After I finished writing yesterday’s Readin’ Roldo, I kept circling back to the questions: Why did Cleveland Mayor Carl Burton Stokes bring General Benjamin Oliver Davis to the city to become his Public Safety Director? And why did Davis depart after only six months? After reading the September 1970 issues of Point Of Viəw, I got an inkling of what was going on.

[Update: After I wrote, but had not yet posted, the following, Roldo wrote a comment offering his more detailed analysis.]

Mayor Stokes brought Davis here for a purpose and pushed him out after six months because the purpose had been served. Roldo, in his 1 September 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 3), lays out what the purpose might have been. In Observations, Roldo ledes:

Why Is Carl Stokes Smiling So?

Joking at press conferences, prancing about the city with an aide challenging all comers to tennis doubles to highlight recreation needs, wider than usual grins.

Why So Confident, Mayor?

Always a master of timing, the Mayor managed frowns in telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer—which found so much comfort in being the first to endorse the first black mayor—to give its endorsement next year to somebody else.

What Do You Know That Others Don’t Mayor?

Mayor Stokes recognizes that his ambush of Gen. Ben Davis assures him a very long, successful political life in Cleveland. Not only did Davis become ensnared in the trap but the regular Democrats, the Republicans and some big businessmen boxed themselves in a corner. They did so by openly or tacitly raising the Davis for Mayor banner. It was blasted down by expert anti-aircraft fire.

But, we believe, it established a significant political lesson by which Cleveland will be ruled for some time to come: No White-Sponsored Black Need Apply For The Job Of Mayor Of Cleveland.

[Stokes enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1945 after having dropped out of high school. He served for two years as a private and was honorably discharged in 1946. I doubt he ever saw a general, let alone a Black general, or had the chance to ponder what it was like to be the son of an Army general, graduate from West Point and become a general yourself. Their lives were very different and perhaps this is what threw Stokes’ expectations for Davis awry. JH] Roldo moves on to Joe Bartunek and his attitudes toward voters, particularly Black voters.

All White Joe—Cuyahoga County Democratic Party boss Joe Bartunek, chosen ostensibly to open up and reform the local Dems, continues instead the racist policies of his party.

Bartunek, who this year will be telling students at Cleveland State University where he is chairman of the board of trustees, has a peculiar sense of how the system should work.

Most students are taught, for example, that voting is the American way.

However, Bartunek told party and labor leaders at a meeting in Columbus recently that he had no intent of registering Negroes in his county. Bartunek turned down funds to register in black areas where 80 percent of the voters are of the same party as Bartunek.

We think of the Republican party today as the party of voter suppression, but we cannot forget that the Party of Lincoln was fighting against the Democrats and that—despite what would happen with the institution of Jim Crow following Reconstruction—Republicans did not have a monopoly limiting the vote.

Next Roldo provides a snippet of how sometimes the big dogs can get fooled. He writes:

Back Door Policy—Although Sam Bauer has been acting welfare director, replacing Steve Minter, he only plays Mr. Front Man. Former director Eugene Burns will run the show from his five-room suite in the County Welfare Building. The suite, concealed by a metal door that looks at first like a utility closet door, has private backdoor elevator service for Burns. He will direct operations with a tighter fist than Minter from his behind-the-scenes headquarters. Burns wants to avoid the public flack welfare directors usually get, especially from clients.

The County Commissioners were said to be unhappy with Minter, particularly after last year’s $24 extra clothing allowance turned out to be a costly item. Clients, poorly informed by the department on their rights, were expected to call in and request additional money over the usual $5 allowance. Those who didn’t call were not supposed to get anything. but welfare workers filled out orders without contact from clients, merely telling supervisors the client had called. Minter, they say, knew of the practice but winked at it, making clients and workers happy, but not the commissioners.

I’m starting to think that Dennis Kucinich is going to be an ever-present present and not pleasing noise in Point Of Viəw for the foreseeable future. Roldo writes:

Making Friends—The world just won’t go fast enough for the ambitions of Dennis Kucinich. At a recent City Council finance committee meeting, Kucinich had harsh words for its chairman Mike Zone. He told Zone publicly that if he couldn’t keep order, “let’s get a chairman who can.” The startled Zone replied, “Aw, Denny” then in an aside: “Somebody take him outside and change his diaper.” That was seconds before dangerous Denny strode out of the room.

Following up his examination of equal employment figures for Cleveland, Roldo looks at how the three downtown department stores fare. He writes:

The Discriminating—All three big downtown department stores have refused to supply information proving that they are equal employers of minority groups. Halle’s, Higbee’s and May’s have been balking for about a year now. Frankly, we’re surprised at top Boy Scout Francis Coy, winner of the coveted human relations award of the National Council of Christians and Jews, refusing such information to Project Equality, an interfaith program for equal hiring policies. It’s unchristian. And Herbert Strawbridge, board chairman and president of Higbee’s, and new appointee to find a new Safety Director, surprised us by the project “outsiders” that they won’t tell him how to run his business. Walter, and son Chisholm Halle, chairman and president of Halle’s, have also been unpleasant about revealing how well they’re doing on minority hiring. Apparently they have something to hide.

And still more Kucinich:

Using People—Milt Schulman, his protege Dennis Kucinich and Ted Sliwa tried to harvest hate at a recent meeting of anti-public housing people in Ward 9. As the crowd thins (some 200 compared to 1,000 at earlier meetings), the rhetoric gets heavier. Schulman and Kucinich warn Ward 9 whites that Stokes and blacks are out to get them and are arming on the East Side. Meanwhile, the real estate interests begin to smell panic and profit. The ‘better sell your house now’ telephone calls have started.

In his 14 September 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 4), Roldo goes hi-tech with a story about Boeing’s 2707. He ledes:

“The first subtle erosion of the government’s promise to prohibit flights of the commercial supersonic transport over populated areas was published quietly last month in the Federal Register,” wrote Doug Bloomfield, consumer writer for the PD. Bloomfield at that time was covering aviation and not an SST fan.

Charles Tracy, Cleveland Press aviation writer, loves the SST and thinks everyone else should too. Bloomfield’s articles bothered Tracy. One gets the impression in talking to Tracy that anyone who doesn’t salute the SST is un-American.

Roldo notes that Tracy’s son was an engineer working on the tail section of Boeing’s billion-dollar SST in Seattle. Was there a connection? Could be.

Thus the 24 May article in which Bloomfield suggested that the FAA was loosening its rules against sonic booms of the SST angered Tracy.

So, as many others do when they read something they don’t like in the newspaper, Tracy sat down and wrote a scratched out a protest letter. But he didn’t mail it to the PD‘s Letter-To-The-Editor column, he wrote Clay Hedges, head of the Federal Aviation Authority, asking, Tracy said, “why the FAA didn’t speak out” about such distortions as those written by Bloomfield.

The complaint letter worked its way through the federal bureaucracy to William M. Magruder, SST Development Director, U.S. Department of Transportation.

Magruder approved. In August, He came to Cleveland to speak at the City Club to those assembled that they had nothing to worry about. He said that “Noise of the SST will be no problem” and that scientific studies “…completely satisfy me that ecology will be safe. A 500-plane fleet of SSTs will have so small effect on the atmosphere.

This was, of course, the real sticking point. Sonic booms were one thing, but because the SST was to fly at altitudes far above normal air traffic, its exhaust had a disastrous effect on the Earth’s ozone layer.

There was also another Cleveland connection, Roldo writes:

On 13 August… Tracy interviewed Glenn D. Babbitt, president of Cleveland Pneumatic. Babbitt said that the media was misinterpreting facts about the SST.

Roldo reminded readers that Cleveland Pneumatic was in possession of a $2.1 million contract for the plane’s landing gear.

I have often suspected why Roldo didn’t play larger on Cleveland radio (I have heard him a couple of times on WCPN’s Sound of Ideas) or television, but in this issue, he lays the story out.

Roldo On Air—Point Of Viəw almost had a TV ‘debut’ on NBC’s Channel 3’s new Sunday morning 90-minute show, ‘Scene on Sunday.’ But it was abruptly canceled—forever.

It was a precarious deal anyway. I was asked to write three- or four-minute commentaries to be used on the program and told the bosses at the NBC affiliate would not be told about it. [Never a good sign. JH] It would be two or three weeks before the bosses would realize it, it was intimated. But it was over much sooner.

The first commentary was taped 4 September at WKYC-TV’s studio. The next filming, I was told, would be on the Case-Western Reserve University campus on 16 September.

But on 10 September, a call came from Rick Reeves, ‘Scene’s’ producer, who said he had been ‘enjoined’ from using the piece—and all others by me.

The decision was made by Joseph Varholy, the station’s program manager, who later said, “I haven’t screened it (the piece)” but the decision was made on the recommendation of others. Varholy said he “really didn’t have time” to discuss the matter but that he would screen it if I liked.

No thanks. Actually, if Varholy did find it acceptable I’d begin to worry.

With full justification. Roldo reaches back again to remind us that the nation, not just Cleveland, had been paying attention to the events of 23 July 1968. He writes:

Media Myths Live On—The Cleveland media came in for sharp criticism in a Columbia Journalism Review article by Terry Ann Knopf, research associate at Brandeis University’s Violence Study Center. She says: The failure of the media to tell the right story in the case of Cleveland (23 July 1968 Glenville Shoot-Out) goes beyond the lack of initiative or an inclination to sensationalize. It also indicates a bias—one which, notwithstanding Vice President Agnew’s declarations, cuts across political and geographical lines. The media are no more aware of this bias than is the general public aware of its own. In part we could call it a class bias in that those who comprise media staffs—reporters, editors, headline writers, etc.—are part of the vast American middle class and, as such, express its views, values and standards.

Both the general public and the media share the same dislike of protesters; both are unable to understand the violence as an expression of protest against oppressive conditions; both prefer the myth of orderly, peaceful change, extolling the virtues of private property and pubic decorum. both will grant that it took a revolution to secure our independence and a civil war to end slavery (at least officially), but that was all long ago and somehow different.

I am reminded here of a high school friend who would take exception anytime we would speak of the American Revolution of 1776. She would tell me that it wasn’t a revolution—this was the 1971 or 1972 when revolution was a dirty word—but rather what happened in 1776 was the American war for independence. We never got around to the Civil War.

Finally, Roldo marks another loss to the journalism community of Cleveland. He writes:

Bye-Bye—Good reporters don’t die, they just go away… from the Plain Dealer, that is.

Don Barlett, the PD’s investigative reporter, has left the Plain Dealer for the second time.

A Journalistic Diogenes, Barlett leads a nomadic life looking for an honest place to report. This trip is to Philadelphia.

After I set down a few words about Don Barlett’s part in writing the exposé of the HADC, Roldo sent me an email writing:

Don Barlett was a hell of a reporter. Don’t know how he got messed on the Hough story. He was warned that he was going to get slammed.

He had taken a job as an aide at a state mental institution and wrote a series that shamed the institution and state. But Vail made a deal with Rhodes that Rhodes would fix the problem and the PD would lay off on the stuff Barlett had found. Of course, Rhodes did nothing.

Vail seemed to always be making deals, and seldom for the good of Cleveland.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

At the bottom of yesterday’s Readin’ Roldo I noted that Davis commanded the famous Tuskegee Airmen of the U.S. Army Air Corps. This morning I discovered that Roldo Bartimole devoted most of Volume 3, Nos. 1 & 2 to Davis in his short tour of duty—21 January-27 July 1970—as the Public Safety Director of Cleveland. I wanted to know more about the man.

