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Dallas: a city of strong developers and powerless women?
By Lee Cullum |

If you’ve been circulating in political/civic Dallas anytime within the past six months, chances are you’ve heard someone mention Jim Crupi. He’s a professor from Georgia State University who has done an extensive study of Dallas for a book on Sun Belt cities, and his appearances here have had an impact far out of proportion to the importance attached to them at the time.

Still the talk of Crupi continues. He has made only three speeches in Dallas, and there was little or no press coverage. Even so, those remarks have generated more thought, more discourse-and in some cases, more anxiety-in Dallas than all the presidential debates combined.

And it doesn’t stop. No sooner had the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture devoted a luncheon meeting to group discussions of Crupi’s ideas than Leadership Dallas alumni proposed a panel to respond to Crupi’s statements. “Why not get some top developers to talk about how developers are running the city?” one spokesman suggested. “Or get some women like Mary Crowley to respond to Crupi’s statement that women don’t have any influence in Dallas?”

I replied to the spokesman that it might be better to get Crupi himself to fly back to Dallas and deliver his speech to yet another audience. (He did-in late May.) As I spoke, I wondered what it was about this gentle professor from Georgia that had so electrified the leadership of this city that the trickle-down effect was turning into an avalanche.

One answer might be that he told us the truth about ourselves as he saw it. We didn’t agree with everything he said, but it was bracing to hear a candid appraisal. Dallas is a consensus city, as Crupi observed. This means that our public life is more polite than in other cities (I doubt that Mayor Starke Taylor will write a book bad-mouthing his political associates, as Mayor Ed Koch did in New York), but it also means that we sometimes have trouble defining ourselves. There are so many of us, and we can’t be sure what others are really feeling while they’re saying all the right things.

Another answer, perhaps, is that Crupi brought to the masculine upper echelons of Dallas a quality usually assigned to the feminine side of our personalities: intuitive insight. Oh yes, Crupi adhered to a strict discipline in his Sun Belt research. Using a process that he calls “decision trail analysis,” he examined critical issues in each city that he studied. He tracked down who initiated an issue, who fought for it and against it, who won and who lost. In addition, he put scores of community boards of directors on a computer and ran cross-tabulations to ferret out unexpected relationships.

But the connections that were most crucial to the effort were those that Crupi drew inside himself from human data collected during 100 interviews with local leaders. The computer itemized the players, but it was Crupi’s own perception that picked up subtleties and nuances that have been tantalizing us ever since he mentioned them.

Not that he was always right. Sometimes Crupi hit short of the mark. Take, for example, his observation about the Chamber of Commerce. “In the business community,” he said, “there is a conflict between the Chamber of Commerce and the Dallas Citizen’s Council. And that is largely because [the Chamber’s] base of membership is different-more diverse. And I am not saying the Chamber is weak; I am saying that relatively speaking to the Citizen’s Council, it is weak.”

“Weak” was not the right word. What Crupi meant to say, I believe, is that the Chamber is not the dominant force in Dallas that it is in Houston. Dallas’ Chamber of Commerce is the heart of the downtown business community, while the Citizen’s Council remains the head. As for a “conflict” between them, I doubt that there’s any conflict that matters.

What does matter is that the Citizen’s Council enthralled Crupi just as it has every observer of Dallas for the past 20 years. And why not? The council is made up of extremely compelling men who have built the economic base on which we stand as a city. Their leadership has been essential to the growth of Dallas and will continue to be. But to suppose, as I suspect Crupi does, that because there is only one woman on the Citizen’s Council that women are powerless here is to miss the real contribution that women are making in Dallas.

Crupi is correct when he says that women are gravitating to politics. He adds the intriguing notion that for women, politics is an extension of their “ministerial role.” But Crupi fails to push on to the implications of his insight: the potential impact of this maternal force on culture as it makes itself felt through the political system.

Just because top business leaders have grown weary of the tedium of local politics doesn’t mean that this sphere is powerless. A vote on the City Council, the Plan Commission or the Park Board is worth something. Ask any homeowner or developer who needs that vote. If women bring their ancestral allegiance to family tradition, human proportion and community relationships to bear on business at City Hall, it can affect (and, indeed, is already affecting) the shape of the city.

The warehouse historic district in downtown’s West End and Deep Ellum (if it can be similarly realized) are examples of architectural culture informed, but not dominated, by feminine values. The opportunity to walk, meet and greet, enjoy the sunshine, eat well and savor the past springs from the female side of our nature, which wishes to enhance good feeling among people and preserve our ties to other generations. Left alone, these impulses grow quickly precious, like too many watercress tea sandwiches. But joined with the masculine spirit of enterprise, as they are in the West End, they gain a definitive vitality.

So a look at Dallas tells us that Crupi is right about the formidable quality of Dallas’ business leadership but wrong about its exclusionary strategies. In fact, it’s absorbing far more far fester on the political front than ever seemed possible a decade ago. The problem is that we seem to be missing prophets and visionaries for whom the startling response to Jim Crupi has shown us we obviously hunger.

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