Berkeley Is Reeling Over Anti-War Vote

The city resolution was watered way down by the time it passed, demanding a halt to the bombing in Afghanistan “as soon as possible.”

No matter. A week and a half later, America’s best-known anti-war town is still being strafed with outrage. More than 1,000 letters and phone messages, many from angry New Yorkers, cover the big oval-shaped conference table in the mayor’s office.

“Shame on you,” they say. And: “What the hell are you people thinking?” And: “Morons, morons, morons!!!” “Hitler and Yamamoto would have loved to have you guys in office.”

And lately, alarmingly: “I used to shop and dine in Berkeley, but those days are over.” Some of the missives are signed, “Boycottingly yours.”

“I never expected to be so misconstrued,” said Councilwoman Dona Spring, who sponsored the pacifist call that she thought would resonate throughout her city. “All the intentions were good.”

If only the same could be said for the fallout, said Mayor Shirley Dean, who opposed the measure.

“In the 20 years I’ve been involved in Berkeley politics, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dean said, speaking by phone from Washington, D.C., where, to her relief, colleagues at a U.S. Conference of Mayors summit were too worried to rib her anywhere but in cocktail conversation. “The economy was already in a slump, and now I’m having to ask people not to boycott the city. I’m getting calls from Venezuela, Canada, the BBC. I mean we don’t need this.”

Since Oct. 16, when the council weighed in on the U.S. military action, the city has been slammed in the national media and peppered with calls from frightened merchants who say business is disappearing as a result of the publicity. By Thursday, the letters to the city included at least 260 threats to dine, buy and invest elsewhere.

It is unclear how big the boycott will become or how much it will cost the city and its 3,600 or so businesses, mostly mom-and-pop enterprises with fewer than 50 employees.

“If you’re a big retail outfit and your sales drop 25%, you can probably suck it up,” said Reid Edwards, chairman of the board of the local Chamber of Commerce. “But if you’re a husband and wife with a couple of employees, with the economy going south already, what are you going to do?”

This week, the general manager of Ashby Lumber Co. said an unnamed customer pulled out of a $60,000 purchase the day after the vote because “he didn’t feel comfortable paying sales taxes to support the city of Berkeley.” The general manager of the Radisson Hotel Berkeley Marina said a local ROTC group canceled a dinner for 250.

A clerk at the Gardener, a small furniture and gift shop, called the mayor and council--and, according to store managers, without their permission--to report that a local customer had canceled an order for a $1,500 table because she preferred to pay for shipping from Michigan rather than buy at home in Berkeley.

Dana Goodell of Berkeley-based Homefinders Bulletin complained that she has suffered telephone harassment. “You have put me in a terrible position,” she wrote in a letter to Spring. “I prefer to keep my personal political beliefs out of my business, but now I have to respond to customers and strangers who are calling me a traitor and other things.”

People Are Taking Business Elsewhere

The Lowenberg Corp., a San Francisco property firm, canceled the purchase of a Berkeley property, writing in a letter to Dean that, “It is not our intention or desire to increase the tax base of a city that shows no loyalty and solidarity to our government.”

Dave Thompson, a contractor in nearby Orinda, said he notified his Berkeley lumber suppliers that he’s taking his business elsewhere--a loss to the city, he estimates, of “maybe $15,000 a year.”

Todd D. Moritz, who works at a San Francisco Internet service provider, informed the city that he and his wife have decided not to make an offer on a $650,000 house in Berkeley they had wanted until the resolution. “I’m not a political person, but it just felt icky,” he said in a phone interview this week. “We’re going to head for more neutral ground.”

And some reports underscored the pain on all sides. Howard Brainen, who had to lay off employees last month for only the third time in the 30-year history of his photo processing company, let the city know when a five-year customer, the Cadeau gift company in Oakland, notified him that it was dropping its business with him as a result of the vote.

“Any more like him, and I don’t know if we’re going to make it,” said Brainen, who compared his plight to that of innocent Afghans caught in the U.S.-Taliban cross-fire.

Alan Macomber, Cadeau’s owner, said, “I told him, ‘Look, I’m sorry you’re getting hosed like this but I can’t vote these guys out--this is the only way to show my displeasure.’ Listen, I used to live in Berkeley. I went to Cal. I was against the Vietnam War. I marched; the whole bit. And this isn’t Vietnam. It’s about the safety and security of our country. It’s a whole different ballgame.”

