Cities: Poor No More

“Goddammit,” roared Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, “they’re kicking the hell out of us!” The Windy City’s plain-spoken boss was referring not to Republicans, but to underprivileged citizens who might ordinarily be among his most loyal supporters were it not for a delayed time bomb built into the $2.3 billion war on poverty that has repeatedly brought the Democratic program into conflict with big-city Democratic machines.

Cascading Dollars. The fuse is a section of the 1964 Economic Opportunities Act requiring that local programs be “developed, conducted and administered with the maximum feasible participation of the groups served”—meaning the poor. Now that the Federal Government is cascading $30 million a week in anti-poverty funds into 2,000 U.S. communities, the poor have power.

Chicago’s poor are waging a bitter offensive against Daley, who has maintained iron control over the $21 million that the city has received so far. Daley’s 75-member Committee on Urban Opportunity (chairman: Richard Daley) is securely ballasted in favor of city hall. Last week, presiding over a banquet celebrating the first anniversary of his anti-poverty board, the mayor grandly ignored pickets from the Woodlawn Organization, a militant neighborhood action group, parading outside to protest its exclusion from the parent body. To charges that wardheelers dominate his program, Daley retorted: “What’s wrong with the politician, if the politician is conducting his office in a proper manner?”

“Empire Building.” In Newark, N.J., Democratic Mayor Hugh Addonizio has been locked in struggle with the United Community Corporation, the agency that took control of the city’s anti-poverty program. When Addonizio warned the U.C.C. against “empire building,” its president, Rutgers Law Dean C. Willard Heckel, vowed that the agency “would alter the power structure of the city.” Many politicians fear that is no idle boast. In Los Angeles, it took the Watts riots to persuade Democratic Mayor Samuel Yorty to accept even seven representatives of “disadvantaged” areas on his 35-member poverty board.

In a recent report on the anti-poverty program, the U.S. Conference of Mayors charged that lack of “coordination” has “caused serious concern among those who have worked hard to develop umbrella-type agencies at the local level”—a not-so-subtle hint that the bosses want less interference from amateurs. Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, is not about to abandon the concept of participation by the poor, not only because it is the law, but also because of his conviction that politicians and the deprived can work constructively together—as they have done successfully in Detroit, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and elsewhere.

“Class Warfare.” Last May, 13,495 Philadelphia poor elected councils to help administer the program in each of a dozen slum neighborhoods. “Poverty Pocket G” in north-central Philadelphia is now supervised by three whites and nine Negroes from the neighborhood, who serve without pay.

Nevertheless, the Administration has been caught in angry crossfire between warring city factions, and Poverty Czar Shriver is under pressure from President Johnson to calm the storm. Two weeks ago, Shriver killed a controversial research project that OEO had financed at Syracuse University. The program, aimed at encouraging the poor to promote their own interests more vigorously, was canceled after federal funds were used 1) to transport mobs to heckle Republican Mayor William Walsh during his re-election campaign, and 2) to bail demonstrators out of jail. Declared Walsh: “This program from its inception has tried to promote class warfare. Its concept, its purpose and its methods are completely alien to our American way of life.”

The trouble in many cases is that some administrators seem to believe that the war on poverty begins at home. Last month OEO held up further funds to Boston pending an investigation of charges that 130 less-than-deprived youths collected $25,000 in wages last summer on anti-poverty projects. In New York City, Livingston Wingate, executive director of Harlem’s HARYOU-ACT youth agency, stepped down at least temporarily from his regular duties last week, ostensibly to work full time on the agency’s books. Official audits have not yet been completed, but HARYOU reportedly is unable to account for up to $2,000,000 of the funds it has received in the past year.