Observations on Cambridge City Government under Plan E
Editor’s note. Edward A. Crane (1914-1982) was born in Cambridge of parents who had emigrated from Ireland. His father was a city police officer. Crane attended St. Mary’s Grammar and Cambridge High and Latin schools; Harvard College, from which he graduated magna cum laude; and Harvard Law School. Long interested in government, he won election to the Cambridge City Council in 1939 and served on it continuously until his retirement in 1971 except for four years’ duty in Army intelligence during World War II.
Crane was elected mayor by his City Council colleagues in 1950, 1960, 1962, and 1964. In 1951 he broke all records for number 1 votes in a Cambridge proportional representation election with 6,032. Husky and tall – 6 feet 5½ inches – he indeed stood out among his colleagues. During the more than thirteen years that John J. Curry was city manager (August 1952–January 1966), Crane wielded such political power that he was commonly regarded as "boss" of the city, although he preferred the title of "leader."
Crane’s informal talk, delivered on May 31, 1977, has been edited from a tape recording.
BACK in my high school days, Friday night was the big night out. That was when you could go up to the Beech Street Bungalow or some other place and get involved with the dance. My father allowed me to go out on Tuesday nights, instead of Friday nights, because he knew I wanted to get down to the gallery of the City Hall and watch the Council meetings. They used to start at eight o’clock, and God knows when they would finish. But I would be getting home-fourteen years old, in high school-about midnight, two o’clock, whenever Dan Leahy or Pat Delaney or somebody else finished.
I can remember very well listening to those people talk. Then in the morning I’d see the old Boston Post, which was owned and operated by the Grozier family that lived across the street here on Brattle, Edwin Grozier and later his son Richard. The Post would always have the latest news on what happened in Cambridge. One of their staff, John Murphy, had a regular assignment. His job, at one o’clock every morning, was to come out to Harvard Square, pick up a Boston Post at the news stand by the subway kiosk, and take it up to the Grozier home. One of the Groziers would be waiting for that copy. He’d read it, and at three o’clock he’d call in and tell the editors whether he wanted them to replate or change anything for the next edition. That’s the way the Post used to stay right up on top of things. Whatever the Cambridge City Council was discussing, there was usually a roll call. The vote, as reported in the Boston Post, was always 14 to 1, Drinkwater dissenting. That was Arthur Drinkwater over the years.
In the 1930s, before there was any talk of Plan E, we had the Cambridge Taxpayers’ Association. They were concerned about efficiency and economy in government. The executive director was Eliot Spalding, later the editor of the Cambridge Chronicle. Stoughton Bell was chairman. I can remember being at the City Council when Stoughton Bell was the only fellow who would stand up and oppose increases in spending, when they had the depression and all in the mid-’30s. And they still wanted to be taking care of everybody with other people’s money. Not many members of the Taxpayers’ Association are still around, but I see one of them here tonight, Dr. David C. Dow, Jr., who followed in his father’s footsteps as city medical examiner. And, of course, Arthur Drinkwater on the City Council was an advocate of efficiency in government. As you know, Arthur still makes his daily pilgrimage in to his Boston office. I don’t know whether he’s 96 or 97. He’s not the oldest living graduate of Harvard College, but I think he must be the oldest who’s still ambulatory.
When I graduated from high school and went to Harvard I concentrated in government. In my sophomore year-this was 1932-I decided to compete for the Baldwin Prize. They gave us five essay titles; one was "The Law and Practice of Proportional Representation." I didn’t know what proportional representation meant, but my tutor at that time, who was an import from Wisconsin for one year, said, "That would be a very interesting subject for you, Crane." So I was off and running into P.R. And I wrote the essay. I got a hundred dollars for the essay in 1932. Then my tutor in senior year said, "Well, Crane, what you ought to do is take that essay on P.R. and expand it now into a case study of Cambridge, Mass." So that became my senior thesis. So I’ve lived with P.R. and the city manager form of government for a long time.
As some of you know, we had some rough times over the years, and I don’t want to get into personalities, because at the Historical Society I should be objective. So I’ll just fall back on some of the old savings of my professors. I figure my Harvard education was wrapped up in about five quotes. At least, it was in the government department.