Here is what Britannica has to say:

Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., in full Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., (born December 18, 1912, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died July 4, 2002, Washington, D.C.), pilot, officer, and administrator who became the first African American general in the U.S. Air Force. His father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., was the first African American to become a general in any branch of the U.S. military.

Davis studied at the University of Chicago before entering the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1932. After graduating in 1936 he was commissioned in the infantry and in 1941 was among the first group of African Americans admitted to the Army Air Corps and to pilot training. Upon his graduation he was swiftly promoted to lieutenant colonel, and he organized the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first entirely African American air unit, which flew tactical support missions in the Mediterranean theatre. In 1943 he organized and commanded the 332nd Fighter Group (the Tuskegee Airmen). By the end of the war Davis himself had flown 60 combat missions and had been promoted to colonel.

After the war Davis held other commands, and he helped plan the desegregation of the air force in 1948. He graduated from the Air War College in 1950, commanded a fighter wing in the Korean War, and was promoted to brigadier general (a one-star general) in 1954. In 1959 Davis became the first African American officer to reach the rank of major general (a two-star general) in the air force and was promoted to lieutenant general (a three-star general) in 1965. After retiring in 1970 he was named director of civil aviation security in the U.S. Department of Transportation. In that post he devised and coordinated measures that effectively ended a wave of aircraft hijackings in the United States. Davis became an assistant secretary of transportation in 1971.

His six months in Cleveland are missing from the official record. They never happened. Additionally, director Anthony Hemingway makes no mention of the famous flier in his 2012 movie about the Tuskegee airmen: Red Tails. Instead, Hemingway gave command of the squadron to a fictious Col. A.J. Bullard, played by Terrence Howard. Bullard was named in honor of Eugene Jacques Bullard the first Black combat pilot who flew in The Great War.

I’ve ordered a copy of Davis’ autobiography to read what he had to say about his stay here in Cleveland, but suffice to say that for a man whose life was so distinguished, his time in Cleveland really sucked.

In his 20 July 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 1), Roldo, under the headline, HATE CLIMATE BUILDS; RACISM UNCHALLENGED, ledes:

While Gen. Ben Davis was “learning” how to solve the problem of student unrest in Washington, D.C. last week, his policies and police force were ensuring Cleveland would have a most unrestful summer.

The former Air Force general, being boomed in the press here as alternately for mayor of Cleveland and D.C., has bridged the gap between the police and the Stokes administration.

He joined the cops.

With white politicians peddling racism wholesale cheap (see yesterday’s Readin’ Roldo) the General has been supporting attacks on blacks and allowing his police to afford the same privileges to white hoods.

Reading the next sentence, written sometime in early July, I had to wonder what Roldo was hearing on the back channels. He continues:

But the General may have trouble getting through the summer with his image intact. Black endurance, even in Cleveland, may not be that strong.

The latest test of that endurance involves attacks on Blacks and “nigger loving” whites in the Tremont area.
…
If nothing else, the attacks united a variety of usually quarreling community groups. Citizens went to City Hall to see the General who was in D.C.

Instead, the group met the General’s Colonel, William Hendrickson.

Hendrickson scoffed when told the protestors were coming, identifying one as a pesky crank. About an hour before, this same woman, overcome by fear and fatigue, collapsed at a public meeting. She and her children had been sleeping on the floor to avoid being shot.
…
With Hendrickson was Dennis Kucinich, Tremont councilman who is always alert and willing to exploit a situation. However, looking meek and concerned in front of reporters and TV cameras, Dennis has been strangely silent during this tense period and has spurned invitations to meet with constituents until they came to City Hall. Dennis said he had toured the tense area but residents curiously had never seen him.

What follows is a portrait of a Kucinich I did not know. I came to Cleveland in 1984 and by that time Kucinich was out of the mayor’s office and between political gigs. Roldo, however, has never let go writing as recently as last August, in KUCINICH—BORN TO RUN, NOT NECESSARILY TO WIN about rumors of Kucinich making a mayoral comeback. Roldo wrote then:

Now, a few months short of 74 years old, Dennis is running again. Or so he isn’t saying anything to refute talk of his interest in the mayoral race of 2021.

He was born to run.

The big question is, however, does he have any chance of winning and of operating a government. A government he had much trouble with in the late 1970s.

He was a one-term, two-year mayor. He squeezed into those two years, among other problems, a voter recall, a financial default, a tax hike vote and a vote on Muny Light. There were no slow days.

He was not re-elected. However, he did become a U.S. Congressman from 1997-2013. He also served in the Ohio Senate in 1995.

Now it is time to look back at his City Hall days.

Returning to July 1970, and the city hall office of William Hendrickson, Roldo continues:

Kucinich’s silence might well be taken as tacit approval by neighborhood troublemakers. He has said that his concern in Ward 7 was with the “stable white community,” not blacks and white Appalachians.
…
The Tremont harassment follows too closely the bitter battle against public housing in Cleveland being led by reactionary white politicians (Kucinich, Richard Harmody and Jim Stanton) who see local benefits in a [George] Wallace-[Spiro] Agnew approach. Most of the threats in Tremont demand removal of Blacks from public housing.

Kucinich, who has been carefully building a city-wide reputation as a youthful anti-black politician, blames, as might be expected, left-wing radicals for the Tremont troubles. At the meeting he hid behind Gen. Davis, obsequiously applauding the Safety Director and placing full confidence in him.
…
The General has become the media darling. The Cleveland Press said last week that Davis “has impressed all segments of the community as a tough, fair-minded administrator.” There’s no criticism of the General’s travels or his Tuesday and Thursday working-hours golf dates.

The Press went on to say, “One rarely hears about disaffection between the mayor’s office and the Police Dept. since Davis has been on the job.”

That’s easily explained. The police, through Davis, now get everything they want. Why would the police complain as they now have the freedom to attack blacks at will and allow white citizens the same privilege?

It’s been carefully noted, too, that Davis fired former Asst. Safety Director Frank Moss, a black, for filing an incorrect report. Moss had a month to go for 25 years’ service. Meanwhile, a white police officer, charged with shooting his wife and then himself, remains on the street, no less the force.

Throughout this period, blacks have shown more patience than this community deserves.

In order to provide more context for Davis’ time in office, Roldo appended information under the head, BACKGROUND. He wrote:

The trouble in Tremont started 18 June when a party was held for an African student and some whites broke it up.

From that time on there has been a steadily growing harassment, including gunfire at buildings housing blacks and whites who have associated with them. Grocery stores have been threatened about serving blacks; several have been fired upon. Windows of an agency serving both white and black youth have been broken and the landlord of another agency was beaten. The apartment of a man who took petitions out for a recall of the area’s councilman, Dennis Kucinich, was set afire and a black woman was called and told of the fire in her “friend’s,” before the fire engines arrived. Children “go to pieces” from threats and obscenities by telephone. (At a meeting discussing the problems in a church basement a tap on the window was heard. Almost immediately one of the black women slumped to the floor out of fear.

On the evening of 13 July, the women were harassed by armed youths. The police were called but didn’t arrive for an hour. They were cussed for being late by a black man, Juba Chilembiwe, who was roughed up at the scene and arrested. The next day Juba was dead. The police said he hung himself in his cell with his belt.

No one believes the story.

Roldo continues:

The police story differed from those present during the incident. Juba swore at the police, asked them why they had been late. A reporter was told by the police that a black man had been raving about racism on the West Side and that they picked him up for drunkenness. Then he hung himself.

The women also swear that he wore no belt. It is normal police procedure to take belts from prisoners.

Two days after the death, the body was cremated, ensuring no reliable autopsy. The word of the police and the County Coroner’s office are unreliable.

Dennis Kucinich blames left-wing radicals for the trouble in his ward.

That is a very different Kucinich from the man who hung out in California with Shirley MacClaine and moved distinctly to the left.

Finally, a note on war supplies. In yesterday’s installment I noted that Davis ordered some 30,000 rounds of hollow-point ammunition. Mayor Stokes was not happy. Roldo, briefly, writes:

GENERAL THWARTED—The order for 30,000 hollow-point bullets, commonly known as dum-dums, by Gen. Davis, has been reversed by Mayor Stokes. Stokes stopped the order and told aides if the Safety Director would like to complain he should see the mayor.

But as we’ll see in the next issue, Davis gets the last word.

In his 1 August 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 2), Roldo goes right for the jugular with the headline, THE DAVIS DEBACLE. He ledes:

“I wish I had a machine gun now. I’d shoot them all down.”

Those are the private words attributed to Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. by an admiring councilman. They were aimed at black militants who refused to stand for a pledge to the flag at a city council meeting.

“There are fundamental causes—poverty, living conditions. Until they are removed, or their effects decreased, I don’t think anybody is going to come up with very dramatic and immediate changes.”

Those are the words of a humbler Gen. Davis to a Detroit reporter before he came to Cleveland as Safety Director.

Davis said recently that he was trying to: “constructively instill in the police dept. a grave concern for the rights of all the city’s citizens and innate courtesy for all.” But when police without warrants took recorders, cameras and files from Panthers, Davis saw nothing to investigate. And he told officers privately not to call blacks “niggers,” but to use “son of a bitch.”

The general got confused with what he was supposed to say as a public official and what he really felt. In the end, 37 years of military emerged unconditionally as victor.

He quit with a blast that Mayor Stokes not only did not support him but gave “support and comfort to the enemies of law enforcement.” The charge, unexplained and without the General’s naming the “enemies shook the administration to its toes.” More on that later.

Cleveland had descended into the “Good Negro, Bad Negro debate. Roldo continued:

Where white liberals found the suave, cool Carl Stokes an acceptable Negro, the General earned the same acceptability from a far larger segment of whites, those who don’t know and fear blacks. The psychological relief from the burden of having to think of oneself as a bigot with the added dividend of allegiance to an authority figure could be a potent political combination nationally.

But as good a mayoral candidate as Davis looked last Tuesday, by Wednesday the chinks in his armor were visible and by week’s end there were embarrassing holes.

Davis began getting tacit support from parts of the media and the Democratic and Republican parties looking for a candidate next year. By the end of the week he had the damaging endorsement of the American Independent Party of George Wallace. Even the Cleveland Patrolman’s Association offered him a post. The offer was made by James Magas, association head, who the week before called for “on the street justice,” the new euphemism for murder when the accused murderer of a policeman is arrested.

Back in the late ’80s I knew a Marine Corps colonel who would have approved of Magas’ position. (I do have to chuckle at the completely unrelated spelling of the his name to our twice impeached soon-to-be-ex-president’s slogan.) The colonel once told me that if he had his druthers, he would line rioters up on the sidewalk and summarily executive them. Roldo continues:

But why did Davis quit so suddenly and in a huff?

Davis probably learned of attacks upon him prepared at City Hall with the knowledge of the Mayor. A report documenting requests for protection of blacks and white in Tremont and, to use a favorite word of the General’s, the “negative” response by Davis, was being prepared. It would have severely criticized Davis.

Further, a cross-fire of criticism from the West and East sides, black and white, was in the making.
…
Because of Davis’ lack of concern about attacks on black in Tremont, clergymen had to be recruited through the Council of Churches to patrol the area. The City Community Relations division also took an active role.

Thus it was amusing, but not surprising, that among Gen. Davis’ “enemies of law enforcement” were Rev. Arthur LeMon, head of the Community Relations unit, and the Council of Churches (actually, Davis means the Council’s Metropolitan Affairs Commission, a black buffer unit that allows elite-level clergymen to avoid all the tough issues).

