Eyes on the Prize II; Interview with Seth Taft

Okay, take us back to October of 1967. How did your campaign change after Carl Stokes won the primary? Well, it was an interesting thing. This campaign started because the incumbent mayor of Cleveland Ralph Loker was not doing a terribly good job. There had been a great deal of unrest in the city. In 1966, we'd had some riots of various kinds. So by 1967, the incumbent mayor was in real trouble. I had thought about running for mayor before, but gradually in that spring time I find he concluded this was the time to do it. And I, of course, in some respects was a carpet bagger. I'd lived in the suburbs. On the other hand, I'd spend most of my waking hours for the previous 20 years in the city of Cleveland.

So it was really my home. Then as we came up towards the filing deadline, in Cleveland at that time there was a Republican primary, a Democratic primary, and you could file an independent. And I thought of filing as an independent because Cleveland is three, four or five to one Democratic. So having a word Republican under your name wasn't necessarily an asset. So I thought of filing as independent and thought I would have a better chance of being successful. On the other hand, the Republican Party said to me, if you run as an independent, we're going to file a Republican candidate. And that would have so diffused the vote so there was no chance of being elected. So I said, all right, I'll run the Republican primary. Then as we got up to the filing deadline around the first of July, Carl Stokes was the very prominent candidate for on the Democratic side. He'd been a state legislator. It was very popular. He's our articulate, a fine person. He and I had worked on legislation together in various fields like fair housing and things and that sort.

So we were good friends. And as we got up to the filing deadline, it suddenly appeared that maybe he was going to run as an independent. And if he ran as an independent, there would then be at least three people in the general election. There'd be Stokes. There'd be somebody who'd won the Democratic primary. It'd be me, me, me who'd won the Republican primary. I concluded under those circumstances, I didn't have a prayer of getting elected mayor. So I announced publicly that I would not run for mayor unless Carl Stokes filed in the Democratic primary. Now, I can't say whether that influences his decision, but at any rate, after I made that statement, he in fact did decide to file in the Democratic primary. And then I filed as a Republican. Frankly, I thought at that time the incumbent mayor would win. After all, that would be the normal thing to expect that an incumbent mayor would win the primary of his own party. So, frankly, I thought that Ralph Loker, the incumbent mayor, would win the Democratic primary. And I sort of campaigned on that basis.

Now, I was during that period in the summer. Since I was the only person who'd filed in the Republican primary, I had no competition. Now, the primary in Cleveland at that time was five weeks before the general election. So it was about the first of October. So that from the filing deadline in late June, early July until October. That's July, August, September, three months. The Democrats were having a rip-roaring primary kind of campaign, and I didn't have one. So I had to run my efforts in such a way as to keep me in front of the voter, so they would know who I was. We even, a guy who was running the media part of my campaign said, you got to have something attractive. So we got an elephant. So we got an elephant. Okay, so after the primary. You ought to get back with the primary. I don't think I could tell you about the primary. I'd tell you about what happened before he had. So we had an elephant and we went around. It said, remember Seth Taft in November. Then the primary came along, and Carl Stokes won the Democratic primary.

Frankly, I was very surprised. And he did, and that obviously changed things. Suddenly there I was running against Carl Stokes, a person whom I had worked together on lots of projects. And that was not a comfortable situation to be in. All the people, and the Cleveland, you must understand. Perhaps other part of the country, people wouldn't understand. Cleveland is a community that grew up primarily around the turn of the century, when the major immigration to the United States was from Eastern Europe. So Cleveland is a city full of nationality groups, primarily from Eastern Europe. When I arrived in Cleveland, if you can believe it, there were three or four daily newspapers in Eastern European languages. There's one in Polarist, there's one in German, there's one in Hungarian. There were probably 15 or 20 weekly newspapers written in foreign languages. And what they tended to group in areas, so that there's a Hungarian neighborhood,

and there was a Polish neighborhood, and there was an Italian neighborhood. Now these people had come over, had scratched their way up the ladder, and finally made it, and they were now happy with their lot. They worked hard themselves to make their way. They're all Democrats, I guess used to be said thus, because Franklin Roosevelt saved their homes from the foreclosure in the Depression. But these people were Democrats, but they were not comfortable with the newest wave of immigrants, which are from the south, black. And consequently, their attitude was, hey, we made it by crawling up the ladder. Why can't these new people make it by crawling up the ladder? So there was a lot of feeling within the community, within this nationality-oriented community, that somehow the newest group weren't making it on their own. And somehow, rather that, therefore, they were not enthusiastic about Karl Stokes.

