Texas Observer No More

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The memory fills Ronnie Dugger with pain, that quiet afternoon in 1974 when his father sat on the front porch of their San Antonio home, eyes brimming with tears.

He’d been a lifelong Republican, a meat-and-potatoes conservative who believed in Richard Nixon and the party that elected him. But now William Dugger felt alone--and betrayed.

“It was just after Watergate, and my father had suffered several strokes,” Dugger recalls. “One day he broke down crying, saying the Republican Party had destroyed everything he believed in. It was like he’d experienced a death in the family, and he died soon after.”

Nearly 20 years later, the father’s grief and anger came back to haunt his son.

By 1993, friends said Ronnie Dugger--a trailblazing journalist and presidential biographer--had become a difficult guest at dinner parties whenever Bill Clinton’s name came up. He berated a leader who seemed to break every promise he hadn’t forgotten, and he railed against a modern Democratic Party that was abandoning the working people who built it.

“I was a holy terror,” Dugger says quietly. “And it was the same rage that had devastated my father. You spend years believing in a political party, and when it disappears, when you know it isn’t coming back, you either die or you change. I had to change my life.”

Squinting in the gloom of a late winter afternoon, the 67-year-old man in jeans and a work shirt ignores a constantly ringing telephone to finish his point: It’s not just that he’s lost faith in the Democratic Party’s ability to solve the nation’s ills and revive the political left in America, Dugger says. He’s talking about something much, much bigger.

“We need fundamental change because people are fed up with politics,” he explains. “They’re disgusted that the White House has been turned into a whorehouse. They’re angry that big business calls the shots in this country. And they’re hungry for real leadership.”

Once, Dugger was content to let his provocative words speak for themselves. As the founding editor and publisher of the Texas Observer--a feisty weekly that is still read far beyond the borders of the Lone Star State--he pioneered a style of bare-knuckled political reporting that rattled the high and mighty. He was, and is, one of America’s leading progressive pundits.

“Ronnie has been an enduring voice on the left, someone who has spoken out when others were afraid to,” says former Texas Gov. Ann Richards. “He’s given a great many disenfranchised people an outlet through his writing, and in his own way he’s made history.”

Yet now, Dugger has crossed the line separating words from deeds. He’s stopped being a mere observer and plunged into the unfamiliar world of political organizing. Frustrated by empty polemics, he’s helped form the Alliance for Democracy, a group trying to build a national populist movement at the precinct level. The group has several branches in Southern California, including West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, where organizers are preparing for a long, unorthodox climb to power and visibility.

Indeed, Dugger and his allies are weary of two-party politics and leery of third-party boomlets. They hope to assemble a broad-based coalition that might one day elect a different kind of president--someone, they say, who is truly answerable to the people.

“This is not just another movement on the left,” says David Korten, author of “When Corporations Ruled the World” (Kumarian, 1995) and an alliance supporter. “A true populist rejects both big government and big business, and our natural constituency is a political center that neither Bill Clinton nor Bob Dole would recognize.”

*

Working out of a cramped apartment in a Harvard dormitory, Dugger spends long hours hunched over a computer, drafting action statements. He responds to a daily flood of e-mail, speaks with members of alliance chapters across the country and, scratching his head, tries to figure out just how the hell you jump-start a movement in late 20th century America.

“This is pretty daunting stuff,” says Dugger, a friendly, soft-spoken man whose Texas accent seems sharply out of place in New England. “But I know that we’re not alone.”

Call it do-it-yourself democracy--a phenomenon that is sprouting at the grass roots today in many guises. Whether they’re creating alternate parties, forming labor unions or launching groups like the Alliance for Democracy, thousands of activists are searching for ways to take control of their lives back from the bigness that pervades modern America. Disillusioned and angry, they share an impatience with business as usual and an almost messianic desire for change. Nearly 100 million people failed to vote last year, and for many organizers this signals that America is not only cynical, it’s ripe for reform.

To members of the alliance’s 60 nationwide chapters, the real enemy is not Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton: It’s the growing strength of corporations in America’s political, cultural and economic life. Until these transnational behemoths are brought under meaningful control, they say, true democracy is impossible. Barring such change, it doesn’t matter which shadow party controls Congress or the White House, because both answer to the same corporate masters.

Currently, 1% of America’s population controls 40% of the national wealth, and 20 mega-corporations own more than 50% of our radio and TV stations, book publishing companies, movie studios and magazines. Alliance leaders say these conglomerates need to be reined in, yet that’s a difficult task in a society that seems resigned to such conditions.

Most of the group’s 6,000 members hail from the 1960s and earlier decades, and nothing in their past activism--not even fighting to end the Vietnam War--compares to the battle they’ve chosen now.

Dugger’s notion of organizing a populist movement--modeled after the Texas farmers who sparked a nationwide crusade against the railroads and big city banks in 1877--first appeared in a 1995 article he wrote for the Nation titled “Real Populists Please Stand Up”:

We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. . . . The big corporations and the centimillionaires and billionaires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government. . . . The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.

