Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Joyce knew even before he returned to Chicago that the first person he would contact was Leo Mahon. Fifty-four years old at the time of Tom’s call, Mahon had been pastor of St. Victor Roman Catholic Church in Calumet City, the first suburb just south of Chicago’s southeastern city limits, since 1975. Mahon had been ordained a priest of the Chicago archdiocese in 1951. Early on, he worked with Puerto Rican parishioners and learned Spanish while also rubbing shoulders with a young community organizer named Nicholas von Hoffman and von Hoffman’s well-known mentor, Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing. Within a few years, Mahon became head of the archdiocese’s Committee for the Spanish Speaking, which planned to start a mission in Panama. Archbishop Albert Cardinal Meyer, whom Leo adored, chose Mahon to lead it, and in early 1963 Leo left for Panama, where he spent the next twelve years.

  The San Miguelito mission flourished under Leo’s leadership, but government officials took a dim view of his pastoral defense of human rights, and pliable Catholic leaders in Panama twice put Leo on trial for heresy. After Cardinal Meyer died, in early 1965, the Vatican named St. Louis native John Patrick Cody as his successor, and Cody was far less supportive of Leo’s work. When Leo returned from Panama to Chicago in 1975, Cody, perhaps out of fear of Mahon’s possible radicalism, refused to take advantage of his Spanish and Latin American expertise and instead “exiled him” to Calumet City.

  Leo had left San Miguelito despondent, knowing that Cody’s attitude meant his long-standing expectation of becoming a bishop would come to naught, but at St. Victor Mahon found a core of energetic and committed young adult parishioners with whom he quickly bonded. Father Leo was “a breath of fresh air,” Jan Poledziewski recalled, selecting female altar servers and using the Sunday Bulletin to advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment. “He empowered laypeople” and “everyone just adored him,” Christine Gervais remembered. “He was such a charismatic person that if he asked you to do something, you just couldn’t wait to help him out.”5

  Sometime in late May 1980, Tom Joyce and Dick Poethig met Leo at St. Victor and asked him to lead a clergy effort to respond to Wisconsin’s closing. “It was quite obvious that the man to see was Leo,” Tom later explained. “Right away, within five minutes, he says, ‘Yes, we’ve got to do something about it.’” Dick Poethig remembered it similarly: “He had the right feeling, right off the bat.” The three clergymen agreed they would invite some ecumenical colleagues on both sides of the nearby Illinois–Indiana state line to an initial meeting at St. Victor on Friday, June 6.

  Come that day, sixteen clergymen and four laypeople joined the initial trio at St. Victor, and, as Joyce wrote in a memo the next day, reached “unanimous agreement that the Church or the parishes and congregations should organize in an effort to get some community say into the steel mill closings.” On June 23, nine of them again assembled at St. Victor, with Tom Joyce stating that their “only model” was the clergy response in Youngstown. He went on to say that the community deserved to have “a modernized, efficient, competitive steel industry” based upon “modernization of the present plants.” At a third meeting on July 7, they chose August 23 as the date to host “a workshop for key leadership people in the community, labor and church.” For that session, Leo emphasized that their effort must not be seen as simply pro-union but instead be “distinctly a religious response.”6

  Later on July 7, Frank Lumpkin and twenty-four other former Wisconsin workers assembled at the union hall of United Steel Workers Local 65—which represented employees at U.S. Steel’s huge but shrinking South Works—and signed a declaration that “we are tired of waiting” and that action was needed “Now.” When contractors for Chase Manhattan Bank tried on July 22 to remove the existing steel inventory, which Chase had arranged to sell for $16 million, from the Wisconsin site, angry former workers blocked the plant gates; on August 5, when contractors sought to remove a crane, the ex-workers prevented that too.7

