PUBLIC AND NONPROFIT EMPLOYEE ROLE MODELS
22nd Annual Conference
“Teaching Public Administration”
Portland, March, 1999
Professor Mark L. Drucker
Department of Public Administration and Policy Analysis
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Edwardsville, Illinois 62026-1457
618-650-3762
618-650-2786 Fax
mdrucke@siue.edu
ABSTRACT
“A small force covering a vast expanse of mountains, canyons, and deserts, they must work primarily alone. In case of danger help is often hours away, even if their radio calls for backup are heard… A huge territory, never enough officers for backup, never enough budget for efficient communications, never what you needed to get the job done.”
Novelist Tony Hillerman’s salute to the six Navajo Tribe Police officers killed
performing their duties, 1975-1996
(THE FIRST EAGLE, Harper Collins 1998, dedication, p. 120)
Public and nonprofit employees rarely are recognized for the extraordinary quality of the work contributions they make. This paper proposes that public administration courses consider the nature of exemplary role models in the practice of public and nonprofit work.
Specific categories of public and nonprofit employees have fared more successfully, of course – military heroes from Rogers’s Rangers to Sgt. York to Ron Kovic, town marshalls, sheriffs, and police officers from Wyatt Earp to Buford Pusser to Bo Dietl, public health officials from the theater of Ibsen to the film of JAWS, public sector doctors and nurses, the occasional public school teaching faculty, spies, social workers counseling drug addicts and parolees.
The nature of public and nonprofit sector work then has been the basis for fiction and nonfiction treatment of action adventure, ethical dilemmas, and sacrifice for the community. But much of this material has had little to offer instruction in the overall field of public administration.
This paper will investigate the recorded work life of public and nonprofit employees as a source for the development of curriculum materials. How best to examine James Q. Wilson’s interest in the compliance of coping workers? What opportunities are there for recognition for these workers, as organizational culture theorists would propose?
Different materials will be explored as potential aids to classroom instruction, from Robert Schrank’s richly observed memoirs of his public work, to print media coverage following the death of public workers in Oklahoma City, to films and television documentaries depicting the stories of Frank Serpico, Jaime Escalante, “Marie,” and Ms. Evers. Hopefully, this paper will represent a first step in promoting attention to be paid to many who do the daily work of the public and nonprofit sectors.
INTRODUCTION
Public administration, as a field of study, properly prepares preservice and inservice students for leadership roles in the public and nonprofit sectors. To do so, students are asked to try out recommended techniques and values in the management of the public and nonprofit workforce. Because of the diversity of the types of public work, and the availability of an organizational theory literature frequently borrowed from studies of the private sector, it is natural that humanistic and participative theories of public organization be fairly general and applicable to a wide range of settings.
Is it possible to take a more detailed look at the nature of public and nonprofit work that focuses not only on the outcomes and performance of service delivery to the community, but also on the character of the work process itself? No one has contributed more to this goal than James Q. Wilson, whose seminal work in this area can be traced back to his earliest interests in the varieties of police behavior, and who graciously pays his respects to the kinds of scrutiny afforded to public work by people like Herbert Kaufman in their examination of subjects like forest rangers.
For the purpose of classroom instruction, it would be attractive to find examples in the popular literature that dramatize the nature of public and nonprofit work. This paper will offer a contribution toward achieving that purpose, recognizing that the popular culture will pay attention to exemplary, rather than ordinary public worker performance. Perhaps, the examples that have been selected also will help illuminate the day-to-day nature of the work, as well.
One tradition in the professional practice literature to draw upon is the work done in developing decision-requiring cases, all of which has been accomplished since the 1970’s, and which was a response to the earlier case writing undertaken at schools like Syracuse University to apply political science principles in realistic settings. Decision-requiring cases, as pioneered by Harvard Business School, instead organize case facts and details as the basis for analysis – and ultimately a recommendation – for a particular decision maker within the case. Most important, each Harvard Business School case begins by richly detailing the production process required to manufacture each specific product.
By the late 1970’s, public sector policy analysts, in their second decade of designing shaping, implementing, and evaluating domestic social programs, also had been fascinated with “what works?” operational questions. And substantive experts like Robert Martinson, in criminal justice and corrections, were forcing their colleagues in practice to address these not especially theory-based questions. In the 1990’s, there is said to be (by postmodernists) consensus between the left and the right on the centrality of “what works,” as a working point of agreement between such institutions as the Progressive Policy Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. And “best practice models” are widely sought to iron out local disagreements on how to execute policy. All of these trends point to a shared emphasis on the operating details of public work.
A second tradition from the past decade has been the deconstrustionist focus upon the causal story, as it has been defined by people like Deborah Stone and Martin Rein. If policy is to be developed, then the basis for its design should emerge from a fully detailed recounting of the story that reveals what problem is to be addressed. This story, perhaps selected from among many competing stories, should clarify the causes of the problem and assign blame for those causes before establishing responsibility for addressing those causes and possibly resolving that problem.
