Decking the halls

Is it just my imagination, or are people embracing Christmas decorations a little more this year? My state of New Mexico recently closed the restaurants and most of the stores (again) and has pretty well given up on schools and churches. One of the few things we can do to act like it’s a normal year is decorate for the holidays. That’s how I felt last weekend when I hung a lighted wreath on the front of my house and strung colored lights on a nearby juniper.

I’m also grateful that moving to a smaller house means that decking the halls is no longer the major production it was for many years.

Not all bushes lend themselves to decoration in New Mexico.

When we lived in Oak Park in the 1970s and 80s, our neighborhood of vintage houses didn’t go in for lavish outdoor decorations. I’d drape some lights on the front bushes and inside our enclosed porch. At some point we’d get in the car and drive through wealthier neighborhoods where folks were more conspicuous in their consumption of electricity.

Decorations inside our house were more festive with a mix of inherited and acquired memorabilia. There was an array of ceramic figurines and knickknacks. A battered Christmas creche included a chipped ceramic Holy Family and amputee animals. A pair of wooden reindeer could be arranged in suggestive poses. We had Christmas tablecloths, napkins, placemats, towels, aprons, glassware and an entire set of china. And a really annoying clock that played Christmas carols on the hour.

My late wife liked Christmas candles. She probably got that from her mother, who was unusually Catholic and lit enough holiday candles to reduce her December heating bill. We became expert at removing wax from tablecloths and had a close call one year when a shelf began to smolder, but generally got through Christmas without collateral damage.

We upgraded our outdoor decorations when we moved to a suburban ranch house in LaGrange, where more ambitious decorations went up promptly on Thanksgiving weekend by unwritten law. I festooned about 50 feet of bushes with lights and wound more lights around the wrought-iron porch railings. Every year we bought a four-foot natural wreath from a handicapped Boy Scout who sold Christmas foliage to the entire neighborhood (because nobody can say no to an enterprising Boy Scout in a wheelchair).

Here in New Mexico, people string lights on their houses but the default Christmas decoration is luminarias. These candles in weighted paper bags are everywhere, lining sidewalks and and perching atop garden walls and rooftops. We tried using them in Oak Park a couple of times but the paper bags did not stand up to Chicago sleet storms. In Albuquerque I got up on a ladder every year to string lights on my faux-Spanish front portal, draped lights over bushes, mounted lighted wreaths and set out a string of electric-and-plastic luminarias.

Last Christmas the kids and I went through years of accumulated holiday paraphernalia — most of which they wisely refused to take off my hands — in preparation for my move. I threw out lots of stuff and donated a number of items to charity. Whoever winds up with the Christmas carol clock has my sympathy.

Outdoor decorations are a little more restrained in the over-55 community where I now live. Many of my neighbors have wreaths and lighted decorations in front of their homes, but I don’t see my fellow seniors climbing ladders to hang lights from the eaves. We do not lack for holiday glam, however, because a team of volunteers draped the community’s security gates with garlands and lined the entrance drive with decorations and luminarias.

All of which feels comfortingly normal. I am looking forward to visiting Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza on Christmas Eve to see the tree and all the luminarias. Even if I have to stay in my car.

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A pandemic Thanksgiving

I’m roasting a turkey breast for Thanksgiving even though I’m not expecting guests. Much as I will miss sharing the holiday with friends and family, I refuse to give up turkey leftovers.

There’s a lot to be thankful for because I’ve been relatively unaffected by the pandemic. I’m retired and have not had to risk going to work or keeping a business from failing. My kids have been able to continue working, I have no grandchildren struggling with school closures, and so far everyone I know has remained healthy.

Just as the pandemic was emerging I embarked on a major lifestyle change: moving from a sprawling home in Albuquerque to a smaller, newly constructed house in an over-55 community half an hour away. Part of my motivation was to expand my circle of friends in a close-knit neighborhood with a wide array of amenities and social activities.

That has not yet happened, of course, because my new community is in semi-quarantine. The neighbors I have met so far are friendly and welcoming, and I hope I will recognize them when the masks come off. I’ve attended a couple of homeowners’ association meetings via Zoom and watched members learn to locate their mute buttons.

Settling into a new house has kept me busy and venturing into the outside world has been generally manageable despite the ever-changing state restrictions and lockdowns. The people I encounter in stores have grown accustomed to social distancing, and I felt safe voting in person.

One positive sign is that people have quickly adopted new hygiene habits that may remain after the pandemic. If people can get accustomed to washing their hands, perhaps there’s hope that we can get them to use turn signals.

One habit I expect to contnue is doing more shopping online. When New Mexico went into renewed lockdown recently I ordered groceries online from Walmart and immediately became addicted. I particularly enjoyed driving up to the pickup area to have my groceries loaded into my car while in-person shoppers lined up halfway around the building. I hope stores and restaurants continue pickup service when the pandemic is over.

I’ve especially missed attending the Santa Fe Opera and New Mexico Philharmonic concerts with friends. Virtual performing arts make up some of the cultural deficit. The Metropolitan Opera streams a different performance every night (for free!) and last weekend I streamed a local chamber music recital. I’ve been getting together with a few friends for socially distanced restaurant dinners.

Things are getting better, despite the panicky news media coverage and arbitrary government edicts, because a vaccine is around the corner. And those annoying campaign commercials are gone until 2022 (unless you live in Georgia). I will miss seeing my kids in person during the holidays but expect to make up for it next year.

In the meantime, I’m looking up recipes for turkey pot pie and green chile turkey stew.

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Pro-union or pro-worker?

