Did this really happen?

[hedgehog]

Poll question: Did this really happen?

"As a junior in high school, while volunteering for the Goldwater campaign (apparently she hadn't quite figured out which side of the political aisle matched her ambitions), she did some canvassing of the infamous Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, a housing project that would eventually be destroyed as a symbol of poverty and racism."

I haven't read Senator Clinton's books, but the link sources this statement as coming from her memoirs.

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/011784.php

Who in their right mind in 1964 would send a white girl from the 'burbs to canvass for a radical right-wing, segregationist Republican in a housing project notorious for crime? Where was Senator Clinton's father when this happened? I was a pretty dumb kid myself, but even I knew that there were certain neighborhoods to stay out of!

[shain from kane]

1. Not only was she there, but as Superwoman, she literally destroyed it as a symbol of

poverty and racism as a one-woman wrecking crew.


And did with millions and millions of words.

[patrice]

2. Look up her graduate thesis: One of her guiding lights was Sol Alenski. Obama knows who SA is/was

too - at the University of Chicago Social Sciences college. He was a Leftie Social Theorist. HC's thesis was partly an evaluation of Sol Alenski and Alenski-an politics relative to the trajectory of her life. I believe Michelle Obama did a related theme in her consideration of what being a "Black American" meant/means to her.

And, Obama would also have studied S Alenski, amongst several other lights in Social Science (people such as John Stuart Mill, Emil Rousseau, America's William James, Jonathan Kozol, John Dewey, and the South American Paolo Freire and others).

[patrice]

3. P.S. As a student of Sol Alenski's she would have known people who knew people who

got her into those neighborhoods.

[hedgehog]

5. Ok - now this is getting silly. My dad had a copy of Sol Alenski's book,

Reveille for Radicals. That didn't make him a personal acquaintance of Sol Alinski.

Not to mention, presumably she wrote her graduate thesis about 1968 or thereabouts and based it on Alenski's writings rather than personal acquaintance.

Besides, you're postulating that as a personal student of Alenski's, she was still canvassing for Goldwater?

[patrice]

8. I don't hink the whole thesis was about Sol Alenski. As is usual to such kinds

of writing, there were probably several conceptual types that HC would have included. I would bet Alenski wasn't THE main one, but the process was supposed to evaluate the current and future relevance of whatever conceptual hallmarks (Social Scientists in this case) that are available. If I recall the article correctly, she might have even rejected Alenski's over-all influence on what she thought would be useful to the future of the U.S.

My basic point is that, around universities, there are people who know people all over the country and have known them for quite some time and some of them have working relationships that provide certain other persons with "credentials". It is nowhere near impossible that such connections got HC into the environment in question, besides which I dislike the promotion of anger and resentment by using loaded words such as Liar, especially when all of the facts are not on the table.

And people who just chime right in with the LIAR robo-chant ARE either ignorant or very suspicious.

[hedgehog]

4. Are you sure you're responding to the right post?

[patrice]

6. HC's graduate thesis at Wellsley was at least partly about the sort of thing the OP is trying to get

"us" to call a lie.

[hedgehog]

7. So you're saying that she really did canvass for Goldwater at the Taylor Homes?

It really is a very bizarre story.


Some info on the Robert Taylor Homes:

Planned for 11,000 inhabitants, the Robert Taylor Homes housed up to a peak of 27,000 people. <2> Six of the poorest US census areas with populations above three people were found there. Including children who are not of working age, at one point 95 percent of the housing development's 27,000 residents were unemployed and listed public assistance as their only income source, and 40 percent of the households were single-parent, female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year. About 99.9 percent were African-American. The 28 drab, 16-story concrete high-rises, many blackened with the scars of arson fire, sat in a narrow two-block by 2.5-mile<3> (300 m by 3 km) stretch of slum. The city's neglect was evident in littered streets, poorly enforced building codes, and scant commercial or civic amenities.

Police intelligence sources say that elevated number of homicides was the result of gang "turf wars," as gang members and drug dealers fought over control of given Chicago neighborhoods. Its landlord, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), has estimated that $45,000 in drug deals took place daily. Former residents of the Robert Taylor Homes have said that the drug dealers fought for control of the buildings. In one weekend, more than 300 separate shooting incidents were reported in the vicinity of the Robert Taylor Homes. Twenty-eight people were killed during the same weekend, with 26 of the 28 incidents believed to be gang-related.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

Maybe she canvassed for Goldwater and maybe she was given a tour of the projects as part of a church youth group or something, but canvassing for Goldwater there?

[patrice]

10. You don't think the University of Chicago would have had Professional connections at least around

those situations?

Unfortunately Criminology and things such as Mandatory Minimums are pure evidence that "Justice" (like the chruches) is another Business, for which professionals require post-secondary training, and would have had need of same for decades and decades, hence, longitudinal relationships in the same arena that you describe.

[hedgehog]

12. I canvassed for McGovern in Cheektowaga, a very Republican suburb

of Buffalo. Looking back, I realize that that was a very odd thing to be doing. It was very unlikely that any of those people were ever going to vote for McGovern! Sending anyone in to a public housing high rise full of single mothers on welfare to canvass for a Republican in 1964 makes no sense at all. Walking around Cheektowaga was at least relatively safe (although some of those people had really loud dogs!)

