BALTIMORE’S BEST
THOMAS D’ALESANDRO III’s renunciation of politics in 1971 brought out a collection of aspirants to succeed him as mayor. Council president William Donald Schaefer announced his candidacy two days after D’Alesandro bowed out. But Schaefer had to overcome considerable uncertainty before entering a confident bid for the mayor’s office. Self-doubt had been an enduring feature of his political career. His original political sponsor, Fifth District boss Irvin Kovens, had nicknamed him “Shaky” because of the worry and personal insecurity with which he contested elections.1
Schaefer confided his doubts about running for mayor to William Boucher, executive director of the Greater Baltimore Committee. His expressed diffidence may in fact have been a shrewd bid for a pledge of financial support from the city’s business community. Kovens had retired to Florida, and Schaefer was shopping for a new source of organized support. Boucher asked an acquaintance to call Kovens to get him back in Baltimore to orchestrate Schaefer’s mayoral campaign, which was managed by a young operative, Theodore Venetoulis, who would later win election as Baltimore County executive. But Schaefer’s campaign for mayor needed high-level political expertise and contacts as well as money and energetic management. Schaefer would enter the race as a political hybrid, combining the backing of a party organization with the support of newer civic organizations. In addition to the Greater Baltimore Committee, he had backing in the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, of which he was a member of long standing and recipient of its first Annual City Statesmanship Award.2
Schaefer faced half a dozen announced candidates in the Democratic primary. City comptroller Hyman Pressman was one of them, until he decided to abandon his quest for the mayor’s office and seek reelection as comptroller on Schaefer’s ticket. Kovens appears to have engineered the shift. One by one, other white candidates for mayor dropped out, leaving Schaefer with only one white competitor, a representative of Jack Pollack’s former empire who was given no chance of success.3
Two prominent black candidates ran against Schaefer—and one another. George L. Russell, city solicitor and former judge, was first to announce his interest in the mayor’s office. State senator Clarence Mitchell III declared a few weeks later. Many black political leaders decried the anticipated division of the African American vote between the two black candidates. Milton B. Allen had been elected in a citywide contest a year earlier as Baltimore’s first African American state’s attorney when other black candidates for the office stepped aside. “What is about to happen in this election,” Allen warned, “will totally destroy that sense of unity and deny us further entry into the decision making inner sanctum for many years to come.” Its aftermath would be a prolonged “political vendetta.”4
Judge Joseph C. Howard had won a seat on the Baltimore Supreme Bench in 1968, with solid black support, the first African American to win a citywide election. Not long before the filing deadline for the 1971 election, black political leaders hoped to make him the “consensus” candidate for black Baltimore, an outcome that hinged on withdrawal of both Russell and Mitchell. Howard could not be persuaded to run while the two other black candidates remained in the contest, and neither Mitchell nor Russell could be persuaded to step aside.5
Their persistence may have been anchored in the diffuse expectation that the time had come for a black mayor in Baltimore. Other cities with large black populations—Newark, Cleveland, and Gary, Indiana—had recently elected black mayors. According to the 1970 Census, African Americans made up 47 percent of Baltimore’s population, and the proportion was growing as a result of natural increase among blacks and migration of whites to the suburbs. Prognosticators nodded at Baltimore as the next city to elect an African American mayor.6
George Russell drew considerable support outside black Baltimore. About half of the donors attending his $50-a-person fundraiser were white. They felt comfortable with him. He was a Roman Catholic in a city with a large population of Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, and German Catholics. And he shared their socially conservative outlook. Russell did not seem to represent a threat to white Baltimore. One of his supporters—a retired white businessman—said as much. Acknowledging that the election of a black mayor would come soon, he favored Russell because we “would rather do it now with someone we know than later with someone we do not know, after some eruption.” Clarence Mitchell III had little white support and did not seek it. He ran on his record as a civil rights activist. His campaign biography noted that he was one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and had been arrested at several demonstrations.7