It’s been interesting to watch the presidential stump speeches to blue-collar audiences. President Trump is bragging about jobs. Former Vice President Biden is promising to create union jobs. It’s an important distinction because in 2016 about half of private-sector union members broke with their Democrat leadership and voted for Trump. The Dems want those voters back.

Democrats are pro-union and Republicans are mostly anti-union, but neither party has proposed an agenda that’s fully pro-worker. We need one.

Whenever I see the Labor Day mantra of what unions have accomplished — the 40-hour week, child labor laws, etc. — I wonder what unions have done for workers in this century. American unions are an artifact of the mid-20th Century because that’s when most of our labor laws were written.

Unions have been in decline for decades, mostly in the private sector. Only 6% of private-sector employees now belong to a union vs. 34% of government workers. At this point union influence is mostly political rather than economic. Unions are a major source of contributions to the Democratic party, and public employee unions have made big government its own special-interest lobby.

Private-sector unions have lost members for a variety of reasons: migration of manufacturing jobs, a growing service sector and less interest in unions by younger workers. This is in spite of government policies, even in Republican administrations, to prop them up. It takes only 30% of employees to launch a federally supervised union organizing campaign and election. Employers must share employees’ addresses so that union organizers can contact them at home. (Nice family you’ve got there. Sign this petition.)

Some states have right-to-work laws that allow workers to opt out of unions, but many state governments require employees to join the union as a condition of employment. States and cities often subsidize unions by requiring union labor for government construction projects.

Labor law allows employers to oppose union organizing and they do. They can, and should, conduct employee-information campaigns to counter union organizing so long as they do not violate labor laws in the process. Some smart employers have remained non-union by treating employees decently and offering competitive wages and benefits. Union organizing campaigns are successful about half the time, and companies whose employees vote to unionize in a secret-ballot election deserve what they get.

Employees are not necessarily better off in a union. A captive membership gives unions little incentive to be accountable to workers. Some unions operate like third-world countries and a few even have hereditary leaders. Rank-and-file union members have no voice in the union’s affairs or the political contributions supported by their dues. Every year, about a dozen union officials are convicted of stealing money from their members. If employees don’t like their union it’s nearly impossible for them to decertify it, so they’re stuck. 

Company-by-company union bargaining gives employers an incentive to move to right-to-work states or outsource jobs overseas to curb labor costs for competitive advantage, instead of investing in productivity (which drives higher wages). That’s not good for workers, either.

Public employee unions, on the other hand, have too much power because they own the politicians who are supposed to represent taxpayers. Roughly half of U.S. union members now work for the government. The unchecked power of their unions has driven some cities and states into insolvency, and has been a barrier to education and police reform. One solution may be to apply the federal model — in which wages and benefits are set by statute instead of collective bargaining — to state and local government.

So the challenge is to restore the labor movement’s purpose and balance by empowering workers in the private sector and empowering taxpayers in the public sector.

I believe workers, and the economy, will be better off with robust private-sector unions and a balance of power between labor and management. I spent much of my career in employee and labor communications at Illinois Bell and Western Electric. Even though union negotiations sometimes resulted in strikes (I’ve been through half a dozen of them) the outcome usually was a win for both employees and management. The partnership of unions and management enabled the company to attract a highly qualified and intensely loyal workforce.

Democrats are promising to make the AFL-CIO great again by doubling down on government coercion: ending right-to-work laws and secret-ballot union elections. This will result in more captive union members and give employers even more incentive to outsource jobs. Republicans focus on growing the economy by giving employers more flexibility. While this has been successful in creating jobs and reducing unemployment, it has not changed the balance of power between workers and employers.

What would a pro-worker labor policy look like?

Start by giving rank-and-file union members the same power as stockholders in a corporation: the right to elect their national leaders, and to approve leaders’ pay packages and political contributions. Retain right-to-work laws to allow employees to opt out of union membership and incent unions to compete for members.

Require unions to hold a recertification vote every 8-10 years. Most unions have been in place for decades: At some companies no living employee voted for the union. A decertification vote to kick the union out will make employers unhappy, too, because it opens the door for a tougher union to come in and organize.

If unions are forced to be accountable to their members, perhaps they will become organizations workers are willing to join voluntarily — and government coercion won’t be necessary to sustain union membership.

Consider replacing individual-company labor negotiations with sector bargaining for multiple employers and unions in specific industries, a little like the railroad industry operates. This would give government a bigger role (sorry, Libertarians) but would remove the incentive for employers to avoid unionization for competitive advantage. Sector bargaining could balance the power of labor and management and make union-management relations less adversarial.

Give employees a role in corporate governance through employee stock ownership plans and encourage employee-owned businesses. Consider European-style works councils.

Get unions involved in worker training and retraining. Government training programs have been a dismal failure and unions certainly can do a better job. Imagine a government-subsidized union initiative to train inner-city youth for jobs in manufacturing and construction.

Figure out how to safeguard worker rights in the gig economy. Democratic proposals to transform Uber drivers and freelancers into full-time employees and dragoon them into unions would eliminate the flexibility and freedom these workers value, and ultimately could kill the gig economy. However, I once joined a freelance writers’ union (oxymoronic as that sounds) because it offered a group medical plan. There’s an opportunity for unions to offer services and representation that will be of value to gig workers if they get away from the 20th-Century industrial model.

Oh, and nominate somebody like Mike Rowe for Secretary of Labor.

Neither party has advanced proposals like this (sorry, Mike). But some experts are beginning to study the possibilities and float policy ideas. We won’t hear about labor reform in the 2020 campaign, but maybe someday.