The immediate reaction was extraordinary: Dugger received more than 1,700 responses by mail, phone and Internet from people who wanted to join up. In November, the Alliance for Democracy held a spirited founding convention in Texas, drawing more than 300 participants. Hopes remain high, but long-term survival is another question.

Columnist Molly Ivins, a former Texas Observer editor, concedes the jury is still out on the alliance and other groups like it. Still, she adds: “This country is like a big old forest that hasn’t had a fire for some time, and one little match could set it off.

“People are sickened by corruption, and they’re dying to fix it. And that’s why folks like Ronnie can make a difference. He’s doing what he’s always done, but this time he’s rolled up his sleeves and he’s getting down and dirty. It’s just another chapter in his life.”

What happens when a self-proclaimed observer forsakes the sidelines to become an active participant? In Dugger’s case, it’s the kind of decision that accentuates his contradictions: Courteous and fair to a fault, he can bristle with anger over the subject of corporate abuse. A stickler for precision when editing others, he’s poorly organized in his own affairs, given to colorful exaggeration and can take forever to answer a simple, factual question.

Dugger is proud of those whose careers he has nourished through the Observer, including Ivins, Willie Morris, Larry L. King and Robert Sherrill. Yet friends privately wonder why Dugger hasn’t experienced similar literary success--and some question whether his latest personal campaign simply masks a growing disenchantment with public-interest journalism.

Married twice and the father of two grown children, Dugger has produced meticulous portraits of human suffering and pain. Yet now, as he tries to organize a movement of real people living in the real world, he sounds more like a philosopher king than a warrior.

“I never believed that because you were a reporter you had to neuter yourself,” he says, answering some of these questions. “I’ve always taken stands on issues and never allowed a false objectivity to censor me. I’ll be damned if anybody tells me what I can or can’t do.”

*

Born in Chicago, Dugger grew up in San Antonio. He inherited a taste for politics from his father and an abiding love of literature and language from his mother, who was a distant descendant of poet Robert Burns. From the beginning, Ronnie knew he would be a writer.

A voracious reader who excelled in debate, Dugger attended the University of Texas and eventually became editor of the Daily Texan. He had grown interested in politics years before, having read Marx, Hegel and other philosophers, but a college newspaper stint covering the Texas legislature gave him an exposure to realpolitik from which he never recovered.

“They usually don’t let 17-year-olds wearing ties into brothels, but that’s what the Legislature was then, just like Congress is now,” he says with a grin. “I got a whiff of the bribery and the corruption that was just standard in the place, and it rocked me.”

Dugger was a gifted student who later studied political theory and economics at Oxford. He was sickened by McCarthyism when he returned to the United States in the early 1950s, and decided to abandon the academic-journalistic world for good. In fact, he had made plans to temporarily leave his first wife and two young children, and board a Mexican shrimp boat in Corpus Christi.

“I was planning to write a novel about immigration and America and begin a literary career,” Dugger remembers. “But the Texas Observer changed all that.”

A few days before he was set to leave, the journalist got an offer from a group of liberal Democrats that transformed his life: Would he agree to edit a new left-leaning weekly? There would be little money, long hours and no guarantee of survival. Dugger jumped at the chance.

When people think of Texas politics, they think conservative. Names like Phil Gramm, John Tower, John Connally and Gov. George Bush Jr. come to mind. While legendary figures like Lyndon B. Johnson and Sam Rayburn were more moderate, they were hardly screaming liberals. Yet the state has had a thriving populist tradition, and it was very much alive in the mid-1950s, just when the Observer began publication with a base of fewer than 6,000 paid subscribers.

The paper billed itself as an independent liberal weekly, and that alone signaled a major challenge to the political establishment, says Lawrence Goodwyn, author of “The Populist Moment” and a former Texas Observer reporter. “The moniker may have little meaning today,” he explains, “but in 1954, in the American South, it was one helluva statement.”

*

Almost immediately, Dugger began lobbing bombs into the halls of power. Politicians who took bribes faced tough questions and scathing analysis on the Observer’s front page. Bankers, lobbyists and other business leaders were also pilloried at the first signs of corruption.

The weekly trained its sights on Johnson’s wheeling and dealing as he rose from Senate majority leader to vice president and finally the presidency in 1963. LBJ didn’t just read the Texas Observer, aides reported. He would underline it angrily with a ballpoint pen.

Modest and polite on the surface, Dugger had an iron core of confidence that served him well. Once, after debating William F. Buckley on the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s at the University of Texas, students told Dugger he had won. The editor brushed off the praise, recalls a friend, then walked into a hallway where he thought no one else could hear him.

“I beat that sonofabitch!” he shouted.

In his best work, Dugger drove a 1948 Chevy across the state, probing everyday life. He chronicled a world of racism and poverty that daily papers either ignored or concealed.

When white teenagers shot up a black neighborhood in East Texas, murdering a black man and injuring others, the story rated scant mention by the Associated Press, and newspaper accounts left out the racial angle entirely. The Observer launched an aggressive investigation that led to criminal prosecutions and laid bare the ugly hypocrisy of Texas law and order.