William Bennett Munro used to say, "You have to have bad government to get good government." This was the pendulum swing, and if you put up with something long enough, the pendulum would swing the other way. Then the question came up, "Well, what is good government and what’s bad government?" Some fellow pointed out that good government is the type that puts my relatives on the payroll. We can’t always agree on what is good government, but the important thing, for me, is what is good politics and what is bad politics? Arthur Holcombe used to say, "Show me men"-and I’ll amend it now-"Show me men and/or women and I’ll show you politics. Because politics consists of the acts of men and women." He said, "I don’t care whether you start with the Cambridge City Council or with Harvard University or with the American Telephone Company or with your own church, the only thing is how they’re exercising their choices." That, I think, is something that you should carry away with you. A lot of people can challenge you on what is good government; what you need is good politics.
Holcombe gave a great lecture over the years on public opinion. Some of you may be young enough to remember when Ivory Soap used to put out full-page ads saying it was "99.44% pure." And Holcombe would say, "Pure what?"
In my senior year I had one-and-a-half courses that I could take outside the government department. I took Fine Arts 1b from Edgell and Public Philosophy from Hocking. That was the nicest and best course I ever took. Ernest Hocking was married to John Boyle O’Reilly’s daughter-now that’s a good combine! And I’ll always remember this ringing in my ears, how Hocking at the finale used to send his students out from Emerson Hall with the message: "Incorporate yourself into reality by aligning yourself with the existing institutions and bending them to your way of thinking." That, to me, was the elective process.
Later on in my career my friends said, "He’s a leader." My opponents said, "He’s a boss." Munro used to say, "A leader is a boss with a college education."
Now I got into politics, as far as being a candidate is concerned, in 1939, the year after I graduated from Harvard Law School. It was in my blood. There was no antitoxin. Nobody’s found it yet, have they, David [to Dr. David Dow]? I ran for the City Council and was elected. That was under the old Plan B, with an elected mayor and fifteen elected councillors, one from each of the eleven wards and four at large. I was elected from Ward 4, the exclusive Dana Hill section. That was, as you know, between Massachusetts Avenue and Broadway, Central Square to Harvard Square. President Conant of Harvard always said, "That’s the future of Cambridge." I was unmarried then and living at the old homestead on Centre Street.
That was my first and only term on the old Plan B Council of fifteen members. The Council was split seven-to-seven, uptown versus downtown, with Ben Wyeth, the only Republican, holding the balance of power. I always loved Ben. He represented Ward 8 here, which at that time was 101% Republican. Ben could tell you who was going to be mayor of Cambridge, who was going to be president of the City Council, because lie held the balance.
Well, I certainly had a hard introduction to the City Council as far as 1940 was concerned. We had lots of troubles. We had the famous battle of the budget. We had troubles over the truck-hire business-ten councillors with trucks directly’ or indirectly on the city payroll, and the mayor telling them how to vote. You think Chicago was bad; some of you probably didn’t know what happened in Cambridge. And we had the fight over a new city charter, the Plan E charter.
The legislature had specified certain forms of government that Massachusetts cities could choose. They had Plans A, B, C, and D, and they had special charters for a few cities. But some people had been pushing for a new option, Plan E, a city manager with a council elected by proportional representation (P.R.). The only elected officials would be the councillors. They would appoint a city manager, who would serve as executive. They would also elect one of their fellow councillors to the ceremonial post of mayor.
Now about proportional representation, the father of that movement in Massachusetts was Lewis Jerome Johnson of Harvard. He was, of all things, professor of engineering; P.R. was his hobby. His greatest personal achievement, he’d point out to you, was the design and construction of the Harvard Stadium. They put it up in two parts, and it was finished within twelve months, as far as construction is concerned. Can you imagine putting up the Harvard Stadium in less than twelve months today? Lewis Johnson was trying to reform city government as far back as 1911.1 He thought proportional representation would allow minorities to be represented but that there would always be government by the majority. Now that was easy thinking in the 1920s and ’30s. Professor Johnson was still going strong in 1938 when the legislature passed a bill to make Plan E available to any city. Few people realized that he used his personal influence on Governor Charles Hurley, who lived up the street here in Larchwood. When Hurley signed the bill, he gave the pen to Johnson.
