CHAPTER 6

“The Hell-Raising Period Is Over”: New Federalism in Baltimore

In 1973, when Maude S. Harvey was appointed the director of the Baltimore Department of Social Services (DSS), she became the first Black woman in the city’s history to run a municipal agency. She also became the first African American to run DSS and one of very few women in a top leadership post in the municipal government. Born in 1918, Harvey had worked her way up through the ranks of DSS during a career that spanned nearly three decades, so she certainly knew the welfare system and its problems well. “The nation’s priority,” she noted, based on experience, “does not seem to be people.”¹ While some complained that the welfare rolls were too long, Harvey countered that they were not long enough. Many people who qualified for benefits and services remained outside of the system and needed to be brought in, she believed. In addition, she noted that a sizable population of city residents did not officially qualify for assistance but were nevertheless in dire need of help that she felt her agency should provide. The likelihood that things would change for the better, she knew, was slim. “People believe everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps when some people don’t even have boots,” she protested, echoing the words of Martin Luther King.² Greed was the problem, she concluded. Miserly state and federal spending on Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other means-tested programs confined many people to poverty and had also created a “welfare mess” that frustrated everyone, she explained.³ During her stint as director, Harvey did what she could to correct the problems. She oversaw the continuing decentralization of DSS, worked to expand service delivery, lobbied on behalf of the Food Stamps program, and testified in the State House to improve welfare programming.⁴

Ultimately, however, Harvey achieved fewer of her goals than she would have liked. Even as she accepted the directorship of DSS, she knew that negotiations were under way to transfer DSS employees out of the municipal government and into the Maryland state workforce. In what was clearly a bid to tame the activist DSS staff, state officials had offered to cover Baltimore’s welfare tab in exchange for changing the status of the workers. Harvey described the transfer, which both public and private social-service providers in the city adamantly opposed, as an effort by state officials to gain the “power to manipulate” 2,600 municipal employees. She also predicted that in her position as director, she would soon become little more than a “figurehead.”⁵ Worse, by shifting control over Baltimore’s DSS to Annapolis, state officials were robbing not only Harvey but all city residents of the limited leverage they had over how the municipal agency responded to local poverty.

Harvey was hardly unique among Black women in Baltimore’s municipal workforce who believed that the nation’s welfare system was flawed and that antipoverty efforts were inadequate. She was also not the only African American and woman serving as a public official who found her authority and influence in the city severely diminished during the 1970s, when officials on the federal, state, and local levels took steps to contain the activism that had exploded in cities like Baltimore during the 1960s. In Harvey’s case, behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing culminated in the transfer of DSS employees to the state civil service, over which African Americans and Baltimore residents had little authority. In other instances, municipal agency heads who remained in the city’s workforce lost influence as a result of federal-level policy changes that Richard Nixon implemented in order to diminish the power of liberals in Congress, shrink the size of the federal government, and return power on the local level back to elected officials. New Federalism, Nixon’s signature domestic policy, was an attempt to reorganize the way that the federal government transferred funds to states and localities. Rather than as categorical grants earmarked for specific purposes and sent to public agencies, the president proposed that federal funds should be repackaged, often as block grants, and sent to elected officials to use with considerable discretion. In other words, he aimed to reduce the kinds of grants that had gone to Parren Mitchell in Baltimore’s Community Action Agency and create new grants that would go to such mayors as William Donald Schaefer, who did not tend to be advocates of community participation or harsh critics of the status quo. Leaders of national civil rights organizations and labor unions led the battle against New Federalism but met with only limited success.

In Baltimore, New Federalism, in combination with cuts Nixon made to the War on Poverty, shifted power relations within the municipal government. Antipoverty and human-services workers, among whom African Americans and women were increasingly well-represented, saw their authority decline, while predominantly white and male elected officials gained influence. The change made it difficult for activist municipal employees to either achieve their objectives or challenge the mayor’s commitment to austerity and growing faith in the power of commercial revitalization to solve the city’s problems. The influence of antipoverty and human-services workers declined at the same time that Baltimore’s law enforcement agencies saw their economic fortunes improve. Nixon’s commitment to law-and-order remedies to urban problems and disinvestment from the Great Society meant that police officers began to replace social workers as the first responders to urban poverty. The change represented a shift in what or whom was perceived as the enemy in cities. The War on Poverty had targeted economic insecurity. The war on crime would eventually become a war on urban African Americans.

Public-sector unions closely monitored the impacts of policy shifts in Baltimore. And the unions fiercely challenged the mayor’s willingness to sacrifice the well-being of city workers and residents for an improved business climate. Strikes by municipal employees won important policy changes and wage concessions during the mid-1970s. Distorted national media coverage of one local strike, however, damaged the prestige of the public-sector labor movement at a time when growing numbers of Americans increasingly viewed not only low-income urban African Americans but also government unions and their members as drains on the national economy. Gains only recently won by municipal employees and their unions proved very fragile during the Nixon years.

“Local Control” or White Control? Nixon’s Domestic Agenda

During the early 1970s, as activist municipal employees in antipoverty agencies and human-services departments in Baltimore continued to press for redistributive responses to economic injustice, the influence they wielded over policy-making and the city’s agenda was under assault. Nixon’s major domestic policy innovation, New Federalism, imperiled their direct access to federal funds, which earlier had provided them with a measure of independence from locally elected officials who did not share their ambitions. Nixon offered an overview of his New Federalism proposal during his 1971 State of the Union address. General revenue sharing (GRS) was one of its hallmarks. The president proposed transferring a portion of the money the federal government collected in taxes to states and localities where it could be used at the discretion of elected officials. He aimed to encourage policy innovation outside of Washington and reduce red tape and bureaucracy, he explained. He also had motivations that he did not mention. He wanted to bolster the authority of elected officials in cities in the wake of the protest movements of the tumultuous 1960s, and he relished derailing the policy agenda of congressional liberals.⁶

Nixon made some of his unspoken intentions clear in his address by using the dog-whistle politics he had honed on the campaign trail. He explained that revenue sharing was intended to replace “present narrow-purpose aid programs,” in other words, the grants that had sent antipoverty funds to cities and often to African Americans. Further, revenue sharing would diminish the authority over policy-making of the “bureaucratic elite in Washington,” meaning liberals who supposedly favored African Americans and the poor over the white silent majority. Alternatively, revenue sharing would provide relief to “homeowners and wage-earners,” again meaning whites.⁷ And it would restore “local,” which also meant white, control over decision-making. (Southern segregationists might have used the phrase “states’ rights” rather than “local control,” but they certainly knew what Nixon meant.) Without so much as mentioning race, Nixon promised to overhaul the funding mechanisms that had enabled service providers to launch the War on Poverty and in Baltimore had given African Americans a voice in local policy-making. Simultaneously, his dog-whistle rhetoric erroneously implied that African Americans fell outside of the category of wage-earning homeowners and that the interests of Nixon’s voters were at odds with those of people with low incomes.