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The Apocalypse may be coming but it’s politics as usual in New Mexico

The coming election is the most important in our lifetime, we are told. Both parties are telling us that if the other party wins it will be the Apocalypse. Depending on which cable channel you watch, America will become either Nazi Germany or Venezuela. I am stocking up on toilet paper just to be on the safe side.

I don’t get overexcited about the wrong people getting elected because I spent most of my life in Chicago, where the wrong people got elected consistently. The city council had the highest crime rate in town and governors occasionally went from the executive mansion to the federal pen. I learned early on that getting emotionally attached to politicians is a losing proposition and developed a high tolerance for malfeasance and skulduggery. Voting while holding my nose is the way I approach most elections.

I don’t like either presidential candidate and that’s okay. I’m hiring someone to run the country, not choosing a drinking buddy. The last president I liked was George H.W. Bush, and I didn’t much like him until he took a strong position against broccoli.

As a transplanted Chicagoan, I feel right at home in New Mexico. The Albuquerque Journal’s standard questionnaire for local political candidates asks if they’ve had a criminal conviction. Two recent secretaries of state were indicted, a public regulation commissioner was convicted of assaulting a romantic rival with a rock, and both candidates in one legislative race had drunk-driving convictions.

New Mexico is not a battleground state because we have one and a half political parties. The two Congressional districts in the northern and central parts of the state are heavily Democratic because government is the biggest industry. Republicans have not fully controlled the state government since 1930 and their candidates are dramatically outspent. When I lived in Albuquerque I registered as a Democrat because the only electoral competition for most offices was in the Democratic primary.

Because both parties have purged their moderates in recent years, statewide contests generally offer the dismal choice between an ultra-progressive liberal and a rock-ribbed conservative.

My recent move from Albuquerque to Los Lunas, about 25 miles, put me in the southern Congressional district that’s the closest New Mexico has to a Republican stronghold. (So I registered as a Republican this time.) Southern New Mexico has an actual private economy because people there drill for oil, raise cattle and grow chile peppers. But because New Mexico Republicans spend most of their time fighting with each other, the district currently has a Democratic representative.

This makes it a close race that’s fun to watch. The Democratic incumbent is running as a moderate despite voting with Nancy Pelosi 95% of the time. So her campaign commercials show her shooting guns like a woke Annie Oakley. The lady running against her shoots guns in her campaign commercials, too, because it’s kind of a requirement for Republicans. All of these spaghetti-western campaign commercials suggest an interesting way to settle a contested election in the New Mexico tradition of Billy the Kid.

New Mexico’s tiny population of 2 million gives politics a small-town flavor. When I lived in Albuquerque, I met my state representative at community meetings and got a personal reply whenever I emailed him. I got acquainted with a former secretary of state and learned later that my neighbor served on the grand jury that indicted her. (She was acquitted.)

I exchanged wisecracks with our current governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, when she was running for the county commission a few years ago. I noted that her primary opponent had two Hispanic surnames to her one and asked her if that was a political liability. She replied that she grew up in Santa Fe and wound up marrying an Anglo because all the Hispanic guys she met were her cousins. (That’s not unusual here: One of my neighbors researched his family and identified hundreds of cousins.) It occurred to me that if some New Mexicans have been marrying their cousins for 300 years, that could explain the legislature.

Our Senators and Congressional representatives are active on social media and I enjoy poking fun at them on Facebook. I am accused of being a Russian troll at least once a week.

I voted in person in the primary and found it no more risky than the checkout line at Walmart. Although I have the option of applying for an absentee ballot or voting early, I plan to vote in person on election day. Just in case one of the candidates gets indicted at the last minute.

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The American Street

When angry mobs of protesters stormed the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011, their rallying cry was: “This is what democracy looks like.” That’s ridiculous, I thought. Democracy is delivered at the ballot box, not in the streets.

I was wrong. Angry protests have increased in the last few years, from broken windows following President Trump’s election to the permanent siege of Portland, Oregon. At this point we have to consider violent protest part of the political process. When the Middle East was in turmoil the Arab Street was considered a potent political force. Will the American Street follow the same trajectory?

Mobs are not going away because they are working. Traditional democratic processes are slow, and seeking the consent of the governed may not produce the desired outcome. If you want to remove a statue, for instance, you can circulate petitions or get the city council to pass an ordinance. That would take months and citizens might vote to keep the statue.

Mobs are more efficient. Just bring in a bunch of people to vandalize the statue and the mayor will cave every time. If the vandals claim they’re fighting racism, local officials are likely to take their side and restrain the police. Protesters who are arrested will be quickly released by a compliant prosecutor and a well-funded nonprofit will spring for their bail. This has been a winning formula in city after city. Some cities even are removing statues preemptively to avoid vandalism.

It works at the national level, too. It took years of peaceful civil rights marches to pass civil rights laws in the 1960s, but Black Lives Matter was able to bring members of Congress to their knees in a matter of weeks once cities began burning. (Okay, they didn’t pass a law, but Congress no longer does that sort of thing.) And corporations are giving them money.

It’s not that the government is powerless. American governments have been preserving order ever since George Washington led federal troops to put down the Whisky Rebellion in 1794. Local police and the National Guard have stepped in on innumerable occasions when peaceful demonstrations became riots. Most recently, Seattle police easily cleared out the “autonomous protest zone” once the mayor allowed them to do so.

Local officials have choices. Most have chosen to favor the mobs because politicians find them useful and are afraid of being accused of racism. They have political cover because the angry mobs that opposed President Trump in 2016 were legitimized when the Democrats declared themselves a resistance movement. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa can count on Democrat politicians and news media to dismiss arson and looting and characterize all protests as mostly peaceful.