Mitchell may have been running not to win but to prevent Russell from becoming mayor. His defeat would mean that Mitchell could run for mayor in 1975 without having to face a black incumbent, and by 1975, African American voters would almost certainly represent a bigger slice of the electorate. Mitchell himself added to the credibility of such speculation in his concession speech, when he announced, “I am a candidate for the mayoralty in Baltimore City in 1975.”8
The election results in 1971 may explain why Mitchell’s second bid for the office never materialized. The combined votes of the two black candidates fell almost 30,000 short of Schaefer’s total. Mitchell came in last with slightly over 6,500 votes of more than 166,000 cast. One imponderable is the extent to which the mutual recrimination between the two black candidates may have depressed black turnout and contributed to the defeat of both. Mitchell denied that the “bitterness” of his fight with Russell had anything to do with individual animosity. But it was hard to square this denial with his contention that the ill feeling was due “to the racist exploiters who achieved division in the black community by running one of their showcase puppets.” The candidate’s uncle, Clarence Mitchell, Jr., denounced Baltimore’s white-owned newspapers for endorsing Schaefer, a “mediocre” candidate, but charged that the Afro-American was “the worst of them all” for supporting Russell while closing its columns to his nephew. The black-owned paper, he said, was “a dictatorship.”9
Schaefer carried almost all of the city’s white precincts by wide margins, but he also picked up about 20 percent of the African American vote. When the white residents of his West Baltimore neighborhood had fled to the suburbs, Schaefer and his mother remained beside their new black neighbors in the row house where the mayor had lived since birth. As a city councilman, he earned the gratitude of his black constituents. One of his young African American supporters remembered “all those times when my grandmother asked him to get something done in our block, and it was always done.”10
“SHAKY” TAKES CONTROL
For Schaefer, the general election was a speed-bump on the way to the mayor’s office. He defeated his Republican opponent with 87 percent of the vote. Because Mayor D’Alesandro was absent from the city, Schaefer was already acting mayor and had begun to issue mayoral pronouncements even before the campaign was over. He announced that he would create four new posts in the mayor’s office—a development coordinator and liaison officers for education, drug problems, and national relations. He also urged voters to support a $3 million industrial development bond referendum that shared the ballot with him. And, before an audience of commercial realtors, he revealed his plans for the money. He identified 13 underused sites for industrial development. The $3 million would be used to purchase them in succession. After clearance and improvements, each site would be sold for industrial development, and the proceeds would finance the purchase of the next site on the list.11
By the end of 1972, the bond issue provided the financial wherewithal to create the Baltimore Industrial Development Corporation, a new quasi-public, nonprofit venture that operated largely outside the scope of Baltimore’s city charter, civil service commission, and city council. It was, however, overseen by the five-person board of estimates, where the mayor controlled three of the five votes. The executive vice-president of the BIDC worked at the headquarters of the local chamber of commerce, which contributed $75,000 toward the corporation’s operating expenses. The city put up another $150,000. A mixture of Baltimore business executives, attorneys, and city bureaucrats sat on the corporation’s board. The BIDC opened a new sector of Schaefer’s municipal imperium, a “corporate branch” of government.12
Shortly after inauguration, Schaefer announced another initiative: the Outer City Conservation Program. It would provide loan and grant funds for the mostly white neighborhoods left out of the antipoverty and Model Cities programs. To take part in the program, neighborhoods would have to organize.13 Schaefer’s goal was to prevent sound, stable neighborhoods from deteriorating, but his program also mobilized a political constituency that could enhance his control of the city and its government. Though he drew support from black Baltimoreans, white residents of the outer city were his core constituency. Unlike programs for poor neighborhoods, the Outer City initiative came with relatively little federal oversight, though it would eventually exploit federal funds.