1. See his paper, "History and Meaning of the Proposed New Charter for Cambridge," Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings 6 (1911): 53-72, which advocated a nonpartisan, commission form of government with preferential voting. Johnson’s other causes of that era included Henry George’s single tax and the initiative and referendum. He helped get the latter two into the state constitution.
Right away, in 1938, local supporters picked up the ball, trying to get the plan adopted in Cambridge. They organized the Cambridge Committee for Plan E, with James Landis, the dean of Harvard Law School, as head. They had their first runout in ’38; that was like in horse races, where they have a little tightener. They tried again in 1940. The problem was to get the City Council to put the Plan E referendum on the ballot. That was another battle. The state Supreme Court, in an unusual Saturday afternoon session, finally had to order the councillors to put Plan E on the ballot. We had councillors being served warrants by sheriffs who caught up with them in the free seats they used to get for football games in the Harvard Stadium.
By that time situations were playing in favor of Plan E. I don’t have to enumerate them, and if I did I’m sure that somebody could quote me in the morning paper. But let me tell you that Cambridge was in rough shape. The pendulum had swung, and people had no trouble in voting for a new charter in 1940. So when I ran for the City Council again in 1941 it was under Plan E.
I got a kick out of one thing in that first election. You know, the people who advocated the plan were talking about having a short ballot. You wouldn’t have any elected officials; just the candidates ‘ for the Council would be on the ballot. But in that first P.R. election they turned up with a ballot with 86 Council candidates’ names on it. This was a short ballot? Under the P. R. system, as you know, you put a number in front of each candidate you want to vote for, in your order of choice. I always remember Billy Hogan, who has just retired as vice-president of the New England Telephone; he was on the ballot. One voter wrote in, alongside his name, "86," as much as to say, "This is the last guy that I want to see in the Council." And the only other mark on the ballot was a number 1 choice for a candidate who didn’t make it. So, on the transfer to the next choice the only other choice was number 86, and Hogan got that ballot. He was elected, and served with me on the Council from 1942 on.
The new Plan E Council took office in January 1942. We hired a city manager, Jack Atkinson. I voted for him. The war was on, and Atkinson was in favor of efficiency and economy – the old E and E. One of his economies was to drop two city employees. I think it’s appropriate tonight for me to read you a letter I got about that matter. The date is April 15, 1942, and it’s on the letterhead of Thomas H. Eliot, U.S. House of Representatives. Tom, as you know, is the brother of your president [Charles W. Eliot, 2nd]. I became acquainted with Tom in 1938 when he was running for the Congress against Robert Luce. Sam Stratton, now congressman from New York, and I did the research for Tom Eliot in that campaign. He didn’t make it that year, but he did in 1940. He represented the Eleventh District. We had more congressional districts then than we have now, Massachusetts being a decliner as people move out to the West Coast and down to the Southland.
"Dear Ed," the letter says, "I hope very much to see you next week." In those days congressmen used to take a train back home on weekends once in a while. "Leo Diehl is out of a job. What kind of experience has he had? Do you think of anything for which he might be fitted, and where could I help?" Leo Diehl was an unfortunate victim of polio. He’d been a representative in the General Court, which in those days paid two thousand dollars. Instead of, as they say now, "moonlighting," he used to "sunlight" by coming over and working in the Cambridge City Treasurer’s office. Then Tom Eliot asked, "Is John Droney admitted to the bar?" John Droney, you know, has been our District Attorney now for about twenty-five years. Then he says, "My very best wishes, Yours, Tom." Then comes a P. S.: "Any idea as to what kind of experience Tom O’Neill has had? What can he do? Incidentally, these men haven’t approached me. But I would be tickled to help them, if I can do so without their knowing about it in advance."
You know, it was pleasant to go down to the inauguration in Washington this year on January 20th and give O’Neill a copy of that letter. Of course he had known about it before, but I gave it to him, with Leo Diehl there. Leo is his right-hand man, his deputy. There they are, set up in the Capitol of the United States, O’Neill Speaker of the House and Diehl as his assistant, both of them once having been fired in Cambridge. They were the only two people that Atkinson fired. What happened was, with the war on, the manufacturers couldn’t produce automobiles. And Arthur McKenzie, who’s known to some of you, was a Ford dealer, and Arthur had nothing to sell. So overnight, Arthur became the City Treasurer. And the next morning Arthur fired O’Neill and Diehl. This is why the letter came up from Tom Eliot as to what he could do. So you see, there was a Democrat who had a nice, balanced blend of heart and head. When I showed him the letter, O’Neill just said to me, "That Tom Eliot, he was always a hell of a guy."
