Just five years ago, it would have been unthinkable, says Bill McCoy, the former head of the UNCC Urban Institute and a longtime authority on all things Charlotte. Yet last week, it happened. With relatively little fanfare, Charlotte Repertory Theatre bit the dust. Until recently, the 30-year-old professional theater company was an institution on the local arts scene that was once so carefully nurtured by the city’s corporate kingpins. Insiders know that the implications of its demise are huge. “Five years ago, I think. . .a Rolfe Neill or a Hugh McColl or an Ed Crutchfield or somebody would have said, ‘We can’t let this happen. We’re going to go raise some money and keep this thing going,'” said McCoy. “But nobody stepped up. It just shut its doors.”
Not too long ago, politicians knew that turning down an arts group’s request for funding, no matter how outlandish, no matter how badly managed its finances were, meant risking one’s political hide. Today, arts groups must grovel for funds.
That’s why the Rep’s demise is about a whole lot more than art. It’s about the titans, and the huge leadership vacuum they left behind.
The titans, as McCoy calls them, included the likes of former First Union CEO Ed Crutchfield, former Bank of American CEO Hugh McColl, former Observer Publisher Rolfe Neill and Duke Power CEO Bill Lee, to name a few.
They were men of huge stature who ran the city like a corporate subsidiary. Directly and indirectly, they and a list of a dozen or so others like them were responsible not just for corporate feats, but also for the fact that Charlotte is today compared to Atlanta, rather than Winston-Salem or Greensboro.
In just a few short years, they disappeared in a wave of retirements that left the Charlotte political scene rudderless by the beginning of the decade. Left in their wake was a whole generation of politicians the titans had supported because of their enthusiasm for playing follow the leader — a game that’s at best challenging when the leader quits and everyone else keeps playing.
“I think the business community and the community in general hasn’t really figured out yet how we are going to make up for the leadership deficit that has occurred with the retirement of the titans,” said McCoy.
For McCoy, Charlotte Rep’s demise is just one example of an increasingly disturbing trend.
“You get almost the same feeling about the school issues,” said McCoy. “You know there is no one of the stature of those people who can simply step out front and say that we have got to do something.”
At the same time, the political culture the titans left behind has turned malignant without them. For so long, the key tenet of the Charlotte Way was that we deal with our problems behind the scenes, never in public.
Until recently, those who pointed out the beginnings of cracks in the foundation — including yours truly — were treated like nimbuses too stupid to “get” the game, much less to play.
This system worked, and quite frankly made sense when we still had leaders capable of taking care of thorny issues behind carefully closed doors — or at all, for that matter. Unfortunately, we’ve still got the part where we deny the problems down cold. It’s the part where we deal with the problems that’s missing.
This is why, for so long, school system leaders like School Board Chairman Joe White and Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Superintendent Jim Pughsley have issued what seemed like increasingly bizarre proclamations that things are A-OK, even in the face of very clear public evidence that they aren’t. They’re still playing the game the Charlotte Way. It’s all they know.
The difference is that were the titans still around, Pughsley — who is clearly in over his head — would have suddenly been hit with a pressing desire to resign to spend more time with his family. All the right people would have thrown him one hell of a soiree on the way out, and proclaimed his administration another success in a long line of smashing educational endeavors. The Charlotte Observer would have canonized him by now with glowing pieces about the sheer wonder of his tenure and a superintendent search committee would be busy rigging the selection process to ensure that the next yes-man we hired had an actual clue.
Then, in the next election, bank-backed candidates with that trademark mix of moderation and ruthlessness would have begun cropping up in school board races, all bearing remarkably similar donor lists.
Instead there is deafening silence.
Somebody needs to break it soon, says McCoy, even though he also believes the era of the titans is pretty much gone for good. Even though “we’ll probably never again see the kind of powerful individual leaders like those four or five people. . . The business community has to figure out how it is going to be involved in a way that is probably different than it has been in the past,” said McCoy. “It would be nice if it developed around this [schools] issue.”
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2005.
