The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  In 1962 she proclaimed loudly that this year she was backing me, and at the grand ball she presented me to her group as the savior of the Democratic party. It was a love feast, and I reveled in her friendliness and lively spirits. After the dinner and before the dancing to a nine-piece orchestra started, Josephine and her managers met with me and my people in a back room to discuss her demands, which were forthright: ‘A seat for one of my people on the school board, the use of a pickup truck, a new traffic light at the corner near the Catholic Church, and three hundred fifty dollars for my workers on election day.’ I agreed to everything and then drove north to attend a much larger meeting of my supporters in the Allentown end of my district, but as we passed through the sleeping villages whose votes we hoped for, I allowed myself a flush of enthusiasm: ‘Well, we built our bridges in Bensalem,’ but my cautious manager said: ‘Don’t count those chickens till the returns come in.’

  On Tuesday night when the vote was announced I was appalled to hear that it was 816 for my opponent, 7 for me. When I stormed about to learn what had happened, my manager told me: ‘It was those dirty Republicans. Their people got to Josephine late Monday night and promised her a seat on the school board, use of a truck, a new traffic light and three hundred fifty dollars for her workers.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what we promised her,’ and he said: ‘True, but they threw in four hundred feet of used sewer pipe.’

  Not long thereafter I was felled by a major illness and as I lay in the hospital frightened and dispirited, my nurse said: ‘Doctor told me you were to have no phone calls, but this woman insists and she made such a fuss …’ It was Josephine Morris, of the Bensalem Loyal Democrats: ‘Jim! We’re all praying for you. You’re one of the finest men we’ve ever worked with and we need you. The whole country needs you. Jim, our club is one thousand percent behind you, like always.’

  When I hung up I started to laugh, recalling the night of that formal ball and the florid speeches and negotiating meetings afterward, and my laughter became so robust that the doctor came in to see what was the matter. I believe that my recovery started from that moment.

  There was one final encounter with Josephine and her Loyals, one that I cherish. Later when I ran for an entirely different office, she called: ‘Jim, we haven’t seen you for too long, and we still love you. On Saturday afternoon next week we’re throwing a gala picnic at the park, and our members agreed a hundred percent that they wanted you as guest of honor, because in this coming vote we’re behind you one thousand percent, like always.’

  Johnny Welsh, our acerbic county leader, drove me to the picnic, and I think even he must have been impressed by the wellspring of good wishes that engulfed me and the promises of undying support for my campaign. Josephine delivered a stately oration about the good I had done their party, and it was about as fine an accolade as any aspiring politican could have, but when, on the drive home, I said: ‘Johnny, regardless of what she did to me in the past, an affair like that is damned touching,’ he growled: ‘Don’t be sentimental, Jim.’

  ‘Why not? She wouldn’t dare poleax me this time. Not after what she just said.’

  ‘Jim! Have you looked up a map of the new voting districts? Josephine and I studied them last month. You’re not running in her district anymore, and she knows it.’

  The position for which I was running in that race exemplifies a truth about my political career. I ran five times for various jobs, lost two, won three, but the rule was: ‘Whenever the job had a salary, I lost. When it was honorary, I won.’ This time it was a nonpaying job, but it was of supreme importance: we were going to try to revise the entire constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in an effort to bring its archaic components into the twentieth century and put the state in a strong position to face the twenty-first. I was elected to serve as a delegate, and when I met for the first time with the others I saw what a sterling group of men and women had been chosen for this task: Governor Scranton led the Republicans; two future governors were among us—Dick Thornburgh the Republican, Bob Casey the Democrat—several federal judges who would have lifetime appointments and numerous businessmen who would later manage large companies. It was a strong contingent, some of the women being especially able, but we were all well aware that every other major state that had tried to revise its constitution had failed: New York, Texas, Michigan, and nearby Maryland. We were determined not to fail.

  The success of our effort stemmed largely, I believe, from the sagacious leadership given by Bill Scranton, as fine a politician as I would ever know. He told his Republican cohorts: ‘Yes, we do have a slight majority, and we can bull this thing through pretty much as we wish, but the Democrats have some of the feistiest infighters around, and they’ll be able to tie us in knots and ensure our defeat when we take our results to the electorate for approval.’ He prevailed upon his team to award us Democrats an absolutely fair share of all the administrative jobs in the convention, and as a consequence we worked as an unreachable team, laboring through endless sessions to hammer out one of nation’s best state constitutions.

  As a result of Scranton’s decision to share all important posts, I became secretary of the convention and in that official position worked diligently to find compromises between differing attitudes in the general debate, but as a private delegate I helped lead the fight for a more liberal, well-defined and strong government. I had come to Harrisburg, our state capital, hoping to help achieve five reforms: choose judges by merit selection rather than by chaotic elections in which voters knew none of the candidates; reduce the size of the legislature, which was preposterously large; abolish meaningless row offices, such as lay coroner and prothonotary; eliminate the ridiculous system whereby justices of the peace with no legal training were paid out of the fines they assessed; and tax property held by churches but not used for religious purposes.

