Living for the City: Robert Clifton Weaver's Liberalism (Page 3)

The Negro Ghetto made Weaver's academic name, and he became a leader in the fight for fair-housing laws. In the 1950s, New York Governor Averell Harriman appointed him deputy commissioner of housing (he also served as rent administrator for the state's rent-control board). Yet as Pritchett makes painfully clear in the second half of his book, despite Weaver's mounting successes, the sense of insecurity instilled in him as a young striver never entirely subsided. He and his family rarely attended the parties and other social events that were a regular part of life for many black intellectuals in New York at the time. His subordinates referred to the "Weaver treatment," which one described as a politeness "so unrelieved in its iciness that its victims felt they would be warmer if they curled up in a refrigerator." When a friend called to let Weaver know that he was being offered a job in Harriman's administration, Weaver at first hung up on her, thinking she was joking.

A bigger call for Weaver came in 1960, when John F. Kennedy nominated him to head the Housing and Home Finance Agency, a predecessor to HUD. After being redbaited in hearings by Congressional conservatives, one of whom asked if it bothered him that The Negro Ghetto had been named a "book of lasting value" by an operation called the Workers Book Shop in New York City, Weaver was confirmed. His tenure had some real successes: in November 1962 Kennedy signed an executive order banning discrimination in federal housing programs--something Weaver had fought for ever since the New Deal, made possible at long last in the early '60s by the surging civil rights movement. But Weaver remained a man apart in the capital, a full participant in neither the Kennedy administration nor the civil rights movement. He was hardly involved in the discussions over King's 1963 March on Washington (it is not clear that he even attended the demonstration). He told a reporter that "black chauvinism" was as bad as white, and that he was involved with civil rights "as a liberal, rather than a Negro." But he had few friends in the Kennedy administration; all of the president's civil rights advisers were white, and Pritchett notes that Weaver was expected to stay focused on housing, not to get involved in broader conversations about civil rights. Weaver accepted this position, preferring, as Pritchett says, to be seen "as a professional who was black rather than a racial advocate." It is not hard, though, to imagine Weaver's frustration with being expected to represent the race while at the same time being excluded from the most important debates about racial politics. Acquaintances described Weaver as "basically a loner" who went every day to the counter of a hotel restaurant to eat a sandwich for lunch by himself.

The political costs of such isolation became clear after Johnson created HUD in September 1965. Since Weaver was the head of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, many thought Johnson would quickly tap him for the job. Instead, Johnson dragged his feet. He told Roy Wilkins of the NAACP that Weaver was not a sufficiently "imaginative" leader and that the first head of HUD should be a white man--perhaps the philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller--who could "do a hell of a lot more for the Negro than the Negroes can do for themselves in these cities." For years Weaver had hoped to be taken seriously as a liberal leader on his own terms, without regard to his race. Later on, he said he "would like to feel that I was appointed not because I was a Negro, but maybe in spite of that fact." But for Johnson the appointment was about nothing else--if he selected Weaver, he feared, critics would accuse him of not picking the best man for the job; but if the job didn't go to Weaver, he would disappoint the "little Negro boys in Podunk, Mississippi," and civil rights leaders would say "when you get down to the nut-cutting...this Southerner just couldn't quite cut the mustard--he just couldn't name a Negro to the cabinet." For the proud, restrained Weaver, the waiting was torturous, a "very, very difficult thing," as he remembered in later years. Humiliated and made miserable by reports of Johnson interviewing other candidates, he nearly resigned. And when Johnson at last offered the HUD post to Weaver early in 1966, it was almost too late for him to enjoy it.

