Abstract
David Stradling is the Associate Dean for Humanities, Zane L. Miller Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati where he teaches urban and environmental history. He is the co-author of the book Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland. vThis 2017 interview was collected as part of a yearlong, community-wide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Carl Stokes' election as mayor of Cleveland.
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Interviewee
Stradling, David (interviewee)
Interviewer
Onkey, Lauren (interviewer)
Project
Stokes: Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future
Date
2-25-2017
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
64 minutes
Recommended Citation
"David Stradling interview, 25 February 2017" (2017). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 501014.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1209
Transcript
Lauren Onkey [00:00:05] I'm Lauren Onkey. Today is February 25, 2017. We are here with David Stradling, who's a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. And David is the author of this great book, Where The River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland, along with his brother, Richard Stradling. Thank you, David, for being here today.
David Stradling [00:00:26] And thank you for mentioning my brother's name.
Lauren Onkey [00:00:31] I'd like to start by setting the stage for a contemporary audience to understand the meaning of the environment in the '60s, as Carl Stokes is coming into office. So in '67 or so, when Carl Stokes was elected, how was the environment defined and debated in government or in public policy?
David Stradling [00:00:53] I think that the environment in the late 1960s usually referred to issues related to pollution. So the most important issues in cities like Cleveland, but also in most cities in the United States, were about water pollution. There are very few cities that had sufficient sewage treatment plants, industry polluted almost without regulation still in the 1960s. And air pollution was a remarkably problematic issue, especially in industrial cities like Cleveland, where the major polluters were very approximate to large population centers. There are lots of other issues that will come to play in the environmental movement. Those people reflecting back on the environmental movement of the 1960s think about land use issues, concerned about improving park access to urban parks, but also to regional parks. The 1960s was also a time when wilderness was set aside for the first time in the United States. So there are different components to the environmental movement. But I think for most Americans, and particularly most Americans in the Midwest, the environment meant pollution.
Lauren Onkey [00:02:15] Can you describe the sort of state of the environmental movement, as you called it in say, 67?
David Stradling [00:02:22] So there are a couple of different components to the environmental movement. There are older conservation organizations like the Sierra Club in Cleveland. There's an active Isaac Walton League, organizations that had long been active around issues of natural resources, particularly related to hunting and fishing, but also access to rural places, particularly the Sierra club. In the 1960s, there developed a whole host of new organizations. Many of them are focused on single issues. So there are organizations that are dedicated exclusively to controlling air pollution, for example, because that's the issue that matters most to them. And then there are lots of other organizations that have broader agenda, simply policy directed organizations like the League of Women Voters, who turn their attention to environmental issues more completely during the 1960s as they gain kind of a policy relevance in the mid-'60s.
Lauren Onkey [00:03:23] How would you describe the environmental state of Cleveland?
David Stradling [00:03:30] Cleveland is, because it was still a very active industrial city in the late 1960s, had a remarkably polluted environment. And it wasn't just because there's an ongoing pollution. It's that this is decades and decades of pollution, some of it toxic, spilled onto the ground, emitted into the air, of course, the big steel mills along the river particularly, but also scattered plants around the city, power plants too. And then added onto that the. The fact that the city had grown without fully developing its sewage treatment plant infrastructure. The fact that the city had combined sewers, which meant that the sanitary sewage went directly into pipes below the streets, that were combined with runoff from the streets, which meant that whenever it rained, a certain amount of sewage would make its way either directly into the Cuyahoga river or directly into Lake Erie. So I would say that in the late 1960s, as Carl Stokes comes into office, Cleveland has significant environmental problems that have been ongoing for many, many years and obvious to anybody who comes into the city. So those are the kind of the traditional environmental issues that Stokes administration will have to pay a lot of attention to. But he also. Do you mind if I go into the broader. Carl Stokes also had this broader vision of what constituted an environmental problem. So, for example, Cleveland also had a housing issue, even though it was beginning to lose population rapidly in the late 1960s. As Stokes comes into office, many of the residences that people, particularly in the near east side in Hough and Central, are occupying, they're simply not in good shape. And so Stokes is trying to figure out how to deal with this housing crisis at the same time that he's dealing with other kinds of environmental issues.
Lauren Onkey [00:05:40] Why do you think that he was able to link those kinds of things together when we're thinking about pollution, for example, and housing?
David Stradling [00:05:52] Yeah. I think Carl Stokes own personal experience was very influential in his way of thinking about the urban environment. He grew up in poverty in the Central part of Cleveland. He winds up moving into Outhewaite Homes with his mother and his brother, Lou Stokes. And I think that transition from a dilapidated clapboard home that had all kinds of problems with it. He had issues with rats at his old home, had issues with temperature control, just keeping the heat on, keeping it warm, kind of fundamental physical issues with housing that moving into relatively new public housing was revelatory for Stokes. He recognized both the power of government to provide necessities for residents, but also, I think, just simply the transition, what it means to live in a cleaner, more modern environment, what it meant to kids growing up.
Lauren Onkey [00:07:05] How did he see? How did Mayor Stokes see the relationship between the city of Cleveland and the suburbs or kind of inner-ring cities?
