Deaths (Obituaries)

More stories

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Economy

    Charles R. Morris, Iconoclastic Author on Economics, Dies at 82

    by

    Resisting ideological labels, experienced in government and banking, he critiqued policymakers’ “good intentions” and the costs of health care and forecast the 2008 financial crisis.Charles R. Morris, a former government official, banker and self-taught historian of economics who as a prolific, iconoclastic author challenged conventional political and economic pieties, died on Monday in Hampton, N.H. He was 82.The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter, Kathleen Morris, said.Mr. Morris wrote his signature first book, “The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment” (1980), after serving as director of welfare programs under Mayor John V. Lindsay and as secretary of social and health services in Washington State.The book was a trenchant Emperor’s New Clothes analysis of how the Lindsay administration’s unfettered investment in social welfare programs to ward off civil unrest had delivered the city to the brink of bankruptcy, and it pigeonholed Mr. Morris as a neoconservative.But as a law school graduate with no formal training in economics, he defied facile labeling.While his 15 nonfiction books often revisited well-trodden topics — including the Great Depression, the nation’s tycoons, the cost of health care, the Cold War arms race and the political evolution of the Roman Catholic church — he injected them with revealing details, provocative insights and fluid narratives.“The Cost of Good Intentions” (1981) was less a screed about liberal profligacy as it was an expression of disappointment that benevolent officials had become wedded to programs that didn’t work. He concluded that the best and the brightest in the government, as well as complicit players on the outside, had figured that if a day of reckoning ever came, it would not be on their watch.Steven R. Weisman wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Mr. Morris, as a former city budget official and, at the time, as a vice president for international finance at Chase Manhattan Bank, was more intent on adding perspective than affixing blame.“He exonerates neither his current nor his former employer,” Mr. Weisman wrote.In the book, Mr. Morris quoted Peter Goldmark Jr., then the state budget director, as saying: “Remember the 14th century and the advent of the plague? Was it possible for those people to stand on the docks in Genoa or Venice, watch the rats pouring off the ships, and not understand?”“Yes,” Mr. Morris wrote dubiously, “it was possible.”He would also belie Thomas Carlyle’s characterization of economics as “the dismal science” by injecting tantalizing nuggets.Reviewing Mr. Morris’s “A Time of Passion: America 1960-1980” (1984) for The Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley wrote that “some of the most vivid moments in this book come when he stops the rush of history to describe incidents from his own time as a poverty-program and prison administrator.”“He truly has been ‘mugged by reality,’ in Irving Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative,” Mr. Kinsley added, but concluded, “Overall, his book radiates a generosity and good will that set it apart from the typically sour neoconservative creed.”Charles Richard Morris was born on Oct. 23, 1939, in Oakland, Calif., to Charles B. and Mildred (Reid) Morris. His father was a technician for a printing ink manufacturer; his mother was a homemaker.After attending Mother of the Savior Seminary in Blackwood, N.J., Mr. Morris graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in journalism in 1963. He was director of the New Jersey Office of Economic Opportunity from 1965 to 1969.He earned a degree from the university’s law school in 1972 while working for New York City government. He was recruited by Washington State on the basis of his reputation as the city’s assistant budget director and welfare director.Praising Mr. Morris’s service to the city and his proficiency as an author, Edward K. Hamilton, first deputy mayor during the Lindsay administration, said that he nonetheless differed with some of the conclusions and recommendations in “The Cost of Good Intentions.”“Many of its stated or implied remedial nostrums, even if desirable in theory, were simply infeasible in the real-world circumstances,” Mr. Hamilton said, “given the complex web of intersecting state, local and federal authorities and the politics overshadowing all of it.”Mr. Morris later served as director of the Vera Institute of Justice in London.He is survived by his wife, Beverly Gilligan Morris, along with their sons, Michael and Matthew; their daughter, Kathleen Morris; and four grandchildren. A sister, Marianne Donovan, also died on Monday. Mr. Morris lived in Hampton.Among his other books were “A Rabble of Dead Money: The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929-1939 (2017); “Comeback: America’s New Economic Boom” (2013); “The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets” (2009); “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown” (2008); “The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center (2007),” which dissects the cost of care to the public and to practitioners; “American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church” (1997); and “The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy” (2005).Assessing “The Tycoons” in The Times Book Review, Todd G. Buchholz, a former economics adviser to President George H.W. Bush, wrote of Mr. Morris, “I admired his drive to delve into competing theories of the Great Depression, sleeves rolled up, digging evenhandedly into the muck of academic research and the tumbleweed of the Dust Bowl.”Rarely allowing himself to be typecast, Mr. Morris would debunk what he called the conservative conventional wisdom that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. He complained in the Jesuit magazine America that the nation’s existing health care system benefits the wealthiest Americans. In an interview on the business blog bobmorris.biz in 2012, he criticized graduate schools of business.“Business schools tend to focus on topics that are suitable to blackboards, so they overemphasize organization and finance,” Mr. Morris said. “Until very recently, they virtually ignored manufacturing. I think a lot of the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, and now more recently the 2000s, can be traced pretty directly to the biases of the business schools.”In “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash” (2008), which won the Gerald Loeb Award for business reporting, Mr. Morris precisely predicted the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns and the ensuing global recession.He wrote the book in 2007, when most experts were still expressing optimism about the economy. He also appeared in the Oscar-winning documentary “Inside Job” (2010) about the 2008 financial crisis.“I think we’re heading for the mother of all crashes,” Mr. Morris wrote his publisher, Peter Osnos, the founder of Public Affairs books, early in 2007, adding, “It will happen in summer of 2008, I think.”Mr. Osnos recalled that after the book was published, “George Soros and Paul Volcker called me and asked, ‘Who is this Morris, and how did he get this so right, so early?’” More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Economy

