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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