The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor: The Human Rights Party and College Town Liberalism

The Michigan Historical Review 46:2 (Fall 2020): 31-69©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor: The Human Rights Party and College Town Liberalism By Scott Kamen When the Ann Arbor City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in 2010 banning upholstered furniture on porches in response to a house fire earlier that year, John J. Miller of the seminal conservative magazine National Review took aim at what he saw as the liberal tyranny of the “People’s Republic of Ann Arbor.”1 Like Berkeley, California, Madison, Wisconsin, and other college towns with a reputation for liberal politics, the politics of Ann Arbor have been both derided by conservatives who attach the “People’s Republic” prefix to the city’s name, and celebrated by liberals who embrace the moniker. Despite obvious disagreement as to whether or not the liberal character of Ann Arbor politics is a good thing, conservatives and liberals alike have consistently characterized the city as a bastion of progressive liberalism. A variety of scholars have published studies that help us understand the factors that contributed to the liberal landscape of college towns such as Ann Arbor, but existing scholarship has largely overlooked how the radicalism of the Human Rights Party (HRP) pushed local liberals in directions that established the city that is home to the University of Michigan as a trailblazer on a number of liberal fronts.2 One of very few radical third parties to win elected office in the US during the second half of the twentieth century, the HRP won seats on the Ann Arbor City Council and came to wield meaningful political power in the city during the 1970s. The presence of the HRP on the city council and its sizable base of support enabled the party to play a fundamental role in shaping a unique college town liberalism that both drew from and rejected its innovative political agenda. The successes and failures tallied by this explicitly socialist and radical third party in its efforts 1 John J. Miller, “Ban Arbor,” National Review, October 12, 2010, https://www. nationalreview.com/corner/ban-arbor-john-j-miller. 2 For more on the liberal political landscape of many college towns see Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, The Divided Academy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975) and Blake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). 32 The Michigan Historical Review to push local Democrats to the left illuminates the progressive potential and very real limits of the college town liberalism that Ann Arbor has been widely known for since the 1970s. The HRP had a central role in defining many of the particulars of this college town liberalism, but the general contours of Ann Arbor’s politics are not specific to the city or even to college towns. A number of towns and cities in which a college or university has an outsized impact on the community saw a leftward trend in their politics after ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in 1971, and subsequent court decisions made it possible for students to have significant local political clout by allowing them to vote where they went to school. In Davis, California, the expanded student vote elected a slate of progressive candidates to the city council in 1972 that led the charge for the city’s declaration of a “peace day” in opposition to the Vietnam War and its passage of a groundbreaking energy conservation building ordinance.3 Newly enfranchised students in Berkeley pushed a city long known for its liberal politics further to the left, thanks to the crucial votes they contributed to the election of radical candidates to the city council and the passage of a referendum that established a civilian police-review board with significant legal authority.4 Whether forged by compromises between liberals and radicals, or simply the left-of-center politics common among many faculty and students, the college town liberalism that took shape in cities such as Davis, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor, represents a more thoroughgoing version of what historian Lilian Geismer has termed “suburban liberalism...