    Mark Levitan, Who Measured the True Face of Poverty, Dies at 73

    by

    He came up with a more realistic threshold, changing the way New York City determines who is impoverished and persuading the Obama White House to follow suit.Mark Levitan, who was instrumental in providing New York City officials with a more realistic measure of poverty, and in persuading the federal government to follow suit, died on Thursday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 73.His son, Dan, said the cause was complications of leukemia. Dr. Levitan lived in Brooklyn.The results of Dr. Levitan’s alternative method of measurement were nothing to boast about: In 2006, the first year that the new formula was applied, the overall poverty rate in the city leapt by more than four percentage points compared with the official benchmark, and among older people it soared to a stunning 32 percent from 18.1 percent.But by calculating the added benefits of tax credits, food stamps and housing subsidies to poor people while also taking into account the local costs of rent, transportation, health care and child care, economists, using Dr. Levitan’s methodology, could also calibrate which anti-poverty programs were doing the most good for which group.In 2011, for example, Dr. Levitan found that food stamps and other benefits helped keep a quarter of a million New Yorkers above the poverty threshold.He lobbied in Washington for a similar national redefinition of poverty. While the anachronistic official standard was retained, beginning in 2011 the Census Bureau began issuing what it called a broader Supplemental Poverty Measure. Like New York City’s, the supplemental measure took into account additional factors that affected overall income, as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences.Dr. Levitan was an improbable recruit by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Working for an unapologetic capitalist, he took a job in which he managed to practice some of what he had been preaching for most of his career as a socialist organizer and outside critic.In his decade as a senior policy analyst for the Community Service Society, Mr. Levitan had been an outspoken champion of marginalized New Yorkers. After the 2001 recession, for instance, he pointed out that nearly half of the city’s Black men were unemployed.Dr. Levitan joined the Bloomberg administration in 2007 as the director of poverty research for the city’s new Center for Economic Opportunity, which the mayor had established the year before to measure more precisely who needed help and why, and to design pilot programs to target those groups.Linda Gibbs, who was Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for health and human services, said by email that Mr. Levitan had “created a lasting change in the conversation here in New York City, and across the country, as the work he spearheaded to change the way poverty is measured was adopted by the Obama administration.”In keeping with a life committed to making a difference in the well-being of New Yorkers, she added, “Mark framed a clearer picture of who suffers from real deprivation.”Mark Kenneth Levitan was born on May 12, 1948, in Manhattan to Arthur and Miriam (Orleans) Levitan. His father was a jeweler, his mother a homemaker. He grew up in Brooklyn and Teaneck, N.J.After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Boston University in 1970, he became a factory worker, making Nerf balls near Boston and working in the Dodge automobile paint shop outside Detroit. He was also an organizer for the International Socialists and, after the Dodge plant closed, a researcher for the United Auto Workers.In 1982 he married Gabrielle Semel, who later became a lawyer for the Communications Workers of America. She survives him, along with their son, who is an executive vice president of BerlinRosen, a public relations firm; two grandchildren; and a brother, Donald.After the couple moved from the Detroit area to New York, Dr. Levitan earned a doctorate in economics from the New School and joined the Community Service Society in 1997.After he retired in 2014, he taught at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York. More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Economy

