The Corn Latitudes

My attempt at a history and a sociology of Chicago politics. At some 23,000 words, it is stupid long, but worse things of this sort have been published.

 

The twenty years that have passed since I wrote this piece have rendered it not outdated, exactly, but incomplete. In 2007 I noted that only one of the four Illinois indicted for corruption in the past half-century was from Chicago; today it is two out of six. The trends I noted in 2007 have continued trending, such as the blurring of once-sharp distinction between city and suburban voters in terms of interests and party affiliation. But there is no longer a Daley at City Hall, or is there likely to be; the election in 2019 of a gay African American woman as mayor suggests how much else has changed.

 

It would be hard to judge which iconic figure more often pops into the heads of out-of-towners when they hear the word “Chicago”—the gangster or the politician. The latter’s corruption is as irresistible and enduring an image as the gangsters’ rat-a-tat-tat from the 1920s. One can’t talk with anyone from elsewhere in the nation five minutes before someone will mention 1) a Daley, 2) the Democratic National Convention of 1968, or 3) the “stolen” election of 1960 in which the Chicago machine supposed stole the White House for John F. Kennedy.

 

Few aspects of life in any region are as complex than politics. In spite of that fact, politics is treated by the Chicagoland public increasingly as a sideshow or a bore, when they pay attention to it at all. That’s a shame. Politics in Chicago has never been merely about street sweeper jobs. It’s about building the city, taming its industrial beasts, managing the entry into the U.S. mainstream of repeated waves of immigrants in face of their ignorance and the hostility of the already-settled or managing finances, and, crucially, achieving genuine legal and fiscal independence from a state government that at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the city's interests, and, of late, coping with corrosive poverty.

 

In an ungenerous mood, one concludes that Henry Mencken had it right when he defined Democracy as the worship of jackals by jackasses. Politics, Chicago-style, is a rich pageant of chicanery, buffoonery, high purpose, and low humor. Local lore has the widow of Tom Keane, running for her late husband’s chair in the city council, ingratiating herself to Latino voters by promising to urge the teaching of Latin in schools; it is probably untrue, but it is not in the last implausible.

 

The Encyclopedia of Chicago offers well over a dozen major entries under “politics.” In one of them, Maureen Flanagan writes, “Chicago politics is a national cliché, evoking images of a one-party system, dominated by a boss-controlled Democratic political machine whose crafty politicians dangle patronage before competing ethnic and racial groups in return for votes.” Like most clichés, this is useful enough as a shorthand description of very complex phenomena. But while much of what is popularly understood about Chicagoland politics is true, more of it is not true, and some of what is still true is not as true as it used to be.

 

Tribal territories: The ward system

 

The basic unit of Chicago city politics is the ward. Citizen representation is based on wards; so, largely, is the administrative system by which city services are delivered and the basis on which local political parties are organized. Both political activity and city services are run through the local ward boss. This is the source of considerable clout in the higher circles of, say, the Democratic Party. Indeed, the wards have given rise to innumerable mini-machines that leave Chicago resembling a medieval kingdom with lots of ambitious jealous and sometimes territorially ambitious lords.

 

Since 1837, Chicago has elected its aldermen from wards—two each until 1923, and one each today. The number of wards grew as the city grew, but since 1923 has been fixed at 50—one alderman for every roughly 57,000 people. at first elected to two-year terms, which condemned both the aldermen and the voters to nearly constant campaigning, so the term was lengthened to the present four years. Visitors are usually surprised to learn that aldermen have been elected on a nonpartisan basis since 1920, but in Chicago would-be aldermen candidates usually run, unofficially at least, as the candidates as of this union or that ethnic group or this mayor.

 

Aldermen used to rule their wards like suzerains. They had power over the mayor under the city charter, for one thing. The reality underlay the doctrine of aldermanic privilege, which ceded to each council member the power to initiate or block city government actions affecting his ward. If you wanted an alley paved or a tree trimmed or a kitchen remodeled, you had to get the approval of the alderman as well as City Hall bureaucrats.

 

Businesspeople operating on a scale larger than the corner laundry had to deal with what amounted to 50 city governments (one reason why that faction has always been in the vanguard of charter reform movements). The system afforded vast opportunities for bribes, delays, confusion, and inefficiency. That began to change under Daley the Elder, whose control of party apparatus as well as the mayor’s office allowed him to substitute clout for the formal executive power he was denied by the city charter. It was Daley who took away members power over construction permits—the so-called “driveway permit” power. Even as curtailed by Daley and his son, aldermanic privilege is still an expansive assertion of power by these 50 local potentates, who still enjoy vetoes over zoning and property dealings by the city in their wards.

