Fifth District, Kovens was a member of the Baltimore Liquor Board, appointed by Republican governor Theodore McKeldin. He had two influential lieutenants: state senator Philip Goodman, who was chair of the city’s legislative delegation until pushed out of the position by Pollack allies, and John Luber, Speaker of the house of delegates. But only two months after Pollack’s agents opened for business in the Fifth District, Kovens abruptly resigned from the liquor board and announced that his family and business obligations, together with his doctor’s advice, had led him to withdraw from politics.⁴

In fact, Kovens’s “retirement” from politics merely provided him with cover for a temporary withdrawal from the Democratic Party. Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., who had become mayor with the support of Jack Pollack, was now running, with Pollack’s backing, for the US Senate against the Republican incumbent, J. Glenn Beall. Free of his Democratic ties, Kovens backed Beall, not just to defeat D’Alesandro, but to curb the imperialistic designs of the mayor’s political sponsor—Jack Pollack. During the election campaign, Kovens’s lieutenant, Philip Goodman, oversaw the operations of his leader’s political organization in the Fifth District. The “retired” boss was conspicuously present at his club’s rally a week before the general election. Also conspicuous were campaign signs bearing the names of all Democratic candidates save D’Alesandro. Senator Goodman spoke in support of the party’s nominees, except for the mayor. Goodman later denied charges that he and his organization planned to “cut” Mayor D’Alesandro from sample ballots, locally known as “palm cards.”⁵

According to a Democratic election official, “a well-organized campaign of ticket-cutting” had operated in four of the city’s six districts. Sample ballots in D’Alesandro’s First District and Pollack’s Fourth District were unaffected, but the mayor’s name disappeared everywhere else. In some precincts, it was impossible to vote for D’Alesandro because the lever next to his name was jammed. In others, party labels had been removed from voting machines. Democratic leaders blamed Kovens. D’Alesandro managed to carry the city in spite of the irregularities, but not by enough votes to compensate for his unpopularity in the rural and suburban counties. After 23 consecutive election victories, D’Alesandro was a loser.⁶

Irvin Kovens emerged from his “retirement” in time for the municipal primary of 1959, when D’Alesandro ran for an unprecedented fourth term as mayor. D’Alesandro’s opponents within the Democratic Party coalesced around J. Harold Grady, the state’s attorney and a former FBI agent. Grady announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary by declaring that he had “not the slightest inclination or desire to become a political boss or to build a political machine in order to dominate the city.” His ticket included Kovens lieutenant Goodman for president of the city council, and physician R. Walter Graham for comptroller—the “Three G Ticket.” Grady urged Baltimoreans to turn out the “entrenched political machine” that had been running the city “pretty much as it pleased” during D’Alesandro’s 12 years as mayor. Toward the end of the campaign, he became more explicit. The election would decide “whether Jack Pollack is going to take over Baltimore.” Maryland’s governor, J. Millard Tawes from the Eastern Shore, endorsed D’Alesandro but may have inadvertently supplied the ammunition that gave force to Grady’s accusations. Days before the primary, Tawes announced a list of nominees for state offices. Pollack’s son-in-law was to be chief magistrate of Baltimore’s traffic court; the mayor’s son was appointed president of the board of supervisors of elections. The mayor lost the primary by an astonishing 33,000 votes. Kovens, according to the Sun, was one of “the small headquarters group which helped Mr. Grady mastermind his campaign.”⁷

Grady’s Republican opponent in the general election was Theodore McKeldin. Each candidate claimed that the other was tainted by bossism. McKeldin wasted no time in linking Grady to Irvin Kovens, while naming Kovens as a “protégé” of Jack Pollack. “Mr. Kovens,” he said, “is running the campaign because it is his intention to take over control of his party . . . and he intends to do it through the distribution of patronage that would be made available to him” with the election of the Grady ticket.⁸ McKeldin’s attack on bossism lost some of its force because of his so often being either a beneficiary or a benefactor of Democratic bosses himself. It was widely known that Boss Pollack had helped him win the governorship in 1950, and as governor, he had appointed Boss Kovens to the Baltimore Liquor Board.⁹ Kovens reminded the voters of McKeldin’s political history. Grady, having run as an anti-machine candidate in the Democratic primary, cranked up the same rhetoric to attack McKeldin.¹⁰