Davis’ charges had the old “soft on communism” tone to it. Like old Joe McCarthy waving his list, Davis refused to name the “enemies.” Stokes eventually released the list made up of names given to him, he said, by Davis.

Was that enough for Britannica to ignore Davis’ six months in Cleveland? Perhaps.

In his THRU THE GRINDER section, Roldo touches on three items:

SECOND TO LAST ACT?—Before quitting, Gen. Davis ordered 30 pump action shotguns and 275 Smith & Wesson 38 heavy barrel revolvers for his troops.

And:

CHOP-CHOP—Plain Dealer editors chopped two important facts out of a recent story on a robbery of 300 TV sets. First, one of the five men charged with the theft was a fireman and so noted the original copy of the reporter. Second, the lawyer for three of the five was Hugh Corrigan. This was penciled out of the story. County Commissioner Corrigan rarely handles any court cases. It will be interesting to watch what charges are finally made by County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan. The Corrigans are cousins.

Further Jim Stanton, close friend of both, got avid support, including financial, from the firemen in his Congressional primary victory.

And:

DIRTY DOW—The beauty of being a major polluter of the Great Lakes for Dow Chemical is that it reaps profits from its destruction. Having dumped mercury into the lakes for years, Dow is now collecting some $550,000 this year to clean up the lake.

The city of Cleveland has authorized $250,000 this year added to some $300,000 for Dow.

This last reminds me of the chutzpah of the Sackler family marketing a drug to treat the addicts hooked by their own devious marketing of OxyContin.

As a final note, this post covers two month because Roldo decided to give himself some breathing room for the summer, omitting the first issues from July and August. He returned to bi-weekly publication in September, where we’ll go tomorrow.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

This installment of Readin’ Roldo is a Blue-Moon post that contains a third issue of Point Of Viəw, numbers 22, 23 and 24 of the second volume. This also marks the end of Volume 2 and Roldo Bartimole’s second year as an independent journalist and pamphleteer. This is also my 26th treatise—25 double and this triple posts as Roldo’s Cleveland Boswell.

Determining exactly where and when the first police officers—as we now think of them—came into being is difficult. The why, however, has always been clear. No matter the name—guards, watchers, patrols, constables or police—their function has remained throughout human history a constant: to protect the property of those who had property from those who did not.

In his 1 June 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 22), Roldo makes the case that in his present day Cleveland (and apparently still today) police continued to serve that function. When police are paid by taxpayers, however, those with more property to protect than others might want to find a way to remind the police that some are more equal than others.

Beneath the headline, WOULD YOU DIE FOR BLUECOATS? Roldo ledes:

“If I’ve got to die, I hope I die in the line of duty.”

This quote is attributed to Cleveland policemen by a reporter writing a glowing article about an organization called the Bluecoats.

The reporter saw the Bluecoats—an organization which aids the families of policemen who are killed doing their job—as the “most remarkably warmhearted organization.”

We’d like to make this sort of an open letter to Cleveland policemen to tell them why Bluecoats is rather a cold, calculating organization designed to buy the friendship of policemen and since the money comes from Cleveland’s corporate elites—buy it very cheaply.

Bluecoats says it is an organization dedicated to lifting the burdens from the families of killed policemen. But the real, though unstated, goal is to encourage policemen to stick their necks out, even at the cost of their lives, to protect property. And as we shall see, most of the property belongs to the members of Bluecoats.

…
Bluecoats brags that “even the paper work burdens will be lifted from the widow’s shoulders. The go-here, go-there complications that bewilder in the lonely anguish of bereavement.”

Bluecoats will help getting the pension insurance, social security, workman’s compensation, etc., paper work done.

What members of Bluecoats don’t say, however, is that in their corporate suits, they have fought every one of those programs at every stage of legislation and continue to do so.

[According to its literature, since its inception in 1956, Bluecoats has assisted more than 100 families of safety officers—police and fire—who died in the line of duty. JH]

Why then are these men so interested in police and firemen?

The answer is obvious. You’re working for them and if they can get you to take added risks to protect their property and you’ll do it, then that’s your problem. But the next time you take a chance on getting yourself killed or killing someone else, to protect property, remember the Bluecoats—who you are protecting and what you are protecting.

Not as clean and simple as hiring a part of Allan Pinkerton’s force to guard your property in the 19th century, but nearly as effective and at a much lesser cost. How much less? Roldo continues:

So you see, that $250 annual donation and the Bluecoats propaganda that goes with it, have nothing to do with love or respect for policemen. Many policemen, however, are feeling the pressure of being put in the middle, forced to somebody’s dirty work.

Under NOTES, Roldo notes:

OHIO THE BACKWARD: A new study of government taxation and spending shows Ohio slipping nearer to last place in everything.

Ranking of the state by spending per inhabitant: education, 46th; public welfare, 40th; hospitals, 46th; health, 47th; police protection, 49th; natural resources, 44th; financial administration, 48th; general control (legislature and judiciary) 50th and libraries, 45th.

[This last has changed dramatically in 50 years. I don’t have the numbers but my experience talking with writers in other states leads me to believe that our libraries—particularly our Cuyahoga County system—are amazing. JH]

In his 12 June 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 23), Roldo lays out some numbers on who’s getting hired in Cleveland under the headline: CORPORATE RACISM—POLITE VIOLENCE. He writes:

It has been at least a decade since “equal employment” of minority group members has qualified as a “crisis” problem and a U.S. national priority, yet major corporations with facilities in Cleveland—a city 35 percent black—have been unable to find non-white workers.

At least that’s the impression one gets reading the list of companies which have been unable to bid on city contracts because of their poor record of employment of minorities.

And since the program, one of the better ones of the Stokes administration, has been having the effect of at least forcing the companies to pledge better attention to hiring minorities, it has now come under attack from city council, which seems intent upon subverting what seems to work and preserving all malfunctioning mechanisms.

I was not surprised to find that the numbers were, well, unbalanced. Roldo digs into the numbers for some key Cleveland employers beginning with the company infamous for napalm. He continues:

Dow Chemical, chief corporate pretender to patriotism, feels it is its patriotic duty to do what the U.S. government asks of it. Or at least its propaganda tells us so.

For example, Dow officials said they made a “moral judgment” to produce napalm “on the long-range goals of our government and we support these.”

[The government, of course, doesn’t ask anything. It pays millions to buy the patriotic services of companies such as Dow. Would Dow have made another “moral judgment” to manufacture Zyklon B if the government had asked it to? But I digress. JH] Roldo continues:

Too bad that Dow isn’t similarly inclined on the stated goal of the U.S. for equal employment.

Out of 662 workers in the Dow Packaline plants in Cleveland, only 20 workers are members of minority groups. All of them are in lower echelon jobs.

In its downtown office, Dow employs 45 persons. One is a member of a minority group—a clerk, naturally.

Other major corporations don’t perform any better, according to Roldo:

Xerox has 201 [Cleveland] employees and only five are minority members.

Then in city of more than 300,000 blacks, some 15,000 Puerto Ricans and other minorities, Xerox can only find five and Dow 21 minority members.

Out of 475 employees at the accounting firm of Ernst and Ernst, only 24 are minorities and except for two professionals, all 22 others are clerical workers.

Oglebay-Norton, which tried to sell high-sulfur coal to the city, has only 19 minority members in the workforce of 192.

Pickands-Mather, which also tries to sell unsafe coal to the city, employs 305 white workers, four black workers and one South American employee.

We make a great deal here in 2021 about organizations and presidential cabinets looking like America. In 1970, not so much.

In his Thru The Grinder catchall, Roldo next turns his attention to the continued animosity between Cleveland police and the residents of the Glenville neighborhood. He writes:

JULY 23RD TACTICS: The pattern of provocation and harassment that last time led to the July 23rd [Glenville Shoot-out] gun battle between police and citizens seems to be at work again.

This time the police target is the Ohio Chapter of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, the political and social bureau of the Black Panther Party. The first recognized Panther Party unit has begun organizing in Cleveland.

Early Saturday morning, May 30, members were stopped by the police. The incident was followed by police shining spotlights into the organizers’ apartment and then lining up with shotguns and carbines in front of the apartment. The attempt to provoke an incident was averted when organizers moved people into the street from apartments and bars and police backed off. The incident went unreported in the media but the pattern of police tactics is familiar and it’s apparent the Cleveland police learned few lessons from July 23rd.

In a second Grinder piece, Roldo celebrates a bit of corporate largesse.

TAX WRITE-OFF: Lipton Tea Co. donated 15,000 cases of instant tea, pre-sweetened with cyclamates, to Ohio. Despite the U.S. Health Dept. warning of its cancer-causing effects, Ohio accepted. The state will serve the tea at mental institutions and prisons.

Cyclamates would be later found to only be indirectly a cause of cancer. Well that clears that up, doesn’t it?

In his 27 June 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 24), Roldo examines the tensions between Mayor Carl Burton Stokes and City Council President James Vincent Stanton and how their animosity gives Cleveland lockjaw. With the headline, RIGOR MORTIS OF PERSONALITY POLITICS, Roldo ledes:

“You’ve been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything,” Mark [Marcus Alonzo] Hanna once wrote privately, but truthfully.

Cleveland City Council President Jim Stanton apparently has adopted the spirit of Hanna’s truism as personal policy. It’s good mental preparation for Congress where Stanton will be next year.

In the remaining months, the Council president continues his nearly three-year battle over who will be mayor of Cleveland. It’s been said often that Stanton wanted to be mayor. It’s apparent now that he considers himself the uncrowned Mayor of White Cleveland and protector of its purity.

Roldo wouldn’t stoop so low, but I have no such scruples: Stanton saw himself as the White Knight. Roldo continues:

Who is right, who is wrong, matters little. Neither Stokes or Stanton is much interested in the problems of their constituents, other than how they might be used for personal aggrandizement. Stokes appears to be grooming himself for much bigger things; Stanton to control the local Democratic Party apparatus.

Beneath the surface the continuing struggle revolves, naturally, around money and power and whether the few blacks will share with the few whites, who have been receiving for so long.

[Roldo list four areas to examine: first, the Stanton-Stokes rivalry; second, the District 21 Caucus, a Stokes brothers creation to solidify black political power; third, Public Housing and council’s attempt to ban it in white areas; and fourth, a stalemate over recreation facilities in the city.]

On the Stanton-Stokes rivalry, Roldo writes:

City hall has become a paranoia factory with rumors streaming out of council chambers about the wrong-doing in the Stokes administration.

The rumors about the mayor personally and about others in the administration are spread by Stanton people, building a hate atmosphere. When spread, as it is being, to disgruntled whites protesting at city hall, it can lead to an explosive, dangerous situation. (At a public housing hearing last week hundreds of angry whites from Ward 9—kept waiting for 2 1/2 hours by the planning commission—at one point wanted to storm the hearing upstairs. [Sound familiar? link to Klepper video.] Had there been 10 blacks there to protest, the halls would have been loaded with police and red squad. As it was, there were none.

On the importance of the 21st District—created by the Stokes brothers (Mayor Carl Burton and Representative Louis)—Roldo writes:

The District 21 Caucus, primarily black Democrats, broke from the regular Democrats after Stanton put together suburban reformists and his West Side power base to select Probate Judge Joseph W. Bartunek as party chief, replacing one cheap politician for a younger one.

