Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff and that’s fine with me.
My parents met in the bargain basement of Goldblatt’s department store on State Street in downtown Chicago. They did, really.
My father in his younger days. The pipe may be hereditary.
Allan McClure, my father, arrived in Chicago from his hometown of Corinth, Mississippi, in the late 1930s to study voice at (probably) the American Conservatory of Music in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. He lived at the downtown YMCA at 820 S. Wabash Ave., where he shared a room with an aspiring artist, Charles Banks Wilson, who was studying at the Art Institute of Chicago: a little like a Chicago-Depression version of La Boheme.
Wilson later became famous for works depicting American Indians. I have a lithograph of an elderly Indian for which Wilson used my father’s hand as a model. The button on the Indian’s overall is inscribed “McClure.”
Dad had a scholarship but had to support himself. He told me his father would have contributed to his education if he had chosen to study a respectable profession such as law or medicine, but if he wanted to become an opera singer he was on his own. So he worked at a variety of odd jobs, including working as a longshoreman on Chicago River barges.
My mother, Vilma Gasperik, applied for a job as a telephone operator after she graduated from high school but was rejected because she was too tall. (The Bell System’s approach to ergonomics in those days was to hire operators to fit the switchboards instead of vice versa.) She wound up working at the day-old bakery counter in Goldblatt’s basement, where discounted bakery goods were popular during the depression.
My father also worked at Goldblatt’s demonstrating electric shavers: a job for which he was suited because he had a heavy beard and could shave several times a day. Among other things, they had a common interest in music: My father sang and my mother played the piano.
My folks came from different backgrounds. My father had to assure his parents that my mother was not Catholic even though her family came from Europe. And my mother’s folks wanted to know whether my father was part Negro because he came from the South. They were married at City Hall August 22, 1941.
When they were first married my parents lived with my grandmother on the South Side, and moved to an apartment on the West Side before I was born two years later. By that time my father had abandoned his opera career and was working as a machinist. He said he had been offered a scholarship to study opera in Italy but World War II intervened.
How to drain the swamp
What’s most appealing about Donald Trump’s victory (with apologies to my friends who believe he’s the incarnation of evil) is the prospect of long-overdue government reform. His “drain the swamp” campaign pledge resonated because 75% of Americans believe there’s widespread corruption in the federal government.
The deepest swamp in Washington is not politicians and lobbyists, but an unelected federal bureaucracy that writes and enforces thousands of regulations. Term limits for Congress aren’t the answer. That would make it even easier for entrenched bureaucrats to outlast the people’s representatives.
Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have an opportunity to disrupt the executive branch, and that’s a good thing. My corporate career made me a big fan of disruption. Companies re-invent themselves regularly to stay competitive, and bring in new management to take the enterprise in a new direction.
In the federal government, however, every Trump cabinet appointee will inherit hundreds of executives who may oppose the new administration and are virtually impossible to fire, even for misconduct. In some cases political appointees “burrow” into permanent positions with civil service protection. Politicians are even urging federal employees to actively resist the Trump administration’s policies. No private enterprise tolerates this. When a company changes direction, executives who don’t get on board go out the door.
So Congress needs to reform the civil service system to give federal agencies the same capability for change as private companies. Folks like payroll clerks and wildlife inspectors must be protected, but government executives should be as accountable as their private-sector counterparts. Government agencies need the authority to fire executives (above GS-15) for poor performance, policy violations or criminal behavior without going through years of civil service reviews.
Private companies often cushion major shake-ups with buyout offers that make it easier for managers to leave. Congress should enact a short-term program to offer a graceful exit to federal managers who disagree with their agencies’ new policies.
Conflict-of-interest rules need to be tightened. Environmental Protection Agency employees should not be in cahoots with Exxon Mobil or the Sierra Club, and we don’t want Treasury Department officials to help their Wall Street cronies. Yet it doesn’t make sense to bar experts from government positions just because they used to work for a private company or association. We need a thoughtful solution to enable talented industry professionals to serve the public without corrupting the fairness we expect of government.
Congressional oversight of federal agencies is broken. Democrats fought investigations of the Obama administration, inspector general positions were left vacant and the Department of Justice declined to prosecute corruption. There is nothing to prevent Republicans and a Trump administration from doing likewise. We need something like a bipartisan commission reporting to Congress to hold the administration accountable.
Reforming federal agencies may be the most daunting challenge for the new administration because public employee unions finance all Democrats and some Republicans. In recent years legislation to give the Department of Veterans Affairs more authority to fire employees was blocked or watered down by Congress.
With a Congressional majority and overwhelming public support, the opportunity has never been better to reform the executive branch. It will be a tough fight because every new policy direction will meet with stiff opposition from special interests and howling outrage from the celebritocracy and the news media. But if President-elect Trump is serious about draining the swamp, this is the place to start.