[lbo-talk] Report from KPFA CAB meeting

Joseph Wanzala jwanzala at hotmail.com
Fri Oct 14 18:25:03 PDT 2005


Doug, a lot has happened since 1958 - it is true that until the mid-1990s KPFA did not have a direct membership due and did not afford its listeners electoral privileges and responsibilities. The bylaws of the Pacifica Foundation - as a direct result of experiences that clearly showed that Hill's model was obsolete now enshrine the very model of listener-democracy that Hill eschewed *at the time*. If you are against democratic governance, then you should look into changing the bylaws.

I invite you to read John Whiting's essay 'The Lengthening Shadow' which lays out the complex history of Pacifica in those early days:-

http://www.radio4all.org/fp/shadow.htm

Hill had gone to great lengths to set up a structure which would guarantee that the staff would retain collective control of the station. Vera Hopkins, who has functioned for many years as Pacifica's quasi-official historian, unwinds the tangled skein with great precision in her indispensible 1987 pamphlet, "Growing Pains":

Hill was an idealist who established KPFA on

egalitarian principles of equal pay and equal voting.

The ultimate governing body, the Executive Membership,

met twice a year. It was composed wholly of staff

members. Originally it served to bring full staff

opinion to bear on the decisions of the Committee of

Directors. The Directors were five staff elected by

the Executive Membership to run the station and

conduct the business of Pacifica Foundation including

KPFA. The Directors could replace their number if

vacancies occurred, subject to later approval by the

Executive Membership. (HGP p.4)

But the very fact of staff autonomy meant that there were no checks and balances, no external sanctions. The integrity of the community depended entirely on the integrity of the people who composed it. Eleanor McKinney reflects:

I think Lew's saddest experience was that he could

attract so few men of quality and intelligence and

capabilities to be in a community of artists and

workers and broadcasters who would share the delight

in each other's skills and diversity. (MEI)

And so in June 1953 there was a palace revolution and Lew Hill resigned as chairman of the station he had conceived and brought into existence. Vera Hopkins offers so much detail that it is necessary to know the protagonists to appreciate the agonies and ironies of each conflict of conscience, personality, or ambition.

And, well-documented though her history is, a panel of survivors would even now come no closer to agreement on the facts than they did when the wounds were open.I think that Eleanor McKinney in conversation caught the essence of the conflict, both its causes and its atmosphere, in words that can be grasped without footnotes because they interlock with what we already know of human frailty:

There was a difference between people who had been

there from the beginning and the next generation who

had different ideas. It was a series of almost

accidental circumstances, disagreements in the board

meetings. From my standpoint it was a difference

between young people with not very tested theories and

the older ones who had experimented.... They [the

younger ones] called Lew, Dick [Moore], and me "The

Triumvirate"! Lew was a poet, and yet he could run the

mimeograph machine and do carpentry and fund-raising

and poetry and drama and so on--a kind of renaissance

man who aroused a lot of competitiveness in men

especially, and I think that was at the root of it....

Everybody resigned except me; I have a tenacity, I was

determined to hang on... When they got in trouble some

months later they called me and asked if I would help

them (that is, the other side) from going under. I had

this terrible dilemma: do you help the individual or do

you seek the continuity of the institution? I was

heartbroken: I turned him down and I never got over

it. I always felt that I had betrayed the personal,

which in the long run is what matters....

I kept being a thorn in their side. I said, "Pacifica

was designed to present every point of view and to be

exactly the resolution of these kinds of conflicts. If

you don't embody that in your very being as a

foundation, how can you embody that on the air?" The

whole point of Pacifica was that the people who made

the policies carried them out. We didn't have an

absentee board; the staff were the board. I said,

"You're shedding the very principle of what Pacifica

is about." Alan Watts leapt to his feet and came over

glowering and thrust his face into mine--like a

monster, trembling with rage. He shouted, "Principles

are all very well and good until they don't work and

then you throw them out!" In later years this was one

of the big jokes of all time. I'm afraid heopportunistically

picked up the pieces and started going with the other

side. But that's Perennial Philosophy. He and Lew Hill

had some fascinating debates at Asilomar on exactly

these subjects: the difference between Ethical and

Perennial Philosophy, where everything is relative. (MEI)

