Remembering Mitch Snyder

On the hottest day, so far, of the humidity wave in this cool wet summer, the Lasko fan that had been keeping the screen porch bearable gave out. Luckily the little hot-air fan I used last winter works as a very small cool-air fan. I sweated, I sweltered, and from time to time I swore, but I survived. Even the computers survived. And I dug through the big stack of things I'd been meaning to post here some day, and remembered the man who did not survive a day like this one.

When I was seventeen my parents wanted to make sure, if I insisted on going to college, that I went to a church college where I’d be kept safe from immoral influences like sex, drugs, and Communism. So I went to a church college where all the lower-division course work basically reviewed what we’d done in grade nine or ten at Gate City High School, and waiting for the Yankees to catch up left me more time to bond with addicts and learn to admire one of the theology teachers’ friends, who were at the very least fellow-travellers, if not positive Communist. I did have enough sense to stay away from sex, probably because Seventh-Day Adventists cultivate off-putting personalities, but two out of three...

Anyway, Professor Casey did offer students a full range of options for Christian community service. As course work, we did this. In one of the courses we read articles about the Christian lifestyle, generally, including how much time Christians should reasonably be expected to put into community service, and then as the “lab work” for the course we served the community in one mission effort or another. For the B.M.O.C. types there were Big Brothers and Big Sisters; they had cars and were regularly sent generous amounts of pocket money. For the ordinary Nice Girls and Boys there was a tutoring program in which college students tutored primary school children. For the daring and rebellious there was the urban mission experience offered by the Community for Creative Non-Violence, and that, Nephews, is how your aunt came to meet somebody like Mitch Snyder.

You might still be able to find the movie about him, Samaritan. It’s fact-based; it’s just very very Hollywood. Martin Sheen did study Snyder’s rhetorical style. He even had close to the right coloring. If you went to the C.C.N.-V. looking for a sleek black-haired movie star, however, you’d be disappointed. Snyder’s face tended to make fast transitions between haggard from fasting and puffy from poor condition. He generally looked older than most people of hia age. Grungy jacket and messy-looking, graying hair were fashion statements of the period—the kind most men in Washington wanted to avoid making.

But he was real. The Community for Creative Non-Violence were absolutely real. Misguided, messed-up, with a few Sick Green features, which were part of the way hippie households were. They really did live together in a large but crowded group house where they slept in shifts and went out to raid garbage bins in the middle of the night. They ate a little better than the homeless people they fed at the soup kitchen, but not a great deal, which was part of the reason why they all looked so weatherbeaten. Clothes were casual, rumpled, and unisex. Jackets and trench coats were grungy. Money really was spent on feeding and sheltering homeless people. And cats. C.C.N.-V. members spent very little time asking for money and very little money on “high life.” At another urban mission some of the homeless people told me, “The leader of this outfit tells people he has three ships to do good work in the Caribbean. He has three ships all right—three yachts—one for him, one for his wife, and one for his other woman, and they’re always using them to have a good time in the Bahamas.” The C.C.N.-V. didn’t have yachts.

Another key to the maintenance of good relations between the C.C.N.-V. and the church college was that, when we were there, the adult leaders who wanted to be called by kindergarten names, Mitch and Carol and Harold and Wayne and all, didn’t do a lot of talking; didn’t try to recruit us into any of their left-wing political ideas, mostly talked to us about the practical details of cooking and serving and washing dishes. Some things they did were intended to be political statements. The ones they invited us to participate in were fully compatible with being conservative Protestants. (Though actually we were "liberal" Seventh-Day Adventists; we were seen in jeans and trench coats, and I think most of us even voted. For Reagan, of course. There are limits to everything.)