To add insult to injury, Nixon offered a paean to local control that entirely neglected the history of African Americans who had endured slavery and then a century of government-sanctioned Jim Crow segregation and exploitation that had only recently been tempered by federal civil rights legislation. The president expounded, “The idea that … you cannot trust local governments is really a contention that you cannot trust people to govern themselves. This notion is completely foreign to the American experience. Local government is the government closest to the people, it is most responsive to the individual person. It is people’s government in a far more intimate way than the Government in Washington can ever be.”⁸ Contrary to his populist rhetoric, however, revenue sharing was partly an effort to undermine the actual democratization of local decision-making that occurred during the 1960s when African Americans and residents with low incomes in cities such as Baltimore had actually gained some formal influence over policy-making. To be sure, there were legitimate ideological and practical issues at stake in debates over federalism. But Nixon foreclosed honest conversations concerning the level at which governmental decision-making should occur by ignoring racism and invoking white victimhood and identity politics.

Not surprisingly, GRS quickly won the bipartisan endorsement of the members of the national organizations that represented states, localities, and their elected officials, such as the National League of Cities, the Council of State Governments, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the National Governors Association. Their members embraced GRS for three reasons. First, they believed that the federal distribution of categorical grants robbed them of control over policy-making on fiscal matters in their jurisdictions while empowering federal administrators. Second, they worried that categorical grants gave the directors of local public agencies unwarranted control over resources. And finally, many disliked the community participation mandates associated with some grants, which empowered the very citizens in localities who were often the least satisfied with the political status quo. In sum, elected officials anticipated the GRS would reconcentrate authority in their offices.⁹

The most vocal opponents of New Federalism on the national level were leaders from civil rights organizations and the labor movement. NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins cautioned, “It ought to be remembered that the whole fight of Black Americans for 70 years has been for federal legislation, federal executive action and federal court decisions precisely because many of the individual states grievously shortchanged them.”¹⁰ Labor leaders contended that New Federalism would enable elected officials to evade federal equal-opportunity provisions, labor-standards laws, and other regulations required of recipients of categorical grants. In testimony before the Committee on Ways and Means, Andrew Biemiller of the AFL-CIO derided Nixon’s initiative as “no-strings, no-standards, and no-supervision revenue sharing.”¹¹ Critics also worried that New Federalism would undermine community participation in decision-making. Further, they argued that the initiative would disperse across multiple jurisdictions, including wealthy districts, federal funds that should have been targeted at areas with high concentrations of poverty.¹² And even revenue that made it to struggling cities would not necessarily be used to fight poverty. “You can’t make me believe that the localities which get the money are going to use it for the poor,” protested Maryland’s congressional representative Parren Mitchell, who as the former director of Baltimore’s Community Action Agency was intimately familiar with the obstinacy of locally elected officials when it came to funding anti-poverty efforts. Mitchell also found it unlikely that elected officials, especially southerners, were going to use the money on behalf of Black people.¹³

Notably absent from the anti-GRS coalition was AFSCME. The public-sector union’s leaders predicted that Nixon’s initiative would be a boon for many of their members and supported the measure. When AFSCME president Jerry Wurf testified on GRS before the Senate’s Finance Committee, however, he was mindful of the threat it posed to a targeted war on poverty and said as much. “Funds must be allocated to those jurisdictions which have the most serious fiscal difficulties,” he urged.¹⁴ Nevertheless, as was the case on other important policy matters during the 1970s, including most notably liberal efforts to secure full-employment legislation, government workers’ interests put them at odds with those pursuing the social and economic justice agenda more fully embraced by civil rights organizations and some unions representing private-sector workers.

Despite the opposition from civil rights and many labor leaders, as well as the reluctance of some members of Congress to weaken their own authority over policy-making, GRS became law. Urban advocates did succeed in ensuring that local- rather than state-level officials received the lion’s share of GRS funds. The new iteration of intergovernmental aid only transferred one-third of allocated federal funds to states, while local governments shared the rest, and ultimately, GRS only accounted for about 5 percent of state and local budgets. When paired with decreases in federal spending on the War on Poverty, however, the change had profound implications for power relations in cities that disadvantaged African Americans.¹⁵

Opponents had greater success in limiting the second type of revenue sharing that Nixon proposed. Through the use of special revenue sharing, Nixon planned to consolidate multiple categorical grants into block grants with loose policy directives. This represented an important, although not unprecedented, departure from past practices. Categorical grants, which had risen in number during Johnson’s War on Poverty, were the primary means the federal government used to redistribute federal dollars to states and localities. Critics on the right and left legitimately charged that the grants were in some cases redundant and also the source of considerable red tape. They also necessitated a sizable bureaucracy on the federal and local levels. Additionally, categorical grants could preclude policy innovation outside of Washington, DC. Mindful of the problems, Johnson had funded the Model Cities program in a block grant–like fashion in order to provide flexibility to those actively engaged in local antipoverty efforts. Despite their flaws, however, categorical grants were the source of the independence from elected officials that antipoverty and human-services workers capitalized on in cities such as Baltimore as they fought the war on poverty.