Let me say that there were only two people that I know of in my lifetime, people that I could call by their first names, who I thought were capable of making the White House under the circumstances that exist today. One was Tom Eliot, and the other was Jack Kennedy. So I’m batting five hundred. Tom Eliot, you know, made his big gamble in 1942 after they had a gerrymander of the congressional districts. The new district included East Boston and the West End and Charlestown. It turned out that James Michael Curley, sitting in his living room over there on the Jamaicaway, looked the new district over and said to himself, "I always topped the ticket in those places." He didn’t even live in the district, but he decided he was going to throw his name in there. And Tom decided to take him on in the primary. It was a very close contest, one of those 25,000 to 22,000 things. If Tom Eliot had got over that hurdle I think I would have been batting for a thousand. And you [to Charles Eliot] might have been the Secretary of State. Jack made Bobby the Attorney General, you know. [Eliot: "We don’t have family business that way."] It’s all under the table, eh?
But let’s get back to the city government under proportional representation. From 1942 on we’ve had coalition governments. We never had any such thing as a pure working majority as far as Cambridge was concerned. If you were going to get a common denominator and put five Cambridge City Councillors into it, it would have to go from here to Hawaii and bank again, because it just doesn’t exist. That was true even of the first Council in 1942. They held a meeting but they couldn’t elect a mayor. Then they had a luncheon at one of the hotels. Billy Hogan came over and tugged at my shirt and said, "Look, you get me that vice-mayor’s vote from John Corcoran and I’ll vote to make him mayor." That’s how we came up with Corcoran as the first mayor under the Plan E charter. This is what goes on behind the scenes.
Over the years there have been plenty of delays and deadlocks. People say, "What the hell’s the matter with those councillors? There are nine of them. You put them in a room, and can’t five of them agree on a councillor for mayor?" That’s not the easiest thing. There’s a lot more than just a title to being mayor. There’s more than the headache of being chairman of the School Committee. When I became mayor I inherited two Cadillacs from my predecessors. And you get a full tank of gas all the time; you get a driver. You can put in your two first cousins once removed as the secretaries and put somebody else on the switchboard. They give the mayor a couple of thousand dollars extra over the regular councillors now. So the whole thing wraps up to about $25,000. They’re rolling dice for $25,000 down there.
That’s why I was always proud that in 1949, six weeks in advance of inauguration, the papers printed a picture of five councillors shaking hands and agreeing that they were going to make Crane the mayor. That was for 1950-1951. Then I went off to my happy honeymoon, and I came back to my happy first term as mayor. In 1951 1 topped the ticket, because everything was going fine. But that was the only time that I was ever happy as mayor. I was mayor from 1960 through 1965, but I was strictly the back-end mayor. And I’ll tell you why.
What happened in 1960-1965 was that the newly elected Council would meet for about three weeks and nobody could get five votes. Then Al Vellucci would decide, "Well, Crane can win, so we’ll make him mayor and he can’t cash in." If they picked the fellow from the bottom, the ninth man, say, he might use the mayor’s title to draw more votes in the next election and knock one of them out. So they took the fellow that they figured was going to win and wasn’t going to be a candidate for reelection as mayor. It just postponed the inevitable for two years.
There were a lot of nice little things that went on. One time when they were going to make me the mayor, Vellucci announced, "The next ballot there’s going to be a mayor." One of the councillors knew who was going to change his vote, and he said right outright, "Don’t you vote for that Irish son-of-a-bitch!" You know, there’s a little feuding and fussing in the background of some of these people, and it carries on and it’s an unfortunate thing. But I tell you that the stakes are high, not only as far as the mayor’s job is concerned but also for the more important thing, which is the selection of the city manager.