The same insecurity that led Kovens to call him “Shaky” may have driven Schaefer to insist on close control of the city’s operations and detailed information about them. Control began with the members of his own staff. Early in his administration, he asked them to supply him with material for a speech by preparing outlines of what they had been working on. A few weeks later, he issued a request for updated outlines of their activities every month.14 His governing strategy combined a systematic drive to centralize power in his own office with a decentralization of municipal responsiveness to neighborhood mayor’s stations, service centers, and programs such as his Outer City initiative. The contrary combination of consolidation and devolution seemed designed to prevent development of any bureaucratic power blocs between the mayor and his constituents. The four mayoral staff officers whose appointment he had announced before he was elected were part of his program of “institutionalizing executive authority and accountability.” There was also an inner circle of administrative assistants who rose to prominence partly because they managed the mayor’s schedule and therefore controlled access to him. He later appointed one of them, Bailey Fine, as president of the school board. Another, Joan Bereska, became deputy mayor and de facto chief of staff.15
The mayoral cabinet, however, became the principal mechanism of executive oversight. Schaefer was not the first mayor to meet regularly with a cabinet of bureau chiefs. Mayor Preston had initiated the practice in 1911.16 But Schaefer launched a plurality of cabinets. The principal cabinet had two wings: one concentrated on physical development; the other, on “human resources.” The cabinet as a whole met once a month, but each of its two components met more frequently “to discuss policy matters in great detail.” The cabinet also had interdepartmental and ad hoc committees. Schaefer complained that “many agencies were not really working together.” His cabinet was supposed to foster interagency cooperation, but Schaefer also used it to enhance mayoral control over city agencies.17
The cabinet’s regular meetings occurred monthly on a Thursday, but in 1976, Schaefer created the “Special Tuesday Cabinet.” It included some high-level agency chiefs such as Robert Embry, commissioner of housing and community development, and Francis Kuchta, director of public works. Embry and Kuchta were accompanied by some of their staff members. The mayor brought most of his own staff to meetings, along with the city solicitor and Charles Benton, the influential director of finance. Initially, the Special Tuesday Cabinet seems to have concentrated on city finances. One of its first meetings focused on guidelines for laying off municipal employees. The cuts were a response to a shortfall in city revenues.18
Soon the Tuesday Cabinet moved beyond financial issues to address a wider range of municipal business. The mayor’s other cabinets expanded their agendas in much the same way. In 1972, for example, the mayor introduced a cabinet for the chairs and presidents of city boards and commissions—the “Mini Cabinet.” Its first item of business was a council bill governing the conduct of boards and commissions, but the discussion quickly moved to parking garages, the policing of downtown, and bringing conventions to Baltimore. In 1973, Schaefer called the first meeting of “second-level personnel” in city agencies, known (for reasons not recorded) as the “Maxi-Mini Cabinet.” The mayor wanted to advise midlevel managers “of some of the policies of the present administration,” in particular “changing the image of the city from a negative to a positive one.” At subsequent meetings, Schaefer discussed the importance of rapid and courteous responses to citizen requests. He saw the Maxi-Mini Cabinet as a vehicle for interagency coordination, and he introduced a program that assigned second-level personnel to work for short periods in agencies other than their own to learn something about the departments with which they were supposed to cooperate.19
The Maxi-Mini Cabinet and the Cabinet of Commissions and Boards were short-lived. They disappeared after a year or two. A new “Executive Cabinet,” convened in 1975, apparently survived for only one meeting.20 But Schaefer seemed to have long-term plans for the Special Tuesday Cabinet. He ordered one of his staff members to come up with a format for the group that would maximize the effectiveness of the meetings. He approved the memo on the new format, but indicated that he did not want it distributed to members of the Tuesday Cabinet.21
Schaefer’s management strategy, with its multiple cabinets and secret memos, seemed calculated to keep his bureaucrats off-balance and on their toes—just as insecure as Mayor “Shaky” himself. Administrators faced repeated demands for progress reports and briefings about current programs and future plans, and exposure to questions and criticisms from the mayor and his staff. During his early years as mayor, Schaefer added to their insecurity by keeping several key members of his cabinet on “acting” status. In other words, the mayor did not submit their names to the city council for confirmation. They were “temporary” employees, and Schaefer could fire them without explanation. If council members wanted to get rid of an acting appointee, they could have voted the official out of office. They never did.22 But a commission appointed by the mayor to review the city’s charter criticized Schaefer for departing from the conventional process for approving nominees. Some council members also complained about the practice, and two years into his term, Schaefer finally submitted several appointments to the council for approval as regular city officials.23
Schaefer continued to tinker with his cabinets up to the end of his administration. In 1984, he complained that the “Cabinet has not been as productive or satisfactory as it should be.” His solution was to “rearrange” it into four separate units: Discussion Cabinet, General Interest Cabinet, Physical Development Cabinet, and Human Services Cabinet. The four panels met on successive Tuesdays each month. The mayor clearly hoped that the new arrangement would induce the municipal bureaucracy to respond more promptly to his authority. He complained that “things are not getting done on time” and that a “memo from the Mayor means nothing.” At the first meeting of the General Discussion Cabinet, he told his administrators that the appearance of the city was bad and suggested that they were hiding “behind excuses” rather than taking responsibility for its unsightliness.24
The mayor enlisted his top administrators in his campaign to improve grassroots service delivery. He required each of them to spend at least two hours a week out on the streets, “noting and reporting items such as abandoned cars, potholes, downed traffic signs, dead trees, etc.” Municipal employees with city-owned automobiles were expected to conduct similar inspection rounds and to meet a quota of at least one problem per week.25 The mayor did not exempt himself from such duties. On weekends he drove around the city looking for urban eyesores and infractions. He would then report these problems to the appropriate agencies, but not their locations. His complaints would send municipal workers roaming across Baltimore to find and eliminate the particular urban abomination that had offended their sadistic mayor.
