The Larger Part of the Iceberg: George Romney and His Concerned Citizens Movement

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 45:2 (Fall 2019): 127-151©2019 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved The Larger Part of the Iceberg: George Romney and His Concerned Citizens Movement By Laura Jane Gifford Martha Blom, a housewife from Orchard Lake, Michigan, sat down to write a letter to her former governor on December 1, 1972. She had read that George Romney was considering a new venture—a “Concerned Citizens’ Movement” organized to address the major problems of the day—and she wondered how she might become involved. Blom had worked in grassroots politics and with the League of Women Voters. “Now my family is slowly making the great exodus and I have time to give,” she wrote. “And, frankly, I’m frustrated and discouraged about so much around me I feel I must try to do something about it.”1 Romney had hit a nerve with his advocacy of citizen-led voluntary efforts to meet the challenges of a tumultuous time. Martha Blom—and, as it turned out, many others—wanted to join him in taking action. Informed citizen activism became especially important for Republicans concerned about the growing polarity and heightened secrecy of party politics in the early 1970s. Former Michigan Governor and US Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney was at the forefront of efforts to combat partisanship and political alienation with programs for voluntary citizen involvement at all levels of society. Romney’s interest in voluntary action stemmed from a variety of sources, and most notably from his leadership in Citizens for Michigan, an organization that successfully mounted a campaign to rewrite the state’s outmoded constitution in the early 1960s. Romney was also involved in the leadership of the Nixon administration’s Cabinet Committee on Voluntary Action, which established a National Center for Voluntary Action in 1969; following his 1969-1972 service as Nixon’s HUD secretary, Romney served as the center’s chairman. 1 Letter from Martha Blom to George Romney, 1 December 1972, folder “B,” box 17-P, George Romney Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan [hereafter Romney Papers]. 128 The Michigan Historical Review Perhaps Romney’s most cohesive articulation of voluntary-action principles, however, came with his attempt to create a Concerned Citizens Movement following his resignation from Nixon’s cabinet. Romney perceived this movement as a complementary, non-governmental effort that could draw upon what he viewed as deep wells of possibility within American society. The Concerned Citizens Movement represented Romney’s belief that by mobilizing the expertise of leading citizens from all walks of life and across party and ideological lines, the “life or death” questions of the early 1970s could successfully be solved. Romney’s vision dovetailed with sentiments expressed by a growing body of activists concerned about the plight of the individual versus larger, structural forces in American society. Moreover, it also drew from deep wells of progressive sentiment that continued to vie for position within the fractious climate of 1970s Republicanism. While more recent scholarship on post-World War II Republican politics tends to focus on the growth of conservatism as a political force, several newer studies have highlighted the contingency still resident in the GOP of the early 1970s. Donald Critchlow argued that the triumph of the conservative movement within the Republican Party was “neither preordained or inevitable” until as late as 2004. Perhaps even more to the point, “[t]he years 1965 to 1976 were not good for liberals or conservatives. American politics had become polarized, but neither end of the political spectrum seemed to benefit from the electorate’s disillusionment.”2 While Watergate clearly had a major impact on GOP vitality, historians such as Geoffrey Kabaservice reminded us that in this polarized environment, moderate Republicanism remained a distinctive political and ideological posture with a national scope.3 The Nixon administration’s weak embrace of some moderate Republican positions, coupled with attempts to reach out, for example, to Democratic conservatives, frustrated GOP progressives while providing the foundations for critique of Republican policy from both the right and the left.4 If, as Greg Schneider observed, “[t]he Nixon years reminded conservatives that policy mattered”—and they needed to move beyond...