Harold Washington, a product of the Democratic machine, was swept into the mayor`s office-at first against his will-by a social movement that changed the nature of government and politics in Chicago.
Although he was always a political pragmatist, he became more than a politician, more than a chief executive. He was the real and symbolic leader of an emotion-driven movement comprised of black liberals and moderates, white progressives and, as time went on, a fair number of Hispanics.
The movement enveloped the very rich and the very poor, the college-educated and the illiterate, the residents of luxury high-rises along Lake Shore Drive and the residents of high-rise housing projects along the Dan Ryan Expressway. The one thing they had in common was their hatred of the established political structure and a belief, whether out of hope or out of fear, in Harold Washington.
With his death, that coalition is in danger of being pulled apart and its influence negated. And people who care about the city wonder how long it will take to build a new one capable of governing effectively. They point ominously to the possibility of having four different mayors in the next five years, depriving the city of political stability as it tries to deal with serious urban problems and shrinking revenues.
The city faced similar uncertainties 11 years ago when Mayor Richard J. Daley died as unexpectedly as Washington. But the situation today is much different and, in many ways, much more troublesome.
The public schools, no prize in the Daley era, have continued to deteriorate. So have public housing and public health, services of immediate concern to the city`s poor and to the competing middle class who subsidize these programs with taxes.
Federal urban aid, plentiful during the administrations of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, has slowed to a comparative trickle under Ronald Reagan. Local property taxes have soared to make up for some of the loss, but in the opinion of many homeowners and business people, they`ve reached their limit.
Economic and demographic changes have presented more problems. The city`s transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, already underway during Daley`s time, has dislocated thousands of workers and as a result weakened the bonds between strong unions and Democratic politicians. The percentage of Chicagoans who are black and Hispanic has risen; the percentage of whites has gone down. There is no racial majority in the city: The most recent figures are 43 percent white, 41 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic.
Washington was nowhere close to solving those problems, as even his most fervent admirers will admit. But he had overcome three years of constant opposition by the former majority in the City Council. He had proved to white Chicagoans, many of whom had whipped themselves into a racial frenzy during his 1983 campaign, that they could live with a black mayor. He had beaten former Mayor Jane Byrne in a one-on-one primary last February, laying to rest the claim that he was a minority mayor who could win only when two or more candidates split the white vote.
He kept intact his majority coalition despite furious internal disagreements. He accomplished this by using his symbolic position as the city`s first black mayor to stifle dissent among black activists and progressives while offering previously withheld political power to Hispanics and policymaking positions to independent whites.
At the same time, he excised those who were a threat to him, distancing himself from Jesse Jackson, founder of Operation PUSH, on the night of his first election and replacing himself in Congress with a pliable old friend-all to the dismay of black political movement leaders who wanted the congressional seat for one of their own.
Despite the administrative shortcomings of the Washington regime-and tales of bureaucratic warfare and wheel-spinning were legion-many hoped the administration finally had developed the momentum to start moving the city forward.
”The mayor, after a fractious first term, appeared to be positioning himself to exert power and authority and leadership,” said James Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League. ”It will require a tremendous amount of leadership to move forward.
”He kept it together through force of personality, experience, toughness, guile. There`s no automatic transfer of that power to anybody. It has to be fought for and paid for.”
The fighting began minutes after the mayor collapsed Wednesday morning, and it continued through the weekend. To protect their own influence while trying to keep Washington`s policies in focus, the remnants of the late mayor`s government have organized a rally for Monday night, at the University of Illinois-Chicago Pavilion, complete with prayers and videotapes of the mayor.
Some Washington organizers view this rally as critical to the survival of the coalition. Others see it as a means to push their own successor at the expense of their confederates.
And Jackson, who could hope to fill the political vacuum as a symbolic leader, already has been sought out by mayoral aspirants for his blessing. He will participate in that rally, though administration organizers of the event may find that troublesome.
”There`s no way we can keep Jesse off the stage,” said one of the late mayor`s organizers. ”And if he wants to try and manipulate it, there`s really nothing we can do. Everything`s in flux.”
Later this week, the City Council intends to appoint an acting mayor to serve until the voters choose a mayor in a special election in 1989. Then there will be a regular mayoral election in 1991. That means Chicago could have three different mayors in a four-year period-four if you count Interim Mayor David Orr.
”That possibility is awesome to contemplate,” said Louis Masotti, professor of management and urban affairs at Northwestern University`s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. ”This is a critical time in the city`s history, and I worry about continuity. We may be faced with political instability for the foreseeable future.”
Government traditionally slows down before an election because politicians are loath to take any action that risks offending key voting blocs. At best, they offer showy short-range programs while tossing platitudes at the big problems.
”Whoever gets to be mayor will have to spend full time trying to solidify his position,” Masotti said. ”That means less attention to substance and more attention to process.”
It`s possible, of course, that the mayor anointed by the council will quickly consolidate power and breeze through the 1989 and 1991 elections, leading Chicago on to a new day.
But no one really expects that. The new mayor is not likely to command the allegiance of so many disparate groups.
”We formed an almost impossible coalition of black businessmen, black nationalists, white liberals, community leaders, Hispanics,” said Chris Chandler, former press aide to the mayor and now a free-lance writer. ”It was like a campaign of 10,000 volunteers. There was a lot of tension between the groups, a lot of tension.”