Years before other news organizations asked the question, Dugger wondered what happens when the state puts a man to death. In a searing, four-part series, he told the story of Charles Elbert Williams, a 20-year-old black sharecropper convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Williams said he had an alibi and protested his innocence, yet his white, court-appointed lawyers never presented any of that to the jury.

Dugger sat six feet away in 1961 as Williams was strapped into the chair:

“Trussed, gagged, in the dark, he is ready.

“All right. His hands clench. All right. The executioner goes back through the open door. His hands relax. The sound of breath sucked through teeth, he is lifted against the straps, his fists clench, his clothes balloon from his limbs, there is a distant sparking sound.

“His body is tensed against the straps for a very long time, a scene of terror.

“The power goes off. He is limp in his straps, his head falls to the side. It is 2 minutes after 12 midnight. There is a sweetish-pungent smell of burnt human flesh.”

Dugger’s extraordinary work would inspire other journalists and writers who went on to heavyweight careers. All credit him for teaching them to report the truth without regard for political consequences, and for using the Texas Observer as a battering ram for change. In 1994, after more than 40 years, Dugger finally stepped down as publisher.

“Here was a journal whose readership never got much higher than 6,000, yet by the sheer force of its ardor and its talent, it was read by everyone in Texas whose opinions had authority,” wrote Morris, former Harpers editor, in his memoirs. “Dugger is not only one of the great reporters of our time; he imbued an entire group of young and inexperienced colleagues with a feel for Texas, for ‘commitment’ in its most human sense, and for writing.”

*

It’s 11:30 on a chilly November night, and Dugger isn’t mulling over an unfinished manuscript. He’s in a room packed with noisy alliance supporters, chairing a meeting where the group will vote on its name and a statement of policy. Hours later, they’re still at it.

“Folks, we’re looking at a pit 50 feet deep,” he says. “I beg you, please let’s not get bogged down in procedure. . . . Let’s give each other order; let’s keep it democratic.”

Whatever that is. Should the people who couldn’t attend be given the same representation as those who made it down to a ranch in the Texas Hill Country for the founding convention? Do the people who count votes count their own votes or does someone else count their votes?

The minutes drag by, speeches eat up the clock and Dugger looks exhausted. The next morning, bright and early, he’s at it again, this time huddling with committee chairmen to decide on the agenda for the next night of the convention, when voting begins again.

“Maybe there’s such a thing as too much democracy,” jokes Katie Winchell, the alliance’s national coordinator, looking back on the three-day meeting. “That room was filled with some of the most intelligent people you’ll ever meet. But nothing comes easy.”

Ultimately, the alliance members put aside differences and agreed on major points. Yet the difficulty in getting a room filled with true believers to decide on a name underscores the larger problems in creating a movement. For starters, how do you get people’s attention?

“Language is a very real problem,” says Billie Beach, who heads the West Los Angeles alliance, based in Santa Monica. “You have to reach the average person in the street, and their eyes may glaze over if you give them a long speech about corporate power. You have to connect with them in a way that makes sense in their daily lives or you’re lost.”

In the San Fernando Valley, alliance leader Jo Seidita says it’s important to tell people that the group is not anti-corporate, because virtually everybody is or knows someone who is directly affected by a corporation, through jobs, mortgages, investments and the like.

“We just want corporations to correct their irresponsible behavior and be good citizens like anyone else,” says the Northridge resident and veteran organizer, who orchestrated the 1984 California Nuclear Freeze Initiative. “When you put it that way, people listen.”

These are subtle questions of tactics and strategy that Dugger has generally avoided during his journalistic career. And the day-to-day strain of kitchen-table activism has begun to take a physical toll on him. Soon, he hopes, others will assume daily management of the alliance, freeing him to help the group develop its message. In the next two years, he explains, the alliance will launch a number of political initiatives, only a few designed for media consumption.

Meanwhile, he and his wife continue to live in a Harvard apartment, where both are finishing research projects for the university. Where they will go next is unknown.

“I’ve suggested that we rewrite the Declaration of Independence to reflect a more populist point of view and have it read in Philadelphia this summer,” he says. “For other events, we need privacy. We’re not into media exposure now; we need to build our numbers.”

As far as Seidita is concerned, Dugger also needs to take better care of himself.

“Ronnie is overworked, and sometimes you can get aggravated with him,” she says. “He puts things off until the last minute, he’s overweight and he pushes himself too hard. He’s not a kid anymore. I sent him an e-mail saying that if he has a heart attack, I’ll never forgive him.”

It’s a long way from the hills of east Texas, but Dugger says his new passion in life makes sense. For once, he feels completely free of the past--and illusions.

“I’m not mad at Bill Clinton anymore,” he says with a delighted grin. “He doesn’t bother me, because ultimately he doesn’t matter. He’s not the real problem. These days, he’s a sideshow.”

* The Alliance for Democracy can be reached by telephone at (617) 259-9395, by fax at (617) 259-0404, by e-mail at peoplesall@aol.com or by mail at P.O. Box 683, Lincoln, MA 01773.