This paper then will tell five stories. The first is an autobiographical story about a career devoted in good part to understanding the nature of public work. The next four stories are familiar ones, fully recounted in the popular literature, each depicted vividly in a fine motion picture, and also available to be told through television documentaries. They are five stories about the nature of public work.
BOB SCHRANK’S STORY
One of America’s greatest storytellers, Robert Schrank, wrote his autobiography, TEN THOUSAND WORKING DAYS (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), about his work life. It is a wonderful story reflecting his political education from radical politics to trade unionism, with a side trip into corporate capitalism, on to social activism and public administration and finally sociology and perhaps inevitably foundation philanthropy and consultancy. Sometimes it is a bawdy story (even politically incorrectly so), flush with Schrank’s life discoveries about the rich and poor, bosses and workers, blacks and whites and all kinds of ethnic folks. But it always is about his work.
Like Harvard Business School case writers, each of Schrank’s case study stories of his work life is rich in the details of the character and day-by-day nature of each of his work experiences – how the job gets done and the physical and intellectual qualities needed to succeed, the social interaction in the work place, the bonds that tie together and the pressures that estrange Schrank from his co-workers, and the motivations that spur him to perform (and sometimes to malinger).
Much of the autobiography is devoted to work in the private sector. Amazingly his career included sojourns as a furniture maker, a farm hand, an auto worker, a machinist and tool maker, a union organizer and official, and a plant manager and engineer. He writes: “I have worked 42 years now and have not been much of a success when it comes to ‘hanging in there’ . . . at 60 I am still not sure what I want to do (p. IX).”
But in 1963, tired of gear ratios and quotas, he listened to his Brooklyn College Sociology professor who told him, “Why are you wasting time running some plant when you could be making a real contribution to solving some of our country’s problems? . . . There is this new project on juvenile delinquency. They need somebody who knows something about work. Stop wasting your time. Go talk with them.” So Schrank went to work with Mobilization for Youth, New York’s pioneering antipoverty community-based organization.
At MFY, he would run job training programs with a staff of counselors who themselves had struggled very hard to avoid blue collar work but had no idea about what plumbers and welders actually do. Schrank’s approach was to reimburse portions of the enrollees’ salaries in exchange for on-the-job training from employers, the most successful of which involved one-on-one apprenticeships, but the transition from adolescence to the adult world of work (responsibility and discipline) was hard for many teenagers, especially for 16-year-olds assigned to factories who saw work as the punishment for being poor.
Because Schrank had emerged from a union organizing background, he understood the practical importance of compensation and working conditions, at one point, he experimented with replacing punitive disciplinary rules with rewards as incentives for positive demonstrations of performance. He also noticed that the youths constantly being exhorted to work hard on their jobs viewed the well-paid MFY central office staff as having the idealized jobs – sitting around air-conditioned offices, talking on the phones, and enjoying all of the freedoms of autonomy which white collar workers share. This he felt might be the real basis for job satisfaction – and for growing blue-collar resentment of those who we now call “suits”(p. 170).
Moving on to a city commissionership responsible for training for the poor, Schrank found his own work to center around developing and managing contracts, and enrolling large numbers of trainees. It became difficult for him to quality control a training bureaucracy operated by such large numbers of community-based agencies, although he recognized that the trainees needed to learn to care about the products of their work, not just to repeat simple unchallenging tasks, and that they needed to be challenged by attentive supervisors in order to gain confidence in themselves (p. 203). But Schrank found the size of his enterprise to be daunting, leading to a fascination with structural details and data (too much process) and a loss of focus on what he felt mattered most – the content of training (harder to depict). And again he felt frustrated by how remote the central office was from the operating level of the training programs.
In the final chapter of his autobiography, Schrank reflected back on his own earliest experiences as a worker and unionist fighting for compensation and decent working conditions, as he studied for the Ford Foundation the work place redesign and participation initiatives of the 1970’s. Motivated by a tight labor market and enveloped within a social welfare state, the Swedish Saab plant at Sodertalje had tried to address the problem of the boring nature of repetitive tasks by “work enrichment.” But this translated into requiring much more concentration by their workers on what still were boring tasks, not necessarily “more meaningful experience.” Philips Electric in Eindhoven, Holland, had created more autonomous work groups, but at the sacrifice of and leading to the resistance of the factory’s union-organized foremen, a real shift in the nature of management control (p. 221). At Volvo’s Goteborg plant in Sweden, the union insisted that the factory’s deployment of 15-person assembly teams not lead to a speed-up in the assembly line; they enforced quotas.
Meeting with United Auto Workers, Schrank came to believe that we need to strengthen our ability to organize work in ways that make them more participative (p. 227). Trained to take orders within a hierarchy, these American workers lacked a predisposition for assuming more responsibility and little understanding of why participation would benefit them. According to Schrank, without grass-roots constituencies among workers for more cooperative work styles and practices, there was no reason to expect that the experiments would succeed.
