"You know," says Alan Solomont, "I've always believed there are two ways to change things." The 1970 Tufts graduate leans back in his chair. "You can change conditions that exist. Or" - he pauses, twirling a pencil in his right hand - "you can invest in people who can change things."
Throughout his multi-hyphenate career as an activist, community organizer, businessman, philanthropist and fundraiser, the self-described "political junkie" has maintained a commitment to bringing about social change through both approaches.
And he's always kept a clear mission in mind. "There's a wonderful inscription at the Kennedy Library that reads, 'This library is dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, and to all those who, through the art of politics, seek a new and better world,'" Solomont says. "And that, to me, has been the inspiration behind doing what I do."
Though Solomont's impact has extended far beyond the Hill - he founded one of the New England region's largest elder-care companies and raised more than $40 million as the National Finance Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 1997 - it was at Tufts that the Brookline, Mass. native first made his political mark.
"While I was here, the biggest political issue was when Lewis Hall was being built," Solomont says. He squints from behind his round, tortoiseshell glasses as he recalls the details: All of the construction workers hired by the University's contractor - as well as most members of Boston's construction unions at the time - were white men.
"I remember organizing around that issue, trying to raise people's consciousness about it [and communicate] that we had a responsibility as a university to be good citizens and to confront this issue of institutional racism," says Solomont, who, along with other concerned students, managed to halt construction on the dorm by demonstrating, leafleting, and knocking on doors.
"And," he says, "we paid a visit to Ballou Hall and sat in at the president's office." This particular tactic garnered Solomont his first brush with press coverage. "There was a picture on the front page of the [Record American, the Boston Herald's predecessor] of a bunch of students in the president's office," he says, starting to laugh. "There are a lot of African-American students, and then, you know, there's this white kid, in a cap, sitting on the president's desk, reading a newspaper."
The best-laid plans...
Had you asked the eighth-grade version of that cap-wearing kid where he thought he'd end up, the answer he would have given you without hesitation would have been totally different.
"I probably had my life's path mapped out much earlier than a youngster should: I was going to go to college and then to law school, and then be a lawyer - that was the plan," says Solomont, who grew up in a religious household in a predominantly Jewish, middle-class pocket of South Brookline.
"My dad was first-generation, hadn't gone to college, and I was the oldest of four brothers, so a lot of his aspirations fell on my shoulders," Solomont says. "He had a cousin who had gone to Harvard Law School, and to him, that was the ideal. So I was going to go to law school there to be a lawyer - that was the plan."
He smiles. "In fact, in eighth grade, we had to write autobiographies. I still have it - it sort of maps this out. But fortunately," he says, "it didn't go that way."
Instead, during his time at Tufts, Solomont developed dovetailing interests in urban studies and political activism.
"I fell under the spell of the dean of Jackson College at the time, Antonia Chayes," Solomont says. "She had worked for the anti-poverty agency in Boston, and she was teaching urban studies in the political science department. I just gobbled it up."
Solomont spent his senior year writing an honors thesis on the politics of citizen participation in community health planning. "It was all about the anti-poverty program and the growth of neighborhood health centers and citizen participation," he says. "I spent a lot of my time interviewing community leaders in Roxbury and Dorchester."
"I was here [at Tufts] from '66 to '70, so I had the benefit of being a college student at a very exciting time in general - and specifically, a very exciting time here," Solomont adds. "It was a time of great activism, you know, a lot of political engagement."
But it was also a time of political disillusionment. In 1968, Solomont, who was active in anti-war organizing, traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a page for the Massachusetts delegation. And when he talks about what went on both outside and inside the convention that year, Solomont's voice is equal parts angry and somber.
"I was on the floor of the convention hall the night [President Lyndon Johnson's Vice President] Hubert Humphrey was nominated over [anti-war Minnesota Senator] Gene McCarthy," Solomont says. "I remember vividly, as they passed out the 'Humphrey for President' placards and the balloons started to fall and the band was playing 'Happy Days Are Here Again,' in the back of the hall, TV monitors were showing news clips of my peers getting their heads beaten in [Chicago's] Grant Park."