    Bernadette Bartels Murphy, Pioneering Wall Street Trader, Dies at 86

    by

    Starting out as a secretary, she became a sought-after financial adviser in a male world and found a national platform for her views on public television.Bernadette Bartels Murphy, a rare woman on Wall Street in the 1950s whose work as a trader helped legitimize a once-derided approach to anticipating market trends, making her a respected voice in the financial world and giving her a platform on television, died on March 3 in Nyack, N.Y. She was 86.Her death was confirmed by her niece Mary Ann Bartels. Ms. Murphy died at her niece’s home.Ms. Murphy began her career at the investment bank Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. as a secretary — one of the few roles then available to women in the financial industry. But over time she became a trader and analyst who found a national audience as a regular panelist on Louis Rukeyser’s long-running “Wall Street Week,” a public television side gig of hers for 25 years.Toiling as a secretary, Ms. Murphy found that it was the work of the traders on her desk that interested her more. She began studying the movements of stocks and the overall market as a way to anticipate future trends, an approach known as technical analysis.At the time, that method of anticipating market movements was looked down on by traditionalists, who favored an approach called fundamental analysis: forecasting a shift in a stock price by gleaning the intrinsic value of a company and its shares. They referred, often derisively, to technical analysts as “chartists,” for the graphs and data tables they pored over to make their forecasts.“I had to keep my charts in the bottom drawer of my desk,” Ms. Murphy recalled in a 1992 interview with an industry magazine. “In those days, technical analysis was not considered an acceptable discipline, not in a conservative firm.”To learn more, she took classes at the New York Institute of Finance and began creating her own charts. She used the trading floor around her as her training ground, soaking up information on the interactions between the various markets her firm worked in, like corporate and municipal bonds, equities and trade orders from overseas. (After Ladenburg she went on to work for two more Wall Street firms.)She also started sharing her ideas with co-workers and industry contacts in a newsletter, “This Is What I Think,” which became her calling card, prompting clients of her firm to ask her bosses for her views on trades they were considering. By the early 1970s, she was monitoring stock portfolios for customers and sharing her forecasts with them.Her breakout moment came in 1973, when a market crash and global economic crisis sent stocks tumbling in a 21-month-long swoon.“My readings were very accurate,” Ms. Murphy said in the book “Women of the Street: Making it on Wall Street — The World’s Toughest Business” (1998), by Sue Herera. She anticipated, for example, a sharp plunge in a popular group of stocks known as the “nifty 50,” which included household names like Coca-Cola and Polaroid.“My timing was right, my anticipation of what was going to happen to stocks was on the money, so I started getting phone calls from institutions and invitations to lunch,” Ms. Murphy said in the book. “And that’s how my business began to build.”Ms. Murphy, who encouraged women to pursue Wall Street careers, appeared on the cover of a business publication for women in 1994. via Murphy familyShe started appearing on “Wall Street Week,” which aired on Friday evenings, in 1979.Within the industry, Ms. Murphy was known for her contributions to trade groups and civic organizations. She was, at various times, the president of the Chartered Market Technicians Association, the New York Society of Security Analysts and the Financial Women’s Association. She was a founding member and governor of the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute, a trustee of Pace University and a board member of the American Lung Association of New York City.“Everyone who belonged to an organization always tried to get Bernadette to join, which she often did, being a social bee,” said Sheila Baird, a founding partner of the investment firm Kimelman & Baird, where Ms. Murphy worked as the chief market analyst for many years.Bernadette Bartels was born on April 9, 1934, on City Island in the Bronx to Joseph Francis Bartels, a stationary engineer (maintaining industrial machinery and systems), and Julia (Flynn) Bartels, a nurse. She was the youngest of four children. She is survived by her sister, Julia Campbell. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Our Lady of Good Counsel (now part of Pace University) in White Plains, N.Y. She credited her father with urging her to use her education to pursue a career.“I certainly knew that before I married I was going to accomplish something. That was my driving force,” she told Ms. Herera. “I wanted to be a fulfilled person, confident in myself.”In 1982 she married Eugene Francis Murphy, whom she had met on Tiana Beach in Hampton Bays, N.Y., after he rescued her from a riptide. Dr. Murphy, an orthodontist, died in 1997.Ms. Murphy, who retired from Kimelman & Baird in 2015, encouraged women to pursue Wall Street careers, whether she was speaking at high schools or colleges or informally among friends and family. One of them was her niece, Mary Ann Bartels, who became a managing director at Bank of America.Ms. Bartels recalled a story Ms. Murphy often told. As a child, she said, she stopped at a waterside arcade on City Island and put a coin in a vending machine to get her horoscope. “It said her element was fire, her color was red and that, ‘You are an Aries, the ram — a trailblazer and pioneer,’” Ms. Bartels said. “She told us that story so many times, and she really lived by that every day.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

