Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Leo took their proposal to his CCRC colleagues, telling them, “I feel that this is the kind of direction our organization must take.” He half-humorously told his own parishioners that “the talk around Calumet City . . . is that the parish of St. Victor’s is openly going ‘Communist.’” Frank Lumpkin, the actual Communist, was continuing his work for SOJC, and the Tribune’s Richard Longworth published a moving profile of Frank and his colleagues, in which Frank estimated that five hundred former Wisconsin workers had left town, fifteen hundred were still unemployed, and twelve hundred or so, including his friend Daniel “Muscles” Vitas, had found some type of new job, Vitas as a school crossing guard.

  UNO’s May 8 founding convention was “a sight of such inspiration that few will forget it,” observed Father Tom Cima, UNO’s new board chairman and pastor of Our Lady Gate of Heaven Parish in Jeffery Manor—a primarily black middle-class neighborhood located between South Chicago and South Deering. UNO and SOJC collaborated in a downtown protest at which marchers chanted “We want jobs,” and progressive Catholic clergy throughout Chicagoland—as most residents called the metropolitan area—were overjoyed when on July 10 Joseph Bernardin, the liberal archbishop of Cincinnati, was named archbishop of Chicago, succeeding the widely reviled John Patrick Cody, who had died on April 25.17

  Of seemingly lesser consequence, in the summer of 1982 Mary and Greg’s corps of southeastern Chicago organizers received a new recruit. The twenty-two-year-old Bob Moriarty had grown up in an Irish working-class Chicago suburb, and during his junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, the town just north of Chicago, he had taken a community organizing seminar taught by a professor named John McKnight. A fifty-year-old Ohio native and navy veteran, McKnight had worked for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, directed the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and headed up the Midwest office of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In the latter role, McKnight had been in the room when Martin Luther King Jr. negotiated a much-criticized end to his 1966 civil rights protests that had roiled Chicago, and from that post, McKnight had moved to Northwestern.

  Beginning in the mid-1970s, McKnight wrote a series of influential articles on how service economies reduce citizens to consumers and clients. Writing first in the Christian Century in 1975, McKnight explained that each time a social problem, or need, is identified, “citizens have an increased sense of deficiency and dependence.” Two years later, McKnight expanded on that analysis and argued that service economies “are peopled with service producers and service consumers—professionals and clients.” The former controlled the relationship, and “the client is less a person in need than a person who is needed” in order to justify the salary or income of the provider. As “the interpretation of the need necessarily becomes individualized,” it disables “the capacities of citizens to perceive and deal with issues in political terms.”

  By 1979, McKnight had honed his analysis further. “A service economy needs ‘deficiency,’ ‘human problems,’ and ‘needs’ if it is to grow. . . . This economic need for need creates a demand for redefining conditions as deficiencies” and “the power to label people deficient and declare them in need is the basic tool of control and oppression.” As government social welfare bureaucracies expand, “the professional servicers now receive more money for their help than the recipients receive in cash grants.” Quite possibly, McKnight contended, “there are more people in Chicago who derive an income from serving the poor than there are poor people. . . . The welfare recipient is the raw material for the case workers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, mental health workers, drug counselors, youth workers, and police officers. Do the servicers need the recipient more than she needs them? . . . Who really needs whom?” McKnight believed that professionals willing to cast aside their own self-interest must commit themselves “to reallocation of power to the people we serve so that we no longer will need to serve.”18

  John McKnight was unquestionably the most influential social analyst in 1980s Chicago, and he brought Bob Moriarty to organizing. But Greg Galluzzo thought the twenty-two-year-old Moriarty was too young for the congregation-based organizing that UNO was moving toward under Jerry Kellman’s tutelage, so by September 1982 Moriarty was going door to door in South Deering, just like Mary Gonzales had in South Chicago two years earlier. Moriarty’s job was to warn residents that Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), a huge garbage conglomerate that already operated a four-hundred-acre landfill farther south, below 130th Street, had just applied for a city permit to open a new landfill on the 289-acre “Big Marsh,” located just south of 110th Street and west of Torrence, only a few blocks from residents’ homes and the Bright Elementary School on South Calhoun Avenue.

