Beating the Voter Backlash

Like other ethnic groups before them, American blacks are steadily climbing the political ladder, winning more state, local and national offices each election. Some 90 black mayors are now serving in U.S. cities and towns, including Newark and Gary. That is not surprising, because those cities have black majorities. But last week brought the most dramatic evidence yet of black political progress. Los Angeles, the nation's third largest city, elected its first black mayor, although the Negro population is a distinct (18%) minority. City Councilman Thomas Bradley won because enough whites regarded him not as a black politician but simply as a man deserving of their vote.

No Replay. At first the election looked like a rerun of 1969. Once again, Bradley, now 55, faced Incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty, 63. Once again, Yorty played on white fears. Once again, there were predictions of a last-minute backlash that would throw the election to Yorty. But this time the backlash did not develop, and Bradley defeated Yorty by a surprising 56% to 44%.

Bradley won not only 92% of the black vote and 51% of the Mexican-American vote (which in the past had gone to Yorty) but also half of the white vote. "I have never run as a black," he said after his victory. "I am a politician who happens to be a black. This will be the new style. We [blacks] will achieve political influence because of our stand on all the issues."

Bradley's campaign strategy was to reassure whites. He constantly referred to his 21 years' service on the Los Angeles police force, in which he rose to lieutenant; he let nobody forget that he stood for law-and-order. He carefully disassociated himself from the Black Panthers, antagonizing the more militant blacks. In his low-keyed TV commercials, he was mainly seen with whites, who praised him for his police work or his efforts to save parks and beaches from developers. At all times he appeared dignified, unruffled by occasional taunts from hostile whites. Once when he encountered a belligerent crowd, he good-humoredly told an aide: "Write that one down as doubtful."

Sam Yorty, on the other hand, had lost much of his following. He had stayed in office for twelve lackluster years largely by entertaining Angelenos, but they had begun to tire of the show. In his last term, he spent one out of every four days outside the city. Most of the time he was overseas, garnering publicity and decorations, and his wanderings had become a joke. Cracked Bradley: "People ask why Yorty doesn't go to Watts. But the mayor has an answer. He says that just as soon as Pan Am flies there, he'll go."

Yorty showed no awareness that people were fed up with growing pollution, traffic congestion and haphazard development. He continued to refer to environmentalists as "kooks." When Bradley proposed a moratorium on highway building and the start of a rapid transit system, Yorty objected that highways "really move a lot of automobiles very efficiently." When Bradley urged a halt to drilling for oil on beaches, Yorty replied: "We ought to do everything we can to develop our oil."

Toward the end of the campaign, it was revealed that some of his aides had bought a $50,000 paid-up life insurance policy for him from campaign contributions. Yorty shrugged it off, saying that he had no control over campaign finances. Voters, alarmed by the Watergate scandal, were in no mood to put up with campaign-fund abuses--and the insurance policy was probably the death blow to Yorty's chances.

Lagging in the polls in the final week, Yorty tried to repeat his 1969 ploy of scaring voters away from Bradley because of the color of his skin. This time Bradley was much less vulnerable.

Campus and ghetto rioting, which had so alarmed Californians four years ago, had subsided, and Bradley was not perceived as a threat. Yorty sent out a blitz of letters crudely proclaiming: "The black bloc vote went massively for Bradley in the primary. Radical elements could control our police department and city services."

Even in the conservative San Fernando Valley, an area that Yorty had carried heavily in 1969, voters were repelled by the racial appeal. It was, said a commentator, "Yorty's last tango."

When the returns were in, Yorty's strategists admitted that they had badly blundered. Said Ed Ziegler, a Yorty campaign coordinator: "The old black-radical cries about Bradley were not working. To voters he was looking whiter and whiter all the time." Before Yorty conceded defeat, he declared: "The change will be very radical, and there will be a lot of people who wish they went to vote." Replied Bradley: "If you mean a mayor who works 14 hours a day and earns his paycheck, that would be a radical change."

Diligence in office is what Bradley promised voters, and if his past is an indication, he will do as he pledged. "I am basically a cautious, conservative man," he says. His is the typical up-by-the-bootstraps story, black or white. He was born in Calvert, Texas, a dusty town so small, he says, "that you can spit all the way across it." His father, a cotton picker, kept moving the family until they finally reached Los Angeles in 1923. Bradley attended an almost exclusively white high school. Nicknamed "Long Tom" because of his commanding height (6 ft. 4 in.), he became a football and track star. He took racial slurs in stride. Recalls Robert Carter, a landscape architect who played football with him: "Even when they spit on him, he wouldn't say anything. He was completely at peace with himself."

While at U.C.L.A. on an athletic scholarship, Bradley dated Ethel Arnold, whom he later married (they have two grown daughters). He joined the Los Angeles police force, where he acquired a reputation for outtalking and outrunning offenders but not roughing them up. His style was to conciliate. In his later years on the force, he worked in community relations, trying to bridge the growing gap between the cops and the ghetto. In the evenings, he managed to earn a law degree. After leaving the department in 1961, he ran for the city council in his racially mixed neighborhood; he won and has stayed in the 15-member council ever since. He always seems to be the same man under any conditions, representing, says an admirer, the "black sliver of the white puritan ethic."

The question is whether Bradley can deliver on many of his specific campaign promises. The Los Angeles mayor's office is one of the weakest among the nation's big cities because much of his power is parceled out to other authorities that set policy in important areas: education, transportation, pollution control.

Limiting Growth. Bradley intends to expand his powers and use opportunities that Yorty overlooked, reminding his commissioners of his big election mandate. He has called for the crash development of detoxification centers for drug addicts, the use of volunteer community patrols to curb street crime and gang violence in schools and the setting up of an ombudsman to initiate public hearings and investigations.

Bradley's first priority is to build the rapid transit system that auto-happy, smog-ridden Los Angeles lacks. "I already have my shovel," he says, vowing to begin construction within 18 months. He is willing to start with a piecemeal system. "We could use rail to begin with and then go on to the more sophisticated 21st century types of transportation as they are developed."

Through zoning changes, he also intends to limit the growth of the city's population (currently almost 3,000,000) to a maximum of 4,000,000, instead of the 10 million that some overly enthusiastic boosters contemplate. He will ask for a new master plan to prevent overdevelopment of the endangered Santa Monica Mountains. He hopes that his national prominence will attract the state and federal funds that he sorely needs. Unlike his predecessor, he does not plan to make so many trips out of the city for help or publicity. Let the world come to Tom Bradley--and maybe it will.

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