AN ENDEARING CITIZEN.

The Secret Lives of Citizens

Pursuing the Promise of American Life

Thomas Geoghegan 

Pantheon Books, $25, 240 pp.

Imagine yourself a twenty-two-year-old Harvard graduate. It's 1972, and you are a staff writer for the New Republic. Choose a topic to write about-anything. Your classmates might pick the McGovern presidential campaign, or the environment, or court-ordered racial busing, or the women's movement, or the final, dreadful, throes of the American war in Vietnam. But if you're Thomas Geoghegan, you have bigger fish to fry. For you, the most significant, cataclysmic phenomenon of the age is: the Rise of State Government!

Even the managing editor has his doubts. Maybe Geoghegan should find a new subject.

"You know the break-in over at Watergate?" the editor asked. "Why not drop all your other duties here, and simply follow that! Just that one story, just follow it, see where it goes."

Geoghegan gasped. "You really...you really think, this break-in...is more important than revenue sharing?"

The Secret Lives of Citizens, a memoir cum political treatise cum urban expose, is full of this kind of charming self-deprecation. A labor lawyer and exemplary citizen, Geoghegan can be very funny, especially at his own expense. A policy wonk, we're invited to laugh, passing up a chance to beat out Woodward and Bernstein for the Watergate scoop! But the breezy style and mock heroic wit are a bit deceiving and sometimes annoying, like Dave Barry filling in for Mike Royko. Is this a put-on, or what? If you read on, though, and it is almost impossible not to, you begin to realize that Geoghegan has serious, even passionate, convictions.

That business about revenue sharing was not just a joke. The redistribution of federal power and money to the states began with Kennedy, accelerated with Nixon's "New Federalism," and was pursued with a vengeance under Reagan. The result, according to Geoghegan, is nothing less than the collapse of central government-one of the most profound and disastrous institutional transformations of the late-twentieth century. In 1950, for example, one of every two government employees worked for the federal government. Now it is down to one out of six.

But what's so great about central government? Hasn't it produced more than its share of militarism, inequality, and Republican rule? Perhaps, in practice, Geoghegan might concede. But only federal power has the potential to support broad-based progressive reform-to raise wages, to ensure the right of labor to organize, to extend "the promise of American life" articulated by Geoghegan's heroes of the Progressive era and the New Deal.

The reason Washington has not fulfilled this potential boils down to a fundamental flaw in democratic representation: the Senate. Geoghegan makes a surprisingly persuasive case for abolishing it. All those virtually empty, conservative states with two votes. No wonder there is gridlock. Did the founders really intend to create all those rotten boroughs? Forty senators represent only 10 percent of the population, but can stop any legislation with a filibuster. "That is, 90 percent of the population base as represented in the Senate could vote yes, and the bill would still lose." So much for one person, one vote.

But didn't the House of Representatives produce Newt Gingrich? True, but that is because democracy and voter participation have been so effectively degraded by the intransigence of the Senate. Anyway, let's not get too bogged down in national politics. After all, though Geoghegan still fantasizes about a heroic return to the "commanding heights" of central power, he virtually gave up on it by 1979. "In our times Washington means nothing. It can't raise wages, or get health care, or stop the rise of poverty." The only people who get to use federal power are antigovernment types like Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

But Geoghegan is not one to moan on the sidelines and wait for progressive elites to dispense democracy. If you read his remarkable first book (Which Side Are You On: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, Plume, 1991), you know that he has spent twenty-five years crusading for perhaps the most forgotten of all grassroots causes, American labor. There Geoghegan chronicled his legal efforts to stem the tide of this second most profound and disastrous institutional change of the late-twentieth century-the collapse of organized labor.

While the first book focused on Geoghegan's day job, this volume is really about his moonlighting as a citizen of a great American city. When he left Washington in 1979, he resolved to settle in "a big disheveled city, Catholic and alcoholic." On to Chicago! Here, surely, one could have a meaningful civic life. Chicago had wards, aldermen, political machines, Haymarket Square, unions, immigrants, Nelson Algren, Saul Alinsky-our political city! Though Geoghegan never entirely lost his initial enthusiasm for Chicago, what he found was bleak and depressing-a city of deep class and racial divisions with yuppie neighborhoods around the Loop, full of health clubs and trattorias, and largely abandoned neighborhoods of the poor, "a city of dead children." Political power had gone south to Springfield, the capital, and out to the suburbs of DuPage County.

How, then, to be a citizen? After toying with the idea of running for state rep (always hunting for the center of power), Geoghegan immersed himself in an extraordinary round of volunteer service. He worked for Mayor Harold Washington (1983-87), took on legal suits against child labor, used long neglected public- health laws to fight the rise of TB, coached teen-agers for job interviews, worked with several gun-control organizations, and more.

We get to go along, riding shotgun in city ambulances and touring neighborhoods with dozens of Geoghegan's anonymous friends ("L," "M," "B," "Father C," "Carl W"-are they all in witness protection programs?). If you sign up for the tour, be forewarned. There will be lots of sardonic asides to lighten the mood, but you won't be spending much time sipping cappuccino. The standard package includes a midnight trip to convenience stores to talk with sixteen-year-old workers. Then its off to the Narcotics Night Court ("It's like a plantation"), followed by an early morning drive-its too big to walk-around the city jail ("this is what I now took out-of-town friends to see instead of steel mills"). If you're lucky, and stay long enough, Geoghegan might drive you out to West Chicago for a leisurely dinner at a Polish restaurant where you'll get an instructive quiz on Chicago demography (Latinos are one-quarter of the population, but Poles have been emigrating in higher numbers).

This is a fascinating book. By now just about everybody has written a memoir, but only a rare few move beyond the self-absorption of our age to connect private life to a new and compelling public understanding. And The Secret Lives of Citizens is also oddly moving. Somehow the combination of wry humor, gloomy assessment, insatiable curiosity, and romantic idealism serves to inspire. Few of us can live up to Geoghegan's standard of citizenship. And he is, in his modesty, perhaps too willing to let us off the hook ("If I had a kid, I'd immediately leave the city. It's not even an issue.") But the example of this decent and endearing citizen may well give us the nerve to do something more, however small, to extend the promise of American life.

Chris Appy is the author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993).