Conservative elected officials in Washington were keenly aware that the method that the federal government used to transfer money to states and localities had significant implications for local power dynamics. They also knew that liberals and increasingly African Americans were particularly politically influential in the nation’s cities. In fact, conservatives, including both Republicans and southern Democrats, had already used that knowledge strategically during the late 1960s when Congress was debating the response the federal government should take to growing concerns about crime. As part of the deliberations over the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, conservatives succeeded in replacing with a block grant smaller grants that the Johnson administration had proposed sending to local law enforcement agencies. They also made the block grants available only to state-level officials and prohibited the distribution of the funds to any agency with ties to the Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversaw the War on Poverty. By so doing, they used a funding mechanism to place authority over the nation’s burgeoning war on crime firmly in the hands of the white and largely conservative governors and outside of the purview of the agencies in which African Americans had gained the most influence. By calling for block grants and targeting them at elected officials during the early 1970s, in other words, Nixon was not reinventing the wheel.¹⁶

Civil rights and other liberal activists appreciated what was going on and opposed special revenue sharing. They opposed efforts to reduce congressional oversight of the use of federal funds and to enhance the power of state and local elected officials. They met with some success. Nixon initially proposed six block grants, but only the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 (CETA) and the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which created Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs), became policy. Gerald Ford had replaced Nixon as president by the time CETA made it through Congress. Ford was also in office when Congress passed Title XX of the Social Security Act in 1975. A block grant–type program, Title XX allowed states that had already qualified for federal support for social services programming to receive the funds as block grants.¹⁷

Although AFSCME officials had not opposed most of Nixon’s New Federalism, they were very wary of CETA. It replaced job training–related categorical grants and also mandated some job creation in the public sector. The leaders of government workers’ unions were understandably alarmed by the introduction of special categories of public-sector jobs. AFSCME officials were especially concerned because their membership rolls already included many at or near the bottom of government pay scales. They worried that CETA workers might be assigned tasks regularly performed by full-time government employees, who could in turn be eliminated. They were also concerned that the presence of workers employed on terms less favorable than those whose compensation was determined by collective bargaining could force rollbacks in hard-won wages and benefits packages. The use of the government as an employer of last resort, an idea that had many progressive supporters, worried AFSCME officials because of their members’ vulnerability.

In the long run, the creation of CETA and other block grants certainly did not entirely transform American domestic policy. Categorical grants remained the primary way the federal government transferred funds to states and localities, and the Nixon and Ford administrations created fewer block grants than they proposed. In addition, during their years in office, Nixon and Ford committed more federal resources to grant-in-aid programs than had previous presidents. And contrary to the concerns of revenue-sharing critics, the regulations governing the use of federal funds also increased—at least during the administrations of the two presidents. Nevertheless, the practice of distributing intergovernmental revenue as block grants became a tool that conservative elected officials on the federal level continued to use to target revenue at their like-minded counterparts on the local, or more often state, level and to exclude African Americans and liberals from influence over policy-making and implementation.

In Baltimore, New Federalism threatened in three key ways gains African Americans had only recently achieved. First, it contributed to undermining the nation’s War on Poverty. Both types of revenue sharing diffused among many localities with varying degrees of need funds that might have been directed entirely toward antipoverty efforts. Moreover, because population counts figured into the formulas used to determine a locality’s appropriation, older cities with declining populations stood to lose funding while suburbs and Sunbelt cities with expanding populations gained.¹⁸ Second, federally mandated community participation fell victim to New Federalism. In a booklet on GRS and civil rights, for example, officials explained, “While it is the responsibility of local government officials to make the final determination of where and how revenue sharing funds will be used in the community, it is the residents of the community who have the responsibility to inform their elected officials of their needs and desires” (emphasis in the original). Residents were encouraged to influence decisions by educating themselves, organizing citizen committees, meeting with officials, and “writing letters to the editors of local newspapers.”¹⁹ Third, New Federalism altered power relations between elected officials and those at the helm of public agencies and departments. Categorical grants distributed by the federal government were earmarked for specific uses. When the federal government had allocated resources to anti-poverty efforts, they had given administrators of human-services programs a measure of security that their agencies would be funded regardless of the priorities of local- or state-level elected officials. GRS upended this dynamic.²⁰ In cities such as Baltimore, the authority that African Americans and women had gained in the municipal government during the 1960s was concentrated in agencies that relied on War on Poverty–related categorical grants, whereas the officials who controlled budget-making were almost entirely white and male. The shift in policy that Nixon introduced eroded the authority and independence of those government officials most sensitive to the concerns of African Americans and poor people and who tended to be advocates of a strong welfare state.

“Occasioned by Cutbacks in Federal Spending”: The War on the War on Poverty

In Baltimore, Nixon’s New Federalism made it difficult for antipoverty activists and human-services providers to pursue their policy priorities. It also hampered their efforts to counter Schaefer’s agenda and temper his commitment to austerity. The workers’ enhanced influence over the municipal agenda during the mid-1960s had enabled them to compel city officials to move away from a near single-minded focus on downtown commercial revitalization, a goal that local business leaders affiliated with the Greater Baltimore Committee had secured from the city council during the 1950s. To be sure, fighting poverty directly and fighting it via private-sector job creation were hardly mutually exclusive. Few in the city, including activist municipal workers, rejected all commercial revitalization efforts. Residents needed jobs and expected that the private sector would be the major source of many of them. And the mayor and leaders in the business community did not oppose all redistributive poverty-fighting strategies. Yet many antipoverty and human-services workers as well as other local activists felt the mayor’s priorities were skewed too far in favor of private interests. And Nixon’s New Federalism further tipped the scales to his advantage. In turn, administrators of antipoverty agencies and human-services departments became competitors who had to vie against one another for a share of the municipal budget and federal revenue-sharing funds.