[I love this quote from Bartunek, a Democrat. JH]

Bartunek, an old political name, once said: When I came down here (to Columbus as a legislator) [He was a state senator from 1948 to 1964, JH] I was against unemployment compensation, and worker’s compensation because I thought they were socialistic.
…
District 21 Caucus represents the Stokes’ forces’ response to a Stanton dominated party. However, it is also traditional ethnic politics. Black politicians need ethnic cohesiveness at this point to solidify their strength, stifle divisive elements (someone who might, for example, run against Mayor Stokes to split the black vote here) and essentially to create a bloc vote for trading or electing.

District 21 will avoid gut socioeconomic issues (except in sporadic rhetoric) thus ensuring little organizing to relieve conditions. Black politicians in power won’t constitute Black Power and more than Jim Stanton in power has anything to do with White Power for most whites. There remains, however, a certain sense of justice, misleading as it is, in the shift from white to black political moneymakers.

Roldo moves on to the third topic: Public Housing. He writes:

Stanton, before the May 5 primary, promised Stokes he would provide Council approval for 3,700 units of low income housing. The Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority wanted authorization for 20,000 units to be built in the next five years.

However, Stanton wasn’t able to deliver, probably because the public housing issue became too hot and enticing for those looking toward Stanton’s soon vacant council presidency.
…
Dick Harmody, Ward 9 councilman and a candidate for Stanton’s seat, and other offices, has found himself an issue to ride and he’s playing it to the fullest.

CMHA plans to build a 132-unit, single-home development for low income families. It’s in south Cleveland’s Ward 9 which gave [1968 third-party presidential candidate George] Wallace more votes than any other ward (more than 2,000).

Finally, Roldo explains the matter of proposed recreation facilities. He writes:

The hearings on the recreation centers brought similar protest [to those against public housing] by whites interested in the South Side center to serve Wards 14 and 15. The administration wants a package deal for South, in a white area, and JFK and Glenville recreation, both black.

Stanton has engineered a holdup of the legislation to provide full funding for all three. The administration can hardly be blamed for ensuring centers in the black areas. Wards 14 and 15 hardly deserve more attention from Stokes, having given his opponent 12,000 and him 1,300 votes last year.

The parks and recreation committee, on Stanton’s command, denied the necessary authorization. Stanton didn’t want the issue to come to a vote; however Dennis Kucinich, who never stops running, was beaten to the punch by the elderly Carrie Cain, Hough councilwoman. Dennis was supposed to get a motion to table the issue on the floor, but before he did, Mrs. Cain motioned the vote. The one other black on the committee seconded it.

It made it necessary for five white council members to vote against recreation. That night Margarete McCaffery, committee chairwoman, was on the phone explaining to Southsiders. To one who favored all three, she explained that the vote had not been racial, though it might seem that with five whites voting “no” and two blacks voting “yes.”

In his Thru The Grinder section Roldo wonders if the city’s Public Safety Director is worried about an invasion from Canada. He writes:

LOOKING FOR A WAR?—Gen. Ben Davis, the man brought to Cleveland to pacify it, must have access to the Nixon peace plan. First, he ordered a $40,000 armored tank for the police (but “it is not a tank,” he says, it’s a rescue vehicle), and now he’s ordered 30,000 Remington .38 special, 125 grain hollow point cartridges. The hollow point slugs explode on contact with the force of a .60 caliber slug to create fatal damage. It’s said the hollow points open up causing a small hole as they enter the body and a larger on exit. The general also ordered 750,000 regular bullets. Davis at the City Club last week said that there are black nationalists” out to get the police and out to get us.”

Somehow we think he’s got it backwards.

[Benjamin Oliver Davis was the commander of the Red Tails, the Tuskegee Airmen, during WWII. He became Cleveland’s Public Safety Director in 1970 and lasted only seven months.JH]

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

A little more than a month ago I wrote: “I’ve been waiting for the Plain Dealer editorial pages to show some courage and sharply tell readers what a sickening danger Donald Trump is and how he’s getting worse.”

Little did I know.

I continued: “But the paper shies away from any kind of moral stance about the dangerous and damaging actions of our lying President.”

On January 6 it became clear.

Prompted by Trump, hoards of his supporters marauded the U. S. Capitol, seeking vengeance on U.S. Congress reps and Senators.

The policy of the Plain Dealer has been hands off where Trump has been concerned. He seemed off limits editorially.

I put the blame on Chris Quinn, the executive editor. He’s the boss.

Just last Sunday Quinn, in one of his notes to readers (Letter from the Editor) he said, explaining himself to readers: “The most important roles we play… are holding people in leadership positions to account…”

Really?

Yet, day after day, week after week, Trump’s crazed behavior had been ignored by the PD.

Trump kept poking his finger in the public’s eye but the PD remained editorially quiet—a stain on its record and on Quinn’s.

And everyone knew that he was telling the Big Lie about the November election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

He should have been called on it editorially by the paper. It didn’t peep.

Quinn, who told readers in his Sunday message that he “leans left,” seems to lean back.

I believe Quinn—like look-the-other-way Republicans—didn’t want to poke the bear Trump.

This appeasement typically doesn’t exact peace but more of the same.

Quinn recently wrote: “The last thing we should do is create more reason for division.”

That’s a signal to not arouse public debate.

In a democracy that’s deadly; for a newspaper its avoidance of its responsibility.

Avoiding Trump’s excesses only leads to more. Disastrously.

He has been a terrible President.

How many are dead? 390,000? How many will die, 500,000? More?

Trump has been allowed to concoct an entire conspiracy theory that he had been robbed of a second term. He did it by the old game of repeating the Big Lie, as concocted by Hitler himself.

It needs quick and continued exposure.

What are we waiting for Quinn?

I’ve just spent a large chunk of the last 24 hours revisiting and writing about the most tragic moment in Ohio’s history during my life time. When I saw this headline this morning: Ohio governor activates National Guard ahead of potential riots, my heart sank. I purposely chose a non-Ohio source for the story because I wanted some distance.

Associated Press reporters Farnoush Amiri and Julie Carr Smyth lede:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine activated 580 National Guard members Tuesday in preparation for what the FBI identified as massive armed protests planned in Columbus and every state capital in the country leading up to Inauguration Day.

“People have the right to protest. They do not have the right to be destructive,” DeWine said during a briefing Tuesday. “They do not have the right to hurt other people.”

“We all saw what happened at the U.S. Capitol. And we know we are very concerned,” he added.

The Republican governor authorized National Guard members from Jan. 14 to Jan. 21 to conduct training and be prepared in case called upon to police the armed riots authorities say are planned at the U.S. Capitol and the Ohio Statehouse.

In Washington, D.C. protesters waltzed into the Capitol building and people died as a result. DeWine does not want a repeat here. I hope that his result is better that of when the Guard was deployed to the campus of Kent State University.

Capitalists are only moved to action by threats to capital and such threats are the only leverage free people may use to exact change bent on broadening freedoms and access to power. In two, back-to-back issues of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole illustrates how failing to exert that tool resulted in capitalists maintaining their desired status quo.

In his 1 May 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 20), Roldo begins by examining a morning newspaper facade beneath the headline: 3-Month Probe a Dud: H.A.D.C. RIPPED BY P.D. LIES, WHITE ELITES PROTECTED. He ledes:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s vendetta against the Hough Area Development Corp. by Don Barlett represents—not an exposé of HADC—but a cover-up of white business elites and reflects the incredible inability of the PD to deal honestly with anything that has to do with black people.

Further, the stories again falsely and dangerously fan the fears of the white community that federal funds are being massively misused and, indeed, are financing violence.

The attempt to paint HADC in conspiratorial terms as the den of black extremists is about as convincing as Louis Seltzer’s desire to blame communists for the 1966 Hough riot. Indeed, Barlett draws upon the same mentality and inaccuracies for his hatchet job.

This divide-and-suppress strategy is an oldie but a goodie for Cleveland’s capitalist elites seeking to maintain their comfortable place atop the economic structure. Roldo continues:

The PD plays on racial distrust by rehashing the old story that funds went to Ahmed Evans and were used to buy guns. Somehow HADC gets the blame.

Actually, the funds were from Cleveland Now and HADC was used by white business elites who didn’t want it known that they were giving funds to black militants, even though the funds were for a program, unlike similar payments in 1967, which we will get to.

The 1968 funds came through the Mayor’s Youth Committee, headed by Dean Ostrum, vice president and general counsel of Ohio Bell Telephone Co. The decision was not HADC’s and HADC provided the accounting mechanism for the transfer of funds.

The money was not HADC’s, but rather came from a pot controlled by the Cleveland Now expenditure made up of leading business elites of Cleveland:

George Grabner, president, Weatherhead Co.;
Richard T. Baker, managing partner, Ernst & Ernst;
George Dively, chairman of Harris-Intertype;
Tom Patton, chairman, Republic Steel;
John Sherwin, chairman, Pickands-Mather & Co.; and
Jack Reavis, managing partner, Jones, Day, Cockley & Reavis

[The name Reavis shows up in Roldo’s writing so much that one might begin to think him a member of royalty. JH] Roldo continues:

Now, why all this crap about Hough Development, as the PD puts it, paying militants and assorted hoodlums rather than the poor?

Roldo explains:

It has to be funny. Such organizations as HADC are told to succeed with insufficient capital, little management skill, forced to work in severely depressed marketing areas, limited primarily to marginal economic ventures, forced to work without the important corporate legal talent. And if that isn’t enough, they are expected to employ those the society has crippled and are brainwashed into accepting as a condition of success the capacity to ‘share the wealth’ with the community. Several months after forming a corporate venture but not having come up with a pat ‘share the wealth’ plan, the PD strongly insinuates that HADC is screwing poor people.

Of course, Barlett knew full well that his series was bullshit, but he had his instructions from his editor and he wanted to keep his paycheck. Roldo, however, was having none of it. He writes:

Anyone with half a brain has to know that HADC is engineered to fail. If one is to understand HADC at all, one has to realize that it was not created to solve problems, but rather to meet the pressing political needs of a society that will not seriously deal with any major social ill, but has great capacity to fake it.

Further, any community organization that wishes to be successful has to control, or at least have the power to seriously reflect its wishes upon important community institutions—police, political, education, etc. Obviously, should HADC begin to reflect that power, the PD would be the first to cry about misuse of government funds.

Power is for the powerful to wield and, on occasion lend when it served the purposes of Capital; in this case through a top tool at the PD. Roldo continues:

The entire HADC series had the quality of Ted Princiotto, night managing editor and strategically the most important man at the PD. He directed the HADC exposé.

The trademark is familiar: lack of substance is compensated for by big headlines and prominent placement on page one, which Princiotto nightly plans. Rather than reasoned presentations, the articles are played for spectacle. “Look here, look at the dirt we, the Plain Dealer dug up for you,” the splashy display says. To keep the series going, the same information is rehashed and repeated.

And, the tool worked. Roldo concludes:

When power rules, don’t blame the powerless when they finally get the idea and put it to some use. The PD began one of its stories with:

Nearly two years have slipped by since HADC received its first $1.6 million, and so far the organization’s achievements consist largely of voluminous reports and promises to ghetto residents.”

Look around, Plain Dealer, because decades and decades have passed and millions and millions of $ promises to ghetto residents.

Now, after less than two years of a community-run program, you seem awfully eager to use the meat ax.

This is how the Capitalist’s version of Jim Crow worked in Cleveland and, generally, the North.

