From the Mirror Files

Sunshine and Noir Prevail But the Old Order Loses

Peggy Clifford
Mirror Editor

Part Three

In the face of a City Council decision to demolish the Santa Monica Pier in 1973, residents rallied to save the pier. In the next election, Council members who had backed the demolition were unseated and replaced by pier partisans and the battle for the pier soon escalated into a wider battle for control of the city. The activists discovered and acted on one key fact: over 70% of Santa Monica residents were renters.
   The Pier partisans, disaffected residents and '60s activists allied with a group of aging radicals who had already rallied retired people on fixed incomes to fight escalating rents and founded Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights.
   In 1978, the city's best-known political activists were actress Jane Fonda, whose vigorous opposition to the Vietnamese war still rankled conservatives, and her husband, Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society in the early '60s and one of the Chicago Seven who were tried on and acquitted of a variety of minor charges during the "Days of Rage" at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
   After losing a hard-fought Democratic primary challenge to incumbent U.S. Senator John Tunney, Hayden organized a state-wide grassroots organization, Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED). About the same time, Fonda set up her own motion picture production company, IPC.
   Fonda, Hayden and their children lived in a big old frame house near the beach in Ocean Park and CED's headquarters moved from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. Though CED's agenda was much broader than SMMR's, some overlap between the two organizations was inevitable.

The New Order Emerges
The most visible leaders in the renters' movement were Ruth Yannatta Goldway and her husband, Derek Shearer. After serving as the chairwoman of a 1973 national meat boycott, Goldway headed a consumer advocacy group, moved on to Governor Jerry Brown's Department of Consumer Affairs, headed the Center for New Corporate Priorities and ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the State Assembly.
   Co-editor of Pentagon Watchers, which claimed to "elucidate the workings of the imperial defense establishment," including RAND, and co-author of "Economic Democracy," which was defined as "the transfer of economic decision-making from the few to the many," Shearer lectured on urban policy at UCLA and was a director of the National Consumer Cooperative Bank, which gave loans and technical assistance to consumer and worker-owned enterprises.

The Clinton Connection
Shearer and Bill Clinton had become close friends at Oxford and the young governor of Arkansas was the star attraction at the SMRRs' first fundraiser in 1979. In the subsequent election, SMRR Council candidates Goldway and lawyer William Jennings won seats on the Council, SMRR's rent control charter amendment passed and a SMRR slate won all the seats on the new Rent Control Board in a special election that summer.
   Shearer managed the '81 campaign and four more SMMRs were elected to the Council: Dennis Zane, a teacher and SMRR co-founder; Dolores Press of the Retail Clerks Union; parole officer Ken Edwards; and Ocean Park's free-wheeling Methodist minister James Conn. The new SMRR majority made Goldway mayor and, ignoring charges of nepotism, named Shearer to the Planning Commission and some of his students to the City planning staff.
   In 1983, Shearer co-authored a third book, "The New Social Contract," which focused on means of reviving the post-Reagan economy, included an "Economic Bill of Rights" and concluded that "corporate autonomy in investments and social decisions must be severely reduced at the same time that efforts are made to democratize these corporations."
   An unusually good-looking and self-confident couple, Goldway and Shearer outshone their SMRR colleagues and, like Hillary Rodham Clinton a decade later, Mayor Goldway was panned at least as much as she was praised. A Los Angeles Herald-Examiner story about Goldway was head lined "A Dragon Lady or A Pussycat?" Some residents nicknamed her "Ruthless Ruth." When the couple accepted a complimentary trip to London from Laker Airlines, opponents dubbed it "Lakergate," in an unsuccessful effort to impeach SMRR's first couple.
   Some of her staunchest allies criticized Goldway for contributing an article about SMRR to Playgirl. Describing SMRR as a coalition "designed to humanize the quality of human life," she wrote, "Developers are the largest single contributor to local government throughout the country. They basically control local government throughout the country. So when you have any group (not controlled by developers) that's a fundamental political change, one that should be supported and encouraged."

SMRRs Take City Hall
The SMRR chiefs saw their victory as a mandate to take on everything from services for the elderly and women's rights to urban design and U.S. foreign and nuclear policy. The U.S. political left had been reborn in Ronald Reagan's backyard. Shearer said, "If you think of Reaganism as a right-wing populist strategy, there is a left-wing one, and the biggest failure now is people not trying. I think we are evidence that if you work hard enough on this you can win."

Though Reagan was the SMRR chiefs' political opposite, he was the RAND Corporation's latest benefactor. "Defense Guidance," a Top Secret working paper, written by Ex-RAND analysts, Andrew Marshall and Fred Ikle, for Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, advocated building an American nuclear force capable of fighting and winning a protracted nuclear war. The paper was both blueprint and rationale for Reagan's big weapons build-up and his aggressive foreign policy and both his nuclear and foreign policies were frequently condemned in SMMR chiefs' Council resolutions.
   In their first months in office, the chiefs imposed a moratorium on high-rise development, which stalled plans for several new office buildings, organized a weekly farmer's market on a downtown Santa Monica street over the protests of area merchants, decided to shut down the airport and replace it with light industry, recreation facilities and affordable housing and planned the restoration of the old pier which had existed in a state of benign limbo since it was saved from wrecking crews in 1973.

SMRRs Take Hits
Soon after the '81 election, Council member Jennings, who'd brought the local Democratic Club into the SMRR camp, had defected, citing the SMRRs' "radicalism," which reduced SMRR's edge to 5 to 2. The SMRRs expected to make up the loss in the '83 election, but, to their dismay and astonishment, Goldway lost her bid for re-election. The SMMR chiefs still held the majority of seats on the Council, but they reacted to Goldway's defeat the same way their friend Clinton had reacted to his loss of the Arkansas governorship in 1980. Like Clinton, who took the governorship back in the next election, they trimmed their progressive agenda and charted a more conventional course.
   Having run successfully against Santa Monica business and real estate interests and supported both rent control and a moratorium on commercial development, the SMRR chiefs began to court the so-called enemy, collaborating with the Santa Monica Area Chamber of Commerce on a new Convention and Visitors Bureau, which cost taxpayers $500,000 a year, and establishing a new Hotel District in downtown Santa Monica to attract big, new hotels. They also began to approve major new commercial projects.

Change in Direction
The City's new land use plan decreed that growth would not be "limited," after all, but "controlled." Between 1975 and 1982, SMRR's conservative predecessors had okayed the construction of four million square feet of new commercial development. 1982 projections estimated another 4 million square feet by the year 2000. But, between 1983 and 1989, the City Council, which was dominated by SMRR almost continuously, approved 5.7 million square feet of commercial space and 1,580 new hotel rooms, nearly tripling the previous commercial growth rate.
   The self-styled anti-business SMRR chiefs designed and detonated a commercial building boom that was bigger and more drastic than anything their predecessors had done.
   From the moment they took City Hall, the SMRR leaders were sure that they knew what Santa Monica should be and, all of their rhetoric notwithstanding, they believed that they could orchestrate bigtime commercial growth and use it to achieve their original goals.