An examination of the Midwest Academy gathers the threads of Obama’s career around a number of themes raised earlier in this book. In the interest of clarity, let us recap them. In Chapters One and Two we encountered an incremental and pragmatic form of socialism, tied to community organizing and championed by Michael Harrington and other leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Working closely with Michael Harrington’s DSA, the leaders of the Midwest Academy provided a real-life model for the DSA vision of a partnership between community organizing and socialism. Over the course of the 1970s, the leaders of the Midwest Academy and their supporters also played a central role in dragging the militant ex-SDSers of the New American Movement (NAM) into a more pragmatically minded alliance with Michael Harrington. We got a hint of that in Chapter Two, but the fuller story of the decade-long transformation of NAM from militance to pragmatism is well worth telling. The story of NAM and the Midwest Academy helps explain why real-life community organizers adhere to a version of socialism very different from what standard-issue treatments of Marxism might lead us to expect. In Chapter Three we also learned of a stealthy brand of socialism advocated by a theorist of community organizing named Harry Boyte. Boyte closely collaborated with the leaders of the Midwest Academy, and his vision of socialism is embodied in the work of that institution.
The Midwest Academy succeeded in synthesizing the community organizing techniques of Saul Alinsky with the sort of national electoral strategy Alinsky had long refused to countenance. Through their vision, ambition, and ideological earnestness, the leaders of the Midwest Academy turned Alinsky’s localized techniques into the key to an ambitious national strategy of socialist transformation. Barack Obama, by all accounts a brilliant student of community organizing, was for years in an ideal position to drink all of this in. Michelle Obama (herself closely affiliated with the Midwest Academy) has said of her husband that he thinks of electoral politics as a kind of project in community organizing writ large: “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.”2 This way of understanding electoral politics was virtually invented by the Midwest Academy. So let’s have a look at the history of this extra- ordinary institution, and of its ties to Barack and Michelle Obama.
“Socialism and the Coming Decade,” the 1969 pamphlet published by the future leaders and core supporters of the Midwest Academy, took the quest for socialism in a very different direction than the Weather Underground. The Weathermen nursed wildly improbable hopes of fomenting revolution through a terrorist war waged against police, the military, and the symbolic seats of American democracy. In contrast, “Socialism and the Coming Decade” is all about long-term strategy, realistic short-term objectives, and the deep-down social change that only patient community organizing can bring. For all that, the program itself remains radical, with clear support for the Vietnamese communists and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans among its positions, for example.3
Even so, the SDSers behind “Socialism and the Coming Decade” counsel patience, and acknowledge that the United States of 1969 (with Richard Nixon as its new president) has entered a “non- revolutionary period.”4 In these non-revolutionary times, we’re told, “a conscious organization of socialists” needs to found and guide community organizations among the working class.5 These neighborhood groups can mobilize workers around concrete issues like urban redevelopment and health care, thereby giving “the socialist movement relevance to the daily lives of the people.”6 Over time, patient neighborhood organizing and struggle will prepare the workers’ consciousness for the socialist revolution to come.
Notice the implicit difference here between the socialist consciousness of the organizers and the less-than-fully-socialist thinking of their “mass” followers. Community organizations may be “anti-capitalist” in practice,7 but that is not the same thing as full socialist consciousness—which according to these socialists takes time and education to develop. So beneath the surface of “Socialism and the Coming Decade” lurks the problem of precisely how honest socialist community organizers ought to be about their beliefs. Should community organizers proudly proclaim their politics and convert the masses to socialism—or quietly draw their unsuspecting followers into implicitly socialist schemes? Over time, the answer became clear. As America’s “non-revolutionary period” persisted, organizers at the Midwest Academy increasingly opted for stealth.
By 1971, with the Weather Underground in the midst of its futile terror campaign, Heather and Paul Booth were following through on the more plausible program that they and their colleagues had outlined two years before in “Socialism and the Coming Decade.” With the SDS a dead letter, the Booths turned toward Alinsky. This was despite, or perhaps because of, Alinsky’s long-standing conviction that the SDS’s organizing methods were naive and counterproductive. Heather Booth enrolled in Alinsky’s fledgling Chicago organizer training institute in the summer of 1971. (Records show that Obama’s original training mentor, Jerry Kellman, was a classmate of hers at the time.)8 Meanwhile, Paul Booth was assuming the co-chairmanship of the Citizens Action Program (CAP), a pioneering city-wide community organization in Chicago that emerged out of Alinsky’s new training institute. The experience and connections the Booths gained through CAP would enable them to found their own organizer training institute, the Midwest Academy, in 1973.
CAP was Saul Alinsky’s attempt to organize the white middle class.9 The rising Black Power movement of the late sixties had driven Alinsky out of organizing projects in African-American neighborhoods and left him with no choice but to shift his focus to whites. Yet Alinsky was also convinced that large-scale socialist transformation would require an alliance between the struggling middle class and the poor. The key to radical social change, Alinsky thought, was to turn the wrath of America’s middle class against large corporations. After initial drives against corporate pollution and Chicago’s plan to construct a crosstown expressway, CAP launched one of the first campaigns against bank “red-lining,” paving the way for ACORN’s fateful attack on the mortgage industry decades later.
An unpublished University of Chicago doctoral dissertation in sociology by David Emmons, himself a CAP research director and organizer, offers a remarkably frank inside portrait of CAP, the Midwest Academy’s immediate predecessor.10 Emmons notes that CAP’s campaign against the bank “red-lining” was pushed by “organizers who were mostly left-of-center social democrats and populists. They attributed most of the city’s ills to underlying economic forces and longed for CAP to adopt an anti-corporate agenda.”11 “Social democrats and populists” is a bit of a euphemism, since the files of the Midwest Academy make it clear that CAP’s organizers were largely socialist. But the interesting point here is the tension between what socialist-leaning organizers really wanted (anti-corporate campaigns) and what they sometimes had to agree to in response to their membership’s interests (fighting the mayor’s plan to construct an expressway). While the Weathermen were in hiding, hatching their absurdly unrealistic terror plans, the Booths and their fellow radicals were learning how to lead in the real world. In exchange for patient willingness to pursue popular projects of less-than-ultimate interest to themselves, socialist organizers could occasionally harness the power of the “masses” to actions with genuinely radical potential—like an attack on the banking system.
Having spent eighteen months in CAP, Emmons provides an informed and sobering account of the duplicitous and intentionally polarizing tactics at the center of Alinskyite organizing. For example:
CAP organizers manufactured anger: targets were baited to behave provocatively so that members would respond angrily. Frequently a cycle of rancourous protest was set off … CAP organizers prized angry confrontation because it created solidarity and a commitment to further action among participants. But it also created an image of militancy which repelled more conser- vative and frequently substantial local leaders, thus sometimes irreparably dividing neighborhoods into opposing camps.12
We saw exactly the same pattern in the methods Obama himself adopted under the training of Alinsky acolyte Greg Galluzzo. The CAP experience provided the Midwest Academy’s organizers with a fund of these polarizing Alinskyite techniques on which to draw.
While Paul Booth would be a board member and a power behind the scenes at the Midwest Academy, his wife, Heather Booth, would become (in 1973) the Academy’s true founder and guiding force. Heather Booth was in an excellent position to observe and participate in CAP’s battles of the early seventies. Yet Heather Booth’s chief efforts in 1971 were devoted to organizing for socialist feminism. Booth and her early collaborator at the Midwest Academy, Day Creamer, were involved in both the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) and the Action Committee for Decent Childcare.13 The juxtaposition of the explicitly socialist CWLU with the less ideological daycare project—open to all women, not just committed socialists—exemplifies the strategy Booth and her collaborators had laid out in 1969’s “Socialism and the Coming Decade,” in which small, consciously socialist groups quietly build and guide less openly ideological mass movements. Booth’s developing ideological and strategic perspective is presented in her 1971 pamphlet, written with Day Creamer and a small group of others, “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement.”14 This pamphlet was reprinted by the Midwest Academy “for historical purposes,” and was sometimes used in the Academy’s training sessions.
The most interesting thing about Booth’s “Socialist Feminism” pamphlet is its open blending of socialism with Alinsky’s intentionally non-ideological language. Alinsky was a cross between a democratic socialist and a communist fellow traveler.15 He was smart enough to avoid Marxist language in public, however. Instead of calling for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, Alinsky and his followers talk about “confronting power.” Instead of advocating socialist revolution, they demand “radical social change.” Instead of demanding attacks on capitalists, they go after “targets” or “enemies.” Yet Booth and her collaborators use socialist and Alinskyite jargon interchangeably, as if their pamphlet were a sort of translation guide to the hidden socialist language of community organizing. For Booth, the Alinskyite “target” or “enemy” is openly equated with the “power of the ruling class.”16 Community organizing should “alter the relations of power,” says Booth, which she elsewhere calls “weakening the power of the ruling class.”17 In Chapter Four, we saw Obama deploy a typical Alinskyite euphemism in Dreams from My Father. After criticizing black nationalist separatism for its inability to circumvent capitalism, Obama suggests that the only real solution for blacks is “changing the rules of power.” That phrase is classic Alinskyite code for the sort of broad-scale social changes that lead to socialism. Booth’s pamphlet makes the “translation” clear. So in 1971, Booth’s SDS background was already combining with her Alinskyite training to produce a more self-consciously ideological brand of community organizing.
Booth’s “Socialist Feminism” pamphlet also reveals the deeper reason for the Alinskyite embrace of hardball organizing tactics. Consider, for example, Booth’s socialist-feminist approach to organizing around the abortion issue. Instead of simply working to expand legal protections for abortion, Booth tells feminists to figure out which corporate executives serve on the boards of churches that oppose abortion. That way, organizers can launch “direct action” campaigns against these executives, presumably, laying siege to their homes and boycotting their businesses.18 When your ultimate goal is the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class, intimidating businessmen is not a problem. On the contrary, it moves the battle beyond conventional legal reform and toward radical consciousness—which is Booth’s explicit goal. Most Americans are put off by Alinskyite tactics, implicitly feeling them to be violations of the underlying rules of fairness and civility on which society depends. Yet if in your heart you stand outside of society and hope to see the current system swept away, breaking the rules actually helps to get you where you’re going. In other words, Alinsky’s tactics are more than means to an end. His tactical radicalism points to an underlying socialist ideology. Thus does Booth’s pamphlet reveal what Alinsky himself kept hidden.
That doesn’t mean Booth herself was entirely open about her socialism. Her pamphlet does lay out an ideology—calling for free universal health care, the disarming and community control of police, collective responsibility for rearing children, and other radical goals.19 Yet Booth is cautious and sophisticated about the relationship between “conscious socialists” and “mass organizations.” The socialist Chicago Women’s Liberation Union may have favored free, twenty-four-hour child care, but Booth makes it clear that it would be foolish to broach so radical a proposal to members of a “mass organization” (i.e., a group not restricted to socialists) like the Action Committee for Decent Childcare.20 The most radical socialist-feminist goals must be revealed only gradually, and chiefly to women who seem like possible recruits to socialism. In 1971, then, two years before the founding of the Midwest Academy, Heather Booth’s stealthy synthesis of socialism and Alinskyite community organizing was taking shape.
