Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  As for the internal security paranoia, in Orange County, hundreds of engineers went home from working on top secret defense projects to children who could not know what their fathers had done at the office that day. The example was Los Alamos: it took only one disloyal American to hasten catastrophe. Local business leaders developed complete dossiers on the two thousand southern Californians identified as having once been Communist Party members. They had two million index cards for suspected—as Robert Welch coined it—comsymps. James Wallace was an ordinary representative of his community.

  Another was Walter Knott. Orange County residents loved to tell his story: An itinerant day laborer from one of the poorest families in Pomona, at age thirty-one Knott managed to rent a forlorn berry plot in Buena Park. His wife, Cordelia, sold delectable berry pies from a roadside stand; then, noting the increasing traffic from yachters on their way to the harbors at Newport Beach and Balboa, she convinced her wary husband to let her have a try at selling chicken dinners. Cordelia’s savory cooking and homey kindness brought customers back again and again; a banker offered Knott a loan to open a restaurant. Knott refused the debt but built the restaurant anyway.

  He did well as a restaurateur. But in true Orange County fashion, it was technology that made him rich. Painstakingly, over the course of three years, Knott had been nursing a new hybrid: a cross between the loganberry, blackberry, and raspberry, marvelously fat and juicy, that a certain Mr. Boysen had invented, then abandoned when he found the prickly bramble too difficult to cultivate. Knott had the entrepreneurial spirit to persevere. “Boysenberries” yielded Knott a Depression-era fortune. In 1940 he expanded the restaurant and opened a restored Western ghost town, a tourist monument to the pioneer spirit that had built the West—and to the entrepreneurial pioneers like himself who kept it great. Through the years an abandoned schoolhouse was shipped from Kansas, a hotel from Arizona, and rolling stock from around the country to build a working railroad line. In 1951 Knott moved in an entire abandoned Mojave Desert silver mining town in which he had once toiled as a day laborer. By the 1960s Knott’s Berry Farm was drawing seven thousand visitors on a busy weekend and was the region’s second biggest tourist attraction, behind Disneyland. Knott shared the welfare-capitalist business philosophy of Barry Goldwater and Herb Kohler: his employees had profit-sharing, health insurance, and a generous retirement plan; he also headed the fight for a California right-to-work law in 1958.

  Knott also added a “Freedom Center” to the grounds—a two-story restored farmhouse where a former college president and a former minister toiled full-time spreading the free-market gospel. Knott wrote the Freedom Center off on his taxes as a business expense; no use giving Washington any more of his money to waste than he had to. “We’ve seen government grow until it is all out of proportion,” he told Reader’s Digest in a profile called “One Man’s Crusade for Everybody’s Freedom.” “Every time it grows, it takes bits of freedom out of our lives, and we become more dependent on it and less on ourselves.”

  But Orange County residents and Reader’s Digest left out the most telling part of Walter Knott’s story: the boysenberry was a welfare case. It all started when the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Plant Industry’s experimental station at Beltsville, Maryland, received a letter reporting a rumor of a marvelous new berry developed by a Mr. Boysen of Orange County, California. An agent at the Bureau did what he was paid taxpayer money to do: he made the trip out to California to investigate. He began asking local berrymen what they knew. None had heard of the boysenberry. Walter Knott was intrigued, though, and asked if he could tag along on the agent’s investigation. They located Rudolph Boysen, who was working as a “tax-supported” (as Ray Hoiles would have put it) park superintendent in Anaheim. The three of them found the abandoned vines amidst the weeds at Boysen’s old farm. Boysen gave Knott the right to try to cultivate the berry for profit.

  The men who led their families on weekends to Knott’s Berry Farm as if to secular worship were like Walter Knott’s boysenberries: in a way not quite apparent to the naked eye, they were welfare cases. Veterans who returned home from World War II to a country terrified of sinking back into depression benefited mightily from federal schemes to boost consumer spending by subsidizing homeownership; before the war, a typical mortgage required a down payment of 50 percent and came due in ten years; now a mortgage involved a down payment of 10 percent, was financed at 4 percent, lasted three decades, and was tax deductible—one of the most generous redistributions of wealth in American history. The irrigation projects that were the lifeline of the arid region were funded by taxes from the forty-nine other states. People like James Wallace cursed Washington at John Birch Society meetings after spending their days inside firms built lock, stock, and barrel with government contracts and after earning their engineering degrees in California’s tuition-free, state-run university system, or buying them with GI Bill money. They delighted in Ronald Reagan’s sparkling professions of free-market faith. But even his faith had its limits. When Reagan began saying that the Tennessee Valley Authority drained the U.S. Treasury better than its own basin, he was reminded that G.E. had a $50 million bid in for TVA generators. Reagan gladly dropped the reference.

  All the way across the country, on the banks of the Hudson River in New York State, there was another Orange County. Like the one in California, it was rock-ribbed Republican, also shot through with orchards and berry fields and thriving manufacturing companies, and also a favorite terminal for postwar migrants seeking their fortune. In 1952 a handsome little town there called Newburgh, population 32,000, won Look magazine’s All-American City award.