David Stradling [00:07:16] So I'll try and answer this kind of broadly around the environment. Yeah, sure. Part of the reason why Carl Stokes develops this very expansive view of urban problems, and the urban environment in particular, is that he recognizes that these are problems that span the municipal boundaries. So, for example, although the largest steel mills in metropolitan Cleveland are in Cleveland, some of them are not. And there are large mills and polluters that are outside of the city that Cleveland simply has no authority over and never will get authority over. Probably more evident to Stokes is that he's trying to reduce the water pollution in the Cuyahoga River. And of course, the Cuyahoga enters Cleveland already very well polluted. And there are several suburban communities that, like Cleveland, had difficulty treating its own sewage or put no effort into treating its own sewage. Simply had pipes that ran directly into the Cuyahoga. And there are industrial polluters that had wastewater that ran directly into the Cuyahoga river, and they were permitted to do so by the state of Ohio. And the city of Cleveland simply had no authority over that issue. So as Stokes Administration is trying to deal with these issues, I think they're reaching out to the suburban leaders to try and arrange regional organizations that can help. Eventually, the sewage treatment becomes a regional organization. Of course, eventually the federal government establishes regional water airsheds for air pollution control. Eventually those solutions get made, but it takes some time. And for a while, Stokes recognizes that Cleveland is really hemmed in by the fact that it does not have the ability to solve problems that people will identify as urban problems, but actually span the entire region. And I'll note that one of those issues, one of the most important of those issues is poverty and housing, that Cleveland is that more and more metropolitan residents will think of poverty as an inner city problem and dissociate it from the broader metropolitan region. The fact that most suburbs don't choose to build public housing, it's their choice whether to participate in this. And that perpetuates the concentration of poverty in the inner city.
Lauren Onkey [00:10:03] So when he becomes mayor in '68, that is, in late '67, he entered right away. They did it differently back then. He was inaugurated in January.
David Stradling [00:10:13] No, he was inaugurated almost immediately after. It's like three weeks or so. And in fact, that's one of the reasons why they changed it. Because this isn't a sign. I'm sure you don't want to use it, but it's very difficult to, if you don't know you're going to win, to establish a cabinet, get people to agree to. So everybody was basically going to get off To a slow start, when people had low expectations for municipal government, that wasn't a problem. But as people start to think that new administrations need to have full agendas and hit the ground running, then they come into office later with a little time.
Lauren Onkey [00:10:51] But when he comes in, that. That kind of problem that you describe around the state of. Of the urban core, it's not just an issue in Cleveland.
David Stradling [00:11:00] Right, right.
Lauren Onkey [00:11:01] This is a national issue. You write a lot in the book about the- You use the term a rotting kind of corpse of a city. Can you describe a little bit, if we think about this nationally-
David Stradling [00:11:15] Yeah.
Lauren Onkey [00:11:16] About the state of industrial cities broadly in that period?
David Stradling [00:11:20] Right.
Lauren Onkey [00:11:20] What are the kind of- What gets us to that kind of crisis moment?
David Stradling [00:11:25] Right. So there's a long period in the United States that we - I think we refer to as the urban crisis - in which we see the flight of jobs, the flight of people, particularly wealthier white people, away from central cities and into the suburbs. Part of this has to do with being attracted to particular kinds of environment, environments that you can buy a home relatively cheaper, that has a larger yard in the suburbs, and you've got access to newer schools, et cetera. But a good bit of it has to do with the fact that you have access to new kinds of jobs that are being created in the suburbs. And some of these are industrial. A lot of the industrial development. Cleveland is still metropolitan. Cleveland is still adding industrial jobs in the late 1960s, but they're not adding them in the core. They're adding them out along railroad tracks and out along highways, where the new kinds of plants that are very, very horizontal, take up a lot of space, can be built more cheaply, where workers can have access to free parking because they're going to be driving to work. And this means that older industrial facilities, even if they upgrade their technology to compete, they usually do so in a way that means that they'll wind up with fewer workers over time. You can see that Cleveland is producing about the same amount of steel through the 1960s and even into the 1970s, but they're doing so with far fewer workers. So you combine these two things with the fact that lots of industry is actually choosing to be developed in other regions in the United States, and even eventually by the 1970s and 1980s in other parts of the world, industrial development, you see, that used to be concentrated in the center of cities, moves to suburbs, moves to other regions, moves to other nations, which puts older industrial cities like Cleveland and Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, puts them at a disadvantage that they have to conceive of themselves as either different kinds of places or to develop new kinds of economies. It takes a long time for people to recognize what would have to happen, that a lot of that old industrial infrastructure would have to be replaced. Simply updating it wasn't going to work any longer. And if we think about, if you don't mind a really long answer, if we think about what this actually means physically, where, where had places like Cleveland developed its industrial infrastructure? It was largely along waterfronts. It was along Lake Erie and along the Cuyahoga, which meant that basically any other use of those spaces would be difficult to manage. Right. Because they tended to be loud, polluted, high value spaces. So part of the redevelopment of Cleveland in a post industrial environment, even though Cleveland remains an industrial city, is to repurpose those formerly industrial spaces as something that could be an asset to the city in a different way. And part of it is expanding parks, expanding public access to waterways, and taking advantage of the fact that now we don't have to compete with polluting industry and can make better use of these spaces.