As we’ve seen, in 1969, with the SDS in collapse, the authors of “Socialism in the Coming Decade” called for the formation of a “conscious organization of socialists.” Between late 1971 and mid-1972, two authors of that document, Paul Booth and Harry Boyte, helped to found the New American Movement (NAM), a democratic socialist organization offering a home of sorts to the scattered veterans of the SDS.21 One reason the history of NAM is virtually unknown today is that the organization was in many respects a failure. Despite grand plans to unite workers and the poor in a multi-racial revolutionary movement for socialism, NAM’s membership remained minuscule. Political plans notwithstanding, NAM functioned as something of a lifestyle time-warp for aging sixties revolutionaries. Prospective new members were often driven off by the cliquish and retro feeling of it all.22
More important, most NAMers had a spectacularly unrealistic sense of America’s readiness for a socialist revolution. There was barely any strategy at all, beyond the assumption that capitalism was teetering on the brink of failure.23 It was taken for granted that an uncompromising and boldly articulated socialist vision would bring the “masses” flocking to NAM. Nixon’s impeachment seemed to confirm NAM’s hopes, and the group squandered its limited resources organizing around that crisis—only to be stunned after Nixon’s resignation by the system’s recuperative powers.24 Yet the admittedly comical features of NAM mustn’t blind us to its significance. We saw in Chapter Two how the eventual willingness of some in NAM to postpone their revolutionary dreams and work for socialist-friendly candidates in the here and now ultimately led to an influential alliance between Harold Washington and Chicago’s socialists. The circle of organizers who would found and support the Midwest Academy were at the heart of this more realistic and effective tendency within NAM. Over the long term, the Midwest Academy group helped transform NAM into something new—creating a working relationship between modern community organizing and socialism in the process.
In April of 1972, just as it was getting started, NAM sponsored an organizer training workshop conducted by Heather and Paul Booth along with Bob and Day Creamer. The Booths had pushed the idea, partly as a way of increasing the tactical savvy of these ex-SDSers, but really as a way of pulling NAM in their own strategic direction. Archival documents paint a revealing picture of the splits within NAM that emerged at this early workshop.
The NAM leaders who introduced the Booths and Creamers to the organizing workshop took care to withhold NAM’s official endorsement from the presenters. The Booths and Creamers, it was noted, had developed their methods while working with “non-socialist organizations” and “liberal mass movements” (i.e., CAP and the daycare advocacy group), whereas many NAMers believed that revolutionary mass organizations must be built around openly socialist ideas. At the workshop, Heather Booth defended the value of movements built around piecemeal reforms as a way of gradually creating radical consciousness. Booth “called on those present to fight perfectionism, correct lineism, impossibilism, and all the other isms that have distracted the Left.”25 In other words, Booth argued that unless NAMers lowered their revolutionary expectations and worked for gradual and only implicitly socialist change, they would never get past square one with the American people.
The workshop included readings from Andre Gorz, whose theories, we learned in Chapter Two, held that capitalism could be crippled and transformed from within by a series of reforms that were far more radical in effect than they appeared to be.26 Yet the Booths and Creamers were pressed during the workshop to go beyond “reformism” and explain how to build mass movements with explicitly socialist consciousness. The presenters apparently avoided answering those questions head-on. Similarly, one of the NAM leaders who corresponded with the Booths prior to the workshop pressed them to be more specific about the delicate question of how open community organizers ought to be about their socialism (the terms “front group” and “mass activity” in the following passage translate to “community organization”):
What is the relationship of the NAM chapter to the mass activity? Under what conditions should actions be carried out in the name of NAM? Under what conditions should it be a front group or a coalition? Who really decides, the front group or the chapter? How and when do you raise the question of socialism? How do you recruit NAM members out of a mass action?27
This same leader pressed the Booths to “deal with the question of illegal activity” like “violence and street tactics.” “Why are these less than useful?” he wanted to know. From the beginning of NAM’s existence, then, a split was developing between hardliners who saw a violent and openly socialist revolution around the corner, and a pragmatic faction content to organize and provide quiet socialist guidance to movements that were liberal in appearance, yet radical in their ultimate intention and effect.
In the winter of 1973, a then twenty-seven-year-old Heather Booth founded the Midwest Academy as a training institute for community organizers. Steve Max was the other key trainer, while Paul Booth, Bob and Day Creamer, and a small number of other associates served on the board of directors.28 Because many files of the Midwest Academy, along with a number of Heather Booth’s personal papers, have been archived at the Chicago Historical Society, it is possible to reconstruct the internal operations of this remarkable institution through about the mid-1980s. Of course, document archives offer a very partial picture of what happens in real life. Face-to-face interactions and phone calls don’t get archived. That said, the voluminous Midwest Academy records are revealing, particularly because key figures were sometimes in different cities and communicated by letter. Draft manuscripts traded among colleagues also shed light on the ideological development of the Academy’s leaders. The bottom line is that the Midwest Academy archives are a window onto the inner workings of a modern-day socialist front group. With the assistance of the archives, it is possible to identify numerous links between the Midwest Academy and both Barack and Michelle Obama.
How do you train community organizers? The Midwest Academy mixed role-playing games (e.g., mock negotiations between demonstrators, steel company executives, and a mayor) with readings, lectures, discussion, and participant observation at actual demonstrations.29 Students at the Academy’s 1973 Summer Session, for example, attended a CAP bank protest and got detailed lectures from Paul Booth on CAP’s history and strategy. Academy students even sang old labor songs and put their own lyrics to others. “Show the targets we can beat them!” sang the students of ’73.30
While Academy training had a lot to say about tactics, there was plenty of opportunity to introduce students to socialist ideas as well. A session on the “political science of organizations” dissected the inner workings not only of CAP and the National Organization of Women (NOW), but of “Communist Party fronts,” “Socialist Workers Party fronts,” and “agitprop” (Marxist abbreviation for “agitation and propaganda”).31 There were discussions of “movement history” and “class consciousness,” as well. As time went on, the Academy put more emphasis on the history of the left, exposing students to veteran activists from the thirties, of which there were many in Chicago.32
The most entertaining bit of evidence for the ideological training going on at the Midwest Academy is a song created by Academy staffers as a sendoff for Steve Max when he had to leave Chicago for a time. The tribute to Max, highlighting his favorite theories, was to be sung to the tune of the Internationale, the communist-socialist anthem, and included the following lyrics: “Arise a left, no more we’ll mourn/We’ll organize for socialism/With anti-capitalist structural reform!”33 Not only did the Midwest Academy’s leaders approve of Gorz’s theory of “non-reformist reforms,” they actually set it to music.
So along with contemporary socialist theory, the communist and socialist history of community organizing was actively conveyed to Midwest Academy trainees. Steve Max, the son of a prominent American communist, could draw on his Communist Party heritage to drive home these lessons.34 Yet Heather Booth was fully involved as well. She handled much of the Academy’s continuing “socialism session,” which included eight weekly units covering Marx, Engels, and Lenin, moving through a century of sectarian battles, and culminating with Michael Harrington’s democratic socialism and the factional struggles of the SDS.35
Only some students would have attended the full socialism ses- sion, but Max’s references to the communist and socialist past in the regular training sessions would have been more than enough to alert Academy students to the socialist background of community organizing. If some expressed interest in learning more about socialism, they were no doubt marked out as potential NAM recruits. For example, a “Director’s Report” from June of 1974 indicates that many leaders of a group in-training from Iowa State NOW “say they are socialists of sorts.”36 Most groups had to pay for Midwest Academy training, but the Academy did sessions for both NAM and Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) for free.37 In the Academy’s fall 1974 session, five out of twenty-two students were members of NAM.38
Factional tensions between the Midwest Academy and NAM continued to cause problems, however. On the one hand, the Academy’s leaders wanted to get as many NAMers as possible into their program, in the hope that this would convert the group to their more stealthy, patient, and pragmatic vision of socialism. On the other hand, Steve Max’s letters show that he was nervous about having to train his fellow NAMers. Max feared that when NAM’s hardliners got exposed to the Academy’s more prudent approach to socialism, they’d respond by “forming a caucus to fight our revisionism.”39 So Max suggested that Booth invite their close ally Harry Boyte to come to Chicago from Minnesota to attend the NAM training session. As a founder and leader of NAM, Boyte could run interference for Max in case the hardliners attacked.
SECTION TWO
All of which brings us to 1974–75, a time of chaos within NAM and change for the Midwest Academy. Around this time, a crisis-ridden NAM began to break apart.40 Three years after the New American Movement’s creation, there was no sign whatever of a socialist upsurge in the United States, much less a revolution. NAM was failing. But why?
For NAM’s left wing, the answer was that an undisciplined group of quarreling “democratic socialists” had failed to present America’s workers with a single clear and politically “correct” ideological “line.” A newly formed “Marxist-Leninist Organizing Caucus” sought a return to classic Leninist party discipline and conversion of NAM into a tightly knit group, or “cadre” organization, of professional revolutionaries.41 At the same time, on NAM’s “right” (obviously a relative term), there was frustration at the organization’s refusal to consider socialist ventures in electoral politics. Most NAMers insisted that participation in America’s hopelessly bourgeois electoral system would mean co-optation by capitalism and betrayal of the revolution. That stance disappointed NAMers who believed that, over time, openly socialist ideas could win electoral battles. And we already know that members loyal to the Midwest Academy were exasperated by NAM’s dismissal of community organizing ventures not publicly labeled as socialist.
The result of these differences was confrontation and schism on the left, and quiet departures on the “right.” (Again, “right” in this context means “slightly less radically socialist.”) Actually, we already encountered one of the sharpest internal confrontations in Chapter Three: the rift between communist and democratic-socialist community organizers in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1974. Recall that after failing to enlist the working-class residents of Cambridgeport in their protests, a group of community organizers in that town decided to drop their Alinskyite stealth and come out openly as socialists. Honest and enthusiastic socialist exhortation, they calculated, would bring in batches of working-class recruits, where Alinskyite stealth had failed. Their new socialist honesty, however, produced only ideological in-fighting, rejection by the blue-collar residents of Cambridgeport, and organizational collapse. NAM’s records make it clear that this story, told at the head of Let the People Decide, Robert Fisher’s influential history of community organizing, was intertwined with NAM’s internal crisis—something Fisher never lets on.42 The records of the Midwest Academy’s organizing ventures, combined with the backstory of the Cambridgeport fiasco, make it clear that hidden socialist maneuvering stands behind a good deal of modern American community organizing.
On NAM’s “right,” the leaders of the Midwest Academy, Heather Booth and Steve Max, quietly left the organization around 1975, to ally instead with Michael Harrington’s politically pragmatic Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).43 Harry Boyte, a close ally of Booth and Max, and their co-author on the 1969 “Socialism and the Coming Decade” paper, remained in NAM but joined Harrington’s DSOC as well.44 Around the same time, John Judis (today a writer for the liberal New Republic) led a pro-electoral faction out of NAM.45 This group soon clustered around the socialist periodical In These Times. In Judis’s words, the In These Times faction believed that only electoral participation could build “a majority movement for socialism that would take over the government and establish a new society.”46 We saw in Chapter Two that Harold Washington’s electoral success in Chicago in 1983 generated considerable optimism at In These Times about the prospects for a socialist-friendly electoral movement in the United States.
