From The Vault Of Art Shay: Shay V. U.S. Senate

By Art Shay in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 20, 2012 7:00PM

Illinois Senators Everett Dirksen and Paul Douglas at a Harvard, Ill. Milk Day Fest shortly after their involvement in President Johnson\'s Power play to get Dirksen\'s GOP vote on a controversial appointment to the Federal Coal Commission. My favorite question? Dirksen grilling me on my memory on what was happening on 70 photos taken a few years prior. I replied, \"With all due respect, Senator, several years ago I photographed you greeting the Japanese women\'s softball team in your native Pekin and you regaled them of how it was in Pekin long ago. I do not claim to have as good a memory as the senator, but...\" The chairman, Sen. Frank Rausch, scolded me for being flippant. But the audience loved it\r\n

My hastily organized \<em\>Life\<\/em\> coverage. I just copied the contact prints and enlarged them in basement, of the historic 1959 rump meeting in Deerfield. In 1965, I testified in secret before the Senate Commerce committee against the approval of Carl E. Bagge to be on the Federal Power Commission. My reason? He had, in 1959, led the campaign to \"successfully\" keep \"Negroes\" from buying $45,000 homes in Deerfield. His reason? \"Negroes had made him flee to the suburbs\" and he would \"by God not let it happen in Deerfield.\"\r\n

The controversial $45,000 homes now surrounded by a park and pool instead of the planned \"floral park development\" which would have offered 4-5 homes to African Americans, integrating Deerfield and the North Shore. Imagine the Uproar! A few years earlier, Catholic families were discouraged from moving to Deerfield. And us Jews? Don\'t \<em\>esk\<\/em\>! Now? Now you can \<em\>esk\<\/em\> at Max & Benny\'s deli.\r\n

Builder Max Weinrib, No. 2 man in Morris Milgram\'s liberal Philadelphia building firm, inspects the damage to the controversial houses wrought by vandals during the night. \r\n

The Deerfield Citizens for Human Rights Group at their first meeting. (I would be elected PR Director.) I was late and shot this picture through the basement window. The well-lawyered \"16 and counting\" anti-African American majority tried to get me fired from Time, Life and Fortune. A black Time editor enclosed his own pic in his anonymous answer. He wrote, \"Do I comprehend this matter correctly? You all want me to fire a fotog for shooting pictures on \'is you is or is you ain\'t gonna let niggers build rooming houses in y\'alls\' community?\'\" Like that, I went on to have 3,000 pictures in Time Inc. mags.\r\n

CBS TV went national with the Deerfield housing controversy. this is a sold out local audience, one ill-meaning minister drew cheers from his parishioners when he gave a sermon on property values.\r\n

Co-leader with Carl Bagge of the \"exclusion of blacks\" wing was Harold Lewis, a John Birch-type master of hate speech masquerading as the will of the people. his people? Mostly from the upscale River Woods area of Deerfield.\r\n

Carl Bagge, hand raised, gets the floor to describe his victimization by \"Negroes.\"\r\n

Bagge invokes his sainted mother\'s brave stance against being driven away as he was.\r\n

Fifteen local lawyers gather around Bagge to seek a lily-white suburb. Their answer: parks. A parks referendum had been defeated in two previous election cycles. Bagge testified he hadn\'t even voted the last time. The tall bald man in glasses was Robert York, an ardent Village board pro-parks proponent. Just yesterday I became aware of a pleasant integrated street named for York just half a mile from the fateful Legion Hall.\r\n

This is what Bagge testified was a mild response to his \"spurious\" park plan. In effect, that Deerfield now needed parks more than a few African American homeowners. This is how the American system works: partisanship, lies, a vote that defeats any threat to the pocketbook. Time passes, History\'s shit detector cuts in and another government employee hired to regulate an industry ends up on its payroll. In this case, \"Mr. Coal\" Carl Bagge.\r\n

Activist Mary Ann Sabato waits to express herself at the CBS mike.\r\n

(Legendary Chicago photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his photography archives, Art recollects the time he testified before a Senate committee.)

To paraphrase Hemingway's boast about the most vital of his sensory organs, History too has a built-in shit detector.