Lauren Onkey [00:15:08] You talked about a new kind of economy and a new approach to city. It seems accurate to say that Carl Stokes understood that, that something new was coming. Can you kind of describe that part of his vision, if we want to call it?
David Stradling [00:15:22] Yeah. So part of what Stokes is doing is working on a new model of what the industrial city would look like or the post industrial city would look like. He knew that he had to befriend banks and other kinds of white car industries and make certain that they were comfortable in the city of Cleveland. This means that they have to be well taken care of and mostly in Downtown Cleveland. So even though Stokes himself is very much concerned with the problems of poverty and residential issues in places like the east side, he's also concerned about redeveloping downtown. And so he inherits the project that Erieview redevelopment projects, one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the whole country, recognizes its value and continues to attempt to attract new employers and new residences to Downtown Cleveland.
Lauren Onkey [00:16:26] Let's talk about- I want to get into some examples of programs that happened during his administration or events that happen in administration. So you mentioned Erieview, so why don't we just stay on that?
David Stradling [00:16:40] Okay.
Lauren Onkey [00:16:41] Can you describe the Erieview project as it was conceived and how it fits, maybe in the story that you're telling his administration and the environmental state of Cleveland. What's the importance of Erieview?
David Stradling [00:16:55] Erieview was a vision of a central city in which the kind of modern ideas about dividing up various kinds of uses, kind of cleaning up the urban environment so that we would have certain kinds of uses here and certain kinds of uses there. We would tear out older infrastructure that wasn't up to date, didn't have the right kind of electronics or temperature control, didn't have modern elevators, and put in brand new buildings that had all of these modern conveniences, usually glass walls. The vision. So it would be clean and there would be open spaces for people to mingle outside of buildings. The vision of I. M. Pei, who puts together this, the Erieview drawings and this conception of this clean, modern city was that if we made disentangled downtown, made Cleveland modern, that lots of middle-class Clevelanders would want to move back into the city where they could participate in this open space that would be created by demolishing these older, shorter buildings and replacing them with taller towers. That they would find new employment in banks and government buildings that were part of the original vision. And underneath we would have all of these parking spaces or in parking garages. It was a vision that was developed in the 1950s that eventually comes true. And it may have been kind of ahead of its time, which is one of the reasons why Review doesn't work out very well for Cleveland in the midterm. So in the 1960s, there's a very slow development at Erieview. There's a lot of surface parking. And part of the problem is I think that once a lot of that older part of the- Just on the east side of downtown Cleveland gets demolished, a lot of Clevelanders kind of lose connection. There's really nothing there. And it's hard to develop a relationship with a glass box. And that's really what I. M. Pei was imagining, is that Clevelanders would develop an attraction to a place that didn't seem like Cleveland, at least not right there. And I think it's very telling that eventually, when Clevelanders do start moving back into the central city in large numbers, they prefer to go to neighborhoods that have that older connection, that historical connection, the Warehouse District, for example, where a good bit of the early, early redevelopment takes place. You can feel yourself living in Cleveland of the 19th century. Although development will eventually gain momentum in the area that was cleared for Erieview. It doesn't have that same kind of panache.
Lauren Onkey [00:19:53] And can you state for us historically where that Erieview development project fits with Stokes administration? It begins before him.
David Stradling [00:20:03] Yeah, it developed considerably before him. It's envisioned and most of the demolition, maybe even almost all of the demolition for the first- There were two different phases so the first phase is well underway by the time Stokes comes into office. In fact, the Erieview Tower itself is finished. The question is, how do you then attract new employers, employers that would bring new jobs to Cleveland, to those other areas that had already been demolished. So Stokes is kind of continuing and hopefully adding some momentum to this kind of vision of a modern downtown. I will say one of the things that he understood and people were clamoring for that was different than earlier mayors, is that you had to do multiple things to make new employers, this new economy, comfortable in the city. It wasn't just that very proximate space in Erieview. You had to clean the air. Nobody wanted to work in a polluted city because the pollution was still being emitted down from the river, and a good bit of it could flow right over downtown. So that needed to be cleaned up and still understood that. And the city itself needed to have a variety of amenities. It had to have the thing, the cultural attractions. So the Playhouse Square area had to be supported and redeveloped. The retail corridor along Euclid had to be supported and developed. But also there had to be these environmental amenities. We had to be able to make a claim that Cleveland was an attractive place not just to work, but also to live, because that was part of the Erieview image.
Lauren Onkey [00:21:57] So that's where you get the connection between the environment and commerce?
David Stradling [00:22:01] Yes. Yeah. So and we see this, how this vision gets played out. It takes a long time. It takes so much longer than people could have imagined. But so it's by the early 2000s. Right. It takes another 30 years for the infrastructure to change. Right. That that old industrial environment had evolved enough, partly through the private sector, but a good bit of it through public engagement, through federal dollars and state dollars and local dollars and emphasis to create a new kind of environment where we had enough of the historic infrastructure to make it attractive, enough of those old cultural institutions. New institutions like the. Bringing the basketball arena Downtown, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. New infrastructure that makes Downtown a to be, but undergirding all of it. And you can't have any of that development without imagining a cleaner Lake Erie, a cleaner Cuyahoga river and cleaner atmosphere.