The conduct of Jack Pollack was extraordinary, perhaps desperate. He showed up at a $100-a-plate dinner for Harold Grady without being invited. Grady refused to speak to him. Pollack nevertheless endorsed him, but when the rebuffs continued, he changed course. At an end-of-campaign rally of his followers, Pollack failed to mention Grady. He announced that he was “releasing” his workers and urged them to vote for “the man with experience.” Remarkably, the next step of the seldom visible boss was to book four 15-minute segments on a local television station for a series entitled “Meet Jack Pollack.” On the first show, he introduced Mrs. Pollack along with his three grown children and their spouses. The program’s purpose, he said, was “to remove the veil of secrecy from practical politics.” He compared his Trenton Democratic Club’s decisions about candidates to the deliberations of the Sun editorial staff in their “smoke-filled board room” to decide on the paper’s endorsement of candidates.¹¹

Grady capitalized on Pollack’s new visibility by charging that the boss and his organization were covertly supporting McKeldin. Pollack added credibility to the claim by issuing a series of increasingly strident attacks on Grady. McKeldin never issued a categorical repudiation of Pollack, but some Republicans, possibly recalling McKeldin’s dismissive treatment of his own party when he was mayor and governor, announced that they were repudiating him. The Republican candidate lost the city by a record 81,000 votes.¹²

THREE G’S MINUS TWO

As mayor, Grady never lived up to his landslide. He initiated a mayoral television program on Sunday evenings. One week, he took calls from constituents complaining about neighborhood nuisances; another, he and Baltimore legislators discussed the city’s “tax crisis.” But no remedies emerged. The program ended after four weeks.¹³

At the suggestion of Walter Sondheim, Grady applied for $15 million in federal funds to pay part of the city’s $23 million investment in the Charles Center project. The Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency (BURHA) advisory commission, headed by Sondheim, took the initiative in applying for federal support. Grady provided only his acquiescence.¹⁴

In Harlem Park, where Mayor D’Alesandro’s urban renewal program was supposed to make its debut, the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) found “major problems of coordination” in the enforcement of housing codes between the city’s urban renewal agency and the bureau of building inspection. Fire and health inspectors added to the confusion. The GBC recommended that code enforcement for the urban renewal area be consolidated under the authority of the BURHA. An independent study conducted by the League of Women Voters arrived at the same conclusion, as did the Citizens Planning and Housing Association. Mayor Grady ignored all three, and the protests of the Harlem Park Neighborhood Council, by consolidating code enforcement in the bureau of building inspection.¹⁵

The mayor seemed insufficiently interested in his job. Two years into his term, he was considering the possibility of a federal judgeship.¹⁶ Not long afterward, the city council lost patience. Grady had nominated his executive assistant to be chairman of the zoning board. Six council members linked to Jack Pollock opposed the appointment, but even Grady’s allies turned against him. Council president Goodman and vice-president William Donald Schaefer—both Kovens loyalists—rejected the nomination, as did the city comptroller R. Walter Graham. The opponents acknowledged that the nominee was a “decent, honorable man” who was qualified to serve on the zoning board. The attack was aimed instead at the mayor for “his ineptitude, his lack of leadership, and his unwillingness to learn how to operate in the political field.” His consideration of an appointment as a federal judge was a sign of his “disloyalty to the city.”¹⁷

Grady did not receive a call to the federal bench, but in 1962 he was named to the Baltimore Superior Court and resigned as mayor.¹⁸ Under the city charter, council president Philip Goodman succeeded him in office. During his brief tenure as mayor, Goodman built his reputation as a champion of civil rights, but without involving the city council, whose devotion to the cause was uncertain. Instead of urging his former colleagues to enact a public accommodations ordinance, for example, he negotiated directly with Baltimore’s restaurant association to open the city’s eateries to African American diners. Goodman also supported a venture sponsored by several private social welfare organizations working on “a comprehensive master plan for ‘The Inner City and Human Renewal.’ ” The Community Chest, Associated Jewish Charities, and Catholic Archdiocese each contributed $5,000 to the planning effort, and the city matched their support with $15,000. Goodman appointed a new administrative assistant for human renewal, Stanley Mazer, who was to orchestrate the services of private and public agencies to address such problems as “high crime and delinquency; broken families; high unemployment; low level of education and early school dropouts; poor nutritional and health standards; low motivation for responsible citizenship; limited access to facilities for self-help.”¹⁹ While urban renewal attacked the physical decay of the inner city, “human renewal” would address its social deterioration. The program was an anticipation of the War on Poverty, aimed at the noneconomic handicaps that accompanied economic deprivation.

