Edward Crane: A Boss Who No Longer Rules

There are a couple of sure ways to get votes these days in Cambridge. One is to promise that you'll fight unrestricted development. The other is to claim that you're on the side of neighborhood preservation--that you'll battle for downzoning and against the Kennedy Library.

It wasn't always that way. From the 1930's to the 1960's, the word in Cambridge was "build"--high rises, university towers, hotels, offices, anything--and get them up as quickly as possible without protest. And the man most responsible for that legacy of development, as most Cantabridgians will tell you today, is Edward A. Crane '35.

Eddie Crane, poor son of a Cambridge cop, Harvard magna cum laude, city councilor for almost 30 years, was a power broker for as long as most Cambridge political experts can recall.

When Cambridge adopted its present from of government, Plan E--a good government instrument that attempts to separate city administration from politics by hiring a city manager to make up the budget and execute business--in 1939, few would have predicted that it would cause a vacuum of leadership that only a boss like Crane could fill.

Crane created a coalition that was built around keeping taxes down by any means--particularly growth by white collar industry. His strength lay in his ties--he felt at home with the universities, Harvard Square businessmen, Brattle Street dowagers, and working-class Cambridge.

By the mid-sixties, the other city councilors grew tired of his one-man rule. While Crane failed to detect the rumblings, he was ambushed and in 1966 a handful of councilors threw out his hand-picked city manager, virtually stripping him of his power. He stayed on to run again in 1967, but failed to finish in the top three and retired from politics.

Today Crane is more or less out of commission--a physically huge man, stuck behind a small desk in a tiny Boston law firm--far removed from the power scene that he once ruled. He's mellowed now too, given to reminiscing about his past triumphs, his friends, and most of all his final Brutus-like undoing at the hand of the liberals on the city council in 1966.

"When the bridge blew up in 1966, there weren't too many people throwing life-savers to me," Crane recalls. "They told me, 'Jesus, Ed, everybody knew you could swim.' Yeah, maybe, but the problem was when I swam, I didn't end up on the left bank."

Crane's reminisces serve as more than just a relic of the days when one man could run a city. They provide a unique contrast to the liberal neighborhood people that he says now play the major role in Cambridge politics.

"We were in a growth era then," Crane says--private growth, and a city's self-sufficiency were the city's primary goals. Now, he says, Cambridge is stagnating, and its council spends more time trying to get federal funds than attempting to build from within. "It's a Santa Claus-type government now," he says, "and nobody is going to object to getting federal funds."

"Rent control laws make it so nobody in his right mind will build an apartment house in Cambridge without a government subsidy," he' says. "We used to think in terms of encouraging building--but they don't anymore."

As for the claims of those who want to stop unrestrained development--downzone, and begin planning for people--Crane calls them all "ENE's"--ecologists and environmentalists--who prefer to stop rather than start things in Cambridge. "To me accusations of progress [under my administration] without planning are just wordy rhetoric. Any course of action is open for criticism in Cambridge nowadays." He claims that his administration "certainly endorsed planning." Witness the planning office, he says, which jumped from a $15 appropriation for postage stamps in 1938 to $186,000 by 1971. "Unrestrained development? There are not six square miles [the size of Cambridge] in this world that have been worked over more intensely by planners."

Instead of fighting for neighborhood preservation, Crane prefers to show what can happen when neighborhood preservers don't halt progress. He claims credit for Tech Square--"a tax payer"--the new Draper Labs, and a slew of other offices that are making money for Cambridge every day.

But nothing makes Crane seethe more than when the discussion turns to the Kennedy Library. Here is a project that makes him wish he was back on the council. "That JFK Library is a real ripoff. We spent over $50 million to make that site available for the library. And then the ENEs came in overnight. They started throwing their spears after we got the green light. They were well-represented, and well financed."

Crane looks upon those who opposed the library with disgust. He calls them a small, unrepresentative minority, who ramrodded their position through. Worse, to Crane, is that the opposition cares little for the memory of John F. Kennedy '40. He considers it a family insult, and he considers himself a close friend of that family.

Crane says he takes the library struggle so personally because of his relationship with Kennedy. He dwells on the time when Kennedy told him at an October 1963 reception in Washington, "I will see more of you later in January when I can tell you about the world, and you can tell me about Cambridge and Dublin."

He then points to the picture of John on the wall and tells the story about his encounters with Kennedy when Crane worked in the Freshman Union, then a library. "John used to spent his nights in there reading. He once borrowed my notes for Government 3--about government in Ireland. And I looked at those notes after he gave them back to me--and he annotated a part of the notes--the part that said that Ireland was governed by a benevolent dictatorship tempered by assassination. He circled that statement, and wrote 'good-good' next to it," Crane recalls.

If he were a councilor now, Crane says, there would be a library and a museum constructed already, insead of just tentative plans for half the project. "We'd appoint a blue ribbon committee to get the facts--bring in the heavyweights. People like Archie Cox, unbiased people, a few other Cantabs," Crane says.

But Crane acknowledges that he is through with that fight now, and he prefers to think of the better days, when things got done through coalition and cooperation. And he feels that he does not see anybody on the scene right now who can repeat that coalition or gain that cooperation.

The problem, Crane thinks, may be in the form of government. "Under Proportional Representation, incumbents become more aware of their number one supporters. As long as they can keep them happy, they an afford to be independent of their colleagues," he says. Thus you get a Saundra Graham accountable only to her Riverside-Cambridgeport constituency and a David Wylie, responsible for the views of West Cambridge rather than all of the city.

"In government class at Harvard they told us that you have to have a government that governs," Crane says. But he adds there isn't one now, just minority representation.

Crane is a realist and he sees Cambridge's biggest problem as the inability of either side to really "get that five," the magic number that would provide it with a council majority on all issues.

As for Crane's role in the history books of Cambridge--he doesn't mind going down as a boss. "In school we were always told that a leader is an old-time boss with a college education," he says. "Anyway," he laughs, "my name was on the ballot every two years for 30 years and if they didn't want me they could have always gotten rid of me."