Republicans are behind the curve here. They can’t use “racism” as a magic word and Tea Party-style peaceful protests don’t cut it. It’s a dilemma because most Republicans balk at destroying property or attacking police officers. Not to mention wearing masks. And lose the guns, guys. Everybody knows you’re not going to use them and they give people an excuse to freak out.

As mobs have become emboldened political support for them is becoming a challenge. We’ve seen TV reporters describe protests as “mostly peaceful” as buildings burn in the background. Video shots of violence the TV networks refuse to air are widely available on the Internet. Politicians claim Antifa does not exist. In a Congressional hearing not one Democrat criticized attempts to burn down a federal courthouse but instead blamed the violence on federal law enforcement. It’s getting harder for the national news media to ignore events like a mob attack on a Ronald McDonald House. We’ve accepted politics as an irony-free zone, but this is dark comedy.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the presidential campaign. Democrats continue to deny that the mobs they have tacitly supported are a problem. There was no mention of rising violence during a national convention in which speakers urged their supporters to keep fighting. Yet they are making an implied promise that once Donald Trump is defeated everything will be calm once more.

How, exactly, will this work? Will a Presidential commitment to end systemic racism (whatever that is) convince Black Lives Matter to shut down its protests, or will BLM continue to press its demands to abolish the police, prisons, immigration enforcement and capitalism? Can anyone believe the activists calling for the overthrow of the entire American system will put down their Molotov cocktails if Joe Biden is elected?

Republicans are going to promise that re-electing President Trump will end the violence, but that will only stiffen the resolve of Democratic politicians to oppose any federal action to restore order. This may be an untenable position because mobs are difficult to control once they’re unleashed. Remember that the French Revolution ended in dictatorship after the Jacobins began sending their own leaders to the guillotine.

Some public officials are discovering that mobs lack political loyalty. Angry protesters are showing up at the homes of mayors who had backed the protests. That wasn’t part of the deal. The mayor of Chicago recently declared that looting is criminal and not part of political protest — in direct opposition to a BLM leader who argued that looting is reparations. Even the mayor of Portland dared to criticize the rioters (if only because they help President Trump score political points).

The good news is that many Americans do not support unimpeded protests as much as their politicians do. Rallies in support of the police are taking place across the country. In Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, local residents drove off a group of outside protesters. Growing public opposition to mob excesses may be why some mayors are discovering their spines, especially when discontented residents and businesses are filing lawsuits and leaving town.

If mob rule is going to be checked, it’s up to ordinary Americans. The riots will stop once mayors and governors decide to take back their streets, enforce the law and put lawbreakers in jail. They will not do this until their constituents convince them that voters, not protesters, will keep them in office. It’s that pesky consent of the governed thing, inefficient as it may be. Let’s hope we still have that.

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Experiment in integration

My hometown of Oak Park, IL., is all in for Black Lives Matter and I’m not at all surprised. Because the nearly all-white suburb where I went to high school became a rarity in America: a racially integrated community.

Oak Park is the first suburb west of Chicago, birthplace of Ernest Hemingway and workplace of Frank Lloyd Wright: an attractive community of around 50,000 with graceful vintage houses and apartment buildings. It became a social experiment in the 1970s when it bucked the trend of resegregation to embrace intentional integration.

Saul Alinsky, the legendary community organizer, defined integration as the time between when the first black moves in and the last white moves out. That’s what was happening in Chicago in the 1960s: Unscrupulous real-estate agents fanned racial fears with blockbusting tactics to buy houses at bargain prices from frightened white families and resell them to blacks on lucrative installment contracts. I saw this happen on the West Side and covered it as a reporter for a community newspaper. Urban experts were predicting that much of Oak Park would be all-black in a few years.

But Oak Park had some things going for it. As a separate municipality it had an honest, nonpartisan village government — unlike Chicago neighborhoods neglected for decades by corrupt politicians. Its public school system was one of the best in the country (which is why my parents moved there in the 1950s). In 1968 the village enacted a fair housing ordinance that committed the community to racial integration.

When Kathy and I bought our first house in Oak Park in 1969 people were a little nervous. The fair housing ordinance had prompted a few people to move. When we moved in some of the neighbors were relieved that we were white.  

The fair housing ordinance quickly evolved into a stated community strategy:  If you want to live in an all-white or all-black neighborhood, you have plenty of choices. Oak Park is going to be a place where people value integration.

How it worked

Making integration happen entailed a dizzying list of initiatives supported by widespread citizen participation. We were immediately immersed in what amounted to a movement to transform the entire community.

  • To counter real estate misconduct the village government banned for-sale signs and prohibited steering white buyers to one neighborhood and blacks to another. An innovative equity insurance program offered to reimburse homeowners if racial change reduced the value of their property.
  • The police force was increased to counter the crime beginning to spill over from Chicago and assure residents that racial change would not diminish public safety. The schools adopted a voluntary integration plan to ensure racial balance in every school.
  • A nonprofit referral service for apartment rentals — half of the village’s housing units — used reverse steering to encourage blacks to move into mostly-white neighborhoods and whites to move to integrated areas. The village stepped up enforcement of housing codes and purchased blighted apartment buildings for renovation and resale. A beautification program gave awards to homeowners who fixed up their houses.
  • A flurry of public works projects included a new village hall, new street lights and cul-de-sacs to reduce traffic on residential streets. The village government organized block parties, community festivals and a farmers’ market. An economic development program attracted new shops and restaurants, converted a downtown street to a pedestrian mall and used Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright architecture to attract tourism.
  • Citizen participation went on steroids because every initiative involved a commission, committee or task force. Hundreds of people were working on village projects and new residents, black and white, were quickly recruited and engaged.
  • Kathy joined a women’s group that developed the equity assurance program and posed as a house-hunter to test realtors’ compliance with the anti-steering law. I served on a planning committee, a street lighting task force and the economic development board. We both were active in a citizens group that pushed to expand the police force.

