Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  And yet, although Vrdolyak’s remark was indicative of a broader wave of racial hate that would wash over white Chicago in the months to come, it also may have blown the election for Byrne. This might seem like a curious conclusion in view of the fact that this was Chicago and this was the Reagan era, when Republican politicians, North and South, made convenient use of popular notions of black cultural dysfunction and ghetto pathology to justify their cries for welfare reform. Moreover, Chicago, in particular, had a special role to play in the antiwelfare backlash. Perhaps the most conspicuous catchphrase echoing through the attack on the welfare state during the 1980s was “Chicago welfare queen,” an image Ronald Reagan had conjured up during his 1976 presidential campaign. The Chicago welfare queen, according to Reagan’s hyperbolic tale, had cheated the federal government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by having illegitimate children and creating multiple aliases. While Reagan never mentioned explicitly that the woman in his sordid tale was African American, he did specify that she lived on Chicago’s South Side, a detail whose significance was missed by few. This was typical of the rampant coded or ventriloquized cultural racism during these years. By the mid-1980s, universities and corporations alike were instituting cultural sensitivity training programs, and even conservatives, who were increasingly appealing to values of colorblindness, meritocracy, and free market individualism, were beginning to understand that racism made them look bad. Furthermore, to confront the demands of minority groups for race-conscious policies, many conservatives had taken to minimizing the presence of racial discrimination. If racism could be eliminated as a cause for poverty, then one could only conclude that some combination of cultural deficiencies, individual failings, and the negative effects of the welfare system itself were to blame for the ghettos and barrios that persisted in American cities.54 There was thus much to be gained in planting culturally racist notions in the minds of middle-class whites angry about their taxes, but the trick was to do it without opening oneself up to charges of racism. This was why the overt forms of racism that ran wild in Chicago around Harold Washington’s rise ended up working to his advantage by shocking outside observers, turning the stomachs of just enough white liberals, and erasing much of Byrne’s remaining support within the black community.

  This last effect was perhaps the most critical of all, for it was the astonishing mobilization of the black community that ultimately pushed Washington over the top. Black organizers conducted an aggressive registration campaign that had added over one hundred thousand black voters, enabling Washington to capture a startling 84.7 percent of the black vote, which constituted 92.1 percent of his total citywide. In view of the machine’s patronage leverage in black Chicago and the reluctance of many longtime residents to believe in the electability of a black candidate, this was a remarkable feat.55 In fact, it was common knowledge among political insiders that the machine owned a certain percentage of the black vote, regardless of the candidates vying for election. Famed Chicago campaign manager Don Rose, who had helped Jane Byrne take black votes away from the machine in 1977, estimated the figure to be 20 percent. “This is the vote,” Rose joked, “the machine would deliver for a George Wallace against Martin Luther King.”56 But against Washington, Byrne had garnered the support of a mere 8 percent of registered black voters. The Washington campaign had accomplished this, according to historian and political consultant William Grimshaw, by developing a “carnival” and “movement” atmosphere that helped transform its candidate into a “messiah.”57 Some of this was orchestrated by Washington’s skilled campaign manager and Chicago civil rights veteran Al Raby, but the real magic was in the movement’s more spontaneous moments, when street rallies pulled thousands of observers off sidewalks and into swirling, singing, dancing masses, and groups of young people swept through neighborhoods chanting “Harold, Harold, Harold” and knocking on random doors to urge people to vote. It all came together just days before the primary, when more than twelve thousand supporters defied a driving snowstorm and packed into UIC’s basketball arena for an electrifying two-hour rally. Days later, after the votes were tallied, Washington had garnered 37 percent to Byrne’s 33 percent and Daley’s 30 percent.

  FIGURE 16. The carnival atmosphere of the Harold Washington campaign. Photo by Jacques M. Chenet/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

