My Democratic Party activism actually goes back to childhood. My parents were active in the G. Mennen Williams/Neil Staebler version of the Party that emerged in postwar Michigan, with Williams being elected to the first of 6 2-year terms as Governor in 1948. My father ran for the State Senate in 1950, but lost to the incumbent in the primary. (I was happy; I didn’t want him in Lansing half the year!)
After several years away for college, grad school, and an early job, I returned to Detroit in 1965. I was interested, but had no entree into activism. In 1968, I started a new job with the City of Detroit; the Deputy Director of my agency was on the Board in the 17th District. (Most Michigan party organization was by county, but in Wayne County it took place in Congressional Districts.) Meanwhile, I had also run into an old acquaintance who was active in a new organization within the 17th District, called the Liberal Conference (LC). It was the gathering place for the more left-oriented folks, anti-Vietnam War and the dominance of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and other labor unions in the party structure. In early 1969, after the disaster of the 1968 election, I became involved in LC.
I am an extreme left-brained person. Professionally, I am a demographer. I’m good at being an organizational treasurer, and especially at dealing with the arithmetic of understanding population and voting patterns and using that ability to help win elections. I’m also good at data bases – although, back in those days, we didn’t have computers on which to maintain them; it was all index cards and file cabinets! In short order, I was elected treasurer of LC and eventually of the District organization, and kept the membership records. My friend and I co-wrote and published the Liberal Conference Newsletter. We had campaigns almost every year, because Detroit municipal elections take place in odd-numbered years. First in LC and then in the District, we made endorsements in the partisan primaries and for non-partisan races, and then ran local campaigns to help our choices.
My husband was also a member of LC. In late 1970, he ceased coming to meetings. “Where’s Allan Becker”?, we asked. Oh, “he’s getting a divorce and living in Southfield.” Southfield wasn’t in the District – it was across 8 Mile Rd in Oakland County and another world as far as we were concerned. But, one day in April 1971, I got a call from him asking to take me to lunch because he was job-hunting. We were engaged in early June and married at the end of August – 45 years ago. Naturally, almost all our friends at our small wedding were LC activists!
Meanwhile, LC member Bill Brodhead had run for the State Legislature in 1970. I was part of the small campaign group gathered to get him elected, involving identifying primary voters and going door-to-door with literature. We vanquished the primary opponent, and he won with little difficulty; because the district was in Detroit, there was only token opposition in the general although the seat had previously been held by a Republican. In February 1974, our long-time Congresswoman, Martha Griffiths, announced her retirement, and the race was on. By this time, after post-census redistricting, the district was no longer all-Detroit; it included significant suburban territory as well.
A total of six candidates were running in the primary. They included a suburban township supervisor, a conservative with construction unions support, a guy named Levin (first cousin to Carl and Sandor Levin; Sandy had run for Governor two years earlier), and two minor candidates. The campaign was an enormous and extensive grass-roots team effort, again focused on primary voter identification and door-to-door canvassing. Bill’s legislative district was only about 20 percent of the congressional district.
We held fundraisers; we direct-mailed absentee voters (the Detroit and suburban elections offices provided their names and addresses); we direct-mailed every list we could get our hands on – and we didn’t use a mailing house; all envelopes were labeled, stuffed, sealed, and stamped by hand. We “papered” the entire district with copies of our hard-won Detroit Free Press endorsement on the weekend before election.
During all this, I was pregnant; our daughter was born 5 days after the general election. I was also working full-time for the City of Detroit. Every spare moment went to the campaign. We had all dropped our general LC and district work to focus on it full-time.
On primary election night, we had people in every polling place to take down voting results as the voting machines were opened after the polls closed. I was at our district headquarters, taking in all this information. At midnight, I was talking on two phones at once, to people in the Detroit elections office and to people in the State elections office where suburban vote totals were being reported. In the end, we won by 201 votes out of about 70,000 votes cast.
There was a recount, of course; I had predicted, the week before election, that it would be close and made sure that the best expert on recounts would be available to us. We borrowed calculators from my office and figured out where the problems would be. By the end of the recount, the margin was up to 256 votes.
In comparison, the general election was a piece of cake. Bill won comfortably, and went on to serve 4 terms in Congress. Every two years, the campaign organization, all volunteers, reconvened to raise money and do what needed to be done to ensure re-election, but there were no real problems.
In 1982, with Reagan in office and Congress accomplishing little, he decided not to run for a new term. During those 8 years, Allan and I had continued our political activism in LC and the District organization, but we too were tired. Since then, we’ve maintained our state party membership and support good candidates financially as much as we can, but that’s it. Our active political days are over.