The five-point resolution was generating a furor even before its passage at a raucous council meeting packed with TV cameras, flag-wavers and “Stop the War” signs. Spring had tried two days after the Oct. 7 start of the military campaign to get the council to call for a cessation of the bombing. But she failed to muster the votes.

And Berkeley already was the locus of several other controversial peace actions. On Sept. 19, the city Fire Department asked firefighters not to fly full-sized American flags on firetrucks during a UC Berkeley anti-war demonstration so as not to antagonize student protesters. The edict ended up antagonizing the firefighters, who were still mourning the loss of their New York brethren in the World Trade Center collapse.

On Sept. 25, the council voted unanimously to commend Rep. Barbara Lee, whose district includes Berkeley. Lee, who has received death threats but also been lauded by thousands at peace rallies, cast the lone vote in Congress against authorizing broad use of force in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Polls have shown the American public to be overwhelmingly in favor of military intervention, but Spring said she sensed the usual loyal opposition coalescing in Berkeley. “There were three peace rallies the weekend before I introduced the item,” she said. “And the roots of the peace movement go very deep in the Bay Area.”

But Berkeley was more deeply divided on Afghanistan than Spring realized. City Hall phones started ringing even before the agendas were published--something Spring’s critics say she should have expected.

City Is Becoming More Mainstream

Though the national media plays up Berkeley’s reputation as a far-left stronghold, the city has become increasingly mainstream with the advent of tech-boom-inflated home prices. Voters may have turned out for Ralph Nader in larger numbers than for George Bush in the last election, but Berkeley also is a community in which Yuppie couples and dot-commers spent the last decade bidding up the prices of two-bedroom bungalows.

Single-family home values last year were four times the national median, according to an April city report on housing. Despite rent control, rents have crept up to about double the national average. The pro-business mayor got 60% of the vote in her 1998 reelection.

“It’s true that this has, more and more, become a city of working couples with 1.5 children in child care,” said Councilwoman Linda Maio, a Spring ally. Still, she said, she expected the resolution to be greeted like any other foreign policy stand--from Vietnam to South Africa to Tibet--that Berkeley has taken. Instead, she said, “It took on a life of its own.”

Debate was fanned by a report before the vote in the Daily Californian, the UC Berkeley student newspaper, that Spring had said the U.S. was actually the terrorist. She said she had been misquoted, but the furor helped force a toning down of her measure.

The resolution that finally came to the council condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, expressed concern for both military personnel and “the innocent people in Afghanistan,” asked for a national campaign to reduce oil dependency in the U.S. and inserted “as soon as possible” into the request for an end to the bombing. “It was pretty mild,” Spring said. “I mean, who doesn’t want the bombing to stop ‘as soon as possible’?”

But by dawn, the vote was on the CNN news crawl as a “condemnation” of the U.S. action. Berkeley was immediately slammed by media ranging from the conservative National Review to the liberal Salon.com, where social critic Susan Sontag’s son, journalist and author David Rieff, wondered whether the city’s “soft left” would be so “fuzzy-headed” if sarin gas were suddenly unleashed in the Shattuck Avenue BART station.

An attempt by Spring and Dean to set the record straight on a conservative cable news show only aggravated matters. Web sites popped up featuring Osama bin Laden’s photo beneath a request to “Boycott the City of Cowards, Berkeley, California.” Fliers began circulating, calling on the public to “Let Berkeley sell their products to the Taliban.”

This week, the city of Santa Cruz--another left-leaning college town--decided against a similar resolution for fear of similarly dividing the city.

Meanwhile, Spring and Maio say they are answering each complaint and have had thousands of copies of the resolution printed in the hope that, when critics see it, they will be less offended. An existing “Buy Berkeley” campaign is getting a fresh push, Spring said, and ads will be taken out in the local papers.

She blames the media for misrepresenting her position and the mayor for whipping up merchants. “This was just a gut reaction,” she said, “and if it hadn’t been for the publicity, it would have fizzled. The best thing now is to focus on the positive.”

But Dean notes that the local mail has run 3 to 1 against Spring and the council. She has asked three of the measure’s backers to call for a formal reconsideration. “Unfortunately,” she said, “I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere.”