That's where it amounts to. So right after the primary, we just had thousands of people marching into our headquarters. We want to campaign for you. We think you're the great guy. They never heard of me before. But so we had made a very uncomfortable situation. I can assure you, when a whole batch of people rushing into your headquarters and want to work in your campaign, when you don't like their motive, on the other hand, if you were running for office, and somebody said, I'll vote for you, and you don't like the reason he's going to vote for you. Do you turn him down? Do you say, don't vote for me, because I don't like why you're going to vote for me? So uncomfortable, as it was, I couldn't see any alternative, but to accept those supporters. We fired a whole batch of them that went out and campaigned, saying, hey, you wouldn't want a black mayor of this. Eddie, would you? And we got rid of everybody. We could have that sort. Frankly, both of us ran a, I think, a very much affirmative non-racially-oriented campaign. But the racial issue was like one postage stamp thickness below the surface.

It was sort of there all the time. It was very hard to get away from it, partly because there wasn't much difference between the two of us except color. What kind of campaign had you hoped to run? I mean, who did you hope would support you? Well, I hope that the supporters of Carl Stokes would support me. I'd been on the Urban League board. I'd been involved in lots of things in where the black community were. I'd been ahead of fundraising campaigns for settlement houses in the black community. I had a very good reputation. And I felt that since the, that democratic majority, in Loker himself, was from Romania. I was a part of that nationality group I was describing to you. I felt that the black community would come behind me. So I felt that the combination of Republican support plus just sort of general civic background that I'd been involved in plus the black community was enough to get a majority.

And so frankly, I made a major effort to get along with Carl all during the primary and I'll tell you a little later about him very embarrassing. The letter I wrote to him, so that that was the campaign I expected to run. And I thought that was a plausible one that had a good chance of success because Loker, who would then in that set of assumptions would be the opposition candidate, was a guy who'd had all the trouble in City Hall. Did you expect that the business community would come out solidly behind you after after Stokes won? No, not a bit. I'm not. There was a, because already in the primary I could see what a lot of my business acquaintances were doing. They believed that after the troubles of the previous year that we might very well be better off to have a black mayor. That if we had a black mayor, he would be able to understand and to deal with the concerns of the black community in a better way than a white mayor. And so a lot of my people that I knew in business were supporting Stokes and I knew it.

I mean, I had a lot of supporting me, but there was certainly no unanimity of whatsoever in the business community over who should be elected mayor. After the first debate, that was one in Alexander Hamilton on the east side. How did you feel after it was over? What was your assessment? My assessment was not very comfortable. It was not a, it was difficult. Carl did a much better job of introducing his family. And yeah, of course it was in an area where the audience was 90% pro Stokes so that it was one very easy for me to make any kind of a presentation. I think I'd say they'd sort of get hooded doubts. It was a very uncomfortable situation. He's very good on his feet. He's articulate. He did a nice job of presenting the issues. And no, I did not feel that I was any better off afterwards. No, I should say that early in the campaign, I had to be sure we had debates because he was the guy who was well known. Polls had shown in early spring that he would beat me three to one in a general election.

By June, it was down to two to one. By October, it was about three to two in his favor. And I knew that I had no chance of success unless I got him on a debating platform. Not that I was such a great debater, but I had to get that, that amount of attention. I knew Carl well enough that I was pretty sure that I could challenge him in a way he wouldn't refuse. He's this young, whatever snapper isn't going to talk and say I'm afraid to debate. And so our technique was to be sure that we got debates. And so I had a lot of places. I said this guy hasn't got the nerve to stand up and debate the issues in this city. Okay, we're going to change. Okay. We're going to jump to the second debate that was wanted at John Marshall High School on the east side. Louis Salcer is the moderator. Carl Stokes comes up to the platform.

What does he say? What happened that night? Well, it started off fairly routine matter where each woman started saying why we should be mayor. At one point in the end, well, he was on the floor. He turned to me and said, and point his finger at me and said, if this man is elected mayor, it will be because his skin is white. The whole place went cabooie. You couldn't hear a thing for five minutes. And Carl was trying to say, hey, hey, hey, get attention and so forth. But he lost the audience. Now that audience was a west side audience and it was 90% white. So he really stuck his head in the buzz saw at that event. Now there have been explanations later as to why he did it. And you can ask him about that. But it had an electrifying effect on that particular audience. And through him, I don't think he expected it to be quite such a horribly adverse reaction. It's the first time they've been a mention of anything by either of us of that kind of directly racial character. So when I got up, I started off saying, well, well, well.

So the race issue is with us. Let me tell you about it. So I pulled out a full page ad from the Cleveland Planned Theater, which in words, all you could read was great big blacks words that don't vote for an e-grow. Exclamation point. Vote for a man. Vote for good candidate. Vote for somebody with competence. Vote for Carl Stokes. Then I pulled out another one, which said, same, same thing. Just do a few words you could read. Let's do Cleveland proud. And that's a do Cleveland proud by overcoming your prejudices. Vote for the most competent person. Vote for Carl Stokes. So he had been playing this issue just barely off to the most direct one. The most direct way of doing it. And this time, he really got into the middle of it. And when that debate was over, that was clearly a potential turning point. If I had won, that would have been the turning point. After that, he did better.