  One day Bob knocked on the door of a home on 108th Street, hardly four blocks from the now-shuttered gates of the Wisconsin Steel plant. Moriarty introduced himself to a woman named Petra Rodriguez, who was interested in his information, but Rodriguez also had a hugely consequential recommendation for him: “You should meet my daughter.” And so Bob walked around the corner to her home at 10814 South Hoxie Avenue and brought to Chicago organizing the most important recruit of the decade. The next eight years of Chicago politics would be different because he did so.

  Mary Ellen Rodriguez Montes was a twenty-four-year-old stay-at-home mother of three young children. In Spanish, her name was Maria Elena, but to her family, and to the young organizers she would work with, she was simply Lena. “She was very smart, very beautiful, very tough,” Bob remembered, and a “quite extraordinary person,” another organizer explained. A priest who knew Lena well recalled her as “a real dynamo. She was also very attractive: great charisma and personality and very engaging.”

  Lena easily recalled Bob’s first visit: “I remember him coming to the door.” She knew about the Love Canal environmental disaster near Niagara Falls, New York, and Chicago newspapers were reporting that a company called SCA Chemical Services had asked the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) for permission to move toxic chemical waste from downstate Illinois to an incinerator located at 11700 South Stony Island Avenue, just southwest of where WMI wanted to locate its landfill. Lena and her husband Ray agreed to host the first meeting of Bob’s recruits in their second-floor living room. Another young stay-at-home mom who attended was Alma Avalos. One year younger than Lena, she had grown up on Petra Rodriguez’s block and now had two young children. Bob, Lena, and Alma then spent the next several weeks recruiting other South Deering residents to protest against the two facilities.

  Before the end of October they were ready to act. They wanted a public meeting, in South Deering, with IEPA director Richard Carlson, but they got no response. Then Moriarty, along with another organizer, Phil Mullins, who had come to UNO from Pilsen, suggested taking a busload of residents, along with their children, to Governor James R. Thompson’s office in downtown Chicago. Arming the children with sticky caramel apples, the group made its way to the governor’s suite via an unsecured back stairway. With Lena and Alma in the lead, the group said they weren’t leaving until they spoke to Carlson. Unhappy staffers got Carlson on the phone, and he promised a meeting, but by the upcoming Election Day, November 2, one still had not been scheduled. Jerry Kellman happened to know where the governor voted, so another bus trip was scheduled for what turned out to be a chilly, rainy day. After a wait of several hours, Thompson’s limousine finally appeared, and the group dashed toward him brandishing picket signs. With plenty of journalists looking on, a public meeting was quickly promised.

  Four weeks later, on the evening of December 6, Carlson traveled to the Trumbull Park Fieldhouse, on South Deering’s northwestern flank, to speak to a crowd of more than two hundred residents. Moriarty and his recruits had prepared carefully for the session. They were concerned, however, by the presence of Foster Milhouse, a well-known precinct captain in Alderman Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward political organization and a leader of the old-line South Deering Imp
rovement Association (SDIA), a group that traced its roots back to an infamous August 1953 race riot. When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) accidentally assigned one black family to the housing project that adjoined Trumbull Park, SDIA’s membership responded with violence. After more African American families moved in during the next four years, even greater violence erupted in July 1957. When Milhouse began heckling at the outset of the December 6 meeting, Moriarty’s recruits responded quickly. “We call him Judas,” Moriarty remembered, and “they just jeer him out of the hall . . . ‘Judas, Judas, Judas.’” Once Milhouse was dispensed with, Carlson quickly agreed to the residents’ requests, but it was Lena who emerged as the star of the evening. “I somehow kind of like blossomed in this room,” she remembered. “I actually enjoyed it,” and indeed “felt called to it.” Also present was her husband Ray, who “really had an interest in being a lead person” and who “seemed a little bit upset about it,” Lena explained, when his wife emerged as the residents’ lead spokesperson. Ray “was a decent guy, but really insecure,” Bob recalled, and Alma described it similarly: “jealousy.”19

  Carlson’s appearance put their group on the map, and by the end of the year, they had chosen a name to distinguish themselves from the larger UNO: Irondalers Against the Chemical Threat, or IACT. In February 1983, a wary Alderman Vrdolyak met with them about WMI’s proposed landfill. Lena recalled that he “met with us on the site of Waste Management’s proposed dump and from where we stood, we could see our homes. He said, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize that it was this close to the houses.’ I said, ‘Does this mean you’re going to oppose it?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, I’ll reconsider and get back to you.’ Well, he never did get back to us.”