Once in office, Weaver presided over a great expansion of public housing. More affordable housing was built under the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 than at any other time in the nation's history, and Weaver's proposals were the ones the administration followed. A national fair-housing law was finally passed in 1968, with Weaver lobbying Congress to support it. Yet these were also the years of the riots in cities like Detroit, of deepening poverty and deindustrialization. Black radicals criticized the housing projects that Weaver helped to build as simply reconstituting the ghetto in new ways. They rejected his quest for a race-blind meritocracy; in a July 1967 column, Jimmy Breslin quoted one such activist: "You know what everybody says about Weaver? They say, 'He's light and bright and damn near white.'" Weaver was deeply troubled by the riots, which he argued represented a deepening "community despair and hopelessness" that could only be undone by concerted government action. But the Great Society lasted just a few years, razed by the politics of backlash as white city dwellers reacted to the housing projects rising in their neighborhoods by fleeing the cities in a panic about living next door to blacks. The public housing projects that Weaver had once viewed as the beachhead of a better society came instead to more closely resemble holding pens for the poorest of the poor, people left out of any social compact whatsoever. The projects became exactly what Weaver had once wanted above all to avoid: a second ghetto. Not only the vision of public housing but the buildings themselves seemed to have failed.

Weaver left Washington with Johnson, telling the president, shortly before Johnson chose not to seek re-election, that he planned to resign at the end of 1968 no matter who was in the White House. He returned to New York City, where he served as the first president of Baruch College of CUNY. There, his long career in public service had a sad coda: he sat on the board of directors of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the organization created to float bonds on behalf of New York City during its fiscal crisis and flirtation with bankruptcy during the mid-1970s. The MAC helped to enforce a dramatic program of restructuring for the city government, cutting funds for daycare, schools, firemen, police, social workers and hospitals, as well as instituting tuition for CUNY. Although the New York fiscal crisis in many ways marked the end of the expansive liberal vision Weaver had long championed, he was a silent member of the board, doing little to shape the course of events. He told an African-American State Assembly member that "you may be sure" that when "specific issues affecting minorities" came before MAC, he would speak up for "what I believe to be the interests of those so long disadvantaged." But according to Pritchett, the minutes of MAC meetings contain no evidence that Weaver ever tried to do so; perhaps he felt there was nothing he could really do. He ended his career at Hunter College, living on the Upper West Side until his death in 1997. His wife--a light-skinned black woman who was able to pass as white and who received hate mail from segregationists chiding her for marrying a black man--had died a few years earlier, and their adopted son (the "Bobby" to whom he dedicated The Negro Ghetto) had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the early 1960s. Weaver--true to form--said nothing publicly about his son's death and destroyed all the letters of condolence he received. Three years after Weaver's death, the HUD headquarters was rededicated in his name.

By the end of Pritchett's book, one is struck by how much Weaver was hindered by the New Deal and Great Society liberalism that nurtured his long career. In some ways midcentury liberalism was always a precarious politics, especially with regard to race. In the 1930s the Roosevelt administration, never unequivocally committed to civil rights, made its peace with the Southern Democrats; in the '60s Johnson's expansion of the welfare state coexisted with a deep paternalism. For a young, ambitious black man like Weaver, the choice to ally himself with these mainstream liberals--as opposed to working with the more radical social movements that so often forced their hands--could not help but yield a certain frustration. Pritchett avoids venturing into the dangerous terrain of psychohistory, preferring to present Weaver as a pioneer in race-blind politics. Yet it also seems possible that Weaver's careful and lifelong eschewal of radicalism was the result, in part, of his own deep sense of an imperative, instilled by his parents and grandparents, that his individual accomplishments were the ultimate measure of success. And if at times this meant steering clear of engagements that might prove dangerous to his quest for mobility and security--that was the cost of moving forward in the world.

One can't read Pritchett's book without thinking of Barack Obama, whose career seems, in certain respects, a reflection of Weaver's ambiguous legacy. Obama's victory undeniably marks one kind of progress toward racial equality. And surely Weaver would be thrilled to see Obama in the White House (which was built mostly by slaves and free blacks), identifying with the candidate's choice to carve out a career at the pinnacle of American politics and his promise to transcend the politics of race. (Weaver might also have appreciated that during Obama's tenure as a community organizer, he worked in the Altgeld Gardens housing project in Chicago--a World War II development that was part of the early wave of public housing.) Yet even as it is now possible for a black man to become the president of the United States, the cities to which Weaver dedicated his life remain nearly as sharply divided by race and poverty as they have ever been. The battered buildings of the housing projects of Chicago and Detroit that Weaver worked so long, with so much hope, to build, cast their long shadows on the pages of this book, bleak reminders that the triumph of an individual cannot alone make up for these larger defeats. The strength of Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City is that it enables the reader to see the victory and the loss at once.

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