I made a mistake. It’s depressing. My wife and I should be banned from bookstores. Inevitably, we exit with full book bags, additions to our already groaning bookshelves filled with vertical and horizontal titles or the rising stacks next to common reading perches.
Recently we traveled to Bellingham for a birthday brunch for our grandson studying at WWU. The popularity of the chosen restaurant yielded an hour-plus wait for a table and the “opportunity” to visit the adjacent Barnes & Noble store. That’s where I made the first part of my mistake.
Years ago, as a councilmember and mayor, I met Jim Ellis who served as our bond council. Already Jim was a Northwest icon for having led the cleanup of Lake Washington, Forward Thrust, repairing the I-5 scar through downtown Seattle with Freeway Park and the convention center, and the not-yet-launched Mountains to Sound Greenway. And here, front and center at Barnes & Noble was his new book, Jim Ellis – A Will to Serve! I had to have it.
Brunch was fun. Great company and snippets of college life in the 21st Century reminding we elders of our youth. And tours of the GenZ accommodations leading to storied memories of boomer dormitories. Then the trip home and the rest of the mistake.
I read the book. Jim’s memoir opens a window to a world that no longer exists. Jim and his generation came of age during a devastating depression then served in World War II. Jim lost his brother Bob, killed in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Post-war, Jim and his wife Mary Lou committed to giving back to the community as a way of honoring Bob’s life. The journey Jim and Mary Lou started in the 1940s took place in a culture very different from ours. And they acted in ways that seem quaint in retrospect.
The ‘50s were a heyday of civic engagement in Seattle, as elsewhere. The League of Women Voters, Municipal League, and the many other associations described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone and The Upswing. Jim Ellis’ journey paralleled these community associations. Through the Municipal League Jim led efforts to start to think about what problems our region had and how to engage the community to solve them.
My parents moved to Seattle shortly after Jim’s success creating Metro and beginning the cleanup of Lake Washington and Elliott Bay (my mother never let my friends and me swim in the lake!). Forward Thrust ranks as my favorite example of Jim’s genius. Just think about it: He organized the “Committee of 200.”
Unlike so many committees, the name described the committee exactly. It consisted of 200 individuals, and ultimately more, a leadership umbrella over 20-some subcommittees each with a specific portfolio (e.g., Health & Safety, Transportation, Housing, Public Utilities, Public Education, Legal, Legislative, and Campaign to name a few) co-chaired by members of the Committee of 200. Each of the members of the Committee of 200 signed a written pledge “to make a personal commitment of between two and four hours a week for 18 months and not to assign this responsibility to a subordinate or alternate.”
The phrase “not to assign” sends one immediately to the list of the Committee of 200. They constitute a list of who’s who in the 1960s Northwest: obviously business leaders, but also leaders representing labor, the League of Women Voters, and leaders from Seattle and suburban neighborhoods. Busy people, tied into their communities and committed to doing the work themselves. People who believed in our region, believed politics provided a path toward improving our communities, and committing their time and talent to make it happen.
A chapter head quotes Jim as follows: “Participants at any level in our system of self-government will find that success is carried on a tide of patience and persistence.” A later quote from a 1968 Ellis speech foreshadows our current culture: “Positive civic action of any consequence requires more sustained work than most people are willing to commit.”
How long did it take?
- Lake Washington Cleanup: 14 years, 1953-1967
- Metro Transit: 20 years, 1953-1973
- The Kingdome: 12 years, 1963-1975
- Farmland Preservation: 11 years, 1974-1985
- Freeway Park: 8 years,1968-1976
- The Convention Center: 10 years, 1977-1987
- Mountains-to-Sound Greenway: in process, 1989-?
Jim said shortly before his passing, “The future of this region will be as bright as its citizens are willing to make it.” He was wrong. The future will be as bright as serious citizens invest their time, intellect, and empathy to make it.
Unlike the members of the Committee of 200, serious people all, we have let non-serious people degrade our civic culture. Performative politics doesn’t clean Lake Washington, heal scars I-5 left in the downtown or preserve farmland.
Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded me why I remain attracted to Edmund Burke. “In 1790,” she writes, “Burke argued that the role of government was not to impose a worldview, but rather to promote stability, and that lawmakers could achieve that stability most effectively by supporting the structures that had proven themselves effective in the past. . . Those in charge of government should make changes slowly, according to facts on the ground, in order to keep the country stable, [Burke] thought. If it behaved this way, the government, which in his time was usually seen as a negative force in society, could be a positive one.”
Burke’s views reflected the 18th Century’s Age of Reason as well as his experience of the French Revolution and the American. He advocated what we today would call progressive reform, for example his crusade against the East India Company, incrementally and within an evolving culture. Our experience with revolutions since the French, and with MAGA and Woke re-enforce his teachings.
Ellis took on concrete, understandable problems, engaged leaders in the community, and made the kind of reforms Burke advocated. He built consensus as Alexander Bickel advocated in his seminal book, The Morality of Consent.
Gov. Dan Evans trod that same path with his Blueprint for Progress, a 1964 listing of some 60 reforms to state government, and its extension through 1968s as outlined in “Action for Washington.” What campaign today would articulate such a laundry list? But for Evans and “Action for Washington” it provided concrete reforms, three to five connecting to any community in the state and consequently providing electoral majorities. It also provided a consensus for the 12 years of the Evans Administration and resulted in a modern, stable, late industrial age state government.
The French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848 set off a great debate in the 19th Century. Democracy or autocracy? My reading of the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries suggests autocracy was ascendant among those seriously considering how societies were organized. Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Oswald Mosely all focused on the efficiency and effectiveness of the authoritarian form contrasted with the messiness and perceived ineffectiveness of democracies. Fewer decisionmakers equals efficient decision making,they thought.
Fortunately for us, that ascendancy collided with the most destructive war in history. In its wake the 18th Century liberal thought undergirding our Declaration of Independence and Constitution became the basis for a new world order. With the victory of that world order over the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama famously crowed “the end of history and the last man,” meaning that humanity arrived at a consensus that liberal democracy and market economics constituted how civilized societies organized themselves.
Would that it was so simple.
We now live in a world where it appears autarchy is regaining its glow. Certainly, it is settled for Axis of Resistance powers and under the Federalist Society’s Unitary Executive doctrine. The failure of our legislative bodies, our dissipated civic culture, our inability to resolve serious issues for decades pushing resolution into the courts when our feckless legislative bodies wallow in performative legislation — all this ended the kinds of reform Edmund Burke, Jim Ellis, and Dan Evans championed.
People like Dan Evans and Jim Ellis found ways to build consensus and improve communities without divisiveness, and they proved how democracies can build prosperous, progressive, and inclusive communities. It required community leaders working together and sacrificing personal time and energy to make the community work.
Now our governments remain in the mid-20th Century while our communities, economies, and the world left that century behind decades ago, creating the need for public sector reform. Our unserious civic culture and political class proved unable to respond.
So, it’s no wonder we chose a truly revolutionary party last November, one led and run by unserious people, thoughtless and outraged, but willing to make efficient decisions to reform the public sector. I suspect their reforms, driven in the spirit of Robespierre, undeterred by law or traditional norms and intended to implement an “objective” ideology won’t, in fact, make America great again.
Historians argue the excess of the Gilded Age’s motivated what today we remember as the progressive movement. That movement, largely Burkean in its approach, began in the 1880s and 1890s and remade our civic culture over the following 75 years, producing the reforms we Baby Boomers enjoyed. That democratic, progressive movement engaged serious people, which yielded a stable and prosperous society. That movement contrasts with the revolutionary Jacobin remaking of France, presaging over a century of political instability.
I fear things must get much worse to motivate today’s serious people to decide that politics are important and leaders like the Committee of 200 to resurface and rebuild a civic culture that can sustain democracy and rebuild what we watch being torn down.
The political class or elected officials will not rebuild our liberal democracy. Only when serious people invest in building a new civic culture, as did Jim Ellis and his generation, will we succeed.
Until then, we await the motivating crisis and the subsequent long journey.