  • 125 Shares139 Views

    in Economy

    Margaret C. Snyder, the U.N.’s ‘First Feminist,’ Dies at 91

    by

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMargaret C. Snyder, the U.N.’s ‘First Feminist,’ Dies at 91Inspired by her liberal Roman Catholic upbringing, she refocused the organization’s development efforts to include women’s empowerment.Margaret C. Snyder in 2016 at the exhibition “HERstory: A Celebration of Leading Women in the United Nations” at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. Dr. Snyder created and ran a series of programs that brought training, loans and equipment to women around the world.Credit…Megan SnyderFeb. 5, 2021, 12:52 p.m. ETMargaret C. Snyder, whose liberal Roman Catholic upbringing inspired a pioneering career at the United Nations, where she refocused the mechanisms of global development aid to include millions of women in Africa, Asia and Latin America, died on Jan. 26 in Syracuse, N.Y. She was 91.The cause was cardiac arrest, her nephew James Snyder said.Dr. Snyder, who went by Peg, had already spent years working on women’s development issues in Tanzania when she joined the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in 1971. At the time, the overwhelming male staff directed most of its resources to helping men become better farmers and entrepreneurs, even while women were doing much of the growing and selling.“There was a failure to realize,” she wrote last year for a U.N. publication, “that the most serious problems of development defy solution without the involvement of women.”During her nearly 20 years at the U.N. and more than 30 years afterward as an informal adviser to the organization, she created and ran a series of programs that brought millions of dollars in training, loans and equipment to women around the world — for instance, supplying mills to women in Burkina Faso to process shea butter and helping Kenyan women counter soil erosion by planting trees.Known widely as the U.N.’s “first feminist,” Dr. Snyder promoted women within the organization as well. When she began working at the U.N., in the early 1970s, most women there did secretarial work. Under her influence, that began to change: She put young women on her staff and later helped them advance, both at the U.N. and in their home countries, through her considerable network of contacts, which eventually included presidents like Joyce Banda of Malawi and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.“Peg was a trailblazer,” Comfort Lamptey, the U.N. women’s country representative in Nigeria, said in an interview. “She believed that if you put money in the hands of women, they can do magic.”Dr. Snyder in the 1950s, when she was the women’s dean at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y.Credit…via Snyder familyMargaret Cecilia Snyder was born on Jan. 30, 1929, in East Syracuse, N.Y. Her father, Matthias, was a doctor, and her mother, Cecilia (Gorman) Snyder, taught Latin and German in a local high school.She is survived by her brother, Thomas Snyder. Another brother, Robert, died in December.Syracuse in the first half of the 20th century was a hotbed of liberal Catholic thought, producing leading thinkers and activists like Theodore Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame, and the peace advocates Daniel J. and Philip Berrigan.The Snyders were friendly with both families, though Dr. Snyder said her biggest influence was her parents. During the Great Depression, her father put New Deal posters in the window of their home and took in patients on welfare. Her mother brought in extra money by playing the piano for silent movies — earning 30 percent less than a man who did the same job on other nights, an instance of gender segregation that Dr. Snyder said inspired her interest in women’s rights.In high school, Peg worked summers at a settlement house in Syracuse, helping Black migrants as they arrived from the South. She attended the College of New Rochelle in Westchester County, N.Y., graduating in 1950; two years later she received a master’s degree in sociology from the Catholic University of America in Washington.While working as the women’s dean at Le Moyne College, a liberal Jesuit institution in Syracuse, she became enthralled by John F. Kennedy’s call for young Americans to volunteer overseas. In 1961 she took a yearlong sabbatical to work with volunteer organizations in Tanganyika (which merged with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964) and Uganda. Among other tasks, she arranged for African students to attend college in the United States — part of an effort known as “Kennedy airlifts.”When her year ended, she quit her job at Le Moyne and stayed in Africa, but she moved home in 1965 to help run the East African Studies program at Syracuse University. She advised students from the region on their graduate work, many of whom went on to hold leadership positions in their countries — the first threads of her continentwide network. Five years later she went back to Tanzania, where she completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1971.Dr. Snyder, seen her with an unidentified African woman, began her career helping women in Africa and later built the U.N. Development Fund for Women into a global powerhouse.Credit…via Snyder familyThat same year she joined the U.N. as a co-founder of what would become the African Training and Research Center for Women, the organization’s first major program directed specifically at improving economic opportunities for women. In 1978 she moved to New York City, where she was put in charge of a development fund focused on women that was paid for by voluntary contributions from member states.She built the organization, later renamed the U.N. Development Fund for Women (and even later U.N. Women), from operating on a shoestring budget to a global powerhouse that served women not just in Africa but also across the developing world. By the end of the 1980s, it had created women’s development commissions in 30 countries, through which the U.N. funneled millions of dollars to grass-roots women’s projects.“We were trying to make a paradigm shift from looking at women as mothers to looking at women and their economic activities,” said Thelma Awori, a former assistant secretary general of the United Nations who worked closely with Dr. Snyder. “Peg picked that up and enlarged it.”One of her first grants went to Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, an anti-deforestation initiative led by Wangari Maathai, who went on to win the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize in part for that work. Dr. Snyder and Ms. Maathai remained close friends — whenever Ms. Maathai came to New York she would stay at Dr. Snyder’s spacious, light-filled apartment on Mitchell Place in Manhattan, just north of the U.N., and Dr. Snyder hosted a wedding party for her daughter Wanjira.After she retired from the United Nations in 1989, Dr. Snyder was a Fulbright scholar in Uganda and a visiting fellow at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. She also wrote or co-wrote three books on women’s economic development in Africa.But perhaps her most important post-retirement work was as an adviser and advocate for a long list of women activists and organizations, many of whom she hosted at her apartment. It was there, in 2006, that she helped organize the Sirleaf Market Women’s Fund, a program to rebuild markets across war-torn Liberia, named for Ms. Sirleaf, the country’s first female president.For all her career success, Dr. Snyder was in constant conflict with entrenched interests within the U.N., both because she was a woman and because her approach to development challenged the ways many of her colleagues were used to doing things. The risk of bureaucratic sabotage was ever-present: Once, Dr. Snyder and her team returned from a trip to find that their office had been moved to a different building, in a room without a single phone line.But she could take some comfort in the long view: By 2021, women would make up a significant portion of the U.N. professional staff, and women’s issues, including development, remain one of the organization’s focal points.“Through all of the administrative issues, we were reminded that working to empower the poorest women was threatening to some high level and powerful people,” she wrote in 2020. “They could move us, but they couldn’t stop us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    John J. Sweeney, Crusading Labor Leader, Is Dead at 86