  In the meantime, when incumbent mayor Jane Byrne, whom Vrdolyak energetically backed, finished second in the Democratic mayoral primary on February 22, Vrdolyak’s political fortunes took a turn for the worse. Byrne got 33 percent, and Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley—a son of the late Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in late 1976—placed third with 30 percent. The upset winner was African American congressman Harold Washington, who rode a tidal wave of enthusiasm among black voters to a 36 percent plurality. Washington still had to win the general election against Republican former state legislator Bernard Epton, and the racial symbolism of Chicago electing its first black mayor—or white voters uniting to stop it—cast the contest in starkly racial terms.

  Washington visited the IACT activists at Bright School on March 29, and on April 12, he narrowly edged Epton, winning 51.7 percent against the Republican’s 48 percent. Analysts concluded that only 12.3 percent of the city’s white voters, primarily from the generally liberal lakefront wards, voted for Washington. Seventeen days later, on April 29, 1983, Chicago’s first black mayor took office.20

  Throughout the latter part of 1982 and the first five months of 1983, the outlook for Southeast Side steelworkers grew worse and worse. There was even more concern when word got out that PSW president Tony Roque had signed an agreement with Chase Manhattan in August 1980 that allowed the workers to recoup their bounced checks, but that also potentially released International Harvester from most if not all of its pension obligations to Wisconsin’s former workers. Roque had not understood the legal implications of what he had signed. Some families were becoming so desperate that SOJC had initiated free food distribution twice each month and received additional funding support via UNO.

  For decades, U.S. Steel’s South Works, located well north of 95th Street, had been the unchallenged behemoth of the Calumet region’s steel mills. Its 1973 workforce of ninety-nine hundred had shrunk to seventy-four hundred in 1979, fifty-two hundred in early 1981, and then forty-eight hundred in the spring of 1982, but in September 1982, U.S. Steel chairman David M. Roderick announced that the company would build a new rail mill at South Works thanks to concessions from both USW Local 65 and the state of Illinois. The new facility would add up to one thousand jobs, and completion was targeted for late 1983. “If we were going to be shutting down South Works, we wouldn’t be building the rail mill here,” Roderick assured Chicago journalists and state officials. Six months later the USW accepted an openly concessionary contract, hoping that laid-off workers would be brought back. Then, in May 1983, Roderick reversed himself and told U.S. Steel’s annual meeting that South Works might indeed be closed due to the impact of environmental regulations on such an aged plant. The same week that Roderick spoke, a comprehensive survey of Southeast Side neighborhoods showed “a job loss rate of 56 percent since 1980” and “an unemployment rate of 35 percent.”21

  In late May, more than 150 IACTers and other antidumping protesters descended upon WMI’s annual meeting in tony suburban Oak Brook. The protest drew significant press attention, and next the IACTers—who had revised their name to Irondalers to Abolish the Chemical Threat, rather than just “Against”—blockaded the entrance to WMI’s large Calumet Industrial District (CID) landfill south of 130th Street, creating a backlog of scores of garbage trucks. Chicago police, unsure whether the remote location was in Chicago or instead in Calumet City, made no arrests. In the meantime, Mary Ellen Montes, who was seeking an appointment with the city’s new mayor, met with his sewer commissioner on June 10, and six days later the IACTers again blocked the CID entrance. This time Chicago police had a map, and seventeen of the sixty protesters were arrested, including Lena. Her mother Petra spoke to reporters, and Moriarty and others went door to door in South Deering to raise bail money.