Outside the convention that night, about 3,000 anti-war protesters sparred with the police, infuriated by Humphrey's nomination and the fact that the Democratic delegates had vetoed a proposed Vietnam Peace Plan. More than 300 protesters were injured.
After the convention adjourned that night, convention delegates traveled in buses to Grant Park, where they held a candlelight vigil. "I always thought it was not only for what happened in Grant Park, but for what happened on the floor of the convention," says Solomont. "Politically, I recall that experience as having witnessed the fracturing of the Democratic Party."
'I fell in love with taking care of old people'
For the next 25 years, his party had trouble winning the White House. But in his own endeavors, Solomont met with success. He won a prestigious Watson Fellowship, and after graduating from Tufts with a degree in political science and urban studies, he spent a year traveling in Europe, the Soviet Union, North Africa and Israel "to study universities as agents of social change."
That year, Solomont says, was "an incredibly liberating experience - I had enormous freedom to travel and experience new things." Grinning, he adds that it was also "the final nail in the coffin of my legal career."
Though he knew he "wanted to do something that would help change the country," Solomont's experience at the 1968 convention had soured him on electoral politics. So, having returned to Brookline, Solomont put his energy into change at the community rather than national level.
After linking up with a community-organizing collective, Solomont moved to Lowell, where he "spent the better part of the '70s as a community organizer."
"We believed that the way to change America was to go out into working-class communities and help organize folks around local issues. We believed if ordinary citizens became empowered and learned through that process that they could exercise control over their lives and their communities through politics, the direction of this country could be changed," Solomont says. So, along with the three other members of the collective, he organized against hospital expansion, fought for rent control and published a community newspaper.
One thing he wasn't doing? Making a living. "At some point, I needed a job," Solomont says. So he became an orderly at a nursing home. "I was making $2.32 an hour," he remembers.
In 1972, the nursing home's administration told their employees they wouldn't be getting raises because President Richard Nixon had frozen wages and prices to combat inflation. Solomont didn't take this lying down.
"I read the law, and it had an exemption for low-wage employees, so I got involved in an organizing campaign to unionize the nursing home," he says, clearly relishing reliving the fight. "I wound up getting fired, allegedly for smoking in the bathroom, but really, because I was making trouble.
"That experience taught me many things," he says. "One is the power of when people put their jobs on the line. I mean, it's one thing for middle-class kids to go out and protest the war - not that that was without some risk. But working with people who risked their livelihood by signing a union card was a powerful lesson for me.
"And, I fell in love with taking care of old people. So when I got fired, I decided to go to nursing school: if I became a nurse, I could support myself, and still do organizing."
Onward and upward
That's exactly what Solomont did, earning his second undergraduate degree from the University of Lowell. But when he got out in 1977, "the world was going in one direction and I was going in another," he says. "I fell into the business world, not at all by design."
Solomont ran a nursing home in North Andover for eight years. "I loved taking care of old people in a different way than I had when I was an orderly," he says. And soon, he had taken that "different way" to the next level: Solomont started the A.D.S. Group, which became one of the largest elder-care providers in the Northeast.
"It was a wonderful experience: I was an entrepreneur, and we got to experiment with the most innovative things to do in elder care," Solomont says. "It was also a platform that allowed me to do other things that I was interested in, like non-profit and political work."
When it came to fundraising, Solomont started small: "I started by selling $50 tickets to a fundraiser at the Red Tavern Inn in Methuen, Massachusetts for a friend of mine who was a state senator, Sharon Pollard," says Solomont. He went on to work on Michael Dukakis's successful governor's race and unsuccessful 1988 presidential race.
"Dukakis's fundraiser, Bob Farmer, became the head of fundraising for Bill Clinton, and in '92, he introduced me to the governor of Arkansas, who was running for president," Solomont says. "And of course, like many others, I fell in love with him."