    by

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJohn J. Sweeney, Crusading Labor Leader, Is Dead at 86As head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., he embraced immigrants, women, minority groups and low-wage workers in an effort to reverse organized labor’s long decline.John J. Sweeney in 2005 after being re-elected president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in Chicago. He was a force in helping Democrats, including Barack Obama, win elections.Credit…Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressFeb. 2, 2021Updated 2:10 p.m. ETJohn J. Sweeney, a New York union researcher who climbed to the pinnacle of the American labor movement in the 1990s, leading the A.F.L.-C.I.O. for 14 years through an era of fading union membership but rising political influence, died on Monday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 86.Carolyn Bobb, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. spokeswoman, confirmed the death. She did not specify the cause.As president, from 1995 to 2009, of the nation’s largest labor federation — 56 unions with 10 million members near the end of his tenure — Mr. Sweeney flexed labor’s political muscle with thousands of volunteers and helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008. Over the years, he also helped elect Democrats to seats in Congress, to governorships and to state legislatures across the country.His tougher task, a quest to reinvigorate and diversify the faltering labor movement itself, had the weight of history pushing against him.For decades in the 20th century, labor had not welcomed women, African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans, often engaging in blatantly discriminatory tactics to preserve the dominance of white men in the workplace. Substantial but uneven gains had been achieved since the civil rights era of the 1960s, when unions began removing “whites only” clauses from their constitutions and bylaws.But Mr. Sweeney, still facing lopsided demographics, plotted a sea change. He crusaded to bring women and minorities into the fold, often in leadership posts; made alliances with civil rights groups, students, college professors and the clergy; and championed low-wage workers, shifting away from the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s traditional emphasis on protecting the best-paid union jobs.Mr. Sweeney, center, after speaking at a union solidarity rally in Chicago in 2005. At right was his deputy, Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Behind him, at right, was his eventual successor, Richard L. Trumka. Credit…Brian Kersey/Associated PressIn Mr. Sweeney’s campaign for the federation presidency, his running mate, for the newly created post of executive vice president, was Linda Chavez-Thompson, a Texas sharecropper’s daughter. She was the first minority group member ever elected to organized labor’s top executive ranks.The 1995 balloting itself was unique: It was the first contested election in the history of the federation, which had been created in 1955 by a merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations after a long estrangement.A signature Sweeney initiative encouraged the recruitment of thousands of immigrants to his unions. Many members had long been hostile to undocumented workers, accusing them of stealing union jobs and dragging down wage scales. Mr. Sweeney rebuked such talk as discriminatory and called for justice that included better treatment for underpaid immigrants and a path to citizenship for those in the United States illegally.Critics contended that Mr. Sweeney’s policies were locked in a liberal past, deploying mid-20th century civil rights and blue-collar union strategies to organize 21st century workers with internet skills. Mr. Sweeney rejected that claim, just as he had rebuffed corporations that moved jobs overseas and denounced the hostilities that many young white-collar workers voiced toward old-line unions.In a labor movement that had been declining since 1979, when union membership peaked at 21 million, Mr. Sweeney prodded his constituent unions to greatly increase spending on organizing. He often said that his first priority was to reverse the long slide and substantially expand labor’s rank-and-file.Mr. Sweeney in 2005 at New York University in Manhattan during a protest by graduate assistants in a contract dispute. One of his priorities  was to expand labor’s rank-and-file.Credit…James Estrin/The New York TimesBut by 2009, when he stepped down, his vision of a dramatic unionization surge comparable to those of the late-Depression 1930s and the postwar ’40s had failed to materialize. In fact, overall union membership in America had fallen on his watch to about 12 percent from 15 percent of the workforce, a trend that has since continued, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.“Based on the optimism that supporters of the labor movement felt in 1995 when he was elected, I think it’s hard not to be disappointed with the results,” Richard W. Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University, told The New York Times in 2009. “How much of that you can trace back to John Sweeney is a whole other question.”In a departing interview with The Times in his Washington office — looking across Lafayette Park to the White House, where he had conferred with President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and with Mr. Obama more recently — Mr. Sweeney spoke optimistically in the face of the Great Recession, which had been underway for more than a year and had already forced thousands of layoffs, further winnowing union ranks.