Reining in Blue Collar Workers

William Walsh's recent election to the Cambridge City Council as a conservative, anti-rent control representative of the landlords, marked the coming of a new type of politician to the city, council candidate Ed Cyr says. While other anti-rent control candidates such as Mayor Walter Sullivan essentially campaign by appealing to ethnic affinity and personal ties, Walsh was the first candidate to take the issue of rent control seriously.

Cyr says that while Sullivan and his fellow independents may oppose rent control, they have never been serious enough to try to abolish it. They knew that their blue-collar ethnic constituencies wouldn't stand for it. But Walsh was different. Walsh was the businessman's candidate, and he has remained their advocate, according to Cyr. Two kinds of independents emerged; the old style neighborhood' politicians and the young issue-oriented ones.

And so Cyr figured that if there could be a representative for upscale conservatives, then it was time for Cambridge to have a city councillor for "downscale progressives," a term he uses to describe the liberal blue-collar ethnic consitutency he hopes to mobilize.

Amidst a group of independents--who are generally older and oppose rent control--and a slate of younger, more progressive, candidates who favor rent control, sponsored by the Cambridge Civic Association, Ed Cyr stands alone. The question is, how alone will he be come election day?

Cyr could have tried to win the endorsement of the progressive Cambridge Civic Association, which dates to the mid-1940s. Like many CCA candidates, Cyr is definitely a young progressive. He is a strong supporter of rent control, which for years has been the main political issue in city politics, and he also has been active in a number of local causes. He founded a group called Toxic Alert which he says chased Arthur D. Little Co. out of the nerve gas business. He has opposed the Seabrook Nuclear Plant. Currently, he is the director of the Community of Elders, the city's largest service organization for the elderly. In short, he's a community activist who's been around the neighborhood for a decade.

As he says, "When I do door knocking, I've knocked on all the doors before."

Cyr believes that Cambridge politics centers on class. He maintains that the CCA has been buoyed by wealthy Cambridge liberals who have no contact with Cambridge's blue-collar ethnic base. He notes that he recently ran across one elderly woman who told him straight-faced that Harvard ran the CCA. "She really thought President Bok was making the decisions for them," he says. And Cyr says that impression reflects the estrangement of Cambridge blue collar ethnics from the CCA. As a result, Cyr shunned requests asking him to seek the CCA endorsement.

The CCA's Executive Director J. James Marzilli says that Cyr's decision was not as principled as he would have people believe. "He's got a lot of friends who have a negative gut reaction to the CCA. If he joined with it, he'd lose their votes." But that gut reaction is precisely what Cyr is trying to capitalize on.

He says that the CCA has never made the effort to get to know less well-off Cambridge citizens as the independents have. He notes that he has never attended a wake from which Mayor Sullivan was absent. His candidacy is an effort to attract blue collar voters with liberal views away from the conservative independents who have survived on their support.

Marzilli says that his organization is not a "monolithic block of Cambridge brahmins," but he admits that the CCA has not "tried as hard as we should to meet [blue collar ethnics] on their