  On Monday night, July 28, Frank Lumpkin’s group of workers, now calling themselves the Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC), were joined by Mary Gonzales, a Chicago native in her late thirties who, with her new husband, Greg Galluzzo, had begun working in the Southeast Side communities just before Wisconsin’s demise. Gonzales and Galluzzo had first met eight years earlier, when Greg was a Jesuit seminarian working for Chicago’s Pilsen Neighbors Community Council and Mary was married with several young children. By 1979, Mary was a single mother of three daughters and Greg was leaving the priesthood, and late that year Mary was hired by the Latino Institute as director of advocacy while Greg was working for the Illinois Public Action Council (IPA), which traced its organizational roots back to Saul Alinsky, who had died in 1972. Together they began to work in the Southeast Side’s increasingly Hispanic—primarily Mexican—neighborhoods, but as of February 1980, when they married, their only office in South Chicago was their car.

  Mary and Greg went person by person through South Chicago, focusing on its Catholic parishes. Their long-range goal was to have “a citywide coalition” of permanent, neighborhood-based advocacy groups. By early March, they had conducted scores of one-on-one interviews, established contact with five parishes, and had five small nascent groups of residents meeting and talking.

  Mary’s father had worked at Wisconsin Steel for thirty-five years, never missing a single day, before dying of brain cancer at age sixty-two. Mary had not heard any advance rumors about Wisconsin closing, but when it did, “it just reverberated through that whole neighborhood,” with thousands of families losing all of their health care coverage. Doing one-on-one interviews all across South Chicago, she recalled years later, the most common refrain was “I don’t have a doctor.”

  By June, their new organization had a name—the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) of Southeast Chicago—and Mary had drafted a proposal to circulate to potential funders. Wisconsin’s demise had created not only “tremendous unemployment,” but also “psychological pressure on families.” Life “has changed in a shattering fashion,” and more than two dozen people out of the several hundred they had approached were now actively participating in the nascent UNO. “The staff’s main function will be to train leadership,” Mary’s proposal said, and they hoped to publicly launch UNO as a southeast-wide organization within eighteen months. “Never since the Depression has this community been hit so hard.”8

  Leo Mahon’s August 23 conference at Calumet College in Whiting, Indiana—just across the state line from southeastern Chicago’s largely white East Side—was a four-hour event that attracted a good crowd and good press coverage. Leo presented a vision that was grand, or grandiose, given how little he knew about Chuck Rawlings’s unsuccessful effort to save Youngstown’s steel economy. A statement issued on behalf of the conveners asked how management “can morally justify divestiture” in light of “its unwillingness to invest its profits” to modernize antiquated plants. They went on to say that local parishioners must force “the industry to see its responsibility to the community rather than simply to shareholders,” yet Leo confessed to a reporter, “I had one of my parishioners tell me we’re two years too late.”

  The conveners believed the conference gave them “a mandate to organize a permanent structure,” and Dick Poethig imagined they might attract $60,000 in support from the Presbyterian Church and a combined $35,000 from Cardinal Cody and the Catholic bishop of nearby Gary, Indiana. Leo suggested they name themselves the Calumet Religious Community Conference—soon changed to Calumet Community Religious Conference, or CCRC—and that they hire Roberta Lynch, who had contacted him when she heard about his efforts to mobilize the community in response to Wisconsin’s closing; Roberta had two uncles who were priests in Panama, so she had long heard of Leo Mahon. Roberta brought experience from working for progressive Southeast Side Illinois state representative Miriam Balanoff. By the end of August, CCRC hired Roberta as its first staff member, at a salary of $500 a month.9

  Two days after CCRC’s conference, the PSW’
s attorney informed the federal bankruptcy court that PSW, Chase Manhattan, and International Harvester had reached agreement that Chase would cover 100 percent of the March 28 checks that had bounced—$1.3 million, including vacation pay—and 30 percent of an additional one week’s wages—some $1.1 million—that Wisconsin workers were owed contractually. An earlier offer of just the $1.3 million had been rejected seventeen hundred to sixty-two, but the new deal elicited an angry protest by several hundred workers because this agreement also cleared the way for Chase to sell the accumulated inventory that the workers had previously blocked. The Tribune reported that these workers “also marched on their union headquarters,” but Tony Roque “refused to meet with them.”