Instead the details of Schrank’s own career, as he has recounted them, provide an object lesson in understanding what might be most important in the nature of public sector work: the rhythms and fabric of work place camaraderie and interaction among public sector workers, the autonomy and freedoms enjoyed by white collar workers as they move around and in and out of their work places at their own paces, the amenities, such as telephones, they can employ. And, most of all, Schrank’s narrative has offered us the most introspective of practical self-examinations of a private and public sector career as a worker.
That then is Bob Schrank’s story.
FRANK SERPICO’S STORY
Frank Serpico was a highly ethical police officer from a traditional Italian-American family in Brooklyn who grew up admiring the contribution the police could make to their community, and who aggressively pursued his ambition to advance his career in the New York City Police Department. Unfortunately his fierce honesty and commitment to the truth contrasted with what he found to be the prevailing values of many of the officers with whom he worked, and the resolution of his department’s hierarchy to cover up those crimes.
The best way of recounting Serpico’s story is to follow the depiction of his career in the extraordinary film, SERPICO, based faithfully upon Peter Maas’s book of the same title (New York: Viking Press, 1973). James Lardner, first in THE NEW YORKER, and then in CRUSADER (New York: Random House, 1996), has done a fine job of telling the subsequent story of Serpico’s colleague, Lieutenant David Durk.
Serpico, fresh out of the Police Academy and reporting to his first assignment, quickly establishes himself as having a different point of view about police work from his first partner. In exchange for overlooking his double parking violation, a delicatessen owner provides free sandwiches to the police, but Serpico would prefer to pay for his own sandwich and obtain a better cut of beef. He won’t go along with his squad car partner’s suggestion that an incoming call is “not in our sector; let’s not take the call.” Nor will he allow his brother Pasquale to fix him up with a young woman whose father, uncle, and brother all are police officers.
But, more important even than his rejection of this orientation, and socialization to the police organizational culture is the unique way he handles his “good cop, bad cop” side of the interrogation of one of a group of rapists. He raises the issue of peer loyalty and obligation by reminding the teenager that he was left behind by his friends. When Serpico arrests and brings in one of the others, the “collar” is assigned to a detective, because “it doesn’t mean much to a patrolman.” Moving on to the criminal identification bureau, because he is told that this is “the path to a gold shield,” he finds that one point, not two points, of fingerprint identification is sufficient, because “that’s the way we do things,” despite Serpico’s objection to giving “a guy a record for one point.”
Serpico has relocated to Greenwich Village, takes classes, dates a dancer, and generally joins the 1960’s. His superior believes that he is a “weirdo cop,” and, at the suggestion of his mentor, he attends weekend retreats for Catholic officers and is assigned to a precinct where his new commander, worried about the police being isolated and not communicating well in the streets, assigns him to go undercover. While successful on his own, undercover, Serpico sometimes encounters trouble, such as in a case ending with a uniformed police officer firing on Serpico, rather than the perpetrator. In exchange for the ballistics report he will have to file, the other officer asks for forgiveness and also for the collar: “Jesus, Frank, how was I supposed to recognize you?” Serpico does tell him in reply that he fired “without warning, without looking, without a brain in your head.” Perhaps, the audience wonders, Serpico’s career – and his life – may end this way: shot by police who won’t recognize him as one of their own.
But it is systemic police corruption that will prove to be the real challenge to him. In a new precinct where there are not quotas, the police work a “9 to 5” day and a “couple of hooker collars would keep it cool,” Serpico receives money on his first day at work there. His new (Amherst-educated, Lt. Durk character, well-connected) friend proposes that they take the bribe to the “most honest cop I knew,” the second ranking officer of the separate NYC Department of Investigation. This gentleman, in turn, advises, “Things like this were common practice in the bad old days. It’s kind of surprising it’s still going on . . . Two alternatives: if it comes to a jury, before it’s over, we’ll find you face down in the East River . . . (or) forget it.”
When Serpico returns to his mentor for guidance, he is told that he has a tendency for self-pity and his mentor arranges a transfer to a friend of his’s division in the Bronx which he has been assured is “as clean as a hound’s tooth.” Unfortunately immediately upon arrival, Serpico is brought along by an old friend on a shakedown of a gambler, and, when he declines a share, the other officer acknowledges that “we got a call about you from downtown. They said you can’t be trusted. Who’d trust a cop who didn’t take money? You’d never hurt another cop? We’re skimming a little gambling money. It’s not dope. We’re not hurting anyone. We don’t go overboard. We’re not sloppy. We’re careful.”
Serpico responds, “I feel like a criminal, because I don’t take money. If I was broke, or had a family . . . but why stick my neck out?” “It’s already out” is the reply. And the film then illustrates this world of police corruption, “the pad,” with its own cast of corrupt police characters, including one middle-aged “bag man” who is Serpico’s partner and is sending his daughter to study in the chorus of the San Francisco Ballet: “It took a lot of money. You just go along, unless you want to go back to uniformed duty.”
