The Corn Latitudes

Paul Douglas was a professor of economics who, like Charles Merriam, Douglas was introduced to politics via work for a reform commission when in 1929 Douglas headed an investigation of utilities magnate Samuel Insull, that led to Insull's downfall. in 1939 Douglas became a Democratic Hyde Park alderman with the backing of the Kelly machine, then turned around a bit the hand that fed him in the council. After a failed the U.S. Senate race in 1942 and a distinguished service in the Marines in the Pacific (going in as a private, he left as a lieutenant colonel), Douglas In 1948, he ran for the U.S. Senate again and won.

 

Paul Douglas mentored a new generation of reformers. One of his economics students, for instance, was Leon Despres. Despres was a 20-year Fifth Ward alderman and bete noir of Richard J. Daley. Admirers called him “the conscience of the Chicago City Council.” For his dedication to the standard progressive issues—civic improvements, education, ethics, and good government. He was raised by Hyde Park liberals—he studied economics under Douglas, and When Hyde Park's alderman, Robert Merriam, ran for mayor in 1955, Despres served as chairman of the committee to find an independent replacement. Despres has quoted the Bible, Shakespeare, John Donne, St. Thomas Aquinas, Milton, and Emerson in Council debate. He also undertook quixotic challenges such as ordinances that require public disclosure of city employees' outside income—it would be hard to say which habit struck his fellow council members as odder.

 

As a group, Hyde Park politicians backed good government of a generally progressive sort, based on disinterested administrators and professionally trained staff implementing policies based on solid research rather than grubby political tradeoffs. All believed that corrupt city administrations could only be changed from the inside. Their stubbornness and integrity are admirable, but they achieved little, at least in the city council. Like most academics they vastly overestimated the power of facts and reason to sway people who did not have chalk on the lapels. The Hyde Parkers frequently faced 49-to-1 defeats in their respective city councils. When they were allowed the occasional win, it was to reform what didn’t matter—mostly symbolic gestures such as creation of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks (which no one listened to) and Chicago's fair housing ordinance (which no one enforced). But if they seldom actually reformed anything, their trying helped keep reform in the mind of the voters as an issue, if not as a possibility.

 

Judged by energy, commitment, and innovation, these reforms efforts are much to the university’s credit. Judged by extent to which Chicago was actually changed, well, improved the university reputation more than the city. Referring to novelist Robert Herrick, who was member of the Chicago English faculty and such of Herrick’s colleagues as the poet William Vaughn Moody and Thorstein Veblen, critic Robert Bray has noted:

 

Their traditional role in society was to act as efficacious moral agents, as sorters-out and patchers-up of the social mechanism. But what if nobody seemed to respect such work? The professions were either being ignored by the society at large or, what was worse, even being subverted by the new marching tunes of the Philistines.

 

And in no city did the Philistine band play louder than Chicago.

 

Resort to the Law

 

There is at the moment no reform faction in City Hall, no prospect of a new party or even a winning faction of an existing party that is devoted to reform. After more than a century of seeking to change government by changing the rules through electoral action, have the goo-goos given up?

 

Perhaps. The failure of reform movements to achieve lasting changes seems to have led much of the public to a new understanding: If you can’t stop them from stealing, at least stop them from enjoying it. The result, as Paul Merriner has written, is that the waves of cleanups of the most recent half century owe not to the demands of outraged publics nor the fulminations of clout-heavy civic groups but to the diligent work of law enforcement professionals and private attorneys suing public officials.

 

Reform used to mean throwing the bums out. Now it means throwing the bums into jail. It is widely said—sometimes in admiration, sometimes in disappointment—that the only real reformers left in Chicago are U.S. Attorneys. The former are more likely to change the system, but the latter are better able to throw people in jail, which is as much as most people expect.

 

There are several reasons for the shift. Faith that reform might be efficacious is weak. And while it is often in the interests of state and federal prosecutors to pursue corruption—especially if the miscreants are members of an opposing party--fewer and fewer voters see it in their interest to vote, much less to organize the like-minded.

 

The resort to the courts was not exactly new. Chicago politicians had always used the courts as a reform tool—to “reform” the other party out of office. Republicans state and federal attorneys in particular go hunting in Cook County the same reason that deer hunters go to Pike County—because that’s were the trophy bucks are to be found in numbers. The conviction of big time Chicago pol is the crowning achievement of a professional career for a prosecutor. More than one has used such cases to catapult himself into politics. Republican Dwight Green appointed in 1926 as special attorney for the federal Bureau of Internal Revenue and later a special assistant on income tax matters to the state’s northern district attorney. It was Green who nailed Al Capone and other mobsters for income tax evasion after many attempts to jail them on more conventional charges had failed. Now a public figure, Green was elected to two terms in Springfield as governor in the 1940s.

