Green Pastures of Harvard

Ansara’s activism began at age thirteen, when he balked at participating in a Cold War–era civil defense drill at his public school in Brookline, Massachusetts. This led to his campaigning for nuclear disarmament and then racial justice as a supporter of the Southern civil rights movement.

As a teenager, he worked on several independent political initiatives, including a race for the US Senate by peace candidate H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard professor who did not fare well against a young Democrat with White House connections named Ted Kennedy. Ansara also supported a long-shot campaign by civil rights advocate Noel Day, the first black candidate for Congress from Massachusetts, who also ran as an independent against House speaker John McCormack.

In 1964, the author crossed the Charles River and, as a scholarship student, started raising hell in what Bob Dylan called, at the time, “the green pastures of Harvard University.” The next few years were a blur of late-night debates, marches and rallies, student strikes, and street battles over the Vietnam War.

Harvard and nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were the twin towers of war and imperialism in the Boston area. When you had Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Dow Chemical (which supplied his department with napalm for dropping on Vietnam), and the shah of Iran all visiting your campus — plus the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) as a permanent presence — there was no shortage of targets of opportunity for SDS supporters, who were in turn arrested and brutalized by local cops and/or disciplined by university administrators.

Not far from Harvard Square, MIT was also viewed by angry students as an integral part of “the war machine,” due to its “$100 million a year in Pentagon research and development funds, making it the tenth largest Defense Department R&D contractor in the country.”

Ansara helped create a coalition of students from twenty-five Boston-area colleges and universities, plus local high schools, which faced court injunctions and police violence when it mobilized thousands of students in an attempt to shut down MIT’s military research facilities.

One revealing reflection by Ansara, as a key local leader of this “massive youth insurrection,” relates to his relationship with the rank and file:

In SDS, the confusion over leadership inhibited our effectiveness, allowing young arrogant men like me to lead without being accountable. . . . Leadership structures and a culture that promotes the intentional development of new leaders are important for any insurgent democratic movement. It is especially important for student groups where every four years, older leaders cycle out and every year new people cycle in.

Postgrad Turn to the Working Class

Hard Work also addresses the still-relevant question: What do student radicals do after they graduate and need to find a job in which they can remain politically active? In the Boston area, some former SDS members went to work in big industrial shops like the unionized shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, the General Motors plant in Framingham, the GE Works in Lynn, and even a Raytheon missile plant (which is still turning out union-label products for the Pentagon).

In parallel fashion, Ansara and other New Left veterans created a dynamic, fast-growing network of Bay State groups, called Fair Share, that organized workers and their families around non-workplace issues in some of the same blue-collar cities and others like Chelsea, Revere, Lowell, Worcester, and Fall River. The author writes that Fair Share tackled issues including taxes, energy and insurance costs, toxic waste sites, plant closings, telephone company rates and policies, red-lining and other unjust bank practices, youth jobs, and “an endless stream of neighborhood issues.” Among the group’s victories, large and small, were “rate hikes stopped, rebates and tax abatements in the millions sent to working and low-income families . . . stop lights won. Parks cleaned up. Abandoned buildings fixed up.”

By 1979, Ansara claims, “brilliant campaigns and systematic work built a statewide organization with greater name recognition and support than any organization or politician at that time in Massachusetts” (which probably would have been news to my old Bay State congressman, US House speaker Tip O’Neill, and a soon-to-be presidential candidate named Ted Kennedy). Still, over 110,000 families — 10 percent of the households in the state, including my own — were Fair Share members, paying dues of at least $15 per year and receiving its statewide newspaper.

On any given day, at Fair Share’s peak, there was, according to the author, a local membership meeting somewhere in Massachusetts with ten to five hundred people in attendance. Door-to-door canvassing was nonstop; Fair Share leaders, staff, and members were able to raise $3,000,000 a year to support their model community organizing work.

Unfortunately, “Fair Share grew faster than my ability to manage it,” Ansara writes. And it was “too dependent on staff.” Due to the absence of spending controls and a sudden loss of federally funded Fair Share jobs, the group developed cash-flow problems, a deficit of $1.2 million, mounting bank debt, and IRS back taxes or penalties it struggled to pay.