  During September, reports spread that Thomas Fleming, a businessman who had helped Envirodyne acquire Wisconsin Steel, had encouraged an African American friend, Walt Palmer, to pursue reopening the mill. Savvy journalists were highly dubious, but on October 6 Palmer, Tony Roque, and Chicago mayor Jane Byrne appeared before what the Tribune called “1,500 cheering steelworkers” at the downtown Auditorium Theatre to announce that Wisconsin Steel would reopen on November 1. Byrne stated that President Carter—just four weeks away from a tight reelection face-off against Ronald Reagan—had said federal support was available, and “as soon as there’s agreement on the financial plan presented by Mr. Palmer, you can count on the steel mill opening.” According to the Tribune’s Richard Longworth, Palmer was “a mesmerizing speaker,” who received “a standing ovation” from the workers, many of whom “had tears of joy in their eyes as they left.” But it was only a political chimera, and nothing more. By the end of October Byrne was claiming that the government would loan $10 million to rehabilitate Wisconsin’s coke oven, but she admitted that Walt Palmer was “no longer in the picture.”10

  CCRC’s efforts to become an active organization met with mixed success, as Roberta Lynch was having trouble organizing groups of parishioners. At the CCRC Steering Committee’s monthly meeting, she said that “getting people involved at the congregation level is taking much more time than we had originally anticipated.” Neither the bishop of Gary nor Cardinal Cody had offered any firm financial support, and as 1980 was ending, CCRC’s clergymen worried that “a fully-staffed and functional organization” would not be in place prior to 1982, and they reduced Roberta’s work to just half-time.11

  By the end of October, Mary Gonzales and Greg Galluzzo had a small UNO office in the heart of South Chicago’s commercial district. On Thanksgiving, in full alliance with Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC), UNO staged its first protest action as thirty former Wisconsin workers, and their families, descended upon the “Gold Coast” block where Jane Byrne lived in a forty-third-floor condominium apartment, chanting, “The mayor is a turkey.” Much of Mary’s work focused on organizing parents at an overcrowded elementary school to push for construction of a new building. By the outset of 1981, she and Greg had won financial support for UNO from Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund and also from two small, progressive Chicago funders, the Wieboldt Foundation and the Woods Charitable Fund, the latter of which had just hired its first staffer, a young woman named Jean Rudd.12

  At CCRC’s first monthly meeting in early 1981, Roberta Lynch echoed something Dick Poethig had said two months earlier: “there is still not a widespread sense of crisis about the steel industry in our area.” What’s more, she admitted, “the vagueness of CCRC’s program makes it difficult for people to see what they might accomplish by getting involved.” Dick Poethig suggested that CCRC mount “a mortgage-protection campaign to prevent the unemployed in the region from losing their homes” and pursue “state legislation calling for advance notice of a plant closing” plus state funding “for retraining the unemployed.”

  A CCRC training session in mid-February allowed Roberta to describe why she, like Leo, rejected Saul Alinsky’s confrontational approach to community organizing. She said they would not use a model where “you find a target, you look for ways to bring people quickly into confrontation with it” yet only “on a very narrow . . . basis . . . looking to win a very quick victory.” The CCRC, she said, should not be “deluding people” with any easy victory “to get this or that” because that “isn’t going to have meaning in terms of what the real problems are.” Instead, since the church is “a tremendously vital and important force,” reaching out to “clergy people in every congregation in the region” would allow CCRC to become “an organization that can go to U.S. Steel and say we represent 200 churches, 50,000 people in the Calumet region.” But so far congregations’ responses had been “very mixed,” since “one of the big problems we have is just . . . convincing people that a problem exists.” In a subsequent memo, Roberta again emphasized how CCRC needed “to identify an initial program,” for “a concrete focus is essential if we are to convince people to work with us.” Investing time made sense to parishioners only if they believed it was “building toward something that will have an actual impact,” and she confessed, “I have certain hesitations about whether we will really be capable of carrying out sustained activity.”13