 

James R. Thompson was a young federal prosecutor who specialized in bringing good cases against bad public employees—white cops who beat up black kids, city aldermen and a former Cook County clerk on the take, even a former governor tainted by a race track stock deal. Like Green, Thompson became a name, and in 1976 he was elected to the first of his many terms as governor of Illinois.

 

Nothing puts the fear of god into a Chicago pol like an honest judge. If Richard J. Daley “stole the election of 1960 for JFK, he didn’t do it to put JFK into office so much as to keep Ben Adamowski out of it; Adamowski was the apostate Democrat and Daley foe, now nominally a Republican, who had been elected Cook County State’s Attorney in November 1956. He had spent next four years making Daley miserable, with successful prosecutions of illegal syndicate gambling dens corruption in the circuit courts, and theft rings run by—not just tolerated by—Chicago police officers, and he was running for re-election in 1960.

 

Beginning in the 1970s, federal prosecutors have slammed the cash drawer onto the fingers of dozens of local judges, attorneys, aldermen, and contractors. the histories of the era will be organized not around the campaigns of prestige panels of the great and the good, citizen as in the past but of federal search and destroy missions such as "Operation Silver Shovel" (which targeted aldermen bribed to allow illegal construction-debris dumping), "Operation Haunted Hall" (target: ghost payrollers), "Operation Incubator" (which targeted bribery schemes involving aldermen and other city officials and businessmen) and "Operation Greylord" (judges bribed to fix robbery and drunk-driving cases). Since 1972, fifteen aldermen alone have been convicted on federal corruption charges, mostly some form of bribery, extortion, mail fraud or income tax evasion. (In his history of corruption, James Merriner notes that so many former Chicago officials—four alderman, a water reclamation commissioner, and a state representative) were doing time simultaneously at one Wisconsin federal prison that whenever one passed the others in a hall, they jokingly cried out, “quorum call!”)

 

The methods of reformers, especially reformers in the cloak of prosecutors, tend toward impurity, much as those of corrupt politicians do. Wealthy businessmen employed extralegal means to ease the scourge of 1920s gangsterism; the undercover federal corruption investigation known as Operation Silver Shovel was itself a scam whose methods would have been open to question had not been done by people with badges.

 

 

The most significant of the lawsuits attacking corruption resulted in the so-called Shakman decrees. In 1969, an independent candidate for delegate to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention named Michael Shakman sued the Democrats’ county organization, arguing that the patronage support for Machine candidates gave them an unconstitutional advantage. A series of negotiated settlements, court rulings, and finally, in 1983, a court order and a series of consent decrees based on it banned taking politics into account in hiring public employees for non-policy positions.

 

The Shakman decrees have indeed dramatically reduced the patronage power of the party organization at City Hall. The senior Daley is thought to have controlled some 35,000-40,000 patronage jobs, his son directly controls only two or three thousand. That has diminished the latter’s power less than one might think. Political clout mattered to past mayors because mayor had so little actual statutory authority under Chicago’s governance charter. Beginning with Daley I, power gradually been concentrated in the mayor who determines who runs what through his appointive power and, through his power over the budget process, determines who gets money for which projects. He also  staffs the extensive array of agencies that are under his administrative as well as his political control.

 

Alas, the deterrence effect of imprisonment to deter future wrong-doers is proved weak. As the new century dawned on Chicago, it shone light on some old habits. Federal investigators found massive patronage hiring scheme in city hall, millions of dollars of waste and wrongdoing, and misuse of the city's affirmative-action contracting program. Alderman Mathias “Paddy” Bauler’s famous remark ought to be amended. It is not that Chicago ain’t ready for reform, it’s that Chicago has never been ready for permanent reform.

 

Expanding Democracy

 

A major thrust of progressive-era government reform was to expand democracy, either by permitting more citizens to vote, or to expand the range of issues and people they could vote on, or both. The result, it was hoped, would be to restore to the People the powers over their own affairs that had been misused by their elected surrogates.

 

In the mid-1800s, for example, many city offices were appointed by the City Council, including city clerks and treasurers, city attorneys, and city marshals; reformers pushed for such positions to be made elective, to shift some of the power from very corrupt aldermen to the slightly less corruptible people. Tax assessors, justices of the peace, even police constables were also elected.

