BOOK REVIEW: How Can We Make Progress on the Unfinished Business of the Hard Work of Hope?
Written by Lew Finfer
The Hard Work of Hope
by Michael Ansara
Michael Ansara has been a significant figure in organizing in Massachusetts and sometimes nationally since the 1960’s. This has included extensive work in the Boston Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, a major leadership role in the Anti-Vietnam War movement with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and an important role in the major organizing group Massachusetts Fair Share in the 1970’s into the 1980’s.
His memoir tells his story and is filled with memorable accounts of meetings and people connected to these events over several decades. He wistfully reflects now that in the many decades since those events, “I would never again have the heady sense that I was leading thousands, that I was making history. I remain aware of my flaws. My hope is to be helpful to a new generation of leaders.”
It is not easy to write this review on several levels. We now are in the nightmare of the worst period in American history since the Civil War. So, to be focusing on one past period primarily in Massachusetts only has so much to say to our times now. Michael has had many accomplishments. But a couple of notable mistakes, too.
I know his work primarily from having worked at Massachusetts Fair Share from 1975-1977 as Director of their Dorchester chapter while Michael was Fair Share’s Director. I was organizing at two Dorchester groups in the years prior to that when Michael was organizing at another Dorchester group called The People First, so I saw some of his work. And recently for some months this year, we’ve worked together with many others on a campaign to oppose President Trump’s moves against universities and for increasing college affordability including as a part of the Crimson Courage Harvard Alumni group.
As an adolescent walking home to Brookline, he saw people picketing Woolworth in 1960 in support of the Southern lunch counter sit-ins. “I step into a slow-moving line , step into ‘the movement’, out of adolescent despair and bleakness and now a new life”. He got to work with major Boston Civil Rights leaders like Noel Day, Rev. Jim Breeden, Sarah Ann Shaw, Mel King, Byron Rushing, and Ruth Batson.
He entered Harvard in 1964 and soon became the Regional Co-Director of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at only age 17. SDS is remembered aa a militant anti-war group, but at first it was a civil rights group that did community organizing on local issues too.
It can be hard to grasp all these years later the incredible impact the Vietnam War had on America. All told 543,000 US troops were there at the high point in 1969 and cumulatively during the course of the war 3.1 million troops went to Vietnam. 58,281 American soldiers were killed and some 304,000 wounded. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from 1.5 to 3 million soldiers and civilians. The North Vietnamese soldier and author Bao Dinh went to war with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade of 540 soldiers of which only 10 survived the war.
We had been raised that every war we fought was right. That our leaders always told the truth. That communism was terrible, and that our government was always right. During those years, we learned the Vietnam War was not such a just war, and that we were intervening in a civil war. That the communist Ho Chi Minh as the national leader in wars against the Japanese invaders and French colonialists would have won a national election, if it had been held as planned in 1956, but our government didn’t allow the election to happen.
SDS organized the first major national anti-war demonstration in 1965. As the war dragged on, SDS leaders had moved away from non-violence as practiced in the Civil Rights Movement. They carried North Vietnamese and Viet Cong flags in demonstrations in their desperation to stop the war, but those flags incited intense opposition. Our country was bitterly divided not unlike we are now.
Michael comments on the anti-war movement at times seems self-righteous without listening hard enough to those who were unsure or for the war. He rightly says in hindsight, as disappointing as Vice President Humphrey was on the war, sitting out the election helped elect Nixon, which was worse. The glass being half full is better than it being empty.
Michael was a leader in organizing countless demonstrations during those years. He recounts organizing with other 600 Harvard students in November 1966 to circle a Harvard dormitory where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was meeting. And they wouldn’t let him go until he answered three questions. And McNamara lost his cool and was jabbing Michael in the chest as he spoke. Michael recounts how that same night, McNamara met with Henry Kissinger to begin the secret study of the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Our government tried unsuccessfully to block its publication.
