Wade Rathke and the Roots of ACORN

I would not lead you into the Promised Land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. —Eugene Debs

Power is the ability to achieve a purpose. Whether or not it is good or bad depends upon the purpose. —Martin Luther King Jr.

Early on the morning of May 25, 1970, a determined young man packed his belongings—his clothes, his wife's clothes, and his only piece of furniture, a rocking chair—into his 1967 Datsun station wagon. He slid into the front seat and began a 1,500-mile trip from Boston to Little Rock, Arkansas, uncertain of his future but convinced he could transform American politics. He planned to help the poor by organizing them into a powerful political force.

At twenty-one, Wade Rathke had already come a long way. Two years earlier, he had been a sophomore at Williams College. Like many students during that era, he had joined the radical activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and agitated against the Vietnam War. But Rathke found the Williams students elitist, the professors dull, and his courses irrelevant to his aspirations. In January 1968 he dropped out and headed south to New Orleans, his hometown, to organize resistance to the war. His father, Edmann, an auditor who lived in a middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans, was furious. "You were an Eagle Scout," he cried. "Now you're a traitor and a dropout!"

Rathke was disturbed but unmoved by his father's tirade. He didn't live at home and did not want his father's money. To get by, he worked as a busboy, then as a print dryer, and finally as a lift-truck driver. He volunteered as a draft counselor and organized college demonstrations against the war. Yet after six months Rathke found himself as restless and frustrated as he'd been at Williams. He was tired of advising pampered college students on how they could avoid military service. The students "were not the blacks, Puerto Ricans, and working families, many of whom I had worked with and who were really suffering in America." Rathke was not, as he later put it, "interested in setting up a service bureau for upper-middle-class college kids."

Like many activist students in 1968, Rathke believed that the times were ripe for world-shattering change. The antiwar movement had become so powerful that it forced President Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection. Yet, Rathke felt, the hopes of 1968 were not coming to fruition, partly because many antiwar leaders had contempt for or were indifferent to working-class people.

In August 1968, five days after his twentieth birthday, Rathke married his high school girlfriend, Lee, a secretarial school graduate. Uncertain about what he should do next, he defaulted to a conventional route and headed back to Williams. On the way, he attended a national SDS meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and watched in dismay as the group tore itself apart. A leader of a faction of SDS, called the Progressive Labor Party, talked of unions seduced by "false consciousness"—meaning that workers persisted in supporting the capitalist system that oppressed them—and challenged those attending to start a worker-student alliance. Rathke shook his head in disbelief.

Later he told his wife that the speakers were a bunch of spoiled students who never worked a day in their lives. "The idea that workers were looking for alliances with students, and that students would lead them to the Promised Land, was bullshit," Rathke thought; these student activists were completely disconnected from reality. He sensed that their politics, unlike his own, lacked the vital element of hope. That was his last SDS meeting. A rangy redhead with a long lean face and a prominent Adam's apple, Rathke wore denim shirts and cowboy boots, as if to show the other activists in the North that this Louisiana boy was not one of them. He could have been mistaken for a country-and-western singer.

Back at Williams during the fall of 1968, Rathke set up a draft-counseling center and organized a three-day shutdown of the campus to support a sit-in at the administration hall by African American students. Eventually, though, he imagined a different path—an antiwar movement not simply set on ending the war but growing into a force for fundamental change, addressing issues like economic inequality, the shortage of jobs, and city slum conditions.

But that fall, organizing the poor and working class would have to wait. Running short of cash, Rathke trudged fruitlessly from factory after factory, warehouse to warehouse looking for work. After several weeks he landed a job with a federally funded antipoverty program in North Adams, Massachusetts, not far from Williams. The program advised welfare recipients regarding their rights. When Rathke read an article in the Nation about a plan to reduce poverty, the rigor of its arguments intrigued him. The authors, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, urged leftist activists to help the poor get on the welfare rolls. They noted that throughout history, only when the poor used disruptive protest tactics did they succeed in significantly improving their lot. Their break-the-bank strategy would require adding millions to welfare, which in turn would "precipitate a profound financial crisis," since cities lacked the funds or the staff to accommodate the spiraling number of desperate people seeking financial assistance. This strategy, Piven and Cloward predicted, would force mayors and governors to lobby for a guaranteed adequate annual income for the poor.

Soon after Rathke started working at the antipoverty community center, he joined several staffers on a bus trip to Boston to attend a rally for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Rathke stood on the Boston Commons that summer day with several hundred others listening to NWRO leader George Wiley urge the crowd "to join our crusade for welfare rights." Wiley, a black man in his late thirties, cut a formidable figure with his large Afro and his billowing African dashiki. A former leader of a civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), with a PhD in chemistry, he had created the NWRO in 1966. Wiley wanted to achieve economic gains for welfare...