Mayor’s stations and multiservice centers offered more systematic mechanisms for grassroots surveillance and service delivery. Both had precedents in the administration of Mayor D’Alesandro, but Schaefer increased their number, redefined their functions, and imposed central direction. The stations and centers were to see that “the full range of needed services are provided and coordinated in the local neighborhood.” But they were also to function as data-collection points that would provide city hall with profiles of neighborhood needs. Schaefer created an office to oversee these municipal outposts by combining the remnants of the antipoverty and Model Cities programs into a new department: the Urban Services Agency. The service centers were located in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, while mayor’s stations served “slightly more well-off” areas.26 Eventually, the two types of neighborhood offices would be renamed “multipurpose centers” under the supervision of the Urban Services Agency.
Schaefer was a mayor suspended between the old politics of the urban machine and the new politics of municipal bureaucracy. The party organization and its patronage appointees no longer gave him reliable control of city administration. The influence of urban bureaucracies, as Theodore Lowi pointed out, arises from their “cohesiveness as a small minority in the midst of the vast dispersion of the multitude.”27 Mayor Schaefer countered bureaucratic power and independence partly by using multiservice centers and his Outer City Conservation Program to organize and mobilize Baltimoreans in their neighborhoods, reducing the “vast dispersion of the multitude” and building himself a grassroots constituency.
By his second term, he was working with 92 neighborhood advisory committees. The community groups soon discovered that when he responded to their demands, he usually had demands of his own. If they wanted a playground, they would have to raise money for swings and a sliding board. Protest demonstrations and posturing met stone-cold indifference. By the time he left the mayor’s office in 1986, Schaefer had expanded his base to about 350 community groups. He appointed some of their leaders to city jobs and converted their neighborhood associations into a citywide political organization that embraced both white and African American communities. Schaefer had converted himself into “Citizen One, a man who represented the people before the bureaucracy.”28 The so-called shadow government, exemplified by the BIDC, gave Schaefer an alternative bureaucracy controlled by the board of estimates, which was controlled in turn by the mayor. Finally, Schaefer’s multiple cabinets gave him multiple vantage points on the business of city departments and opened them up to his supervision and micromanagement.
THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION
Mayor Schaefer used about as much political muscle to change the “image” of the city as he did to change the city itself. One of his early initiatives, for example, was the “Approachways Project.” Travelers along the northeast corridor saw the worst of Baltimore. The view as they passed by, according to the mayor, was “punctuated with piles of junked cars and buses, tangles of overhead utility wires, clusters of signs that do little to guide you, roadways which have not been well maintained and roadsides totally lacking in landscaping. I am sure—just like me—you cringe.” The city could not eliminate all of the eyesores, but many of them could be hidden behind almost a mile of “screening,” which, along with improved signs and strategic landscaping, would enable Baltimore to make a better impression on motorists and passengers riding by on their way to someplace else.29
For Baltimoreans themselves, Schaefer launched a strenuous program of celebrations and festivals, not just to lift their spirits, but to engender pride of place. Schaefer did not invent the Baltimore City Fair. It was initiated by an official in Robert Embry’s Department of Housing and Community Development, a year before Schaefer became mayor, as “a little world’s fair of neighborhoods.” Schaefer doubled its size and made it a city institution—a celebration of the town’s diverse and numerous residential areas, but also a reminder of Baltimore’s “oneness.” The site of the first fair was Charles Center, but it soon outgrew this location. An expanded version began with a parade of neighborhood floats and high school bands that marched through downtown to the Inner Harbor, where dozens of neighborhood associations had erected booths on city piers to introduce their communities to the city at large. At the 1974 fair, the Ednor Gardens–Lakeside organization turned its booth into a representation of one of its neighborhood’s typical row houses. Union Square’s residents reproduced an “old-fashioned corner store selling homemade pickles, jellies, and jams.” Its volunteers dressed in “Victorian-period costumes.” The civic league of upscale Roland Park decked out a booth to look like a “Victorian summer house with wicker porch furniture.” More than 60 neighborhoods were represented at the fair, along with more than 90 city agencies and nonprofit organizations.30