  But after a raucous victory party, all the carnival jubilation began to ferment into consternation when Washington’s supporters began to realize that, unlike in past years, the Democratic machine was not going to marshal its forces for this particular candidate, and victory in the general election was far from assured. In fact, at first there was a great deal of confusion among the Democratic Party’s committeemen. In the immediate aftermath of the primary, Vrdolyak told the press that the party would give its full support to the Democratic candidate, and longtime alderman Vito Marzullo, the boss of Little Italy and the Near West Side since 1953, declared Washington “the Mayor of Chicago.”58 Then the defections began. Before the end of February, Alderman Aloysius Majerczyk, whose ward encompassed the Polish neighborhoods around the McKinley Park area to the north of the old stockyards, had announced his support for Epton. Referring to the “message of racial pride” his constituents had been giving him, Majerczyk told the Tribune, “We’re against open housing in my ward, and we always have been.”59 Indicative of just how much Washington’s candidacy was galvanizing whites of all ethnic stripes, Majerczyk’s endorsement of Epton was quickly seconded by Ivan Rittenberg, alderman of the traditionally Jewish Fortieth Ward on the far North Side. Days later, the Tribune was reporting that Epton’s campaign headquarters in Irish Bridgeport was being overwhelmed by Democratic volunteers, and that in the heavily Italian and Polish neighborhoods of the Northwest Side, buttons reading “Italians for Eptonini” and “Polish for Eptonski” were being passed around.60 Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian—these were groups that had quarreled almost incessantly over power, place, and resources since before the turn of the century. Certainly ethnic ties had progressively attenuated in the postwar decades, but it was hard to deny that business relations, real estate dealings, and friendships still tended to work best when the parties involved were of the same ethnic ilk. This was a situation, moreover, that the machine system had promoted with its divide-and-rule style of governance. It is therefore somewhat ironic that many of the Democrats who defected to the Republican camp justified their decision by claiming that Epton would be somehow better at uniting the city. In fact, whites in the city had never been as unified as they were in the spring of 1983, except perhaps in the months after Chicago’s own Jack Johnson became the first black boxer in history to win the heavyweight crown, and the call sounded across the nation for the “Great White Hope” who could beat Johnson and thereby restore the supremacy of the white race. Epton was regarded as the next great white hope. Outside of a handful of Lakefront liberal and racially mixed wards, the only question for Democratic committeemen was whether to openly oppose Washington or to remain publicly neutral while working behind the scenes against him.

  However, to say that race was the only issue for many Democratic defectors would be misleading. There is reason to believe that had Washington not run an uncompromising antimachine campaign, a good many committeemen and aldermen who ended up endorsing Epton would have grudgingly supported him instead. In fact, Washington was something of a machine insider. After earning a law degree at Northwestern University, where he was the only African American in his graduating class, he had worked for Third Ward alderman Ralph Metcalfe between 1951 and 1965, a time when Metcalfe was still cozy with Daley. Although some hoped that this political experience would make him come around and play ball with the machine, Washington never backed off his promise to rid the city of a system that he claimed perpetuated “outdated politics and pie-in-the-sky financing,” while providing “fat consultant contracts for a few politically connected firms and jobs for a few patronage workers.”61 He was therefore a threat to the aldermen a
nd committeemen, whose power rested in their ability to lubricate their precincts with patronage. If, as Milton Rakove had observed, the men who dominated the Chicago machine were, above all else, “practical, pragmatic, parochial, and nonideological,” then the color of Washington’s skin should have made little difference.62 But it did—alas, it did.

  Why it did, however, had to do more with culture than ideology, and it had less to do with machine cadres than with ordinary Chicagoans infusing the normally staid conduct of mayoral politics with a new energy, anger, and urgency. When Rakove wrote his scathing indictment of the machine in the early 1970s, the system he was attacking was still working to keep the city’s political culture impervious to the ideological challenges of the era—liberalism, democracy, conservatism, you name it. Its ability to do this with such efficacy had allowed it to outlast all the other big city machines by decades. But what Rakove could not see as he was completing his manuscript was the role that grassroots cultural struggles would play in the coming years. By the early 1980s, the national political landscape was increasingly characterized by seemingly irreconcilable conflicts over cultural issues and moral values. Abortion rights, censorship of obscenity, and gay rights constituted the first wave of “culture wars” to grip the country. But beginning in the early 1970s, a new set of cultural issues revolving around the lingering questions of racial segregation and inequality had moved into the political sphere, as white Americans debated policies like busing and affirmative action and responded to minority claims for greater cultural respect and recognition in institutions of higher learning.

  Such issues did not seem to translate into what one might call “politics” in Chicago. Aldermen like Vito Marzullo and Roman Pucinski, the “leader of Chicago Polonia” since 1959, knew little, if anything, about the politics of recognition and “political correctness”; politics to them was filling potholes, fixing parking tickets, and doling out jobs and contracts to key constituents. However, whether they knew it or not, the cultural politics of race was overtaking them, even if it would not remove them from power. One of the first things they learned was that they would have to watch what they said much more than before. One of the signs that Chicago was merging to a greater extent with mainstream political culture were the many allegations of racism that were flying around the city’s newspapers. While many of these charges were, of course, warranted, some white Chicagoans began complaining that black leaders were construing as “racist” any opposition to Washington. In the face of such allegations, the Epton campaign and its supporters began throwing around charges of “reverse racism,” claiming that the blacks accusing them of racism were, in fact, the racists, not them. These were sentiments that would be increasingly heard on college campuses in the coming years, as minority groups pressed their demands for greater cultural recognition and conservatives decried the censorship and factionalism of “political correctness,” but such circumstances had seldom been witnessed in big city politics.