 

Ward boundaries were flagrantly gerrymandered, mainly to protect the Ins from new majorities of Outs that resulted from immigration or neighborhood change. African American and Hispanic constituencies for example had been split among several wards to dilute their polling power.

 

Gerrymandering is not the only way that the machinery of democracy in Chicago has been tinkered with to keep every generation’s “them” out of power. For nearly 90 years, for example, Chicago voters chose their mayors through party primary elections. That changed in 1995 when mayors began to be elected the way aldermen were, in nonpartisan elections that called for a  run-off between the top two vote-getters if no candidate wins a majority. The “reform” was engineered in Springfield by losing factions in the mayoral election of 1989, and was intended to prevent another Harold Washington; that year,  two white candidates for the Democratic Party nomination had split the white vote and allowed African American Washington to win with a plurality.

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For decades, the Chicago City Council thus reflected the makeup of the people it represented only imperfectly. One-person-one-vote court decisions sent the council rummaging in their desks for fresh pencils; ward borders had to be redrawn five times in the 1970s and 1980s under court orders.

 

Thus is the ward so central to city life that, like the parish or the neighborhood, it is the basis of Chicagoans' tribal identifications. The new City Council elected in 2007 is much more representative, at least in ethnic terms, than it was in the 1970s. During those 30 years, the number of white people in the council dropped from 35 to 22. Polish membership dwindled from ten to two (although this being Chicago, another three aldermen have Polish roots). Croats lost their two representatives, and Italians lost three of their five. The number of African American aldermen was up to 20 from 15, but it is the city’s Hispanic populations that saw the largest gains in representation—eight aldermen in 2007 compared to none in the 1970s.

  

The soul of the old Machine

 

“Chicago” and “machine” are usually assumed to go together like “apple” and “pie” but much about the city’s fabled machine is misunderstood. “The Machine” of recent memory has in fact been several different machines in succession. Indeed, for most of the city’s history the machine as a single entity did not exist at all. Instead, Chicago political life in the early twentieth century was dominated by several mini-machines, most under the sway of powerful ward bosses. When a party boss wielding authority across all the wards finally emerged in the 1930s, he was less a king than a diplomat brokering deals among his ambitious and jealous nobles.

 

That leader was Anton Cermak, who bolted together the machine in its modern form. After his death, the machine’s custodians included Pat Nash and Edward Kelly and, by the end of World War II, West Side ward boss Jake Arvey. Richard J. Daley inherited this apparatus in the 1950s. The Daley organization was several organizations—the South Side machine, a West Side machine, the mob—operating in loose coalition under his guidance. Factions joined him for the same reasons that companies joined in cartels—competition was costly even for the winners.

 

Daley was often referred to as the last of the big-city bosses, but even he was a boss in the old style, because the machine wasn’t the old machine. The latter’s demise had begin when Daley was still an altar boy. Remarkably, Daley the Younger does not even hold a Democratic Party post, so unimportant has the party become to governance. As Richard l. Wade explained in a 1986 article in Chicago History magazine, quarterly of the Chicago Historical Society, the New Deal largely took away the welfare function once performed by machine politicians. en. The resurgent labor unions, given new powers under pro-union FDR, The unions now found the jobs, exercised discipline in the workplace, protected the employed worker, and, along with the federal government, took care of him during slack times, with the result that “the union hall replaced the old political clubhouse.” The Social Security Act provided help to the elderly, and new public housing put roofs over the heads of the very poor. “In short,” wrote Wade, “what the machine had provided on a primitive level and with obligations was now provided by the federal government as a matter of right. Thus, few people noticed as the whole rationale for the boss system slipped slowly away.”

 

While Daley found it in his interest to not contradict the press when it referred to his being all-powerful—a reputation for power is nearly as good as having the real thing—not even a Daley has been able to rule Chicago unchallenged. Daley I was beset by disaffected African Americans acting in alliance with liberals of all races. Daley II—known variously to local political bloggers as “mayor-for-life” or “His Elective Majesty” —faced an uprising in 2006 led by an upstart labor union representing lowly service workers when he vetoed a union-backed ordinance to compel “big box” retailers in chicago to boost their minimum wages. The union filled a campaign war chest with a reported million bucks to pick off aldermen who had voted the mayor’s line and shrunk his majority in the council. 

