The Last Patrician (25 page)

Were its critics right? Was the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal individualism an archaic throwback to an America that no longer existed? Only sentimentality could make us think so. The railroad-building, factory-creating nation that gave the world Emerson and Lincoln was not an overgrown village. Americans in the early nineteenth century were oppressed by many of the same confidence-killing things that weigh upon them so heavily today. They, too, felt the pressure of mortgages, bills, employers, and tax collectors. In
Walden
(1854) Thoreau wrote that on applying to the assessors at Concord he was

surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him.… What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfill their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, the moral character breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than those who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersaults.
21

America was always a nation of desperate men. The very things that do so much to undermine our spirits and sap our confidence today existed, in only a slightly different form, a hundred and fifty years ago. Mortgages, debt, bankruptcy, the interest rate, the necessity of making a living, the necessity of paying taxes did as much to limit freedom of action and inhibit the development of a self-confident attitude toward the world in the nineteenth century as they do today. Social class, ancestry, and religious affiliation were often a far heavier burden then. If the world is more complex today, it is no more antipathetic to the individual's desire to express himself freely and self-confidently in it. And yet there was, Bobby knew, an important difference between Emerson's world—the world of the early and middle nineteenth century—and our own. A hundred and fifty years ago the confidence-crippling effects of bills, mortgages, debts, tuition, and taxes were mitigated by an institution that we in the twentieth century have allowed to fall into disrepair and desuetude—or so Bobby argued. He argued that our contemporary civilization, in destroying the small communities and neighborhoods that once flourished in the land, robbed us of the very things that had once made Americans such a spectacularly self-confident people. In destroying the close-knit civic units, the little platoons to which Americans had once belonged, and which had once given them comfort in the midst of their desperation, our modern civilization had destroyed the very things that had once sustained and nurtured self-reliant citizens.
22
Bobby concluded that if Americans were, in the middle of the twentieth century, suffering more acutely from feelings of anxiety and worthlessness than they had in the past, it was in part because they no longer lived in the kind of communities that had once given them a sense of stability, a sense of order, a sense of belonging, a sense that there existed around them a network of friends, neighbors, churches, clubs, and associations to which they could turn for help and guidance, and that could in turn lift up their spirits and stimulate in them a feeling of confidence in their powers.

The individual and the community were closely connected in Bobby's mind: a compassionate community could liberate an individual from his crippling pain, and so give him a degree of control over his destiny; liberated individuals, in turn, could contribute to the vitality of the community that had nurtured them. Bobby believed that participation in the life of the community worked to awaken the soul, stimulate the moral sense, and strengthen self-confidence. The question he asked in 1966 was how a sense of community could be restored in America's neighborhoods, how people could be made to feel again a sense of “larger common purpose.”
23
How, Bobby wondered, was it possible to tap the “nucleus of leadership and community concern” that existed in even such a place as Bedford-Stuyvesant, a “decaying, dying city,” the “worst slum” in America, a place where thirty percent of the housing was classified as deteriorating or dilapidated, a place where the rates of crime, venereal disease, alcoholism, and infant mortality were far above national and even New York City averages?
24

The mechanism upon which he eventually settled was the community development corporation.
25
The prototypical community development corporation was the Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration project itself. Bobby outlined the basic theory of these corporations during the Ribicoff hearings in August 1966, when he took the “unusual step” of testifying before a subcommittee of which he himself was a member.
26
In testimony in which he quoted Aristotle and Lewis Mumford, Bobby lamented the destruction of the “thousand invisible strands of common experience and respect which tie men to their fellows.”
27
He lamented the decline of the “civic pride” and “human dialogue” that enabled each citizen to feel his “own human significance in the accepted association and companionship of others.”
28
“The whole history of the human race, until today,” Bobby declared, had “been the history of community.” But community was now “disappearing,” disappearing “at a time when its sustaining strength” was “badly needed.”
29
An older America, an America in which “the values of nature and community and local diversity” found “their nurture in the smaller towns and rural areas,” had vanished; it had been replaced by a bigger and more impersonal world, one in which Americans were condemned to live their lives “among stone and concrete, neon lights and an endless flow of automobiles.” Detached from the vital warmth of community, men became “more and more both perpetrators and victims of coldness, cruelty, and violence.”
30

Bigness, loss of community, organizations grown far past the human scale—these [Bobby declared] are the besetting sins of the twentieth century, which threaten to paralyze our very capacity to act … our ability to preserve the traditions and values of our past.
31

All Americans, he declared, had “suffered somewhat the loss of personal identity” brought about by “the disintegration of the neighborhood as the basic unit of local democracy.”
32
Even the affluent “child of the suburbs” had “suffered from the loss of community”:

He lives, after all, in a vast bedroom, removed by ribbons of concrete from the city, where his father's work and the cultural and social amenities that are the heart of community life are located. He, too, suffers as he grows up from a sense of being unable to be an active, determining force in his own life.
33