For example, recalled Renault Robinson, an early Washington organizer who later had an unsuccessful tenure as chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, the movement relied on the support of two dissimilar groups along the north lakefront: the traditional ”lakefront liberals” and a more radical group led by Uptown activist Slim Coleman and Helen Shiller, now the 46th Ward alderman. ”You had to keep them separate because they were fighting,” Robinson said. ”Their issues were in conflict. Coleman`s group wanted subsidized housing. The (traditional) lakefront liberal groups didn`t want any; they thought it would tear up their communities. Something like that was a really delicate time bomb. To keep everybody happy, you had to negotiate that right out of the official platform.
”It was like that all over the city with different issues.”
But Washington held them all together, aided by the intransigent council majority, whose leader, former Ald. Edward Vrdolyak (10th), helped solidify the Washington coalition by thwarting the mayor`s will for three years.
”The problem for Washington`s government was that he was the only one who could really control those different groups,” Vrdolyak said. ”There were the so-called black nationalists, the far-left liberals on the lakefront and the (black) ward committeemen.”
Black activists ”were victims of this movement they created,” Vrdolyak said. ”Harold controlled them all, and if they differed with him on issues, they were caught up in their own rhetoric, that of being a traitor to the black constituency.”
Vrdolyak`s views were echoed by black activist Lu Palmer, who was responsible more than anyone else for putting together the alliance that carried Washington to victory in 1983. As the Washington administration wore on, Palmer grew increasingly frustrated with its failure to deal effectively with the intractable problems of the black underclass. He and others-including Jackson-were also more than miffed at being held at arm`s length throughout Washington`s tenure.
”The streets were paved and the middle class got their money, but the quality of life for poor people did not change and is not likely to change,” Palmer said.
But neither Palmer nor any other more radical black publicly raised his voice during the Washington years because, as Palmer said, ”You just could not, without some retribution, criticize Harold Washington. Harold was seen as a messiah.
”That kind of psychology made it easy to be manipulated. By pushing racial solidarity, as we did with Harold`s first election, we may have contributed to that. . . . Black people lost the will to fight on issues, because they weren`t going to fight Harold.”
That will change under a new black mayor, Palmer said. ”The novelty of having a black mayor is over,” he said. ”The symbolism is greatly diminished. A new black mayor won`t be a god. He`ll have to answer on problems. And that will be good for people.”
As blacks and other groups begin to choose up sides during the next administration, it could be on the basis of economic class rather than race. Washington submerged those economic differences by uniting middle-class blacks and the city`s almost-forgotten underclass against a common foe: Vrdolyak and the old regime.
Class conflicts arose at the opening of the school year when black middle-class parents threatened to leave the integrated Dearborn Park neighborhood if their children were required to attend school with poor children from a nearby housing project. Similar conflicts have arisen in Uptown, where affluent Washington allies continue to fight with poorer ones over the gentrification of the neighborhood.
Despite their competing interests, those groups backed Washington. A new mayor cannot automatically expect the same support.
Washington could take the solid support of the black community for granted; a new mayor cannot. Nor can the new mayor expect the same lakefront support that helped Washington win two elections. And the city`s rapidly growing Hispanic community, never completely in Washington`s hip pocket, is keeping its options open, too.
”What I fear most is that the new mayor will be more concerned with accommodating and compromising than with continuing the mayor`s programs,”
said State Sen. Miguel del Valle (D., Chicago), a Washington supporter. Del Valle acknowledged ”some surface discontent” with Washington among Hispanics who felt he slighted them in the awarding of city jobs and contracts, but others have said Hispanic dissatisfaction is much deeper and will present a problem to the next mayor.
The people who most vehemently opposed the first election of Harold Washington, the white ethnics on the Northwest and Southwest Sides, are not expected to reassert themselves if the next mayor also is black, some observers say.
”I think we`ve overcome the barrier of having a black mayor, especially since Washington was elected to a second term,” said Ed Marciniak, president of the Institute of Urban Life at Loyola University. ”I think race will no longer loom as such a big issue, and we`ll be back to politics. As a ward committeeman once told me, `Whenever race and politics are involved in an issue, you can be sure politics is more important.` ”
But Marciniak worries, as do many others, that ”a lot of momentum will be lost” in the transfer of power from the Washington movement to another yet unborn. ”It could be a serious problem, because government won`t be as good as it could be,” he said.
On the other hand, the city`s governmental system does provide for a considerable amount of continuity through the many boards and commissions that control major agencies with multimillion-dollar budgets. Washington`s council opposition considered these agencies so important that it held up his appointments to their boards for three years during the ”Council Wars.”
But the mayor finally prevailed, and his appointees will continue under the new administration. In some cases, their terms last into the next decade. The new mayor may, if he wishes, replace Washington`s top aides and Cabinet officers as soon as he takes office, but he will have to wait for some time before he can substantially alter the makeup of the Chicago Board of Education, for example, or the Chicago City Colleges Board.
If this provides continuity with the past, it also makes it difficult for the new mayor to take control of city government, just as Byrne`s holdovers thwarted Washington`s efforts to run the city`s parks, schools and libraries the way he wanted.
Washington`s minister, for example, is the chairman of the board of the Chicago Housing Authority; his dentist is president of the Chicago Public Library Board. It is not at all certain that their support will transfer to a new mayor, even a professed Washington loyalist.
In Chicago, those personal loyalties often turn out to be more important than class, race or political philosophy. This was demonstrated succinctly in an exchange between a Washington aide and a pro-Washington alderman in Northwestern Memorial Hospital, shortly after the mayor was pronounced dead Wednesday.
As the aide began to lobby for a candidate to replace the mayor, the alderman turned and spoke to her in the language of the old Democratic machine:
”What are you talking to me about? Your Chinaman`s dead.”