Even before the advent of New Federalism, Baltimore’s City Charter already imbued the mayor with considerable authority over the municipal budget. The document enabled the mayor to nominate all municipal department heads, including the director of the Department of Finance. The Department of Finance drafted the city’s annual budget and then presented it to the Board of Estimates for review. The board had five members, including the mayor and two of his appointees. With an almost guaranteed majority on every vote, the mayor could easily tailor the budget to suit his agenda. From the Board of Estimates, the budget, called the Ordinance of Estimates, moved to the city council. Baltimore’s charter, however, only empowered the council to reduce budget allocations; the members could not increase funding for any department or program. As a result of this executive-dominated system, control over fiscal matters, as over city management, rested firmly in the office of the mayor. Nixon’s New Federalism enhanced the power of the position. Schaefer used his considerable authority over appointments and the budget to combat dissension in the municipal workforce, bolster his political base, and advance his business-friendly agenda.²¹

The Community Action Agency was an easy target for Schaefer. By the early 1970s, the CAA was no longer the source of activism and rebellion it once had been. In 1968, following the city council’s refusal to appoint Walter Carter to the agency’s top post, activist antipoverty workers had shifted their energies to Baltimore’s new Model Cities program. After a subsequent CAA director was indicted for fraud, which hardly raised the popularity of the agency in and around Baltimore, Mayor D’Alesandro and the city council appointed African American Lenwood Ivey to the top post.²² While committed to relieving poverty, Ivey was not an enthusiast of community participation. As he later explained, he suspected that federal policy makers may have intentionally required community participation in order to make antipoverty ventures fail and Black people look incompetent. Putting residents without the requisite skills in positions of authority was hardly a recipe for success, he argued.²³ In the early 1970s, as the head of the CAA, he declared the “hell raising period … over.”²⁴ He prioritized service provisions over community mobilization and largely abandoned the agency’s effort to fundamentally redistribute power in the city.²⁵

Meanwhile, some transplanted CAA activists in the Model Cities program and their coworkers tried to use that agency to prolong the hell-raising period. They were led by William Sykes, the program’s director; Elva Edwards, an African American social worker who began her career at the CAA; and the activist members of the Model Cities Policy Steering Board.²⁶ Increasingly, however, the Model Cities’ staff found themselves diverting energy they had earlier committed to community mobilization to efforts intended simply to save their agency in the face of federal funding cuts. The staff of the CAA faced similar pressures. In early 1972, Sykes sent a memo to Model Cities’ project directors requesting “that priority be given to grantsmanship” so that they might find alternatives to the federal funding on which the agency had relied.²⁷ A year later, Sykes announced imminent “expenditure controls,” “staff reductions,” and “increased workloads” for those spared the pain of a pink slip. “It will take a cooperative effort on the part of all of us if we are to survive this period of transition during which the degree of federal commitment to the kinds of activities supported by Model Cities is tested,” he reported.²⁸

Sykes and Ivey lobbied in Congress and the Maryland General Assembly largely unsuccessfully to secure replacement funding for their agencies. They did, however, win Schaefer to the cause of preserving an antipoverty agency in Baltimore. Although the mayor prioritized improving Baltimore’s business climate, as an executive in a struggling rust-belt city, he hardly opposed fighting poverty head on—especially if he was in charge of the money and staffing. As a result, even as CAAs across the nation closed their doors permanently, Schaefer worked with Ivey and Sykes to find ways to maintain some of the services provided by their agencies. In 1974, the CAA and the Model Cities program merged to become the Urban Services Agency (USA), a new division of the city government. The outcome was a victory given the dismal fate of many antipoverty agencies elsewhere. Thereafter, however, and as evidence of their fading independence, USA administrators, like the heads of other human services, were often compelled to compete for resources in annual budgeting contests.²⁹

Theoretically, GRS and block-grant money could have compensated for the loss of federal antipoverty funds, an arrangement antipoverty activists appear to have endorsed. The mayor and his advisers, however, did not adopt that approach. Robert Embry, the white administrator of the Department of Housing and Community Development, was among them. So too was Mark K. Joseph, the city’s white development coordinator. “The new [antipoverty] group both as an agency and its citizen advisory group should not be the agency which is charged with setting priorities for either revenue sharing or for special revenue sharing,” Joseph argued (emphasis in the original).³⁰ On community participation in the new agency, the two advisers also had similar views. Embry recommended that the mayor disband the Community Action Commission and Model Cities Steering Board and proposed that the administrator of the new agency be accountable only to the mayor. Joseph concurred. “We may want some citizen involvement,” he conceded, “but I would not see a heavy emphasis on it.”³¹

Schaefer’s advisers largely won the day. Between 1975 and 1980, Schaefer directed 18 percent of the almost $200 million Baltimore received in CDBG funds to USA. While the figure was higher than the share of CDBG funds that elected officials in other jurisdictions allocated to human services, it also reflected Schaefer’s decision not to invest in the War on Poverty as enthusiastically as he pursued commercial revitalization. Ultimately, the funding USA received was considerably lower than the combined budgets the CAA and Model Cities would have enjoyed had they been supported at 1960s levels. Antipoverty advocates did succeed in winning a citizen’s advisory board for USA. The director of the agency, however, answered only to the mayor and was not accountable to the board. And Schaefer chose the relatively conservative Ivey to head the agency. Longtime antipoverty worker Edwards became the agency’s deputy director. In her new post, Edwards joined a small but growing number of Black women who were winning leadership positions in the municipal government during the 1970s. The victories multiplied, however, as antipoverty and human-services agencies lost both clout and independence.

The appointment of African Americans to top municipal posts, moreover, did not necessarily correspond with activist leadership. In fact, Evelyn Burrell, an original member of the Model Cities board, argued that some highranking African American municipal officials were themselves culpable in the loss of momentum of the War on Poverty in Baltimore. Disunity resulted, she explained, when “Black people, mostly Black males” won influential positions and “just back[ed] off and stop[ped] pushing.”³² No doubt she was right. Schaefer was hardly inclined to appoint agency heads who were likely to challenge his power and agenda. Simultaneously, however, New Federalism and the defunding of the War on Poverty undermined community participation and eviscerated the strength and independence of antipoverty agencies.

