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Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California REVEREND ROBERT CROMEY Minority Politics in San Francisco, 1964-1996 Interviews conducted by Martin Meeker, PhD in 2007 Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Robert Cromey, dated April 26, 2007. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Robert Cromey, Minority Politics in San Francisco, 1964-1996, conducted by Martin Meeker, PhD, 2007, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2007. v Table of Contents—ROBERT CROMEY Interview #1: February 12, 2007...............................................1 [Audio File 1]........................................................................1 [Audio File 2]........................................................................27 Interview #2: March 13, 2007...................................................59 [Audio File 3]........................................................................59 1 Interview #1: February 12, 2007 Begin Audio File 1 Cromey_Robert1_02-12-2007.wav 01-00:00:06 MEEKER: Okay, could you just say your name? 01-00:00:09 CROMEY: My name is Robert Cromey. 01-00:00:11 MEEKER: Just date of birth and where you were born. 01-00:00:15 CROMEY: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 16, 1931, 76 years ago. 01-00:00:22 MEEKER: Excellent. Good, although I need to put this on if I'm going to be heard. I think that you're all right, if you won't just maybe move it up a little bit on your lapel, and it's actually out of the video screen, so you can't even see it. [laughter] But it looks like that it's recording, I guess. Okay, as I was mentioning just when I was introducing this project, from the vantage point of 2007, when, say, the media talks about Protestantism in the United States, it seems to be much more from the vantage point of an evangelical, conservative point of view, even to the point of being called right-wing. But when you were first ordained in the 1950s, it seems that mainstream Protestantism historically was much more liberal then. Can you just comment on that? 01-00:01:24 CROMEY: Well, I think it's quite true that the battles on the sexual level in the Protestant denominations in the [19]40s and 50s were largely focused [break in tape]. Other Protestant denominations, most of the Jewish groups were all pro-birth control. That seemed like a very big thing, and I think there was a lot of unity behind that. And I was ordained in 1956, in New York City, and there was also a kind of anti-Catholicism that united Protestants, liberal Protestants, the fear being that Roman Catholics in New York City were very strong, very 2 pro-censorship, what you could read, what was on the movies, and that kind of thing. So there was a unity behind this censorship issue, and also the burgeoning, the beginning of the strong involvement on the concern of freedom for African-Americans. And I think that generally speaking, Protestants were behind that, except in the deep South, where some of the Southern Baptists and [others] were very conservative and didn't do much about the issue. I think they're okay about it now, but it was a long time for those Southern churches to do much. But in the North, and in the West, there was a strong liberal strain that united Protestants in general toward a liberal perspective on many things, because it was the end of World War II, and there was concern for peace, and then there was the anti-Communism craze. Again, I think generally speaking, in those days, the Protestants were pretty strongly against that kind of censorship, whether it was from the Church or from the state. 01-00:03:28 MEEKER: You know, it's interesting. I, too, think about, New York City, or in the East Coast, and the forces of what might historically be considered conservatism. I think of Will Hayes, of the Hayes Code, and he was Catholic, right? 01-00:03:44 CROMEY: I'm not sure of that, but I wouldn't be surprised. [laughter] 01-00:03:47 MEEKER: And then of course, Cardinal Spellman, who was rather notorious, particularly, as an anti-Communist. 01-00:03:55 CROMEY: He was very pro-military, pro-war, anything the government wanted to do was okay with him. 01-00:04:01 MEEKER: It was also a time, however, of kind of burgeoning ecumenic[ism], historically. And I'm particularly thinking of thinkers like Will Herberg, the Protestant-Catholic-Jew notion about these sort of three strains of Western 3 civilization that, again, come together in the United States. And it also seems, historically—and I don't know, maybe you agree or disagree—but the different strains of Protestantism seemed to have kind of common cause at this point in time. Did you feel that when you were in seminary? 01-00:04:39 CROMEY: Yes, there was a good deal of talk about the ecumenical movement and great concern about that. The Bishop here at that time, James Pike, had the Pike Blake proposal, which was a proposal to unify the Presbyterians, who—that was Pastor Dr. Blake and Bishop Pike—and they had a sermon at Grace Cathedral, a dialogue sermon where they talked about how the Church could move forward by being united in its activities. And I think there was a good deal of interest in that, and by and large, it failed, partly because individual clergy who run their churches, they don't, Presbyterians, want any Episcopalians fooling around with them, and the local Baptist church, they don't want any Presbyterians giving them advice. I think it got to be very parochial, and I think in many ways, it fell down in that area. I think the ideas were great, and people really thought about them, and there are still ecumenical institutes going around today, trying to do that. I just think of my own self getting together with the Council on Religion and the Homosexual— [that] was the thing that I did in my ministry, really in conjunction with other partisan groups, but day in and day out, we hardly ever spoke to each other. And recently, for instance, the Episcopalians and the Lutherans got together. Well, okay, so I can go celebrate Communion in a Lutheran church and the Lutheran minister, but again, it doesn't really work out very well on a practical basis. I think it's still a good idea, but I think it doesn't seem to work out day by day. 01-00:06:25 MEEKER: So you were still in New York, you moved to San Francisco in 1960s— 01-00:06:29 CROMEY: '62. 4 01-00:06:30 MEEKER: In '62. So in those, I guess, six years that you were a priest in New York, were there any ecumenical activities that you participated in? 01-00:06:42 CROMEY: Well, let me just back up one second about—I was born and raised in New York City, I went to New York University and General Seminary, all in Manhattan. So New York was really the basic part of my growing up until I moved to California in 1962, and there were many more, when I was a rector in an Episcopalian church in the Bronx, I used to meet all the time with the Presbyterian minister down the street, the Lutheran pastor, the rabbi. The Roman Catholics were pretty distant, they didn't come out and play very much. But it was, again, kind of informal, and we would do a few things together, but not really very much, so Thanksgiving joint services and things like that, mostly laziness, and then we all didn't have to run a service, but nobody came [laughter]. So we do one service when nobody came, so there was a New York City Council of Churches, I think it was called, and they were very strong and had a lot of activity to try to combat the censorship that was perceived and true.

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