United Power for Action & Justice, the curious organization that burst onto the public scene Sunday, attracted more than 9,000 cheering and foot-stomping recruits to the UIC Pavilion for its very first meeting.
The group already has raised $2.5 million and trained activists for more than a year. It has assembled an all-star team of Chicago’s religious leaders, along with Illinois’ three largest labor unions, neighborhood groups and health organizations.
It carries the banner of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and the imprimatur of his successor. It has nostalgia and even a whiff of controversy.
United Power for Action & Justice has everything, it seems, but a plan.
The group’s founders say it is an unprecedented community organization, spanning city and suburbs, that will fight for society’s powerless on social, political and economic issues.
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Even after two years of organizing, however, those leaders say they have yet to determine exactly what those issues are and what solutions United Power might offer. Nobody will know where this mammoth enterprise is headed, they maintain, for months or perhaps years to come.
“My hope is that this will be an organization that is not manipulated by anyone, but directed by the people who’ve come together here,” said Roman Catholic Archbishop Francis George, taking a break from the hot-dogs-and-Dixieland-jazz atmosphere of Sunday’s rally. “They will set the agenda, and they will work for that agenda.”
But why did they get together without any agenda in the first place?
“That’s hard to understand, I know, but I think that’s part of its genius,” said Monsignor Jack Egan, the 81-year-old dean of Catholic activism, who did as much as any single person to create United Power.
In interviews last week and in a flier passed out Sunday, organizers have mentioned housing, gangs, public school funding, drug use and voter turnout as a few of the issues United Power’s 275 member groups might consider.
But mostly organizers prefer to stay away from specifics altogether.
A small group of conservative Catholic critics, meanwhile, has offered its own speculative answers. United Power, they contend, will take on the shape of the group it has hired to organize its members, the Industrial Areas Foundation.
At a conference in Westmont a week ago, more than 150 people gathered to hear speakers denounce the IAF as a corrupt vehicle used to fund and direct left-wing political causes. The conference was organized by the Wanderer Forum Foundation, an independent group affiliated with the stridently conservative Catholic newspaper, the Wanderer.
“Chicago’s going to be a different city when this is all done,” said Paul Likoudis, news editor for the Wanderer. “It’s church money used for Democratic politics, never Republican . . . My primary concern is that it’s going to ruin the parishes, polarize them, and drive away people who don’t want their money going to these causes.”
The Wanderer, based in St. Paul, is best known to Chicagoans in recent years for its sustained attack on Bernardin, before and after the cardinal’s death. Likoudis acknowledges that its campaign against the IAF and United Power has yet to catch fire here.
But among conservative Catholics, even those who do not embrace the Wanderer’s extreme stance harbor some concern about United Power, despite its Catholic roots. Egan’s idea was, after all, fueled initially with $1 million raised by Bernardin.
“I’ve never heard of an agendaless organization,” said Thomas Wronski, president of the watchdog group Catholic Citizens of Illinois. “We don’t want to fight it from the outset, just raise a warning sign. We want to see what they will do.”
On Sunday afternoon, what United Power members did was listen to some 60 speeches by representatives of the 275 organizations United Power claims to include–from the West Cook Community Development Corp. to Sinai Family Health Centers to the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees.
As speakers rose, their constituents in the stands often stood as a group to cheer, dozens or even hundreds strong. Some organizations in the stands sported matching T-shirts, hats and lapel buttons.
The feel of a political convention was further enhanced by the rhetoric from the stage, drawing big cheers with denunciations of the political status quo, but without many specific alternatives.
Even the generic sound of United Power for Action & Justice seems to defy categorization or judgment.
The one thing United Power does have to help define it is names–big ones.
The most intriguing name is Archbishop George’s. Seeing the archbishop as a friend to conservative Catholics, Likoudis and his allies hoped that George would withdraw the archdiocese from the project after his arrival in May.
Instead George, who aides say worked with community organizers in Portland, Ore., and Yakima, Wash., not only permitted the archdiocese to continue supporting United Power, but allowed his name and face to be used by the group in publicity leading up to Sunday’s meeting.
A letter to newspapers, co-signed by George and Bishop Arthur Brazier of the Apostolic Church of God, calls for “collective action on behalf of the whole.”
“Fantasy? Hopeless idealism? Perhaps,” the letter continues. “But what is never imagined will certainly never come to pass.”
George’s support has led some, like Wronski, to hold off on criticism of United Power, for now.
But George is far from alone in giving United Power credibility. The glossy photo sent out in advance of Sunday’s meeting also featured heavy-hitters such as Brazier, longtime activist Rabbi Herman Schaalman, Islamic leader Talat Othman, venerable preacher-organizer Addie Wyatt and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Bishop Ken Olsen.
Not pictured, but on the team, are leading Methodists, Episcopalians, Missouri-Synod Lutherans and Baptists, representing a wide swath of black, white, Hispanic, city, suburban, liberal and conservative congregations.
With Bernardin and the archdiocese out front early, that coalition came together quickly.
Pastors of black churches, such as Dr. Leon Finney of Christ Apostolic Church in Woodlawn, were among the first to join. Many had experience with IAF activism in the 1950s and 1960s; Finney, for example, is director of The Woodlawn Organization, one of the few remaining operations in Chicago that was originally formed by IAF founder Saul Alinsky.
For many of the mainline Protestant denominations that later became involved, it was reportedly just a matter of receiving an invitation to join from a member of the Chicago religious community they respected.
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In fact, that kind of personal trust has kept the group moving from its first days.
Egan said he has long had faith in the idea of community organizing, with its methodology of creating one-on-one relationships that build upon one another until they have enough power to work for the common good.
Egan learned community organizing from Alinsky, who created the IAF in 1940, and became a personal friend of Egan’s. Though Alinsky died in 1972 and the IAF moved to New York, Egan stayed close with Alinsky’s successor, Ed Chambers.
It was Egan’s faith in Chambers that cemented the IAF’s integral role in United Power, and it was Chambers’ respect for Egan that led to the IAF’s quiet return to Chicago in 1994.
Support for the budding idea of a metropolitan, interfaith, social action organization also grew within the archdiocese, in no small part, because of the trust local Catholic leaders have in Egan.
Rev. Peter Bowman, now an official on Archbishop Francis George’s staff, was pastor at St. James Church in Arlington Heights when Egan asked him to become involved.
Egan’s word was enough. Bowman eventually became a trustee in the organization from which United Power grew, Metropolitan Sponsors. Even now, he said, it is his belief in the other people involved, not insider knowledge, that gives him hope.
“Am I taking a lot on faith?” he said. “Yes, I certainly am. I have faith in good people.”
Rank-and-file members who attended Sunday’s rally agreed it is people, not issues, igniting United Power.
“I don’t know what their plans are, but I know this: We’re never going to get anything accomplished if we continue to stand apart,” said Julia Bledsoe, a member of St. Agatha Catholic Church on the West Side. “Now that we are standing together, there is no stopping us.”