None of these improvements happened automatically. Every new program was debated, often argued, at village board meetings that routinely ran for hours. Nor were Oak Parkers a bunch of wild-eyed radicals: Most public officials in those days were moderate Republicans. But the village government was stubbornly nonpartisan and the commitment to integration transcended politics.

Living with integration

Within a few years Oak Park became an exciting place to live where good things were happening. In 1972 the experts still were predicting that Oak Park would resegregate, but Kathy and I had enough confidence in what was going on to buy a bigger house. Best investment we ever made.

Even though Oak Park’s black population was only around 10 percent at that point (18 percent today), we got acquainted with African-Americans as neighbors, fellow committee members and participants in informal strategy sessions that quickly became social gatherings. Our kids went to school with black kids and had black teachers. Virtually every neighborhood in the village was integrated: The block-by-block resegregation people had feared never happened.

Shortly after we bought our second house, we got a visit from an unenlightened relative who immediately asked: “How close are the N_____?”  “Three doors away,” I replied. The look on his face was priceless.

Oak Park residents, especially the many who were involved in community activities, quickly developed a comfort level with integration because the African-Americans we encountered were middle-class homeowners who had moved to Oak Park for the schools, just as we did. The community’s commitment to integration made it a magnet for like-minded people: university professors, community activists who had been displaced from resegregated city neighborhoods and ordinary folks, black and white, who thought integration was a good idea.

Oak Park also attracted racially mixed couples and white families who had adopted black children. In later years the commitment to racial integration extended to LBGTQ tolerance and we saw an influx of gay couples, some of whom started businesses.

By the end of the decade integration in Oak Park was considered a success even though Chicago’s crime-ridden ghetto was literally across the street. The real estate market figured out that the village was not going to resegregate and property values increased. The equity assurance program was never used because everybody who sold a house made money. As did we, when we left Oak Park in 1992 for a suburban ranch house that accommodated Kathy’s disabilities.

Aftermath

I continue to follow Oak Park events and the community still is a work in progress. People appear to be as involved as ever and arguing continues to be the most popular pastime. There are some challenges we had not anticipated in the 1970s.

Oak Park’s integration started as a middle-class proposition. Black residents were middle-class for the most part — nobody moved there from the housing projects — and economic differences were not part of the equation. In those days the threat of resegregation made Oak Park houses a bargain. Today’s prices are much higher and so are property taxes. There may be a wider class diference today between homeowners and apartment renters and more concern for economic diversity.

At the same time Oak Park, like other close-in suburbs, is urbanizing. The quiet downtown shopping district has been transformed with high-rise buildings and heavy traffic. Many apartments have been converted to condos.

The high school, as shown in a  recent documentary series, is wrestling with differences in academic achievement between black and white kids. They’re working on it — really hard — but there’s no easy solutiion.

Today’s residents and community leaders appear to be as committed to integration as ever but, inevitably, view it from a different perspective. Oak Park’s generation of integration pioneers saw Chicago resegregate and many had experienced it first-hand. Their attitudes toward civil rights had been shaped in the 1960s, and they took decisive action as a matter of community survival. Today’s leaders inherited a successful community and may be tempted to consider integration a done deal.

Oak Park is a more political place than it was 50 years ago, like the rest of the country. Moderate Republican and Democrat public officials have been supplanted by ardent progressives. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass pokes fun at what he calls the People’s Republic of Oak Park.

Today’s hyper-racialized culture did not exist in the 1970s. For all the arguing that accompanied Oak Park’s transition to integration, people rarely accused each other of racism. Perhaps we assumed — naively, in retrospect — that the act of living in Oak Park was a commitment to racial justice and that everyone was trying their best not to be racist. We also had seen actual racists attacking Martin Luther King on Chicago’s Southwest Side a few years earlier. I suspect attitudes are different today.

Integration worked in Oak Park because residents were willing to embrace social engineering to make it happen, sometimes at the expense of individual rights. When for-sale signs bans were declared unconstitutional, local realtors continued to observe the ban voluntarily because they were willing to suspend their right to post signs for the greater good of integration. The practice of steering black and white newcomers to different neighborhoods to preserve racial balance, while not mandatory, could be viewed as an affront to the right to live wherever you choose.

So far Oak Park’s commitment to integration appears to be intact. The village continues to be an attractive place to live despite soaring housing prices, complete with Covid-precaution rules for block parties. And new generations of Oak Parkers are addressing old and new issues with passionate argument.

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When Greenpeace helped the Navy

For many years the Navy’s annual Great Lakes cruise deployed a ship on a goodwill tour of Midwest cities to build awareness and boost recruiting. As a Navy reserve public affairs officer in Chicago in the 1980s, I was involved in promoting the cruise and generating publicity.

Having a warship at your disposal is a terrific public relations asset. The ship docked at cities along the Great Lakes to host visitors and prospective recruits. Local dignitaries turned out and some were invited to ride the ship to the next stop. Every port visit attracted lots of media coverage because it usually was the biggest event in town.

Except in Chicago. Chicago is big-league, one of the busiest local news markets in the country where slow news days are rare.

We launched a textbook publicity campaign, issuing news releases and calling news desks. Our pitch was enthusiastic: “The Navy is bringing one of our newest frigates to Chicago for a port visit and will offer tours of the ship.” The typical response was: “Just like last year, right? We may send someone if we can but an alderman just got convicted, two factories are on strike and there’s a riot on the South Side.”