Serpico’s mentor has spoken to the Police Commissioner on his behalf, and he says that the Commissioner is glad “that a man of integrity has surfaced . . . You’ll be his eyes and his ears. He’ll reach out for you at the right time.” The right time never comes.
The Knapp Commission Report (New York City Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the City’s Anti-Corruption Procedures December 26, 1972) detailed Serpico’s efforts in 1966-1967 to address corruption issues: how Inspector Cornelius Behan, Serpico’s mentor, met three times with the first deputy police commissioner, in charge of anti-corruption activities; that Behan at the third meeting had been furnished by Serpico with the names of the Seventh Division officers on the pad; how the first deputy commissioner ignored Serpico and his information.
According to the report, Serpico and Durk then met with Jay Kriegel of the Mayor’s Office, and were told that the Mayor could not risk antagonizing a police force he might need to depend upon, if there were ghetto riots that coming summer. While a visit with the City’s Investigation Commissioner was equally fruitless, charges from Serpico within the Bronx Division finally led to 42 indictments against civilians, and ten against officers, as well as departmental charges against 19 officers. The Commission however concluded that “no general evaluation” was undertaken, until Serpico and Durk went to the New York TIMES (p. 203).
In the film, Serpico meets with the Bronx prosecutor and describes the indictments in that borough as “a few flunky cops dumped to the wolves,” since the cover-up by the police “bosses” remains covered up. Serpico, who keeps on pleading that “I just want to go somewhere where I do my job,” is now confronted by internal police investigators committed to “localizing” the problem and handling it within the division itself. They are most concerned with whether Serpico is meeting with “outside agencies.”
Serpico is transferred to two additional assignments. First, he is assigned to Manhattan, where he will work personally with his new commander Paul Deliso, who, at the risk of his career will support him in revealing the scandal to the TIMES. But, in the film, other police on the pad in Manhattan warn him, “You spilled your guts. Say it isn’t so, Serpico. We know how to handle guys like you. I’d cut your tongue out.” (In Manhattan, it is retired officers who collect bribes for the pad.) He, Durk, and Deliso then go to the TIMES, and the Mayor appointed the Knapp Commission to investigate the corruption that now has been made public. Finally Serpico is assigned to Brooklyn Narcotics South, and “in front” of other narcotics officers who fail to provide him with adequate back-up at a Brooklyn apartment, he is shot in the face by narcotics traffickers in that apartment.
Serpico has told the Knapp Commission that he hoped that police officers “in the future won’t suffer the frustrations and anxieties that I was subject to for the past five years. I was told by my superiors that I was burdening them with an unwanted task. The atmosphere doesn’t exist when an honest officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal by his fellow officers. Police corruption cannot exist unless it is at least tolerated by higher officers in the department. The most important thing that can come from these hearings is a conviction of police officers that the department will change.”
The Knapp Commission reported that a new commissioner for the first time held supervisors and commanders accountable for the dereliction of duty by their subordinates; they would be transferred and/or demoted (p. 232). The ranks of then current senior administrators systematically would be thinned, new sergeants unsuccessful in commanding their subordinates would be demoted, and a formal “career path” to detective assignments would replace a process replete with payoffs (pp. 222-224). The Commission argued that the department’s view that “a few rotten apples in a clean barrel” reinforced and made respectable the prevailing code of silence and was a key barrier to meaningful reform (p. 7).
Serpico left the police with his disability and spent eight years in Switzerland and Holland and Wales, before returning to upstate New York. New police scandals, however, in 1992 brought him back to public attention. He told Larry King that new cover-ups by new bosses made him feel that he was reliving the charade: “The real problems are the commanders, who won’t let us do what it takes to do the job. As O. W. Wilson said, society gets the police it deserves.” And he told Barbara Walters (TURNING POINT, 1993): “There should be no such thing as a crooked cop. You’re a crook, or you’re a cop.” “Crooked cop” Michael Dowd told her that, 25 years after Serpico’s corner, “a cop today who’s a ‘goody two shoes’ is called a ‘Serpico.’”
Nat Hentoff wrote in THE VILLAGE VOICE (June 16, 1998) about Serpico’s appearance in 1997 before New York’s City Council to oppose police brutality and what he described as “not isolated incidents – it’s a general atmosphere that exists” of brutality, corruption, and racism embedded in the department’s culture. Hentoff quoted the TIMES coverage of that appearance: “Plain clothes officers guarding the entrance to City Hall gave Serpico looks that could have cooled burning coals . . . they glared in unvarnished hostility as they pointed him toward a metal detector.” And when Ottawa, Kansas Mayor Blaine Fitch selected Serpico as his hero for the November 1998 issue of ESQUIRE, Serpico told Fitch: “You’re not going to change things that don’t want changing. You’re there to help the people who need your help. Don’t ever forget that.”