  But this Orange County turned out to be less blessed than the other one by the tides of economic history. Work in its needlework plants, sporadic in the best of times, stagnated; Eisenhower’s interstate neutralized its best economic advantage, the Hudson River frontage that had made it a bustling transportation hub; factories pulled up stakes to head south and west; rivalries among municipalities kept them from working together to lure new ones. In 1957 the Labor Department declared the region an “area of substantial unemployment.” And in Newburgh every other downtown storefront fell vacant.

  Hurt most of all were the African-Americans who had migrated there from the South upon hearing rumors that jobs were to be had in the Hudson River Valley—and who then found themselves last hired and first fired for what dwindling work there was. The residential district along the waterfront, which custom reserved for blacks, deteriorated, a process exacerbated by Newburgh’s city government’s being too apathetic to revise and enforce its health and sanitation codes, and the unscrupulous landlords’ neglecting to keep up the properties they rented there at gouging rates. Crime doubled. One city council member, a plumbing contractor named George McKneally who displayed a “KHRUSHCHEV NOT WELCOME HERE” sign in his shop, barely failed in 1959 to get the other city council members to authorize the purchase of police dogs to patrol the waterfront. “The colored people of this city are our biggest police problem, our biggest sanitation problem, and our biggest health problem,” he said at a meeting. “We cannot put up with their behavior any longer. We have been too lenient with them. They must be made to adhere to the standards of the rest of the community. If necessary we will enforce our ideas on them.” The black community was enraged. The city manager, convinced they had averted another Little Rock only by a whisker, quit when his contract came up in the fall of 1960. George McKneally led the search for a replacement.

  The city council received sixty applications. A balding career bureaucrat named Joseph Mitchell, who had just finished up a disastrous tenure in a township in Pennsylvania, impressed McKneally the most. Mitchell agreed with McKneally’s theory that the reason for the town’s troubles was the share of the budget taken up by relief payments to Southern blacks who came to Newburgh because of its reputation as an “easy relief town.” Joe Mitchell got the job. He proceeded to turn “Newburgh” into a household word.r />
  As city manager Mitchell made his first policy decision in February. Newburgh had been hit hard by the same squall that blanketed Washington on the eve of the inauguration. To make up a deficit brought on by snow removal costs, he decided to close out thirty “borderline” relief cases and reduce the food relief allotment. Welfare, he said, was bringing “the dregs of humanity into this city” in a “never-ending pilgrimage from North Carolina to New York.”

  That move provoked an injunction from the state welfare department; Mitchell was not deterred. In April, the city sent out letters to all relief recipients: “Your welfare check is being held for you at the police department. Please report to the police department and pick up your check there. This procedure is effective for this check only. Future checks will be mailed to you as in the past.” And so they came: women, mostly, many with infants in their arms, and elderly home-relief recipients leaning on canes. Some came on foot, others in buses, still others, police reported, in Cadillacs. (The police report was the first of many politically charged misapprehensions to come, since the Cadillacs belonged to members of the town’s Junior League who were shepherding the oldest and frailest citizens to city hall to save them the shame of hobbling through the center of town.) The welfare recipients all milled about the police station confusedly as officers tried hopelessly to organize an orderly queue. The mayor, William D. Ryan, who had not been apprised of the muster, stormed in from his office to find out what was going on. “This is nothing more than a routine audit,” Mitchell told him. “We’re just trying to weed out the chisellers.” The mayor, the only Democratic voice on the five-member city council, ordered Mitchell to stop. “I’ll stop,” Mitchell retorted, “when I’m finished.”

  No cases of fraud were found. Mitchell did not back down. He claimed Newburgh’s reliefers, 5 percent of the city’s population, cost the city $1 million annually, one-third of the town budget. He commissioned a report, by a panel of his allies in the town, that found that save for “the care of worthy folk in the city home and infirmary,” relief payments were “a total loss,” much of the money going to indulgences like liquor and fancy cars. “The gradual changes and widening in the philosophy of public welfare has merely changed the behavior of certain elements of the community to take advantage of it,” the report concluded. “The broadening of the base of public welfare has not curtailed social problems—it has increased them.” And so on June 19 Mitchell pushed through the city council thirteen provisos for the administration of the city’s welfare system.

  The first demand was that all cash aid be converted into vouchers for food, clothing, and rent. Then: “All able-bodied adult males on relief of any kind who are capable of working are to be assigned to the chief of building maintenance for work assignment on a 40-hour week.” If recipients were offered a private-sector job but refused it, “regardless of the type of employment involved,” they would lose their relief. “All mothers of illegitimate children are to be advised that should they have any more children out of wedlock, they shall be denied relief.” No relief package for any one family could exceed the take-home pay of the lowest-paid city employee. Newcomers to the city would have to demonstrate a concrete offer of employment, “similar to that required for foreign immigrants.” Any payment of aid would be limited to three months in a year. The relief budget would be slashed; the city’s corporation counsel would review all cases monthly. Finally, “prior to certifying or continuing any more Aid to Dependent Children cases, a determination shall be made as to the home environment. If the home environment is not satisfactory, the children in that home shall be placed in foster care in lieu of Welfare aid to the family adults.”