Plan E is not only proportional representation; it’s also the council-manager form of government. The statute says, "The manager serves at the pleasure of the City Council." So obviously the most important thing in Cambridge is electing a Council who can pick or appoint a city manager who will serve at their discretion. The city manager is supposed to be the administrator. But when he has to do everything that the elected officers want him to do you lose the real benefit of the Plan E charter. And Cambridge has gone from minority representation and government by majority to having really what amounts now to nine mayors.
Everybody now is acclimated to the P.R. system of voting. The councillors know about laying in a base of number 1 votes. And as long as they’ve got their 7 or 8 percent of the votes they can tell anybody else to go to hell. And that’s what they do. They represent sent the various groups, economic or political or ethnic or sexual. I don’t care whether you go by creed or what; this thing has even separated the Irish, if you can believe that. You take your minority; if they have any substantial group, that minority is represented in Cambridge. I’ve witnessed all these waves, ethnic and other. I started, obviously, from the Irish side; they’d say that I was a bridge-builder. Then I saw the Italians come into the Council. I saw the women come into the Council. My God, sex was something. Then we had color in the Council, and all the rest of it. It was nice to see and meet and survive all of these thrusts. But I can tell you, when you have that conglomeration it’s pretty hard to knit together what I refer to as a common denominator, so that you have a government that can govern. That’s what William Yandell Elliott at Harvard used to say: "You know, gentlemen, the first basic is to get a government that can govern." You’ve got to have somebody who can give you the answers.
John Hynes, the late mayor of Boston, said to me the only criticism he had of the Plan E city manager form of government was that it didn’t have the leadership. Plato used to say that you have to get the combination of the elected leader and the king philosopher or philosopher king. You don’t get those people at City Hall, or any other place, if you have to grind yourself out through the P.R. system of voting.
I’m just going to read a little bit out of a thesis here, because I think it kind of capsules what was going on in Cambridge in the thirty years that I’m covering, 1941 through 1971.
Cambridge’s council-manager experience was initially marked by two stable administrations. The administration of John Atkinson lasted for ten years, and ended because of Atkinson’s personal clashes with the majority of the Council. [He didn’t have the support of five councillors.] His early years in the job were applauded by many citizens since the tax rate was reduced. [This was in World War II, of course, and there wasn’t much effort for patronage in those days; they could all go down to the shipyards.] John Curry’s reign ... [That’s pretty good, "reign"; I get a little subconscious inference there.] John Curry’s reign lasted thirteen years. He was fired when a majority of the Council revolted against the considerable power which had been acquired by their colleague, Councillor Edward Crane. During Curry’s administration the tax rate did not increase significantly and new public buildings were constructed.
All I can say is that I was very much aware of the fact that people used to identify John Curry with me. He was my tutor back when I was taking college boards. I always told people, "My name is on the ballot every two years, and if you don’t like the way I’m operating down at City Hall you can throw me out. But I’m telling you this, that the people who elect me expect me to be effective." I’m saying this not from my personal standpoint but for any councillor, I don’t care whether it’s Bob Moncreiff or Dan Clinton or Barbara Ackermann. The people who vote number 1 for those councillors expect them to be effective. When councillors go down to City Hall and find that they’re being pushed aside and put on the junior varsity, well, obviously they’re going to look around and see what kind of a coalition they can get into where they’re not going to be on the junior varsity. Because, you know, everybody likes to get on the varsity.
I have been told that one of my omissions or mistakes was not voting in 1968 for Jim Sullivan, your present city manager. In fact, Bernie Goldberg, who cast one of the five votes that elected Sullivan, held up the Council meeting for an hour because he wanted to get Crane to vote for Sullivan, figuring it would bring a little unity. I said, "I have run no research on the man. He called me. I was the first one to notify the Council that he was a candidate.` Let me say this, he was available. You know, you can say "position seeks the man" or "man seeks the position." Certainly, moving over from executive secretary of the Milton selectmen at $15,000 to Cambridge city manager at $30,000 was a step up. I did not vote for Jim Sullivan, but I was happy to have him be the city manager. The last thing that I would do would be to get involved with him because I was ready to get out. I had settled my scores on the Curry-De Guglielmo situation.2 As Elliot Richardson said, "The best tribunal has spoken." And that was the people, when they elected five councillors to bring about the removal of De Guglielmo in 1968.