Lauren Onkey [00:23:11] That makes me think about-
David Stradling [00:23:12] Did you like that I mentioned the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? You can take that part out.
Lauren Onkey [00:23:17] Right. Nothing to do with it. Couple things I want to go to there, but let's go to the letters about the air, because, you know, you referenced there that people want to. They don't want to just work in a nice office, but they need they want cleaner air around them. So one of the most fascinating things, I think, about your book is these letters that are sent to Mayor Stokes, from children about the air to. Could you start by just describing how that comes about?
David Stradling [00:23:53] Yeah, sure. So Carl Stokes was mayor when the first Earth Day was organized in April of 1970. And as much as he had already been in office for two and a half years, and he recognizes the importance of environmental problems, obviously he's been working on them diligently, but he's also a little wary of buying in completely to this, the new environmental movement, because he sees in the language of the environmental movement that a lot of his primary concerns, social justice issues, poverty, they're just absent. And you can see this in part in the way in which the community engages Stokes as the first Earth Day arrives. In the Stokes papers at the Western Reserve Historical Society, there's a very thick folder filled with letters that come mostly from school children. And that first April of 1970, that first Earth Day of 1970. And some of them are small children who are writing with pictures, drawings. They're just making an announcement that they know that the environment is an issue. And some of them are from older school children, high schoolers, who very articulately describe how they think an environmental crisis is holding Cleveland back, their fear for the future. And you really get an intense sense of crisis from some of these letters, imagining having to wear gas masks, for example, because the air pollution continued to get worse, or the fact that Lake Erie itself had died because of continuing pollution. So I think that these students are really feeling pressure, and most of this is related to the city of Cleveland itself. A great number of the students who write to Mayor Stokes are not living in Cleveland. They are living in the suburbs, in Westlake, or even farther away from the city. Maple Heights sends a lot of letters to Carl Stokes. So they're writing about environmental problems that they consider to be urban, and they write about them from sometimes very clean, leafy suburbs. And I find it fascinating that many of them refer to even air pollution as a problem that's specific to the city and one that they had experienced during visits to the city. So they describe car trips into the city, to go to a baseball game or to a football game or to go to a museum and smelling the city of Cleveland and recognizing that it was distinct from the kind of environment that they experienced in the suburbs. So they described the environmental crisis as one that's very real, but also one that's fairly distant, literally distant from where it Is that they themselves live. Carl Stokes, I think, is much more attuned to a different kind of environmental crisis. One that's described by the kids who write to him from inside of the city. The Morgan School, for example, in Hough. The kids in one particular class, they get together and they have a brainstorming session about how to solve the litter problem in their neighborhood. And it's a fascinating list of things that they would like to see happen. Some of it are very practical, that the city should come around and pick up trash more often. And some of it has to do with kind of broader law enforcement issues. Dogs shouldn't be allowed to run around without a leash, that owners of dogs should have to clean up after them, that somebody should sweep up the broken glass. What I find fascinating about the letters that come from these kids who are living in the city is they tend to describe an environmental crisis that's very proximate to their lives. It has to do with exactly where they live, and it describes the way that they live, that they're very much, you know, living a life that's circumscribed by how far they can walk for the most part. And so they describe kind of the disorder of the inner city neighborhoods. It has to do with crime, broken glass, and litter. And several of them mention problems with rats. This is an environmental crisis that Carl Stokes understands. He knows it from his own experience. He knows it from his continuing engagement with inner city residents. And that's the environmental crisis that Carl Stokes is. I think this is where his heart is, the kind of crisis that he'd like to solve.
Lauren Onkey [00:28:47] So let's map onto that pattern that you're describing. Race, racial demographics. How does the racial population demographic of Cleveland and the suburbs get inflected into these tensions?
David Stradling [00:29:09] So there are two different kinds of- Well, let me pause for a moment and reflect on this, because I want to say it kind of carefully. As Stokes is mayor, even though he gets elected in a majority white city, he's still living in a city that- Where- In a region where white racism is a critical issue, that African Americans can only even imagine living in certain parts of the metropolitan region. That one can actually talk to anybody in metropolitan Cleveland and get a sense of, well, this is a white neighborhood, this is a Black neighborhood, this is a white neighborhood that will probably be a Black neighborhood relatively soon. People could actually map where African Americans are able to live and where they think that they might move next. So that desegregation tension informs everything that Carl Stokes is doing. As mayor, not just his environmental policies, but all kinds of policies related to housing and jobs. Even that. Stokes is very careful as he's mayor to reflect on Cleveland's problems, problems of the city, urban problems, in a way that African American communities will recognize that he is talking about them and their lives. But a certain percentage, at least, of white Clevelanders will recognize as problems that affect them, too. So he's walking this line of trying to describe urban problems as problems that are experienced overwhelmingly by African Americans because they are trapped by segregationist behavior, but one that will have impact on the broader. Not just the city of Cleveland, but the entire region. Because if African American neighborhoods on the east side of Cleveland fail, it will have repercussions for the entire metropolitan region. Stokes knows this, and business leaders know this, and so he can gather an awful lot of support for trying to solve the problems of central city neighborhoods. Unfortunately, these turn out to be problems that are really, really difficult to solve without solving the problems of the underlying white racism that led to their creation. To begin with, let's talk about how.