Nor has Frank Serpico ever forgotten that his commitment to public service was based upon his vow to do his job consistently with his own high standards, regardless of colleagues who felt threatened by his unwillingness either to be complacent or complicit with their compromises, or of superiors who would protect their system by covering up those compromises.
That then is Frank Serpico’s story.
JAIME ESCALANTE’S STORY
Jaime Escalante is an American original, recognizable neither by accent, appearance nor demeanor. He looks and sounds so different from other Latino Americans that Edward James Olmos, who plays Escalante in the memorable STAND AND DELIVER transformed both his own accent and appearance in order to capture Escalante’s uniqueness – and his charisma – in playing the part. Bespectacled, short, pot-bellied, with a serious combover and the thick hands of a superb handball player, Escalante exudes unconventional presence.
Escalante came to teach calculus and other math courses at East Los Angeles’s Garfield High School from a career previously teaching elite secondary school students in LaPaz and working as an engineer in corporate California. He is a gift to America from Bolivia’s altiplano who creates a classroom filled with passion, theatrics, intimidation, humor, affection, guilt trips, and surprising diversity of temperament (sometimes natural, often improvised for effect). Jay Mathews, the Washington POST LA Bureau Chief, who wrote the definitive biography, ESCALANTE (New York: Henry Holt, 1988) subtitled his book “THE BEST TEACHER IN AMERICA,” and he makes an excellent case for that designation. Before leaving Garfield, Escalante invented a preeminent math program in one of America’s poorest and an almost entirely inner city Latino public school.
In 1979, when he tackled the project, less than 2% of American high school students attempted the Advanced Placement Calculus test (p. 12). By 1987, at Garfield, which almost had lost its accreditation in 1975, there was the 4th highest number of calculus students in the United States, and 66% of those 129 students qualified for college credit, based upon their A. P. test performance (pp. 4, 310). By that school year, Escalante, who particularly sought out students who previously had not been stars, had 350 students involved in his program, “no longer dealing with a thin crust of high achievers (p. 184.”
Escalante’s approach is brilliantly dictatorial: picking fights with his students (over tardiness, their dress, and so on) to engage their anger and then their interest (p. 84); befriending and simultaneously frightening them (p. 98); and quick harsh action at the first sign of trouble (p. 97). Typically he has given up on most of the administrators he works for – unless they help him, for example, with the intimidating discipline he enforces (p. 85), and he continually threatened to resign to return to private industry or to go to other schools (p. 123).
STAND AND DELIVER conveys much of Escalante’s style and genius. He challenges the gangs: “Tough guys do fried chicken (as fast food workers), not math.” He preaches “ganas” (desire). He requires contracts from parents (p. 140), and, in a real incident recounted in the book, follows a student to her family’s restaurant to plead for the time she needs to succeed at her math work (pp. 129-130). He requires of his calculus students pre-school 7:00 A.M. and after school and Saturday and summer sessions. He demands high standards and challenges (quizzes daily and tests on Fridays); his own challenge is “to invigorate the most listless and discouraged students (p. 83)”: “The Mayans were way ahead of everybody on the concept of zero. You burros have math in your blood!” His examples are pithy: cutting up apples (while wearing a chef’s cap); digging in sand; talking of small business and sports and sex.
Escalante invariably challenged his colleagues. In the film, he says, “I can do more. Teachers will rise to the level of expectations.” And an administrator warns him about the students, “If they fail, they won’t bounce back.” When he initially requested new textbooks from his chair, the reply was, “I don’t think these kids are going to be up to it, Jaime. It’s all I can do to get my kids to sit and add a column of figures.” All of this, he changed.
Escalante and Garfield’s national recognition however emerged largely from coverage of the events surrounding the A. P. testing of Escalante’s first substantial-sized calculus class (18 students) in May 1982. This story provides the emotion-jarring concluding chapters of the film STAND AND DELIVER and is rather fully reconsidered by Mathews in his biography. What happened was that while it had seemed that all 18 students had succeeded in obtaining a college credit-qualifying score on the test, in fact, the Educational Testing Service found some improbably coincidental similarities in the development of the same answer by nine different Garfield students. Also, the E. T. S. believed that the pattern of correct and incorrect multiple choice answers was quite similar for 16 of the 18 students.
The Garfield community – the students, Escalante, other administrators, Latino leaders in L. A. – believed that the students had been “indicted” for copying, and that the comparison of their tests – much less the conclusions E. T. S. developed – were based on shock at the potential success of 18 poor Latino students from L. A. As a student in the film says, “They thought that we were too stupid to cheat correctly.” And, of the letter E. T. S. has written to the students, the Escalante character in the film concludes that “they lost confidence in the system they were now qualified to be part of.”
