A Kind of Genius

Imagine that you’re a graduate student at Columbia Teachers College in 1953 majoring in American literature. You’ve advanced an unconventional interpretation of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s saga of poor and oppressed migrants during the Great Depression. In contrast to a decade’s worth of literary critics, you’ve embraced the book’s undervalued but lyrical inner chapters—those metaphorical ruminations on earth-gouging tractors and on devastating drought and especially the one about the indomitable land turtle’s precarious crossing of a treacherous Dust Bowl highway—chapters that endow with epic dimensions and greater purpose a novel that you’ve just audaciously claimed as your personal manifesto. The professor’s sole critique of your hand-written paper dismissively focuses on form rather than content: “Lines not parallel to top edge of paper.”

The young student was disappointed by his professor’s criticism, but not discouraged. He sought a second opinion directly from the source: John Steinbeck himself. He wasn’t just seeking vindication when he wrote to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, although that would have been sweet. Above all, Herbert Sturz, the tenacious son of a New Jersey saloonkeeper, was constitutionally unable to accept dogma, from an English professor or any other so-called expert, and he was acutely curious about getting to the bottom of any intellectual argument. When Steinbeck answered Sturz, he did so in a poignant essay handwritten on a yellow legal pad, like the original 200,000-word manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath itself fourteen years ealier.

“You say the inner chapters were counterpoint and so they were—that they were pace changes and they were that, too, but the basic purpose was to hit the reader below the belt,” John Steinbeck wrote. “You are the first critical person who seems to have suspected that they had a purpose.”

Critics, Steinbeck continued, have a curious view of writing, an egomaniacal image of authors groping their way up the staircase of immortality. Writing, by itself, without any illusions of imperishability, is tough enough. “Most good writers I know,” Steinbeck concluded, “have no time for immortality.”

Herb Sturz embraced the great novelist’s response as inspiration, as a personal invitation to a lifelong odyssey through the labyrinthine corridors of power and as an opportunity to ameliorate poverty and injustice. It would inspire him not only to write but also to give voice, as Steinbeck had, to the voiceless, to couple the journalist’s probing curiosity and irreverence with the novelist’s utopian vision. Unlike Steinbeck, however, Sturz would help fashion happier endings than otherwise might have been.

“He was,” Sturz says of Steinbeck, “the first person to take me seriously,” and so, “I took myself a little more seriously, gained some self-confidence.”

Throughout his life, Herb Sturz has been taken seriously by commissioners, judges, mayors, presidents, publishers, philanthropists, scientists, by individuals addicted to drugs and alcohol, crime victims, convicts, bankers, builders and homeless people. Many of the people whose lives Sturz has altered were those with no grasp on power. Or they were people with power they didn’t know they had.

Largely as a supplicant seeking financial and political support, Sturz tinkered with, tweaked and finally helped revolutionize bail and other aspects of the criminal justice system, from the outside. As an innovator from inside, he turned government into a vehicle for reform. And, later, he returned to the private sector, first as a critic, then in the trenches again and finally in his most uncharacteristic role, as a benefactor, working for one of the richest men in the world. In every incarnation, he hewed to the same values, and was driven by the same strategy—to lead himself and lure others through imagination.

Most people have never heard of Herb Sturz, even though their lives have likely been touched in some way by his take on society’s toughest problems. For more than a half century, Sturz has been largely an unsung hero, a shrewd social engineer and social entrepreneur without a rigid ideological agenda. Armed instead with mastery of process and human nature, of means and motive, of intellect and emotional intelligence, Sturz has profoundly altered the public perception of fundamental issues, has improved the way things get done and made government work more smoothly. As if armed with a divining rod, he could find funding streams in the public and private sectors and combine them to power his visions. And he could intuitively discover and nurture hidden talents that other people rarely knew they had.

As he fostered change, the breadth of the challenges Sturz has tackled, the power of his ideas to reorder the nation’s agenda, the scope of his ability to replicate solutions across the United States and in countries as diverse as Chile, South Africa, Britain and Russia, are virtually without parallel. Peter Goldmark Jr., a former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has called Sturz “the best social engineer in America.”

Gara LaMarche, the president of the Atlantic Philanthropies, sees Sturz as the archetypal social entrepreneur and as living proof that “public policy is a realm where you can have a certain creativity, almost genius.”

Aryeh Neier, the president of George Soros’s Open Society Institute, says Sturz has made “an enormous difference assisting marginalized people.”

George Soros, the financier and global philanthropist, has attributed Sturz’s effectiveness to his ability to work with, rather than against, any given system. As Soros puts it, “People with ideas tend to be worn down. He makes the system achieve complete objectives.”

That’s because ideas, to Sturz, are only the beginning. He would never isolate himself in an ivory tower. The great vice of academicism, the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “is that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.”

One of Sturz’s underlying principles, according to Jack Rosenthal of the New York Times, one of his oldest friends and colleagues, is “using nonprofit, private and even governmental pilot programs and experiments to prove out remedies for wrongs—and using the proof to achieve government funding at scale.”

“Some people start with the position that government doesn’t work because they don’t want it to work,” Sturz says. “I had nine years in government. You can do an enormous amount. But to effect real change, why would you expect government to do it alone?”