“I think the recession is going to drive people to the conclusion that they can’t resolve their problems by themselves, and they have to look to organizing,” he said. And, noting that his father had been a unionized New York City bus driver, he drew a lesson from childhood.“Because of the union, my father got things like vacation days or a raise in wages,” he said. “But my mother, who worked as a domestic, had nobody. It taught me from a young age the difference between workers who are organized and workers who were by themselves.”Mr. Sweeney, left, was the incoming president of the Service Employees International Union in June 1980 when Senator Edward M. Kennedy (waving) spoke to its convention in New York. Mr. Kennedy was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. At right in the foreground was the outgoing union president, George Hardy.Credit…Associated PressJohn Joseph Sweeney was born in the Bronx on May 5, 1934, to James and Agnes Sweeney, Irish-Catholic immigrants whose struggles in America had shaped John’s social perceptions from an early age. The boy had accompanied his father to many union meetings, where he learned of class and workplace inequalities and of union efforts to improve wages and working conditions.He attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1952. Coming of age, he resolved to find a future in organized labor. He worked as a gravedigger and building porter (and joined his first union) to pay his way through Iona College, a Catholic school in New Rochelle, N.Y., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1956.He worked briefly as a clerk for IBM but took a sharp pay cut to become a researcher for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Manhattan. He met Thomas R. Donahue, a union rep for the Building Service Employees International Union, Local 32B, who persuaded him in 1960 to join his union as a contract director. Mr. Sweeney would face Mr. Donahue in a run for labor’s top job 35 years later.In 1962, Mr. Sweeney married Maureen Power, a schoolteacher. She survives him, along with their children, John Jr. and Patricia Sweeney; two sisters, Cathy Hammill and Peggy King; and a granddaughter.The building employees union was one of the most progressive of its day, representing 40,000 porters, doormen and maintenance workers in 5,000 commercial and residential buildings in New York City. Its contracts guaranteed pay raises, medical coverage, college scholarships for members’ children and requirements that employers hire and promote workers without regard to race, creed or color.Mr. Sweeney rose through the ranks, and in 1976 was elected president of Local 32B of the renamed Service Employees International Union. Soon his 45,000 members struck thousands of buildings for 17 days and won major wage and benefit increases. He later merged Local 32B with Local 32J, representing janitors, and in 1979 struck again for contract improvements.In 1980, he was elected president of the 625,000-member national S.E.I.U. and, moving his base to Washington, began merging with unions of public employees and workers in office jobs, health care and food services. He pushed for stronger federal laws for health and safety, and spent heavily to organize new members. By 1995, he represented 1.1 million union members and was a national power in the labor movement.Labor was at a crossroads. Years of rank-and-file frustration with Lane Kirkland, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. since 1979, boiled over in a revolt of union presidents in 1995. Mr. Kirkland, whose internationalist vision of labor had made him a hero to Poland’s Solidarity movement but had left him unmoved, even hostile, to proposed reforms for unions at home, was forced to resign.The 1995 election pitted Mr. Sweeney against Mr. Donahue, his old friend from Local 32B, who had risen to secretary-treasurer of the federation and was Mr. Kirkland’s heir apparent. But Mr. Donahue’s ties to Mr. Kirkland forced him to defend the status quo, and Mr. Sweeney’s progressive calls for growth and change won the presidency with 57 percent of the delegates, representing 7.2 million members.President Barack Obama presenting Mr. Sweeney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010. Mr. Sweeney’s successor said, “John viewed his leadership as a spiritual calling, a divine act of solidarity in a world plagued by distance and division.”Credit…Charles Dharapak/Associated PressHe was re-elected to four more terms of two to four years each, the last time in 2005, when he broke a pledge not to remain in office beyond age 70. He retired in 2009, at 75, and was succeeded by Richard L. Trumka, his longtime secretary-treasurer and a former president of the United Mine Workers.In a statement posted on the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s website on Monday, Mr. Trumka said of Mr. Sweeney: “He was guided into unionism by his Catholic faith, and not a single day passed by when he didn’t put the needs of working people first. John viewed his leadership as a spiritual calling, a divine act of solidarity in a world plagued by distance and division.”Mr. Sweeney wrote a memoir, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: My Life in the American Labor Movement” (2017), and was the co-author of two books: “America Needs a Raise: Fighting for Economic Security and Social Justice” (1996, with David Kusnet) and “Solutions for the New Workforce: Policies for a New Social Contract” (1989, with Karen Nussbaum).In 2010, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. “He revitalized the American labor movement,” Mr. Obama said at a White House ceremony, “emphasizing union organizing and social justice, and was a powerful advocate for America’s workers.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    H. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95