After much debate and soul-searching, and regretting the fact that do so appeared to be an admission of guilt, 12 of the 14 students whose tests had been challenged decided to accept E. T. S.’s offer that they retake the test. As one student said of Escalante, “we ought to do it for him. He deserves it (p. 167.)” All twelve students succeeded.
Since there is a legendary quality to this study, Mathews researched the whole incident as part of the biography he was writing. Since 16 of the 18 incontrovertibly demonstrated their competence in AP Calculus, Mathews believed it was reasonable to check out E. T. S.’s position, but the reporter’s research was very confusing and inconclusive. Two students, promised confidentiality, wrote to him that there was copying, although one of these individuals later recanted. E. T. S. believed that there was a common error among the nine answers that did not follow from a prior and nearly identical error in a formula the nine students needed to demonstrate. The common error involved simplifying the term 10 hw, when 9 = wh. According to Mathews, (p. 175), the students forsook what seems to this author to be simple algebra, and defined h = 9/w, then substituting 9/w into the term 10 hw: (10 x 9/w x w) and forgot to cancel out the w, coming up with 90w, rather than 90 as the answer. The students denied copying to Jaime Escalante, and, to this day, he defends that position. Escalante was interviewed for the February 1998 special issue of GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY at a time when he was continuing to teach at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento. He discussed the successful careers of his former students, a response to the frequent criticism that his students only performed well while they were with him, as he pushed their hot buttons. He was then asked if he was too hard on his students, and he replied, “I look for excellence in education . . . Excellence means: do the right thing the first time. You stand and deliver.”
That then is Jaime Escalante’s story.
EUNICE RIVERS’S STORY
Among the most moving stories of public work this past century has been the history of community health nursing – dedicated professionals assigned to the poorest of rural and urban community clinics, reaching out to the homes and work places of their patients to bring them the benefits of modern medicine and public health. For 43 years, from 1922 to 1965, Eunice Rivers practical community health nursing in Macon County, Alabama, with extraordinary commitment, intelligence, and vigor. Her story would provide the public sector with an exemplary role model, except for an awful mistake in judgment.
Susan Smith (in the JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY 8:1, Spring 1996) has contributed a fine case study about Eunice Rivers called “Neither Victim Nor Villain,” and Dr. David Feldshuh’s play, MISS EVERS’ BOYS, and the motion picture based upon that play, have dramatized her story, as well. Susan Smith wrote that Ms. Rivers was the oldest of three daughters from an African-American farming family. Her mother died when she was 15, but her father worked in a sawmill to support her through Tuskegee’s School of Nursing, although she once told him, “I don’t want to be no nurse. I don’t want folks dying on me.” She did a terrific job in the community however, so successfully that a white extension agent reported that “one woman asked when I was going to have that sweet little woman come back to the county again” (p. 99).”
In the early 1930’s the Rosenwald Fund targeted a number of areas in the rural south, including Macon County, for a syphilis detection and treatment program, but the funding was discontinued because of the financial impact of the depression upon the Fund. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service came into the picture because of their interest in contrasting the progress of syphilis in untreated African-American men with the results of a retrospective study of case records over time of syphilitic men in Oslo (where treatment had not been withheld). At stake for the researchers was one of the racial issues of the time: whether high rates of syphilis were tied to low morals and promiscuity (p. 101).
Miss Rivers came to join the study’s staff from her job as the night supervisor at John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee. Susan Smith quotes her as saying, “I was so glad to get off night duty that I would have done anything.” But also: “I was just interested. I wanted to get into everything I could (p. 100).” She believed that the healthcare needs of her people and a federal government commitment to address these needs would be dramatized by the study. From 1932 to 1965, she provided both continuity and strong outreach skills to men who trusted her.
She described the study in a paper she co-authored for PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTS (68:4, April 1953, pp 391-395): “600 patients were selected for the study. 400 who had syphilis, and, for controls, 200 who did not. The patients who had syphilis were all in the latent stage, any acute cases requiring treatment were carefully screened out for standard therapy.” Viewing herself as a patient advocate she wrote about her patients, “She directs them always to the best available sources of guidance. Realizing that they do depend on her and give her their trust, she has to keep an open mind and must be careful always not to criticize, but to help in the most ethical way to see that they get the best care.”
But early in World War II, penicillin was being prescribed for syphilis, and , by 1946, it was being viewed as the agreed-upon treatment for the disease. To maintain the lengitudinal integrity of the study (up to autopsy), the men were not told of the availability of penicillin for treatment; in fact, clinics and medical offices in the area were told to deny them penicillin, if they asked for it. Actually, as Susan Smith has pointed out (pp. 106-107), syphilis in its latent stage was supposed to be treated, according to medical textbooks in 1932, and, as part of the study, men in the control group who contracted syphilis were then assigned to the untreated group.
The study offered the men annual physical examinations, free meals on the days of the examinations, aspirins, and eventually burial insurance in exchange for the right to do the autopsies. In the PHR article, Miss Rivers referred to the burial insurees as members of “Miss Rivers’s Lodge.” At some points, the patients were required to undergo spinal taps, which the staff called “back shots.”