Roldo, and Cleveland, were focused on local events and not paying a great deal of attention to events unfolding less than 40 miles to the Southeast at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

In his 11 May 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 21), Roldo keeps his focus local with the headline:MORSE, STEIN STRATEGY: Non-Violence Earns CWRU Double-Cross. The Morse and Stein played large in the headline were CWRU president Robert Morse and his right-hand man Herman Stein. Roldo ledes:

In June of this year a study funded by the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (for domestic counter-insurgency and repression) was to be completed at Kent State U.

The grant abstract—Attitudinal Changes in Law Enforcement and College Student Populations—says “This proposal is directed to the analysis of the component parts of a college course which are designed not only to produce understanding of law enforcement philosophies, concepts and procedural operation, but also to produce favorable change in attitudes toward the criminal justice system.”

At Ohio University, under the same financing (created by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968) a study is being made of the “Policeman—his credibility as a message source.”

We don’t know what the U.S. financed study at Kent will find that will “produce a favorable change in attitudes” or produce “understanding of law enforcement philosophies, concepts and procedural operation.”

But it doesn’t matter for the attitudes of Kent State students and hundreds of thousands of others are now shaped by the sound of flying bullets and death and no college course based on manipulative hypocrisy will change that soon.

And today, more than 50 years after the tragic events—involving both police and the Ohio National Guard—producing that favorable change in attitudes remains just as ridiculous. Roldo continues:

In Columbus, as in most other places, the credibility of police will be shaped by their performance and since Columbus police make a practice of shooting youngsters in the back (particularly if their skin is dark—two black youth have been shot this year allegedly for breaking into a school candy machine), that is and should be the credible image of Columbus Cops. [And 50 years later? JH] Not some textbook version.

Ohio campuses, already on edge because of the exposure of President Richard Milhous Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia, exploded. The campus of Case Western Reserve University was no exception, at least at first. Roldo continues:

On Wednesday night, 6 May, more than 3,000 people, mostly students, met at a [CWRU] campus rally. After the meeting there was another attempt at militancy, again an attempted disruption of Euclid Avenue, but it was cooled.

At that point, if there were any students who meant to be militant in their demands, they left CWRU.

But the mood and obvious reasons for anger still had CWRU administrators worried. [CWRU president Robert] Morse and [his right-hand man Herman] Stein played a cautious role, allowing students to “take over” the Student Union and Baker buildings. (The mildness of the CWRU protests can be seen by the takeover of Baker. The students negotiated back to the university all of the building except a lounge and the basement rooms and even some of those were used as usual for night classes.)

At that point, all the students ought to have realized that they’d been had and just packed their bags. But they shouldered on:

Morse on Thursday, 7 May, issued a cautious statement:

“The university can remain open as long as students continue to exercise the best possible leadership and assist in countering efforts to use violence.

However, the element of risk is present. Students should act intelligently to minimize the risk of personal danger.

(From whom? [Roldo asks] The police say crime was at a decade low in the campus area.)

We will continue to be aware of the variety of interests and concerns on our campus and we will try to be in continuous touch with every aspect of campus life.

That turned out to be the biggest lie of them all.

Events all went downhill from there. Roldo concludes:

The final proof that Morse and Stein were playing a game of duplicity and double-cross was the announcement that communications between students and officials would be made via Paul D. Carre.

Carre—a new name to students—had been named special assistant to Morse less than a month ago. He described his function as “facilitating communications between students and Stein. [One has to wonder if Carre went on to work for President Nixon. JH]

It was the first time that anyone shortened the chain of communications by adding to it. Carre proved effective, however, for the university.

The emergency at Case-Western Reserve University was obviously over as far as the administration was concerned.

In a postscript to the story, Roldo wrote:

Today (19 May, as this is written) Morse sent a telegram [Look it up kiddies, JH] to the president of Jackson State College:

The Jackson State College tragedy is shocking to us all. This is the latest in a series of violent responses to the crises on the campuses of America. Jackson State will not be the last such tragedy unless those in positions of political responsibility move quickly to understand and cope with the frustrations so widespread in our land.

As my own postscript I would add:

In the spring of 1983 I went to a Neil Young concert at Ohio University where I was in the third year of my undergraduate studies. This was a solo tour by Young and he played to a sold-out crowd at the Convocation Center.

The 16th song he played was Ohio. I think I could have named that tune in one chord.

I was quiet, remembering that spring in 1970 when I was still a high school sophomore, but the crowd was cheering and I felt too many didn’t know what Young was singing about.

Listening to the song again, just now, still tears me up.

UPDATE AT 0815: While writing tomorrow’s Readin’ Roldo I came across this piece from Volume 2 No. 22 that is so related to events of 4 May that I felt it appropriate to include Roldo’s words here. He writes:

PD PRESSURE, WE AGREE—Plain Dealer military writer and Major in the U.S. Reserves Roy Adams gave the military version of what happened at Kent State but the PD editors refused to use it. He compared the Ohio National Guard with Custer’s men and a saint who lost his life to stoning.

In a memo to other reporters covering Kent, Adams, via his military connections, revealed that “every man involved at KSU had at least 24 hours of (riot) training. It is spread out over a number of training sessions.”

[I served as a Staff Sergeant in the Ohio Army National Guard from 1980 to 1986) and took part in three such training weekends. Unimpressive would be a kind way of describing those sessions. JH]

He quotes Major Gen. Sylvester T. Del Corso, saying “The Ohio Guardsmen absolutely did not panic.” Then he quotes Col Dana L. Stewart quoting a sergeant who said, “Earlier (before the shooting) I saw a major off in the distance, down by some fence, pull his 45 (.45 cal. pistol) and wave it around while showing something about it to somebody. That’s probably where the talk about an officer with a 45 all started. but later, when I was reaching for my 45 that same major came up, rapped me on the arm with his billy club and said, ‘put that thing away. There will be no pistols used here.'”

Adams also cautioned the reporters covering the story on the effectiveness of stones against M1s: [The semi-automatic, WWII rifle issued to the guard, JH] “If it had not been for the wearing of gas masks and steel helmets, some of the injured guardsmen might well have been killed from the force of the blows. It was pointed out that in man’s early wars, stoning was an accepted form of putting people to death.”

Unfortunately, bullets have become an accepted form of quieting dissenters.

And, 50 years later, they still are.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1 Elizabeth was not ready for the revolution.

Bonus No. 2: Trump will leave office. But the ingredients of homegrown fascism remain.

Bonus No. 3: Free Speech Doesn’t Mean “Never Stop Gabbing.”

Bonus No. 4: If you think a really good rant (via Mano Singham) will make you feel better.

Bonus No. 5: Thomas Frank on Bad Faith: After Bernie, What?

Bonus No. 6: How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler.

In the transition from President Lyndon Baines Johnson to President Richard Milhous Nixon America realized that the ’50s were gone. We were no longer, regardless of how much we lied to each other, the greatest nation the world had ever known and we were scared; scared of Russians and Chinese and Blacks and College Students and, shit, what weren’t we scared of?

While we were still a few years away from stagflation and the flattening of growth in real wages, anyone paying attention sensed the fear. For what he was worth, Cleveland City Council President James Vincent Stanton, a Democrat, thought he had an opportunity to lurch to the right and try and grab a bit of that American desire to turn back the clock; to make our streets safe again for decent, hard-working white folk. Roldo Bartimole had a bit to say about that. In his 30 March 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 18), Roldo, in It’s CRIME: STANTON’S ELECTION MISH-MASH BILL, ledes:

The odd thing about the Omnibus Crime Bill—or the Elect-Stanton-to-Congress bill, or the Anti-Black bill or the Anti-Youth bill or the Bishop Issenmann bill—it has little to do with combating crime.

First, the bill is not Omnibus, but Mish-Mash—a collection of codified petty biases not only to cater to the law-and-order crowd but to make the ordinary citizen think something’s being done about crime.

Actually, the ordinances, offered by Anthony Garofoli, Richard Harmody and John Prince, has more to do with the primary election strategy of Council President Jim Stanton than with lessening crime.

As such, the ordinance is a cynical, crude document. Sloppily written, it isn’t meant to be law, but propaganda.

Stanton, a Democrat, was backing a bill that President Richard Milhous Nixon would have been proud to sign into law. Why? Roldo explains:

Stanton can expect the bill to be opposed by the correct opposition—blacks with a militant tinge, similar whites, the ACLU and others who oppose right-wing legislation. The more militant the statements, the better Stanton will look in the media. IF the usual groups decide not to protest, the strategists would have to go out and recruit their own protesters.

The bill will also take the newspapers off Stanton’s back on the question of a gun registration bill. It doesn’t take much to throw the newspapers off track. This should do nicely.

The bill, of course, is being sold to the public as an aide to the police and a serious effort to lessen crime. The effect is probably more to the opposite. This may be the most cynical part of the legislation and shows that Stanton will even play a political game with the lives of policemen.

While meant to suppress dissent and gain the benefit of white ‘silent majority’ votes, it puts questionable powers, teasingly, into the hands of the police.

Key provisions of the bill included a prohibition of:

Three or more persons to assemble—accept at a public meeting or citizens—on any sidewalk, street corner, vacant lot or mouths of alleys and there conduct themselves in a manner annoying to persons passing by, or occupants of adjacent buildings.

Another part says that it shall be unlawful for any person to use improper, indecent or obscene language “toward a teacher, instructor, professor, person in charge of students or any official or employee of any school, college or university while in the performance of their duties…

Yeah, right.

The bit that would probably rile the right-wing today, of course, was the bill’s proposed gun legislation. Roldo writes:

The Council bill prohibits carrying firearms openly, apparently a reaction to a reporter hiking down Euclid Avenue downtown to show that it isn’t unlawful to be openly militant and the display of weapons by black militants.

I’m betting the drafters had California in mind and that state’s Mulford Act signed into law by then Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan. Roldo concludes:

Despite its absurdities, this cynical divisive bill—like Nixon’s Southern Strategy—hopes to ride the crest of emotional issues for personal political reasons. It panders to the frustrations people have in the city but does nothing to solve any problems.

In his 13 April 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 19), Roldo tells us that he’s been ill and now recovering so rather than push it, this issue will be devoted to some unrelated observations and odd bits of information—some personal and some not so.

A sort of, if you will, Omnibus Point Of Viəw. There is a lot of great stuff inside, but three pieces grabbed my attention having to do with Roldo’s battle with photocopying by elites, Dorothy Fuldheim and Cleveland’s dark love affair with Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Roldo begins with a letter to a local law firm:

It has been brought to our attention that the firm has been Xeroxing a substantial number of copies of Point Of Viəw (about 40 issues, we are told).

We would like to bring your attention to the fact that at 7-cents a Xerox copy, the price most law firms charge clients, the cost would be $280 a year.

May be suggest, therefore, that at our quantity price of $3 a year, the cost for 40 subscriptions would $120, a dramatic savings to you of $160.

This also would release secretarial and clerical help for more pressing duty.

Needless to say, there was no response from our favorite law firm. Not even a sense of humor there.

But it is being read, in law offices, welfare agencies even the Plain Dealer, since the library has a standing order for 10 Xerox copies.

Moving onto Tim Russo’s favorite Cleveland newspaper and broadcast journalist, Roldo writes:

SAD AND SAGGING Dorothy Fuldheim still knows how to milk publicity from the media. Her staged tantrum cutting off an interview with Jerry Rubin by tossing a copy of his book at him was applauded by Cleveland commentators and the Cleveland public. Ch. 5 used the sequence to promote Dorothy.

The same commentators who found Dorothy’s bad manners so cute would have fractured sensibilities if an establishment figure was treated rudely by students.