There were the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in Lafayette Park, within sight of the White House. Officially these were about feeding the homeless. Some of the people fed actually were homeless. More, as far as I could count, were church people making a statement by sharing a potluck meal with the homeless. It was actually a pretty fashionable crowd one met at these dinners. I remember observing that it was hard to tell the donors from the recipients and being told, “We’re all recipients. That’s the point.” Rich people were sending truckloads of roast turkey, vegetables, bread, and coffee to be consumed mostly by other rich people. I wrote down a memoir of one Thanksgiving dinner I shared with two school friends, a Presbyterian church lady, a Methodist church lady, a Quaker couple, and finally one actual homeless man, pursued by a Communist organizer. And Snyder, drifting through the crowd, first to teach us a song and then to give us his blessing.

There was an obligatory “joke” at all these gatherings—parties, protests, whatever. “”What about that old man in the big white house? Why is he not here with us?” I think some White House staff might have been with us but I remember saying brightly, “Did anyone invite him?” Anyway, periodically people would shout “Hey, Ron, whyncha come out to dinner,” and similar things. Nothing really ugly. Snyder was a Jewish-born converted Catholic. Others at the C.C.N.-V. were other things, but nice people. Old school. They could keep things real without letting them get rowdy or raunchy. 

Something I remember as really remarkable about the C.C.N.-V.: not only was I never harassed or molested, or made to regret being a top-heavy teenaged girl, in any way, but I remember hearing remarkably little of the “gutter language” some of my Adult Education students spoke  People might be homeless, they might be hippies or punkers or druggies or just plain barking mad, but the C.C.N.-V. seemed to enchant them into being polite. If one homeless man seemed to be looking at any of us students too long, another one was likely to step in as our self-appointed honorary uncles.

Snyder’s genius? Carol Fennelly’s? The group’s, as a whole? How could you tell?

Some people who tried to help the very poor through small private organizations were accused of leading toxic cults. I’ll say this: When homeless people can put a name on an individual benefactor, there is a tendency for them to collude in forming a toxic personality cult. The benefactor seems like a substitute for the parents they wish they'd had. I saw no evidence that Snyder ever tried to take advantage of the way people who’d stayed at a C.C.N.-V. shelter, or whom the C.C.N.-V. had helped to stay out of shelters, seemed to feel about Snyder. But he was the alpha male in the group. People might have formed personal friendships with others, but Snyder was the one whose full name they remembered. Many would have gone to war for him. If he’d been the type to demand that grown men call him “father,” that people seek spiritual healing from him and throw away their medications, or any of the other abominations cult leaders have set up as proof of followers’ loyalty, those things would have happened. They never did happen.

By the 1980s Snyder could not fairly be called stupid, but people were always talking about hs questionable judgments. “Not letting the census takers take a census of the homeless? How’s that supposed to help them? “, or “But if he thinks the homeless population everywhere is like the very special and unique homeless population in D.C., well I have news for him...” I don’t think Snyder was stupid or crazy or a fake, at all. I think he was hard on his body. Too much junkfood, possibly not enough water, too many routine fasts “just to stay in condition” for too many hunger strikes. In the 1970s one preacher who advocated regular fasting had warned people that the special significance of the number 40 in the Bible is that forty days is as long as a person can fast without doing some permanent harm. Snyder fasted for 60 days once. It would have surprised me if the man who died so “old,” just short of his forty-seventh birthday, could have gone back to work in any of the jobs he'd done in his twenties.

So he did some stunts that don't seem to have helped anything, that make one wonder who ever thought they would. He raised money to pay an artist for an installment, then got into a lawsuit with the artist. He staged a minor "demonstration" during church services. 

But he was a genius activist. If there was a man who had the rhetorical gift to play the rebellious son to Reagan’s reasonable father, Snyder was that man. He took the C.C.N.-V. from being just another left-wing hippie crowd to being a genuine, and effective, community service group. Their shelter was generally both cleaner and more respectful of its occupants than other shelters; they were more likely to be able to transfer a suddenly homeless family into a new home.