NAM’s breakaway “right-wing” factions were pragmatic about advancing socialism in the present, yet remained radical in their vision of the future. At best, admitted Judis in 1974, openly socialist electoral victories would be but a prelude to a broader social revolution and probable “armed struggle.”47 In a 1975 address to a conference of socialist feminists, Heather Booth criticized her comrades as “in-grown, abstract, sectarian,” and “isolated from the lives of most women.”48 Socialist feminism, Booth added, has become “more like a religion than like a movement for social change.” As a model to emulate, Booth proposed Ralph Nader’s step-by-step anti-corporate campaigns. To build a successful movement, Booth insisted, women need concrete victories, “collective actions … where they see the enemy cringe in front of their eyes.” Yet Booth conceded that even the best community organizing strategy in the present could only prepare the battlefield, so to speak, for the inevitable revolutionary showdown of the future. Said Booth: “Truly reaching socialism or feminism will likely take a revolution that is in fact violent, a rupture with the old ways in which the current ruling class and elites are wiped out.”49 Heather Booth’s willingness to contemplate the “wiping out” of America’s “ruling class,” even far in the future, is disturbing, to say the least. It also casts a suspicious light on the supposed moderation of “democratic” socialists. That said, the revolutionary commitment of seventies socialists like Judis and Booth matters less for our purposes than their determination to drag modern American socialism, kicking and screaming, into the heart of America’s mainstream institutions.
The Midwest Academy group may have formally left NAM in 1975, but their goal remained unification of the old and new left under a more pragmatic banner—with community organizing at the center of a reformulated socialist project. Over several years, the Midwest Academy faction largely succeeded in engineering this shift. Michael Harrington’s correspondence shows that Harry Boyte made the first move, writing Harrington in January of 1974 in hopes of initiating cooperation between Harrington’s DSOC and NAM.50 Steve Max’s correspondence with Heather Booth shows that he also played a key role in arranging an eventual merger of the two groups.51
With all this talk of socialism, it’s important to keep in mind that the Midwest Academy remained extremely cautious, not only about mentioning socialism in its public organizing, but also about too much socialist talk in front of the organizers they trained. Not every feminist or senior citizen activist was receptive to hard-left advocacy. So in 1977, the Academy set up a discreet “Committee of Correspondence” that would allow socialist community organizers to privately exchange ideas about the relationship between their work and their ideology.52
The records of this group show organizers grousing about how hard it is “to get people to make the leap from seeing how big banks and other businesses are ripping them off to seeing that such practices are inherent in our economic system.”53 There were also debates about the role of violence, if any, in a socialist seizure of state power. Stealth was another topic, as in this remark by an anonymous correspondent from Washington, D.C.: “If we initially start out by talking about reallocating wealth and power, let alone about ‘socialism,’ we will turn too many people off to build the kind of socialist mass movement we seek.”54
It’s tough to build a socialist mass movement without mentioning socialism. Yet that is exactly what these organizers were trying to do. The most difficult problem of all—highlighted in correspondence from Steve Max and Harry Boyte—was that “every social proposal that we make must be couched in terms of how it will strengthen capitalism.”55 This is a telling admission. While Max and Boyte long for the day when political taboos melt and they can argue for the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in openly socialist terms, they effectively admit to manufacturing shaky free market rationalizations for measures they support on socialist grounds. So the Midwest Academy’s confidential Committee of Correspondence proves that at least in some cases, deceptive socialist intentions really do stand behind legislation justified in the language of free enterprise.
Meanwhile, in the late seventies, the influx of a small but highly influential group of ex-communists into NAM was pushing the revolutionary group toward conventional American politics. In particular, two veteran communists named Dorothy Healy and Max Gordon took the lead in arguing that NAMers had to rethink their opposition to acting within the Democratic Party.56 Ripping into NAM’s simplistic, purist, and anti-electoral interpretations of Marxism, Gordon pointed to explicit calls by Engels and Lenin for participation in American electoral politics. Real Marxists, Gordon insisted, work flexibly, never isolating themselves from the working class but joining in its struggles as a way of pulling the workers ever closer to socialism. In the United States, labor votes with the Democrats, so that’s where NAM must be, said Gordon. These ex-communists had painful memories of their support for Henry Wallace’s third-party campaign in 1948. That third-party venture had isolated the communists from their Democratic allies and left the party vulnerable to destruction in the fifties.
The ex-communists in NAM had been profoundly shaped by the “Popular Front” of the 1930s. During that period, America’s communists dropped their openly revolutionary language and presented themselves as ordinary Americans instead. The Popular Front embraced American icons like Abraham Lincoln and the Founders, but moved to redefine them in de facto communist terms. The result was by far the greatest expansion the party had ever seen. The price paid was secrecy, as communists now worked through manipulation of mass-membership organizations (“front groups”) they controlled on the sly.
NAM’s ex-communists defended the Popular Front against attacks from purists who preferred openly revolutionary radicalism. Never were so many Americans drawn to socialism as during the Popular Front, these ex-communists pointed out. The Popular Front may have been short on Marxist jargon, but its democratic rhetoric and stealthy coalition-building worked, swelling the Communist Party of the 1930s to unprecedented proportions.
It’s tough to strike a more-radical-than-thou pose against legendary veterans of the Communist Party. Slowly but surely, then, the combined pressure of organizational failure and the ex-communists’ arguments began to push the remaining NAMers into cautious electoral experimentation, and ultimately into a merger with Michael Harrington’s DSOC. Ironically, it took America’s veteran communists to push the remnants of the SDS into the Democratic Party.
Between NAM’s crisis of the mid-seventies and the merger of NAM and DSOC in the early eighties, a steady stream of manuscripts for comment flowed from Harry Boyte, an academic in Minnesota, to the leaders of the Midwest Academy. Boyte, a longtime community organizer who in 1969 had co-authored “Socialism and the Coming Decade,” along with the Booths and Steve Max, was the unofficial big-picture theorist of the Midwest Academy. Through the latter part of the seventies and the early eighties, Boyte refined the Academy’s concept of a stealthy brand of incremental socialism rooted in community organizing. As a founder of NAM and, after 1975, a leader of the DSOC as well, Boyte also played a central role in arranging the merger of these two socialist groups into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Boyte’s struggle with his fellow NAMers during this period ran very much in parallel with the ex-communists who had recently joined the group. In 1975, Boyte began to explicitly defend the communist Popular Front period as the model for a workable socialist strategy. With its willingness to exchange socialist jargon for American democratic language, said Boyte, the Communist Party of the thirties successfully built a coalition with “progressive sections of the ruling class—those portions of the business elite which looked toward a modernized and efficient welfare state as the ‘way out’ of the economic crisis.”57 Also in 1975, years before the Midwest Academy turned in earnest to electoral politics, Boyte articulated a vision of a synergy between movement-based politicians and grassroots organizing. Boyte saw this short-term political plan as part of a long-term revolutionary strategy, and freely drew on Marx, Lenin, and Mao to make his points. Yet like the ex-communists in NAM, Boyte emphasized the “strategic and realistic” side of the great communist icons, rather than their more dogmatic themes.58
This “Popular Front” strategy had always been implicit in community organizing. Modern community organizations themselves can best be understood as miniature front groups—little coalitions crossing ideological lines but maneuvered from behind by socialist organizers. As seen above, some NAMers even used “front group” and “community organization” as virtual synonyms. It’s no coincidence, then, that NAM’s new direction was engineered by an alliance of community organizers and actual veterans of the communist Popular Front.
A Popular Front strategy means stealth, and this may have been the greatest sticking point between Boyte and his fellow NAMers. In 1977, Boyte was attacked by prominent socialist strategist Frank Ackerman, in NAM’s internal “Discussion Bulletin,” for his refusal to openly preach socialism. Many working-class young people will respond to socialist appeals, said Ackerman, “unless, of course, we deny our existence to them, the apparent strategy of closet socialist Alinskyites.”59 Boyte’s response to the “closet socialist” charge was to grant the need for sophisticated socialist strategizing behind the scenes of a broader, populist style movement.60
Much of Boyte’s theoretical work during this period grew out of his study of America’s socialist past. Early in the twentieth century, America’s Socialist Party generated substantial electoral support. Yet the greatest socialist successes of that era were products of stealth. Boyte pointed to example after example of early-nineteenth-century regional parties that used populist or communitarian, rather than socialist, language to describe their radical programs. Many candidates of these regional populist parties “had a Socialist Party background but had decided that the formal language of socialism would make little headway” with Americans. In other cases, said Boyte, “middle-class socialists … abandoned the linguistic purity of the Socialist Party,” developed a communitarian vocabulary, and worked within the Democratic Party. Some of America’s most “progressive” legislation of the thirties was enacted at the state level using this stealth socialist strategy, said Boyte.61
In 1980, as preparations for the NAM-DSOC merger were well underway, Boyte went so far as to lobby behind the scenes for the new organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, to drop the word “socialist” from its name.62 Boyte hadn’t turned against Marx, Lenin, or Mao, of course. His desire for stealth was based on simple realism about what the American public was willing to accept. Boyte pointed out that despite the DSOC’s considerable influence within the Democratic Party, it was still “frozen out of media coverage” because of the “cultural sanction” against socialism. Boyte knew that there were already plenty of “anti-capitalist” organizations that for strictly practical reasons had decided not to call themselves socialist. He believed these groups might be prepared to join a unified NAM-DSOC if the new organization was willing to drop the word “socialist” from its name. Boyte and the members of his “communitarian caucus” pushed for an end to open socialism at the DSA through the mid-eighties, yet never quite managed to bring the majority of the DSA around to the idea. Nonetheless, Boyte’s emerging vision of a large-scale populist movement pushed toward radicalism by discreet socialist leaders inspired his Midwest Academy colleagues to try something new.
SECTION THREE
In April 1978, at a gathering of nearly seventy labor and liberal groups in Washington, D.C., the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition (C/LEC) was launched.63 Formed ostensibly in response to the era’s energy crisis, this group was pledged to fighting for lower gas and oil prices. In fact, this brainchild of Heather Booth’s Midwest Academy and Michael Harrington’s DSOC was created with far broader goals in mind. C/LEC was an initial attempt to build a nationwide populist movement, quietly directed by socialists, and specifically designed to unify and revive a fragmented American left. The sixties had divided patriotic and socially conservative unionists from a generation of radicals sympathetic to socialist revolution abroad and movements for feminism and gay liberation at home. Kicking off an anti-corporate battle over energy prices was a first attempt to heal this rift, while launching a full-spectrum movement of the left under effective socialist control. The idea was to unite the working and middle classes against American corporations, thus creating a majority coalition for progressive “social change.”
In time, this neglected yet influential episode in American political history gave birth to a new way of linking socialism, community organizing, and electoral politics.
C/LEC’s program embodied the pragmatic and incremental political strategy shared by Harrington’s DSOC and the Midwest Academy. Heather Booth co-founded a group of socialist feminists in the early seventies, yet from 1978 on, she proved willing to subordinate her commitment to feminist radicalism to the larger and more workable project of assembling a populist coalition around economic issues. For the sake of making peace with their unionist allies, Booth and the other community organizers in C/LEC also agreed to avoid the question of nuclear power. Environmental activists loathed nuclear power, while unions looked forward to jobs in nuclear plants.