As indicated by the journal article, the study was no secret. For 40 years, everyone in the fields of venereal disease and social epidemiology could read about the study in their journals. A faculty member at Howard University Medical School presented the study every year to his students, and no one ever challenged the premise (p. 103). For Mary Starke Harper, to whom a chair in geropsychiatric nursing research is dedicated: “We did not know which patients were experimental and which ones were in treatment… all patients had a number. We gave the patients medication according to the number (Linkage 2000: Witness To History Interview).”
In 1972, when the fact that the study existed, and was continuing, was leaked to the press, and the study finally was shut down, Miss Rivers, according to Susan Smith’s research, still defended her participation: “Honestly those people got all kinds of examinations and medical care that they never would have gotten. I’ve taken them over to the hospital and they’ve had a GI series on them, the heart, the lung, just everything. It was impossible for an ordinary person to get that kind of examination (p. 107).” And, of course, she attended the men’s funeral services with their families: “It was expected to be there – they were part of my family (p. 106).”
In 1997, President Clinton formally apologized to eight surviving members of the study: “What the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.”
Miss Rivers had died many years before, having fulfilled all of her commitments to her profession, to her people, and to public service, except for the terrible decision she had made in error.
That then was Eunice Rivers’s story.
MARIE RAGGHIANTI’S STORY
Marie Ragghianti was a divorced mother of three young children when she was appointed to state office in Tennessee – at a salary of less than $9000 per year in 1974. No public employee could have been more vulnerable to pressure form her superiors, nor ultimately as courageous in responding to this pressure. Her struggle was told by Peter Maas in MARIE: A TRUE STORY (New York: Random House, 1983) and in the subsequent movie based upon the book. As he indicated in a note preceding his text: “One day I asked Marie how she had managed to hang in, and she said, ‘Well, you know. I believed in the system and I had to find out if I was right.”
In 1974, when she started her career in public work, she already had lived a traumatizing life, having dropped out of college to marry David Ragghianti, a man with profound psychological problems which erupted into terrible violence and abuse. Only her Catholicism, intelligence, and fierce sense of integrity sustained her as her youngest son underwent two tracheotomies and a continued need for home treatment (in a home filled with cockroaches and squalor). But she obtained a divorce and a double degree in Psychology and English from Vanderbilt, while juggling multiple jobs. Ms. Ragghianti also became involved in Democratic politics, and surprised herself at the beginning of the new administration of Governor Ray Blanton, by asking for and obtaining a state job as Tennessee’s extradition officer from a friend, Eddie Sisk, the governor’s counsel.
Sisk assigned her additional responsibility as his and the governor’s liaison to the state board of pardons and parole, then filled with three Republican holdovers from the previous Dunn administration.
One of the state board’s responsibilities was to advise the governor on executive clemency cases, a process circumventing a state law requiring a felon to serve half his or her sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Clemency could take the form of an outright pardon, a commutation to time served, or a partial reduction in time to be served, making the prisoner eligible for parole at a fixed future date (p. 107). The previous governor had handled his role in this area very carefully, personally reserving time to study each case on its substantive merits. According to complaining regional parole directors, the board however had been ignoring recommendations for parole revocations in an environment dominated by judicial rulings over prison overcrowdings (p. 178).
Ms. Ragghianti soon was told by Sisk that she would be promoted to a board membership, emphasizing to the remaining two incumbents how accountable they needed to be to the governor. In response, she initiated an impressive and successful campaign for an appointment to chair the board, winning over even the support of Nashville TENNESSEAN publisher John Seigenthaler. She would be paid $26,400 per year, a real help to her family of four.
But the board, from the beginning of the administration, frequently had been forwarding submissions, not recommendations to the governor and his counsel. The mayor of Lebanon in his legal practice told her that he had been approached for a bribe in a clemency case he was handling and, over her head, in her initial role, the extradition of an alleged armed robber to state authorities in Georgia had been thwarted again and again.
Ms. Ragghianti met privately with the governor, who told her that he himself was only familiar with 2 or 3 of the individuals pursuing executive clemency for prisoners. He also told her, “Use your best judgment. That’s why I put you there. That’s what I expect (p. 196).” She wrote in her journal: “Even to ‘look the other way’ when all this dirt is flying through the air would be to prostitute myself and my integrity (p. 205).” Meanwhile when she and her colleagues recommended against clemency for a Memphis drug dealer whom the Memphis district attorney believed to be nationally connected, the drug dealer’s husband seemed to believe that they had been doublecrossed. Ms. Ragghianti begain meeting with the FBI. And in October 1976 the FBI raided the board and the legal counsel’s offices.