And yet if suicide, drugs, and delinquency had come to the suburbs, still it was the “child of the ghetto” who “suffered most” from the loss of community.
34
The ghetto child was “the prisoner” of a “vast, gray, undifferentiated slum, isolated physically and in every other way from the rest of the city and its resources.”
35
Only by restoring a sense of community in the ghettos could Americans hope to create the self-confidence that would lead to economic self-sufficiency there; only by creating a sense of civic pride in the inner city could Bobby's entrepreneurial vision of bringing “the people of the ghetto into full participation in the economy” be realized.
36

Under Bobby's plan members of the community would themselves control the community development corporation; the corporation, in turn, was charged with attracting employers to the area, putting unemployed citizens to work rebuilding neighborhoods, and doing what it could to engender a sense of civic pride in the community as a whole. Unlike many advocates of community (e.g., Rousseau), Bobby did not believe that civic spirit was incompatible with private enterprise. On the contrary, he hoped that a strong community would attract private investment, and that this investment would in turn lead to the creation of jobs that would give purpose and meaning to the lives of the community's citizens. “We must,” he said, “combine the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system.”
37
Government funds in the form of an “initial grant of capital” would be necessary to jump-start the project. But “for their ongoing activities [the community development corporations] should need and receive no significantly greater subsidy than is ordinarily available to nonprofit housing corporations under present law.”
38
Community development corporations could not “and should not be owned or managed by Government, by the rules and regulations of bureaucracy, hundreds of miles away.”
39
Bobby was hopeful that, once the essential viability of the program was demonstrated, private capital would play the most important part in the project.
40
(The number of overlapping agencies to which the Bedford-Stuyvesant community development corporation was forced to apply for initial funds and approvals was itself an indication of just how bloated the bureaucratic state had become; the Department of Labor, HEW, HUD, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Small Business Administration, the Economic Development Administration, the Model Cities Program, the Lease Guarantee Program, the Federal Housing Administration, and the City of New York each had some measure of jurisdiction over the project).
41

To cover start-up costs, the Bedford-Stuyvesant community development corporation sought, and eventually obtained, $7 million in “special impact” funds for a construction and training program. (“Special impact” funds could be obtained only where there was a likelihood that such funds would lead to “private investment” and the creation of “for-profit enterprises” in a particular area; Bobby and Jacob Javits had themselves sponsored the legislation creating the “special impact” program in 1966.
42
) Special impact funds were to be used to teach unemployed, underconfident residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant how to restore old houses and build new ones; the process of construction would itself function, Walinsky observed, as a “social change lever.”
43
The act of building houses would provide Bedford-Stuyvesant's citizens with the best as well as the most productive kind of therapy. Bobby hoped that the Bedford-Stuyvesant community development corporation would serve as a model of how to enlist “the energies and labor of the ghetto” in a “massive program of physical reconstruction,” a program of reconstruction “consciously directed at the creation of communities—the building of neighborhoods in which residents can take pride, in which they have a stake.”
44
It was a good idea; the problem lay in unsympathetic labor unions that did not like to see their monopoly on construction in New York challenged.
45
By May 1967 the goal of putting people to work building their own houses was in danger of being lost.
46

During the fall of 1966 Bobby, his staff, and members of the Bedford-Stuyvesant community worked out the details of the Bed-Stuy community development corporation (the organization is now known as “Restoration”). It was necessary to “be vague” about the precise details of the undertaking; it was essential that its inherent drama not be undercut by premature disclosures.
47
The launch of the Bedford-Stuyvesant project was to be what Walinsky called a Kennedy-style blitz in which the element of surprise would be crucial; all the procedures that had brought the Kennedys victory in the past—secrecy, organization, careful preparation, and, as the decisive moment drew nearer, a massive investment of time and energy—were to be scrupulously followed.
48
The planning and preparation would culminate in what Walinsky called “a month of intensive effort” in anticipation of the launch date. To students of Kennedy tactics this “intensive-concentration” method was familiar enough; Bobby and Jack had pioneered it during the 1960 campaign and perfected it during the crises of Jack's presidency—the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, Oxford, Mississippi. The Kennedys, Walinsky said in a memorandum to Bobby, were masters at developing “the urgent sense of concentration that great enterprises require.” The tactics that had worked against Khrushchev and Ross Barnett would work against urban poverty; these tactics could pay off, Walinsky said, “where lesser efforts go piddling.”
49
Walinsky urged Bobby not to go abroad in November or December 1966; Bedford-Stuyvesant would need his undivided attention during those months. The point, the young staffer said, “was to build an organization” that, in a single month in 1966, could “begin to make demonstrable progress towards rebuilding” a community.
50

Walinsky advised Bobby to “maintain contact with Lindsay” in the weeks preceding the “crash effort” but to withhold the key dates from him; by surprising Lindsay and other officials, the Kennedy team would throw its rivals off balance.
51
The urban crisis had become a hot political topic; each politician had his own preferred solution, and none was above stealing the best features of a competitor's program. Javits was busy pushing his own ideas; after Bobby completed his August testimony, Javits hectored him about the inferiority of the community development corporation concept to proposals he had put forward.
52
When the Ribicoff hearings resumed at the end of November 1966, Edelman urged Bobby to “hit as many witnesses as possible” with the community development corporation idea and contrast it with the “monolithic” federal approaches favored by Javits and Ribicoff.
53