The "Radical" Five

Wendell Smith is an amazingly articulate, energetic person who just happens to have some of the most interesting ideas on how to deal with Cambridge's problems the town has seen in a long time.

Smith achieved a certain amount of publicity last year, when in the middle of Spiro Agnew's speech at a Boston Republican dinner, he stood up (because, he said later. "I couldn't just sit there and listen to that") and was promptly tackled by guards and carted off to jail. He has a reputation for doing things that are somewhat out of the ordinary and his presence at many a City Council meeting has both embarrassed the slower-witted Councillors and provided excitement for other spectators.

At one City Council meeting this fall, when the issue of whether the Council would approve $1500 for voter registration promotion came up at the same time as a complaint that the elevator in the main voter registration location had been broken for over a year, Smith came up with a proposal which left the other councillors speechless. "What I think y'all ought to do," he drawled, "is to take the money it normally would have cost to fix the elevator, let the elevator stay broken, and apply it to the $1500 we're asking for."

Smith outlined a number of his ideas in a Crimson interview. A sampling:

Cut Their Arms Off

"The key to the solution of the university-community problem is that they are just going to have to expand their definition of "human being"--it's just a little too narrow right now. Harvard and MIT should both be rezoned so that they can't build anything more and the city should take by public domain any housing that can't be called part of the campus. If they won't shrink we ought to cut their arms off.

"The first thing that ought to be done to insure better communication between individuals in the community and different sections of the city is to set up decentralized units of about 50-100 people in each unit, with representatives of these units publishing a small newsletter. It would let the people know what was going on in each of their areas, and let them know what the city was doing. These smaller groups would also be responsible for things like the collection of garbage. There would be a central collection point for each little group, and this would make the city's job easier and more efficient--one stop where there used to be 50.

"But the greatest benefit to be derived from such a system is that it would get people to work with one another; it is a means by which you break down the feeling of isolation--people would soon see that there was no sense having a fence separating their properties.

"Exactly $1.50 tax on each person in Cambridge could provide 20,000 bicycles, which if they were properly marked and identified could not be taken out of the city or stolen. They would belong to everybody: it would be a step away from our automobile system of transportation. Eventually it would be nice to do away with all streets, except for the necessary firelanes.

"As far as police go, we must operate from the promise that people have a legitimate interest in how police power is exercised. We must integrate police power in the community, and secondly, emphasize that never, never is a policeman's life less important than another man's property. We will get better policemen that way and people will be more satisfied with the protection they're getting."