Party Crashers

Three young Democrats who opened the door to Frederick politics and invited themselves in

by Richard Daub

It was the 1960s and the country was changing. The civil rights movement was growing stronger by the day and young people across the nation were standing up for what they believed in. In dimly-lit, smoke-filled back rooms of Frederick, however, the "good 'ol boys" were still in charge, as they had always seemingly been. Anyone who was interested in running for political office still had to see them first, and they didn't particularly care for anyone who didn't already have several generations buried in nearby soil. Outsiders were about as unwelcome as suggestions of doing things any differently than they had always been done. 
      The good 'ol boys had been in the back rooms with the door closed for so long that they didn't notice what was happening outside. They didn't notice that Frederick was no longer a rural farming community and that it had grown from a large town to a small city. Even if they had noticed, they probably didn't perceive it as a threat to their way of life. They had the names, they had the money, and, as far as they were concerned, that's all they needed for business to go on as usual. 
      Then came along three young schoolteachers—teachers, of all people!—who had hardly any money or political connections, but had plenty of gall to think that they could just start running for office without asking permission first. Still, were they really a threat? Or were they just a bunch of naïve kids who didn't know any better? The voters of Frederick couldn't possibly take them seriously, so why worry? Besides, there were always hearty helpings of rumors and innuendo to spread around while they were campaigning, and, even if the polls were close, votes could easily be bought on election day with a little "walking around money" or miniature bottles of liquor. 
      Much to the chagrin of the good 'ol boys, however, the voters did start to take these teachers seriously. With downtown storefronts being boarded up and liquor stores thriving, they finally realized what a stagnant backwater pond their elected officials were swimming in. Their city was growing, yet at the same time it was dying. They wanted a more representative form of government. They wanted someone who would listen because the old guys couldn't hear them through their closed doors. 
      Galen Clagett, Ron Young, and Tom Slater realized that Frederick was in trouble and wanted to do something about it. Though each had been interested in politics at an early age, what finally spurred them into action was not the desire to make a career for themselves but to simply do something for their city. They not only saw what Frederick had become, they envisioned what it could be if people who cared more about the city than protecting their cronies were in charge and citizens from all walks of life could participate. As members of the local chapter of Young Democrats they began searching for just such people to run for seats that were up for election, but they had a difficult time finding anyone who would take them seriously. Finally they decided to just do it themselves. 

"It started for me in the fourth grade," says Delegate Galen Clagett, who is presently the only Democrat in the Frederick County district of the House of Delegates in Annapolis. He is also president of Clagett Enterprises, a successful commercial real estate company that he founded in 1987. "That's when I decided that I would probably want to do something in public life. I wasn't sure what it was gonna be, but I was always very interested in politics. So, after finishing college, I got involved in a couple of campaigns, and the first one was the Lyndon Johnson campaign in '64. Ronnie Young and I pretty much ran that campaign for Frederick County, and that was the last time that a Democrat won Frederick County for the presidency. Ronnie and I had grown up together, so it sort of brought us back together, and then I wound up working in Goodloe Byron's campaign in '68, which was really the big hook for me. And Ronnie was involved in that and a lot of other people, and ultimately we became a part of what was 'Young Democrats'." 

"I first volunteered and did some door-to-door campaigning in Adlai Stevenson's campaign in 1952 when I was a kid," says Ron Young, who is a bit of a Renaissance man these days. After serving four terms as mayor of Frederick from 1974 to 1990 and more than ten years as deputy secretary for the Maryland Department of planning, he now manages the town of Indian Head in Charles County three days a week in addition to painting and writing, with a second novel in the works along with a book about Frederick. "But, in the late '60s, we got a group of guys together and just started talking about Frederick City, County, what we thought needed to happen, changes and whatever, and there were a group of ten or twelve of us. Galen, Tom, and I were all part of that group, and a number of others. In 1969 the city election was coming up and we'd been meeting for a while, and we said, 'Well, are we gonna talk about it forever or are we gonna do something?', and we decided we would make a list of people we thought would make good candidates and asked them to run and offered to support them. And we made such a list and we went out and talked to all these people and everybody turned us down. I guess maybe they looked at us as a bunch of twenty to thirty year olds and said, 'Who are these snot-nosed brats?' or whatever, and we didn’t find anybody that would run, so we kept back and said, 'Well, what should we do?' And somebody said, 'Let's run some people from this group,' and some people started making excuses: 'I don't live in the city,' 'I just had a baby'—'Young, you live in the city, you can run.' And all of a sudden I was running. And then Galen Clagett also decided to run, so the two of us ran for Board of Aldermen in 1969 together and I got elected. That's how it kind of started. So, we got that, but I felt pretty shut out. I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old, everybody else was in their sixties and seventies, and I was discouraged. I was ready to just say, 'Okay, I did this, that's enough.' And I just said, 'No, if I just quit, I'd be a quitter and I'll never forgive myself. I'm gonna run for mayor, and either I'll get to be mayor and be able to do something or I'll lose, but at least I tried.' So, I filed and ran for mayor. That's kind of how I got into it. Never ever intended to run for office. Never dreamed I'd stay there as long as I did, but we began to get things done. I've often said, 'I probably won the first election for the wrong reasons and lost the last one for the wrong reasons.' But that's the way life is." 

