Elsewhere, civic leaders might announce it is time to clean house when a federal judge takes a municipal hiring process under court supervision, dressing down a city attorney like some mope behind on his child support.
Scions of blue-blood families would signal their availability for a ballot-box challenge to a mayor besieged by a constant barrage of cronies’ and subordinates’ indictments.
But this is Chicago, where corruption and reform long have engaged in a complicated ballet. It’s a difficult dance for amateurs to master but enthralling to watch.
Eight decades ago, a visiting British journalist made an observation worth recalling before anyone writes Richard M. Daley’s political obituary.
Harold Spender was fascinated to find that here, “Two sides of life–graft and enterprise–seem to be strangely intertwined.”
Chicago has hosted some notable reformers.
Jane Addams battled to free impoverished immigrants from firetrap slums.
Mayor William E. Dever crusaded against cronyism in the Police Department and Board of Education, building schools and shutting down Roaring ’20s bootleggers.
Before becoming the Tribune’s longtime editor and publisher, Col. Robert McCormick rid the Chicago Sanitary District of political hacks and slackers.
The more sagacious reformers realize it’s better to be allied with the cigar-chomping ward heelers than to advertise a good-government campaign as a punch in their faces.
A century ago, when fortunes were made wheeling and dealing in public transportation, streetcar mogul Charles Yerkes freely spread money around to get an ordinance introduced in the City Council giving him a monopoly over Chicago’s transit lines.
Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. went to battle on behalf of the straphanger masses, and the bill lost by a single vote. Harrison’s victory was due to his careful courting of the 1st Ward’s aldermen (each ward then had two), “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who doubled as patrons of the city’s red-light district.
$150,000 for votes
Yerkes offered $150,000 for their votes. But as Bathhouse put it, they decided to “stick to the small stuff.” The boodle included a cozy relationship with the Lincoln Park Zoo, which shipped an elephant to dandy up Coughlin’s palatial summer home in Colorado.
He explained it as civic mindedness.
There are “two elephants in Lincoln Park eating up the taxpayers’ money,” Bathhouse said. “One is enough.”
The head of the Chicago Crime Commission once witnessed the symbiotic relationship of reform and corruption by asking Al Capone’s aid in policing the polls on Election Day. “There was not one complaint, not one election fraud, not one threat of trouble all day,” the Crime Commission chief bragged about the efficacy of a working alliance with a mobster.
By contrast, good-government types who draw a distinction between their friends and allies and the bad guys find themselves on the receiving end of a curious kind of name-calling. The city has its own patois. Along some streets lined with bungalows and two-flats, “reformer” is pronounced with a hint of skepticism and scorn.
For his accomplishments, Dever was mentioned nationally as a potential presidential candidate. Closer to home, he was chastised by an alderman, though both were Democrats, for forgetting his roots.
“It is all right for a Republican to go heavy on that reform stuff, but … a Democrat doesn’t fit into a fanatical reform picture,” the alderman said. “To give the impression that you’ve gone over to the silk-hatters after you’ve been raised under a fedora is fatal in politics in Chicago.”
As the alderman prophesied, Dever was defeated in 1927 by Big Bill Thompson, who wore his corruption on his shirt sleeve. One of his biggest campaign contributors was Capone.
Edward Burke, present-day 14th Ward alderman, notes there is a sociological explanation for why reformers have an uphill battle when they are too vocal in identifying themselves as such.
“Chicago voters tend to be suspicious of the term `reformer,'” said Burke, a published historian. “There is an ethnic bias against people who would dictate how other people should lead their lives.”
Chicago, like the nation, was founded by English-speaking Protestants, but it quickly filled up with a Noah’s Ark of immigrants, most of them Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Jewish.
When that older-stock elite decided the city’s growing pains were traced to twin evils–ward bosses, such as Bathhouse and Hinky Dink, and booze–Chicago politics spilt on an ethnic fault line. Protestants were for good government and Prohibition. Ethnic ears heard a preachy tone in the reform proposals of people who didn’t understand the virtues of wine, whiskey and beer.
Those cultural divisions have been with us ever since, especially because the ward heelers offered more concrete help than an abstract program of civic reform. That tradition can still be seen during the evening office hours Chicago aldermen hold weekly in their ward headquarters. Constituents register complaints about unfixed curbs and seek guidance for navigating the labyrinth of big-city life. A job is begged for a deadbeat brother-in-law.
According to a long-standing pact between Chicago’s voters and politicians, the ward bosses deliver basic services, seeing that garbage is picked up and potholes repaired. The electorate returns the favor at the ballot box–and pretends not to notice when office holders and their friends dip into the public trough.
Mike McDonald, brothel owner and the Mr. Fixit of Chicago politics in the 1880s, got a sweetheart contract, the equivalent of today’s Hired Truck boondoggles. He got $128,500 to paint the courthouse, a fortune then, and kept expenses down by using a mixture of chalk and water.
That enduring deal between politicos and voters can produce staggering vote totals that leave critics speechless or crying “vote fraud.” Of course, there has always been skulduggery, but it’s not the system’s bedrock. As Mayor Anton Cermak, founding father of the Chicago machine, liked to say: “Only lazy precinct captains steal votes.”
A work in progress
There is something in the system, too, for the more practical-minded of the city’s elite. Chicago has always been a work in progress. It sprung up out of the prairie faster than any city before it, burnt to the ground and was rebuilt. Now it is being rebuilt again, repairing decades of urban decay and urban renewal.
Land deals and cushy contracts are the common denominator of Chicago’s past and present. That lucrative reality is usually enough to stifle cries for reform from business leaders. Cliff Kelley, former alderman and radio talk show host, noted that the fortunes of politicians and wheeler-dealers are bound together by a simple formula.
“You don’t give contracts to people who want to throw you out of office,” he said.
The local mentality has been so shaped by the system that reformers are branded as impractical dreamers and corrupters take bows for efficient government.
Edward F. Dunne, a progressive-minded mayor of the early 20th Century, was lampooned for filling City Hall with “long-haired friends and short-haired women.” When Bill Singer challenged the first Mayor Daley, whose administration was marred by scandals just as his son’s is, he couldn’t overcome long-standing local preconceptions. As an alderman, he’d been a fluent spokesman for the cause of reform.
“I found lots of people were sympathetic but didn’t vote for me,” said Singer, now a partner in the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. “They feared they would wake up in the morning and the stoplights wouldn’t work.”
Now, though, the city’s political tradition is being put to a severe test. Chicago has never looked so good, and the corruption has rarely been so dramatic.
Will the whole system come tumbling down? Or, as in the past, will a federal attorney pick off some lesser players, while the big shots go unscathed?
In the haze of a late summer evening, I seem to see Lady Justice hovering over Millennium Park. In one dish of her scale is that beautiful lakefront expanse, the city’s new crown jewel. In the other, is the fact that the fix was put in for its landscaping.
She looks first to the one, then to the other–for in Chicago, there’s no such thing as blind justice. Then she winks and gives a nod.