 

The Democratic machine in its heyday enjoyed suzerainty in many wards—poor wards, where votes could be had in exchange for jobs and small favors, and in the ethnic wards, where ethnic and party solidarity merged. It wasn’t the voters in these wards who decided who represented them, but the ward organizations. In city- and county-wide races, however, the middle-class and business has a say. To attract their votes, machine candidates had to be plausible, and sometimes better than that. Arvey for example was a shrewd ob­server who understood that if the machine was to stay in power it had to surrender some of it by slating not pliant party hacks for major offices but “clean” (and thus potentially troublesome) candidates. The Arvey machine even backed “reform” candi­dates now and then, such as Paul Douglas (U.S. Senator) and Adlai Stevenson (governor) in 1948.

 

The Daley machine peddled good-government efficiency to the middle-class, white supremacy to the ethnic wards, and symbolic achievements in lieu of real change to the poor. African Americans for example got bailiff jobs, not control of the police department, jobs as housing inspectors, not control over zoning, teaching jobs, not control over school policy.

 

However, an organization can never count on holding on to power by trusting to the fickle affection of voters. Politicians in Chicago early on realized the wisdom of dealing in more durable currency—favors, jobs, contracts, cash. Its permanent constituencies included labor unions (whose loyalty was purchased through fat contracts), business (including property developers) and the mob.

 

Successive generations of reformers never succeeded in doing away with the machine, but they have changed the way it operates. Patronage, its main source of power, has been gradually whittled away by reforms and (more damaging) court rulings. (See Improving Democracy in Social Reform.) Patronage survives, but it flows not through personnel office or ward organizations but through the mayor’s office. For example, Daley II uses no-bid professional services contracts for public works projects to win friends and influence elections; those grateful contractors provide precinct workers that get out the vote just like the ward bosses used to. Perhaps more important, they donate the campaign cash that influences votes these days. As a result, Dick Daley ran a Democratic machine, his son Richard M. runs a Daley machine.

 

Peasants and overlords

 

Say “ethnic politics” in the rest of Illinois and people will point toward the northeast. In the rest of Illinois, the ethnic cast of politics in Chicagoland is inferred from the surnames of the officials the process anoints as leaders. The region’s Annunzio and Kocialkowskis and Rostenkowskis are unpronounceable and un-understandable to much of the rest of Illinois. One of the “issues” in the 2002 gubernatorial race was the fact that the Dem nominee was a Croatian American who had a name—Blagojevich—that was inconvenient for Downstaters to spell and pronounce.

 

Issues as well as personalities have always had an ethnic cast in Chicago. Maureen Flanagan in the Encyclopedia of Chicago notes that the political parties realigned themselves along class and ethnic lines as the industrial city grew. The struggle over how much power Chicago should have to govern itself, which ostensibly was waged between the city and the state, was also fought within the city among factions divided along ethnic/religious lines. Granting more powers to City Hall meant granting more power to whoever controlled City Hall—a good thing to immigrants who felt they deserved it because of their numbers and need, a bad thing to WASPs who felt they did because they were fitter to govern.

 

The famous early example of an essentially ethnic dispute that was expressed politically is the lager beer riots. Protestant natives—themselves immigrants from Britain—alienated new Germans and Irish arrivals by having the municipal government raise the cost of liquor licenses and require Sunday closing of saloons. Such efforts usually backfired, in that they excited such resentment that ethnic voters begin to organize in opposition to them, and or at least to reconsider their allegiances; in the early decades of the 19th century, for example, opposition to the nativism among the Whigs attract Irish and German voters to local Democrats.

 

The ethnic voter was a threat to the hegemony, both social and political, or the established British Americans. It wasn’t until the early years of the 20th century that the electoral arithmetic counted decisively against them. This did not mean that WASPs were thus banned from public life, however. WASP politicians knew how to count, and any number of American-bred mayors relied on ethnic votes. At the 19th Century’s end, Carter Harrison catered to such voters by keeping temperance activists in the City Hall waiting room; he also opposed efforts by local chauvinists to make the Chicago public schools English-language only. Harrison’s fellow natives saw this as treason, but it went down so well in the ethnic wards that Carter was elected five times. The same pattern could be seen again in the 1920s and ‘30s, when ethnic factions who otherwise detested each other worked politically for Anton Cermak because they shared his and each other’s outrage at Prohibitionists.