  The state department of welfare responded to the draconian strictures with alarm. Local welfare spending was subsidized by Washington and Albany; both reserved the right to regulate how that money was spent. In a special meeting in New York City on June 22, the state declared that Mitchell’s new code fell well afoul of the rules. Mitchell responded that his Thirteen Points would be implemented in full by July 15. The New York Times, which had been covering the battle of wills since May as a story of local interest, now put the long-faced, balding forty-one-year-old career civil servant on the front page and ran an editorial on the fracas, “The Dark Ages in Newburgh”: “Cruelty anywhere is the concern of mankind everywhere.” A dispatch over the AP wire saw the Thirteen Points reprinted in newspapers around the country. Hubert H. Humphrey denounced them as “a substitute of police methods for welfare methods.”

  The critics were in the minority. “I willingly join those you defame as ‘know nothings,’ ” read a typical letter to the Times. Newburgh’s “people have a good deal to protect from this creeping modern malady which well may be softening us up for the cold war.” Another letter writer wondered why “those receiving unearned benefits from the public purse” should not “suffer the social stigma that is rightfully theirs.” “Responsible municipal officials everywhere watch with anxiety the constantly increasing welfare fund burden,” said the Cleveland Plain Dealer; “Detroit and other large cities with oppressive welfare loads and a comparable problem of rising costs into other municipal projects would well take a lesson from Newburgh,” echoed the Detroit Free Press. Even critics could not resist praise. The clause denying further relief to mothers of illegitimate children, said a Life editorial, “is not only dubious but quite unrealistic since it is simply not in the American character to let anyone starve.” Be that as it may. “Newburgh provides a healthy example of local government assuming due initiative and responsibility.”

  Liberals, advocates for the poor, policy experts, welfare officials: All leapt confidently into the fray with a bunch of data suggesting that Mitchell’s system would be more bureaucratic and expensive than the present methods. They pointed out that Newburgh had spent $338,000, not $1 million, on relief the previous year. Mitchell said that real estate valuations had gone down by $1 million owing to migrants’ slovenly housekeeping; values had actually gone up slightly. Newburgh, in fact, carried less of a welfare burden than comparable cities around the state, and among a sample of the thirty “borderline cases” Mitchell tried to close after the winter snowstorm, twenty of twenty-three had resided in Newburgh for over three years, and eleven were lifelong natives. They added that work requirements for able-bodied men were already written into state taw—and pointed out Mitchell’s shocking display of ignorance in demanding that women have their children in wedlock in order to get their relief: federal law prevented families from receiving Aid to Dependent Children if there was a man in the house.

  The Board of Social Welfare expected that public hearings slated to be held in Albany on July 7 would scotch the whole sorry affair once and for all. Instead Joseph Mitchell emerged as a hero. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “It’s a fine commentary on public morality in this country when a local community’s effort to correct flagrant welfare abuse is declared illegal under both state and federal law.” Mitchell bragged of receiving hundreds of letters from the public, 60 to I in his favor. It was Albany’s “social work mentality,” he told reporters, that was the problem; it would result in a “form of government that truly does smack of an ideology we are all fighting today.” Since the Leopold and Loeb case, he said, “criminal lawyers and all the mushy rabble of do-gooders and bleeding hearts in society have marched under the Freudian flag toward the omnipotent state of Karl Marx.”

  The day of reckoning came, July 15. All able-bodied men on relief were to show up for a work detail. Television cameras and reporters massed to meet them. An hour passed, then another. A single able-bodied male reliefer arrived—the only one in town, it turned out. He was a thirty-three-year-old former ironworker with one eye who lived with his wife and six small children in a house without a stove, heat, or hot water, and who had been searching for a job in vain for months. Once again liberals claimed vindication. Once again victory was only apparent. Mitchell went to Washington that very night to speak at the biannu
al Human Events political action conference. The huzzahs were predictable. But it was not just the Human Events crowd that was lionizing him. “I find myself in the unenviable position of not having public support,” lamented his most vocal critic, Mayor Ryan. Social welfare professionals felt blindsided. Kennedy’s new Health, Education, and Welfare secretary, Abraham Ribicoff, had made reforming welfare his priority. His goals paralleled Mitchell’s: fighting illegitimacy, reducing dependency, moving recipients to work—even, as many experts were insisting, women with children. Now suddenly came this demagogue from a tiny town brandishing the experts’ own ideas and casting them as the enemy.

  They warded off the menace with more statistics: Spiraling welfare costs were a myth; in fact costs were declining. The very dynamism of the American economy left whole sectors behind when markets shifted, and automation wiped out thousands of unskilled jobs a month. How could you blame a helpless individual for that? The city manager Mitchell had replaced, now secretary to the New York state senate, called the whole scandal “a microscopic example of the deterioration of the German middle class under Hitler.” On July 28 a sixty-year-old reliefer in Oneida County assigned to shovel debris on a 90- degree day died of heat prostration; the same day, in Newburgh, Mitchell hired a local gym teacher as commissioner of welfare. Social work professionals said that was like replacing atomic engineers with tenth graders to build missiles.