Along with a pragmatic willingness to focus on issues that would unify the left, C/LEC’s leaders experimented with a new way of fighting for socialism. Instead of following the classic Marxist playbook and demanding nationalization of the energy industry, C/LEC crafted a regulatory regime that would have effectively put this sector of the economy under government control. At the same time, C/LEC called for the creation of a publically owned energy corporation to provide “competition” for private oil companies.64 C/LEC’s strategy is a little-known but important precedent for President Obama’s health-care plan, with its elaborate regulatory apparatus and “public option.” The president’s cap-and-trade proposal is reminiscent of C/LEC’s program as well.
Critics of today’s cap-and-trade bill sometimes claim that its advocates tout the prospect of global warming merely as a pretext for imposing socialist-inspired government controls on the energy sector. Whether that’s so or not, however, socialism surely was the hidden motive behind C/LEC’s legislative plans. Heather Booth and her allies at the DSOC were clearly using popular discontent with the energy crisis as a pretext to justify their long-standing desire to socialize the economy. It was obvious to most observers in the seventies that the energy crisis had been precipitated by the newly formed OPEC oil cartel. C/LEC largely ignored OPEC and blamed the crisis instead on the structure of America’s energy industry. The plan was to channel consumer anger at rising energy prices into a step-by-step de facto nationalization process. As with today’s energy battle, in public C/LEC emphasized solar energy and what we now call “green jobs.” Yet this seems to have been something of a cover for C/LEC’s top priorities: price controls and higher energy taxes. As with cap-and-trade today, C/LEC’s call for higher energy taxes was stymied by the prospect that the oil industry would pass the cost along to the consumer.
C/LEC’s program was laid out in the Citizens Energy Act, submitted to Congress by Representative Toby Moffett (D-CT) and Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) in 1980. C/LEC never expected the bill to pass in its entirety. It was far too radical for that. Yet several of the Citizens Energy Act’s provisions were written into law, and the remainder of the bill inspired a variety of grassroots campaigns managed by the Midwest Academy. The goal of these campaigns was to win a place for community organizations on local regulatory boards and utility commissions—very much at the heart of socialist strategy in the late seventies and eighties. So C/LEC gave substance to the vision of a coordinated and incremental national political strategy running from grassroots organizations to the halls of Congress, and controlled by socialists behind the scenes.
While C/LEC didn’t get everything it wanted, this populist coalition won a surprising number of legislative battles. It took the conservative think tanks five or six years to figure out what this new player on the scene was up to. Beginning in 1983, a series of think-tank reports on C/LEC began to piece together the story of the socialist leadership behind the populist facade.65 Yet conservatives in the eighties had only a very partial sense of just how deeply socialist a venture C/LEC actually was. The think-tank reports largely focused on the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee’s (DSOC) outsized involvement in the coalition. But that was only the beginning.
C/LEC was jointly headed by Heather Booth and International Association of Machinists president William Winpisinger. Conservative policy experts had only the barest inkling of how profoundly socialist each of these leaders was.66 It was duly noted that Winpisinger had once described himself as a “seat of the pants socialist,” but that apparently casual remark could be dismissed. In fact, Winpisinger was a vice chair of the DSOC. As Michael Harrington’s correspondence reveals, moreover, in his capacity as head of the Machinists, Winpisinger was a major—maybe the major—financial supporter of the DSOC.67
Winpisinger’s well-camouflaged views are revealed in the September 1979 issue of DSOC’s newsletter, Democratic Left. There he talks about using the frustration of consumers caught in gas lines to undermine the capitalist system. Despite his obvious support for the grassroots socialist strategy of the day, Winpisinger was something of an unreconstructed centralizing socialist. In the pages of Democratic Left, he calls for “socialist central planning,” “mandatory price and profit controls,” “mandatory controls on all forms of income,” and “a guarantee that workers’ real income will be permitted to rise incrementally each year.” Winpisinger freely acknowledges that his vision of “centralized economic planning and controls” cannot “possibly be executed without encroaching on … traditional property rights.”68
So the think-tankers were even more right about C/LEC than they realized. Not only was DSOC helping to run the show, but Winpisinger himself was a hard-edged socialist and a high official and key financial supporter of DSOC. And this is not to mention Winpisinger’s co-leader, Heather Booth. Conservative policy wonks duly noted Booth’s SDS history, but had little sense of what we’ve already seen: how very deeply her socialist ties and convictions ran.
What does any of this have to do with Barack Obama? A great deal. As we’ve seen, the resemblance between C/LEC’s incremental socialist strategy and the Obama administration’s major legislative initiatives is striking. Also, Obama worked closely with the very people who developed and implemented C/LEC’s strategy. Midwest Academy records, for example, include a letter from C/LEC’s administrative director, Ken Rolling, thanking Harry Boyte for letting him know that the DSOC board had just passed a resolution “in favor of adding consumer and labor representatives to the boards of energy corporations.” Rolling promises to use the resolution as a talking point.69
So C/LEC really was a socialist front organization, conceived as a partnership between Michael Harrington’s DSOC, the Midwest Academy, and the stealthy left of the labor movement. The C/LEC idea was inspired by Harry Boyte’s vision of a majority left-populist movement, guided quietly behind the scenes by committed socialists. And the conscious template for this was the communist Popular Front of the thirties. Boyte himself helped to pass the strategic ideas from the DSOC, on whose board he served, to his colleagues at the Midwest Academy. The operation, moreover, was administered by Ken Rolling, a man who funded and then worked closely with Barack Obama for years. Rolling was by no means the only source from whom Obama could have learned the Midwest Academy’s stealthy and incremental blend of socialism, community organizing, and national politics. Yet with a working relationship extending over fifteen years, Rolling was surely a very important conduit of the Midwest Academy’s political expertise and perspective to Obama.
Conservative charges that C/LEC was determined “to withhold from the public its underlying philosophy and goals” never got much traction in the media.70 If Harrington’s DSOC was frustrated by the press’s refusal to publicize their leverage within the Democratic Party, conservatives were equally stymied by media reluctance to entertain charges of dissembling by effectively socialist citizens’ groups. In general, the media treated the socialism issue as too hot to handle.
I sympathize, since I downplayed the socialism question myself during the 2008 campaign. Yet an honest encounter with Obama’s organizing background virtually compels a reconsideration of this cautious policy. It turns out that stealthy and incremental socialist legislative “conspiracies” really do exist, at least in the world Obama inhabited for years.
In April of 1980, a coalition of labor and citizens’ groups that substantially overlapped with C/LEC sponsored “Big Business Day.” The event was intended to kick off a populist anti-corporate movement, just as “Earth Day” had launched the environmental movement a decade earlier. The keystone of the day’s events was the introduction in Congress of the “Corporate Democracy Act of 1980,” another regulatory wish list designed to preserve the appearance of corporate independence while nationalizing America’s businesses by degrees. Big Business Day’s sponsors brazenly denied that socialism had anything to do with their plans: “Ultimately, then, the issue is not regulation vs. freedom… . Nor is it capitalism vs. socialism. It is autocracy vs. democracy.”71 This was nonsense, of course, given the pervasive presence of socialists among the event’s sponsors. Yet it nicely illustrates the Popular Front–inspired substitution of democratic language for straightforward socialist advocacy.
So by the late seventies, the Midwest Academy had initiated a “populist” strategy combining grassroots organizing with a national legislative program. Yet community groups continued to resist electoral involvement, fearing that electoral campaigns would drain energy from local agitation and undercut the ability of organizers to control events. It took the election of Ronald Reagan to erode the traditional reluctance of Alinksyite organizers to enter the electoral arena. The Midwest Academy was at the epicenter of that tactical change.
“Bread for organizers,” that’s all President Johnson’s War on Poverty was good for, said the revolutionary radicals of the sixties. In the seventies, President Carter placed the VISTA program (Volunteers in Service to America), a surviving remnant of the original War on Poverty, in the de facto control of die-hard radicals from the sixties, once again making the federal government a ready source of “bread” for leftist political agitation. The capture of VISTA by the left was arranged, in part, by Midwest Academy, and it was the collapse of this scheme under Ronald Reagan that finally broke the resistance of the Academy and its network to electoral politics.
Heather Booth, along with ex-SDS leader Tom Hayden and his wife, Jane Fonda, were among the key figures recommending their friend Margery Tabankin to head the federal ACTION agency under Jimmy Carter.72 ACTION helped dispense VISTA grants, and Tabankin quickly found a way to divert VISTA money from traditional “direct service” volunteering to her community organizer colleagues. Tabankin was a friend and collaborator of many leaders within the Midwest Academy network. In fact, it was Tabankin who first drew SDS veterans Paul Booth, Heather Booth, and Bob Creamer into their alliance with Saul Alinsky in the early seventies.73 Tabankin had worked closely with ACORN as well. Shortly after her appointment in 1977, Tabankin arranged a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., with the nation’s top community organizers—many of whom also happened to be her friends. Out of those meetings came a scheme for distributing VISTA grants directly to national networks like ACORN and the Midwest Academy. This new national program made it possible to circumvent state-level grant restrictions and successfully kept the system out of the public eye for a time.74
Within a couple of years, however, controversy exploded. A report prepared in 1978 and published in 1979 by the investigative staff of the House Appropriations Committee detailed a series of VISTA grant abuses—especially by ACORN and the Midwest Academy. In numerous instances, said the report, ACTION had failed to observe congressional guidelines for grants, many of which were awarded non-competitively to Tabankin’s personal network of organizing colleagues.
These problems might have slowed the Midwest Academy, but it was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that threatened to bring the entire edifice of American community organizing—now thoroughly dependent on federal money—crashing down. Reagan appointee Thomas Pauken replaced Tabankin at ACTION and quickly set about investigating the Midwest Academy, C/LEC, and related organizations for possible abuse of their VISTA grants. Pauken also discovered the highly politicized tracts used to train VISTA personnel—Booth’s socialist feminism essay, for example.75 Midwest Academy files show Ken Rolling, in his capacity as C/LEC administrative director, resisting Pauken’s inquiries with a series of counter-demands. A hand note to Rolling from one of the VISTA grantees under investigation says: “Keep up the good job of running them around in circles.”76 But with Midwest Academy personnel increasingly distracted by investigations,77 and with the Reagan administration determined to slash funding for what it viewed as a hopelessly politicized VISTA program, Heather Booth began to rethink the reluctance of Alinskyite organizers to enter the electoral fray.78
C/LEC had always been intended as merely the first volley in a far larger attempt to bring a national dimension to community organizing. Alinsky’s early writings had envisioned a grand coalition of neighborhood “people’s organizations” uniting to fundamentally change American society. Alinsky created CAP (the Midwest Academy’s predecessor) as an initial stab at a city-wide coalition of neighborhood groups. Heather Booth’s idea was to push the coalition-building to another level, creating statewide assemblies of community organizations, then knitting them together into a national coalition. Linking this collection of grassroots groups to organized labor, Booth believed, would create a powerful national movement of the left. So beginning in 1979 and for several years thereafter, local affiliates of the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition began turning themselves into multi-issue grassroots groups, organized into state-wide units and gathered nationally under the banner of “Citizen Action.”79
The most established and effective of these statewide Citizen Action groups was the Illinois Public Action Council (IPAC). IPAC had actually been around since 1975, and was run by Bob Creamer, a close associate of Heather and Paul Booth, and of the Midwest Academy. IPAC was effectively the Midwest Academy’s action arm, as well as the model for a nation-wide Citizen Action coalition. It was through IPAC that Booth and Creamer began experimenting with a blend of community organizing and national electoral politics.