 

If Chicago’s industrialists welcomed, or at least tolerated the presence of immigrants for their labor force, Chicago pols did the same because the newcomers were a source of votes. D’Eramo, in characteristically blunt language, reports that the Chicago machine—and there have been several, of both parties—used immigrants as “polling cattle.” Sociologist Marco D’Eramo makes the point that the bad reputation of the machine in Chicago owes to its being an ethnic machine; peoples contempt for ethnics was extended to the political machine that catered to them, or rather exploited them. Thus did “anti-corruption” come to be understood to mean “anti-immigrant.”

 

Most immigrants had little experience at democratic self-government, thanks to imperial or royal overseers in the old country. Chicago wasn’t very democratic either, and the adjustments to Chicago-style democracy were not as hard as they might have been. Inevitably, immigrants brought to politics in Chicago the attitudes and assumptions that govern political behavior back home. People accustomed to the landlord or the priests found the ward boss a familiar, even comforting figure. And the ethnic pols in turn reverted to ancient roles in their dealings with those who held power over them. Richard J. Daley essentially re-established the ancient relationship of the Irish peasant to what Milt Rakove described as the city’s “Anglo-Saxon-Protestant overlords.” In his subservience to Chicago’s manorial capitalists, Daley was a true son of Erin.

 

Chicago ethnics thus sometimes affected politics in the rest of Illinois too. The nativist Whigs for instance opposed allowing unnaturalized immigrants to vote, and not only because the Democrats, who relied on the foreign born, relied on their votes. Indeed Pease recalls that the concentration of Irish in Cook County in the 1830s so frightened the natives that even Democratic Downstaters turned Whig.

 

Chicago politicians administered their machines through party representatives in the various ethnic wards. Michael Diversey, alderman of the German Sixth Ward in the early 1840s, was one of these. Oscar DePriest and William Dawson in the African American wards in the early 20th century were others, as was Swedish-born Fred Lundin, who ran a Republican machine on the North and Northwest sides. Mike and Moe Rosenberg delivered West Side Jewish voters into the welcoming arms of the 24th Ward Democratic machine; FDR famously outpolled his opponent in the 24th in the 1936 presidential election 29,000 to 700, which led the President to dub it “the number one ward in the Democratic Party.”

 

A Chicago politician serving one its larger and more polyglot districts had to demonstrate a cosmopolitanism than would test a UN delegate. Carter Harrison’s distinguished family was of British ancestry, but on the stump, Harrison proudly identified with every ethnic group. As on St. Patrick's Day, it has been said, he wore his finest green. Germans heard about his friendship with Bismarck. With Scandinavians he claimed a Viking heritage, and among African Americans he recalled being raised by a "colored mammy." Sidney R. Yates, the nation's longest-serving congressman whose North Side district included such melting pots as Roger Park, told colleagues that he won his first election in 1948 because of his ability to serenade various constituency groups with their own ethnic songs while campaigning.

 

The most politically adept of Chicago’s ethnics are, of course, its Irish. But while the city is famous for an Irish machine, they did not build the first true city-wide machine—that credit goes to Bohemian Anton Cermak. However, the Irish excelled at managing multi-ethnic coalitions of that type, and usually dominated them out of proportion to their numbers. Chicago’s Irish politicians are the American equivalent of the leprechauns in the old country. They had inestimable advantages—they spoke English, for one thing, for another, the Irish had been enemies of no one but the English in the old country, and thus had no enemies among the Continental immigrants who flooded the city in the 50 years after 1880. “A Lithuanian won’t vote for a Pole, and a Pole won’t vote for a Lithuanian, and a German won’t vote for either of them,” goes a much-quoted maxim of the local trade, “but all three will vote for [an Irishman].”

 

As early as the 1840s, the Irish controlled enough of the Democratic party “to elect officers for the sole reason that they are Irishmen.” Already in the 1850s, the Irish had adopted the Democratic party as their political home. Their saloons became precinct headquarters, and they took their share of spoils in the form of jobs in what could be called an early affirmative action program. By the mid-l850s, a fifth of the elected or appointed government officials in Chicago were Irish. By the 1880s, the Irish controlled the Democratic party on the ward and precinct levels, and after 1883, City Hall closed regularly on St. Patrick’s Day, since no one was likely to show up anyway.

 

Proud Chicago Irish knows certain stats as well as they do the batting averages of favorite ball players. The city has elected eight Irish mayors (every Chicago mayor but two since 1933). The police force was disproportionately Irish by the 1890s, as was the fire department. Irish women were to local hospitals and schools what their men were to the police and fire departments.