The neighborhood exhibits might look back to a Victorian past, but the spirit of the fair convinced Baltimoreans that their city was alive and flourishing in the present. A local television station’s editorial cited the fair as the answer to critics who claimed that “the City is dead . . . it simply doesn’t work anymore as a place where large numbers of people can live comfortably and peacefully.” A mother wrote to the mayor to thank him for all of his “efforts in trying to make our city a lovely place to live. Our family went to ‘The Fair’ on that rainy grey Saturday afternoon. But just being with everyone black and white and seeing how people enjoyed themselves made it a sunny day for Baltimore.” A survey of 1974 fairgoers found that 79 percent thought Baltimore was “a better place today than it was in 1972.”31
Baltimoreans who turned out for the fair might have been more upbeat about their city’s progress than the stay-at-homes. But the testimony of the fairgoers undoubtedly reflected Schaefer’s success in changing the way Baltimoreans perceived their city at least as much as his achievement of tangible changes in the city itself. The mayor himself said as much. At the midpoint of his first term, he issued a statement to his department heads outlining “what we have accomplished in the past two years.” According to the mayor, if “there is one overall achievement of my Administration, it has been to awaken a feeling among our citizens that they are important, they have much to contribute, and they are heard and involved.” In his meetings throughout the city, “this theme is repeated: Baltimore is on the move.”32
The city fair was only the beginning of Schaefer’s assault on Baltimore’s inferiority complex. Five years after becoming mayor, he introduced his signature celebration of Baltimore and its residents. Thousands of bumper stickers announced “Baltimore’s Best / Baltimore Is Best.” The program distributed awards every three months to Baltimoreans who had gone “out of their way to express their enthusiasm for the ‘Big B.’ ” At the end of each year, one of the winners was honored as the “Best of Baltimore’s Best.” Those cited included an unofficial cheerleader at Orioles games, a bank that provided financing for rehabilitation of inner-city housing, and a cab driver who promoted the attractions of Baltimore while driving travelers between the airport and the city. The Sun called the Baltimore’s Best program “mass therapy for Baltimore’s famed inferiority complex.”33
Schaefer was convinced that the elevation of Baltimore’s self-image required careful and constant attention to the everyday contacts between citizens and city government. Little more than a year into his first term, he had asked his development coordinator, Mark Joseph, to remind the members of his cabinet to devote special attention to these interactions. “You will recall,” wrote Joseph, “that the Mayor expressed a concern that the Administration over the past several months has not been dramatizing its concern for everyday matters—people kinds of concerns.” Schaefer asked his agency heads to suggest how he might demonstrate his own attentiveness to those everyday concerns. It was all very well to manage the municipal budget in the face of declining federal aid, make peace with increasingly aggressive unions, and announce ambitious plans for a new expressway or downtown development project—he had done all of these things during his first year. Schaefer wanted the next year “to be more clearly dedicated to the people, to little things; the year of the neighborhood.”34
It was not just the theme of one year. Schaefer was resolutely focused on “the ‘little things’ that are important to taxpayers.” In the middle of his second term, the human resources unit in the mayor’s office was engaged in a “Little Things Mean a Lot” initiative, with its own monthly newsletter in which staff members reported the special efforts made to investigate and resolve the complicated problems of individual Baltimoreans.35 The mayor’s fixation on little things produced results. In 1977, the National Municipal League named Baltimore an “All-America City,” notable in particular for a high level of citizen participation. A year earlier, a study of 22 cities found Baltimore to be the most responsive to neighborhood organizations.36
Mayor William Donald Schaefer promised that if the National Aquarium were not completed on schedule, he would take a dip in the seal pool. It wasn’t, and he did—one in a long list of stunts designed to call attention to the city and its attractions. Reprinted with permission from The Baltimore Sun.
The mayor’s propensity to think small, though thoroughly Baltimorish, seemed out of joint with the big projects and programs that made his administration memorable. According to his biographer, C. Fraser Smith, some of Schaefer’s top administrators doubted whether the mayor really understood the big programs. “They also began to see that it didn’t matter. He was the program, the common element in everything that happened.” His staff members tolerated his petulance and endured his abusive treatment because they had begun to see him as the “human counterforce” against urban decline.37 From time to time, he also allowed Baltimoreans to see him as a clown—and they liked him for it. He stood ready to wear silly hats or mug for the cameras or take part in ridiculous stunts to call attention to worthy municipal enterprises. His comic turns were all the more effective because his usual demeanor was so humorless, and they reassured Baltimoreans that he, like them, did not take himself too seriously. This was almost certainly a false impression.