    by

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyH. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95He used medicine to take on poverty, racism and the threat of nuclear destruction. Two groups he helped start won Nobel Peace Prizes.Dr. H. Jack Geiger in 2012. He believed doctors should use their expertise and moral authority to improve conditions like poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.Credit…Angel Franco/The New York TimesDec. 28, 2020, 3:17 p.m. ETDr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors groups that shared in Nobel Peace Prizes, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.His death was confirmed by David Shadrack Smith, his stepson.Dr. Geiger was a leading proponent of “social medicine,” the idea that doctors should use their expertise and moral authority not just to treat illness but also to change the conditions that made people sick in the first place: poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.“Jack redefined what it meant to be a physician,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and the co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund. He added, by email, “He felt it was our right and responsibility as doctors to ‘treat’ hunger, poverty and disparities in health care, as directly and openly as we treat pneumonia or appendicitis.”The social order, not medical services, determines health, Dr. Geiger said in “Out in the Rural,” a short documentary film made in 1970 about the first community health center in Mississippi. “I’ve never seen any use in what I call the Schweitzer bit,” he added, referring to the humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, “which is the idea that you stand around in whatever circumstances laying hands on people in the traditional medical way, waiting until they’re sick, curing them and then sending them back unchanged into an environment that overwhelmingly determines that they’re going to get sick.”In the 1960s, Dr. Geiger was a co-founder, with Dr. Count Gibson, of community health centers in South Boston and in Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. They provided desperately needed health care but also food, sanitation, education, jobs and social services — what Dr. Geiger called “a road out” of poverty. The centers inspired a national network of clinics that now number more than 1,300 and serve about 28 million low-income patients at more than 9,000 sites.“I don’t know if some of the Mississippi white power structure cares about dead Black babies or not,” Dr. Geiger said in the film, about the first center in Mississippi. “But if they don’t, even they can’t afford to say so publicly. We have been able to enter and to do things under the general umbrella of health that would have been much harder to do if we’d said we were here for economic development or for social change per se.”Dr. Geiger, second from left, treating a baby in Bolivar County, Miss., where he co-founded a community health center.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionDr. Geiger was a founding member of two advocacy groups, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to end the nuclear arms race, and Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 prize for working to ban land mines.He rallied doctors in the Cold War era to speak out against what he saw as a myth being promoted by the government, that nuclear war could be survivable. On the contrary, he insisted, hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed, and even victims with treatable injuries would perish.Drawing physicians out of the clinic and into the political fray “was a really signal event,” said Dr. Robert Gould, a pathologist in San Francisco and president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.In an email for this obituary sent in 2012, Dr. Geiger said he was driven in part by an outrage over injustice.“I’ve been angry,” he wrote, “seeing terribly burned children in Iraq after the first Gulf war, or interviewing torture victims in the West Bank, or listening to Newt Gingrich say ghetto kids should learn to be part-time janitors and clean toilets (in another country, they called that Bantu Education). So anger doesn’t vanish, but is replaced by a determination to do something.”Home Was a Way StationHerman J. Geiger was born on Nov. 11, 1925, in Manhattan. (It was unclear what the J. stood for, but he was mostly called Jack throughout his life.) His father, Jacob, born in Vienna, was a physician; his mother, Virginia (Loewenstein) Geiger, who came from a village in central Germany, was a microbiologist. Both parents, who were Jewish, had emigrated to the United States as children. Mr. Geiger grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and their home was often a way station for relatives fleeing the Nazis.“The last to appear were some cousins from my mother’s birthplace, Kirtorf,” Dr. Geiger said in the email. “When they got their visas to come to the U.S., they said, the Nazi authorities were furious. On the night before their departure, the authorities ordered all their neighbors to go out at twilight and stone their house. The neighbors all dutifully gathered — and threw loaves of bread instead.”That story, Dr. Geiger said, taught him not to stereotype.He skipped so many grades in the city’s public schools that he graduated from Townsend Harris High School (then in Manhattan, now in Queens) at 14. Too young to start college, he learned typing and shorthand and went to work as a copy boy for The New York Times. He also began hanging out at jazz joints, listening to Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Fats Waller. His parents were often beside themselves, waiting up for him and sometimes even calling the bars to ask if “Jackie” was there.Jack soon ran away from home and turned up, suitcase in hand, in Harlem’s Sugar Hill section on the doorstep of Canada Lee, a Black actor whom he had seen on Broadway and had gotten to know after talking his way backstage. Mr. Lee, once a teenage runaway himself, let young Jack sleep on the couch — after consulting with his parents — and though Jack sometimes returned home, he spent most of the next year in Harlem. The year was 1940, and Mr. Lee’s home was a hub for writers, actors and musicians — Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Billy Strayhorn, William Saroyan. The Black guests told harrowing stories of racism, and Harlem was seething over the mistreatment of Black troops at military bases in the South. Jack Geiger took it all in.In 1941, with a loan from Mr. Lee, he began studying at the University of Wisconsin. He worked nights at a newspaper, The Madison Capitol Times. Because Madison had a curfew for anyone under 18, he said, “I am probably the only police reporter in history who had to get a special pass to be out at night.”In 1943, after meeting James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, Mr. Geiger started a chapter of the group in Madison. It was the height of World War II, and after turning 18 that year he left school to enlist in the merchant marine, which he chose because it was not racially segregated.When Dr. Geiger arrived in the all-Black Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou in the 1960s, he found conditions there as desperate as those he had seen in the poorest areas of South Africa.