 

It could be said that not only did the local Irish achieve prominence out of proportion to their numbers, they did so out of proportion to their merits. The Irish legacy in Chicago is in some ways a dubious one. Dispossessed peasants, the Irish upon their arrival in Chicago became the original underclass. The mostly young and unattached male Irish brought to the cities a culture that tolerated, if it did not actually endorse, drunkenness, bastardy, and hustling. The city’s first “bad neighborhoods, such as Hardscrabble near what became Bridgeport, were Irish.

 

One aspect of the ethnic’s alien-ness was religion. Political and party allegiance in Chicago were heavily influenced by one’s religion. Protestants among the Americans, British, Scandinavians, and English Canadians tended to be Republicans for example, while Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Europe were just as likely to be Democrats.

 

The immigration explosion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with suburban out-migration, so changed the electorate that the traditional political order was threatened. such was the anti-Catholic prejudice that no candidate who ran with a pro-Church agenda (as distinct from a pro-Catholics agenda) could get backing in citywide races. Indeed, “ethnic” meant “Catholic” in the eyes of many city voters uneasy at the prospect that Catholic politician behold to Catholic votes might favor Catholic issues and interests as blatantly as most Protestant politicians had traditionally favored the issues and interests of their fellow believers.

 

Catholic historian Thomas Sanders noted that in 57 mayoral campaigns prior to 1930, Catholic candidates won only three. Such pro-Church policies as came from City Hall tended to be the work of American native mayors who had won office through help of Catholic blocs and returned the favor as mayor. A good example is Carter Harrison I, during whose lengthy tenure Chicago parochial schools were gifted with free city water. The two Harrisons- explains sanders, while died-in-the-wool native Americans, won rode to ten mayoral victories between 1879 and 1911 with solid Catholic support. Carter II struck many a Catholic voter as for all intents and purposes a Catholic mayor, having been educated at St. Ignatius College, married a devout Catholic, and raised his kids in the faith.

 

When a Catholic did finally run successfully for the mayoralty, he did so only with reform credentials that endeared him even to Protestant bigots—and made it impossible for him to unduly favor the Church’s interests. As John Schmidt explained in The Mayors:

 

Once in office, [Mayor William] Dever recognized his role as a ‘respectable ethnic.’ He often told Knights of Columbus suppers or other such gatherings that he would show the critics a Catholic could govern wisely. He tried to avoid any hint of favor­itism, and was so scrupulous that a few Catholics complained the mayor was not being fair to his own people.

 

Dever’s rigorous application of Prohibition laws in spite of the detestation his fellow Irish had for them also can be attributed to his desire to out-WASp the WASPs.

 

Separate-but-equal politics

 

Legend has it that Chicago machine transcended ethnicity, that it was a prototype of the “rainbow coalition” in which diverse people supped at the same table, or rather slopped at the same trough. This romantic notion is beloved of political journalists with a story to sell, but political scientists have been poo-poohing it as simple-minded for years. There was no ethnic group that didn’t have to fight its way for a share of the spoils against the machinations of the bosses and the ambitions of their ethnic neighbors. 

 

Ethnic voters, especially settled ones, often vote alike—not because they’d been dictated to but because they share interests with their neighbors. A disaffected voter could be ignored; a disaffected voting bloc could not. One remedy was to gerrymander ward boundaries to spread ethnic populations across more than one ward to weaken their influence in any one of them. The Puerto Rican vote—the second-largest Hispanic group after Mexicans—was splintered this way, which left them without clout. As recently as 1966, not one Puerto Rican held political office. None was an administrator with the Board of Education, and none held any prestigious position in the Police Department. That pattern of exclusion quickly changed when Irene Hernandez became the first Latino elected to office in 1974 when she became a member of the Cook County Board.

 

All the region’s minorities have had to adjust to a new political system, but over time that system has had to adjust to them too. The Arab population concentrated in the southwest suburbs not long ago showed it has become Americanized to the extent it mastered the art of pressing its elected representatives for new laws congenial to its interests. The General Assembly adopted a bill require "truth in marketing" for food labeled as meeting Islamic food preparation rules—a bill proposed by a legislator named Radogno.

 

The 2000 Chicago census prompted demands by Hispanics for at least two and as many as five more super-majority Hispanic wards, up from the seven that already had Hispanic majorities. Such has been the growth in the strength of the Hispanic vote of late, indeed, that the Democratic Party in Chicago has resorted to gerrymandering in order to get Hispanics elected; in 1992 that the first Hispanic Congressman from Illinois was elected (in the person of veteran alderman Luis Gutierrez) after the Democrat-controlled legislature helpfully redrew the boundaries of his House district to make it 64% Hispanic by population.