  Everyone was released in time for a 10:00 A.M. meeting the next day with new mayor Harold Washington. At least one woman showed Washington the visible bruises she had from her arrest, and the mayor agreed to speak at an IACT meeting in South Deering. By midsummer, IACT had access to a crucial meeting place which previously had been denied it: St. Kevin Roman Catholic Church, on the east side of South Torrence, just north of the rusting Wisconsin Steel plant and by far the neighborhood’s largest church. Up until early 1983, St. Kevin’s pastor had been Father Bernard “Benny” Scheid, a notoriously hateful and sometimes drunken political ally of Alderman Vrdolyak. Two years earlier, when the Chicago Sun-Times had publicly exposed the extent of then-Cardinal Cody’s financial misdeeds, Scheid wrote a letter to the paper’s editor warning him to “get your affairs in order. We pray for your sudden and unprovided death every day.”

  Fortunately for IACT and South Deering, Scheid’s successor was Father George Schopp, who for several years had worked with Greg Galluzzo and UNO as pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish on the East Side. Schopp was inheriting a parish that included not only Lena and Alma, but, far more menacingly, Scheid’s buddies and Vrdolyak precinct captains like Foster Milhouse (“we used to call him Fester Outhouse,” Schopp recounted) who were “kind of a goon squad.” But Schopp was already familiar with Vrdolyak’s iron grip control of Southeast Side politics, and his arrival at St. Kevin dramatically altered the parish’s political role, as all of Chicago would soon see.

  In late August, Harold Washington announced that he was blocking WMI’s attempt to open a landfill in Big Marsh as well as a proposed expansion of the nearby existing Paxton Landfill on East 120th Street. Then, on Wednesday evening, August 24, Washington came to South Deering to speak to an IACT-organized crowd of some six hundred people packed into St. Kevin’s large basement hall. As the Tribune’s headline the next morning put it, “Washington Invades Ald. Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward Turf.”

  Both George Schopp and Dennis Geaney, Leo’s associate pastor from St. Victor, were worried about what Benny Scheid and Vrdolyak’s lackeys might try to do, so Schopp asked a number of supportive priests to stay close to Scheid. As reporters scanned the crowd and a television crew set up their camera, Scheid “assured me that he would work over the crowd by telling them that Washington was an ex-convict and still a big crook,” Geaney recalled a few weeks later. Once Washington arrived and the meeting got under way, Geaney happened to sit beside Petra Rodr
iguez, “who told me that the chairperson was her daughter, Mary Ellen Montes. This tiny woman steered the tight ship of 600 people like a seasoned sea captain. Benny and the 10th Ward Regulars never got an opening.” Scheid “got up and started blustering, trying to berate Mary Ellen,” Schopp recalled, but Lena was unbowed and the hecklers were silenced.

  Washington was a powerful and emphatic speaker, and he took control of the crowd. “There is an over-concentration of waste facilities in this community” and the multiple dumps posed a significant danger. “I am appalled things have gone this far.” Washington singled out WMI by name: “I believe this company has a horrible record of violating the public trust and endangering the public health,” he said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this. We’re investigating this now. Apparently Waste Management has quite a bit of influence over certain key people,” an obvious allusion to Vrdolyak, who had received at least $18,500 in political contributions from WMI.

  As Washington concluded, the crowd rose to give him a standing ovation, but Lena, standing beside him, immediately intervened: “The meeting’s not over yet, Mr. Mayor. We’re not finished.” She then sternly insisted that Washington give a yes or no answer to each of five specific IACT demands for city action, and as she recited them, Washington smilingly said “yes” each time. After her fifth one—“Are you committed to stopping Waste Management?” to which Washington responded, “Yes, I am”—Lena reached up, “threw her arms around him and kissed him” on the cheek, as 10:00 P.M. news viewers all across Chicagoland soon witnessed. Washington looked smitten. “Now I know why she is your leader. She’s quite a politician,” he told the crowd. To Lena herself, the mayor was even more complimentary: “Boy, you’re a tough woman. I don’t want to mess with you. I’ll do anything you want me to do,” and Washington gave her his private home phone number.