 

But democracy was at war with another progressive principle, efficiency. By World War I, Chicagoland voters were spending as much to elect their city officials as they used to spend bribing them. The ballot in the Chicago general election in 1912 was more than three feet long; in the next general election voters were asked to choose or help choose more than 300 people for sundry offices. The inevitable result of this surfeit of democracy was anti-democratic; voters, if they voted at all, voted a party ticket, or for whichever name was most familiar to them from billboards and banners. The voters also proved not much better at selecting office-holders than the aldermen, so Democracy was saved for speeches. Today all city officials are appointive save for the mayor, clerk, and treasurer.

 

Although recent mayors—well, those named Daley anyway—have done much to centralize power in the mayor’s office, the formal structure of governance in the city is cumbersome, what with 50 wards, separate bodies dealing with parks and water, regional special purpose governments dealing with planning and sewers, not to mention overlapping county and township governments. Facing so many elections for so many jobs has left the voting public confused and ultimately numb. That suits the politicians just fine, since it is when turnout is low that a well-organized campaign can have maximum impact. A system set up in part to ensure that power resides in the hands of the people rather than the politicians has, perversely, had just the opposite effect.

 

This is a familiar cycle by now in Chicago. The demand is made to let the people select officials after the politicians have proven inept or corrupt, only for reformers to call for their being made appointive after the people have proven themselves indifferent or uninformed. Elected local school councils were set up in 1989, for example, after Chicago public school parents lost faith in the ability of the school board downtown to run neighborhood schools.

 

Which contests ought to be settled by voters remains an issue in Illinois to this day. Over the last 200 years the trend has been toward broadening the participation in nominating candidates, taking control away from the few and giving it to millions. Every version of the nominating process—from the caucus method use in the early 1800s to party conventions of delegates elected at the precinct level by party members to the direct primary in which party members themselves elected nominees—was at first hailed as a reform that expanded democracy, only to later be damned as a tool of the bosses and the special interests.

 

Consider the direct primary. Choosing candidates in Illinois in the latter 1800s and early 1900s was often less a matter of fidelity to party platforms or electability than of placating factions in the form of a “federal crowd,” a “statehouse crowd,” and a bewildering array of mini-machines in Chicago based on ward organizations, such as the William Lorimer, a Chicago manipulator who for years was the “evil genius of Illinois Republicanism.”

 

In 1904 to pick one famous example, patronage allies Richard Yates (Downstate) and Lorimer backed opposing candidates; the Republican delegates meeting in Springfield had to poll themselves seventy-nine times before compromise candidate Charles Deneen was able to—or perhaps allowed to—prevail. Disgust with this sort of political vaudeville incited the public to approve an advisory referendum later that year that called for an end to the convention nomination system.

 

Illinois was late in adopting direct primary elections—not, as most assume because of opposition from the political bosses (although they were opposed) but because of repeated objections by the courts. Gov. Charles Deneen helped pass three primary laws between 1905 and 1908 that were all ruled unconstitutional; a law that passed legal muster was not put onto the books until 1910.

 

The direct primary approved that year certainly seemed an improvement. Rather than few party leaders, choice of each party’s candidates in Illinois was made by potentially millions. Did the direct primary fulfill the hopes of reformers? Historian Donald Tingley has written that the pri­maries increased the number of candidates and improved the chances of independents. Certainly, the direct primary made possible a number of challenges to boss rule in Chicago, most recently when independents beat regular party candidates in the black wards in the civil rights years.

 

Whether they have materially improved the level of public administration in Illinois, or the faithfulness with which elected representatives reflect the public will, is a harder question to answer. Eroding the power of the parties has not invigorated democracy, at least judging from the low levels of voter participation in primaries. And the shift from party-leader-nominated to party-member-nominated candidates has also arguably made Illinois politics more strident, as the system favors candidates that appeal to the ideologically committed party members who tend to dominate the turnout in primaries.

 

The low voter turnout in Illinois primaries may not reflect a poor appetite for politics, but a keen appetite for privacy. The state’s direct primary has been from the start a closed primary, meaning voting for party nominees is closed to people who are not members of the party. In Illinois, you become a member of the party on election day by openly declaring your membership, a declaration that becomes part of the public record.

 

The closed primary’s many critics insist that by identifying themselves as Democrat or Republican, voters leave themselves vulnerable to political retribution and discrimination in the awarding of public contracts. At a minimum, betraying one’s personal party preference offends many Illinoisans’ more evolved modern sense of privacy.

 

For more than 30 years, reformers sought to give Illinois an open primary that does not oblige voters in nominating elections to declare their party, or at least does not require that such declarations be public. Opinion polls consistently suggest that overwhelming majorities of Illinoisans who say they would prefer it, but reformers have to date achieved only minor procedural changes, mainly because the state’s major political parties benefit from the existing system. The parties also raise a knotty question of principle: Are primaries meant to express the people’s will or the parties’ wills?