 

In the process they suffered wounds in the battle with other ethnics, the memory of which make it all the harder for them to greet successors generously. In The Pig and the Skyscraper, Italian sociologist D’Eramo describes the way things really worked.

 

Every council post reserved for an Irish American is denied a Pole. Every fa­vor done for an Italian is at the expense of a Latino. Politics doesn’t so much revive old ethnic rivalries as create new ones: An Irishman who came here hating only the Englishmen and Irish Protestants, soon hated Poles, Italians and blacks. A Pole who was free arrived here hating only Jews and Russians, but soon learned to hate the Irish, the Italians and the blacks.”

 

Thus the impression made on generations of Downstaters that Chicago is a mean town. They had hatreds back home, sure, but in Chicago, group animosity was the basis of civic relations.

 

Each immigrant group, having risen to control the local government machinery, used it to limit access of their newer arrivals—and now rivals—to the goodies. The most vivid example of this was in the 1980s, during the “Council Wars, when the city’s first elected black mayor found his administrative appointments and policy initiatives in City Hall blocked by white ethnic aldermen whose hold on the council (as a federal court later ruled) owed to gerrymandered ward boundaries. The three-year impasse earned the city the nickname “Beirut on the lake.”

 

The city’s new immigrants in the half century after World War I were African American. Strangers from another land—the American South—they were Protestants like the British and many of the Germans, many were peasants like so many of the European Catholics, they were targets of centuries old prejudice as were the Jews. But while a Jew or a Catholic could pass for a WASP, a black-skinned Chicagoan could never pass for a white one, and in that fact long assumed that they constituted a special case among the city’s ethnic groups. (Separate-but-equal is a doctrine that had it days in history-writing too.) However, the political experience of Chicago African Americans and its other immigrants are more alike than not.

 

Politics is one of the areas in which the city has always painfully worked out new social arrangements with its newcomers. The city has had black elected officials as far back as 1871, when an African American named John Jones was elected to fill an at-large seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners. In 1876, John W. E. Thomas became the first African American to be elected as a state representative in the Illinois General Assembly. Edward H. Wright became the first black alderman in 1915, Edward H. Morris, distinguished black lawyer, and stalwart of the Sumner Club, one of the top African American political and social clubs of the day was elected to the Illinois House in 1890 and 1902, and Chicago sent African Americans to the house routinely after 1906. In 1928 Adelbert H. Roberts became the first African American elected to the Illinois Senate. That year also saw Oscar DePriest elected to the U.S. House— the first black man elected to that body from Illinois. In the 1980s, two of the most prominent black politicians in America resided in Chicago in the persons of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the country’s first serious black candidate for president of the United States.

 

It would be misleading to attribute these achievements to an enlightened polity nor even a sizeable black vote. Before 1908, county commissioners were elected by slates, slates were nominated at party conventions, and party leaders apportioned seats on the slate to appease constituent groups, not the voters. They did so until primary elections were adopted in 1908. Once voters rather than party bosses decided who got to run, opportunities for black candidates in city- or county-wide races disappeared, African American candidates were not elected in county-wide races until 1938, although they continued to elect black aldermen in black-only wards.

 

Most of those pioneers marched into the history book under the banner of the Republican Party. Chicago African Americans were loyal backers of the party of Lincoln from Reconstruction through the New Deal. Not large in itself—before World War I only 3 percent of the city’s population was African American—the black vote could be crucial in tight races, as many races tended to be in those decades when the GOP was still a viable force in city politics. The result was that black voters were courted, and within limits, catered to. The forementioned Mayor Thompson, turn-of-the-century gov­ernor Charles Deneen, and U.S. Senator William Lorimer were among the Republican party heavyweights who relied on the black vote.

 

“Vice”—mainly gambling—was to the black wards of the early 20th century what temperance had been in the old ethnic wards in the middle of the 19th. Mayor “Big Bill” Thomp­son in 1927 racked up pluralities in the black wards of more than 90% not by championing civil rights or jobs but by promising official tolerance of the numbers rackets that provide work and amusement in the black wards.

 

African American voters may have been only a small part of the general population of Chicago, but the residential apartheid of the city concentrated them and their votes in only a few wards, where they could be decisive in local elections. first one ward, then two able to elect blacks reps. many of these were party hacks of the sort that Chicago always sent to Springfield. An exception was the best-known black politician prior to 1930, Alabaman Oscar DePriest. De Priest ran away from home at age seventeen and in 1889 arrived in Chicago, where he built a real estate business and helped organize the Negro Business League. He was a Chicago pol of the grand tradition. The Chicago Tribune, in honoring him, called him “shrewd, smart and street savvy,” which in Chicago means crooked but smart enough to not go to jail— DePriest was indicted for graft but was acquitted.