The staff of the Department of Health also found themselves competitors in battles over revenue-sharing funds and the municipal budget. By the early 1970s, the health department could claim some important achievements. The city’s African American infant mortality rate had declined and was approaching the white rate. Maternal deaths and tuberculosis cases were at an all-time low. Although cases of lead poisoning had risen, the consequence of the city’s extensive stock of dilapidated housing, rat bites were at an all-time low. New nutrition programs for the elderly were also making a dent in public health figures.³³ Officials at the health department were quick to point out that some of the improvements were the consequence of “many social and economic factors.”³⁴ But the positive health statistics also “reflect[ed] the improved utilization of Baltimore’s expanded medical services,” which had grown under the guidance of community residents and in accord with the neighborhood-based service delivery model.³⁵

Efforts to make additional improvements stalled, however. “Cutbacks of federal funding” were part of the problem, according to health officials.³⁶ So too was the inability of the officials to secure replacement resources from Schaefer’s budget and cache of revenue-sharing funds. During the early 1970s, the department operated five decentralized facilities but scaled back the number of services they had planned to provide. Primary care was one such casualty, despite the critical need for that service occasioned by the declining number of private providers in the city. Community engagement in health care planning was an additional casualty. In keeping with the spirit of the 1960s, the health department had created citizens’ councils in an effort to democratize decision-making. Researchers studying Baltimore’s decentralization efforts in 1974, however, discovered that residents had begun to lose interest in the councils as their recommendations could not be matched with funding sources. To remedy the situation, the researchers suggested the mayor allocate GRS or CDBG funds to the councils. City officials responded that those funds had already been “committed.”³⁷

While the control that Nixon’s New Federalism transferred to Schaefer enabled him to constrain the independence and ambitions of antipoverty warriors and municipal human-services providers, the mayor used his power to make appointments, using political cunning and good old-fashioned patronage to eliminate the staff of the Department of Education as a source of organized opposition to his authority. He moved slowly and with stealth, as he had to evade considerable opposition from Black activists. During the late 1960s, African Americans had launched a campaign to win control of the school system, which served a growing percentage of Black students as white parents increasingly sought private or suburban alternatives for their children’s education. In 1971, intense pressure by Black city residents and leaders led the members of the school board to select Ronald Patterson as the district’s new superintendent. Patterson quickly earned the ire of many whites, including Schaefer, by attempting to eliminate patronage-hiring in the department and by replacing some high-ranking white administrators with African Americans. He also worked cooperatively with Black leaders who many whites considered “militants,” pushed for desegregation and community control, and partnered with outspoken critics of the mayor. Not surprisingly, Schaefer wanted him out. He also wanted to be able to use the school system to achieve political ends.

It took several years, but Schaefer ultimately achieved his goal. By 1975, Schaefer had appointed three African American supporters to the school board and had the votes to oust the activist superintendent.³⁸ Thereafter, the mayor firmly clamped down on dissension within the Department of Education. As Schaefer’s biographer C. Fraser Smith, explains, “Control over the schools was given over to African Americans as their inviolate pool of patronage.”³⁹ Black Baltimore did not receive free rein over the system, however. Scholar Kenneth Wong observes that although the Department of Education became the city’s “Black agency” and was consistently headed by local African American administrators, “central office school administrators critical of the [Schaefer] administration were either demoted or transferred.” What is more, Wong reports, “Not infrequently, school resources were allocated in a politicized manner to serve as a warning to dissenters at the school building level.”⁴⁰

Maude Harvey and her staff at the DSS also saw their independence and influence undermined during the first half of the 1970s. Early in the decade, Maryland officials offered to cover for Baltimore the portion of welfare costs that state law required local governments to pay. In exchange, state officials wanted to transfer Baltimore’s DSS employees into the state civil service. Opposition to the proposal in the city was immediate. Critics suspected that the move was intended to tame the activism of DSS employees.⁴¹ Benjamin Davis, the executive director of the Maryland Chapter of Social Workers, explained with frustration that his members were superficially stereotyped as “bleeding hearts who are too permissive.”⁴² Baltimore was home to about 70 percent of Maryland’s welfare recipients, and critics throughout the state blamed the city’s welfare workers for the large and expensive caseload.⁴³ Criticism was sharpest in the state’s most conservative areas: Western Maryland, the Eastern Shore, and some of Baltimore’s suburbs. Staunchly conservative Republican state senator Robert E. Bauman, a founding member of both the Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Unions who later represented Marylanders in the House of Representatives, raged against the “negative attitude” among welfare workers, who he believed pandered to the poor.⁴⁴ The widespread belief that DSS employees enrolled “ineligibles” or “cheats” for AFDC and Food Stamps motivated Maryland’s elected officials to propose the takeover of the Baltimore DSS.

Welfare workers and members of DSS’s citizen advisory board fought the change as did AFSCME and the Maryland Conference of Social Workers. They defended the integrity of DSS workers and argued that local control over the agency made it adaptable to specific circumstances in Baltimore. Mindful that the Maryland governor’s willingness to waive Baltimore’s welfare expenses would prove tempting to Schaefer, Maurice Harmon, who was the DSS director when the change was proposed, wrote a letter to one of the mayor’s key advisers. “I recognize the fiscal plight of local government and believe there should be increased federal and state assistance in these programs, but feel we should not abdicate whatever little control still remains with the City,” he argued.⁴⁵ The Conference of Social Workers concurred. “Urban welfare needs cannot be satisfied by further alienation of the city’s citizens from the social services system,” the group argued.⁴⁶ Eventually, however, the change proved inevitable. Reading the tea leaves, Harmon accepted a position in the Maryland DSS, anticipating that he might be “able to do more for the City from the State level.”⁴⁷ The move at least assured Baltimore’s welfare recipients and DSS employees an advocate on the state level—for the time being. Schaefer eventually replaced Harmon with Harvey, whose appointment as the first African American woman to run a municipal agency was symbolic but whose stature in the municipal government soon diminished.

By the mid-1970s, Baltimore’s antipoverty and human-services workers had lost much of the independence they had briefly enjoyed. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the agencies had served as sites of opposition to local, state, and federal legislators whose actions imperiled the nation’s fragile welfare state. They had also been a source of policy innovation and improvement as the largely female and African American staffs of the agencies had used their positions within that state in efforts to direct the course of public policy and make municipal services more accessible, useful, and accountable to poor residents. Antipoverty and human-services providers prioritized an urban agenda that served as a counter to the business-friendly solutions of the Schaefer administration. Nixon’s New Federalism bolstered the mayor’s authority while undermining the independence of the agencies. Baltimore’s mayor accelerated the change as he worked to consolidate his power. The waning independence of the agencies eroded the ability of the staffs to demand that city leaders attend to the pressing concerns of residents with low incomes.