At the same time the Navy was telling us that the ship was getting front-page coverage in Duluth and Sheboygan, and the captain expected similar acclaim in Chicago. We brainstormed the possibilities and concluded that the only way to get front-page coverage in Chicago would have been for the ship to fire on Canada as it passed through the St. Lawrence Seaway. We reconciled ourselves to striking out on media coverage.

Enter Greenpeace. During the 1980s Greenpeace promoted its message of peace and environmentalism with aggressive, often dangerous, maneuvers to interfere with Navy ships during training exercises and missile tests. The organization saw our Great Lakes cruise as an opportunity to stage demonstrations and get publicity by accusing the Navy of carrying nuclear weapons into the American heartland.

It was a far-fetched claim. The small ship the Navy sent into the Great Lakes was not part of the nuclear triad and would not carry nukes into the Midwest in any case. It would have been easy to point out how ridiculous the Greenpeace accusation was, but the Navy’s security policy dictated that we could neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons aboard any Navy ship. Greenpeace knew this and took advantage of it to create a bogus issue.

So now our ship’s routine goodwill visit was controversial. The Greenpeace operatives did a masterful job of alerting the news media to their plan for a mass demonstration to embarrass the Navy.

When the ship arrived at Chicago’s Navy Pier the media turned out in force. They were treated to some impressive military theater: The ship fired a gun salute as it approached with flags flying, a band was playing on the pier and local dignitaries held a welcome ceremony. Only a dozen or so Greenpeace protesters showed up and the city kept them at the entrance of the pier.

That evening’s TV newscasts featured lavish video footage of the ship’s arrival festivities and wholesome-looking sailors being welcomed to Chicago, with fleeting shots of the bedraggled Greenpeace contingent as an afterthought. It was the best media coverage we had seen in years.

The Greenpeace folks abandoned their Great Lakes cruise protests after that. We were disappointed when they stopped helping us.  

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Here’s looking at you

I recently attended my first homeowners’ association meeting as a new resident of an over-55 community. Because of the pandemic it was conducted online via Zoom. It worked pretty well once participants were reminded to mute their microphones when they were not talking, and I enjoyed seeing my neighbors peering into their computers.  

One effect of the Coronavirus is that much of the population has developed a comfort level with videoconferencing, from informal Zoom meetings to TV talk shows that look like Hollywood Squares.

It’s been a long time coming.

I started using videoconferencing when I worked for Illinois Bell 50 years ago. The big-deal technology then was the Picturephone. AT&T and Bell Laboratories had invested untold millions to develop a Star Wars-looking desktop box that housed a video camera and a five-inch, black-and-white TV screen. Someday every home will have one, we were told. It was a fun gadget but a little hard to take seriously.

The company equipped a conference room with a Picturephone in front of each person. In my first Picturephone meeting, with a few friendly colleagues in Chicago and New York, I had just walked into the building on a subzero February morning and kept my ski mask on for the first few minutes.

When a major company tried out the Picturephone in its Chicago headquarters, a few employees punked their colleagues by holding a photo of the CEO in front of the camera. We often wondered if the Picturephone would add a new dimension to the obscene phone call but that did not happen. As far as I know.

The Picturephone was a commercial disaster because it required more bandwidth than was practical for that era’s technology and was prohibitively expensive. For a number of years a few major companies used specially designed Picturephone conference rooms with big screens instead of Star Wars boxes. But the technology still was fragile: I once brought a reporter into our Picturephone conference center to interview a couple of executives in New York and was embarrassed when the video circuit went down.

The Internet finally made video conferencing feasible. In recent years I’ve participated in video meetings on a variety of Internet platforms. The technology mostly got in the way: The first half-hour of each meeting was spent in mutual tech support until everyone could see and hear one another.

A few years ago some of us went through a Skype phase, chatting online by video with friends and participating in meetings. I chatted with a former co-worker I had not seen in years and Skyped regularly with one of my cousins. Eventually the novelty wore off. I haven’t used Skype in a long time, and my cousin and I keep in touch on Facebook.

Zoom and other videoconferencing services probably will be a keeper after the pandemic abates as some people embrace working at home and distance learning. But I hope my homeowners’ association will return to in-person meetings. Maybe with refreshments.

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Time for more statues

Mobs have declared open season on every aspect of American’s history.  Confederates and abolitionists, Christopher Columbus, Founding Fathers, and the occasional saint are being erased from memory. What an opportunity! 

This is the perfect time to deepen our understanding of the country’s history by erecting a bunch of new statues while creating a context to preserve the old ones. The jihad against historic statues suggests that Americans need some lessons in history that our educational system failed to teach them.

For starters, correcting the way we memorialize the Civil War is long overdue. Most of the Confederate statuary is the result of the “Lost Cause” propaganda campaign, which successfully whitewashed the South until well into the 20th century and perpetrated historical inacccuracy.  So there’s a massive bas-relief in Atlanta of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — who never set foot in Georgia during the Civil War — instead of John Bell Hood, who actually lost the Battle of Atlanta. And then there’s Gone With The Wind. We know better now, thanks to a growing body of historical work such as the Ken Burns TV series. But the statues remain, frozen in time.

Communities erect monuments to reflect the sentiment of their citizens. It made sense to put Confederate statues in the courthouse squares of Southern towns when the families of Civil War veterans were still alive, but those communities moved on decades ago. So it’s time to move statues and monuments that reflect local history (rather than a transplanted Lee or Jackson) to a less prominent location and erect a statue of a more contemporary hero in the middle of town. 