"I was young and I wanted to change things," says Tom Slater, who is presently serving in his sixth overall term in the Frederick County Democratic Central Committee and third as committee chair. He is also a lawyer and runs a law firm in downtown Frederick with his son. "It was the '60s and it was the Kennedys, you know, John Kennedy and all that kind of stuff, so that's what got me motivated. And then in '68 I was driving with my wife along 15 up past the 7th Street shopping center and I saw this trailer out in the shopping center and it said 'Byron for Congress.' I didn't really know who Goodloe Byron was, but we went into the shopping center, went up to the trailer, and Beverly Byron was there, and she was manning the phones and doing this stuff and I introduced myself and said, 'I'm a teacher, what can I do to help?' So she put me in charge of what they called the 'Byron Boosters' since I was a teacher getting the high school kids out knocking on doors and doing all kinds of stuff." 

"It was a strong boss system," Clagett says of Frederick government during the 1960s. "There were basically party bosses. What we represented was a change in how that worked. So, we were at loggerheads to some extent with these people because we didn't go ask if we could run for office. It wasn't because we wanted to be wise guys, it was because we didn't know. We were dumb enough to believe the system didn't work, that the old party boss thing didn't exist. Well, it did exist. I saw things at polling places like miniatures and money being handed out, all kinds of things—and it's 1969! I couldn't believe it. I could not believe that kind of stuff went on." 
      "It was a closed circle," says Young. "There were some political bigwigs that kind of decided who got to run and who didn't. There was some very old Frederick money, and, if you wanted to run for office, you were supposed to clear through them. When I first got elected, I had some of those people let me know I had no business being mayor—I didn't get their permission. There was some of that. There's still some of that, but I don't think it's anywhere near what it used to be. People move here and can find acceptance." 
      "The mayor and Board of Aldermen was up for election in 1969," Clagett continues, "and we decided we'd run some folks for Board of Aldermen. It was a problem because in those days you had a convention system, so we went to our party and asked for a primary, and there was a big meeting and all of the precinct leaders were there, and they voted to give us a primary. The Republicans held a convention again. The problem with the convention was basically that it was closed, so that when the Democrats opened the thing up to a primary, it just rolled back the barriers. Ronnie and I ran for aldermen, and we both got nominated for aldermen, and we ran on a bunch of issues. One of the issues that we stood for was the ward system, which to some people seemed to be regression, but all the aldermen came from what we called the 'Silk Stocking Precincts Five and Six,' so our belief was that we need to change that so that different groups of people, different socio-economic levels, can be involved in the running of the city. There was an organization here that did not allow African-American members, and we wound up taking the lead on that and causing that to change." 
      "The old-time Democrats in Frederick had set up this club called the 'Jeffersonian Democratic Club'," Slater says. "It was set up by the powers that be as a social club, but a political club, and it was a major participant in Frederick County politics. The annual dinner that the Democrats had was the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, which it still does. At that time, the various Democratic clubs would each send representatives to a meeting and they would plan the dinner, and so they called for a meeting at the Jeffersonian Club, and Galen, who was still president of Young Democrats, designated me and this guy named Gerald Daley, who was African-American, to go to the meeting. Not with any intention, but just that Gerald was somebody that Galen thought would be a good person to help plan the meeting. So we go to this meeting at the Jeffersonian Club, get a beer, sit down with all the other representatives from the other clubs, and have a meeting. When we got word back from the Jeffersonian Club that they thought it was inappropriate to allow an African-American to come in, I think what we decided to do then is that we were gonna join and then sponsor some African-Americans as members. So, I sponsored the membership of Sherman Mason, who happened to be at that time the president of the N.A.A.C.P. And maybe Lord Nickens—I think we sponsored Lord's name too—and you would think that they'd be smart enough down there to figure out who they were! Anyway, we're all at a meeting of the Young Democrats one night, and Sherman Mason comes in, and after the meeting he says, 'Let's go have a beer at my club.' We thought he was talking about the Black Elks Club, and he said, 'No, the Jeffersonian Club. I just got my membership in the mail.' So we went down to the Jeffersonian Club and sat down. And we sat. And we sat. And nobody would wait on us. Finally one of us went us went up to the bar and said, 'You know, we want to get a beer.' Somebody came over and said, 'We don't serve blacks in here.' And we said, 'Would you serve him if he was a member?' And they said, 'Well, he can't be a member.' And so Sherman whipped out his little membership card that had Phil Beard's name—Phil Beard was the president—signed by Phil Beard. I said, 'There's Phil Beard's signature on it, he's a member of the club. Now give us some beer.' And he said, 'No, we can't do it, we don't serve blacks.' So, then they call me back into the kitchen and Phil Beard was on the phone, and he said, 'What in the world are you all doing?' I said, 'We're just here to have a beer. What's the problem?' And he said, 'We don't allow black people in here.' And I said, 'Why not, Phil? What's the problem?' He said, 'Well, they break up the furniture.' And I said, 'Phil, if Sherman breaks any furniture, I'll be good for it. I'll pay for any furniture that he breaks. Just give us some beer.' Well, he wouldn't. Finally Sherman said we ought to leave, and by that time the police had been called." 

After more than three-and-a-half decades in the Frederick political arena, these guys are showing no signs of slowing down. Galen Clagett says he will run again when his term is up, though he's not yet sure for what. Ron Young is presently campaigning to win back his old seat at Frederick City Hall from current mayor Jennifer Dougherty, while Tom Slater has his sights set on one of the five alderman seats that will be up for grabs in November. 
      Regardless of where they wind up next, they will continue working to make a difference in a political climate that has made a sharp turn to the right in recent years. And, despite now being considered by some as part of Frederick's old political machinery, it does not seem at all appropriate to refer to these guys as "good 'ol boys." 

Written for Frederick Magazine, February 2005