Lauren Onkey [00:31:44] Let's think about now where the federal government comes in. Okay, so how did Mayor Stokes use federal dollars or seek to use federal dollars or federal programs or federal allies would think about any of these things to advance his agenda?
David Stradling [00:32:02] Okay, so there are three different things I want to say here, so remind me if I don't say them all. When Carl Stokes comes into office, the HUD had stopped sending money into Cleveland, had put a hiatus on all of the urban renewal projects that were going on in the city. His first priority was to get that tap turned back on to get some of those redevelopment issues moving again. Some of them are related to housing. Some of them are related to Erieview, for example. Some of them are related to industry, too, that federal dollars were critical to redeveloping urban infrastructure. And remember that Cleveland has very limited local resources because of depopulation, because jobs were leaving the city, City budgets continued to shrink at a time when demands on the budget continued to grow. So the federal government becomes an increasingly important resource. This works out okay during the Johnson administration, when the war on poverty. Johnson's expansive ideas about liberal government being involved in all manner of reforms, particularly related to solving the problems of poverty. But housing and job training, all kinds of issues related to central city stagnation. When Johnson leaves office in early 1969, he's replaced with Richard Nixon, who keeps many of those programs going, but replaces them with block grants. And this means that cities have to apply and. And Stokes spends A great deal of time going into Washington, D.C. to give testimony to lobbies for specific kinds of proposals for Cleveland, things that need to get done. But he also becomes a bit of a superstar in Congress itself, because here is the only instance in 1968, 1969, where there is an African American mayor who grew up in poverty, grew up in public housing, who can speak directly to these inner city from personal experience, and at the same time, from the experience of being the person who is in charge, the person who is empowered to try and solve these issues. He's a unique figure in this way, and he speaks on these issues with incredible authority, not just from, you know, way back as a child. He tells those stories with great impact, but also because he has incredible command of the current issues. He knows the legislation that's being proposed. He knows what it might be able to do for the city of Cleveland. He also has the advantage of having a brother who is in Congress at the time, that they have a close relationship, they can work with each other, that Louis Stokes makes a good pathway for Carl in D.C. and I think the two of them are a good combination for the city of Cleveland. There are things that Louis Stokes does on his own while in Congress, but together, I think they do good things to bring resources into the city of Cleveland. Cleveland. And of course, Lou continues to do this long after Carl has left office.
Lauren Onkey [00:35:33] Describe a specific example where the two of them were working together at the federal level.
David Stradling [00:35:39] Yep. So one of the ways in which one of the areas in which Lou and Carl Stokes collaborate has to do with the Cuyahoga River itself. So the Cuyahoga catches fire in June of 1969, and Carl uses this moment to good effect to bring the press down to the Cuyahoga River and talk about the many issues that are running through. It's not just the fact that oil slicks develop on the river itself, that they occasionally catch fire and pose fire hazards, but there's a sewage problem. There's a problem of dealing with toxic wastes that are dumped into the river from industries right along Harshaw Chemical particularly. And it's also that the river inherits all of these pollutants from upstream, including pollutants that are solid wastes, the silt that's heavily polluted from sewage, and also toxics that come downstream. So Stokes goes to Carl Stokes goes to D.C. to testify on the condition of the river, and Louis Stokes puts into a bill the specific reference to the Cuyahoga River to get resources to allow the Army Corps of Engineers to. To Study the issue of the Cuyahoga not just related to pollution, but also to siltation to reduce flooding problems, to look at the issue of the river kind of comprehensively to implement solutions. So that's one of the most, I think, one of the concrete examples where the two of them come together and bring federal resources to solve a local problem.
Lauren Onkey [00:37:23] You mentioned Lou doing work on his own, of course, because his congressional career is much longer. Span any particular environmental contributions that you would say in Lou's congressional career?
David Stradling [00:37:40] Yeah, I'm going to have to take a pass on that. The only one that I can think of right off hand is the one that I've just talked about. So hopefully you'll have others who can. We've really whipped on. You know, early on we talked to Lou Stokes, but we didn't really kind of think about how we could take it. We didn't want to take up too much of his time, for one, and we wanted him to comment really on Carl because we knew he would be at the focus of our book. So we didn't really talk much about his own. Lou is a very gracious. Was a very gracious man and complimented his brother, you know, know, remarkably thinking of him as somebody who deserved all of the attention that he could get because he was so influential during that. That moment in time and really set the stage for lots of changes that would come later in other cities as far as black power in. In municipal arenas. But he, he was, when we spoke to him, he was very kind of shy about touting how much he had accomplished over his much, much longer career in Congress.
Lauren Onkey [00:38:52] You mentioned a lot of different moments when Carl Stokes is in Washington and kind of his charisma.