  I had studied the last problem as it had existed in Tudor England, in prerevolutionary France, in Rumania and especially in Mexico. In each of these countries the unceasing accumulation of property held in mortmain by churches had led to revolution and I wanted steps to be taken now to avoid that peril. One night, in a startling move, the convention voted to correct this impropriety. As we filed from the hall a small, wiry man with an agitated countenance stopped me and snarled: ‘All right. You won tonight, but tomorrow morning the God-squad is going attack you so hard you’ll never know what hit you,’ and he must have been busy on the telephone all night, for at seven next morning my phone and those of the other delegates began ringing furiously, and by the time we convened at nine Harrisburg was filled with more church lobbyists than we had known existed.

  With great force the God-squad moved in on us, swamping us with cajolery, protests and threats of excommunication if we did not immediately revoke the decision we had reached the night before. I, as secretary of the convention, was so heavily targeted that by eleven o’clock I saw that unless I signaled for retreat, I was going to be relentlessly persecuted. By noon the offending proposal had been killed, and I, among others, learned what could be altered in American life and what could not. In similar fashion I lost my other major battles: judges would be elected, the row offices would remain and the legislature would continue to be the largest in the nation by a wide margin. Only one of my proposed reforms was approved: we got rid of more than five hundred untrained justices of the peace living on their fees, and replaced them with salaried legal experts who have served the state well.

  Despite my lost crusades, I consider the work I did in helping Pennsylvania move into the modern age the best single thing I have accomplished in my life. I attended every minute of every session, labored to hold disparate elements together, and at dusk retired wearily to my quarters, where my wife would have eight or ten of the delegates, a different group each night, for those impassioned discussions that seemed a mature continuation of my Angell Club meetings. Then, when everyone else was in bed, I would sit at my typewriter putting down my recollection
s of that day; the pages proliferated; they told a straightforward story of how a group of ordinary men and women struggled to organize their society. I left them on file somewhere; perhaps in the next century they can be recovered and edited by someone knowledgeable about politics, for I should be proud to have them in print. Few readers would be interested in them, but anyone who has ever labored in politics would recognize the way events and procedures evolve.

  Certain events at the convention loom large in my memory. When the seating was arranged alphabetically so that Republicans and Democrats could not cluster and be tempted to form party-line cliques, I was seated next to a Mrs. Miller from Pittsburgh, who seemed not to know what was going on. Democrats from her region came by now and then to tell her how to vote, and she seemed always to listen and smile. Members of my team whispered: ‘Jim, keep an eye on Mrs. Miller, and when a really important vote comes along and she isn’t looking, reach over and pull her toggle switch in favor of the vote we want.’ I said that this seemed improper, but they pointed out: ‘If you don’t tell her what to do, someone else will.’

  Only twice did I activate Mrs. Miller’s toggle, and on both occasions the vote was critical, but I was beginning to receive some very harsh questionings about votes I was casting because they seemed contrary to what my spoken positions had been. I said: ‘Impossible! I never cast any vote on that proposal! And certainly not a nay.’ Then we found that during a vote, when I was attending to my secretarial matters, Mrs. Miller was pulling my toggle, and also the one to her left, whenever she got the chance.

  When the leatherette handbooks of the convention were distributed I learned what a shrewd politician this Mrs. Miller, the frumpy housewife from Pittsburgh, really was, for whereas I simply accepted my copy graciously, glad to get the permanent roster of the delegates, she sent pages scurrying about picking up stray copies until she had about forty. When I asked her what she was going to do with them, she explained: ‘I’ve been getting reelected without opposition for thirty years. I understand politics. I’ll mail one of these to each of my district helpers and word the letter so it sounds as if I had personally paid for them, just so they could have a record of what I’ve been doing.’

  One of my defeats had tragic consequences. Throughout the convention I pleaded for our new constitution to contain a code of ethics, but the professional delegates pooh-poohed this condescendingly: ‘Part-time amateurs don’t really understand the workings of a full-time legislature. No code of ethics is necessary.’ I then begged for at least a statement recommending that any legislator when proposing a bill or supporting it be encouraged to reveal any conflict of interest that might disqualify him: ‘After he has stated his possible conflict, he can still vote for the bill, but the general body will know how to evaluate his vote.’ This was rejected with hoots.

  Within two years three delegates who had been the most outspoken in ridiculing my proposals fell into the precise traps against which I had been warning. One of the most distinguished Democrats suffered statewide humiliation when it was revealed that he had been vigorously supporting a proposal in which he had a strong but secret vested interest. A handsome, bright young Republican who was being heavily touted as a future governor was caught sponsoring legislation favoring a concern in which he too had a secret interest. Scandal ensued and there was no more talk of a governorship. Saddest of all was the case of the actual leader of the Democratic contingent to the legislature. He was caught in what amounted to selling favors and went to jail. I still believe that frank admission of personal interest prior to a vote is the way to handle such conflicts, and I am increasingly respectful of that unusual verb ‘to recuse,’ as in: ‘He recused himself,’ meaning that the official responsible for a decision, most often a judge, realized that in decency he ought to disqualify himself in this or that case because he has a personal interest and cannot render a just verdict.

