Did ACORN Fall Far From the Tree?

It's called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now – although that's not its original name – and it was always meant to be known by its acronym, ACORN, the solid little nut that grows into a mighty oak. From the start, it was a polarizing group seen through very different lenses.

To its supporters, ACORN was an inspiring progressive force that got liberals out of their limousines and into the streets where they belonged – into the nation's poorest neighborhoods where they could agitate and organize and pressure city governments to do right by people most in need: the working class and non-working poor stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder in a land of plenty.

Its critics thought "nut" was the right metaphor for ACORN, all right, finding its theories nutty, even dangerous. They viewed ACORN as a radical scam run by bullies and ideologues who had no more idea of how to really help the poor than an oak tree does about flying. It was a debate neither side could win because those espousing opposite views of ACORN held very different assumptions about capitalism, poverty and democracy itself. It was, however, a debate ACORN could lose – by consistently proving its critics right. Now, nearly four decades after its founding, with its rhetoric excess, operational overreach and appalling lapses in ethics, ACORN is on the verge of doing exactly that.

It's a shame, really, if you care about the poor. Meanwhile, the recent controversies surrounding ACORN have become an embarrassment for liberals and a headache to Democratic Party leaders at the precise time in political history that the Democrats produced a president who had been a community organizer himself and who enjoyed the support of ACORN in his successful 2008 campaign. Now, after the shocking revelations revealed on film in a private sting operation of ACORN employees in five separate offices casually condoning exploitive prostitution schemes – and even offering advice on how to get away with them – many Democrats have come to agree with ACORN's critics that the best thing to do with this diseased oak is to cut it down.

In an appearance at the National Press Club on Tuesday, Bertha Lewis, ACORN's chief executive officer, defiantly conveyed a competing message. ACORN, she said, had been around for some four decades – and, with or without government funding, will be around at least that much longer. "Nothing will ever be able to wipe away those 40 years of work, and nothing will stop us from 40 more," Lewis said. "As long as there's one ACORN member who's willing to have a meeting in their house, or one church that allows us to have a meeting in their basement, we will go on."

But is this a good thing? To answer that question, let's go back to the planting of ACORN.

In 1970, a brainy leftist named George Wiley had an epiphany. An Army veteran and college professor with an advanced degree in chemistry from an Ivy League school, Wiley had held leadership roles in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had founded the National Welfare Rights Organization. Wiley was brilliant, of that there was no doubt, but the animating idea behind the NWRO was one of the most dubious to ever emerge from academia.

The scheme, espoused in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine by two Columbia University sociologists, Canadian-born Frances Fox Piven and her husband-to-be, Richard A. Cloward, was to enlist as many unwed mothers and other needy Americans as possible on the welfare rolls. This does not sound particularly radical, but the professors' stated goal was not to make sure all of the nation's poor received the benefits to which they were entitled. Rather, it was to blow up the welfare system itself by straining state and local governments beyond their abilities to pay. The article, influential in New Left circles, was titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

Theirs wasn't a strategy that could have ever ended poverty, because it was all about income redistribution and attacking capitalism, not about expanding markets, creating wealth, or generating jobs – let alone encouraging behavioral changes among Americans who were dropping out of school, bearing children out of wedlock, or engaging in other actions correlated to a life of poverty.

Nonetheless, the NWRO made its impact felt. Wiley orchestrated a series of sit-ins and demonstrations and other disruptions, some of which crossed the line from civil disobedience into criminality. His first big splash occurred in the last 10 days of June 1966 – barely two months after the Piven-Cloward piece was published – when some three dozen welfare recipients marched from Cleveland to the state capitol in Columbus to demand an increase in benefits. They arrived at the Ohio statehouse on June 30, greeted by some 2,000 supporters. Similar rallies were organized that day in 15 other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Wiley proclaimed "the birth" of a new movement – the welfare rights movement.

The following summer, the NWRO held its first convention in Washington, where the organizers discussed tactics they would employ nationwide. These measures were not for the faint of heart, and included browbeating social workers, picketing the houses of politicians and occupying welfare offices – by force if necessary. Three years later, in a piece on the tactics employed by Wiley and his followers, The New York Times wrote: "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."