Finally on the matter of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, Roldo writes:

THE RIGHT TO POLLUTE is being demanded by Diamond-Shamrock Corporation of Cleveland. Diamond-Shamrock is one of five U.S. corporations with $20 millions in profits at stake in the production of DDT.

The five corporations, including Stauffer Chemical recently cited for polluting in Cleveland, have put together a pressure lobbying force under the name of National Agriculture Chemical Association which is using every legal maneuver available to delay controls established for the use of DDT.

Among the highly respectable people who direct affairs at Diamond-Shamrock are Jack Reavis of Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis; John Sherwin of Clevite; Horace Shepard of TRW and E.M. de Windt of Eaton, Yale and Towne.

All of whom play the role of responsive civic leaders of our community.

For those too young to remember DDT, the poison almost wiped out our national bird.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: (Via Paul Hanson) Don Pullen ft Don Moye Milano Strut 1979.

Bonus No. 2: Booker T and the MGs live: Time Is Tight

Bonus No. 3: The Greatest Hammond Organ Solos—Part 1.

Bonus No. 4: The Greatest Hammond Organ Solos—Part 2.

Bonus No. 5: The Greatest Hammond Organ Solos—Part 3.

Because I’m not a smart phone user, I missed a subtlety in this argument. I understand now.

Maybe it’s something in the air. Or a malady called Selective Memory.

A week ago Elizabeth Sullivan totally forgot that her editorial daggers had long ignored President Trump’s unstable behavior following his election loss. Now she slammed his enablers, forgetting her own editorial enabling.

Now the left-wing dragon-fighter Ted Diadiun turns and tells us:

“One thing is certain: Donald Trump needs to go. Now.”

He must have read the editorial Betsy wrote.

The company line had changed.

Quickly, Ted, tell us. “He has become unfit,” writes Ted.

You just noticed.

Who says right-wingers can’t change.

Ted has called our President “a bully.” So you can’t say he didn’t warn you.

In a pre-election column, Ted warned that we should vote based on what kind of country we wanted.

Therefore, he reasoned, choose Trump. Easy choice, he wrote.

And Ted has, above all, a vivid crystal ball.

He recently characterized his side of the political field, as only he can do, derisively do:

“Hysterical conservatives did not storm the streets of some major cities, overturning police cars and setting them afire, breaking storefront windows, looting and burning…

“Photos or weeping Republicans did not dominate the newscasts.”

Ted can really wring it out.

He goes on:

Angry right-wingers have not planned a protest march on Washington, passing out Lenin masks to everyone in protest against the fears of a coming socialist state. Trump partisans did not clog the busy streets, preventing people from getting to work.

Oops. Care to make any changes, Ted?

Care to describe the attempted sacking of the U.S. Capital building by…who… yeah, those angry right-wing Trumpsters. Massive numbers.

Diadiun’s people.

It’s time some at the Plain Dealer take their retirement deals and silently make their way into retirement.

The editorial department in particular needs some young, hopefully independent thinkers.

NOW, as Ted would write.

Brilliant cartoonists Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, back in 1971, illustrated the golden rule of elites: Whoever has the gold, makes the rules! This truism held long before Parker and Hart came along and is every bit as true today. Roldo Bartimole understood this and constantly tilted at elites demonstrating that gold didn’t have to be the end of all discussions.

In Cleveland the golden rule for elites can be found most evident in the operation of foundations and other charitable organizations tasked with the distribution of largesse to those sans silver spoons. In his 2 March 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 16), Roldo—beneath the head line, Welfare Fed, UA Stoop To Sabotage—ledes:

The Cleveland Welfare Federation—distinguished by its lack of concern for those it expresses most concern—has now resorted to blackmail tactics in the frantic effort to escape responsibility for solving social problems and to protect its image and status among corporate leaders who control it.

In a series of acts, the Welfare Federation used its power to crush the United Area Citizens Agency. The clear reason: UACA, set up to help organizations of the poor, was actually doing that job. Treason! This is frightening to WF leaders who have to report to business elites.

The need to sabotage UACA was made more clear when it voted $85,000 of un-allocated funds, given to it by the WF, to the Welfare Rights Organization.

The power-play by the WF included harassment, secret meetings, illegal votes and heavy-handed pressure in cooperation with corporate elites and Dolph Norton of the Cleveland foundation. The result was the firing of Gill Marsh, executive director of UACA, and Ed Cabell, its No. 2 man. The firings are a warning to all other welfare administrators and if allowed, a testimony of their subservience. Some Nixon brand repression.

To set the table, Roldo quotes the outgoing president of the Welfare Foundation and Cleveland Electric Illuminating executive, Robert Ginn. Roldo writes:

Ginn, in his farewell speech to the WF, 14 January—in the middle of the UACA battle—publicly warned the WF about its inability to control those it gives funds. The threat was veiled, but really rather clear.
…
Ginn was representing the corporate elites correctly. When you begin to lose a game you completely control, it’s time to change the rules. That’s the meaning of Ginn’s talk. It is a prelude for a move to consolidate everything under the completely elite-dominated United Appeal.

In the defunding of the UACA, the Federation blew a lot of smoke, but Roldo, in talking to those privy to secret meetings came to a transparent conclusion. He wrote:

Privately, it had been made to [UACA] board members that since they had not “controlled” their staff, the board could no longer be trusted as responsible enough to administer funds. The meeting, set up with the help of the foundations, indicated to trustees that the WF had the power to intimidate and would use it. Such treatment of an agency board is quite unusual. One can speculate about why, but one striking reason is that many of the board members are black.

The fight spilled over into a 10 February mewhere, Roldo writes:

The old board members still refusing to install the new members—voted on a motion by, [UACA Trustee representing Cleveland State University Al] Cousins to fire Marsh and Cabell. The reason: to restore creditability of the agency with funding sources. Meaning UACA would sabotage its programs and capitulate to the WF and its rulers in corporations.

Some within the WF committee bureaucracy have attempted to change the priorities of the WF. Some $500,000 was set aside this year supposedly to meet urgent ‘inner city problems.’ But the bludgeoning of UACA undercuts all those efforts.

[WF President A. A.] Sommer in announcing the $500,000 said that “With the cries of the inner city so clear, with the warnings of the Kerner Report and the President’s Commission on Crime and Violence so frightening, the [financial allocation body of WF] had to respond.”

Those words are now meaningless. The actions by the federation indicates clearly that the $500,000 is to be used in the same meaningless way—or not at all.

The funds come, not with strings attached, but with a rope tied in the form of a noose—to be quickly pulled on anyone who attempts to use the funds relevantly.

the attempt to ‘reform’ United Appeal and the WF has failed, as it was bound to do.

Finally, Roldo concluded: United Appeal must be destroyed. It really deserves no less.

Sadly, only the name would be canned. Like Boeing believing that changing the name of its failed 737-MAX to 737-8 would make fliers feel safer, United Appeal became United Way in the coming decade. Roldo, I have no doubt, was not fooled.

In his 16 March 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 17), Roldo stays with the allocation of funds theme in: JUGGLING BOOKS, BLACKS, WHITES. He ledes:

A $15,000 program cut in the budget of Alta House, a settlement in Little Italy, reveals the old elite game of playing white against black, one inner city agency against another.

The Alta House budget was cut to $53,000—about 20 percent—with the excuse that the population of the Murray Hill area had declined. But the problems—just as in many black areas—have increased.

The real reason for the cut is the declining political punch of the area.

Alta House is an affiliate of the Greater Cleveland Neighborhood Centers Association. This year the Welfare Federation which allocates United Appeal funds, claimed that it increased the GCNCA budget by $123,000. The impression was that inner city agencies were infused with new capital.

That’s entirely untrue and reveals the type of game the charity elites are playing to make people think more funds are being made available in poverty areas. Since the idea the public receives is that the money is going to black communities, the charity elites foster bitter racial antagonisms.

The image that comes to my mind is the kid staging bug fights in a mason jar. Roldo continues:

Rather than new money, the elites merely shifted [I’m reminded here by the acronym I learned in the military—along with SNAFU and FUBAR—for Simply Transfer Equipment Among Locations. JH] the budgeting from one account to another and claimed credit for increasing allocations to the inner city to avoid the growing criticism of upside-down priorities.
…
In ideology and purpose, United Appeal, the Cleveland Foundation and Cleveland Now are a trinity—though unholy.

Unfortunately, those disturbed by the cut at Alta House (which serves here as an example for various ethnic groups) blame not those who control the money distribution but those getting a scrap of money. The ethnics don’t blame the bankers, but the black community.

[This is the classic Robbing Peter to pay Paul shell game and expecting accolades for your generosity. JH] Roldo isn’t having it. He continues:

Professionals vie against each other for a few extra dollars, forgetting who the enemy is. The poor either get used as pawns in the game or get lost in the shuffle. Individual power becomes more important than group power and the elites always find it easier to cope with individual power.

Despite the pleas for racial harmony by elites, their actions aid racism. Better Murray Hill fight Hough, each trying to keep the other in his place, than Hough and Murray Hill turn their attention in unity against Cleveland’s elites.

Roldo next jumps to Mayor Carl Burton Stoke’s Commission on the Crisis in Welfare. Under the headline, Welfare FRAUD, he writes:

Nowhere is the lack of civic and moral leadership—or just simply human honesty—so glaringly nauseous as it is in the history of the Mayor’s Commission on the Crisis in Welfare.

Never has a ‘crisis’ been so slowly and pathetically attacked.

Begun two years ago with the naming of a 52-member commission, it is now represented by a brightly colored, dust-collecting paperback.

Indeed, the commission predicted its fate, saying, “The history of report-making is a clear warning that this report, like others, may go largely ignored, whatever its quality, and despite the effort to detail some constructive directions for change.

Quoting from the report, Roldo continues:

Much stronger watchdog efforts, much more resolute political activity and much more involvement of the private sector than we have seen will be needed to pursue such recommendations (as the report made) toward implementation.

Certain channels for making this possible have been suggested, but, if past history is a guide, they can be effective only if there is a truly informed and aroused citizenry. [Emphasis mine, JH]

After listing many of the luminaries among the 52 on the commission, Roldo concludes:

It is questionable what one can expect from the elite commission members. They don’t believe in gouging their institutions and that is necessary. For instance, it was never clearly stated in the report that those who run the welfare establishment for the system essentially come out of the schools of social work.

“…An upper class is institutional in its very essence, since it is control of institutions that makes an upper class, and men can hardly keep this control except as they put their hearts into it. Successful businessmen, lawyers, politicians, clergymen, editors and the like are such through identifying their minds, for better or worse, with the present activities and ideals of commercial and other institutions. Seldom does the new conscience, when it seeks a teacher to declare to men what is wrong, find him in the dignitaries of the church, the state, the culture that is.

The higher the rank, the closer the tie that binds those to what is but what ought not to be. —Social Organizations by Charles Horton Cooley.

The Mayor’s Commission on the Crisis in Welfare turned out to be simply another fraud, perpetrated to maintain the status quo through implied reform.

Roldo concludes:

This should be kept in mind For it is only time before the tactic is used again. Indeed, it may already be in the planning stage.

Forewarned is forearmed.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Republican AGs group sent robocalls urging protesters to the Capitol.

Bonus No. 2: We Need a New Media System.

Bonus No. 3: Congress Votes to Arm Violent Mobs That Storm through Capitols…

Bonus No. 4: Up to 15,000 National Guard members could be deployed in D.C….

