Thomadra Scott (“Chaser”), had come to San Francisco in the late 1950s, after twenty years as a merchant seaman. Yet, most of these activists were still in San Francisco, and welcoming to someone who wanted to listen to their versions of the War on Poverty. They were no longer in the spotlight, some of their groups had ended and others shrunk to a small presence. I had read Wolfe’s essay, and sought out the anti-poverty activists profiled. At Arriba Juntos, the executive director subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, and partnered with the city’s largest corporations and labor unions. The surviving anti-poverty groups were ones that had adapted by becoming more business-like and focused on results. The confrontations had been abandoned, the firehose of free money dried up. This anti-poverty world in San Francisco had shifted by the time I arrived in the fall of 1979 at a community job training group in the Mission, Arriba Juntos. But Wolfe does capture central elements of the 1960s and early 1970s anti-poverty world, in ways that social scientists and journalists did not : the lack of accountability for the money doled out, the absence of any expectations of results, and how little of the money actually found its way into the hands of low income people or into efforts that actually benefited low income people. Wolfe’s New Journalism account mixes fact and fiction, and is not meant as reporting or academic analysis, or the complete story. He’ll say ‘Ain’t that right’…’you know what I mean’ and he wants you to say yes or nod your head…see…It’s part of his psychological jiveass. “Then Chaser would say, ‘Now when we get there, I want you to come down front and stare at the man and don’t say nothing. “Chaser” formed a group in the Western addition, the Youth Coalition, and was one of the main actors in Wolfe’s telling.

Bonfire and the vanities