Solomont worked on Clinton's 1992 campaign, and then, during Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, he served as the national chairman of the Democratic Business Council. The following year, he was asked to serve as the DNC's national finance chair.
"After the '96 election, there were many allegations about fundraising excesses during the campaign," Solomont says. "I was asked to be the finance chair because I was one of the few national fundraisers who wasn't terribly compromised by those allegations. I was asked to do it to clean up the mess from '96."
'The rats are bigger, too'
When asked what it was like to make the leap from local to national politics, Solomont pauses.
"Do you know the Nutcracker Ballet?" he asks. "Do you remember the scene where Clara wakes up in her living room..."
And everything is huge? "Yes," he nods emphatically. "Everything is the same; it's just much bigger. It's no different asking somebody for $50 than it is asking for $100,000, though you don't necessarily ask the same people."
But operating on a "vastly larger stage" had its challenges. "In the Nutcracker, the Christmas tree and all the trinkets are much bigger, but the rats are much bigger, too," Solomont says wryly. "I rode a wave in politics where fundraising became increasingly important, and people like me became much more important than maybe we should have been.
"I went from being a local political fundraiser and activist to being Bill Clinton and Al Gore's chief fundraiser, and that was very exciting. It gave me a front-row seat on the American presidency, which is why I'm now teaching about it." (See box for info on Solomont's seminar on the Clinton presidency)
"I got to see the full majesty of the presidency, [but] I also got to see the underbelly of American politics," he says. "Like everything else, there are parts of our democracy that are wonderful, and there are parts that aren't working as well as we'd like. You can't get deeply involved without seeing both sides."
The good, he says, was very, very good: "I remember being on the White House lawn when the national service legislation was signed, creating AmeriCorps," Solomont says. "I went with President Clinton in '94 to Jordan and Israel for the signing of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. There were some incredibly wonderful, inspiring, and exciting moments, and it was an experience that I was really lucky to have."
But it was also a lonely experience. "I had two young daughters, and I was commuting to Washington," says Solomont, whose wife, Susan, graduated from Tufts with a master's of education in 1981. "I remember tucking one of my daughters into bed one night and saying, 'I'll be away tomorrow.' She said, 'Where are you going to be?' I said, 'The White House' - which for me was really exciting - and she said, 'I hate the White House.'"
"I realized," Solomont says, "that as much fun as I was having and as much good as I thought I was doing, it was taking me away from my family. I'm basically a local guy. I still do things nationally: I was active in the Kerry campaign, and probably would have taken a job in the Kerry administration. But I like being home."
What's now, and what's next
Solomont is not one to rest on his laurels: for him, being at home doesn't mean relaxing at home.
"I'm focused on 2006," he says. "You know, we haven't elected a Democratic governor in Massachusetts in 20 years." And he has a theory as to why: "We have a very late primary: we tend to beat each other up for 18 months, and then for eight weeks we run against the Republicans, so whoever wins the primary is broke, exhausted and has no strategy to win in the general election."
"I believe we need to get behind the strongest Democratic candidate early, so I've been very active with the Tom Reilly campaign as his finance chair," Solomont says.
He's also optimistic about the Democratic party's chances in the 2006 midterm elections. "I think the Democrats have a very good chance of doing well in the midterm elections, particularly in the House," he says. "One of the people I most admire is [House Democratic Leader] Nancy Pelosi. If the Democrats win control of the House, Nancy Pelosi will be the first woman Speaker in our history, and that would be very exciting."
2008 is on Solomont's mind as well. "The Kerry campaign won't have been the last presidential campaign I'm involved in," he says. After all, he says solemnly, "politics has been in my blood since the '60s."
Then he grins. "Harry Truman said the highest office in the land is that of citizen. That's what I am, a citizen like everyone else," says the man who dug the Democratic party out of millions of dollars of debt. "I got a great education at Tufts, though I'm probably not smart enough to get into Tufts now! I have worked hard at trying to make a difference, but at the end of the day, everyone can do this."
"I believe in the power of politics to do good things," he adds. "This is our democracy; this is something everyone can participate in."