To the best of my knowledge, Garry Trudeau has never shown the face of a president in any of his Doonesbury cartoon—choosing instead to select icons to represent the presidents—except for Donald John Trump who Trudeau has drawn as buffoon in his strip, until now.

Given the death tolls under presidents George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama, I think that Trudeau is off base here. Or do only domestic deaths count?

Two days ago Roldo Bartimole, writing in PLAIN DEALER NAMES ENABLERS;CONVENIENTLY FORGETS ONE, took Elizabeth Sullivan Director of Opinion for Cleveland.Com née the Plain Dealer to task for not including herself and her publication in a list of enablers of President Donald John Trump. Roldo, of course, has a long history of such media criticism.

In his 2 February 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 14), Roldo devotes his first double-issue (eight pages) to the state of television journalism in Cleveland. Beneath the headline TV JOURNALISM—AIR-WAVE POLLUTION, he ledes:

THE STATE OF JOURNALISM IN CLEVELAND IS AT SUCH A LOW LEVEL THAT ONE CAN BEST DESCRIBE THE REPORTING HERE AS THE PRODUCTION OF POOR FICTION.

NOWHERE IS THIS WORLD OF MAKE BELIEVE MORE EVIDENT THAN ON THE TELEVISION SCREEN.

The A.I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for Broadcast Journalism could itself come up with no more positive word to describe electronic journalism than “depressing.”

The basis for the “depressing” rating results from a 125-page report based on a survey of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with this devastating [Remember, this a 1969 study produced long before the rise of cable news. CNN would not emerge until 1980 and Fox News would not begin broadcasting until 1996. I seriously doubt the word they would use in 2020 would be depressing, JH] judgment:

Of all those Americans who are trying to get more out of life than they have put into it and who are laying waste their country in the attempt, none in recent years has appeared more successful as a group than broadcasters. In what other business can a moderately astute operator hope to realize 100 percent a year on tangible assets, or lay out $150 for a franchise that in a few years time he can peddle for $50 million—should he be so foolish as to want to sell? The most fantastic rewards associated with broadcasting in most instances grow from enterprises that do as little for their fellow countrymen as they legally can.

This isn’t political speech by a cheap politician. It’s the assessment of those who are supposed to be part of the ‘profession’ they criticized.

Roldo thinks that in comparison to their national competition, local broadcasters are hardly standouts for their performance. He writes:

Locally, the state of broadcast journalism, as we shall see, is best documented by the TV stations themselves. One need only read what they say of themselves.

The ordinary citizen is totally frozen out of any real input into TV programming, especially what passes for ‘news.’ The desires of community people and groups to be a part of the main means of mass communication are subverted, manipulated and censored to produce a dangerous frustration that could end up eliminating even the pretense of freedom of the press.

A ‘free press’ now means that the same old institutions and their representatives are allowed to peddle the same old meaningless propaganda.

Roldo goes on to look at Cleveland’s three network TV stations [in 1970]: WKYC, NBC channel 3; WJW, CBS channel 8 and WEWS, ABC channel 5. [I’ve lost touch with Cleveland TV since 1992 when I tossed my perfectly good television onto the tree lawn. JH]

In examining the inner workings of the three stations, Roldo begins with Channel 3 and devotes nearly as many column inches (33) as he gives channels 5 and 8 combined. He explains this in part by writing:

We don’t mean to criticize only Channel 3. We started with 3 because it claims, with some basis, superiority in broadcasting journalism here—saying something for the state of its welfare.

For example, Roldo writes:

Of its community projects not directly concerned with programming, it cites its help for the Council on Word Affairs and it says:

To help the Council publicize its activities and to raise needed operating funds, WKYC-TV procured a panel of NBC overseas correspondents to appear at a forum sponsored by the Council. All the objectives were realized as a result of a sell-out crowd. [Pun intended? JH]

How nice. The Council is an elite organization with members who have more money than they need or deserve, without the financial help of 3.

Would Ch. 3, for example, do the same for the Cleveland Peace Action Council? Or the Welfare Rights Organization? Or some other group the reader might belong to? We suggest organizations inquire at Ch. 3.

Channel 8 gets the second most column inches (20). Roldo writes:

Channel 8 is the most patriotic, charitable and cause orientated of them all. It is also the most patronizing, weak-kneed and disgusting. [I have to wonder how much of that charitable and cause orientation is due to Dick Goddard. JH]

Channel 5 comes in last with 15 column inches. Roldo writes:

Of the three major stations, only Ch. 5 has shown some recent signs of stumbling toward relevancy with a few special local shows, primarily geared to the black community.

But it has a long road to travel. Just how far can be seen by its unbelievable statement to the FCC on the production it considered its most relevant public service.

This station believes that if it were required to nominate a single program of its creation as the one which has performed the greatest and most consistent public service to this area, it would choose the Gene Carrol show.

The Gene Carroll Show has nothing, but nothing to do with public service. It is an amateur, amateur show. Its best claim can be that it gives a teenage tap dancer the thrill of being on TV.

Even thinking of the show as a public service says devastating things about Ch. 5.

[If anyone has the stomach for watching, there are YouTube videos. JH]

Under the heading: BIG $ MAKERS, he lays out ownership, affiliations, contacts, advertising rates and number of households. He also mentions a single UHF station: WKBF, channel 61. Channels 19 and 25 were not yet broadcasting in 1970.

In a final act of real public service, Roldo concludes:The following are addresses of organizations that have valuable information regarding means of getting TV stations to be responsive to Community organizations. [He lists:]

The American Civil Liberties Union; the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai Brith; the Broadcasting and Film Commission; the Institute for American Democracy; the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting and the Office of Communications for the United Church of Christ.

To go directly to the horse’s mouth [Or maybe the other end, JH] there’s the Federal Communication Commission.

Not to make Cleveland’s print journalists feel neglected, Roldo, in his 16 February 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 15), Roldo fires a few broadsides at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In the third and fourth clauses of the First Amendment to our Constitution, our founders established freedom for information when they wrote: Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press… Where we too often misunderstand those two separate clauses is that the first is universal, the second applies to owners of a printing press.

Anyone can stand on a soap box and proclaim their point of view. That’s freedom of speech. Confusion arises when in later centuries we expand the press to no longer mean the physical machine and the person who owns that machine, with the men and women who are employed by that owner. There is no financial cost—other than possibly that of acquiring a soap box—of speaking our minds. Owning a printing press, on the other hand, is a serious financial investment. Running a press is a business. And therein lies the problem.

Roldo clearly illustrates the problem, in a free society, with the ownership of the press. Under the headline—PD REPORTERS BEND NICELY—he ledes:

It’s amazing how many Judge Hoffmans there are in positions controlling the lives of others. It’s sad to see the Hoffmans beat others down. But it’s sadder to see people bend to the whipping.

A week ago reporters at the Plain Dealer had the choice of submitting to or opposing some homemade repression. They chose to bend.

One of the PD’s best reporters, Terry Sheridan, was ordered to the Lake County Bureau—a demotion similar to sending a major league star to a Double A team. The PD editors knew he would not submit. He did not and resigned.

PD reporters and the American Newspaper Guild also knew the score but both accepted the PD repression without a whimper. About the only support Sheridan received from his colleagues was their lowered eyes, saving him the embarrassment of having to acknowledge their cowardness.

The PD is being run by frightened men.

[NOTE: Readers may find themselves thinking, Hey, didn’t I already read this? Yes, you have, due to a clerical error on the Cleveland Memory Project database, Volume 2, Number 15 was mislabeled at Volume 1, Number 15. I’ve moved the commentary to here, where the text rightly belong. We’re still looking for the real Volume 1, Number 15. I apologize for the confusion. JH]

They are not frightened by militants or minorities or even revolutionaries as such. What scares the bejeezus out of them is the threat such people are to their bank accounts. Roldo continues:

A note from Bill Ware, executive editor, to his editors illustrates the mentality. The memo was attached to a copy of an editorial in Editor & Publisher magazine. The editorial praises a speech by Jenkin Jones, editor and publisher of the Tulsa Tribune and president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Jones says the press is being “used.”

He says: “Let 20,000 patriotic Americans march down Fifth Avenue. Let 40,000 citizens cheer them from the curbs. And let 100 bearded Marxists try to block the march somewhere up town. What happens? NBC, CBS and ABC and all the news reporters and photographers rush to the spot and give the impression that all N.Y. erupted in a fury that someone dared to show the flag.”

Ah yes, the flag. The jingoistic appeal to patriotism is ever the refuge of those without a good cause. Jones continues:

Is this telling it like it is? Or is this a sucker game? The technique is calculated, polished and being used with increasing frequency. Isn’t it time there was a statute of limitations on our stupidity…?

If we permit the institution of a free press to be used by those who can hardly wait for the day when a free press will not be permitted, then we participate in our own execution.

The Free Press—in the later sense—is a bit like the jury at a trial. While both sides claim that they wish for an impartial jury, both the prosecuting and defense attorney’s want nothing of the sort. They want as many jurors seated that will see the facts their way. Newspapers used to be numerous. Each city, and often even smaller town, had a Republican newspaper, a Democratic Newspaper, a labor newspaper, a socialist newspaper, &c. and explicit bias was not only expected, it was a welcome feature. Every group with a cause or point of view, could pool resources and buy a press. Those days are gone. Roldo continues:

Ware’s memo said:

Jenk Jones is absolutely right, in my belief. I think it behooves everybody in the newspaper business to be particularly alert these days to the people who would use us for their own purposes. While we obviously are the guardians of the rights of everyone, we surely have to avoid overemphasis on minorities and especially those who seek exposure for their own selfish reasons.

Clearly, Ware needs to reminded that the job of the newspaperman is not to be the guardian of the rights of everyone, but rather—and I can’t say this enough, a newspaperman: comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable.

Roldo then asks: Mr. Ware, don’t you read your newspaper? and goes on to detail the many ways the pages of the Plain Dealer are, every day, used by the right kind even our kind of people, those with the money to buy the services of the press.

Indeed, this is exactly what Roldo decided to do after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on 4 April 1968: he decided to own his own press and Point Of Viəw was born. In a much lesser sense, I, and thousands of others like me, have followed that route by paying annual fees to Internet providers for our own dedicated spaces so that we are free to publish what we wish. Roldo goes after Ware:

You worry about being used? What other reason is there for your existence, Mr. Ware, but being used?

There’s a column inch in the PD that isn’t being used by some ‘minority,’ and damn near all of it has to do with someone’s private profits.

Terry Sheridan’s experience is not unique or even rare as Roldo takes the issue national:

Recently two women reporters were fired by the N.Y. Post for refusing bylines on absurd “women stories” about the wives of two ballplayers. Management called it “gross insubordination.”

Unlike at the PD, N.Y. Post reporters rallied behind. Three-fourths of the staff told management not to use their bylines until further notice. Management folded. Both women were rehired.

Other changes are underway. In Chicago, reporters have started the Chicago Journalists Review to monitor the media. In Minneapolis there are similar stirrings. Reporters in New York, San Francisco, Albany and other spots are similarly awakening. Editors too will have to learn to deal with a black caucus, women’s liberation units and others demanding not only more pay, but a say in the makeup of the product.

Even Mississippi now has Mississippi Freelance. Can Cleveland be far behind?

He concludes: Wake up PD reporters. You are alive. Have you forgotten?

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

One of the reasons for my decision to engage in a year-long reading of Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw—June 1969 to December 2000—was to reflect on my observations of how what Roldo wrote more than 50 years ago is more than just relevant, but actually dead on for understanding political events today in Cleveland and our United States of America.