David Stradling [00:39:01] Right.
Lauren Onkey [00:39:02] Power that comes from a lot of places. Can you talk specifically about the importance of the March 68 Housing and Urban Affairs Committee in Washington to Cleveland story?
David Stradling [00:39:16] You'll have to give me a little prod here. This is where I imagine I was just referencing this when he was talking about his own experience. Right.
Lauren Onkey [00:39:28] And it's a packed gap.
David Stradling [00:39:30] Yeah. So in the. Housing was a long term issue in Cleveland and particularly in the neighborhoods of Central and Hough. And as the Great Society is still imagining ways, the Congress is still imagining ways to make purposeful investments in dilapidated inner cities. Cleveland sends a large kind of contingent of business leaders, reformers, and Carl Stokes himself to come to testify before Housing Committee to discuss the problems that ran through Cleveland. And although there are lots of really important people in that contingent, I think Carl Stokes was clearly the star in part because he has this gravitas that nobody else has. He's an eloquent speaker. There's that. But he just has this presence. You can tell that he is the person that people have come to see, to speak on these issues. And it's one of the reasons why the liberals of Congress will invite him so often. Because they know that it's not just that the press back in Cleveland will report on the fact that Carl has been and has been speaking about problems that affect Cleveland. But the national press will pick up on it, too. He becomes really, I think, one of the more important spokespeople in the entire country as far as the urban crisis is concerned.
Lauren Onkey [00:41:04] How did he use the press? A lot of battles with the media here in a lot of things. But you argue that when it comes to environmental issues, he made the press an ally. Talk about the role of the press in Matt Ryan's career?
David Stradling [00:41:23] He has a- He has a conflicted- Carl Stokes has a conflicted relationship with the local press. When he leaves office, he writes very bitterly about how the press treat him as an individual, how they're critical of his agenda. Sometimes his political autobiography, the Promise of Power, includes scathing remarks about how racism still influenced the way some of the press treated him. At the same time, because he was so cognizant of the importance of, particularly the daily papers, the Plain Dealer, and the press, he was so aware of how important they were in shaping the policy agenda, shaping the behavior of politicians, and still influencing the way that Clevelanders themselves thought about the problems of their city. He did everything that he could to engage with them. And he found a real ally, particularly in a reporter named Betty Clark, who worked for the Cleveland press and took on in the mid-1960s, a role that was, I think, unique at the time. She became an environment beat reporter, and she covered problems of Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga River, air pollution. She wrote dozens upon dozens of articles specifically on the environment. And in this way, Carl Stokes knew that he had an ally within Betty Clark that he could call upon her, rely upon her to report on these issues and to, in essence, be supportive of his environmental agenda. This is really important in passing a new important anti pollution air pollution law in 1968.
Lauren Onkey [00:43:19] The cover of your book has a photograph of Mayor Stokes at Edgewater Beach. Can you talk about Stokes? Please describe Stokes initiatives to deal with the cleanup at Edgewater Beach, and then the significance of that particular image.
David Stradling [00:43:41] Okay. One of the things that Carl Stokes really wants to do as mayor, and it's basically a promise that he's made to the people of Cleveland that they would be able to swim in Lake Erie again. There are two important beaches in the city of Cleveland. One of them is Edgewater, and the other is White City beach, which was well out on the east side. Of these two, Edgewater was the most important, but it was also incredibly polluted. It was right near the outfall, not just of the. Of the Cuyahoga River, which dumped lots of pollutants into the lake, but also where the sewage treatment plant was. Stokes and his administration, they know that this, to really fix the problem would be hundreds of millions of dollars to solve the problem of combined sewers to provide enough infrastructure to regulate pollution of the Cuyahoga River. All of this stuff would take a lot of money and a long time to solve. So he and his cabinet sit down and brainstorm on what it is that they might do to allow Clevelanders to have access to Lake Erie so that it might be the resource that it should be. And they proposed that they could run out plastic pontoons and drape from them, plastic curtains. So, in essence, create a swimming pool in the lake, which is what they call. Called it. Inside of this space that was then largely protected from the larger lake, they would dump chlorine. And this would solve the problem, the primary problem of swimming in Lake Erie, which is that it had fecal coliform bacteria that threatened human health. So they could kill the bacteria and clean up the beach, clean the sludginess off of the beach and create a pool in the lake. They do this first out at White City and then do it in the neighborhood where it was much more difficult, had to use a lot more chlorine. Down at Edgewater beach, that pool opens up in 1969. On July 4, they have a special celebration, and it's a particularly important moment for the city. They're celebrating the fourth of July. Of course, there are hundreds, thousands of people who have come to the park to celebrate. Lots and lots of people have gone swimming, including Carl Stokes himself and Ben Stefanski, who was his director of public utilities and who was most responsible for dealing with water pollution. And, you know, it's a joyous event. I find those photographs to be especially poignant because it doesn't just show how Stokes imagined even temporary piecemeal solutions, things that needed to be done with the limited resources at hand as a way to show that government could be effective, that things could get done, even though the. The really cleaning lake area was a much more daunting problem. But also because here was a Black man in his bathing suit on a beach, largely surrounded by white children who are thrilled to be swimming in an integrated beach, which was not necessarily the norm in the United States in 1969. So there was. There are multiple barriers that are being broken by Stokes activism in this way.
