A few years ago, I quietly resolved that my goal in my life should be to be more like Herb Sturz. If that seems like an odd goal, then, like most people, you've probably never heard of Herb Sturz. I hadn't either, until I worked at the Open Society Institute, George Soros' foundation, where Sturz was on the board and from which he had created a vast program of after-school activities in New York City. Using Soros' money to attract matching funds from the city and state, he revived the once-forgotten idea that kids should have something constructive to do after 3 p.m.
It took a while, and a few long lunches, before I came to understand that the after-school project was only the latest in a very long string of innovative, daring, and successful social projects, most in New York, that began in 1961 with an effort to reform the arbitrary, cruel system of bail for criminal defendants. Sturz is what is now called a "social entrepreneur," although I can't imagine him using that term to describe himself. (And most of those who do claim that title don't have a fraction of Sturz's accomplishments.)
There is a surprising justice in that, despite his modest profile, a biography of Sturz has appeared and that it should have been written by Sam Roberts of The New York Times Magazine, who covered New York long enough to appreciate why Sturz's initiatives mattered. People like Sturz, who connect ideas, passion, and money, are the unacknowledged legislators of late-20th-century liberalism. They are neither elected officials nor advocates pushing and pulling on official power. The connectors operate differently, building new structures to test ideas and show they can work, or laying the groundwork for new political possibilities.
Sturz's career as a social entrepreneur began from a most unlikely platform: As an editor at Boy's Life magazine in the 1950s, he produced a supplement on the Bill of Rights for students, which got him interested in the Eighth Amendment ("Excessive bail shall not be required" -- not usually one of the fan favorites) and the tremendous inequities in bail that left poor people suspected of crimes sitting in detention for many months without trial, in a system controlled by ruthless private bail-bond firms. With the support of an eccentric, endearing millionaire named Louis Schweitzer, he convinced judges to let young law students interview defendants and recommend that those with strong social and family ties be released until trial. Every person recommended for release showed up on the appointed date.
The Vera Institute for Justice, which grew out of the bail project, generated some 60 other projects related to criminal justice, community courts, prison reform, addiction, homelessness, and job training. A supported employment and training program, Wildcat Service Corporation, became a model for supported employment for young people and former welfare recipients in New York and nationally, and a small bus service to help people get to their job-training sites became a citywide paratransit system. While most were street-level service providers, the Sturz empire also gave birth to institutions focused on litigation, such as the Legal Action Center, or on rigorous evaluation of projects. The Manpower Development Research Corporation, the gold-standard for social-program evaluation, traces its roots to Vera and Wildcat. People who began their careers at Vera or Sturz spinoffs populate many of the most innovative social-service and advocacy organizations in the country.
Sturz entered government in 1978, serving as deputy mayor and later as planning commissioner in the early years of Mayor Ed Koch, an underappreciated period of innovation and change in New York City. After a two-year return to journalism as a member of The New York Times editorial board, Sturz became a developer of mixed-income housing and then teamed up with Soros for a project to build low-cost housing in South Africa, in addition to launching the New York after-school program, which is still thriving after almost 10 years. More recently, approaching 80, he has immersed himself in the sub-prime lending crisis and in a project to help people remain productive in their later years.
In the section on Sturz's years in public office, especially as planning commissioner, Roberts frequently compares Sturz favorably to Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, who held that job along with several others. As a book, A Kind of Genius, like The Power Broker, catches the feel of governance over a long era in New York and how a single visionary could get one thing after another accomplished. But, unlike The Power Broker, it is a chronicle of successful initiatives, rather than a litany of unintended consequences and disregard for the reality of people and neighborhoods.
Roberts is right that Sturz's ideas about urban planning were far less grandiose and disruptive than Moses', but the more relevant contrast, applicable to Sturz's entire career, is that where Moses amassed staggering and unaccountable formal power, Sturz held official power for only a relatively brief portion of his career and even then, wore it lightly. Sturz's natural mode is not the exercise of power but the ability to persuade those who do hold power to use it differently.