In 1982, the mid-term election of Ronald Reagan’s first term, IPAC and the Midwest Academy systematically targeted a downstate congressional district that had voted Republican in every election but one since the Civil War.80 The famous Reagan recovery was some years into the future, and this district was struggling economically. IPAC recruited a young, activist legal aid attorney, Lane Evans, to make the run as a Democrat.81 IPAC then trained both Evans and his campaign staff and launched a district-wide informational canvass designed to help Evans. The Evans campaign’s script could have been written by Harry Boyte. (Who knows? Maybe it actually was.) Evans ran as a populist, yet highlighted conservative and communitarian themes like family, faith, hard work, and patriotism. The difference was that Evans reinterpreted these values, always linking them to anti-corporate themes.82 Once elected in this historically conservative district, Evans compiled one of the most anti-Reagan voting records in the House. On entering office, Evans also helped co-found the Congressional Populist Caucus, the hoped-for vehicle of a new national movement of the left.83
Was Evans’s affinity for “populism” a cover for socialism? Evans certainly would not have called himself a socialist. Yet like Harold Washington, Evans worked closely with socialists, and was touted by both In These Times and the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).84 Evans was one of seven congressmen affiliated with DSA’s national “New Directions” coalition, and was singled out by Chicago DSA for special endorsement as “someone with whom we can work with on an ongoing basis.”85 Chicago DSA had two members working full-time on the Evans campaign, and Chicago’s DSA newsletter called Evans “extremely progressive”—a description these socialists would not have used lightly.86
Behind the scenes, IPAC itself was dominated by socialists. According to a 1981 article in DSA’s national newsletter, IPAC was in the process of shifting “from the usual reform targets of citizens groups (shut offs, street lights, metro fares) to naming, and questioning, the basic economic structure of the society.”87 A number of socialists served on IPAC’s governing board. The founding national convention of Citizen Action (of which IPAC was the most powerful component) featured a well-received and openly socialist address by Michael Harrington.88 IPAC’s program was filled with concrete legislative proposals, centering on various schemes for public ownership and wider distribution of “the fruits of production.” A September 1983 New York Times Magazine piece on the Citizen Action phenomenon focused on IPAC. Said the Times: “At the heart of the movement is an element of class struggle.”89 The Times framed that struggle as “populist,” but once you’ve read through the files of the Midwest Academy, the “populism” of IPAC and the Citizen Action network is revealed as an appealing public face for socialism.
A number of significant figures in Barack Obama’s world had close ties to IPAC and the Midwest Academy. Obama’s early mentor, Greg Galluzzo, organized for IPAC just before he and his wife Mary Gonzales founded UNO of Chicago.90 Gonzales is listed in Midwest Academy files as a member of Citizen Action’s national board in 1981, where she served alongside Heather Booth, Bob Creamer, and other Midwest Academy luminaries.91 This was at the very time Gonzales and Galluzzo were founding UNO, and almost certainly means that UNO of Chicago was a member of the IPAC coalition. If so, the same would very likely have applied to Obama’s own Developing Communities Project. IPAC’s finance director, by the way, was a young fellow named Rahm Emanuel.92 Whatever Emanuel’s politics at the time, he would surely have understood that many IPAC members saw themselves as socialists guiding an overtly “populist” movement from behind.
On election night 2008, former Congressman Lane Evans, then battling Parkinson’s Disease, was honored to be a guest in Barack Obama’s hotel suite.93 Obama has repeatedly expressed admiration for Evans, and even credited his 2004 Senate victory to Evans’s early support. Yet the history of IPAC casts Obama’s admiration of Evans in a new light. Evans was very much a creature of IPAC and the Midwest Academy. If Evans offered Obama a swift and critically important downstate endorsement in 2004, that was likely at the urging of Obama’s former colleagues at IPAC and the Midwest Academy. In any case, Obama’s longtime admiration for Evans may have less to do with that U.S. Senate endorsement, significant though it may have been at the time, than with what Lane Evans represents to Chicago’s community organizers. Evans is the very model of successful synergy between grassroots organizing and national politics. Evans’s “populist” stance enabled him to hold a historically conservative congressional district for twelve terms, all the while compiling one of the most liberal records in Congress. To Chicago’s socialists, moreover, Evans was, at minimum, a fellow traveler, if not perhaps, more quietly, one of them.
From 1983 to 1986, Bill Ayers’s brother, John Ayers, served on Lane Evans’s congressional staff. It is possible that Evans and Ayers first connected through IPAC and the Midwest Academy. Recall that IPAC trained both Evans and his campaign staff, so IPAC was clearly in a position to suggest staffers to Evans as well. Heather Booth’s personal correspondence contains a letter on House stationery from John Ayers, along with a card identifying him as Congressman Evans’s “Special Projects Coordinator.” Ayers had clearly met with Booth on several occasions, since he refers to their recent ninety-minute meeting by saying: “I always learn so much when I talk with you.”94
Ayers writes Booth to arrange an Evans address to the Midwest Academy’s annual summer retreat, but also to solicit Booth’s input and cooperation in the just-forming Congressional Populist Caucus. In a hand-written memo accompanying his letter, Ayers explains who Heather Booth is to members and staffers of the Populist Caucus, and lets them know that she would like to address the group. Ayers explains to his colleagues that Booth hopes to involve the Congressional Populist Caucus in formulating an economic program designed to draw community organizations into local and national political campaigns.95 In 1987, just after finishing his service with Congressman Evans in Washington, Ayers moved back to Chicago and connected with Obama. Lane Evans, John Ayers, the Midwest Academy, and Barack Obama all seem to have been part of the same political circle.
Although the extent of her direct ties to Barack Obama are unclear, it’s worth noting that Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who represents Chicago’s immediate northern suburbs, exemplifies the close ties between IPAC, the Midwest Academy, and the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Schakowsky was program director of IPAC from 1976 to 1985, and directed its Utility and Energy campaigns during the C/LEC years.96 On an application for a Midwest Academy administrative training session, she lists Heather Booth as a reference, jokingly calling Booth her mother.97 Midwest Academy files include numerous letters from Booth thanking Schakowsky for helping to train students, during the seventies.98 Documents from the mid-eighties list Schakowsky as one of the Academy’s “associate trainers.”99 Schakowsky eventually married IPAC head Bob Creamer, and had worked closely years before on consumer campaigns with Jackie Kendall, a colleague and successor of Heather Booth as Midwest Academy director.100 In short, Jan Schakowsky had close ties to the Midwest Academy’s core leadership.
Files from the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America show Schakowsky as an active member. For example, in the February/March issue of Chicago Socialist, Schakowsky reports on IPAC’s annual conference, its role in the Evans campaign, its political program, and the continuing role of DSA members on IPAC’s board.101 A 1986 copy of DSA News reports on some of Schakowsky’s initial electoral forays in a section titled “DSAers on the Move.”102 In Congress, Schakowsky has been a leading crusader for health-care reform and, as we saw in Chapter One, was featured in a famous video clip revealing the radical long-term ambitions of health-care-reform supporters.
In 1982, just after the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was formed out of a merger of Michael Harrington’s DSOC and NAM, DSA began publishing a “discussion bulletin” called Socialist Forum. This was to be a strictly internal periodical where DSAers could freely air ideas, disagreements, and sensitive information. The first issue of Socialist Forum featured “A Socialist’s Guide to Citizen Action,” by John Cameron.103 Cameron, a staffer at IPAC and its national umbrella organization, Citizen Action, wanted to clue his new colleagues in to the socialist backstory of this growing political force. Essentially, Cameron was inviting his fellow socialists to join Citizen Action, while also subtly warning them away from attempts to turn the organization into an openly socialist entity. In other words, without quite using the term, Cameron was letting his colleagues know that Citizen Action was a socialist front group.
Cameron duly notes Citizen Action’s overtly “neo-populist” ideology, but explains as well that “most of its key leaders probably consider themselves socialists.” According to Cameron, many DSAers, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, “are part of Citizen Action—as staff or in other activist roles.” The state-wide affiliates tend to be headed by ex–New Lefters, he adds. Cameron then explains Citizen Action’s pragmatic avoidance of hot-button cultural and foreign policy issues, and notes its recent expansion into the electoral arena. Interestingly, Cameron describes Citizen Action’s economic proposals as a “transitional program,” socialist jargon for a program of gradual transition from capitalism to socialism. In short, Cameron used DSA’s new discussion bulletin to reveal the socialist secret of Citizen Action.
About a year later, in 1983, DSA field director Leo Casey followed up with a still franker report on Citizen Action in Socialist Forum.104 Casey argued that Citizen Action’s electoral turn was pulling it toward an ever more open and across-the-board leftist position, little dif- ferent from that of the DSA itself. Yet Casey also acknowledges Citizen Action’s political reticence:
In my estimation, the bulk of Citizen Action leadership would privately profess a socialist politics well within the DSA spectrum. A few have joined DSA and publicly identified themselves as members; Steve Max [the Midwest Academy’s curriculum director] is the most prominent example of this group. But for the most part, socialist sentiments are not expressed in public.105
Casey goes on to defend this policy of secrecy, noting that Citizen Action personnel have already been attacked for their SDS background, and could hardly afford to have their socialist views made public as well. In a fascinating passage, Casey goes on to explain how carefully Citizen Action’s leadership monitors and controls its degree of public socialism:
As Citizen Action has grown in size and influence, its leadership has grown more confident in assuming more progressive positions and less cautious about the presence of open socialists in its ranks. There were a number of indications at this year’s Midwest Academy retreat—both in the form of public symbols and gestures (which are carefully thought through and chosen by the leadership) and in private conversations with key Citizen Action figures—that the general tenor of the leadership is to seek more cooperation and common work with DSA, and to welcome our participation in their organizations.106
Casey goes on to acknowledge problems with Citizen Action, including “staff domination” and “opaque political processes known only to an inner circle.”107 Nonetheless, Casey admits that DSA’s openly socialist approach to coalition building isn’t working very well, and gently hints that joining Citizen Action as its openly socialist wing may be a solution. In any case, it is abundantly clear from Cameron’s and Casey’s pieces that, although Citizen Action, its IPAC affiliate, and the Midwest Academy had made elaborate efforts to avoid being labeled as socialist front groups, that is exactly what they were.
John Cameron’s piece ends by suggesting that Citizen Action’s stealth and DSA’s openly socialist approach represent two competing strategies for promoting “progressive social change in America.”108 The verdict on which strategy will work, says Cameron, will take time to emerge. If DSA’s openly socialist strategy had succeeded we would know about it, of course. Yet what if Citizen Action’s stealthy strategy for socialist-inspired change had succeeded instead? How would we know it? There would be a popular alliance between grassroots groups and left-leaning labor unions, on the one hand, and successful “progressive” politicians affiliated with that movement, on the other. In this strategy, socialism per se would be active only behind the scenes of an overtly populist-communitarian progressive coalition.