Once he was no longer occupied with the daily management of the station, Hill had time for lengthy reflection on what had gone wrong and how it might be corrected. In September 1953 he wrote to Edward Howden,

There were two principles employed in forming Pacifica

Foundation which underlie KPFA's difficulties. The

first of these was the limitation of Pacifica's

Executive Membership to...staff personnel of KPFA... A

second principle was that of equality: all persons

working for KPFA were to receive the same wage..

There is much to be said about the failure of such

ideals, and I will confine myself to the painfully

obvious. Over the years it emerged sadly and often

violently that people burdened with policy

responsibilities which their working hours will not

permit them to fulfill are frustrated.... In many of

the group there was a general predisposition toward

distrust and suspicion, which I am afraid is

inseparable from the very idealistic anarcho-pacifist

viewpoint...what was conceived as a mutually evolving

fellowship became, in much of the operation, a

mutually thwarted competition of personalities...

I felt at the time [June 1953] that my resignation

would remove a focus of controversy and permit the

equalitarian principles of the organization to assert

themselves more positively. Certainly my own rather

prideful reluctance as the originator to admit the

unworkability of this organization was a major cause of

the present chaos. (HGP pp.6-7)

In the meantime the remaining staff, torn by internecine warfare, also put the blame on defective organization rather than their own intractable behavior. A non-staff Study Committee of respected local figures was set up to examine alternative patterns of organization:

One of the listed assumptions on which all of the

interested parties agree: in order to assure the

station's continuance, it is necessary to remove

organizational difficulties which have caused serious

controversy. (HGP p.7)

One of the lessons of human history is that any group of eminent people offered even more power and prestige will sieze it with both hands:

The thrust of the Study Committee Plan was to reduce

staff participation in the governing of Pacifica. They

proposed the immediate addition of two non-staff

persons to the Committee of Directors, increasing the

number from 5 to 7, and electing non-staff persons to

the Executive Membership which eventually should have

no more than one-third staff members. This was the

beginning of a trend. The Committee of Directors in

future years was increased to 11, then to 15. The

Executive Membership increased the percentage of non-

staff and eventually had 33 members. Its importance

within Pacifica decreased until it became superfluous

and voted itself out of existence...(HGP p.8)

Thus, the cornerstone of Pacifica was finally to be eroded. Ironically, the process was aided and abetted by Lewis Hill for his own purposes, though with the best of motives. Eleanor McKinney feels that'The reason Lew Hill separated the Board of Directors.


>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Report from KPFA CAB meeting
>Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 20:42:38 -0400
>
>Joseph Wanzala wrote:
>
>>Doug, try not to think of community as a bad word just because Bernard
>>White utters it. Reclaim it from him. Community is good.
>
>It's a mush word. It means whatever one wants it to mean. There's the
>business community, the Phish community, the economics community, you name
>it.
>
>Here's more from Hill which someone just sent me. It's from his posthumous
>book, Voluntary Listener Sponsorship (Pacifica, 1958), pages 4-5:
>
>>Some attempts to organize audience support for broadcasting operations
>>have been based . . . upon organization of the broadcasting institution
>>itself as a public membership body, with listener payments constituting a
>>direct membership due and involving electoral privileges and
>>responsibilities. The KPFA experiment employed neither of these devices.
>>The subscription was rather a direct payment to the station in
>>consideration of services received by the listener at his loudspeaker.
>>While various privileges or advantages form time to time were associated
>>with a KPFA subscription, these arose entirely from the station's
>>promotional activity, and bore no relation to the control of its policies.
>>Pacifica Foundation, the non-profit educational corporation operating
>>KPFA, had a controlling membership of community leaders separate from the
>>subscribing audience developed by the experiment.
>
>Doug
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

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