The Civil War demands more context. We need more statues of Ulysses S. Grant to correct decades of disparagement while the Lost Cause deified Lee. How about a statue of Lee surrrendering to Grant at Appomatox? We need more statues of William Tecumseh Sherman (perhaps ordering the return of Navajos to their homeland in 1868 rather than burning Georgia in 1864). Perhaps the Emancipation Memorial in Washington can be expanded with a freed slave standing tall and a statue of Frederick Douglass nearby. 

Nor should we erase the Confederates. Let’s move their statues to historical parks with explanatory plaques that will more fully explain who they were, what they did and why. Include guys like Patrick Cleburne, the general who was passed over for promotion when he advocated for freeing the slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate army. 

Let’s expand the pantheon of heroes by adding statues of forgotten ancients and more contemporary heroes. There is room to enhance Revolutionary War history with statues of some of the African-Americans who participated, for example. Practically every town in America boasts a 20th Century scientist, builder, astronaut, civil rights leader or Medal of Honor recipient who merits a statue in front of City Hall. 

President Trump missed an opportunity to add to the celebration of history when he spoke about the Presidents on Mount Rushmore but failed to mention the Crazy Horse Memorial a few miles away. 

There’s an even bigger opportunity for state and local leaders. Instead of just eliminating statues in deference to the mob, mayors and governors have an opportunity to re-evaluate how best to memorialize history now that people are paying attention. Set up an orderly, democratic process for creating new statues and relocating old ones. Appoint a commission. Hold a referendum. Do New Orleans residents really want to take down the statue of Andrew Jackson? Put it on the ballot. Set up a sculpture competition. Re-define a more inclusive sense of civic pride. 

So far nobody is doing this. Elected officials are being intimidated into subtracting history and removing statues without the consent of their citizens. This is an opportunity for them to lead (instead of pandering) and reassure their constituents that the voters, and not the mob, are still in charge of our history. Will they?

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The Civil War’s New Mexico sideshow

The American Civil War was fought in New Mexico. It was, really, though most histories make no mention of the Confederate invasion in 1862 and its two significant battles. It was a bizarre little sideshow.

I’ve been a Civil War buff for years but was unaware of the New Mexico campaign until I moved here and attended a re-enactment of a battle I’d never heard of.  I began reading up on the campaign and was intrigued by what I found. 

General Sibley’s big idea

The invasion was the brainchild of Henry Hopkins Sibley, a Mexican War veteran. He was an Army captain stationed in the New Mexico territory and, like many Army officers from the South, resigned to join the Confederacy when the Civil War began — becoming an instant Confederate brigadier general.

Sibley was an idea man. He invented the Sibley tent and stove that were widely used in the Union Army. He also had a well-known drinking problem and was nicknamed the “walking whiskey keg.” 

In 1861 Sibley met with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and proposed a grand plan to lead an invading army through New Mexico to capture the gold fields in Colorado. He then would march west to conquer Nevada and California, and maybe seize part of Mexico while he was at it.

Bob Newhart could have made this a telephone sketchPresident Davis, I’ve got Henry Sibley on the phone from Texas. Yeah, the whiskey keg guy. He wants to invade New Mexico. … What’s in New Mexico, Henry? … Yes, I know there’s nothing there. Why do you want to invade it? … You want to go to Colorado? And get the gold? And then go to California? Have you been drinking again, Henry? 

History did not record Sibley’s conversation with his president, or whether Davis rolled his eyes when he heard Sibley’s plan. But hey, the Confederacy was going broke and Colorado’s gold would come in handy. Sibley also claimed he could do all this with a small army that would not need traditional supply lines because the local population would rally to his support. It’s easy to imagine Davis saying the 19th-Century equivalent of “Sure, what the hell.” 

So a drunken general launches a bold invasion and expects his army to live off the land. In New Mexico. What could possibly go wrong?

Battle on the Rio Grande

Sibley’s force of Texas volunteer cavalry left San Antonio in November 1861 and won an easy victory at Mesilla, near El Paso, where most residents favored the Confederacy. Then he advanced up the Rio Grande valley toward Fort Craig, south of Socorro, where he expected to replenish his supplies by taking the Union fort. 

Union forces in New Mexico were commanded by Sibley’s former boss, Colonel Edward Canby. When most of his regular troops were transferred east to fight Confederates in Missouri, Canby hastily recruited a mixed force of inexperienced New Mexico militia and Colorado volunteers. To counter Sibley’s invasion he concentrated his troops at Fort Craig. 

When Sibley’s 2,500-man army advanced up the east bank of the Rio Grande, Canby sent 3,000 Union troops across the river on Feb. 20, 1862, to keep the Confederates from crossing and attacking Fort Craig. The two-day battle at Valverde ford was hotly contested with around 200 casualties on each side. The New Mexico volunteers were used to fighting Indians but were new to traditional warfare, and many spoke only Spanish. Most fought well, however, including a unit commanded by legendary Indian fighter Kit Carson. 

The battle included some unusual tactics. A Confederate company of lancers — guys on horses with nine-foot spears — charged what they thought were green New Mexico militia but turned out to be a crack Colorado unit. The lancers were nearly wiped out in a volley of rifle fire, and the survivors dumped their lances and picked up rifles. It was the first and last time lancers were used in the Civil War.

A Union spy company (that era’s special operations) commanded by a saloonkeeper came up with a clever idea: Send mules loaded with explosives into the Confederate camp and blow the place to smithereens. They loaded several elderly mules with howitzer shells and led them across the Rio Grande at night. When they neared the enemy camp they lit the fuses and sent the mules on their way. But instead of mingling with the Confederate herd as intended, the mules turned around and began following the Union soldiers back across the river. The big bang stampeded some of the Confederate horses but did minimal damage.