When Goodman moved up from council president to mayor, the council’s vice-president was William Donald Schaefer. The city charter did not specify who should succeed to the presidency of the council when the position fell vacant. Schaefer may have hoped for elevation to the office. His vice-presidential status was not the only factor that made him a prospect for the promotion. As a loyal soldier in the Kovens camp, Schaefer had been asked to take on the risky assignment of challenging Pollack son-in-law Paul Dorf, an incumbent state senator, in the Democratic primary of 1962—though Kovens and Schaefer soon abandoned this inflammatory attack on Pollack’s family, perhaps because Governor Tawes intervened to make peace.²⁰ But now Kovens passed over Schaefer and recruited ex-mayor D’Alesandro’s son, Thomas D’Alesandro III, as his candidate for council president. Putting “Young Tommy” on the ticket would head off “Old Tommy’s” opposition.²¹ Schaefer played the part assigned to him.

The cooptation of Young Tommy enabled Philip Goodman to campaign for mayor in 1963 with the support of the D’Alesandro forces as well as those of the Kovens organization. He won an easy victory over Comptroller Graham in the Democratic primary. Theodore McKeldin’s success in the Republican primary was just as decisive.²²

McKeldin had followed his own distinctive path toward the Republican nomination. It included a stop at traditionally black Morgan State College for a symposium marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, and soon afterward he became the only mayoral candidate endorsed by the local chapter of the left-liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Samuel Culotta, McKeldin’s opponent in the Republican primary, sent a telegram to the ADA accusing it of “deliberately attempting to sink the Baltimore Republican Party by [its] kiss-of-death indorsement of Theodore R. McKeldin.” The ADA’s support revived old questions about his Republican credentials. McKeldin, however, was running as a Republican in a city where Democrats enjoyed a four-to-one registration ratio. A telling sign of his cross-party appeal occurred on primary day, when election judges received repeated complaints that the lever next to McKeldin’s name was jammed. In every case, the malfunction resulted from the attempt of a registered Democrat to vote for McKeldin in the Republican primary.²³

One week after the primary, all of the Democratic candidates—winners and losers—came together for a demonstration of party unity. The harmony was temporary. Two weeks later, R. Walter Graham, who had lost the mayoral primary to Goodman, refused to endorse the victor. A week after that, another would-be Democratic mayor, the city treasurer, denied Goodman his support. In the meantime, Theodore McKeldin announced that his invitations to a $100-a-plate dinner had elicited “an amazingly open, unsolicited and enthusiastic response from the ranks of the city’s registered Democrats.” One Democrat who showed up was Hyman Pressman, a self-appointed political gadfly and civic watchdog. He had lost the Democratic primary for comptroller. After a lawsuit and appeal, he would turn up on McKeldin’s Republican ticket for the same office.²⁴

McKeldin lost no time in capitalizing on other Democratic desertions. Goodman, he said, had been repudiated by those who were in a position to know whether he was qualified to be mayor because they had been part of “his official family,” like Graham. Goodman ducked a debate with McKeldin before the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was in Florida “for a much needed rest.” McKeldin, an accomplished orator, ridiculed Goodman for his “dread of departing from prepared scripts to comment on issues that he doesn’t understand” and derided his “determination to keep the campaign as quiet as possible so that voter apathy will leave election-day in the hands of his paid muldoons.”²⁵

