Cambridge Civic Journal Forum

City of Cambridge Mayor Emeritus, Sheila Doyle Russell recently passed away peacefully in her home. She was my friend, but like most things I expect to write here, that seems an inadequate summation. I served as her Campaign Manager for the 7 elections she won for Cambridge City Council and as her Chief of Staff during her tenure as Mayor. These roles set me on my own path in public service, but ultimately were just functions I performed which don’t do much to define our friendship. Notwithstanding, since I did write most of the narrative media used to both request and justify support from the thousands of constituents she served so well in her public service career, these functions provide me a unique, although certainly not definitive, perspective on her life. I never wrote anything for her audience of many without first writing it for the review and approval of Sheila.

I preferred watching Sheila review those materials in person, as I valued her initial expressions while she read as a means to dissect what would always be her more measured assessments in conclusion. As both audience and subject of those narratives, her feedback, positive or negative, was part of an extended ongoing conversation we had about who she was, and how she viewed herself as a public servant. Always insightful, often argumentative, and sometimes unequivocally final in her rejection, I learned about her while she also taught me about myself. I’m acutely aware that this writing is my first on Sheila as the subject that will not receive her corresponding critique and approval. I find that circumstance daunting, but whenever I’d get reluctant to write something, Sheila would say “just give it a go.”

Sheila knew me since childhood as one of many Cambridge kids from a close group of mid-century working-class families helping each other stake a claim to the American dream. Amid stories of JFK and Tip O’Neil, they created their own Cambridge version of what is often referred to as the Irish immigrant political machine. I think Sheila would prefer the Gaelic term “Clann” to describe her constituency, not just for its Irish origins, but because the original meaning is flexible and inclusive depending on how it’s used. Perhaps this ambiguity is part of the reason its original meaning has been so corrupted in modern terminology. It’s root, literally and figuratively, is to plant and grown extensions that are connected. It embodies the family you are born into, the family you choose, and/or the family that welcomes you without prejudice. To care for your Clann means to grow beyond yourself.

Sheila’s Clann was planted in the Catholic Irish working class, but like the neighborhoods she knew so well, it grew extensions with each wave of change. The Irish, Italian, French, and Haitian families that shared the same faith in the same parishes as well other African American, Armenian, and Jewish families who shared similar dreams and challenges found representation in Sheila’s Clann. As a working class widowed woman and mother, Sheila’s own journey reflected the challenges and frustrations other Cambridge women of her generation experienced as the simple American dream of their youth evolved to be both more inviting and more elusive. She won over more than the occasional academic atheist as well with her genuine wit, wisdom, and humor.

Conversely, I would often use the more accessible, albeit banal words such as “community” and “constituency” to describe the people of this common good. Yet after nearly 15 years of watching Sheila read the words I wrote for the purpose of telling people who she was, I know she found terms like these, with their presumptive emphasis on simple demographic attributes, insufficient and unsatisfying. As a politician Sheila was a romantic. Not in the sloppy sentimental mockery of the term, but in the purest philosophical definition of the word. She possessed an awesome natural ability to connect with people as individuals through her genuine empathy and her capacity to validate the importance of anyone that approached her. In a word, she loved them.

As her campaign manager, I was typically more utilitarian in grouping these people by their attributes. In my mind, democratic elections were about candidates marshaling limited resources to optimize public support for a set of positions and ideas to be represented within the institutional bodies of government. I thought in terms of wards, precincts, and probabilities. I constructed the scaffolding and trellis around Sheila’s Clann, but she tended its growth. I targeted voters, but Sheila knew them and loved them.

Even to her last days, she maintained a deep encyclopedic knowledge of the people in her Clann. Not only in the academic attributes of my comfortable utilitarian domain, but in the meaningful romantic connections of the living Clann. When her personal recollections didn’t register with me, Sheila would usually begin a seemingly boundless recitation of associations; “she lived across the street from” or “you played hockey with his brother” or “she was married to Jimmy who worked with Leo at the gas company”. Sometimes she would throw me a more utilitarian bone such as “always voted absentee because she couldn’t do the stairs”. I never reached the limits of her depth on the people she cared about. After several failing attempts to jog my utilitarian memory, she would usually look at me silently for a moment, perplexed at my incomprehension. At first, I wondered if she was judging me, but I realized later that she always had another option to offer but was assessing if continuing on the current path would just freak me out. Sheila could always dive deeper, but I think she worried that it would give me the bends.