While antipoverty and human-services workers saw their influence and resources decline, another group of city workers, the predominantly white men who worked in law enforcement, saw the economic fortunes of their departments improve. On the campaign trail, Nixon had made clear his commitment to using the criminal justice system rather than antipoverty agencies to tame crime and solve urban problems. “If the conviction rate were doubled in this country, it would do more to eliminate crime in the future than a quadrupling of the funds for any governmental war on poverty,” he contended.⁴⁸ Once in office, the “law-and-order” president wholeheartedly prosecuted the war on crime, particularly in low-income urban areas populated by African Americans. There, as historian Elizabeth Hinton argues, federal anticrime funds enabled law enforcement agencies to extend their operations deeply into neighborhoods and public housing complexes. Nixon also launched a war on drugs that criminalized drug users and led to significant increases in arrests, and he overhauled the American prison system, building hundreds of new jails. As Hinton explains, Nixon began putting in place the legislation and infrastructure that ultimately led to the crisis of mass incarceration of the late twentieth century.⁴⁹

In Baltimore on Nixon’s watch, the number of drug arrests grew dramatically. In 1966, the city had made 430 arrests on drug charges. By 1972, the number was 4,500. Notably, however, arrests related to heroin use, the supposed scourge that prompted the war on drugs, were in decline. In actuality, most drug arrests involved marijuana use.⁵⁰ At the end of 1973, when the arrest rate was still on the rise, for every one arrest on a heroin charge, four were arrested for marijuana. The tremendous increase led Schaefer’s drug-abuse adviser to advocate marijuana decriminalization.⁵¹ Meanwhile during the early 1970s, the city received more than $20 million in federal anticrime funds. With the sanction of state as well as local officials, the Baltimore City Police Department used the revenue and other resources to increase the size of the force, the density of officers assigned to “high-crime” areas, and the level of security in public housing. The funds paid for some drug-use prevention and also for additional patrol cars, high-end walkie-talkies, computerization, and helicopters. As the influence of Baltimore’s antipoverty warriors waned during the early 1970s, city residents, primarily those in African American neighborhoods, experienced an expanded police presence both on the ground and in the air. The blare of police sirens, the crackle of walkie-talkies, the whirl of helicopter blades, and the glare of searchlights became standard fare in the city as the War on Poverty began to give way to the war on crime and drugs.⁵²

“Money for Everything Except What’s Really Needed”: Public-Sector Unions Respond

Even as the independence and influence of employees in municipal agencies waned, public-sector unions remained an important source of power for workers and of opposition to Schaefer’s austerity and commercially oriented revitalization agenda. Union-led fights with the mayor were battles in larger contests over how the nation should respond to changes in the patterns of global capitalism that were the sources of economic decline in cities such as Baltimore; they were also part of ongoing disputes over how to effectively respond to racial and economic injustice. Among public-sector union leaders and members, those questions were raised directly and also articulated indirectly in widespread anger at low wages that failed to keep pace with rising inflation, poor working conditions, and municipal policies and practices that demeaned the dignity and professionalism of city workers and in some cases precluded them from providing the high quality of services they believed city residents deserved. Strikes in Baltimore in 1974 concerning such issues attracted teachers, sanitation workers, police officers, and other municipal employees in addition to local and national union officials. Many city residents evinced sympathy for the workers’ problems, despite considerable inconveniences created by the strikes and reluctance among many taxpayers to see tax rates increased. National news coverage of the Baltimore strikes revealed little of the local nuance, however. Instead, much of the national coverage presented a city besieged by self-serving unionists, representations that conservative opponents of government unions capitalized on to promote their cause. In Baltimore, striking city employees won some of their demands and demonstrated the growing clout of their unions in municipal affairs. Coverage of the strikes outside of the city, however, helped fuel national animosity toward public-sector unions.

During the early 1970s, collective-bargaining negotiations between the city and its public-sector unions were annual reruns of a familiar drama. As negotiations got under way, Schaefer would threaten that unions’ wage demands would force the layoffs of thousands of city workers. The unions would counter that the city was holding out, hinting that the mayor had access to resources he was hiding from underpaid and overworked employees to use for other purposes. If you can find it in the budget, you can have it, the mayor would retort, making available the city’s Ordinance of Estimates for union perusal. And the wrangling would continue until the city and unions settled on terms that typically included raises that failed to keep pace with inflation and fringe benefits intended to partially compensate for the slow growth in wages.⁵³

But 1974 proved an exception. That year, a month-long strike by Baltimore’s public-school teachers and a two-week-long strike initiated by sanitation workers signaled widespread discontent. The teachers’ strike was called by the Public School Teachers Association in February and supported to varying extents by the Baltimore Teachers Union and AFSCME. PSTA represented teachers; BTU represented teacher aides; and AFSCME represented other employees of the school system such as cafeteria workers. The strike began in early February, when teachers announced they had “had it” with salaries that lagged well behind those in most other jurisdictions in Maryland, unmanageably large class sizes, inadequate teaching materials, deteriorating school buildings, and other working conditions that prevented them from providing Baltimore’s children with a quality education.⁵⁴ According to a survey by the Baltimore Sun, between 85 percent and 90 percent of the city’s 8,400 teachers participated in the strike.⁵⁵

The teachers’ strike enjoyed widespread community support—even if some complained privately of inconveniences and worried about the toll it took on their children’s education. Parents, otherwise bitterly divided over the use of busing to desegregate the city schools, supported the teachers across racial and economic lines. “The problems of the teachers are the problems of the community,” proclaimed Nathan C. Irby Jr., the president of the Parent-Teacher Association of Samuel Chase Elementary School.⁵⁶ Parents also made incisive observations when assessing the strike’s causes and legitimacy. Dorothy E. Lane connected the teachers’ concerns to Schaefer’s downtown revitalization priorities. Referencing deliberations under way regarding the possible construction of a new professional sports complex, for example, she commented, “It seems to me they can find money for everything except for what’s really needed.”⁵⁷ And Anne Gresser addressed the state of Maryland’s culpability in the low salaries earned by Baltimore teachers.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, the Public Schools Administrators and Supervisors Association also supported the strike.⁵⁹