Such tactics paid off for a while, especially in New York City, where Mayor John Lindsay and his welfare commissioner, Mitchell Ginsberg, not only accepted Wiley's proposition that welfare was a "right," but did away with screening requirements for applicants. The New York Daily News dubbed the commissioner "Come-and-Get-it Ginsberg," and come and get it they did: The city's welfare rolls doubled, even at a time when unemployment was low in New York. To pay for all this, Lindsay raised corporate taxes and personal income taxes for businesses and individuals, resulting in the inevitable exodus of corporations and jobs, and sending his successors to Albany and Washington in search of government handouts to bail out the Big Apple.

Nationally, the trend was the same. In the 10-year period from 1965-1974 – a time of general prosperity – welfare rolls soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million. The system had indeed taken a huge hit, but the American economy was strong; it absorbed the blows, and the upshot was a political backlash that helped re-elect Richard Nixon, brought Barry Goldwater- and Ronald Reagan-style conservatism to prominence, and put the Democrats on the defensive: Liberalism, at least in its extreme form, became known as the ideology that championed the poor while doing everything possible to punish and undercut those who actually create jobs in the U.S. economy – the jobs and the tax base that the underclass needed.

Instead of tweaking its tactics or fine-tuning its philosophy, the anti-poverty activists of the New Left expanded their political focus. If middle-class voters were a problem, they'd register more poor people to vote. If employment was still a problem, they'd agitate for a higher minimum wage. And they'd do this on a local level, city to city, across the United States, beneath the radar of disapproving national conservatives and with the acquiescence of sympathetic liberal journalists. And so, in 1970, Wiley tapped a lieutenant, Wade Rathke, to go to Little Rock to start a new group, the Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now -- the group that would become ACORN.

Its critics say that, in hindsight, lawlessness was always part of the package. Maybe so, maybe not. What is evident is that Wiley and Rathke were shrewd political provocateurs who understood several realities of modern American society that initially eluded their critics.

For starters, the U.S. political system, if not a majority of everyday Americans, was indeed ready to accept welfare as, if not a "right," well, then as a government-sanctioned "entitlement." This reflected a profound change, even within liberalism. In his 1935 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt had noted that the Great Depression had put many Americans on the relief rolls. For their own good, this had to be a temporary situation, the president insisted.

"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber," FDR said. "To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy."

But that was the 1930s. In the 1970s, self-esteem was no longer something you earned, it was considered something you conveyed upon yourself with positive self-descriptions and unconditional self-regard. In this less rigorous psychic environment, the traditional stigma of welfare was evaporating, an attitude that was exploited masterfully by ACORN and other outfits and individuals advocating on the side of the poor.

Secondly, ACORN officials astutely realized that the growth of the suburbs, while creating a challenge for those left behind in the inner cities, created opportunities for liberal activists and social scientists because the urban centers had become much more liberal politically than before. The cities became fertile ground for so-called "nanny-state" regulation, ranging from the trivial (anti-smoking crusades and bans against trans fat) to the fundamental (anti-gun and pro-gay rights legislation).

This realization helped ACORN officials reach their third and most significant conclusion: In defiance of conventional wisdom, ACORN simply disregarded the orthodoxy that held that raising the minimum wage would erode job opportunities for those at the bottom rung of the employment ladder. This belief was an article of faith among most prominent economists, whether they were liberal, conservative, or neutral. It was also, apparently, wrong – or, at least, it has proven to have been overstated. And on this question, ACORN was also very much in sync with FDR, the patron saint of Democratic liberalism. In 1933, only a month after he took office, Roosevelt lauded New York state's new law that forbade employers "to pay both less than the fair and reasonable value of services rendered and less than sufficient to meet the ultimate cost of living necessary for health." Five years later, Roosevelt signed the nation's first-ever minimum wage law.

Coming to national office 60 years after FDR – and after 12 years of Republican rule – President Clinton was torn between conflicting advice on minimum wage from his own economic team. Eventually, Clinton sided with the liberals of his own party, including Labor Secretary Robert Reich, throwing his weight behind a proposal raising the federal minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.15, the first such raise since 1979. Confounding economists, this increase did not appear to have any negative effect on employment. Emboldened in 2006, when they took back Congress, Democrats raised the minimum wage again, this time in a series of three installments, the final one coming last summer. By then, ACORN had expanded its horizons. Some 20 states now boast minimum wages higher than the national rate, and in many cities, ACORN's hardball lobbying tactics in favor of "a living wage" has boosted that floor significantly higher.