Jim Ellis inspired three generations of politicians here about the powers of bond tax measures. Following Forward Thrust roughly four dozen were approved. On the whole their efficacies have been marginal (other than for trades unions and contractors). The big impacts of that Ellis legacy here now are those flowing from the types, and excessive amounts, of taxing those ballot initiatives ended up causing. The changes to downtown’s sidewalks clearly reflect those impacts.
Thanks for this thoughtful essay, Fred. One wonders how it has come to pass that so many people are “unserious”?
I’ll offer what I believe is a partial answer to your question, and it stems from the Jim Ellis legacy. The political leadership now is accountable “in toto” to its campaign funders: very rich interest groups benefitting financially from bond tax revenues spending. Those politicians are not serious about traditional governing. They instead are adept primarily at pitching bond tax ballot initiatives. Unserious people do not attract and motivate serious people to work on their behalf.
Thanks for the kind words.
I’ve written about this change before. It has, I think, a lot to do with party reforms like the McGovern Commission in the early ’70s which took authority away from parties for nominations and, generally, takeover of party organizations by people who weren’t focused on winning elections, rather than on ideology. When I grew up in politics, parties wanted to win and half of the legislators from Seattle were Republicans and a third or so of the rural legislators were Democrats. The parties tried to win statewide, not just in Red or Blue districts. That meant the legislative caucuses were much more diverse, and campaigns more competitive but centrist.
Layne P.’s partial answer is backed up by a couple 2017 Seattle Times articles by Brier Dudley, about the role of Transportation Choices Coalition in local government. Look for “Who’s really in the driver’s seat on Puget Sound transit spending?”
And of course the other shoe, the Republican party dominated by Reagan influence has always had a deep soft spot for industry, serving those who benefit from less regulation, weaker trade unions, etc.
The electoral efforts of these two factions are about as serious as professional wrestling, focusing on culture war issues that lie rather far from the boring, lucrative business that brings home the bacon.
A citizenry that cared to take the reins and steer a little more towards sober public policy, probably could, but where would you find that citizenry? We can blame the money for corrupting our government, but we left the vacuum in which it happens. To be fair, what we get isn’t totally dysfunctional, and as we march down the road to totally overwhelming our social systems and the earth itself, the potential for significant positive change gets narrower all the time anyway.
What a terrific summation of the place Jim Ellis has earned and will continue to hold in the long history of creating progressive social and political change through serious and thoughtful community involvement. I moved to Seattle in the early 1970’s when many of the civic projects he initiated were coming to fruition. He was one of a kind. We need more of his kind.
Good piece, Fred. The book is a must-read for anyone who wants to fully understand our region today. He was a role model and mentor of mine from the day I first met him in 1977, when I joined the editorial board of The Seattle Times. He quoted DeTocqueville saying that “The great thing about America is that when a group of citizens see a problem, they form a committee to solve it.” He later was the first Founding Board member of my Washington News Council, because he realized theat the press was extremely powerful and needed an independent outside oversight organization to hold journalists publicly accountable, just as they try to hold other major players accountable. His support gave us instant credibility and led to Bill Gates Sr., Bill Ruckelshaus, Patsy Bullitt Collins, Denny Heck, Suzie Burke, Ken Hatch and other respected leaders joining our board and keeping us in business for 15+ years. Our process was impeccably fair, professional, transparent and helped many victims of inaccurate, biased, unethical stories that damaged them personally or professionally. Jim and Bill Sr. saw the WNC’s great value while other less serious minds did not. My column in mi-reporter.com about a Rotary panel I put together recently with Jennifer Ott, who completed the book after Jim died, may be of interest to Post Alley readers. I contend he did more as an unelected civic leader of a metropolitan area than any single indidual has ever done for any city or region in the country. Can anyone dispute that? If so, who?
John: Thanks for the kind words. I did enjoy your piece in the Reporter and am remiss for not sending you a note. Your observations of Jim align perfectly with my experience with him as a city councilmember and Metro councilmember. Working with him was a treat I’ll always remember.
I’m sorry I missed the panel discussion with you and Jennifer.