  Early in 1981 the federal bankruptcy court awarded title to the Wisconsin Steel site to the federal EDA. The EDA imagined selling the plant, perhaps for use as a “mini-mill” that would employ less than half of Wisconsin’s onetime work force, but everyone realized that with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the chances of federal action to prop up antiquated steel plants had vanished. Nonetheless, Frank Lumpkin announced that 150 former Wisconsin workers would travel to Washington, D.C., to lobby for federal action. Frank estimated that only 10 percent of the ex-employees had found new jobs, and he stressed that all benefits had now run out. When the workers visited the House gallery, six members of Congress rose to speak on their behalf, including Chicago’s Harold Washington.14

  In April, Roberta Lynch resigned to pursue a full-time job. CCRC continued to meet for the rest of 1981, but without even a part-time paid staffer, little meaningful outreach activity was taking place. In stark contrast, Mary and Greg’s UNO of Southeast Chicago was receiving funding commitments from multiple sources ranging from the United Way of Metro Chicago and the Chicago Community Trust to the Wieboldt Foundation and the Roman Catholic Church’s national Campaign for Human Development (CHD), a then relatively low-profile program with a social-action support mission very similar to Tom Joyce’s much smaller Claretian program. Mary also contacted Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, and by the end of 1981 UNO had scheduled a large ceremony for May 8 to publicly launch the organization. Similarly, Frank Lumpkin and his Save Our Jobs Committee, with UNO acting as their fiscal agent, successfully approached small foundations such as the Crossroads Fund for modest support to ensure SOJC’s future. More significantly, thanks to progressive attorney and legendary former Chicago alderman Leon Despres, Frank secured the pro bono services of a savvy young attorney, Tom Geoghegan, so that from mid-1981 onward, SOJC would be an increasingly active participant in the legal arm-wrestling about liability for Wisconsin Steel’s demise.15

  Most important, by early 1982 Greg Galluzzo had added to UNO’s staff a thirty-one-year-old organizer who quickly found his way to Calumet City to introduce himself to Leo Mahon. Jerry Kellman had grown up in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, drifted through two years of college, first in Madison, Wisconsin, and then Portland, Oregon, and by 1971 was undergoing Alinsky-style training by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) staff, the truest—and most aggressive—disciples of the late community organizing guru. That training led to organizing assignments in Chicago, suburban DuPage County, Philadelphia, and Lincoln, Nebraska, where he put together a citizens coalition made up primarily of one congregation’s parishioners. By 1979, Kellman was back in Chicago and in graduate school, first at Northwestern and then at the University of Chicago. Galluzzo knew immediately that he wanted to add Kellman’s faith-based organizing expertise to UNO’s expanding work on the Southeast Side.

  In
February 1982, Leo told Tom Joyce, Dick Poethig, and his other colleagues about Kellman, and they agreed to invite him to CCRC’s next meeting. The organization’s bank account balance totaled $473, but UNO and the Latino Institute had Kellman’s salary covered and within four weeks Jerry, Mary, and Greg sent Leo a detailed three-page memo titled “Our Suggestions for a Church-Based Organization in the Calumet Region.” “We agree with you that the Calumet Region needs organizing if it is to avoid becoming an economic wasteland,” they wrote, but there were two essential challenges: first, “how to organize enough strength to change the situation, rather than set people up for still another defeat,” and second, “how to sustain the organizing over an extended period of time by developing the parish as a community through the organizing process.”

  The trio wanted to expand UNO’s Catholic-parish-based organizing from Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods southward into parishes in majority-white suburban towns like Calumet City, with Kellman doing that outreach. Once a core group of at least ten parishes was organized, the effort could expand to Protestant churches. Funding for the expansion could be sought from CHD and foundations like Woods and Wieboldt, so that by 1984–85 Kellman could add staff to do “leadership development within each parish and congregation.” Then those parishes could “come together for common programs which affect the entire region. The issues start small, but grow progressively larger as the organization grows stronger and as the leaders become increasingly sophisticated.” Leadership training would be ongoing, and “the professional staff is there to share what they know, not to make the leadership dependent on them.”16