McKeldin beat the muldoons. Though Thomas D’Alesandro III outran both the Republican and Democratic tickets, McKeldin and Pressman both got by with margins of about 5,000 votes over their Democratic rivals, in a total turnout of over 200,000. Pressman would remain comptroller (as a Democrat) for the next 28 years. He also served as the municipality’s unofficial poet laureate, reciting his truly awful verses whenever a ceremony or public occasion provided an opportunity to do so. Baltimoreans overlooked the literary shortcomings of his poetry and dubbed him “Rhymin’ Hyman.” The indefatigable Jack Pollack tried to parlay his five-man delegation on the city council into majority control by making an alliance with the new city council president. But there was too much bad blood between them. Pollack had tried to prevent the younger D’Alesandro from succeeding Goodman as council president, and they had clashed when D’Alesandro, as president of the board of elections, had purged many Pollack voters from the rolls.²⁶ The boss had no more cards to play.

ROAD WARRIORS

Mayor McKeldin came to office facing unfinished business. The Jones Falls Expressway was the continuation of an interstate highway that began at Harrisburg and was supposed to extend through the city to the waterfront. Mayor D’Alesandro, Jr., had proposed construction of the city segment of the highway in 1949. In the face of neighborhood protests about the route of the expressway, the city council killed at least three versions of the highway bill, until it finally approved one in 1955. Construction delays and additional controversies slowed completion. By the time McKel-din began his second term as mayor in 1963, the expressway was stalled more than a mile short of its planned destination on the waterfront, where it was to join a projected east-west expressway on an overpass above the Inner Harbor. No progress had been made on the Jones Falls since 1962, and the “East-West Expressway” was a longstanding figment of municipal imagination.²⁷

The necessity for urban expressways followed from the business district renewal begun under Mayor D’Alesandro, Jr., and continued by McKeldin, who proposed to extend downtown renewal efforts to 470 acres just north of Charles Center.²⁸ Charles Center, the Baltimore Civic Center, and McKeldin’s plans for downtown north and the Inner Harbor would all falter unless the city’s transportation infrastructure offered Baltimoreans the means to get to, from, and around the new concentration of business and entertainment. Central business district renewal commanded general support. The highways needed to sustain it did not.

Threading six lanes of concrete through the heart of the city was difficult, not only because of building density, but for aesthetic reasons. Baltimore’s decision makers did not want to introduce an architectural eyesore into their newly enhanced central business district or disturb the integrity of the historic buildings nearby. The plans of the highway engineers had to pass muster with the Expressway Design Advisory Committee headed by the ubiquitous Walter Sondheim. Mayor McKeldin insisted “on expressway designs which do not offend the sensibilities of either our citizens or our visitors.”²⁹

McKeldin’s changeable sensibilities compounded uncertainties about the Jones Falls project and delayed its completion. In 1963, the mayor endorsed a plan for an elevated expressway that skirted the eastern edge of the central business district. It was the plan favored by the GBC and endorsed by the public works and the transit and traffic departments, which had completed most of the surveys and land-acquisition studies for this alternative. The project could therefore move forward quickly to get state approval and start land acquisition and construction. Promptness was important, said McKeldin, because “I don’t want the State to have any idea that we are confused . . . that we don’t know what we want.”³⁰

About six weeks later, McKeldin flatly rejected the plan for an elevated highway. Architectural drawings commissioned by the planning department persuaded the mayor that an elevated highway would be unsightly. The city planners opposed the Department of Public Works’ proposal and supported an expressway route that ran west of the business district at ground level. A few weeks later, the director of public works produced drawings showing how a section of the eastside highway would look if supported by fill dirt rather than concrete piers. McKeldin was favorably impressed but wanted to see drawings of more sections.³¹

A month later, at a meeting with engineers and the head of the Maryland State Roads Commission, McKeldin once again seemed a man in a hurry to build the highway along the eastside route proposed by public works. But before the end of 1963, he discussed the possibility of a westward diversion of the road to make room for a new municipal office building, and in January 1964, he gave in to pressure from the city planning commission and the Citizens Planning and Housing Association to order a study of a westside route at ground level—but expressed a preference for an eastside route if it were “aesthetically suitable” and did not interfere with his plans for an eastside park and new municipal building. He also warned his department heads to “quit their public bickering” about where the expressway should go.³²