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In addition to lacking an open primary, the State of Illinois never adopted measures for direct democracy as the initiative, referendum, and recall of elected officials. Illinois is not Wisconsin, and the larger public, perhaps wisely, resisted taking the power to make laws to themselves. If things went wrong?—which, this being Illinois, they certainly would—who would they have to blame?

 

Enlarging the Franchise 

 

It remains a matter of wonder to younger Illinoisans that the right of women to fully participate in their own government by the vote is no more ancient an innovation than the automobile or the radio. As recently as 1919 the law still classed females with imbeciles, paupers, and felons on the official list of citizens who were not permitted to cast ballots. Historian Ernest Bogart notes that denial of the vote to whole classes of citizen, such as women, was justified by white males on grounds that the interests of those who did not have the vote were protected by those who did. To which a great many women said, like hell they were.

 

To some, the problem of poor government could be traced to flaws in the democratic system itself. Women in particular insisted that the problem was not that government was inefficient or misdirected but that—or rather that both were caused by—the fact that the “the people” as a political category was not encompassing enough. women’s votes in particular were expected to doom the liquor industry, support welfare protections for mothers and children, and, in their more extravagant fantasies, bring about peace.

 

Before they could elevate the world, however, women had first to elevate themselves to the status of full citizens. Campaigns to extend suffrage to women aimed to change that, so that they might take full part in running their city, state, and nation.

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The modern movement to grant women the vote was a thing of complex parts. Some saw it as a civil rights issue. In the 1860s, for example, many women argued that the U.S. had ended one form of slavery it was time to end another—the slavery in which men held women by denying them equal protection of the laws.

 

Others saw women’s suffrage as a social reform movement, a way to wrest control from the men who ran things so poorly. Social reformers as Mary E. McDowell and the Hull house women backed suffrage. So did women of privilege—some eagerly socially enlightened upper- and upper-middle classes such as Louise deKoven Bowen and Ruth Hanna McCormick, who were among the women who formed the pro-suffrage Woman’s City Club of Chicago in 1910) and some more reluctantly, as did the more conservative Chicago Woman’s Club.

 

However, “reform” is in the eye of the beholder. Both the educated, well-to-do, nearly all white middle- and upper-class women wanted change. So did the mostly immigrant women of the swelling working class. (It was a natural alliance resulting from an unnatural political situation; Chicago women for decades found themselves in much the same political position as people outside the social mainstream.) The problem was that these factions did not want to change the same things.

 

If it is hard now to imagine how controversial women’s suffrage was in its day, it is even harder to appreciate how controversial it was among women. There was an organized anti-suffragism movement among Chicago women. Some of them believed that women belonged in home and church and should stay there. Others worried that empowering women would free of males of their traditional obligations as protectors and protectors—to which proponents replied that the world in which that tradition evolved had been destroyed by urbanization and industrialization.

 

Many ethnic and working-class women thought suffrage was a side issue; they had many more pressing concerns. The Women’s Trade Union League did not endorse women’s suffrage until 1907, when possibilities of alliance with middle-class activists suggested themselves after the latter opted to join in a parade to protest the arrest of the then-leader of the International Workers of the World. Such alliances never lasted long, falling victim to disparate social agendas and some ham-handed politics by the middle-class faction, such as doing business with newspapers that the women’s unions had blackballed for unfair labor practices.

 

The vote was won in the end, of course, thanks mainly to old-fashioned grassroots political organizing. Suffragists in Illinois was doomed to lives of constant travel and public speaking (essential in a day before mass electronic media) and increasingly sophisticated lobbying. They were not above resorting to publicity stunts in the attempt to  swing opinion their way.

 

Under pressure, a series of hurdles fell, one by one, the smallest first. Courts had ruled that allowing women to help select leaders specified in state and federal constitutions that did not themselves authorize the female franchise violated those compacts, but legislators proved willing to extend it in other races. In 1891 the Illinois legislature passed a school suffrage bill allowing women to vote in school elections, a measure passed in part because it was seen even by male lawmakers as consistent with women’s traditional roles as protectors of children.

 

The right to vote in all kinds of elections was not feasible politically in Illinois until after 1910. A bill to allow women in Illinois to vote for Presidential electors and for all local offices not specified in the Illinois Constitution became law in 1913; that made Illinois the first state east of the Mississippi to grant women the right to vote for President, an opportunity seized upon by a reported quarter million women in Chicago alone.