Massachusetts Fair Share was begun by Mark Splain, Barbara Bowen, and Lee Staples as a community organization in Chelsea in 1973. They applied in 1975 for a major organizing grant from the Campaign for Human Development (CHD) which funded organizing projects from an annual second collection in all Catholic churches. They had been organizers previously for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Meanwhile, another organization called Citizens Action Program on Energy that was led by Mark Dyen, Michael Ansara, and Miles Rapaport, applied also to this funder. CHD told the two groups, if you merge, we’ll give you $100,000 for each of 2+ years. It was an enormous amount of money when organizers then made often less than $10,000 a year. The two groups agreed to merge and it was a kind of a shotgun wedding that CCHD, the church, performed. In the beginning, Mark Splain was the Director but at the end of 1976 Michael Ansara became Director.
One of the founding groups was shifting from welfare rights organizing of the poorest of the poor to organizing more working-class people but still some poor people. The other founding group was shifting from anti-war organizing to community organizing.
Fair Share grew to be the major statewide community organization in its heyday from 1975-1982. It had chapters in the Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Allston-Brighton, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, East Boston, and Hyde Park in Boston, along with the cities of Springfield, Worcester, Fall River, Lowell, Chelsea, Revere, Quincy, Waltham, Malden, Medford, Somerville, Lynn, and Holyoke. Each chapter had an agenda of local issue campaigns. There were citywide campaigns in Boston on property taxes. There were statewide campaigns on utility rates and auto and homeowners’ insurance rates.
Thousands of people attended local and statewide action meetings. The largely working class membership learned leadership skills of organizing house meetings, researching and choosing issues, preparing campaigns to engage decision-makers in well attended accountability meetings and legislative and budget hearings, and how to negotiate, debrief, and evaluate. It was a hands-on “school’ for democracy which needed to take place day in and day out, not just on Election Day and it did. Reading the chapter on Massachusetts Fair Share recalls the very impressive scope of the organizing and leadership development work those years.
In the Dorchester Fair Share chapter where I worked, we waged a campaign to mass file tax abatement appeals based on overassessment and won refunds and lower taxes for 2200 homeowners over four years. Hundreds of unsalvageable abandoned buildings were torn down. We opposed redlining by banks and passed state laws outlawing redlining. 600 African-American homebuyers won thousands in rebates when we proved the homes were not inspected at the point of sale and forced the seller made to make the repairs. The East Boston and Chelsea chapters won major repair of the Chelsea Bridge. A similar chapter could have been written on accomplishments in Worcester and other areas.
In 1979, Massachusetts Fair Share with Michael as its director played a major part in developing a new national community organizing network called Citizens Action. It included statewide groups also in Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Oregon, New Jersey, Indiana, Florida, West Virginia, Maine, Washington, Pennsylvania, North Carolina. Some of these groups are still organizing today.
The underlying tensions that were present in the merger of the two organizations were never resolved and eventually the co-founders went their separate ways. The Splain/Bowen/Staples vs. Ansara/Rapaport/Dyen dynamic was not just a personal conflict. It reflected differences in organizing approaches that continued to divide the Fair Share staff even after Splain/Bowen/Staples left the organization They and some successor organizers were more oriented to organizing in cities, organizing working class and poor people, building the chapters as local organizations. Ansara’s approach was more statewide organizing including suburban issues, moving into electoral campaigns, having issues for the statewide fundraising canvass for donations that included consumer issues, less support for the chapters. There’s a case to do all of this on both sides of this divide, but passion, ego and human capacities can make this hard to do.
Then, following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Fair Share finances began to fall apart, in a crisis the scale of which Michael chose not to share with the Board or senior staff. Fair Share lost forty VISTA organizing positions when President Reagan took office and cut that program. Michael didn’t want to lay people off so he tried different financial and fundraising efforts, while hoping to free up a large federal grant which was blocked by the new administration. It turned out the group overspent it’s $3 million budget by $400,000 for 3 consecutive years, leaving it $1.2 million in the hole. He had to lay off 2/3 of the organizing staff.
“I experienced profound failure on top of failure. I couldn’t save my parents (who both died). I couldn’t save my marriage (he got divorced). While I refused to admit it, I could not save Fair Share”. He recounts that a group senior women leaders in the group asked him to resign and he did. Leaders are unpaid and make organizational decisions and organize very part-time so are in different roles from paid full time organizers. I would have wanted him to say more about the serious consequences to the organization.