Sturz’s record is laudable not solely on the basis of accomplishment, but also given the constraints of the times in which he achieved success. Describing the “almost languid” decade of the 1950s, David Halberstam wrote: “As younger people and segments of society who did not believe they had a fair share became empowered, pressure inevitably began to build against the entrenched political and social hierarchy. . . . One did not lightly challenge a system that seemed, on the whole, to be working so well.” Sturz challenged that system and not lightly. Not head first, perhaps, but strategically. And, considering the political and temperamental and ideological impediments aligned against him, by design or just because that was the way things were and always had been, the results he achieved are all the more astonishing. Even by the beginning of the 1960s, it was still tough to persuade policy makers, to say nothing of their constituents, that many Americans were being denied justice only because they were poor or that alcoholics deserved to be treated as victims not criminals. Those policy makers might have known their own jobs, to one degree or another, but few of them understood the system. Some wouldn’t even talk to one another. Sturz remembers Frank Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney in the 1960s, rarely meeting with judges and defense lawyers because he considered such contact “professionally inappropriate.”

It was also tough for people to admit that some of the nostrums that seemed so noble when they were embraced early on never lived up to their promise. Sturz succeeded, in part, because he recoiled at the facile and reflexive pat responses that doomed so many other good intentions. In a biting obituary for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Brookings Institution wrote, “Taking refuge in pat, simple answers—decentralize, regulate, coordinate, spend more, spend less—seems unlikely to lead to a workable strategy.”

And if it was one thing to get government grants in the heady early years of the Great Society when the reform credo buzzed through the nation, it was quite another barely a few years later, by which point reformers’ disillusionment was captured by a wry poster in a welfare office that instructed: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Or, two decades later, when Sturz was faced with wringing support for social programs from the Reagan administration, whose goal was to shrink the government and whose hard-heartedness in achieving that agenda seemed best summed up by the Department of Agriculture’s reclassification of ketchup as a vegetable. Or, during the Clinton years, persuading policy makers that it cost money to move people from welfare to work but that the results were attainable and measurable, and again during the Bush administration when he successfully leveraged private dollars to win government investment in an after-school program. Sturz fought on, regardless, tailoring his strategy, but not his principles.

As his long-time friend Robert Hood sees it, Sturz never fails to “fight the good fight even when nobody is watching.”

Because not many people were watching and because Sturz typically preferred it that way, “he is well known in certain elite circles, but he has no public profile,” says Gara LaMarche. “Herb, in that sense, has a very quiet impact on people. Virtually all the beneficiaries of his vision haven’t heard of Herb Sturz and probably never will.”

But it is perhaps Sturz’s best attribute that he is, as a friend, Jay L. Kriegel, who first recruited him to John V. Lindsay’s mayoral team of outsiders, points out, willing to take risks on projects with little chance of return. Kriegel may have summed it up best at Sturz’s seventy-fifth birthday celebration in 2006. “Herb,” he said, “is not afraid to fail.”

And fail he did, sometimes, just because the challenge he faced demanded that somebody do something—almost anything—and because no one else was brash enough to try. “Part of me thinks I can do it,” Sturz says. “The other part thinks the only real failure is not trying.”

In many arenas, Sturz has not only succeeded but succeeded wildly, igniting a nationwide reformation of costly and unjust bail practices, transforming a faceless court system into one that cared not merely about processing people but also about the victims of crime, sparking a physical and spiritual renaissance of Times Square, creating a pioneering community court and serving citizens without any real clout or constituency.

Gara LaMarche calls him “the good Robert Moses,” the benignant twin of the storied Power Broker, one who “dreamed projects up and willed them into being”—without any of Moses’s institutional muscle or unbridled obsessions, or his unforgiving single-mindedness. “He is not a manager,” LaMarche says. “He is not a fundraiser.”

In retelling the history of The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro a decade ago wrote that “to really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless.” That is what Herb Sturz is all about. His is not a story about the ancillary impact of power on the powerless. It is about empowering the powerless—and, more often than not, by working with government rather than, as Moses did, flaunting the power liberally invested in him by government.

The essential vehicle of Herb Sturz’s intellectual ferment is the Vera Institute. At thirty, Sturz became its first executive director. By the time Vera celebrated its forty-fifth anniversary in 2006, its progeny evoked a biblical family tree. A bail project begat a summons project, which begat the Bowery Project and Project Renewal. Vera pioneered the first ambulatory methadone program in the nation for die-hard drug addicts and, directly or indirectly, inspired the Addiction Research Treatment Corporation, the Victim Service Agency (which became Victim Services and then Safe Horizon), the Legal Action Center, Mobilization for Youth Legal Services, Pioneer Messenger Corporation, Wildcat Service Corporation, the Neighborhood Youth Diversion Corporation, the Manhattan Court Employment Project, La Bodega de la Familia, the Harlem Defender Service, the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES) and the Center for Employment Opportunities—and Sturz himself launched the City Volunteer Corps, the Midtown Community Court, Red Hook Community Justice Center, the Center for Court Innovation, The After-School Corporation and the Center for New York City Neighborhoods.

“They are not Vera’s children,” Sturz’s friend Jack Rosenthal says. “They’re Herb’s children.”