And a New Mexican vaquero captured a Confederate cannon by lassoing it from his horse and dragging it off the field. 

Sibley did not participate in the battle, by the way. He was “indisposed” (or drunk on his ass) in an ambulance wagon. 

The battle ended in a tactical victory for the Confederates after they captured a battery of Union cannons and pushed Canby’s force back across the Rio Grande. But they had lost too many men to accomplish their strategic objective of capturing Fort Craig and its cache of supplies. And they had lost many of their own supply wagons and enough horses to convert some cavalry units to infantry. 

Logistics was a big deal in the Civil War because armies needed secure supply lines for miles of wagon trains and herds of cattle. Even well-supplied armies stripped the countryside of everything edible or flammable. Marching without supplies was unusual and risky. Sherman did this successfully in the fertile farmlands of Georgia, but Sibley’s army of 2,500 men and 3,000 horses and mules did not fare as well in arid New Mexico. His force could survive only by capturing Union supplies and getting provisions from the local population.

Sibley had expected New Mexico’s Hispanic population to side with the Confederates. That wasn’t unreasonable: When New Mexico became a U.S. territory after the Mexican War, an uprising by Hispanics and Indians killed the first territorial governor. But while New Mexicans were not big fans of the Anglo government in Santa Fe, they really hated Texans — who had tried to forcibly annex New Mexico to the Lone Star Republic in the 1840s. New Mexican parents used to frighten misbehaving children by telling them the Tejanos were coming for them. The local population generally sided with the Union and served with Union forces. So much for living off the land. 

The Confederates next headed for a federal supply depot in Albuquerque, but when they got there the defenders had fled and most of the supplies were gone. They pressed on to occupy Santa Fe March 13 but found no supplies there, either. So they marched up the Santa Fe Trail toward Fort Union, near Las Vegas, NM, hoping to capture the fort and the supplies they so desperately needed.

Gettysburg of the West?

Meanwhile, a force of Colorado volunteers had been marching south from Denver to reinforce Canby’s Union troops. The two armies met at Glorieta Pass northeast of Santa Fe March 28. Sibley wasn’t present for that battle, either. Neither was Canby.

One of the commanders of the Colorado volunteers was Major John Chivington, a minister-turned-soldier known as the “mad Methodist.” After two days of fighting back and forth along a series of narrow mountain passes, Chivington led part of his force over the mountains, guided by New Mexico volunteers, and destroyed the supply train in the Confederate rear. This ended the battle even though the Confederates had been winning. 

New Mexicans call the Battle of Glorieta Pass the “Gettysburg of the West.” That’s a stretch, since the casualties of Pickett’s Charge alone far outnumbered both armies at Glorieta. But just as Gettysburg was the high-water mark of the Confederacy in the East, Glorieta Pass ended the invasion of the West.

Canby’s wife had remained in Santa Fe while her husband was in the field and was treated courteously when the Confederates occupied the territorial capitol. When Confederate soldiers fell back to Santa Fe after the battle of Glorieta Pass, Louisa Canby organized a group of women to nurse wounded soldiers and became known as the “Angel of Santa Fe.” 

Without supplies and blocked from further advance, the Confederates’ only option was to go back the way they came. They retreated to Albuquerque but were attacked there by Union forces. Several Confederate cannon, buried by retreating Texans to keep them out of Union hands, were dug up and displayed on Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza for many years. 

At this point Canby saw no need to risk a full-scale battle with the depleted Confederates. Since they already were retreating, he merely followed them and encouraged them to keep going. 

Long road to Texas

To avoid Canby’s forces on the main road along the Rio Grande, the Confederates retreated along a more difficult route through the mountains and the Journado del Muerto (dead man’s journey) Desert in search of food and water. Along the way they were harassed by angry New Mexicans, rattlesnakes and the occasional Comanche raiding party. Their retreat was even more difficult because they insisted on dragging along half a dozen cannons they had captured at Valverde. The 1,700 ragged, starving survivors of Sibley’s army finally reached safety in El Paso on May 4. 

The Confederates had marched 346 miles from El Paso to Glorieta Pass, nearly three times the distance of Lee’s advance to Gettysburg and 60 miles farther than Sherman’s march through Georgia. 

Canby finished the war as a major general after a variety of assignments. In 1872, while commanding U.S. forces in the Pacific Northwest, he was killed by Indians: the only general to be killed during the Indian Wars.

Chivington emerged from the Battle of Glorieta Pass a hero and was appointed to command the Colorado Military District, but his reputation was ruined in 1864 when he led the Sand Creek Indian Massacre.

Sibley continued to lead Confederate forces but was court-martialed due to alcoholism in 1863. He served briefly as a military adviser in Egypt until alcohol and illness ended his career. He sued the U.S. government for royalties on his tent and stove patents but lost because he had fought on the other side. He died broke in 1886. 

The New Mexico campaign attracted little notice. President Lincoln followed each battle from the telegraph office, but Valverde and Glorieta Pass were far from the telegraph and rail lines that connected the rest of the country. With everything else going on — the Monitor and Merrimac, McClellan’s Peninsular campaign and the battle of Shiloh — a few thousand troops in faraway New Mexico would not have made headlines even on a slow news day. No newspaper reporters made the trek to New Mexico. Neither did photographers like Matthew Brady and no contemporary photographs exist. 

Even the battlefields are mostly gone. The Rio Grande changed course and obliterated most of the Valverde battlefield, which now is part of Ted Turner’s nature reserve. Interstate 25 paved over most of Glorieta Pass.

New Mexicans still aren’t fond of Texans. Some voted against our last governor, Susana Martinez, because she grew up in El Paso. There was a campaign sign that read: “Susana es una Tejana.” 

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