Michael mentions several long-time organizers who joined the staff in 1979-1980 and “besides their experience, they also brought their own ways of doing things, and in several cases, a distinctly competitive approach…the growth of factionalism….criticism of my leadership.” I can think of three experienced and respected organizers he was talking about. [Splain, Bowen and others continued their careers with ACORN and then SEIU]. No one was completely right in all this, but I think his criticism of them was unfair.
He says that so many Fair Share organizers and some of its leaders went on to have major roles in unions, community organizations, electoral campaigns, electoral offices, environmental groups. That is very true and is a credit to the organization and the role it played in building the larger movement. For instance, former Fair Share organizers played major roles in both the election campaign and progressive administration of Boston’s Mayor Ray Flynn from 1983-1993. Several others went on to organize with UNITE HERE union across the country, contributing to the dynamic growth of that union and its unique political impact. Others built statewide community organizing groups with ACORN in other states.
It was a big loss for community organizing in Massachusetts going forward. There have been plenty of successful community and union organizing efforts since then, but none came near Fair Share in the number of places in the state that were organizing at the state and local level and the numbers of people attending meetings and actions. So that’s a loss.
However, no organization lasts forever.
Michael mentions his role in the Teamsters Union election that led to President Ron Carey having to resign. Carey was a reformer who won election after the corrupt, undemocratic Teamster leaders Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Fitzsimmons. He was a leader in the rank-and-file Teamsters for a Democratic Union that won control of the Teamsters. Under Carey’s leadership they won a great victory in the UPS strike in 1997. It was considered a high point after decades of decline. Only days after the strike was settled, his reelection victory over James Hoffa Jr. was voided because of the illegal diversion of more than $200,000 in Teamster funds. Carey was forced to step down. There were huge consequences of Ron Carey’s ouster as Jimmy Hoffa Jr. then led the Teamsters for more than 20 years with a top-down undemocratic leadership regime.
Michael Ansara was in the middle of this scandal and set back for the labor movement. He said, “I would, unknowingly, participate in a conspiracy of money laundering, misuse of union dues, fraud….Once I understood, way too late, what I had been part of, I took full responsibility, pleading guilty to one felony count” and paying a significant fine. Some told him he should fight the charges, but he decided he had to take responsibility.
In the closing pages, he regrets not having been able to end the Vietnam War much sooner and all those without draft deferments who died. He recognizes the impact of the assassinations of MLK, RFK, of civil rights workers, and Fred Hampton. “I do not miss the weight of knowing that we, our band of desperate, hopeful young people, were all that stood in the way of an even wider war,…..I do not miss the feeling, every single day, of not being good enough, not being smart enough, not being effective enough to live up to the imperatives we faced”, he says with anguish and some humility.
There are lots of lessons in this story that lead me to reflect on my own organizing experiences. How each organizer listens, reflects, strategizes, leads, acts, shares, and evaluates? How do we do all this as a team? How do we walk with leaders, who can be organizers but just have less time to give? How do we enable criticism and learn from it? How can we be both empathetic and walk in people’s shoes and truly understand where they are coming from and how to be sympathetic to the hardships of others? How can we be curious to learn about politics, history, and current issues both in our organizing work and beyond that in the wider world? How can we be effective organizers and still be good people? Or course, I want to feel I’m fighting to be both.
His book is not only a memoir, as he tries to keep to his opening goal “to be helpful to a new generation of leaders.” He examines what he sees as some of the mistakes of the anti-war movement and in organizing in general, as well as lifting up the accomplishments.
We must always remember with humility and thanks that we stand on the shoulders of those who took risks before us. Particularly in these greatly trying times, there are lots of obligations still in the “miles to go before [we] sleep.”
Lew Finfer is Director of Massachusetts Action for Justice. He began his organizing career in 1970 in Dorchester with Dorchester community groups and then with Massachusetts Fair Share. He has had a long organizing career and is now with Massachusetts Action for Justice.