This latter strategy was authored, above all, by Harry Boyte. Obama first encountered it in New York, where he likely read Boyte’s books and watched Boyte debate his stealthy organizing strategy at the 1985 Socialist Scholars Conference. Although Boyte and his Midwest Academy allies, Heather Booth and Steve Max, succeeded in breaking NAM’s revolutionary impatience—and in merging NAM with Harrington’s more pragmatic DSOC—Boyte and his “communitarian caucus” ultimately failed to persuade the newly formed Democratic Socialists of America to abandon socialist language and adopt a full-on stealth strategy. Outside of DSA, however, Boyte and the Midwest Academy faction succeeded. Their stealthy plan to launch a populist-communitarian movement quietly directed from the background by socialists became the keystone of modern community organizing. Boyte, Booth, and Max had settled on this plan as far back as their original SDS manifesto in 1969.
Boyte, Booth, and Max surveyed their new movement in a co- authored 1986 book, Citizen Action and the New American Populism.109 The book is filled with socialist ideas framed in populist-communitarian language:
Populism revives the central view of economics articulated by our nation’s founders … that all forms of economic enterprise and private property … are charges over which we are stewards for the broader community.110
They follow up these principles with proposals for worker representatives holding half the seats on corporate boards, legal restrictions on the movement of businesses, and the rest of the socialist program of the era.111 Although co-authors Boyte, Booth, and Max were key figures in the development of modern American socialism, the subject of socialism never openly comes up in their book. As it was published by some of Chicago’s most prominent community organizers in the midst of Obama’s own Chicago organizing stint—during a time when Obama reportedly was “obsessively” reading material about his new profession—it’s reasonable to assume that the future president read this book.112 Given the extent of his contact with the Midwest Academy, it’s also reasonable to assume that Obama understood perfectly well that behind the “new populism” lay socialism.
SECTION FOUR
In 2008, Harry Boyte was an advisor to the Obama presidential campaign.113 In the summer of that year, Boyte completed a policy paper on “civil engagement” with co-author Carmen Sirianni, of Brandeis University. In other words, Boyte was helping to coordinate Obama’s efforts to link his political success to grassroots movement building—very much a continuation of the Midwest Academy’s political strategy. The text of the 2008 Boyte-Sirianni policy paper was personally approved by Barack Obama.114 Sirianni, by the way, spoke at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences from 1983 through 1985, when Obama was in New York. At the Cooper Union Conference, for example, Sirianni addressed the panel “After the Revolution: Marxism and Utopianism,” and was listed in the program as the author of Workers Councils and Socialist Democracy. Who knows whether Obama may have run into Sirianni at those early conferences, but she was clearly a part of Harry Boyte’s socialist world. At any rate, Barack Obama’s connection to Harry Boyte apparently runs from the days of the Socialist Scholars Conferences right up through the 2008 presidential campaign.
Chicago DSAer John Cameron, author of “A Socialist’s Guide to Citizen Action,” was also at the center of the alliance between Chicago’s socialists and Mayor Harold Washington. In Chapter Two, I recounted the early relationship between Harold Washington and NAM, followed by the alliance between Washington and DSA during the mayoral campaign of 1983. Much of the material I drew on for that account was authored by John Cameron in various socialist publications. So it’s of interest that in Sasha Abramsky’s 2009 book, Inside Obama’s Brain, Cameron is identified as both a “longtime staffer for Citizen Action” and an Obama colleague and fan.
According to Abramsky, Cameron first encountered Obama at a meeting in Obama’s Illinois State Senate office.115 It would appear, then, that during his Illinois State Senate years, Obama was working closely with Citizen Action by way of this prominent Chicago socialist. This is particularly important because we have no office records from Obama’s State Senate years. During the 2008 campaign, the group Judicial Watch claimed that Obama had handled his State Senate records in such a way as to avoid leaving a “paper trail.”116 If Obama was hiding something, it was probably his close and continuing relationship with the radical community organizations he’d worked with for years prior to his political career. In any case, Obama’s ties to Cameron and Citizen Action indicate ongoing links to the Midwest Academy network. From his position on the board of the Woods Fund, between 1993 and 2002, Obama also channeled money to the Midwest Academy for years. In cannot be said, therefore, that Obama’s radical organizing background and socialist network were irrelevant to his later political career.
Sources ranging from Obama-friendly author Sasha Abramsky, to the indefatigable libertarian blogger Trevor Loudon, to In These Times journalist David Moberg confirm the close friendship and political alliance between longtime IPAC/Citizen Action legislative director William McNary and Obama.117 Loudon has also unearthed ties between McNary and Chicago’s Democratic Socialists of America. Taken in isolation, Obama’s links to radical activists like Cameron and McNary may seem insignificant. This perhaps is part of the reason why the investigations of Loudon and other bloggers into Obama’s radical network have failed to gain wide notice. (It’s also fair to say that some of these blogger-identified radical connections are either unconvincing or insignificant.) Situated in the broadest ideological, political, personal, and historical context, however, the dense network of ties between Obama and Chicago’s radical left becomes more disturbing, not less.
Although Obama’s many links to the Midwest Academy’s network certainly grew exponentially when he moved to Chicago, the Academy’s reach likely extended to Obama’s New York years as well. We’ve seen evidence that Obama was studying Harry Boyte’s writings during his NYPIRG organizing days. NYPIRG itself was part of the Midwest Academy network. Steve Max’s letters to Heather Booth from New York include references to contacts with NYPIRG,118 and NYPIRG leader Don Ross was an invited observer at the founding conference of Citizen Action.119
The “Social Movements” panel at the 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference may well have introduced Obama to his new profession of community organizing. That panel was organized by Peter Dreier, whose conference talk, I argued in Chapter Two, was probably worked up in an article Dreier published in the July 23, 1983, issue of The Nation. That article centers on Citizen Action’s strategy of harnessing grassroots movements to the campaigns of politicians plucked from the ranks of community organizers. Dreier himself helped to train Midwest Academy students at a session in late 1978 or early 1979 and corresponded with Heather Booth at the time about ways to link community organizing and politics.120 It’s also of no small interest that Peter Dreier was an advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.121 John Atlas, Dreier’s co-author on the Nation article, attended the Midwest Academy’s summer 1983 retreat and caucused afterward with John Cameron, Leo Casey, and a large group of other DSAers present at the event.122 These DSAers argued out the implications of the growing Citizen Action network for socialist strategy. So Obama’s conversion to community organizing at the April 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference was inspired, in a sense, by the Midwest Academy’s increasingly successful “neo-populist” (and covertly socialist) strategy. In the mid-eighties, the alliance between socialism and community organizing was the talk of the socialist world, and the Midwest Academy’s new strategy was at the center of the excitement. This was the apparently intoxicating world that Obama entered at the Cooper Union in 1983.
As the Citizen Action network increasingly moved into electoral organizing, the leaders of the Midwest Academy realized that their strict focus on economic issues would be difficult to maintain. Supporting congressional candidates would inevitably raise issues of foreign and defense policy. So Citizen Action decided to experiment with organizing on these issues as well. The move into international issues was fraught with danger, not only of splitting the coalition, but also of publicly exposing Citizen Action’s underlying socialism. Perhaps for these reasons, Citizen Action’s foreign policy efforts never gained significant traction. Nonetheless, for at least a couple of years, from about 1984 through 1985, Citizen Action had an active foreign policy wing.
Citizen Action’s International Affairs Committee was headed by two people who would go on to play important roles in Barack Obama’s career: Ken Rolling and Alice Palmer. Rolling would someday supply funding for Obama’s organizing ventures, would work with him on Chicago school reform, would serve with him at the Woods Fund, and in the latter nineties would run the Chicago Annenberg Challenge under the leadership of Obama and Bill Ayers. Alice Palmer would go on from her work with Citizen Action to become an Illinois state senator representing Hyde Park and other sections of South Chicago. Eventually Palmer would select Obama as her political successor. Obama may well have had a direct connection to Palmer through the Midwest Academy. In any case, before choosing Obama as her political successor, Palmer would surely have received extended reports on his abilities and political leanings from her one-time partner Ken Rolling, and from her other Midwest Academy colleagues as well.
In 1984 and 1985, Rolling headed up the Citizen Action International Affairs Committee’s efforts on Central America, while Palmer concentrated on South Africa. Rolling’s Central America work for Citizen Action provides plenty of evidence for his socialist sympathies. Rolling, for example, represented Citizen Action and the Midwest Academy at a Chicago celebration of the sixth anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution. He also visited Nicaragua in August of 1984 with other Citizen Action leaders and staffers.123 On that trip, Rolling and his group met with CDS, the Sandinista Defense Committee, “the largest community based organization in Nicaragua.”124 Rolling and the other Citizen Action delegates clearly saw these local Sandinista regime defense committees as the counterparts of their own community organizations in the United States. Literature in the Citizen Action International Affairs Committee files idealizes “neighborhood democracy” under the Sandinistas and acknowledges the Marxist character of the regime.125 On meeting with Nicaragua’s own neighborhood organizers, Rolling’s delegation immediately moved to set up an exchange. Rolling then personally hosted Milagros Leyton, director of the Secretariat for International Relations for the Sandinista Defense Committee, during Leyton’s visit to the summer 1985 Midwest Academy retreat. Leyton slept at Rolling’s home, and along with participating in the retreat, visited IPAC’s offices to meet and brief the staff.126
There is an excellent chance that Obama himself attended this 1985 Midwest Academy retreat. The Academy’s summer retreats were the Chicago counterpart of the New York Socialist Scholars Conferences, and there is substantial overlap between the panelists at both conclaves. In fact, too many characters mentioned elsewhere in this book spoke at the 1985 Midwest Academy retreat to list. Suffice it to say that attendance at this or future Midwest Academy retreats would have quickly introduced Obama to the full cast of characters of Chicago’s socialist organizing world. Obama arrived in Chicago in June of 1985, just a month or two before the August 2–4 Academy retreat, which he surely would have wanted to attend.
Several panelists at the Midwest Academy’s 1985 retreat deserve mention. Alice Palmer moderated a South Africa panel, a topic of longstanding interest to Obama, and could have struck up an immediate relationship with her future successor here. Also, Obama’s key organizing mentors, Greg Galluzzo and his wife Mary Gonzales, headlined a panel on “Organizing Through Existing Institutions.” With two of his new mentors lecturing on the topic of his own work, attendance at this session was probably obligatory for Obama. Harry Boyte spoke at this conference on “What It Means to be a Democratic Populist.” Lane Evans addressed this and subsequent Academy retreats as well. The 1986 retreat featured a presentation by Jan Schakowsky and a joint Boyte-Booth-Max press conference on their just-published book, Citizen Action and the New Populism. Again, this only scratches the surface of the links between the networks outlined in this book and the list of presenters at the Midwest Academy’s annual summer retreats.127
By the mid-eighties, Midwest Academy retreats and related conferences began to have an impact on the Democratic Party. National news accounts started portraying the Midwest Academy/Citizen Action network as the “progressive” rival of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.128 Harry Boyte’s populist-communitarian ideas got some play in the press, and by the 1987 Midwest Academy retreat, all six official or prospective Democratic presidential candidates addressed the gathering.129 The Midwest Academy was accumulating real political power. Their stealthy socialist strategy had succeeded where Michael Harrington’s relative openness had failed.