2. When the City Council in 1966 voted to remove John Curry as city manager, it replaced him by Joseph A. De Guglielmo, a former city councillor and mayor. Crane was active in the campaign that led to De Guglielmo’s removal two years later.-Ed.
And so I stayed out of this thing completely in 1968, as far as the manager was concerned. Then, two years later, the Council voted to remove Sullivan. I was one of those who voted to remove. Professor Louis Loss of the Harvard Law School calls me up and says, "Ed, what happened?" I said, "It’s a personality clash." You don’t spell the whole thing out.
My biggest regret now is that I didn’t spell out what happened in the Jim Sullivan situation. Here’s how it went. Sullivan came down with nominees for the Housing Authority and for the Redevelopment Authority. They had to be confirmed by the City Council. The last two names that he submitted were not confirmed. So then he asked for an executive hearing in the mayor’s office. This is what happens in practical politics. The mayor called the Council in, and Jim Sullivan told us, "Look, I’m not going to embarrass anybody further." This was like the president sending in somebody’s name for ambassador; if the Senate is going to kick him out you don’t put him up in public and give him a real knock-out. So they kicked it around for about two hours. I was just sitting back, the old pro, as they would say, the voice of experience. I said, "Now look, this is very simple. When you have somebody that you want confirmed by this Council for the Housing Authority or the Redevelopment Authority, all you do is make sure between that nominee and yourself that you have five votes for confirmation."
So two weeks went by, and I got a call on a Thursday morning. It was Jim Sullivan. He asked me if I would vote to confirm A and B. I said, "Look, I don’t have any personal interest, but I know those people, I have no reason not to vote for them, and if you submit their names I’ll vote for them." Thursday p.m. he called up and told me, "We have five votes now for A and B." I said, "That’s fine, Jim."
Monday night I went into the Council meeting. They have a supplemental addendum if there are any last-minute changes. Sure enough, there was one. Instead of A and B, whom I had been pressed to support, it comes up with the names of Y and Z. So when that happens, you decide that you are on the junior varsity. And Councillor Thomas Coates across the chamber calls out, "Edward, you didn’t know that they had a meeting Sunday night, and they were going to challenge on the five votes." So we accepted the challenge, and that’s what happened. But when you get that kind of a thing, you have to do something. So I just sat up there in the hearings on removing the city manager and listened to what was said and voted to replace. I do regret that I didn’t spell out my reasons, but I just ask any of you how you would feel if you were in business, and you and the board of directors and everybody decided that you were going to appoint A and B, and then, without any further consultation, you get Y and Z. At that time you start to realize that you must be back in kindergarten. And in politics, I can tell you that nobody who goes through an election wants to end up in kindergarten.
Now there have been some changes in Cambridge, obviously. I see some people here who were very devoted supporters of the CCA or, as I call it, the former CCA.3 They gave of their time and their effort and their finances. The CCA that we knew was really a different organization. I left the CCA on two grounds. In 1966 I was asked to sign a pledge that I would vote for anybody for mayor who was nominated by three of the five CCA councillors. In other words, if there was a majority you had to go along with it. Well, when somebody says to me, after twenty-five years in public office, "You’ve got to sign a pledge," I say, "I’ll see you later." All I think that you can expect of any candidate is that they’re going to use their own God-given judgment, and you know what their past is.
3. The Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), which grew out of the Cambridge Committee for Plan E, was organized in 1945; Crane was one of the charter members. Its most important function has been to endorse a group of candidates in the biennial, nonpartisan City Council elections. Over the years CCA candidates have sometimes won five of the nine seats, but more often only four. Their opponents, known as the independents, have only recently formed an organized bloc.-Ed.
The second thing came in 1969. It was the last time I was a candidate. I was endorsed by the CCA, and then, on election eve, the CCA decided that they were going to shift to a position in favor of rent control. I told the president, John Moot, that I would be the first to shoot or hang a gouger up on Cambridge Common, as far as some of these landlords were concerned, but that we had had only one case of gouging reported to City Hall in one year, and if he felt that the CCA should endorse rent control he could remove me from their list of endorsed candidates.