While she was to testify before a few grand juries, the federal investigation stalled, and gradually Blanton and Sisk came to focus on her as a likely source of the FBI’s investigation. This was a matter of considerable danger for her; if prisoners anticipating that they could exchange bribes for clemency saw her as the major barrier to their freedom, they might seek to remove that barrier. Surprisingly trouble came from another source: trumped-up charges for driving violations, despite the fact that she passed one breathanalyzer test, and had a low score on the other; and expense account and overtime charges brought by an auditor who was close to the governor. The governor himself then fired her for cause.
In August 1977, represented by Watergate attorney Fred Dalton Thompson, she sued, arguing that the governor’s office had been improperly trying to influence board decisions: “her employment was not terminated for good cause, but on the contrary because she carried out her duties in a forthright and honest manner and because she would not participate or succumb to improper pressure from the governor’s office (pp. 330-331).”
The governor preceded to do himself in, by appearing on television to discuss the case of a double murderer and son of a major political supporter whom he was using as a state photographer and would pardon before the end of his term in office. And in a non sequitor, all of a sudden, he said, “I haven’t sold a single pardon or parole, and none of my people have (pp. 342-343).”
Ms. Ragghianti won her lawsuit, reinstatement to her job, and a year’s back pay. The Justice Department accelerated its own investigations, and, before the end of Blanton’s term, had indicted Sisk and others. Blanton, in his final days, went into a frenzy of commutations and pardons, and his successor was sworn in early to stop this travesty of justice. Marie Ragghianti was advised by a state legislator that she had no hope of a political career, since she was “unpredictable and uncontrollable”. She wrote in her diary; “Our chauvinistic society attributes courage to a man who does what I did, but ‘female unpredictability’ to me (p. 409).”
As the film shows so well, what her story tells us is of the indomnibility of spirit of a public servant who maintained the public trust against the attacks of her corrupt bosses.
That then is Maria Ragghianti’s story.
SUMMARY
So five lives of public workers can be understood through these stories, as well as the causal problems with which they were engaged. Something of the nature of job training, street police work, teaching calculus, community health nursing, and arranging pardons and paroles can be understood from these stories (and something of the causes of the problems in tackling these social issues can be observed, as well).
Because these individuals are extraordinary and exemplary, their stories received popular attention, but the stories will be lost, unless they are retold. In RUSHMORE, a popular candidate for 1998 Academy Awards, the prep school protagonist is staging “SERPICO: THE MUSICAL” not unlike this season’s Broadway presentation of a musical based upon the Leo Frank story. But it is hard to predict a continuing future for the stories of public workers, unless these stories interest great artists, as the work of salesmen, as symbols, interested Arthur Miller. Only then is there the assurance that attention will be paid. More likely, even when a serious fantasy is written about, for example, the postman, commercial considerations may capsize the project, leaving an image not of a worker symbolically linking us by our own communications, but instead just of a puddle of whines and false bravado.
Occasionally calamities will draw the press’s attention to public workers, and the national coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and the local and national coverage of the federal government shutdown are examples of this sort of calamity. Human interest stories and sidebars provide some sense of the prevailing attitude toward the public workers involved. U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, for example, wrote about the Center for Disease Control’s Dottie Knight, who pawned her wedding ring, and bought her own stamps to continue to provide information to people with chronic fatigue syndrome. And Kerry Lewis, a Dallas Veteran Administration nursing assistant, who received an eviction notice because he could not pay his rent on his $475 per week salary. The St. Louis POST-DISPATCH, in turn, reported (December 31,1995) on how the Bedford, Massachusetts V.A. Hospital employees raised $1400 in a “care and share” program to help their neediest colleagues survive the holiday season. And at the Boston Housing and Urban Development office, a 33-year employee, Edward Morrissey, with seven children, six college loans, and a big mortgage, filed for an unemployment benefits, saying, “It’s paycheck to paycheck for me, and I feel that I’m one paycheck away from welfare at this point.” Newspapers and news magazine average of both events is likely also to have focused on the substantive work that federal employees, in this case, were accomplishing.
Public administrators often fill the dual role of supervisor of public workers and subordinate to an elected official or his or her appointee. So just as it is important to operationally understand the work responsibilities of their staffs, it perhaps is even more important for public administrators to be able to communicate that understanding to their own bosses, often clueless about a public workforce, at least at the start of their careers in elective office. Nothing about their previous work as lawyers – or wrestling coaches or celebrities – necessarily has prepared them to lead a public workforce, and, even when they have had prior experience – as a police chief or as a prosecutor – their experience and expectations may not be all that positive.
James Q. Wilson had major insights to offer on these points. If public administrators are unable to understand the nature of their subordinates’ work, and/or how they perform successfully, they will be in a poor position to justify or explain what is being attempted or accomplished to anyone outside the organization who may be critical of what they perceive to be happening. Heightening the awareness of public administrators to the actual character of the work lives of their public workers, in response to Wilson’s concerns then, through stories like these or through other means, becomes crucial to the success of the public enterprise in which they together are engaged.