Lauren Onkey [00:47:34] Who would you say are his most important allies, either locally or nationally, in envisioning a different kind of city?
David Stradling [00:47:49] Stokes' most important allies are the African Americans who serve city council. He cannot rely completely on the Democratic party. There are a certain number of white ethnic Democrats who will simply not align with an African American mayor. Of course, the Republican party plays a much more muted role inside of the city itself. So for Stokes, his most important, his most reliable ally are other African American politicians. He also surrounds himself with really talented people in his administration. Some of them have come from outside of Cleveland because they recognize that this is an important moment in time, that they had the ability to bring their expertise to the first African American administration of a large American city. And that's not going to roll around again. So he has new public health officials who come in, who do wonderful work in clinics and putting forward new program, new ways of thinking about how the local government can solve health problems. I think those are his most important allies. More visible to Stokes in the way that he'll think about his administration and afterwards reflecting back on it, were those who were getting in the way. He had a rocky relationship with Governor Rhodes, a white Republican whose political base was not in places like Cleveland. He had a rocky relationship with largely Republican suburban mayors who had no real incentive to collaborate with Carl Stokes. Their own political base had nothing to do with Carl Stokes agenda. And the white ethnics who were still inside of the city and were imagining a time when they would replace Stokes with somebody who looked more like themselves.
Lauren Onkey [00:49:48] How was Mayor Stokes, if, you know, representative in the counterculture from the younger African American press, you know, the generation after him, not his generation? But how are some of these things received there afterwards?
David Stradling [00:50:14] You know, Stokes is so embittered. This is just my. You may not want to use this. This is just my sense. And I didn't really study this in detail. But you know, for a while, Stokes kind of disappears as a major player. Part of that is intentional that he really doesn't want to. I think he's so frustrated by his experience as mayor. He goes. The job that he takes immediately after office is he goes to New York City and does local news in New York. So it's not like he disappears completely from popular Culture. But his political role is very muted now. He comes back to Cleveland as a judge. He spends some time working as a diplomat. So his public career is not over when he leaves in 75. But his engagement is not what one might have thought when he first enters office in 1967, where it really looks like he's going to have a long political career with great success. I think part of the reason why he disappears, and this is me just editorializing, I think, has to do with the way that African American politicians are treated generally. People spend way too much time focused on. On personal issues. They try to tear them down through any kind of story that they might latch onto. He has a difficult personal relationship with several members of his immediate family. Not his brother, but other people in his immediate family. And all of this stuff, you know, kind of clouds people's sense of who Stokes actually was and what he had accomplished. You know, I think this is one of the. And continuing to editorialize, I think this is one the of. Of the major accomplishments of the Obama administration. He understood that because of who he was, that he would be at risk. If there were anything in his personal life, in his relationship with his family, it would be blown out of proportion. It would predominate in the news that his administration managed to be in office for eight years. Not a whiff of scandal, personal or otherwise, is a testament to how diligently it says something about the man that Obama is and the person that Michelle Obama is. But it speaks to also his understanding of the particular risks that Black politicians face when they enter public office.
Lauren Onkey [00:52:35] What drew you to the story that became this book? Was it Carl Stokes himself? Was it the particular situation here?
David Stradling [00:52:45] Clearly, I came to this project through my brother Richard, who had written a wonderful piece as part of getting a master's in journalism at Ohio State on how the press handled the various fires on the Cuyahoga River. And it struck me as an understudied issue. The Cuyahoga river itself, all of these fires, water pollution in urban America, but also that Cleveland itself had been remarkably understudied. So here was an opportunity to study the relationship of an industrial city to a very polluted but natural environment, the Cuyahoga River. Early on, I started to do research into the Stokes papers, which are remarkably complete. I think Stokes himself understood that he was an important figure that historians would want to study in detail. And so he saved his papers in a way that made them incredibly fascinating to a person like myself. And as I was looking through for evidence about his relationship to the Cuyahoga river, his policies toward water pollution in particular. I recognized in Stokes a different way of thinking about the city. And in fact, our book was shaped not by our own conceptions of what was most important to Cleveland at the time, but by Stokes conceptions of what was important to Cleveland at the time. He led us in multiple directions. He brought us to housing. He brought us to the issue of dealing with rats and public health. Things that were really distant from our own thinking about this project when we first started. And really what I came to appreciate about Carl Stokes is that he understood how all of these issues were related. That you couldn't solve the problems of housing or employment in the city of Cleveland if you also didn't tackle issues as seemingly mundane as air pollution.
Lauren Onkey [00:54:41] What surprised you most about his work, his career?