To that end, and in light of Wednesday’s insurrection, I present today’s issues, with a few substitutions on the front page. Roldo’s original words will be crossed through and my words presented between [square brackets].

In his 27 January 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 12), Roldo’s first headline was Cleveland [American] Cops White-Hot Racism. He ledes:

Cleveland [America] may be closer to open war between races than any other American city [Nation] precisely for the reason many hopeful people two [12] years ago felt this city [nation] might offer an alternative to disaster. The reason, of course, is a black mayor [president].

Rather than an escalation of goodwill and unity, an ugly, brutal racism has surfaced.

In October 2017 Ta-Nehisi Coates,in The First White President, wrote:

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

President Donald John Trump made that inheritance clear on 6 January, the 1,813th day of his single term in office, only two weeks from his departure. Americans stormed the Capital leaving five dead and democracy in near tatters. Roldo, and I, continue:

The naive from the beginning thought unity was possible but all the unity evidenced was a facade for blatant self-interest, lead by those with the least to lose. To the business community the image of a black mayor [president] meant full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal to boost itself. To the politicians—from judges to prosecutors [Congressional representatives to senators]—it meant the opportunity to exploit racism openly for personal gain. Few chances were missed.

And the focal point of it all—the Cleveland police—White-hot racism.

Reality intruded on the phony brotherhood dream quickly merchandised by the community [nation].

And the man who thought the dream could be his ‘program’— Mayor Stokes [President Obama]— now finds himself tossed and buffeted so that he has almost become a sorry figure. Not really believing the dream but finding it marketable propaganda, apparently Stokes [Obama] thought others wouldn’t be similarly motivated. He was wrong. He knows that now.

President Barack Hussein Obama is, of course one of our former presidents and enjoying his elder statesman status. His vice president, however, takes the oath of office in only 11 days. Joseph Robinette Biden will assume leadership of a hot, sticky mess far worse than that inherited by Obama. In that light, I give you one more then-and-now paragraph:

Rather than feel sorry for him, rather than allow ‘unity’ to be the cry again, Stokes [Biden] must be pushed hard to do what he must now do—represent the black [progressive] community. If he doesn’t (and he shows no sign of doing so), he is not only dispensable, he should go.

The balance of what Roldo wrote in January of 1970 is a cautionary tale for Americans in January 2021. We ignore our history at our own peril. We do not need to repeat past mistakes.

Back to focusing on Mayor Stokes. Just how bad was the mayor’s relationship with the Cleveland Police Department? Well, Roldo writes:

Then came election day and the intimidation plot by police and firemen. Armed cops openly placed themselves in black polling places for a single purpose—to intimidate black voters. In South Vietnam or Mississippi, the organized scheme would have been a scandal. In Cleveland, the County Board of Elections, while pretending to investigate, decided to make the absurdity policy, showing how comfortable it would be with the Gestapo.

Further, material compiled by members of the Stokes administration about the police, including use of weapons to threaten, has been kept secret.

The question I have to ask is this: Was Stokes terrified of assassination or of being found complicit? Roldo took the extraordinary step of printing three blocks of text in ALL CAPS. In the first, he writes:

TO ANY OF THE RANK-AND-FILE COPS—ESPECIALLY THE VIGILANTES WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT—THE MESSAGE HAD TO BE STOKES DOESN’T HAVE THE APPETITE FOR CONFRONTATION. STOKES HAS BACKED DOWN SO OFTEN HE’S NOW IN THE CORNER WITH NO WHERE TO GO.

Stokes asked for “acceptance and support from the public,” but he failed to tell the public what he was asking of them.

THE RESULTS OF THIS WEAKNESS BECAME EVIDENT WITHIN 24 HOURS AS THE POLICE, IN TYPICAL EARLY MORNING AMBUSH FASHION, RAIDED WHAT THEY CALLED A “BLACK PANTHER HEADQUARTERS.”

THE POLICE FOUND A DOGIE AND WHAT THEY CALLED A GUN RACK.

THE FOLLOWING DAY THE POLICE ANNOUNCE THAT A “BLACK PANTHER” HAD BEEN EXECUTED, INDICATING, OF COURSE, THAT HE WAS KILLED BY OTHER “PANTHERS.”

BY WEEK’S END FRANK SCHAEFER, FOP PRESIDENT, MADE THE DECLARATION THAT “THIS COUNTRY DOESN’T NEED A BLACK PANTHER PARTY. TO MY WAY OF THINKING THEY HAVE TO BE WIPED OUT.”

I have no doubt that Shaker Heights police corporal Cpl. Michael Spuzzillo is the ideological descendant of Schaefer. Fifty years later and police forces have stayed the same. What has changed, however, is the pushback from citizens. Spuzzillo, and more recently Columbus police officer Adam Coy lost their jobs. That is far from sufficient because Spuzzillo and Coy had the support of good cops. Until police get their house in order, no one is buying the few bad apples dodge. Roldo continues:

Some hard questions have to be asked. Since the police, who know there is no Black Panther unit in Cleveland, seem so able to identify corpses as Panthers, has the ‘wipe out’ already started? And since there is no Black Panther unit who decides which blacks are Panthers?

OR ARE ALL BLACKS ‘PANTHERS,’ A VIEW THAT BETTER FITS THE PERCEPTION OF THE POLICE?

THEN WHICH BLACK IS SAFE?

AND WHO, AFTER THE POLICE SAY A BLACK WAS EXECUTED BY SOME UNKNOWN, WILL ASK FOR THE FACTS? BY WHAT MEANS IS THE PUBLIC GIVEN THE ESSENTIAL INFORMATION? WHY THE CORONER CAN HOLD AN INQUEST. BUT COUNTY CORONER SAM GERBER HAS ALREADY SAID THAT HE TAKES THE WORD OF THE CLEVELAND POLICE.

As for Carl Stokes, he stands to become a tragic figure.

Finally, Roldo concludes:

THE ATMOSPHERE FOR AN ESCALATION OF WHITE VIOLENCE HAS BEEN WELL ESTABLISHED WITH THE HELP OF THE CLEVELAND POLICE.

ONE CAN RECALL FORMER POLICE CHIEF WAGNER TELLING THE OHIO LEGISLATURE THAT BLACK NATIONALISTS WANT “TO SHOOT ALL CAUCASIANS.”

WAGNER’S VILE COMMENT WAS MADE IN 1965.

IN 1967 SGT. JOHN UNGVARY TOLD THE EASTLAND INTERNAL SECURITY SUBCOMMITTEE THAT “WHAT WE NEED IS A LAW THAT WOULD LET US CHARGE THEM ALL (BLACK NATIONALISTS) AS CONSPIRATORS… BEFORE AN OVERT ACT IS COMMITTED.”

JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO POLICE INSPECTOR JAMES LIMBER TOLD US THAT THE CITY WAS IN THE “THIRD STAGE OF REVOLUTION” BY WHICH BLACK NATIONALISTS WERE INTENDING TO TAKE OVER CITY.

THUS IS THE COMMUNITY, OVER A PERIOD OF TIME, CONDITIONED TO ANYTHING THE POLICE DESIRE TO DO.

In a speech in October, W.H. Ferry theorized about the possibility of civil war. His reasoning is applicable to Cleveland, 1970:I have felt that civil war was most likely to be precipitated by one or another of the numerous counter-revolutionary groups, many of them ethnic in composition, standing in the wings of most urban centers awaiting a suitable provocation, a suitable pretext to launch a virtuous assault against the black community somewhere or another.

Might Ferry consider a sitting president speaking two weeks before he leaves office to an armed crowd of mostly young white men and telling them:

So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

…sufficient?

In his 31 January 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 13), Roldo circles back yet again to the Glenville Shoot-Out, the trial of Lathan Donald and the police beating of NBC cameraman Julius Boros. Roldo, however, begins with a much broader canvas under the headline—SILENCE: CRIME OF MORAL ELITES. He writes:

THERE IS A PLAUSIBLE ‘REASON’ WHY JUSTICE IS UNTIMELY, POVERTY UNCONQUERABLE, CHANGE INOPPORTUNE RIGHT NOW. THOSE WHO PROFESS TO BE ON THE MORAL SIDE ARE MOST READY TO PROVIDE THE ‘REASONS’ FOR SLOW CAUTION.

THUS, IT BECOMES MORE AND MORE DIFFICULT FOR PEOPLE TO LOOK AT A PROBLEM AND TO DETERMINE WHICH INSTITUTION OR INDIVIDUAL SHOULD HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY TO CORRECT AN ILL.

THAT’S PROBABLY BECAUSE MOST PROBLEMS ARE DIFFICULT TO ASSIGN TO ANY ONE INSTITUTION OR PERSON. YET BEING SO ‘OBJECTIVE’ ABOUT PROBLEMS LEADS ONE TO ACCEPT THE STATUS QUO.

THIS LEADS ONE TO EXCUSE THOSE WHO BENEFIT MOST FROM THE INABILITY TO SOLVE PROBLEMS OF THE NECESSITY TO PRODUCE SOLUTIONS. BLAME SHIFTING BECOMES RELATIVELY EASY UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, ESPECIALLY FOR THE POWERFUL. BLAME-PLACING BECOMES VERY DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY FOR THE POWERLESS.

In Pirkei Avote—The Ethics of The Fathers—it is written: You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. Essentially, just because you know for a fact that you cannot solve a problem does not mean you can absolve yourself from even trying. Any societal change may require generations of effort. I always remember the horrible weight of our history that reformers face reflected in the head on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay in the Atlantic:250 YEARS OF SLAVERY. 90 YEARS OF JIM CROW. 60 YEARS OF SEPARATE BUT EQUAL. 35 YEARS OF STATE SANCTIONED REDLINING.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Gradualism sucks, but anyone who thinks they can defeat centuries of wrong with one moment of right, is delusional. Yet, that does not allow us to desist from the work. Roldo continues:

There are certain institutions that claim for themselves such a morally superior position that they leave themselves open to being requested to fulfill some of their claim.
…
WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE CATHOLIC ESTABLISHMENT SO DEEPLY ENMESHED IN OUR SICK SYSTEM OF JUSTICE—FROM THE POLICE RIGHT THROUGH THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE AND INTO THE COURT.

Bishop Clarence Issenmann can begin with County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan and his office and the Cleveland Police Dept.

In what follows, Roldo uses the testimony of Donald and Boros to illustrate his points about the sanctioned behavior of Cleveland’s police. If he were writing his narrative today, he would require a trigger-warning for the brutality that occurred. he does not add commentary until the very end when he presents Boros’ response to a question from the FBI:

Q. What were they beating you with?

A. THEY WAS KICKING ME WITH THEIR FEET, AND BEATING ME WITH SHOTGUN BUTTS AND STICKS… THEY BEAT ME AND STOMPED ME, THESE TWO TEETH I LOST THAT NIGHT, MY FACE WAS PUFFED UP; I WAS BLEEDING; MY CLOTHES WERE SOAKED IN BLOOD, AND THEY TOOK ME AND DRUG ME AND THREW ME IN THE WAGON AND I BLACKED OUT.

Whose heroes are these? Roldo asks.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. —Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (Via Harry Banks.)

Bonus No. 1: Conspiracy theories have deadly consequences.

Bonus No. 2:Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath.

Bonus No. 3: Wednesday’s Other Story.

Bonus No. 4: Marcus Ranum has thoughts on Wednesday, 6 January 2021.

Question No. 1: Who made the decision to hold off the Maryland National Guard and why do they claim they made that decision?