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionRabble Rouser for JusticeDischarged in 1947, Dr. Geiger enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Chicago. He discovered racial discrimination there — Black patients being excluded from certain hospitals, qualified Black students being rejected by the medical school. He fought the policies for three years and ultimately helped organize a 1,000-strong faculty and student protest strike — an activity virtually unheard of in that era.He paid a price for his rabble-rousing. The American Medical Association wrote to medical schools warning of his “extracurricular activities.” No school would take him. He had, in effect, been blackballed.Dr. Geiger went back to journalism for the next five years, as a science and medicine editor for the International News Service (later part of United Press International). It was, he said, “a gorgeous education” that let him read journals, attend conferences, interview researchers and, significantly, meet deans whom he could lobby to let him into medical school. In 1954, at 29, he was admitted to what is now Case Western Reserve University’s medical school in Cleveland.During his last year at Case Western, he traveled to South Africa and worked with two physicians who were setting up a health center in an impoverished, disease-ridden region of the country called Pholela, which was then a Zulu reserve. A key to the center’s success was that local people — its own patients — worked there and helped run it.For five months Dr. Geiger took care of patients, visiting thatch huts and cattle kraals, meeting traditional healers and seeing the huge improvements — pit latrines, vegetable gardens, children’s feeding programs — that the health center had brought to the region.“I learned a little Zulu, including the three oral clicks in that language, which always made me drool, to the hilarity of my African teachers,” he wrote in a chapter he contributed to the 2013 book “Comrades in Health.”Dr. Geiger’s time in Africa made him want a career in international health. He trained in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital and in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.In the “freedom summer” of 1964, he traveled to Mississippi to help care for the civil rights workers who were pouring into the Deep South to campaign for voting rights. The next year, he organized medical care for the people who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.“I took a long look around,” Dr. Geiger recalled of his first visit to Mississippi. He saw conditions much like those in South Africa: families living in shacks with no clean drinking water, toilets or sewers; sky-high rates of malnutrition, illness, infant death and illiteracy; few or no opportunities for residents to better themselves and escape. He did not have to travel to Africa to find people in trouble, he realized.Mound Bayou in the 1960s. Dr. Geiger originally traveled to Mississippi in 1964 to treat civil rights workers and realized he could do more.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionA Clinic in Mound BayouUnder President Lyndon B. Johnson, the war on poverty had begun, and the Office of Economic Opportunity had been created to pay for projects to help the poor. Sponsored by Tufts University and armed with grants from the opportunity office, Dr. Geiger, Dr. Gibson, Dr. John Hatch and others set up a health center in Mound Bayou, Miss., a poor, Black small town where most people were former cotton sharecroppers whose way of life had been wiped out by mechanization.The center was a copy of the Pholela project. The clinic, which opened in 1967, treated the sick but also used its grant money to dig wells and privies and set up a library, farm cooperative, office of education, high-school equivalency program and other social services.The clinic “prescribed” food for families with malnourished children — to be purchased from Black-owned groceries — and the bills were paid out of the center’s pharmacy budget.The governor complained, and a federal official was sent to Mound Bayou to scold Dr. Geiger for misusing pharmacy funds, which, the official said, were meant to cover drugs to treat disease.“Yeah,” Dr. Geiger replied, “well, the last time I looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”The official, he said, “shut up and went back to Washington.”Dr. Geiger in 1966 with Dr. John Hatch during construction of a community health center in Mound Bayou, Miss. They, along with Dr. Gibson, secured government grants and a sponsorship from Tufts University to bring more social services to the area.Credit…Jack Geiger, via Associated PressDr. Geiger helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1961. The group argued that official predictions of the effects of nuclear war minimized the number of casualties and the extent of the destruction it would cause. At the group’s public meetings, Dr. Geiger’s job was “the bombing run” — offering a detailed account of what a one-megaton nuclear bomb would do to the city in which the meeting was being held.He had a resonant voice and a crisp, forceful delivery. His presentations left audiences stunned, according to a colleague in the group, Dr. Ira Helfand.Dr. Geiger was a co-author of one of the first articles to look at the medical costs of nuclear war. The article, in The New England Journal of Medicine, predicted the fate of Boston in a nuclear strike — 2 million dead, a half-million injured and fewer than 10,000 hospital beds left in the entire state of Massachusetts. Doctors must “explore a new area of preventive medicine, the prevention of thermonuclear war,” the article said.It was published in May 1962 — five months before the Cuban missile crisis, which took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.Dr. Geiger’s marriage in 1951 to Mary Battle, an administrator and executive assistant in health care, ended in divorce in 1968. They had no children. (Ms. Battle died in a car accident in 1977.) In 1982, he married Nicole Schupf, a neuroscientist, epidemiologist and professor at Columbia University.In addition to his wife and his stepson, Mr. Smith, Mr. Geiger is survived by two stepgrandsons. An older sister, Ruth Ann, a schoolteacher, died in 1986.In 1978, Dr. Geiger became a professor of community medicine at the City University of New York Medical School at City College of New York.In his final years, which were marked by bladder cancer, lung cancer and blindness from glaucoma, he continued to write book chapters, articles and editorials and to give talks.To the end he was an impassioned advocate for civil rights. In an essay published in 2016 by Physicians for Human Rights, he called for more action to fight the lead-poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Mich., and to hold accountable the officials responsible for it.With characteristic bluntness, he ascribed the contamination to “a contemptuous disregard for the health of people of color, especially if they are poor.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More