So what's the problem?

This is where the conversation gets subjective, as well as legalistic and partisan. Looking at ACORN from the outside, the mindset of the group couples hyper-partisanship with a prevailing sense of victimhood. In ACORN-world, Republicans are bad, poor people are good, racism explains criticism of the organization, both the corporate and political systems are rigged. And if that is your belief system, it's easy to fall into a trap where the ends do indeed justify the means.

Within the organization, the ethos of victimization is so pronounced that when a transparently over-the-top amateur film producer and his purported sidekick enter ACORN offices seeking help on how to do things like import underage girls from Latin America for prostitution, or funnel the proceeds of prostitution to buy a house and evade taxes, ACORN employees in Baltimore and Washington were only too happy to advise them. Top ACORN officials were incensed when they heard about this, but mainly at the filmmakers, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles.

So ACORN immediately went on the offensive, maintaining that the two had tried to scam elsewhere and had been rebuffed. This assertion turned out not to be strictly true. At two California ACORN offices, and at a fifth in Brooklyn, the thespianic pimp and his putative prostitute also got helpful advice on how to evade the law. ACORN fired the workers in question, but saved their real ire for O'Keefe and Giles. They are lawbreakers, Bertha Lewis insisted Tuesday at the National Press Club. "It is illegal to record someone in the state of Maryland without their permission," she said flatly. "Nothing trumps breaking the law."

Bertha Lewis is not a lawyer (and neither am I), but this seems an overbroad, not to mention self-serving, interpretation of Maryland law. Notwithstanding the obvious First Amendment considerations – O'Keefe and Giles certainly seemed to be acting as citizen journalists – the actions explicitly prohibited by Maryland law are not videotaping without permission, but the "interception" of telephone communications – unauthorized wiretaps. Moreover, it's difficult to convey how off-putting it is to see such misplaced outrage. To recap: Bertha Lewis presides over an organization in which five separate offices counseled two people posing as criminals to break the law even though they were pretending to be sex traffickers of underage immigrants, and to her the moral of the story is that the fired workers didn't sign a waiver form allowing their picture to be taken.

These incidents, of course, follow years of accumulating evidence that ACORN's voter registration drives are rife with corruption. In 1986, a dozen ACORN members were convicted of election fraud. In 2004, six others plead guilty to election fraud, mainly for signing up dead people to vote. In 2005, an ACORN official in charge of the Big Vote program was convicted of vote fraud. In April 2008, eight ACORN employees pleaded guilty to federal election fraud. And all of that was in one state, Missouri.

Similar allegations, indictments and convictions have been leveled in North Carolina (registering the same names repeatedly); Ohio (a man was paid to register 72 times); Nevada (where authorities estimate half of ACORN's voter registrations were fraudulent, including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys); and a dozen other states. In the face of such claims, Bertha Lewis points out (correctly) that ACORN officials self-reported some of the 2008 shenanigans while also maintaining (implausibly) that "not one individual voted fraudulently in the 2008 presidential election." Anyone who says differently, she asserted, is spinning "an utter fabrication – a work of fiction."

At the National Press Club, Lewis was asked if she is embarked on an "apology tour." Not hardly. A "setting-the-record straight tour," she replied. Lewis, whose passion for helping the poor is obviously genuine, described herself as "clean and relatively competent." And she's certainly being forthright when she points out that she took over an organization that was in disarray after Wade Rathke was fired last year, accused of covering up his brother's alleged embezzlement and misappropriation of $1 million from ACORN and its subgroups. But Lewis does her cause no favors when she claims that O'Keefe was motivated by racial animus, that the "attacks" on ACORN are unprecedented in nature, and – she seemed to be serious when she said this – that ACORN's troubles are mainly the fault of Karl Rove, who sent word from the White House that ACORN "needed to be stopped."

Embracing the dogma of victimization has not helped the poor survive in this country, and it won't help ACORN make a comeback now. A large tree needs strong roots, growing in fertile soil. It must be watered with truth, and it must grow in the sunshine of openness, not the shadows of paranoia.