  If one reviews the printed minutes of our convention, one will see numerous instances in which I was opposed, rebuked and in one instance vilified. And, of course, I lost the major battles, so for me the sessions were hardly a success. But when the time came to appoint a small, powerful committee to supervise the implementation of the changes we had imposed, the leaders of both parties agreed that I should be the chairman, and I spent the better part of a year attending to those fascinating details. I thus spent about two full years discharging my civic duties and I doubt that I ever in my life was occupied with a more meaningful task, and when someone today chides me for my political naïveté I smile and think: Sonny, I wrestled with the God-squad and that’s education enough.

  In the 1970s Arthur Miller and I helped organize a small committee to protest the sorry abuses suffered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) since it fell into the hands of a willful and destructive minority. Our complaints were threefold: the organization was attacking the basis of free speech and a free press by demanding that reporters covering Third World nations be licensed by those nations in an effort to prevent adverse reporting; it had fallen captive to the Arab nations, who were using their voting strength to outlaw Israel and bar her from UNESCO operations; and it had allowed itself to become a platform for the most virulent and untruthful anti-American propaganda.

  Miller and I had a long meeting in New York with the head of UNESCO, Amadou M’Bow of Senegal, who had shown a visceral anti-Americanism. Although he did listen with a bored expression as we outlined our anxieties, when we were finished he dismissed us as though we were a pair of schoolboys. It was frustrating that he had not attended seriously to any of our complaints and humiliating that we had been so abruptly rejected. As we left I said: ‘Secretary M’Bow, if your organization persists in its present actions, you must realize that sooner or later if the United States is incessantly insulted we’ll stop paying dues and even withdraw from UNESCO.’ He replied that we were obligated by international law to pay the dues and that UNESCO formulated its own policies. In fairness I must also add that he said he could not see how anything done so far could justify the United States’ even thinking of resigning.

  I was now so deeply involved in this issue that when an international conference was convened in Paris, I flew over to join Isaac Stern and Arthur Rubenstein as members of the American delegation, but again we accomplished nothing, and after the sessions ended, UNESCO under the leadership of M’Bow continued its vigorous anti-American policies; it worked for suppression of freedom of the press; and its attitude toward Israel was disgusting.

  Much later when our government developed the same distaste for UNESCO that I had experienced for a decade, a committee was appointed to advise the president on whether or not our country should resign from UNESCO and cease paying dues to an organization that continued to vilify us, and because of my long-term interest, I was invited to serve. This committee, headed by the able president of the University of South Carolina, James Holderman, started its sessions by reviewing every logical reason why we should remain in UNESCO, and the evidence was persuasive that we should. It did wonderful work in designating cultural treasures that should be protected. Its publications on out-of-the-way sites that enriched world art were handsome. Its work in education in Third World nations was commendable, and even the most jaundiced critic had to admit that its accomplishments in the field of art were not trivial.

  But I was one of the delegates unable to ignore the evil done by looking at the good. Perhaps I had been unduly influenced by Secretary M’Bow’s insolent behavior; perhaps I was overreacting to the insults heaped upon my country in the UNESCO debates; and perhaps I placed too much emphasis on the manner in which UNESCO fought to ostracize Israel; and perhaps I was culpable in other ways I did not recognize, but one thing was certain: I wanted the United States to withdraw from UNESCO and stop paying large annual fees to an agency that was abusing not only us but also the world’s free press and Israel’s just rights. I so testified, and persistently at every meeting of our commission, but
several of the other members whom I admired most, such as Leonard Marks, the international specialist on broadcasting, argued that we remain members and pay our dues.

  When I was again sent to Paris as a member of the presidential committee to monitor a plenary session of UNESCO I obtained a much more serious hearing than I had the first time I went there. This time I met a cadre of Secretary M’Bow’s able young assistants from Third World nations who now had high-paying jobs in Paris with lavish expense accounts, and I found them as enjoyable companions as any I had known since my Navy days. They were bright, savvy, eager and completely aware that if my country stopped paying its dues, they might lose their cushy assignments. The reasons they gave me, over fine dinners, for the United States to overlook these past dissatisfactions were not only relevant but also persuasive, and had I remained under their influence for long I suspect I might have been dissuaded from my intentions. But when I studied the actual operation of UNESCO and saw how almost every aspect of its functioning was weighted unfairly against the United States, I became doubly offended. Secretary M’Bow, learning from his aides of my continued dissatisfaction, invited me through them to discuss whatever complaints I had, but remembering our earlier meetings, I had no desire to do so. I feared his primary interest would be to preserve his job and its luxurious amenities.

  When I left Paris it was clear to me that our commission members who favored remaining in UNESCO outnumbered and outweighed in influence those of us who wished to withdraw, so as soon as I reached home I put aside all other work and drafted a carefully reasoned ten-page letter summarizing the reasons why we should leave. I marshaled a specific and devastating indictment of UNESCO as it was operating under M’Bow. The letter was widely distributed, and when the president finally announced our withdrawal, many who had been in the fight wrote to tell me that I had helped convince Washington that what they had wanted to do from the beginning had been correct.