 

Women still could not vote for officers of arguably more importance to their day to day lives, such as state representative, Congressman, or governor. Full access to the polls had to wait until 1919, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution finally was passed. Illinois became the first state to approve this amendment, thanks in no small part to the work of Chicagoland women.

  

The extension of the franchise was sometimes seen as reform in itself—a right thing to do—and a tool of reform. Women in Chicagoland became a constituency for reform in whatever contests they were allowed to participate in. In 1915, the 232,000 women voting did so in large numbers for good government candidates and against saloons, for school reform and better public health.

 

Women legislators tended to be reformers. Lottie O’Neill devoted her 26-year career House career to a maternalist agenda that called for better deals for crippled and foster children, widows, reform of schools finding, the eight-hour day, allowing women to serve on juries, bans on the firing of female school teachers because of pregnancy, etc. Bernice Van der Vries, elected from the Progressive bastion of Winnetka, went on to serve ten consecutive terms in Springfield beginning in the 1930s, during which time she advocate of modernizing notions as city manager government and enlightened mental health laws.

 

Influential from the start, women’s input at the polls was occasionally decisive. In 1914 the indefatigable Ida Wells and the Alpha Suffrage Club supported a black independent in­stead of the regular machine candidate for alderman. On his behalf they canvassed the black wards block by block and registered three thousand new voters, who nearly put the challenger in office. Savvy party regulars struck a bargain with Wells’ group—the women’s support for the party in return for the party’s pledge to slate an African American for the post in the next election. Historian Maureen Flanagan thus concludes that it was the women of the 2d Ward that enable Oscar De Priest to become, in 1915, Chicago’s first black alderman.

 

In 1894 Lucy Flower was elected a trustees of the University of Illinois—consistent with the popular view of the time that education was the one sphere of public life in which women, as teachers and mothers, had a legitimate claim to attention. Flower thus became the first woman elected to a statewide office in Illinois. In 1922, Lottie O’Neill, the Du Page County Republican who was the first women elected to the Illinois House.

 

In spite of such successes, the results never matched suffragists hopes’ that women in voting booth would transform politics or women’s lives. Once the thrill of voting had faded—and women realized how little influence any voter had over politics in Chicago and Illinois—their zeal faded. In Chicago in 1894 30,000 women registered for school board elections (24,000 of whom voted); by 1909, one race saw fewer than 700 register.

 

Chicagoland women remained scarce in the Illinois General Assembly. In the 1930s only two members were female. No woman was elected to the Chicago City Council until 1971, when Marylou Hedlund and Anna Langford secured seats, and Jane Byrne (1979–1983) is the only woman ever elected mayor.

 

Historian Ernest Bogart reported that the relative unimportance of local offices, and the parties’ indifference to getting out the female vote were partly to blame. (Sexism cannot be wholly dismissed as cause for women being shunned, but their own political behavior did not recommend them to the bosses, since women tended to vote for candidate rather than party.) Female turnout might have been better in those years if women voters been able to vote for women candidates, but they were very rarely in the ballot. Largely because most male voters disdained to vote for women candidates, neither major political party slated females for even local offices. However, voting for and running as elected officials are only two of many ways women affect public life of course. Women did grunt work for the parties and cause organizations and helped organize labor unions. Thus did “women’s issues” succeed more often than women candidates did.

 

Vote Early and Vote Often

 

Of course, Chicago is not famous for efforts to expand democracy, but for efforts to restrict it. The surest way for Party A to get more votes than Party B is to prevent Party B’s supporters from casting a ballot. Chicago’s political parties were adept at keeping opponents’ voters off the voting rolls and swelling their own by recruiting voters from the ranks of the transient, even the deceased. The last practice was made possible by official failure to clean the voter rolls of the dead; Chicago’s enthusiasm for politics is such (goes an old joke) that its citizens come back from the grave to cast ballots.

 

Such travesties aroused Honest Citizens from time to time. One body of such stalwarts made a career of fighting for cleaner elections—the Union League Club. Made of what used to be called, without a sneer, enlightened citizens, the Club stated at its founding in 1879 that one of its primary objects was to “preserve the purity of the ballot box”—what Club historian Bruce Grant called “its first great crusade in the cause of better government.”

 

There was plenty of need for it. The thousands of men in near-Loop wards that included skid row willing indeed eager to vote as the ward bosses instructed in return for a bottle of wine or a free meal. Often they voted—and if news accounts are accurate, still vote—more than once, using addresses supplied by precinct workers that are in fact those of vacant lots, cemeteries and abandoned buildings.