Despite the considerable public support, the strike’s resolution ultimately disappointed many. The discontent stemmed from division among and within the unions representing employees of the school system and a degree of political naivete on the part of PSTA. The teachers did win two significant concessions: raises larger than the city originally proposed and an official commitment to smaller class sizes. Had expectations among strikers not risen so high, the settlement could have counted as a small victory. To many, however, especially those in BTU, it seemed a capitulation. Members from that union wanted the strikers to secure commitments from the governor of Maryland and the state’s General Assembly to improve urban education. Reliance on local taxes to fund city schools perpetuated racialized patterns of economic injustice because the city simply could not afford what wealthier districts could, the advocates argued. Their objective became a demand of the teachers too late in the negotiations, however, which produced considerable frustration that an important opportunity had been squandered. The remedy for resolving gross funding disparities among educational jurisdictions in Maryland had to come from the statehouse, BTU representatives argued but striking teachers realized only belatedly.⁶⁰

The two-week strike waged in 1974 by AFSCME-affiliated workers started as a wildcat action during a heat wave in July. A group of sanitation workers dissatisfied with a contract their fellow AFSCME members voted to accept independently walked off the job. The sanitation workers had just cause for their anger. The year of the strike, Baltimore’s sanitation workers ranked twenty-sixth out of thirty-one cities with populations over four hundred thousand in starting salaries and maximum wage rates. The workers were also angry about dangerous working conditions and a demeaning absenteeism policy the city had recently implemented. “They don’t care nothing about you,” complained sanitation worker Leroy Anderson about city officials.⁶¹ After failing to convince the wildcat strikers to return to work, AFSCME officials Ray Clarke and Ernie Crofoot had little choice but to endorse the strike and try to make the most of it. They coordinated walkouts by additional blue-collar workers, including school janitors, prison guards, and sewer, parks, dog-pound, zoo, and highway workers. As in 1968, few women participated in the strike. AFSCME’s female members remained largely segregated in caretaking jobs, and Clarke worried the strike would quickly lose public support if school and hospital employees abandoned children and ailing patients.⁶²

As workers walked the picket line, officials from AFSCME International scrutinized Baltimore’s budget in search of sources for larger concessions than the city was offering. Their findings confirmed their frustration with the mayor’s priorities. As one analyst noted, the municipal budget was “tilted heavily in favor of capital expenditures [such as a highway project] as opposed to operating expenditures [which could be a source of raises].”⁶³ “Such a set of expenditure priorities,” he had earlier noted, “is clearly geared to the more affluent commuters and not to low income inner city residents.”⁶⁴ Beyond the bias, however, he found little fat in Schaefer’s budget and concluded that additional revenue would have to come from the state.⁶⁵ Schaefer’s priorities were skewed, AFSCME officials believed, but if the mayor was holding out, they could not determine how.

As the strike wore on, negotiations between the city and an AFSCME-affiliated police union stalled over the question of raises. Disgruntled police officers initiated a workplace protest campaign. They completed lost property reports for such items as pennies that they found on the street and issued tickets—to the mayor, among others—for the most minor of parking and traffic infractions. When their actions yielded reprisals rather than concessions, a group of Baltimore’s officers—about half—joined the AFSCME strike. The addition of police officers in a strike that already included prison guards raised the stakes dramatically in AFSCME’s showdown with Schaefer; strikes by law enforcement were controversial and potentially dangerous. According to the New York Times, the Baltimore officers’ five-day strike became the most significant labor protest to date by police in a major city since the Boston strike of 1919.⁶⁶

Despite the heaps of stinking trash that began to accumulate in Baltimore’s streets during the strike and the fear occasioned by the police officers’ walkout, many city residents sympathized with the strikers. To be sure, some agreed with one outraged resident who fumed, “They’re making enough money. I’m paying enough taxes for now for what these cats are doing.”⁶⁷ More, however, agreed with Warrington E. Coates. Coates lived with his grandmother in a low-income and predominantly African American neighborhood in West Baltimore, where the strike plunged sanitary conditions from “bad to worse,” according to one local journalist. “The rats have taken over. I can’t even sit here on my back porch. There’s no use in washing it down. I try to grow flowers.… But it’s ridiculous,” his grandmother Helen Coates complained during the strike. Nevertheless, she and many of her neighbors agreed with her grandson, who showed empathy for the workers. “[Schaefer] should give them what they want. It’s a dirty job right from the start. Who the hell wants to pick up garbage?” he asked. Many residents held city and state officials rather than low-wage sanitation workers responsible for conditions in their neighborhood.⁶⁸

Police officers won empathy as well—despite an evening of looting, which occurred the first night after the officers went on strike. Thereafter, the presence of state police sent to Baltimore by Maryland governor Marvin Mandel (but whom Wurf wished in retrospect AFSCME had thought to request) largely restored order. To be sure, the early chaos occasioned by the strike enflamed local racial prejudices and reinforced white fears of Black urban lawlessness. The white wife of one merchant whose carpet business was raided on the first night of the police strike—and who had been put out of business following the looting that occurred in the city after the assassination of Martin Luther King—angrily declared her intention to relocate to “a safer part of the city—an all-white area.” But anger at looters did not necessarily mean anger at police. When asked by a reporter who was to blame for the strike, another merchant replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know. I think police deserve a raise, but where they’re going to get it? I don’t know—they can’t raise taxes.”⁶⁹ Some African Americans also expressed support for the police officers’ cause even as there was no love lost between many Black residents and the police department. In reference to the first six months of 1974, the editorial board of the Afro-American wrote, “We have had enough Black marks against the police this year, what with the corruption trials and convictions, the continued reports of police brutality by citizens, even during the strike period. And not to mention the department’s Black mark on its continued failure to hire and upgrade Black officers on an equitable basis and in proportion to the population.”⁷⁰ Yet the editors nonetheless described a “sympathetic mood” for the city’s strikers and urged that officials “compromise” with the police.⁷¹

In the end, strikers won very significant concessions from Schaefer, an indication of AFSCME’s growing influence in the city. But they also suffered reprisals that mitigated their victory. Although the mayor earlier had claimed “no money,” nonuniformed AFSCME members won a hefty raise, more than 20 percent for some, which would be distributed in increments over a two-year period.⁷² The amount was considerably higher than the 5.5 percent raise the city and workers had agreed on two weeks earlier. The city also agreed to fully fund workers’ health insurance. In addition, the union and city agreed to refer the unpopular absenteeism policy in the sanitation department to arbitration, and the mayor, disingenuously it later turned out, promised not to carry out reprisals against strike participants. Even as he announced the strike’s settlement, however, the mayor added that the cost of the raises would be made up as needed in cuts to city services and layoffs—which he said would be concentrated in the sanitation department. He forcefully made the point that the strike’s settlement compelled only a reallocation of revenue; raises for some meant job losses for others. And in the months that followed, Schaefer kept tabs on which workers suffered the effects of the layoffs with the likely intention of punishing those accountable for the strike.⁷³

