Friday, August 14, 2009
By Jacob M. Jordan
Ask anyone from the Right side of the political spectrum about ACORN. Voter-fraud, physical threats or assault, and the misappropriation of tax-payer money will all spring into mind. If you ask said person about the shady group’s origins are or what the its acronym stands for, you will probably not receive an answer. While ACORN cloaks itself as being simply the follow-up to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, its formation was really predicated upon a completely different set of principles. Although the current news about the organization’s thug-like behavior, criminal allegations, and use as a political instrument are troubling, the facts surrounding its creation and evolution only deepen concern about the group’s relationship with various elements of the federal government.
Richard Cloward and Frances Piven
Back in the sixties, a pair of social work researchers from Columbia University collaborated on the creation of a form of social organizing that would instigate a massive redistribution of wealth. If “successful” (pardon the subjective difficulties of the term), the implementation of such a plan would have the effect of a societal restructuring that would make the New Deal look like a slap on the wrist for the upper-middle class and the financially-independent. These two professors were Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, and their theory—known as the “Cloward-Piven strategy”—essentially advocated overloading the existing welfare system until the government went broke, crippling the economy. What would necessarily emerge (or so they naively believed) would be a society in which all received a guaranteed income. As Richard Cloward put it in a 1966 article in The Nation, the strategy would “abolish the massive problem of poverty now.” In other words, the notion of “being poor” would be rendered obsolete in one fell swoop. In particular, it was hoped that a “guaranteed-income” would result from the shift. If only Jefferson or Madison had enjoyed the benefit of having a couple of professors at their side. They would have been able to incorporate perpetually-guaranteed wealth into the Bill of Rights. How uninformed they were. Before putting such a theory into practice, however, a broad mobilization of lower-income citizens would be required. Rather than watching their proposal languish in the halls of academia, Cloward and Piven wished to see their ideas translated into practice. The ideal way to achieve this system-wide mobilization would be to hijack elements of the contemporary Civil Rights movement taking place across America.
CORE and George Wiley
A disaffected anti-poverty organizer named George Alvin Wiley was critical to the effort at mobilization. During the sixties, Wiley had been a member of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality). Throughout the Civil Rights movement, CORE had been essentially devoted to the matter of desegregation. In his late twenties, George Wiley—then a chemistry professor at Syracuse University—began a local CORE chapter. His high level involvement in the organization eventually propelled him to the number two spot as CORE’s associate national director. Less than two years later, he broke from the group because he believed it was becoming too moderate. Wiley spoke about his distaste for the movement’s existing agenda:
From my years at CORE, I had gotten used to being part of a militant, action-oriented organization, which was prepared to move swiftly into situations as they developed, with relatively little concern about whose toes got stepped on in the process. I am therefore more disposed toward being part of an energetic little phalanx, pressing for radical change, than always having to tone down statements to keep from offending divergent elements of a tenuous coalition.
This is quite a bold statement for Wiley to make, especially considering that James Farmer, CORE’s director, once said of the organization, “We’re more militant than Malcolm X. We’re activists.” As a testament to the group’s growing radicalism, at one point a leader from the Bronx chapter of CORE was arrested for attempting to execute a citizen's arrest on a mayor. It should be noted, however, that Farmer ended up leaving the group in 1966, however, because of concern with the group’s militancy and desire to start arming itself.
NWRO: A Step Up in Community Agitation
Freed from the “moderate” directorship of CORE, an emboldened Wiley began the Poverty Rights Action Center (PRAC) in Washington, D.C. Ideologically, the focus was shifting away from Civil Rights and towards welfare rights. Wiley was also introduced to the Cloward-Piven strategy at this time, presumably due to the popularity of the article in The Nation. PRAC, which essentially networked with other groups, eventually developed a hierarchy and membership system, reinventing itself into the much larger National Welfare Rights Organization. The idea of overloading the welfare system was slowly replaced with the goal of reaching out to existing welfare-dependent members, by offering the incentive of expanded benefits.
Portending the structure of ACORN, the NWRO manifested itself in diffuse locales. The activities of the group involved not only more traditional forms of protest such as boycotts and picketing, but also encouraged property-destruction and orchestrated assaults upon city welfare offices. A New York Times article from September 27, 1970 tells of “rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers, and ripped-out phones.” The same article features a photo of George Wiley, megaphone in hand, observing the commotion at a local office. In another article from that same year, the New York Times reported on the president of a New Jersey chapter of the NWRO being arrested after setting fire to a urban renewal construction site. None of this social chaos should come as a surprise, however. Things were under control. The agitators were simply acting the way that Cloward and Piven said they should. In the same New York Times article, Frances Piven said it was “only when society is afraid of them,” that the poor could get change. I’m sure Ernst Röhm thought the same thing.
Do you get the feeling that these ideas have been bouncing around in a certain someone’s head for a very long time? Do you suppose that Obama may be a little bit more ideologically-driven than your average tax-and-spend liberal?
Apart from the simple issue of vandalism and intimidation, the efforts at agitation also led to near-bankruptcy in the locales in which the rioting took place. In reality, the fallout of the protests incited a backlash—welfare opportunity and special grant exceptions (such as clothing and furniture) were stripped back. Eventually, Wiley left the NWRO because of internal disagreements over the best way to expand NWRO membership. In the second half of this article, we will trace this history of ACORN from its creation in the early seventies to the present.