Ansara was forced to lay himself off, suddenly close Fair Share offices, and furlough two-thirds of its staff. The group continued for several more years and many of its former organizers later became progressive lawyers, academics, union reps, environmental campaigners, or elected public officials. But Fair Share’s “financial crash started a downward spiral that could not be reversed.”

A Second Career

After Fair Share’s debt-driven collapse, Ansara “stumbled into” a second career as a political consultant, with a focus on voter registration. It was a choice seemingly driven by his post-’60s regrets about failing to develop a strategy for change that “included both disruptive protest and effective electoral action.”

Despite Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis’s past neoliberal resistance to property tax reform sought by Fair Share, Ansara worked on his 1988 presidential campaign. He also continued to do organizer trainings and became a highly paid specialist in nonprofit fundraising. One major client of the telemarketing business he created was Working Assets Long Distance (WALD) — which later became CREDO Mobile — a reseller of phone service actually provided by anti-union firms like Sprint and MCI.

Instead of looking for the union label, customers of AT&T, one of the largest unionized private sector employers in the country, were urged to sign up for the more “socially responsible” WALD instead because it pledged to donate 1 percent of its gross revenues to an array of progressive nonprofits. Thanks to call center support provided by the Ansara-owned Share Group, and a big direct-mail campaign targeting readers of the Nation, Mother Jones, and the Utne Reader, WALD grew its customer base from 50,000 to 320,000 during the 1990s. And millions of dollars did indeed flow to nonprofits like Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other “liberal social and political causes.”

But later in Hard Work, we learn that this savvy businessman, employing hundreds of workers in multiple telemarketing centers, suddenly became a babe in the woods of union politics. In 1996, Ansara discloses, he “unknowingly, participate[d] in a conspiracy of money laundering, misuse of union dues, fraud, and extortion of union contractors” as “part of a headline-producing scandal around the campaign of the reform president of the Teamsters Union,” Ron Carey, who Ansara doesn’t even identify by name.

Ansara admits that he “was guilty of multiple felonies” and his “negligence was indefensible.” So he decided to take “full responsibility” and plead guilty to a single felony count (as did two other Democratic Party consultants involved in the costly and messy affair). Their cooperation with federal prosecutors helped all avoid jail time, but Ansara paid more than $700,000 in fines and restitution (which another guilty party failed to do until a lien was placed on his ski condo in Aspen many years later).

Midlife Crisis?

A key figure in the plot was then Teamsters political director Bill Hamilton, a past business associate of Ansara’s. Hamilton contested the federal charges against him, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, embezzlement, and perjury and sentenced to three years in jail. After leading 185,000 workers to a major strike victory over United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997, Teamsters president Carey was indicted on a single perjury count related to the scandal. But jurors believed his assertions, then and before, that he had no knowledge of any misuse of union funds to aid his reelection.

Ansara describes this critical episode in his post-organizing career as a “midlife crisis,” albeit a “profound” one. It was, in fact, much more than that, as former UPS driver and Teamsters activist Ken Reiman documents in Ron Carey and the Teamsters, a well-researched account of Carey’s tragic rise and fall. Despite his acquittal, Carey was forced to step down as Teamsters president and banned from further union involvement, including participating in a rerun election in 1999.

The then twenty-year-old reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which helped elect Carey twice, was unable to prevent old-guard candidate James P. Hoffa — son of longtime, mob-connected Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa —  from becoming Carey’s successor for the next twenty-three years. The reputation and moral authority of TDU and the Carey administration as anti-corruption campaigners took a serious, short-term beating, and Teamsters reform at the national level was set back for an entire generation.

As In These Times and other progressive media outlets reported, the scandal known as “Teamster donorgate” nearly derailed the career of recently elected American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) treasurer Rich Trumka. When questioned before a federal grand jury, Trumka invoked the Fifth Amendment (in violation of the federation’s own constitution) rather than explain how his office became improperly entangled in Carey’s reelection effort.

In a sad echo of Fair Share’s sudden demise fifteen years earlier, Ansara’s misbehavior triggered the collapse of Citizen Action, a national network of groups “working on the same issues” that the author had helped launch. Citizen Action was led by Ira Arlook, an old Tufts University SDS comrade, who ended up in personal legal jeopardy because of his ill-advised role in the Teamsters’ election-related donor swapping. Claiming two million members at the time, Citizen Action was forced to lay off twenty staffers and close its doors in Washington, DC, when its wealthy donors fled.

