THE CITY

The least important casualty of the April 1 city election was the brief and improbable political career of John Schoellkopf. His campaign was almost brilliantly self-destructive from its inception, and his sound tromping at the hands of incumbent Wes Wise merely confirmed widespread preelection suspicions that Schoellkopf was not the right man in the right place at the right time.

What is most significant about Schoellkopf’s candidacy and loss is its fallout on the long-dominant Citizens Charter Association. Court-ordered single member districts and the rise of independents like Garry Weber and Wise most certainly had pinned the establishment slating group to the ropes; the Schoellkopf candidacy, which deeply divided the organization, was the knockout punch.

A. C. Greene was probably right election night, when he remarked on Channel 13’s election special, that the CCA will never actually die, only change. You have to wonder though, as the group barely clings to a numerical majority on the council, what its options for survival are in the future.

The beginning of the end, as has been so often noted, was Avery Mays’ loss to Wise in 1971. It wasn’t so much that the Wise victory signalled a diminishing constituency for the CCA, as it totally rattled the establishment group’s strategists into a series of injurious moves.

In 1973, Schoellkopf was brought in to re-group the group, to reclaim what the CCA powers regarded as lost political ground. Schoellkopf put together a fashionable slate of candidates, but ultimately failed to elimnate the major problem, Wes Wise. In confusion and fear, the CCA finally decided not to field a challenger to Wise that spring.

More importantly, the new style of Schoellkopf’s council began what would become two years later a fatal rift between his wing of the group, and the Old Guard of Stemmons, Aston, and Cullum. In his attempts to revitalize the group with the likes of Adlene Harrison and Lucy Patterson, Schoellkopf only created deep division and total confusion within the group on its political purposes.

Schoellkopf’s own candidacy this spring was not met with unanimous approbation within the group. A number of members of the Old Guard wing simply didn’t think he’d be any better than Wise; jealousy and jockeying set in among Schoellkopf’s younger wing, with no fewer than three of his council members talking independent mayoral runs. The Schoellkopf campaign, which started early and strong, gradually petered out, as Schoellkopf scurried around trying to beat out brush fires within the group, losing valuable campaigning time and suffering from adverse publicity arising out of some of the internal bloodletting.

So the resounding re-election of Wes Wise to a third term was, in a way, a referendum on the Citizens Charter Association’s grip on the city. Not really in an ideological sense: there really never has been any such thing as a “CCA ideology”, and when you have a Garry Weber calling himself an independent and a Lucy Patterson or a George Allen calling themselves CCA, ideology is simply not an issue. But Schoellkopf’s loss was a good barometer of the voting public’s dissatisfaction with the CCA’s increasingly fuzzy, all-over-the-ballpark notion of the city’s leadership needs.

After all, the CCA did not build a constituency of loyal voters on grinding an ax this or that ideological way, but rather on a consistent delivery of intelligent, competent, honest councilmen to City Hall. It was a vague, smoldering feeling in the electorate that those virtues of the group were no longer a sure bet, among other things, that broke Schoellkopf’s and the organization’s backs this spring.

Whether the CCA can recover its image is doubtful. In the past, the group has survived crisis after crisis by the miraculous appearance of exceptional individuals to lead it: Woodall Rogers, R. L. Thornton, Erik Jonsson. Schoellkopf had the unenviable task of being the next messiah. His attempt – the new CCA and its fashionable cocktail liberalism – was sincere, but simply too shallow to reassert the CCA. At the same time, the Old Guard wing grew increasingly out of touch with “the village,” rejecting both Schoellkopf’s new notions and the suggestions of others, and reaching back, in a sort of political senility, for the outdated old ways.

There are not any new faces on the horizon that look like The Answer. A quick post-election poll revealed Lee Turner of DP&L is about the only young businessman considered even marginally capable of getting the organization back on its feet. At that, Turner’s interest in politics is questionable, as is his ability, as head of a major utility company, to become involved in the nitty-gritty of city politics.

Most feel a man or men is not the answer to this crisis. The talk I hear is about the CCA undertaking one of two radical re-orientations of its traditional philosophy.

One theory, forwarded by M.E. Bradford, the thoughtful conservative Democrat who doubles as a professor of English at the University of Dallas, argues that the CCA’s only hope, given single member districts, is the mayoralty, and in order for that seat to mean big clout, the council-manager form of government must be discarded, and the CCA must push for a strong mayor system.



The second hypothesis asks the CCA to admit two things to itself: (1) that partisan politics are coming to City Hall, whether it likes it or not, and (2) that no less than five council seats, including the mayor’s, possibly could be controlled by the CCA simply becoming a city-level machine for Republican North Dallas.

Either or both of those game plans would be tough bullets for the establishment to bite. The strong mayor system and partisan politics at City Hall have been X-rated by the group since the beginning. However, the bottom line of electoral politics is necessarily pragmatism, and as one high-level CCA operative said, “We’ve got to forget the ideals. We’re talking about survival now.”