The police officers also won wage concessions as well as reprisals. Baltimore’s police commissioner Donald Pomerleau took charge of disciplining his officers. Appointed by the governor, Pomerleau was a notoriously intimidating figure suspected of keeping J. Edgar Hoover–like files on the “who’s who” of Baltimore. During the strike, the conservative commissioner took a hard line. “I sense that the moral fiber of this country has been deteriorating rapidly,” Pomerleau declared. He then announced “that there will be no general amnesty for those police officers who have failed their responsibility to the public.”⁷⁴ Pomerleau followed through on his pledge. Despite a no-reprisals promise from Maryland’s Democratic governor, the commissioner fired, suspended, or demoted 170 patrolmen and officers. Following the strike, the police union also lost its exclusive bargaining rights with the city and its dues check-off privilege. The harsh punishments alarmed AFSCME’s Wurf, who personally intervened on behalf of the officers, to no avail. The layoffs of both sanitation workers and police officers had a chilling effect on the city’s public-sector labor movement. Although the union could legitimately call the strikes victories and the concessions AFSCME members won were a tribute to their union’s power, workers also learned to take Schaefer’s threats seriously that raises and layoffs were reciprocal.⁷⁵

Although residents of the city largely took the strike in stride, its depiction in the national media suggested a city under siege. An article originating with the Washington Post that appeared in national newspapers on July 9, even before police officers joined the strike, opened with the alarmist news that the Baltimore strike was nearing “potentially crippling proportions.”⁷⁶ Four days later, while prison guards were outside picketing, a group of juvenile offenders briefly held hostage four replacement guards. Adult prisoners, members of the jail’s inmate council, were helping to quell the disturbance when nonstriking police officers arrived on the scene. Bedlam ensued. Rejecting an offer of help by picketing guards, the officers barged past them and into the jail, where they unleashed their police dogs—on the inmates who were defending the replacement guards. “A lot of innocent inmates got hurt,” explained prison nurse Joan Wendler, who said nurses treated several for dog bites.⁷⁷ National media accounts missed most of the subtleties of the event. In a front-page article taken from the Associated Press titled “Police Storm Baltimore Jail, Freeing Hostages Taken During Strike by Guards,” the New York Times quoted a Baltimore police officer: “We hit the door and we did what we had to. It was a hell of a job.”⁷⁸ The reality was more complicated than the officer—and the newspaper—reported.

National news magazines also depicted Baltimore as ravaged by callous and self-interested municipal workers. The AFSCME sanitation strike coincided with an unfortunately timed announcement by the Baltimore Promotion Council that it was undertaking a $40,000 advertising campaign intended to attract tourists to the city. Baltimore was dubbed “Charm City, USA” in the campaign’s marketing materials. Mindful of the tons of garbage strewn throughout Baltimore’s streets when they made their announcement, the promoters hedged their bets. They invited tourists to come to Charm City—“when we are ready to receive visitors.”⁷⁹ (The announcement was made by the executive vice president of a local advertising firm that clearly was in the midst of a spate of bad luck. It had also just launched an antilittering campaign in the city. “It was just beginning to catch on before we had this strike on our hands,” Schaefer mused regretfully.⁸⁰) Not surprisingly, the press could not resist poking fun at the city’s new moniker. Time covered the strike fairly accurately but under the headline “Chaos in Charm City.” Newsweek’s coverage in an article titled “Trash City,” however, fed antiunion sentiments, leading even the editors of the Baltimore Sun to complain of a “grossly exaggerated account of Baltimore’s troubles.”⁸¹

Conservatives intent on delegitimizing public-sector unions exploited the dramatic coverage of the Baltimore strike and a rift that emerged between Wurf and Mandel. As part of the strike’s resolution, AFSCME had secured the governor’s pledge that striking police officers would not suffer reprisals. When the governor refused to force Pomerleau to reinstate officers he had fired, Wurf and other labor leaders were outraged and withheld their endorsement of the governor, who was in the midst of a reelection campaign. Mandel did not give in, and in August, he made a statement to the press in which he said that during the strike Wurf had “warned [him] that Baltimore City would burn to the ground unless the City gave in to his demands.”⁸² For the rest of his life, Wurf denied having made the comment. And Mandel’s get-tough posturing likely won him votes in the election. Nevertheless, an ardent opponent of public-sector unions, former Newsweek editor and cofounder of the National Review Ralph de Toledano, alluded to the statement in the title of his 1975 diatribe against public-sector unions, Let Our Cities Burn. Conservative senator Jesse Helms authored the foreword of the book, and future president Ronald Reagan, warning that “forced unionization of public employees threatens to replace elected officials with an undemocratic ‘private government,’” described it as “must reading.”⁸³ The momentum de Toledano and other conservatives helped to build against public-sector unionization contributed to undermining ongoing efforts by AFSCME to win passage of the National Public Employee Relations Act, which was intended to extend union rights to all government workers. It also contributed to the national erosion of the public’s support for public-sector unions.⁸⁴

By the mid-1970s, AFSCME had never been as strong—or as vulnerable. The union’s membership continued to grow during the Nixon and Ford years, and collective bargaining narrowed the gap that separated the wages of public- and private-sector workers. As the private-sector labor movement continued to decline, the public-sector movement, powered by large numbers of African Americans and women, increased in clout and stature. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, AFSCME served as an important source of constraint on the Schaefer administration—a reminder that the mayor’s austerity measures that came at the expense of public services and jobs would not go unchallenged. Yet the forces that had already begun to undermine the independence of Baltimore’s antipoverty and human-services workers also presented grave challenges to public-sector unions. Mounting hostility to antipoverty efforts, welfare, human-services providers, and public-sector unions jeopardized significant gains African Americans had only recently secured in Baltimore. Not surprisingly, AFSCME leaders as well as many African Americans and urban residents nationwide hoped a Democrat in the White House would provide some relief.