What made Washington’s homeless population so special was that in the early 1980s, in Washington, a majority of the homeless population were employable or even employed—low-income workers who’d been paying rent on cheap houses or flats for years, then been evicted to facilitate more yuppification. While the roots of this yuppification were bipartisan (Democrats wanted a bigger federal government and posher homes for government workers), the crime against humanity was a soft ball pitched right into the C.C.N.-V.’s glove. In Washington as nowhere else (at the time) the C.C.N.-V. could accurately predict that a randomly chosen homeless man in a shelter was as likely to be sober and competent, if anything likely to have been cut back to part-time work because of his age, as to be a paranoid-schizophrenic or drug-dazed derelict.

For about three weeks I worked for one of the big property management companies, where I was an eyewitness to the creation of this very special homeless population. The company didn’t have a computer yet but they had a “smart typewriter” with the capacity for merging addresses into form letters. Hired because I wasn’t intimidated by such cutting-edge technology, I’d be told, “Right, so this week we’re sending out notices of rent raises at these buildings.” I spent a whole day printing letters to notify retirees, mostly widowed ex-housewives, that they were likely to be put out on the street in sixty days.

“But where will they go?”

“Back where they came from, mostly. Nobody’s from Washington. They’ll go home, or they can go to homeless shelters.”

So it really was true, in Washington, that almost anybody’s parents were likely to become homeless. Snyder seemed to want to believe that that was typical, that reports that most of the homeless people in most places were psychotic were based in prejudice. They weren’t. 

In the mid-eighties Snyder got Mayor Barry to mandate that all homeless people in Washington be sheltered in unused motels. This led to an influx of homeless people from other cities, and to higher incidences of drug use and insanity in Washington’s homeless population. Snyder’s reaction was that being homeless was enough to drive people insane. It is, especially if people drown their discontentedness in alcohol, but Snyder seemed unaware of the long-term effects of some formerly popular drugs—the set of effects that form the stereotype of a homeless person in most of the United States. Since these drugs were manufactured by big corporations for private profit, bashing them would have fitted into Snyder's left-wing ideology...but he didn’t go there. Possibly his prematurely aged brain was beginning to lose some of its ability to process new information.

If one must choose, surely it’s better to lose the ability to recognize a new way corporate profiteering has harmed people than to lose the ability to find a new home for a newly homeless grandmother and three grandchildren.

Snyder was in some ways the perfect foil for Marion Barry, another old left-winger. It would be a pity and a shame if people outside of Washington remembered Barry only as a pathetic old crackhead. Before he became that he was a genius organizer, compromiser, triangulator, manipulator, the one who could always “think of something” to offer everybody. Expectations for a majority-Black city led by a Black mayor were dire. Barry’s brilliance was a good healthy shock. He was constantly criticized, but he was loved. He threw federal funds around like water, but he used the money mostly to help people who had been poor and wanted to work.

Under the circumstances the left-wing response to Washington’s special problem was not perfect, but was better than right-wing non-solutions. Leftists want bigger government. Bigger government was necessary to house all those homeless people. Well, something was necessary, anyway; there were large unruly mobs of them and, while everybody smells fairly ripe at the end of a long summer day in Washington, the psychotics who wore all their clothes all the time, never changing, were becoming very pungent. Barry’s administration authorized the homeless population to take over motels and finally allowed the C.C.N.-V. to build the shelter they wanted.

Not without some bumps along the way. Budgetary disputes slowed things. The idea of disappointing the homeless people weighed on Snyder. One night when the atmospheric pressure was hard for everyone to bear, the combination of a funding snag that would disappoint the homeless people and a lover’s quarrel with his second wife, and that heat and humidity, weighed on him particularly hard. 

Those who are familiar with the courteous detachment, the “nobody would ever be so rude as to speak to anybody” atmosphere on Metrorail trains, may imagine the shock by picturing the way I heard of Snyder’s demise. A man boarded a train carrying a newspaper and announced to the whole car, “Snyder’s dead.”

Everyone answered. “Say what?” “No!” “@#$%, man!”

“No @#$%. He hanged himself.”

Within fifteen minutes I think everyone had a newspaper to read the sad story.

How much more might he have done if he'd only reminded himself that things would look more bearable when the weather broke. How much more if he'd ever swept the cobwebs of failed socialist thought out of his head.

He was, nevertheless, a great American.