 

Among the very first reform laws on the books in Chicago (1865) was a voter registration law meant to forestall ballot box fraud. In a famous municipal election of 1883, canvassers from the Union League Club found 351 persons liv­ing in the second precinct of the old Ninth Ward, but 1,112 votes were cast. As recounted by Grant, thirty-six voters were recorded as living in vacant lots, and factories, foundries, stores, vacant buildings, brothels and saloons all were represented as having public-minded citizens in them. “George Washington cast his ballot in the second precinct of the Ninth Ward,” wrote Grant.

 

So did Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and many other distinguished Americans. Such a turnout of notable men had never before—nor since— been recorded in any one voting place in the United States. And regardless of former political preferences, they one and all had voted the straight Democratic ticket.

 

The next year, forged ballots from one precinct of the old Eighteenth Ward gave the Democratic State Senator candidate a fraudulent majority. And in 1886, it was discovered that fraudulent affidavits sworn by unregistered voters attesting that they resided in the precincts they voted in were subsequently stolen from the polling booths before the returns were made to the city clerk.

 

A law passed in 1885 by the Union League Club, among other reformer groups, set up the system still in place—election commissioners, judges, and clerks from each of the two leading political parties, challengers from each party at each polling place, and registration a must. In 1891 the Aus­tralian secret ballot was mandated.

 

As reformers of other aspects of Chicago’s election system were to find, alas, mere laws were never enough. A generation later, the voter registration requirements had to be made more stringent, and citizen volunteers had to be recruited as  poll watchers in Chicago precincts known for vote fraud. So vulnerable were paper ballots to mischief that the city looked to voting machines as a mechanical substitute for honest citizens; these went into service in the late 1940s.

 

The most infamous example of Chicago’s convenient approach to elections came in 1960, when Mayor Richard J. Daley purportedly won the Presidential election for John F. Kennedy by rolling up massive majorities that gave him Chicago, and thus Illinois, and thus the White House. He did this thanks to majorities racked up in the Machine’s West Side wards that were hard to credit even given Chicagoans’ purported enthusiasm for Democratic candidates. A post-election tally found that in one precinct, for example, 22 registered voters cast 74 votes for Kennedy and 2 for Nixon.

 

In short, Nixon wuz robbed. “This is not to say that Daley espoused the practice of vote fraud,” wrote Len O’Connor in 1975, “he merely let each ward boss know what was expected of him.” The suspect majorities prompted outrage from Republicans who insisted (indeed still insist) that Daley stole the presidency for JFK. However, official inquiries found no substantial violations, and the results owed to a classic, if more than ordinarily energetic, get-out-the-vote campaign by the Democratic organization.

 

The rumors were hardly quelled when it became known that, speaking by phone to candidate Kennedy late on Election Night, Daley told him, “Mr. President, with a little luck and the help a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.” This certainly makes it sound as if the fix was in—but then the mayor had his reasons for making it sound that way. No mayor would pass up a chance to make a new President feel in his debt. However, the consensus that has evolved in the past 50 years is that Daley was less worried about helping JFK win that seeing to it Ben Adamowski—a bitter foe running as a Republican for the state attorney’s job and thus a potential danger to Daley’s machine—lost.

 

No wonder, then, that larcenous Elections Days have become a cherished part of the city’s lore. (Chicago’s unofficial slogan for years was, vote early and vote often.) Skulguggery involving votes—usually blamed on overzealous precinct workers—and if it no longer happens as often as it use to, or even as often as is usually alleged, catching people who try remains on the to-do lists of federal law enforcement officials.

 

 

Too Much of a Good Thing

 

The structure of local government outside Chicago was scarcely more rational, if for different reasons. Civic reformers also perceived that bad personnel are not the only corrupter of governmental processes. Bad structure does too.

 

If the problem in the city of Chicago was that there was not enough local government, for example, the problem in its suburbs was that there was too much of it. In Chicago’s hinterland, local government was achieved through a jumble of townships devised originally for rural areas, separately incorporated villages and cities, counties, and special purpose districts including school systems, all with overlapping boundaries, separate taxing powers, boards of governance, terms of office.

 

Such provision for local government could not be called a system, for that implies some coherence of purpose and coordination of parts that did not exist. While the origins of this cockamamie system are complex—its peculiar shape owes to fiscal and constitutional constraints, compromises between citified modernists and countrified traditionalists—but its persistence is explained by politics. Each unit jealously guarded the power it had to make rules and regulations. (“Each . . . is seated on its own little throne,” Merriam concluded In his 1929 book, Chicago: A More Intimate View of Urban Politics, “These are the Feudalities.”) They even more jealous in defense of their right to survive. As one expert put it, its only excuse for being was its generosity in providing many unnecessary offices for deserving party work­ers.