Indirectly, the Midwest Academy was responsible for funding Obama’s Chicago organizing, which began in June of 1985. Key support for Obama’s early work came in part from the Campaign for Human Development (CHD), probably the largest funding source for community organizing in the United States. Other early funding for Obama’s organizing flowed from Chicago’s Woods Charitable Fund, the left-leaning foundation on whose board Obama and Bill Ayers later served. In both cases, the Midwest Academy’s Ken Rolling likely had a major role in dispensing this money.
Before taking on a leading administrative role at the Midwest Academy and its related ventures, Rolling earned a master’s degree in theology from a pastoral seminary, and maintained close ties to the Catholic left.130 In the late sixties, the Campaign for Human Development (nowadays renamed the Catholic Campaign for Human Development), grew out of Saul Alinsky’s alliance with radical elements in the Catholic Church. Rolling served on CHD’s National Committee, which advised on grant allocations, and Rolling would likely have had particular sway over grants to Chicago applicants. Rolling appears to have left CHD’s National Committee sometime after 1985, probably to avoid any conflicts with his new administrative role at Chicago’s Woods Fund. Rolling did consulting for Woods in 1985, helping to expand the foundation’s support for community organizing to roughly double its earlier levels. By 1986, Rolling had joined Woods as program director and went on to a long career at that foundation—and a long partnership with Barack Obama. So by moving from CHD’s National Committee to Woods in 1985–86, Rolling likely had a role in authorizing both of Obama’s major early sources of funding.
While Rolling served on CHD’s National Committee, he was also a top administrator for the Midwest Academy. And although Rolling formally left the Midwest Academy when he moved from part-time consulting for Woods to full-time employment, he likely remained a de facto force for the Midwest Academy’s interests while working at Woods. Heather Booth certainly saw Rolling’s move to the Woods Fund in this light, Academy files show.131 Rolling is a good example of how the Midwest Academy has long supplied the infrastructure, so to speak, for much of American community organizing. When radical Catholics or left-leaning foundation leaders want to know which community organizers to support, they turn to the Midwest Academy for advice. As we saw, the Carter administration did the same thing when it wanted to know who to put in charge of the VISTA program. The Academy was the hidden hand guiding a great deal of financial support for community organizing in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and Ken Rolling was point man for the Midwest Academy’s efforts in this regard. Rolling was a big supporter of ex–Jesuit priest Greg Galluzzo, Obama’s mentor and co-founder of both Chicago UNO and the Gamaliel Foundation. Initially, Rolling probably supported Obama as a Galluzzo protégé, although Rolling and Obama soon developed an independent relationship.
The Campaign for Human Development has long drawn intense criticism from traditional Catholics and conservatives.132 CHD receives its many millions of funding dollars from a special church collection, usually held on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Critics argue that parishioners have no idea that money they believe is going to traditional charitable activities is in fact supporting the radical politics and controversial tactics of groups like ACORN. On top of that, CHD-funded groups have sometimes supported practices that contradict Catholic teaching, like abortion or condom distribution. Critics also cite CHD for its scarcely disguised attacks on the free market and de facto involvement in partisan politics. Some say that CHD is socialist in all but name. Because the Midwest Academy worked hand in glove with CHD, its files contain an abundance of material validating these concerns. I’ll restrict myself to a quick look at CHD’s ideology, since Obama’s CHD ties yield yet more evidence of covert socialism in his organizing network.
Reading CHD documents of the mid-eighties is like playing charades. The secret word is “socialism,” and CHD seems to be trying everything from stomping the ground, jumping up and down, and turning itself into a pretzel to convey what it sees as the answer to our nation’s troubles, without actually saying “socialism.” The basic assumption behind CHD, we are told, is that there are “serious structural flaws in the [capitalist] system,” which suggest the need for “structural reform.”133 The answer is a new system of “social rights” in which “the freedom of the dominated takes priority over the liberty of the powerful.”134 Poverty cannot be transcended through middle-class success, because poverty itself is created by America’s “economic system and political structures.” The answer is to “go beyond the traditionally accepted claims of the free enterprise system.” So what exactly is wrong with America’s economic system? It “lacks fundamental planning for the good of all.”135 Or consider this tidbit from a speech to supporters by eighties CHD head (and former ACORN member) Reverend Marvin Mottet: “While some tout the merits of our system under the banner, ‘democratic capitalism,’ a more appropriate description might be ‘democracy for capitalists.’”136
As we’ve seen, the files of the Midwest Academy overflow with undisguised socialism—meant for organizer eyes only. CHD’s variation on this strategy was to come as close as possible to openly touting socialism, without ever actually uttering the forbidden word. This was partly to forestall criticism, but also because classic Catholic teaching supports the right to own private property. So explicit endorsement of socialism was not permitted. The CHD documents acknowledge this, yet also admit to actively promoting the long-term “socialization of property ownership.”137 In effect, then, CHD adopts the incremental strategy of modern democratic socialists: Work slowly from within the system, laying long-term foundations for the transition from capitalism to socialism. Subtleties and prevarications notwithstanding, once you dip into Midwest Academy files, the ideology that pervaded the upper echelons of the community organizing world—and that governed the funding of Obama’s early work—is easy enough to identify. It’s called socialism.
Evidence strongly suggests that Obama himself trained at the Midwest Academy. While Heather Booth retained ultimate control of the Academy for many years, she ceded command of day-to-day operations in 1977.138 Jackie Kendall served as Midwest Academy director during Obama’s early organizing years, and first met Obama shortly after his arrival in Chicago. Deeply impressed, Kendall remembers telling her husband:
I just met somebody we’re going to say we knew him when. He just had some quality about him, something special. I can count the number of times I’ve said that on one hand. It was just a presence and self-assurance about him at such a young age.139
Where did Kendall meet Obama and interact with him long enough to make such an assessment? It could have been at the 1985 Midwest Academy retreat, just after Obama’s arrival in Chicago, but Kendall might also have encountered Obama at a Midwest Academy training session, which she and Steve Max jointly ran in those days.140
According to Sasha Abramsky’s book Inside Obama’s Brain, in the mid-1980s, Obama “went through a series of ‘organizing schools’ in Chicago,” at the Gamaliel Foundation and other locales.141 Other than Gamaliel, there were only two organizing schools in Chicago at the time, and the Midwest Academy was one of them. A “Midwest Academy Report to the Board” of July 1987 includes the following note: “In addition we worked with a new training institute in Chicago (Gamaliel Foundation) to help develop a training program for Church based organizations.”142
In 1987, there was little to the Gamaliel Foundation beyond UNO of Chicago, Obama’s Developing Communities Project, and the groups run by Obama’s mentors Jerry Kellman and Mike Kruglik. As the head of one of Gamaliel’s four groups, it seems very likely that Obama would have worked directly with the Midwest Academy to design the Gamaliel Foundation’s new training program. This is all the more likely since, in late 1987 or early 1988, after Obama handed daily control of the Developing Communities Project to a successor, he spent time training Gamaliel organizers.143 In other words, Obama himself was probably helping to run the organizer training program designed for Gamaliel by the Midwest Academy, and so would likely have worked closely with the Academy to draw that program up. Moreover, in an informal yet important sense, both Barack and Michelle Obama ultimately became officials, of sorts, for the Midwest Academy. To understand how that happened, let’s return for a moment to one of Obama’s early organizing mentors—and the man who recommended Obama for law school—John McKnight.
Midwest Academy files contain a couple of letters exchanged between McKnight and Heather Booth in 1978–79.144 McKnight, a professor of urban affairs at Northwestern University, had invited Heather Booth to address one of his classes, and it’s clear from their exchange that Booth and McKnight saw this classroom appearance as a venture in organizer recruitment. McKnight thanks Booth, calls her presentation “superb bait for the cause,” and quotes a student praising Booth’s “evangelical” tone. “It’s clear that we’ll recruit a few organizers from the quarter,” says McKnight. Booth writes back asking McKnight to refer students to one of her workshops and explains that she has student intern positions available as well. The socialist flavor of the classroom exchange is clear, since Booth appends to her letter a reply to a student request for a definition of the word “cadre.” (“Cadre” is socialist jargon for the inner leaders of a revolutionary movement.) Beyond revealing links between the Midwest Academy and one of Obama’s mentors, this exchange helps explain the role Barack and Michelle Obama would eventually play in recruiting students to the Midwest Academy’s training ventures.
In 1992, shortly after Barack Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School, he joined the founding advisory board of a group called Public Allies. The archived files of the Midwest Academy do not extend to this date, unfortunately, but material on Public Allies is available from other sources. Documents outlining the early structure and purpose of Public Allies can be found in the archives of ACORN, housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Also, a limited number of early newsletters from the Chicago branch of Public Allies are preserved at the Chicago Historical Society. These and other records indicate that the Chicago chapter of Public Allies was an extension, of sorts, of the Midwest Academy. The core purpose of the Chicago Public Allies was to draw young people into community organizing, and clearly the Midwest Academy would have been able to use this organization as a recruiting mechanism.
Public Allies was founded by Vanessa Kirsch, a Democratic Party activist and leader of a network of “young progressive women.”145 Kirsch designed Public Allies to connect young people to left-leaning community organizations, non-profits, and government agencies. A stress on “diversity and multiculturalism” was common to the organization, but the three local pilot programs would each have a unique focus. The Washington branch would concentrate on placements in government, for example, while the Chicago program would focus on drawing young people into community organizing.146 Heather Booth, then in Washington, D.C., was on the founding board of Public Allies. The only two board members then resident in Chicago were Midwest Academy director Jackie Kendall and Barack Obama, identified in 1992 as a “writer” (presumably because he was working on Dreams from My Father).147
In short, The Chicago branch of Public Allies was a sort of extension of the Midwest Academy. In fact, an early notice in a periodical for Chicago organizers instructs interested parties to write Public Allies care of the Midwest Academy.148
While we lack detailed Midwest Academy records from this period, a Chicago community organizer named Mark S. Allen provides some information of interest. After working with Obama during the future president’s initial Chicago organizing stint, Allen says:
I went away to college and got my first paid community organizer job with a group called CITIZEN ACTION and Midwest Academy and worked directly under the leadership of women named Heather Booth and Jackie Kendall. It was through the Midwest Academy that I would later get more insight into the leadership of Michelle Obama in that the Academy would be a partner in working with Michelle Obama and the group PUBLIC ALLIES in training young people for public service.149
How exactly did Public Allies and the Midwest Academy work together?