Roberts quotes at length from an interview with Sturz for a Columbia University oral-history project on Koch: "My experience is that most bureaucrats, then and now, prefer not to make decisions. One is not fired, generally, for not doing anything; it's easy to just send memos back and forth and attend meetings." Sturz's modus operandi in and out of government was to make it easy for those officials -- as well as the tycoons who bankrolled his efforts at the early and late stages of his career -- to do something, often by just setting it up for them and showing it could work, as with the bail project or the after-school program.
Sturz's form of persuasion wasn't political -- he wasn't holding rallies or threatening to run primary challenges against uncooperative politicians. He didn't assume that politicians or bureaucrats were tools of evil corporate interests but simply that the natural course would be stasis, and his job was to direct it toward productive solutions. As a colleague, I occasionally found myself the target of Sturz's persuasion -- at one point he drew me into a project that would have involved running expensive ballot initiatives in 50 states, which I slowly whittled down to six and then to three. (And in the end, sadly, and for reasons that had nothing to do with either of us, zero.)
Around Sturz, one sometimes felt that the familiar tables were turned -- the experienced hand was the impetuous one, with brilliant raw ideas, whereas I was already jaded and worried about the messiness of implementation. This is where my resolution to be more like Herb came in -- to be less cautious and responsible. He seemed to know from experience that there was no danger in pushing a project too far or too fast, because others would moderate it, and someone else could run it. Unlike many other social entrepreneurs, he was unafraid to let go of his initiatives. And he was also unafraid of the messy chaotic middle stages of a project, knowing from experience that it would get on the right track eventually.
The book concludes by quoting various Sturz colleagues on Sturz's overall track record as if he were an athlete -- "the Michael Jordan of social change over the last half century," says Peter Goldmark, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Roberts attributes it to "genius," a word he grinds down by overuse. True enough, but not much use to us non-geniuses who might want the secret formula. Why did Sturz's initiatives mostly succeed, when so many other ambitious liberal schemes of the 1960s and 1970s crashed on the shoals of racial backlash and misunderstanding? Many of Sturz's closest allies and fellow social entrepreneurs -- Mitchell Sviridoff of the John V. Lindsay administration and later the Ford Foundation, for example -- had much more mixed records, including debacles such as New York City's experiment with decentralization of schools.
Sturz took on crime, drugs, housing, and schools and emerged not just with successes, but with barely a hint of backlash and frustration that befell just about everyone who did the same, and that is the main theme of almost every other book about urban liberalism in the era, books like The Ungovernable City. (Roberts describes a close call when it was revealed that the bail project had recommended that "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz be released on the basis that his strong social ties -- he lived with his mother -- made it likely that he would show up for trial. But the recommendation was ignored and the bail standards adjusted to distinguish between the good kind of "lives with his mother" and the not-so-good kind, and the crisis passed.)
The best answer is that while Sturz's vision was huge, the projects themselves were precisely defined and practical. The bail project set out to identify that subset of criminal defendants that could safely be released. It didn't set out to transform the others. He didn't enter the decades-old battles in New York City schools, over testing, standards, teacher tenure, and charter schools, but simply added a new layer of activity for kids after 3 p.m. Sturz never saw much to be gained from a "national conversation" about anything. Each project was one in which success could be defined in its own measurable terms.
In this, Sturz is pragmatic, incrementalist, and even, in some important ways, conservative. The importance of social and community ties, and that those ties cannot be willed into existence where they don't already exist, is an insight he shared with the early neoconservatives such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer. But where their caution led to diminished ambitions and diminished expectations, Sturz took it as a call to do more, to do everything possible within the boundaries of flawed humanity and a flawed political process.
The problem with incrementalism is that too often it loses sight of the larger goal, and incremental progress becomes an end in itself. The secret to Sturz's success is that he is an incrementalist who isn't satisfied with incremental progress. And so, with each successful project, he turned it over to a competent ally and moved on to the next thing. As a result, in his 80s and beyond, the sum of his incremental, pragmatic interventions will be a city and a world that is very different from what it would be if he had never left Boy's Life.
And I'm still working on that resolution.