The source I linked to makes no mention of the University of Chicago. Hillary was a high school junior when this supposedly took place.

[patrice]

17. I know Cheektowaga a little. My first husband was from Niagra Falls.

I still have a couple of brothers-in-law in that region.

I canvassed for a Democrat in Mission Hills one long HOT summer. IF they opened their doors, air refrigerated to 65 degrees came rolling out of these 5,000 sq ft + houses where there seemed to be only one person at home and, often, many big dogs.

[hedgehog]

20. It's a little foggy after 30 some years, but I think I was canvassing

Democrats to support McGovern in the primary in 1972. Most Democrats in that area were solid Humphrey supporters.

[patrice]

23. I was still being sad after RFK.

Pregnant with my Son. The only McGovern supporter in Topeka Ks. I remember fretting over how halting Humphrey was about solving Viet Nam.

[Laughing Mirror]

29. Your link says Taylor Homes was completed in 1962

So it was pretty new in 1964 and like most brand spanking new housing projects had probably not yet developed the identity and reputation it later acquired.

It is possible that the projects Hillary visited in 1964 were not the same projects in, say, 1974 or 1984.

I don't know what the laws were in Chicago, but in other projects I am familiar with, they had income ceilings so that families who began to make more money than the ceiling had to move out. Thus, gradually, inexorably, the buildings became filled to overflowing with only the poorest of the poor, and with them an economy based on illicit activity that arises out of that devastating poverty. I doubt if it was like that when young Hillary went there.

[Hepburn]

9. It was her SENIOR thesis....

...she was never in graduate school at Wellsley.

[patrice]

13. Which may explain why they've never actually released it. Perhaps it is an embarassment. nt

[patrice]

14. Has she ever been to graduate school? nt

[nsd]

27. Minor correction: the name is spelled Saul Alinsky. /nt

[Gormy Cuss]

11. I have no idea if the story is true, but Robert Taylor in 1964 was fairly new

and I doubt that it yet had the level of crime later associated with it, although Taylor homes did devolve rapidly from a new community to a broken down, crime ridden mess.

It was mostly if not entirely an African-American community from the start and one can still question whether it was sensible to have a white suburban teen canvassing there for Goldwater.

[hedgehog]

15. That's a good point. Not being from Chicago, I realize that I also have

the Robert Taylor Homes conflated with Cabrini Green.


I guess the point of the OP was to suggest that Hillary has not been as thoroughly vetted as some people would like to claim. I'm wondering how many other events are reported in her memoirs that didn't happen exactly as she reported.

[patrice]

16. Similar to "white" Civil Rights activists who went South, there might have SOMEONE

doing this sort of thing in some places, BUT - for Goldwater?????????? That does seem to be a bit of a stretch.

[hedgehog]

18. The students who went into the South knew that what they were doing was

very dangerous. They were registering people to vote, not canvassing for Goldwater.

As a high school student in the late 60's, I spent a week working at a day care center for migrant workers' children, took part in a demonstration for the grape boycott and visited the local jail one time. These were all activities encouraged by my religion teacher at my Catholic high school. Believe me, my parents would never have allowed me to go canvassing at a public housing development.

[patrice]

26. I was named after a Catholic populist priest who, educated as priests used to be,

would have been aware of what FDR said about Economic Royalists and what Dwight Eisenhower said about the Military Industrical Con-plex, and also coming out of an Irish background and, hence, knowing what discrimination and prejudice are, was known to have frequently delivered some strong sermons on Social Justice, which USED to be a central tradition in the Catholic Church. I was raised very conservatively in the behaviors of the church, but very liberally in my Catholic Education. We talked about Social Justice all of the time. Also, back in those days, no flags were allowed inside the sanctuary itself.

[ORDem]

28. That would make more sense in two ways.

1. There wouldn't be a safety problem for her, and it's then probably not a lie,
2. but, it fits her style of being misleading by tying her particular time there with its later devolution to a crime-ridden area.

I'm sure I have been in areas where during the next 20 years many heinous crimes were committed.

:dem:

[Poll_Blind]

19. As an Obama supporter I have to ask- Why not?

  It's not like Mrs. Clinton doesn't have courage. Just because I disagree with her choices and alliances doesn't mean that I question her courage.

  You go to places like these because that's where the new potential voters are. You don't do it because it's easy- you do it because it's difficult and maybe a little dangerous.

  I wipe my ass on some of the moves, some of the alliances she's made since then, but I have no reason to disbelieve that she would do something brave like that.

  Whether I love her or hate her (or something in-between), I must recognize that she has courage.

PB

[hedgehog]

21. It's not absolutely impossible, but I think it more likely that

several seperate events or activites were mixed up in memory.

[patrice]

25. People do that when they are stressed out.

One thing about Obama is that he doesn't seem to show the stress very much.

[DemVet]

22. Pitiful thread.

[patrice]

24. Are you a Reactionary? Where's the "Third Way"? nt

[mdmc]

30. kick