I have been exultantly threading my way (dry shod through a rushing stream of lies and obfuscation), parsing the transcript of a secret executive session of the Senate Commerce Committee dated May 5, 1965. It was supposed to be a low profile hearing on the nomination of a long ago Deerfield neighbor of mine, Carl E.Bagge, to become a member of the Federal Power Commission.

Bagge, a mild looking fortyish Cheney of a lawyer, had materialized before my Life magazine lens in the Deerfield winter of 1959 at a rump meeting of concerned citizens in the American Legion Hall to exorcise the horrible rumor floating around: a Chicago law firm with—gasp!—the egghead liberal Adlai Stevenson in its boiler room (he was still smarting, the far right story went, from defeats by Ike in 1952 and 1956. And with this blood-libel still mocked by the pre-Tea Party stalwarts for having voted against letting cats run free and daring to suggest that in dealing with Russia we should not burn down the house to smoke out the rats), and this law firm was negotiating with some liberal eastern developers to erect 50 or so $45,000 houses in the Floral Park neighborhood- and then sell ten percent of them—we ain't kidding—to Negroes!!!

(Ed. Note: Art wrote about the tensions of integrating Deerfield, Ill. In this post from Nov. 2, 2011.—CS)

"Throw him out!" Several citizens screamed that tumultuous evening at Village Hall, pointing to me and my cameras. "He's with Life magazine!" (That Liberal sheet run by ardent Republican Henry Luce - as radical as the Wall Street Journal in its prime.) I calmly shot the hoopla as some villagers hid their faces from my cameras, others threatened to get me fired because their company advertised in , and 16 lawyers drifted to the front, determined to find a legal way to keep their sacred home town free of African Americans.

It was around the time Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun stated the same case. A birthing time and place for Bruce Norris's powder-keg of a play, the Chicago and now Broadway hit, Clybourne Park. (Soon, I'm sure, to be a hit movie.)

Segue forward six years and there I am testifying in secret before the 10-senator Commerce Committee against Carl Bagge, whom gold-tonsiled Senator Everett Dirksen, a Republican, had just nominated to be on the Federal Coal Commission, representing Americans of all colors. Bagge asserted that Negroes had chased his family from the South side of Chicago to Evanston, and "they're not going to push me out of Deerfield" to much applause and cheering (see the photos).

What few of us knew that long-ago evening was that President Lyndon Johnson was leaning on liberal senator Paul Douglas (a friend of mine who would go back on his word, alas, when Lyndon put the choke hold on him explaining that he needed Dirksen's vote for his human rights bill! ) "It's all connected" as Studs Terkel used to say.

Senator Maureen Neuberger whispered in my ear: "We'll fight the good fight but we ain't gonna win, Arty. We're fighting a sitting President.”

Bagge testified:"I think Mr. Shay has been much fairer than I thought he would be, judging from the letter he wrote to this Committee. I want to acknowledge that." He also declared his anti-Negro criticisms were "in effect, social criticism. I was perhaps too analytical... it was perhaps a mistake saying that I fled to the suburbs..."

His testimony had been augmented by public utterances on national TV: "Everyone knows what happens when they move in: rooming houses with 20 people in a house. If God wanted black birds and white birds to live together, he would have put them in the same tree." I interviewed the first couple looking at one of the two model homes: an African-American couple resembling a President and his wife some 50 years in the future.

The guy was an MD, his wife a psychotherapist. He arrived in a Lincoln, she in a Cadillac. If they had room-dividers and other boarding house supplies in their trunks I didn't see it.

Bagge glossed over his "running away" from "Negroes" and lied that he had always been an enthusiastic supporter of parks. All those local lawyers had decided that the way to keep African-Americans out was to promote the idea that Deerfield—which had twice rejected referenda on using the housing site land for parks—suddenly needed a third referendum on our great need for parks. And so Bagge won confirmation, eventually becoming not an even-handed arbiter for Big Coal but the spokesman for the coal industry, downplaying black-lung disease, fighting liberal environmentalists until his last breath at 74 in 2001.

He is not only famous for the above contretemps, but became known as Mr. Coal and, lying to the end, maintained, "Scientists haven't found any sound evidence of acid rain damage to vegetation in the natural environment."

And like many another shyster lawyer, Mr. Coal ultimately made millions from his lies, mostly framed as "social criticism".

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