Sheila lived her entire 87 years as a native, lifelong Cantabrigian. However, where she existed was that inexpressible space in between the romantic and the utilitarian. Sheila’s Clann was not a collection of individuals that shared some things in common. It was a beating, breathing life of its own, defined as much by the connections and interactions between as by the individuals themselves. As social media platforms increasingly promote the vain promises of their connection algorithms, it has often occurred to me that these are nothing more than pale mutations of how Sheila’s mind worked organically. We are increasingly living in that mutated world of algorithms that is all utility and no romance. John Stuart Mill, the great English philosopher once wrote that whoever could master both romanticism and utilitarianism would possess the entire English philosophy of their age. I suspect that Sheila would smile and quip that the Irish easily find what the English are still looking for.

True also for the proportional representation election system used in Cambridge, which Sheila would reference in shorthand to the uninitiated as the “Irish System”. She had a deep intuitive understanding of how rank voting improved how people expressed their representative preferences, but more importantly, how it incentivized candidates like her to emphasize our connections rather than our differences. In the days of paper ballots, Sheila relished attending “The Count” where full consideration of voter’s choices recorded in penciled preferences took almost a week to fully tabulate. For Sheila, “The Count” wasn’t just about the suspense and drama of the protracted process. It was about the time spent with the friends and supporters of her Clann gathered in the designated watch area. Together we watched and learned how she achieved the requisite proportion of votes (quota) from her primary supporters woven together with additional support cultivated among the secondary preferences of voters that initially made other choices. Each PR count was a lesson in the importance of cultivating connections rather than forcing voters into hard choices. Often it was a hard lesson to learn for many first-time ego-driven candidates more suited to the traditional yet inferior winner-take-all elections. In other words, it was a lesson in growth.

It’s why I chose the photos included here to represent the Sheila I want to remember. As someone who made a personal practice of reading the expressions of Sheila as they pertain to her public persona, I think these photos capture her at one of her most cherished moments, one vote away from achieving the election quota and removing her name card identifying her as a candidate in the running. No ballrooms or podiums. No canned speeches in opposite pockets, depending on the outcome. Just friends, and friends of friends and associates and colleagues and fellow citizens gathered together in the same space to congratulate the elected and to console and thank the defeated for their best efforts in representing the public interest. This is Sheila as her best public self, caught on camera in the inexplicable space between the romantic and utilitarian sides of political life, perfectly balanced and at ease. To me, this is her true self, and will remain my lasting image of Sheila.

People often ask me why, with my years of campaign experience and ardent interest in election reform, I haven’t offered my services to other candidates. My standard answer is that every election campaign I managed took place before social media was invented, and I haven’t been able to identify, let alone adapt, to the utility of that new order. That’s true enough, but the more pertinent answer is simply that I’ve never met another Sheila. I’m still just the apprentice to the master, learning how to be part of something that can grow beyond myself.

I visited Sheila at her home shortly before her death. Her body was frail and failing, but the Clann algorithms were still processing like they always did. She told me how much she missed reading the newspapers. She could still see them if held close, but her arms could not keep steady enough to read them the way she enjoyed, usually cover to cover. She didn’t say this as a lament for her present infirmity. She said it as a problem to be solved, as if she was contemplating some combination of prosthetics and contraptions that would allow her to continue learning about the people in the places she cared for. I didn’t say goodbye to Sheila the last time a saw her, only because she didn’t give any indication she was going somewhere. I don’t regret that at all. It was pretty much on brand for Sheila.

I patiently await the long anticipated new birth of freedom when we have an election system for representative governance that allows Sheila’s approach to public service to be more rule than exception. There are positive signs. The good people at FairVote.org who are advocating for this exceptionally important right, and the existence and hopefully eventual adoption of The Fair Representation Act; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences creation of the “Our Common Purpose” plan for sustaining the American experiment. Right smack in the middle of Cambridge is Harvard Professor Danielle Allen, who for me is the closest contender for the title of next-gen Sheila 2.0 with the academic chops to document and teach what Sheila demonstrated so naturally.

Increasingly, there are more people who understand and can reconcile our shared cultural history with our changing world without sacrificing the romantic ideals of personal and civic connection on the altar of expedient political utility. I remain hopeful that we’ll recognize and preserve the value in what Sheila demonstrated for us during her life of public service. If we succeed, we may take some comfort in knowing that government of the romantics, by the romantics, for the romantics, shall not perish from the earth.

Sincerely and Hopefully,
David R. Goode