 

It was a natural target of civic reformers eager to impose rationality and efficiency on public administration. Some rational-minded reformers dreamed of abolishing townships when they drifted off to sleep at night. That reform would eliminate one especially outmoded layer of government. Others dared entertain more radical futures. Merriam, Frank Lowden, and other young leaders preferred a single “Greater Chi­cago” in which city and Cook County suburbs would be governed under a single government. Lowden, who was to become governor, often took up the lance for the cause, backed by allies of the Union League Club and Civic Federation, and even helped draft a constitutional amendment laying out the terms. But while cosmopolites in Hyde Park may perceive themselves living in Chicagoland area, citizens see themselves as citizens of a town or a neighborhood and prefer government on same scale, whatever the cost in efficiency. They also fear loss of autonomy to Chicago, which gave them common cause with their Downstate cousins.

 

Chicagoland did embrace regionalism occasionally as the basis for local government, but only as it applied to specific functions. In 1889, for example, Chicagoland voters okayed by referendum the establishing the Sanitary District of Chicago by an overwhelming vote. The new District was one of the first regional authorities in the nation, had  comprehensive brief: to was charged with establishing a comprehensive system that would handle sewage and storm water for the entire Chicago region, improve and expand navigable waterways in the region, and protect its water supply. The SSD model has been used since. mass transit is another service provided regionally. So is what mht be called planning for land use planning in the form of the NIPC, which by design remains a clout-less agency in a government culture in which clout matters above all.

 

So, while special-purpose districts on the Chicagoland scale relieve existing governments of the need to perform some services they do not replace the governments themselves. Indeed, they add to them, and the clutter of local governments is as bad as ever. In the 1920 Merriam exasperatedly called Chicagoland government structure “chaos.” When Merriam wrote that, there were more than thirty separate governments with powers in the region. Today more than 1,200 units of government exercise come power over Chicagoland’s governmental life; their elected representatives alone would populate a small city. The region has so many municipalities that its nine suburban mayors associations have an association, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus.

 

The region prefers local sovereignty for reasons that are good (local control) and bad (patronage). The suburbs prefer ad hoc, cooperative agreements with other governments on an issue by issue basis. Solving problems this way is enormously complex and time-consuming—money lost in patronage in old days nothing compared to money wasted on meetings in intergovernment projects—but it fits the political anxieties of a public that distrusts government in general, and distrusts their neighbors’ governments in particular. As Jon Teaford has put it, “The fragmentation of suburban Chicago was an entrenched fact of political life.”

 

The suburbs disdained city problems for decades—today they have city-style problems themselves. New initiatives stemming from the realization that “we are one region” spurred new  Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to travel to Schaumburg to make a speech calling for cooperation—the Chicagoland equivalent of Anwar Sadat going to Jerusalem—and hired a longtime suburban official to head his new suburban mayors' group. This effort has borne fruit in a number of areas, from cooperation on the 2000 census, to joint lobbying efforts in Washington, to agreements on streamlining and coordinating local government operations, expansion of O’Hare, flood control, traffic management, green space preservation, and many other chores.

 

The one thing that broke down the resistance of suburban public officials to intrusions of the city was the prospect of a service economy without servants. For the workers of the city, the outer suburbs are too distant to drive to affordably by private car even if they have one. Bus rides take too long and the els never reach that far. (In the 1990s, municipalities along the northwest suburban corridor pressed for extension of CTA rails into that area.)

 

Nonetheless, progressive businesspeople of this generation have not abandoned their dream of formal and fully empowered regional government. The Merriams of this generations are Respected national city doctors like Anthony Downs or Myron Orfield argue for various forms of regional government as the solution to inequities in taxable wealth and municipal services across Chicagoland's patchwork of municipalities. A system of tax sharing across borders administered by some new regional entity set up for the purpose might satisfy the demands of both fiscal equity and self-determination. Go-getting towns like Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Columbus do that in different ways; local models already exist from suburban pollution control or traffic planning.

 

Interesting that when local businessmen gathered in the late 1990s to draft a new vision for the Chicagoland in 2020 and beyond, they retained the exasperation of their forbears with the fragmented state of local government, but had finally abandoned their dream of uniting the region, or even Cook County under a single government. The introduction to Metropolis 2020 noted the local bias in Illinois’s governance and tax framework, a bias is “exacerbated by the sheer number of autonomous governmental units in the region.” Rather than proposing a regional government a la Lowden, they lamented merely “the lack of a coordinating mechanism with significant authority to address regional issues.”

