Charlotte Zietlow has been involved in community leadership for more than six decades. (WFIU/WTIU News)
Charlotte Zietlow remembers when she and her husband, Paul, moved to Bloomington in 1964. She had been active in political organization in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. She wanted to be involved in her new college town.
Shortly after they had moved to Indiana, someone came to her door to register her to vote.
“I said is there a Democratic party in town and she said, ‘well, not much’,” she recalled. There were a couple Democrats in county government who traded jobs back and forth when they finished their lawful terms.
Things have changed. As the May 2 primary election approaches, all the action is on the Democratic side – including three candidates for mayor and numerous contested city council races. And that’s not unusual. Bloomington Democrats have controlled the mayor’s office for 52 years; it’s been 16 years since a Republican, Brad Wisler, was elected to the City Council. His term ended in 2011.
Zietlow has been involved in community leadership for more than six decades. She recently wrote a book, “1971: How We Won,” that explores the watershed election that launched the sea change in Bloomington politics.
Republicans controlled Bloomington in 1968. Jack Hooker was mayor and eight Republicans served on the city council, with one lone Democrat.
That year, civil rights and the Vietnam war were issues that burned hot. The presidential primary incited Democratic emotions and propelled a bunch of individuals such as Zietlow to target upcoming local elections.
Zietlow was not fond of Bloomington then, seeing it as a town with dismissive top-down leadership and little civic enthusiasm. She decided to run for city council after seeing council members in action at a meeting with a controversial project on the agenda.
She said the council and mayor were in lockstep, gathering before council meetings in the mayor’s office. That night:
“They marched in and sat down … and had the ordinances read by title only so nobody knew what was really going … the people were ignored, they were angry and fuming, and I said, ‘I can do better than this,’” she said.
Zietlow thought there was a better way to conduct government business. She soon found out others felt the same way.
Democrats won some county offices in 1970. One was Jamie Murphy, who was elected county clerk and supported expanding voting. Then in 1971, Democratic primary races were plentiful.
“My main concern was people should be allowed to speak, and then it turned out there were eight or nine people in the community who lived in different places in town and had come from other places,” Zietlow said. “All of us came from somewhere else and we brought with us the positive things we remembered from where we came from.”
This collection of people did not know each other when they began thinking about running for office. This “motley crew,” as Zietlow calls her fellow candidates who made it through the primary, included a minister, an employee of the university computing center, a 23-year-old antipoverty activist, and a shoe salesman. Zietlow had a doctorate but sometimes was referred to, disparagingly, as “a faculty wife.” Two had witnessed human rights violations in the south. Each had specific interests – from planning and zoning to environmental issues to substandard housing.
They all believed in participatory democracy.
“We all really wanted to have people be able to speak out,” she said. “That became our mutual goal and brought us together. It seems so simple now.”
“A Better Way” became their rallying cry.
“We said there is a better way, we could have better government, if we just worked together on it,” Zietlow said.
Mayoral candidate Frank McCloskey aligned with the group. The 32-year-old was a newspaper reporter and a law student. The relative political newcomer beat former mayor Tom Lemon in the primary to match up with incumbent Republican Jack Hooker in the general election.
Zietlow would face popular IU faculty member Harry Day, one of the developers of Crest toothpaste. She went door-to-door and kept hearing he was a nice man who would be hard to beat
She said she scoured through minutes of city council meetings looking for how Day voted. That gave her talking points when she – like other Democratic candidates – began going door-to-door. She would say:
“I know he’s a nice man who will be hard to beat but did you know there were 200 spot zonings in the last seven years, and he voted yes on every single one …I didn’t have to say anything else, it was not personal, that was just a fact.”
Spot zoning was the practice of allowing developments, like apartment buildings, to be constructed next to single-family homes in neighborhoods – or anywhere else in the city.
Opposing spot zoning was on the Democrats’ platform, along with other issues that included traffic, transportation, the environment, housing, parks and recreation, among others.
In the general election, McCloskey and eight Democratic council members were elected. Jack Morrison, who owned and operated an appliance store on West Kirkwood Avenue, was the lone Republican elected.
But this is not just a simple story about newcomers throwing out the old guard. This was the first municipal election after 18-year-olds were given the right to vote. National media including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times paid attention. What would the youth vote mean?
After the election, a New York Times story by Steven V. Roberts suggested the student vote swept McCloskey and eight Democratic council candidates into office.
The headline proclaimed: “Impact of youth vote was felt by the home of Indiana University.” The story referred to Zietlow as “an unemployed housewife who holds a doctorate in linguistics.”
Zietlow said the conventional view was that students would vote in high numbers.
“They would take over the town, and then what would happen to us, poor things?” she said.
The numbers tell a different story. In eight student-heavy precincts, only 217 more people registered to vote in 1971 compared to 1967 – far short of predictions into the thousands. Zietlow said the students do not explain the Democratic dominance – because they did not vote in high numbers. Students she talked to said they just did not know enough to vote in the municipal election, a position she said she respects.
“It was the citizens of the city itself that elected us,” she said.
Zietlow said those elected in 1971 can be proud of many accomplishments … for example in economic development, environmental protection, public transportation, social services, the arts, public safety, and public health. Her book lists 17 “lasting legacies” from the 1971 election.
She said elected officials had help.
“We engaged people in the community to help us solve our issues,” she said.
She said she hopes those who read the book take that lesson and some other things away from it.
“What I’d like for the book to help people understand is that you can work with people you don’t agree with and get things done,” she said. “What is the problem? Then we can get to solutions.
“We should be thinking of solving problems and not whether or not we win.”