 

By 1928, the black population of Chicago had grown sufficiently large to cover most of a congressional district, and in 1929 DePriest secured the Republican nomination and election to the U.S. Congress. Not only was he the first black man elected from Illinois but at the time he was the only black representative in Congress. As he had done in the Chicago city council, DePriest championed a civil rights agenda in Congress. (In 1933 for example he successfully attached an anti-discrimination amendment to the law that established the Civilian Conservation Corps.

 

The Depression began to turn black Chicagoans into Democrats. The black electorate split, as was the white one, by class differences. The less educated looked to their political representatives for real rewards—welfare and jobs mainly. The middle class—the Black Belt equivalent of the lakefront liberals—sought access to the larger economy, and rewarded pols who were considered friends to the race. Republican Gov. Charles Deneen won wide black support for example because his support of an anti-lynching bill and for his vigorous action in several lynchings and in the Springfield race riot of 1908.

 

The administration of Democrat FDR brought welfare and jobs to the ghetto—replacing the role that Cit Hall had always filled—and later championed (at least rhetorically) equal opportunity. The authors of Negro in Illinois recording this street scene in which a young African American harangued a crowd during a campaign in those days.

 

You better get down on yoh knees and pray that none a these isms gets started here in this good ole USA and thank the Lawd for Uncle Sam and Ant Cha’ity.

            Republicans always knocking the WPA, saying we poke along. . . I ain’t seen none of ‘em refusing to poke ‘long with us and payday they ain’t long poking they hands out for democrat money.

 

The black Republican ward bosses of the 1930s therefore were left having to choose between loyally voting the GOP line or voting against their own constituents. They opted for the latter, and the voters did not fail to notice. In the mid-30s, DePriest was deposed after three terms in Congress, and the Democratic ticket swept the black South Side with more than 80 percent of the vote.

 

The then-mayor, Anton Cermak, offered different inducements to African American to switch parties—in effect state terrorism against the policy rackets. The price of lifting the crackdown, it was made plain, was voting Demo. Cermak’s successor Edward Kelly took a permissive stand on the rackets that were popular in the black wards, and made available to African Americans some of the juicy new plums picked from the federal tree in the form of welfare and work programs.

 

Less predictably, Kelly also won over the black middle class by fighting for civil rights. To the dismay of many white backers, he established Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations, pushed for in­tegrated public schools (Kelly appointed the first black member of the school board, and ended the practice of setting up “branch schools” to separate white and black pupils) In 1940 a black man was promoted to captain in the Chicago Police Department, for example, the first of his race to reach such as plateau. (Just as Chicago had two public housing systems, and two school systems, so it had two police departments, one for black citizens, another for whites. Black officers were not allowed to arrest white people, and black sergeants were never as­signed to supervise white officers.) Such accommodation showed Kelly to have been either a closet progressive or a poor politician, since it went beyond the minimum required of politics and alienated much of the rest of the party’s base in the city.

 

For all its growth, the black electorate was not sizable enough to carry a mayor into City Hall. To win city-wide, a candidate needed white ethnics, and offending them by strong pro-civil rights stands would cost a candidate more in the white wards than he would gain in the black ones. (in the same way, too strong a pro-Catholic stand offended the nativists of previous eras.) 

 

Kelly’s successor, Richard Daley, made symbolic appointments and supportive speeches, but the machine’s black aldermen were not allowed to developed independent power bases from which they might launch attacks on power. Instead, African American ward bosses were granted dominion in their wards in return for fealty to City Hall. The black organization men set a high standard in sycophancy. In American Pharoah, authors Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor recall how one of them, Alderman Claude Holman, once averred of Dick Daley that he was not only the great­est mayor in Chicago history or even the greatest mayor in the world but the greatest mayor in outer space, too.

 

In practice, however, Daley’s administration was, if not anti-black, at least anti-civil rights. Granting black Chicagoans patronage and the occasional commission appointment were one thing; opening the city and its institutions to them was something else. Daley gave African Americans public housing—but only in already-black neighborhoods. He gave black appointees offices but no real power. As the ‘60s progressed, blacks were stonewalled by City Hall on open housing, insulted by discriminatory schools practices that would have embarrassed Mississippi in their blatantness, and overseen by a police force that protected the segregated  status quo at the expense of  black citizens.