So they read me out of the party, after thirty years. I don’t feel bad about it; in fact, I’d like to have a drink with them. They referred to me as the bridge-builder. I remember saying to one of them who was very devoted-he was the best fundraiser in the CCA-"When they blew out that bridge in 1966 there were damned few people that threw out a life-saver to me in the middle of the river." He said, "Ed, they all knew you could swim." I said, "Yes, and I ended up on the left bank."
To finish out, I would just say that the stable thirteen-year period when John Curry was city manager was followed by a seven-year period in which Cambridge government was administered by three permanent managers and one acting manager. We had two managers in twenty-five years, and then we had five managers in five years. Boy, I’m telling you, this is chaos. During this period the Cambridge tax rate more than doubled. Of course, people don’t worry about tax rates now; they figure they can take it as a deduction or something else.
Concurrent with this has been the expression in the Cambridge political process of two opposing philosophies. And I think this is very important. One outlook is that of service-demanding, personality-oriented adherents. That is what I call the bread-and-butter people. They’re with you because they expect to get a job. Then you have the other type of people who see politics as issues and programs. The CCA, Cambridge’s largest political organization, symbolizes this latter political attitude, as it focuses on "good government" and a "liberal program."
The emergence of the CCA as a distinctly liberal organization has only occurred since the beginning of the unstable period, in 1966. This was the late ‘60s when everything was sack the building and bust and strike and all the rest of it as far as the universities were concerned. During the stable period, the CCA concentrated on the tax rate and the forces influencing the tax rate. They were content with the manager if the tax rate didn’t rise sharply. Evidence of the CCA’s liberalization was shown during the Curry dismissal when it was revealed that one of the councillors, formerly known as a CCA purist, had criticized Curry – now get this – for lowering the tax rate unnecessarily. You see how things work around. This criticism would not have occurred during the stable years, when the CCA’s main focus was the good-government goals of economy and efficiency.
As the CCA became increasingly liberal, the inherent conflict of the underlying political attitudes became manifest in the political process. As a consequence of this division, the manager has been placed – and I say this out of respect for James Sullivan or anybody else who would serve in that place in Cambridge – in a very precarious position. He is subject to the demands of both political sides: the independents who want services and patronage, and the CCA that wants the development of liberal programs and policies. The manager must try to strike a compromise between the competing demands, and in doing so he can only make enemies. The product of Cambridge’s political climate is that the manager cannot assume a low profile. Even his routine administrative chores place him in the middle of political feuds. The independents want to know who is going to get the job, and the CCA people want to know why they have to have the job.
Furthermore, under the present council-manager system, the manager has no political base. He does not answer to the people of Cambridge. Theoretically, he answers to nine individual councillors; in practice, he answers to only five. Under the present charter, the manager is supposedly an administrator. But in reality he makes political rather than administrative decisions. To gain legitimacy he should be subject to the elective process. The chief executive making political decisions without a political base has proven to be a destabilizing force in the operation of Cambridge government. Presently, the city manager is supposed to be divorced from politics. In Cambridge that is impossible.
I just want to make a pitch for 1965, when I really left Cambridge public life, because we thought at that time that we had achieved the Periclean Age. After five years of a frozen tax rate, the rate was reduced. Now I know you can’t judge the government by tax rates; I could fool around with the tax rate and vary it ten dollars for anybody. But we’ve had this town-and-gown business in Cambridge over the years. Here, in 1965, the city was going to build two schools. One was the Martin Luther King School, down on Putnam Avenue. The architect commissioned for the King School was José Sert, who was retiring as dean of the School of Design at Harvard. He had just finished the gardens across the way and the Peabody Terrace; we felt that the two things would blend together. Then we had the Tobin School, up here near Concord Avenue. Pietro Belluschi, who had served as chairman of a committee on public buildings, was retiring as dean of M.I.T.’s School of Architecture. He was asked and accepted the commission to be the architect of the Tobin School.
So, with the two retiring deans of Harvard and M.I.T. taking commissions to put up two five-million-dollar public schools in Cambridge, I felt we had just about got the Periclean Age. The next thing that happened was that the government was changed. So everybody should stay in there and keep trying.
Excerpted from "Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings, 1976-1979", pages 87-103.