The author’s own multistate call center operation took a major hit when a key client, the Democratic National Committee, severed ties with him. He was then forced to sell Share Group to others, who continued to operate it (and hired Jackson Lewis, the notorious union-busting law firm, to handle its labor negotiations).

Even Barbara Arnold, Ansara’s second wife, became deeply embroiled in the criminal investigation. She was recruited by him to make large prohibited donations to Carey’s 1996 reelection campaign (listing her occupation as “student”); the Share Group billed the Teamsters for nearly $100,000 worth of services it did not perform to pay back Arnold.

Third or Fourth Act

Within a decade, the author had, nevertheless, bounced back in the same business. Unlike Share — which, to its credit, dealt with my union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), as well as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the United Auto Workers — his new venture, called UpSource, operated on a nonunion basis. According to the author, the firm never opposed unionization at its locations in Canada, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts. And as reported by a New Bedford newspaper, Ansara did strive “to offer good wages and benefits rather than follow the trend toward call center ‘sweatshops.’”

Telemarketing is clearly a tough business to be socially responsible in, even for a former ’60s radical. (On that point, see ex-Teamster Boots Riley’s satirical 2018 film, Sorry to Bother You). Since leaving the industry, the author of Hard Work of Hope has reinvented himself, again, as a published poet and now memoirist.

On his new author website, Ansara is getting rave reviews from old colleagues like Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth (whose late husband, Paul, was an early SDS mentor of the author and, as a top American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) official, tried to help Carey get reelected in a similarly unhelpful fashion in 1996). Former Dissent editor Michael Kazin, a historian of the American left (who is outed in Ansara’s book as a former Weatherman) describes the author as “one of his generation’s most effective community organizers.”

Other 1960s radicals, whose decades of labor activism or community organizing suffered major blows due to the author’s misbehavior, tend to be less forgiving. As Ken Paff, a founder of TDU, told me, “Ansara’s role in taking down a great union leader set back my life’s work for many years.” A former Citizen Action national board member (and retired CWA leader in New Jersey) remains similarly incensed thirty years later.

Crimson Courage

Younger readers of Hard Work will nevertheless find much useful advice for the current roller-coaster ride of antiwar campaigning on campus. One thing to avoid, Ansara argues, is a modern-day version of the sectarian anti-imperialism of groups like the Progressive Labor Party, which developed a late ’60s following at Harvard. This Maoist group proved to be more of a hindrance than help in building a massive 1969 strike by thousands of Harvard students of all political stripes. That shutdown resulted in the creation of an African American studies program and the abolition of military officer training on campus for the next forty-two years.

Last year, Harvard students joined a Gaza protest movement that overlapped with a critical national election cycle. As Ansara notes, there was, in 1968, similar political tension between antiwar demonstrators and a Democratic contender for the presidency who (like Kamala Harris last year) refused to support peace initiatives for fear of alienating a lame-duck White House boss. But since January 20 of this year, Harvard Square, the scene of so many past student battles against university complicity with the military, has become ground zero for Trump’s attacks on the Ivies.

Suddenly, one observer notes, “everyone loves Harvard” because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” According to an undergraduate student leader “school pride is at an all-time high.” Past graduates like journalist Matthew Yglesias — who previously opposed giving any money to this “rich and famous university” — are now “fighting fascism” by donating to a Harvard-created defense fund.

On graduation day last month, Harvard president Alan Garber received thunderous applause from a crowd of 30,000, despite “silencing dissent, prosecuting protest, and abandoning academic freedom,” according to one Harvard Crimson critic who argues that Garber has “already actualized many Trump Administration wishes for the University.”

Last year, Garber was booed by graduating seniors for denying diplomas to thirteen protesters of the Gaza genocide facing disciplinary action. At this year’s commencement, among the supportive alumni handing out self-congratulatory “Crimson Courage” stickers was Mark Dyen, class of 1970, who helped cofound Mass Fair Share after quitting the Weatherman faction of SDS and “coming back to political sanity,” as Ansara puts it.

Dyen, who later founded a renewable energy company, told the New York Times that he was coming to the aid of his embattled alma mater because “Harvard stood up for itself, for us, for higher education, and democracy.” That was not a message that would have resonated with Dyen’s earlier self, or Ansara’s, in the same venue fifty-five years ago — when political friends and enemies seemed easier to sort out.