 

As Daley shifted his power base from inner-city black wards to the fringe-dwelling white ethnics, his black support began to dissipate. It is significant that the last election in which the black vote for Daley was decisive—1963—occurred at the start of the civil rights era. Chicago black Democrats were of the same party as Southern Dixiecrats, with the result that a black leader could be pro-civil rights or be a Democrat, but it was getting hard to be both. University of Southern California  political scientist Michael B. Preston summarized the central dilemma of the black Chicago politician in a 1990 article: “By operating within the political system in Chicago—and thus becoming a part of it— blacks could not challenge that system with any great degree of force.”

 

One of the black politicians caught between party and principle was Alderman William Dawson. A Republican-turned-Democrat first elected in 1935, Dawson rose to the top of the machine-dominated Democratic organization. By the mid-fifties, the domain of this South Side mini-boss spanned five wards, and Dawson was thought to control as many as a quarter-million votes, enough to make him by some reckonings the most powerful black elected official in the country.

 

Richard J. Daley owed much of his early success to Dawson’s black voters, indeed, Dawson one of the party slate-makers who got Daley on the mayoral ticket for the first time in 1955. The two profited by the usual political symbiosis as Dawson votes helped Daley win power, which he shared with Dawson so Dawson could influence more votes. The partnership worked until the civil rights era, when the Democrats’ restive black wards now became a potential source of challenge. Dawson could no longer guarantee their allegiance to the Daley candidates, so the Machine stripped Dawson of his patronage power, the main means to discipline wayward organization members. What the Machine giveth, the Machine taketh away.

 

Unlike DePriest’s, Dawson’s allegiance was to party, not race. Not only did he not fight for civil rights measures, he occasionally fought against them. (“Uncle Tom” was one of the least nasty terms used to describe him.) This was not just kow-towing; segregation kept the black vote concentrated, and dispersal into mixed-race neighborhoods would erode Dawson’s power base. But because the Machine was by then allied with racist whites, it was only a matter of time before the black vote would split between those who wanted to use politics to wedge a way into a enter wider world and those like Dawson who preferred to rule the small part of it set aside for blacks by their white overseers.

 

Independence, and commitment to what was by now a distinct black agenda, would have to be expressed outside the regular Democratic organization. A coalition of seven independent African American aldermanic candidates in 1963 stood on a joint platform to fight segregation and discrimination—and to fight Daley, who was the agent of both in Chicago. One of the renegades won and portended a shift that might remake the Democratic Party, if not the city.

 

The black vote for a time after Daley’s death in 1976 was unanchored. Disenchanted with the Daley Democrats, voters found no alternative road to power through a moribund GOP. The city’s black voters gave upstart Jane Byrne a significant but not huge majority, presumably because she was running against a City Hall faction that barred black alderman from succeeding Daley. Those same voters turned on Byrne, however, after she’d broken too many promises to them; if African American interests were to be advanced downtown, many concluded, it would have to be by a black person.

 

That person was Illinois state senator Harold Washington. African American leaders drafted Washington to run in the 1983 primary. His candidacy sparked the signing up of 200,000 new black voters and later mobilized an unprecedented black turnout. In a three-way primary, Washington won with 37 percent of the vote. That contest was proof that, among Chicago politicians, blood is not thicker than politics: Washington was opposed by 18 of 23 black state legislators and nine of 15 black aldermen.

 

Washington went on to win the general election and would win a second term before he died in 1987, raising hopes for a new era in which African Americans would dominate the machine as the Irish long had. As recently as 1990, learned commentators such as Michael Preston were predicting a new era of black political domination in Chicago.

 

It never happened. The trends that progressive reformers saw as so promising in the 1970s and ‘80s, such as  black wards delivering most anti-machine vote, were reversed. The city’s black population was shrinking in absolute and relative terms. African Americans were doomed by demographics to become the second-largest minority in the city after Hispanics, and thus would never be able to put anyone in the mayor’s chair by themselves. Post-Washington relations between City Hall and the black wards reverted to an old model—what Timuel Black and other chroniclers of the South Side sneered at as “plantation politics.”

 

The return of a Daley to the mayor’s chair in 1989 brought a return to the accommodation worked out by his father in his first few terms. Political loyalty was bartered for patronage, often administered through the same community institutions—the black churches—that had been crucial to Washington’s success. Richard M. Daley got just seven percent of the black vote in 1989, but in 2003 he carried every ward in his bid for a fifth term, winning an estimated 60 percent of the African American vote, running against three African American opponents. Like they say, the city that works.