The bureaucratic infighting continued. Toward the end of 1964, council president D’Alesandro asked the mayor to call a meeting between public works and city planning to stop the “constant bickering.” He was concerned that Baltimore would forfeit federal highway funds if there were further delays in construction.³³ The summit meeting occurred two months later and included many more participants than D’Alesandro had suggested. McKeldin began by acknowledging that planning for the city’s expressways had been “plagued with conflicts, differences of opinion, and personality clashes.” “If we are to move ahead,” he added, “these conflicts must be eliminated and common agreement achieved.” The mayor offered a plan to achieve consensus. He would create the Expressway Policy Committee. Its membership would include the city solicitor, the commissioners of public works, transit and traffic, and urban renewal, and the chairman of the city planning commission. McKeldin himself would head the policy committee, which would “have formal responsibility for all phases of the implementation of our expressway program.” Each member of the policy committee would appoint a representative to a subcommittee that would “handle day-to-day problems and situations as they arise.” A team of consultants would be retained to provide advice on the expressway’s path and design.³⁴

Additional pressure to resolve the highway fights came from George Fallon, US congressman from Baltimore’s Fourth Congressional District and chairman of the House Public Works Committee, which oversaw federal highway grants. He wrote to mayor McKeldin to express his concern “over the lack of progress shown by the City of Baltimore in construction of the Interstate System.” He urged the mayor “to utilize the full prestige of [his] office to bring together those whose divergent opinions are responsible for the lack of decisions needed to move this work forward.”³⁵

The prestige of his office was one of McKeldin’s few political resources. As the lone Republican among Baltimore’s elected officials, he had few allies who could be counted on to support his attempts to bring feuding bureaucrats into line. If he fired errant department heads, the replacements he nominated would have to win approval of the all-Democratic city council. McKeldin faced a further problem. The bureaucratic contestants in the expressway wars had the backing of political actors who were largely independent of the mayor. The planning department was usually supported by the city planning commission, composed largely of eminent citizens who served without pay. Under the Baltimore City Charter, they could kill a projected highway if they deemed it inconsistent with the city’s master plan. For his part, the director of public works routinely invoked the authority of state and federal highway officials to support his positions on expressway design. They controlled the money. Finally, Thomas Ward, a voluble council member, raised objections to the elevated expressway that were endorsed by many of his constituents who lived along the proposed route.³⁶

By 1967, the GBC, one of the original advocates of the eastside highway, had shifted its attention from roads to mass transit. It apparently did so with McKeldin’s encouragement.³⁷ Perhaps he and the committee were searching for an off-ramp from the conflict and confusion of expressway planning.

Once again, some of the confusion originated with McKeldin. In May 1965, a team of engineering and architectural consultants showed him a new design for an elevated expressway. The mayor noted that the distance between the piers supporting the road “would be greater than the usual distance.” This, together with “the arching pattern in the expressway itself . . . would create an almost bridge-like span,” which the mayor thought attractive. But McKeldin was especially drawn to inclusion of a park extending under the expressway and on either side. It even had a lake. “This open-space approach,” he wrote, “would tend to unify areas on either side of the expressway, rather than separate them.” There is no sign that he consulted the members of his Expressway Policy Committee before issuing a press release describing the new plan as “intriguing.”³⁸

The committee members were less charmed. One of them, Eugene Feinblatt, a respected attorney and chairman of the BURHA commission, complained that the architects had misunderstood their assignment. They were supposed “to design the expressway so that it would complement and blend in with its surroundings.” Instead, they tried “to change the surroundings.” He pointed out that their park would infringe on the site chosen for the city’s new post office and require the demolition of a brand new building owned by an electrical supply company. Altogether, the park and lake would require the condemnation of 25 additional acres of urban real estate. Other participants in the expressway debate offered similar criticisms.³⁹

Not long before the mayor proposed his “intriguing” design for the highway, the city planning commission introduced the formula that would eventually resolve the Jones Falls Expressway debate. The commission’s proposal would follow the eastside route backed by the Department of Public Works, but bring the elevated portion of the highway down to the ground as a street-level boulevard well short of the waterfront; it ruled out an aerial cloverleaf linking the Jones Falls with the proposed East-West Expressway above the Inner Harbor. Further disagreements and construction delays would postpone completion of the Jones Falls Expressway until 1983.⁴⁰