 

The potential of consolidation, as with most reforms in Chicagoland, may be exaggerated in any event. The city’s success in annexing contiguous towns meant that the Chicagoland government that livens the dreams of today’s anti-sprawl activists was a reality in Chicago more than a century ago. As the Chicagoland population grew, the city grew with it, bringing contiguous territories subject to the same water and sewage systems, the same taxing authority, the same building code and licensing standards. In the end, that arrangement did not achieve the social equity and administrative efficiency so earnestly desired by modern reformers—not, perhaps, because the hinterland was administered by a single central government but that it was administered by a single central government that ended up being run by people with little interest in equity and efficiency as reformers understood them.

Not Quite Wisconsin

 

The Millennium Delayed

 

Illinois never reached the heights of Wisconsin. Achieving reforms proved exhausting enough; the constant vigilance required to defend them simply wore reformers and voters out. Still, considering the odds against them, progressive-era good-government reformers were surprisingly successful, if by “success” one means altering the ways politicians go about the public’s business. Sensible changes were. In 1895 the state legislature okayed, and the City of Chicago quickly adopted, an act setting up elections commission to regulate party nominations and voting; aldermen have been elected on a nonpartisan basis since 1920, Since 1935, council terms have lasted for four years and elections have coincided with mayoral balloting, to improve voter turnout.

 

Indeed, most of the old progressive political reform agenda has been acted on. That did not, alas, bring the millennium. Replacing party caucuses with primary elections to determine candidates, for example, helped weaken the bosses’s control of the political process, but the nominating process now so complex that only specialists—meaning the parties, and these days the candidates’ paid political consultants—can master it.

 

Likewise, civil service did little to prevent unqualified people from getting government jobs. Most politicians in Cook County continued to hire and fire based on party membership or some other preference than merit. They did so by adapting the new administrative procedures to old ends, with the connivance of a commission staffed by his own appointees. One popular work-around is to fix the test scores. Another is to exploit the provision in the law that allowed officials to bypass the merit selection and hire people for 60 days in an “emergency;” politicians simply reappointed such permanent “temporary” employees every 60 days. (The system was perfected by Big Bill Thompson, who made more than 30,000 such appointments in the first year of his administration.) Another ploy is to invent a job title that fits only the preferred candidate; a legacy of decades of such shenanigans is the City of Chicago’s collection of more than 1,700 separate job titles.

 

The progressive reforms were never wholly abandoned, but they had to be reinvigorated every generation or so, to win back the territory that corruption’s forces had stolen in the interim. That happened in 1983, when decades of reform prayers answered by the judge who ruled that merit, not clout, should be the basis for filling all but about 1,000 policymaking positions from among the 38,000 jobs on the City of Chicago's payroll. This so-called Shakman decree was assumed by the naïve to have killed patronage at City Hall back in 1977, but in 2005, the feds alleged that the administration of the younger Mayor Daley had committed "massive fraud" for more than a decade by illegally awarding city jobs to reward campaign workers. The city allegedly passed over equally qualified or more suitable applicants to open spots for "preselected" applicants favored by connected politicians and union officials.

 

Reforms have added to the already cumbersome and often archaic structure of popular government a further superstructure of special prosecutors, inspectors general, review boards, ethics codes, disclosure laws, and watchdog groups. The Shakman court decree obliged city departments to observe extended notice periods and interview quotas on the hiring process. The new rules give prosecutors more grounds for action. But the complexity of the rules merely offered new opportunities for—critics say need for—bribes to get around them.

 

Much of the good-government agenda was realized—in the suburbs. Widely touted in the early years of the 20th century, the council-manager form of municipal government consists of a small elected council that acts much as a company’s board of directors. The council sets broad policy, approves ordinances, and authorizes the spending of money. The day-to-day operations of government it left to a professional city manager—what amounts to a civic CEO. Council-manager government was never likely to be adopted in Chicago, in part because the constituency for it was fleeing city for the suburbs at about the same time as it became available. In Chicago’s suburbs that organized themselves as cities under state law, council-manager government is the most popular form of self-government.

 

All the other expedients proposed for the city of Chicago—nonpartisanship, hiring by merit, city-manager government—were adopted wholly or in part by the region’s more affluent suburbs such as the North Shore and Oak Park. In such places, efficiency and honesty and decisions by experts were merely the methods of corporate America applied to the problems of civic life. Many other suburbs of course remained as badly governed as Chicago had always been, and sometimes worse. In any event neither they or Chicago rushed to emulate their progressive kin. ●