But that particular debate, he was really walked into a bad situation. Now, his later explanations, Lisa, as I heard them, and you'll have to ask him directly, was that he felt this was important to consolidate his own support. Which was important because as you probably figured out, in the final result, he got 95% of the black vote in the city, which is about 40% of the total vote, and I got 80% of the white vote. And that was a dead tie mathematically, which is about the way it came out. Okay. Did any of your campaign people, did any of them ever strategize it? Maybe you should deal with the race issue. I mean, you obviously had those two news pages. Oh, I was armed. I had a feeling it might come up. I would never brought it up. But he found he felt that that was something he had to do, or wanted to do. And I had a little folder of different issues, things, and when he made that statement, I yanked the folder out, and said, race, or something like that. I don't remember what.

I had those ads that I've been carrying around with me to use, if occasion required. Now the third debate at the Shererson Cleveland. I think that's the one thing. That's called the city club debate. We have a club here that puts on debates between candidates. It's sort of the last final debate generally traditionally among major, and any major campaign. It's usually the Saturday before election, or maybe one Saturday before that. And this was obviously a, by this time, this was the hottest subject in town. And what happened there? Well, it went very routinely, because we'd made lots of appearances, besides two debates, didn't really prove much one way or the other, as far as I could tell. But right at the very end, really, actually, after the time they were supposed to go off the air, he pulled out a letter that I had written him back in June. Meanwhile, I had gotten charts up there about how much he'd been absent during the session of the legislature that preceding spring. And he pulled out this letter, I'd written him in June, saying, Dear Carl, you've done a great job down in Columbus, keep it up.

So I sort of punched a hole in my comment about his 60% of... I had deliberate charts as to how he'd been not attending regularly at the session of the legislature. He was a member of the legislature at the time. And so that letter was sort of what that... My manager said, did you write that letter? Yeah, I guess I did. That's the only thing I really remember about that debate. He said it was a great big public hall where it was going on. Okay, now briefly, election night, you're rising in the polls. What happened? I mean, it was like 4 a.m. before it was decided. How did you think it was going? Well, it was interesting about two o'clock or maybe 2.30. We were ahead in what had come in so far. And so the guys were getting me practiced up on an acceptance speech or whatever we might call it. And then somebody came in with a list of what precincts had not reported. And as soon as we saw that, it was all over.

Because the precincts that hadn't been reported at that moment were precincts in the black community. And we knew what the outcome meant all of those at the base. So as soon as we saw the precincts that were not in, we were reasonably sure that it stokes at one. Okay. Stokes' victory represented a new power alliance. What did you think it represented at the time? Did you see something new happening in Cleveland? Well, it certainly represented the first real acceptance of the black community as a political power within the city. There had been blacks had run for mayor in previous elections, but never got the consolidated support even within the black community. And the Cleveland City Council was still significantly white in its orientation, even though in some of the wards the councilmen were white because they'd been there forever and were well respected in their wards.

But when they retired or died or whatever, they were supplanted by black councilmen. So that there was a change going on there that has progressively continued up until this very day. And so it did become the emergence of the black communities of powerful figure in the equation in the city of Cleveland. It meant that the city of Cleveland was very consistently run in such a way that whether the mayor was white or black thereafter, very strong civil rights programs, equal opportunity programs within the city administration. So that did represent a significant change. And I suppose you would say that as the view of the black community became stronger within the city administration, it met a heavier commitment to effective social programs, to improvement of a lot of the people. On the other hand, the city had to live within its income so that you couldn't suddenly say,

well, we're going to build a lot of housing or something like that. The city still had to, under a high law, it had to operate within its income. And so in that sense, the management of the city didn't change dramatically. One of Stokes's favorite ways of talking about this contest between the two was the grandson of a slave versus the grandson of a president. I mean, in the context of that. Those are two accidents of birth, so I just laughed at it. In the context of the time, we're talking about the civil rights era, losing to a black candidate. Did that have any particular significance to you? No. I mean, he was a candidate, he was a guy, he wasn't like, shouldn't upset. As far as I personally was concerned, obviously sorry I didn't win, because I thought the job would be a great challenge. I still do. I think the office of the mayor of Cleveland is a significant job. He's the second most influential person in the state of Ohio politically after the governor. It's a tremendous opportunity for anyone to make sure government is well done

to be a spokesman for whatever it is that a person believes in. And Carl was a good spokesman for things he believed in, and I think he contributed a great deal to the advancement of equal opportunity in the city of Cleveland. Okay. Those stuff, camera. Does anyone else have any...