Public Allies Chicago had two core programs, each of which appear to have been linked to the Midwest Academy. Every year, Public Allies would recruit thirty or so young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty and place them in ten-month apprenticeships at various community organizations.150 Some of these groups might appear relatively apolitical (eg., the Girl Scouts), while others fit the model of Alinskyite community organizations.151 The apprentices, called “Allies,” would receive “training in a variety of workshops relating to social change and community development.” They would also attend lectures and meet an extensive network of community leaders working for “social change.”152 These apprentices were also broken up into teams and assigned to work and train with various members of the Public Allies Advisory Board.153 In a second program, Public Allies would recruit up to one hundred additional young adults to be honored as one of “Tomorrow’s Leaders Today.”154 As part of the selection process for this award, prospective honorees participated in “training workshops on social issues” and were connected to a “network of resources.”155
In short, Public Allies functioned as a training and recruitment funnel into the Midwest Academy network. Young activists would cycle through the programs, receive Midwest Academy training, and no doubt would be privately assessed by Academy leaders in the process. A few of the most promising recruits would surely have been approached after initial training to involve themselves more deeply in the Midwest Academy’s ventures.
Barack Obama was a member of the original Public Allies national board of directors.156 After persuading the board (really, Heather Booth and Jackie Kendall of the Midwest Academy) to hire Michelle to head the Chicago office, Obama stepped aside to avoid a conflict of interest.157 Yet Barack did eventually become a member of the Public Allies Chicago Advisory Board, along with current presidential aide Valerie Jarrett and several other figures of interest. Midwest Academy director Jackie Kendall was on the Chicago Public Allies Advisory Board, along with John “Jody” Kretzmann and Jacky Grimshaw.158
Jackie Kendall, we’ve seen, likely helped to train Obama when he first moved to Chicago. Beginning in 1982, Kendall took charge of the Midwest Academy’s day-to-day operations.159 In recognition of her work at the Midwest Academy, in 1999 Kendall received the Debs-Thomas-Harrington award, the annual honor conferred by the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.160 Kendall not only worked closely with Barack and Michelle during their time at Public Allies, but was part of the team that developed the 2007 training program at “Camp Obama” for volunteers going into Iowa.161 Obama’s win in the 2008 Iowa Caucuses, of course, was the critical turning point in his fledgling presidential campaign.
In the early nineties, John Kretzmann was project director of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University. There Kretzmann was a close colleague of, and frequent co-author with, John McKnight, another key Obama mentor and the man who recommended Obama for law school. Obama closely studied the jointly authored work of Kretzmann and McKnight. The vision of community organizing sketched out by these two authors was effectively a guidebook to the socialist organizing strategy of the day. McKnight, an admirer of some of the Swedish welfare state’s most radical plans, also worked closely with prominent socialist Quentin Young on health-care policy. Kretzmann and McKnight formed a special institute for community organizing at Northwestern, which was closely linked to Public Allies. In fact, Michelle Obama was an original faculty member of Kretzmann-McKnight’s community organizing institute.162 Obviously, then, McKnight and Booth found a way to regularize the recruiting relationship they tentatively began back in 1978, when Heather Booth enthusiastically addressed McKnight’s class—introducing them to the socialist term “cadre” in the process.
Yet another player of note here is Jacky (sometimes Jackie) Grimshaw. Grimshaw, a longtime top political aide to Mayor Harold Washington, was also on the Public Allies Advisory Board, and sits today on the Midwest Academy board of directors as well.163 Grimshaw is a longtime colleague of Heather Booth. Grimshaw is also the Obamas’ next-door neighbor in Chicago, and it’s obvious from Sasha Abramsky’s book Inside Obama’s Brain that the Grimshaw and Obama families are close.164 Along with Michelle, Barack was very active in Public Allies, lecturing recruits and helping to train them in community organizing.165 In a sense, through Public Allies, Barack Obama himself became a Midwest Academy trainer. Since the Public Allies Advisory Board was heavily involved in the actual training, both Obamas would have worked closely with Grimshaw, as well as Kendall and Kretzmann, in the early nineties.
In 1987, Grimshaw and Heather Booth were jointly honored with the Debs-Thomas award by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America. The Midwest Academy files contain Heather Booth’s speech from that award ceremony, from which it is clear that Booth worked directly under Grimshaw on Harold Washington’s 1987 re-election campaign—another example of the electoral alliance between Chicago’s socialists and the Harold Washington administration.166 Grimshaw and Heather Booth also participated in public speaking events under the sponsorship of Chicago DSA.167 Given the fact that Grimshaw currently sits with Heather and Paul Booth and Jackie Kendall on the Midwest Academy board of directors, Grimshaw’s ties to Booth and the Academy have clearly only deepened with time. We also now know that it was Grimshaw, along with other Chicago community organizers (probably including Booth), whose recommendation secured Barack Obama’s post at the head of Illinois Project Vote in 1992.168 In sum, both Barack and Michelle Obama have close and longstanding ties to a thoroughly socialist network of community organizers, politicians, and political activists centered on the Midwest Academy.
The most interesting connection of all between the Midwest Academy and the Obama administration may run through Robert Creamer, a member of the Academy’s founding board and one-time head of the Illinois Public Action Council (IPAC), the oldest and most important group in the Academy’s Citizen Action network. As we’ve seen, IPAC was also the very model of a socialist-controlled community organizing front group. To this point, I’ve used the name “Bob” Creamer, taking my lead from the many familiar references in the Midwest Academy Records. Now, however, Robert Creamer offers a running commentary on the Obama administration at a popular liberal blogsite, the Huffington Post. Creamer is also a powerful political consultant, with a list of clients that includes ACORN, the SEIU, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.169 He has, as well, served a prison term after pleading guilty to tax evasion and bank fraud.170
The Creamer-Obama link has already been highlighted by some of the Obama administration’s most vociferous critics.171 It’s been noted that this Democratic strategist with a criminal record was an organizing instructor at Camp Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. The book Creamer wrote while in prison, Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win, is often credited with shaping the administration’s strategy on health-care reform. Creamer was an important early advocate of what we now call the healthcare “public option,” clearly an idea along the lines of C/LEC’s public energy corporation. As an influential health-care reform strategist in Congress, Creamer’s wife, Representative Jan Schakowsky, has certainly had plenty of opportunities to carry his ideas to the highest political levels. It’s also of interest that Creamer’s book carries endorsements from Obama mentor and UNO of Chicago co-founder Greg Galluzzo, and from SEIU head and frequent White House visitor Andrew Stern.172
Most intriguing of all, Creamer seems to have ties to top Obama advisor David Axelrod. Axelrod contributed a blurb to Creamer’s 2007 book, endorsing it as a “blueprint for future victories.”173 Axelrod was also one of many left-leaning politicos who submitted friendly letters to the court when Creamer came up for sentencing in 2006.174 At his Huffington Post blog, Creamer has expressed strong confidence in Axelrod’s commitment to “fundamental progressive change.”175 It would at least appear that one of the most powerful leaders of the Midwest Academy and its associated network has considerable connections to, and influence on, the course of the Obama administration.
While Creamer’s critics have pointed to his criminal record, his Alinskyite radicalism, and his apparent influence on some of the key figures formulating the administration’s health-care reform strategy, the earlier history linking both Creamer and Obama to the Midwest Academy and its stealthily socialist organizing empire is not well understood.
Is it conceivable that Obama could have been ignorant of the socialist politics shared by his many colleagues from the Midwest Academy network? No, it is not. Obama had to know that his mentors and colleagues were socialists. We know from an Occidental College acquaintance that Obama was a hard-core Marxist-Leninist in 1980. By 1983 he had entered the world of democratic socialism and, through it, the profession of community organizing. Given Obama’s experience at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences, and his voracious reading on “revolutionary” topics in the mid-eighties, he would have recognized the signs of socialism all around him.
At the 1987 Midwest Academy retreat, which Obama could easily have attended, Jackie Kendall introduced Heather Booth to the crowd by mentioning the Debs-Thomas award Booth had just received.176 (The award was named after the American Socialist Party leaders, Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas.) Obama would certainly have understood the socialist reference. This is simply one example of what would have been many such references over the years. Barack Obama almost surely had Midwest Academy training, which we know touched frequently on socialist topics. In fact, in conjunction with Public Allies, Obama himself effectively became a Midwest Academy trainer.
Could the Midwest Academy and its circle have accepted and promoted Barack Obama to so high a level if they had not been confident of his socialist leanings? That seems next to impossible. We’ve seen how sensitive the Academy was about public exposure of its socialism. Recall that even a prominent socialist observer like Leo Casey referred to the Academy’s “opaque political processes known only to an inner circle.” Barack and Michelle Obama were part of that inner circle. They had to be trusted to get inside. Midwest Academy staffers entertain each other by making up songs about Marxist theory. Obviously, anyone admitted to this charmed circle would have to be reliable. Choosing Obama for the original Public Allies board of directors was an act of trust. So was accepting Barack’s recommendation of Michelle to direct the Chicago chapter of Public Allies. Sitting together on a small board and working closely together in the Public Allies organizer training program would have required political compatibility.
The socialist sympathies of State Senator Alice Palmer are similarly not in doubt.177 Why did she choose Obama as her political successor in 1995? Palmer was a Midwest Academy veteran and could easily have tapped her ex-colleagues Ken Rolling, Heather Booth, and Jackie Kendall for an assessment of Obama’s politics, based on years of joint work. Would Palmer and her network have accepted Obama as her successor if they had not been confident of his socialist leanings? Palmer and her Midwest Academy circle were savvy and tactically ruthless socialist ideologues. It’s tough to imagine them surrendering Hyde Park’s State Senate seat to someone who was not “one of them.” We know that Obama had to win Palmer’s approval in a series of meetings in the late spring of 1995, where he would have presented to her his progressive bona fides.178 Surely Obama himself would have pointed Palmer to her old colleague Ken Rolling and the rest of the Midwest Academy network to vouch for him.
We know that Palmer introduced Obama as her successor at a get-together at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers was a self-confessed “small c communist” who was even then managing an education foundation in partnership with Obama. Dohrn was a life-long socialist. Palmer was a socialist veteran of the Midwest Academy, and may well have known Obama for years through the Academy retreats and her colleagues there. At a minimum, Palmer’s socialist colleagues would have provided a full history of Obama. Prominent DSA leader Quentin Young was also present that day.179 Young would have had access to his close colleague John McKnight’s assessment of Obama, based on years of cooperation.
In sum, Obama was anointed Alice Palmer’s political successor by a roomful of socialists, each of whom had access to an enormous amount of information about his deepest political convictions. The obvious implication of all this is that Obama was chosen to succeed Alice Palmer in the Illinois State Senate because, like Palmer and her close political circle, Obama was a socialist.
The story of the Midwest Academy reveals the hidden truth about Barack Obama’s politics—and more. In a sense, the Academy’s history is a tale of the quiet radicalization of the Democratic Party. Heather Booth went on from the Academy to serve the Democratic Party in various capacities.180 In 1993, after decades of playing defense, the election of Bill Clinton made it possible for Booth to assertively fight for her top priority. Booth joined the Democratic National Committee as the national outreach coordinator of the battle for the Clinton health-care plan.181 Considerable overlap exists between the socialist program of “change” for America and the most sweeping proposals of the Democratic Party. In the eighties and nineties, socialists found a comfortable—and quiet—way to fight for their preferred policy outcomes within the Democratic Party. Barack Obama, evidence strongly suggests, was one of them.