David Stradling [00:54:52] I must say so I was mostly reading his papers from about 2005 to 2009, making various trips to Cleveland to read the papers when I could. And I was thinking then about how current it all seemed, that the way that he articulated the problems of Cleveland struck me as still fresh. And you hardly ever see. As a historian, you hardly ever see that, right? When you're reading historical documents. These are documents that were more than 30 years old. You kind of. You get a sense of the context of them just by reading them. Because in some way the language is dated, or there's something about the way that the understanding of the problems has evolved. But he was spot on in such a way that the way he articulated things is still useful. People can still learn how cities function by reading what Stokes said about Cleveland in the 1960s. I find that really remarkable. Unfortunately, I now find that his sense of race relations as articulated in the promise of power, particularly, he was much more careful during his administration to expound on the continuing power of white racism when he was in office. Afterwards, when he was. He wanted to give a more honest assessment of the power of white racism and the promise of power. He articulated incredibly strong walls that held him back, held Cleveland back, was going to hold America back. And there was a time when I was hoping that he was expressing something that had faded, at least in America. I'm not as hopeful right now.
Lauren Onkey [00:56:55] You said it in a lot of different ways in this conversation. But what do you think we can learn from his administration about cities, public policy and the environment?
David Stradling [00:57:14] Something that gets lost. And maybe this is one of the reasons why Carl Stokes gets very little attention through the 1980s and 1990s is as the United States turned to the right, as the new Right. Gains currency. And as the talk about government as being the problem rather than the solution, Carl Stokes of is kind, his clearly liberal policies, his politics of understanding that government can do good, that loses currency, that people are not that interested in that message. They think that in some way it's flawed. And in some areas it clearly was the federal government's engagement in improving housing conditions, for example. It's difficult to read that entire history as a success. And although we can debate why it fails, it failed. And. But I think that over the long term, the most important impact that Stokes has on the broader polity is understanding that government, when problems are well articulated, when resources are brought to bear, can solve problems, discrete problems, problems like, okay, we can fix this sewage treatment problem by investing the money that needs to be invested, but also in much broader problems like figuring out how to deal with employment, that there can be job training programs that we can implement, that there can be support for things like community colleges that are retraining people and getting them ready for a new kind of economy.
Lauren Onkey [00:58:55] David I think that covers most of what I wanted to get to. Mike. Can we just? You touched on it a little bit maybe about Urban Renewal Administration's approach, their success, or lack of success of what they accomplished with that.
David Stradling [00:59:09] Okay, so urban renewal has a mixed legacy in the United States. I think many of the. I mean, the philosophy behind urban renewal is that localities need an infusion of resources that would allow them to transfer the physical environment, that older infrastructure, housing, old kinds of warehouses and industry needed to be demolished to make space for a new kind of infrastructure, modern housing, for example. I think that Stokes walks into a way of thinking about urban development that had been evolving for more than a decade, for a couple of decades, really, and was just about at the end of its life. So he inherits a city that had done a great deal of bold thinking, broad thinking about what areas could be redeveloped. Erieview is just the most visible of them. There was also a big plan for University Circle. The problem was that there had been, until Stokes got into office, very little follow through. That really, by drawing lines on a map and saying that what we're going to do is spend federal dollars to demolish these buildings and then not getting that money, it basically signed a death warrant on those neighborhoods. The private sector was not going to invest in neighborhoods that it knew were slated to be demolished. So I think there are neighborhoods that actually deteriorated over the course of the existence of urban development. I think that's one of the reasons why that way of thinking that kind of broad government intervention in the urban environment loses favor.
Lauren Onkey [01:01:17] Anything else, David, that you want to say that we haven't. I mean, there's lots, of course.
David Stradling [01:01:22] Yeah. I think we hit some of my favorite topics. So I love talking about the swimming pools and the lake, which I don't always talk about seriously, because there's something comical about it. But I didn't feel like talking about it comically here.
Lauren Onkey [01:01:40] What's a real contribution?
David Stradling [01:01:45] I was curious, what was your age during Carl's term? So I have no personal recollection of Carl's Stokes. I was living in Cincinnati when he is mayor, but I was very young. I was. Let's see, when he left office, I was five. And I must say, and this is one of the things that needs to be corrected, and I hope this anniversary helps do that, is that he just doesn't appear in the history books in the way that he should. It may be a local issue, acutely, because he's some. I mean, you see his name periodically, see both of their names. You see the Stokes name quite a bit, and appropriately so. Outside of Cleveland, there's a lot of work to be done about resurrecting his place in the role of African Americans in transforming American politics. In this critical moment, I think he really should be listed among the most important civil rights leaders. Even though he doesn't talk like a civil rights leader, I think he really serves that role for a lot of African Americans, particularly in Cleveland, but also around the country, that they can point to this man. He's not just a preacher, he's not just an organizer. He's actually in power, and he's doing things, and he's talking about problems in a way that African Americans recognize well. And here's one thing. I think the most important thing that Carl Stokes does for the city of Cleveland is that he hires African Americans in large numbers to do a wide variety of jobs for which they had not considered in earlier administrations. And so that means an awful lot to those individuals and to those families. These are good jobs. They sometimes are stepping stones to even better jobs. He reimagines the workforce for the city of Cleveland. I think it has an even more meaning for the city as a whole that African Americans in Cleveland can think of themselves as being a part of this city, a real part of this city, because he's in office, because he's filled his cabinet with a variety of people, and because he's hiring people to do a variety of jobs who look like them.
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