  In retrospect, it now seems clear that Chicago was in 1983 staging one of the first major dramas of the new era of culturized politics, when all that separated whites from blacks—space, wealth, ideology—would be reduced to ethnocultural factors. By the 1980s a politics of resentment was clearly taking hold on both sides of the color line across the United States. Blacks were resentful about all the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights era, and whites about what they perceived as the stubborn refusal of blacks to let the race issue drop after the civil rights victories of the 1960s. But white resentment, in particular, went beyond this. White resentment, as Chicago ’83 demonstrated, was not only articulated in cultural terms, it was about culture itself. As whites in Chicago gazed at the expressions of cultural pride and solidarity on display in Washington’s messianic movement, they understood, on a palpable level, that blacks possessed something they lacked. As one Epton supporter so poignantly lamented about the dilemma of opposing Washington, “We’re racist, and he has cultural pride.”63

  Such expressions of cultural envy and resentment explain a great deal about the violence that was entering Chicago’s mayoral election around this time. Even if most operatives within the machine still tended to view the stakes of the election in terms of controlling political power and patronage, the groundswell of opposition to Washington was taking the whole affair into an entirely new realm. What was behind the bitter racial hatred exploding into public life in Chicago resembled, on some level, Slavoj Zizek’s description of the dynamics underlying the ethnoracial tensions that tore the Balkans apart in the late 1980s and 1990s. Critical to Zizek’s perspective is the idea that what drove the nationalist fears of ethnoracial others were imagined “thefts of enjoyment”—the idea that racial others threatened to take away the dominant group’s “way of life.”64 This seems an apt way to explain what was transpiring as more and more Chicagoans were articulating the feeling that defeating Washington in the election was a matter of “saving” their neighborhoods and their city—a sentiment Epton sought to capitalize on by choosing the incendiary campaign slogan “Epton, before it’s too late.” Epton of course denied the phrase had any racial implications, insisting it related to the city’s impending fiscal crisis, but this was disingenuous. Epton understood very well that in the eyes of many white Chicagoans, a victory by Washington meant the loss of their city as they knew it. Not only did they fear that blacks would finally get their rightful share of the patronage pie, but for many whites, a city run by blacks would be a city of immorality, corruption, and danger, where public culture would become synonymous with some nightmarish vision of the black nationalist ghetto. Under such conditions, racism ran wild throughout the city in the most virulent forms, seemingly unrestrained by any codes of propriety or civility.

  The first sign that things were getting out of control occurred on Palm Sunday, March 27. Washington and former vice president Walter Mondale had planned to attend religious services at St. Pascal’s Catholic Church on the Northwest Side, but when they arrived, they discovered “NIGGER DIE” painted on a church door. Later, upon leaving the church, the two were mobbed by hundreds of frenzied Epton supporters screaming racial epithets and other insults. Around this same time, a number of racially vicious flyers began circulating in many white neighborhoods. One suggested facetiously that if Washington won, the name of the city would be changed to “Chicongo” and that the city’s official police insignia would include images of a watermelon slice and a rack of ribs; another joked that Washington would place basketball hoops on the Chicago Picasso and rename the CTA “Soul Train.”65 While Epton of course stayed clear of such low tactics, he nonetheless engaged in a smear campaign loaded with thinly veiled cultural racism, all the while accusing blacks and the local media of playing the race card. Understanding the propensity of whites to buy into “welfare queen” notions of black corruption and criminality, Epton exploited some minor legal problems in Washington’s past to impugn his integrity. Washington, it was true, had been in legal trouble in 1972 for failing to file income tax returns, and in 1970 he had his law license suspended for billing a client for services he did not perform, but the amounts of money in question in both instances were insignificant. In a city like Chicago, where corruption was more the rule than the exception, such attacks against a white candidate would have been laughable. Of course Epton never said anything racist per se, but he knew where his comments would lead. By the time Chicagoans cast their votes, Washington had been forced to publicly defend himself against the baseless charge that he had been convicted for child molestation.

  However, once again, on the eve of the election as in the primary, the expression of such ugly racism actually worked in Washington’s favor. In what was the closest mayoral election in Chicago since 1919, Washington managed to prevail by just 46,250 votes out of a total of 1.29 million. The event was one of not just national but international importance. Black mayors had headed major American cities since 1973, when Tom Bradley was elected in Los Angeles, Coleman You
ng in Detroit, and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, but this was Chicago—the city with the second largest black population in the United States, where the saga of black struggle was particularly well known. Moreover, it was an event of great significance for the black diaspora—of lesser magnitude, of course, but not unlike the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. Indeed, Washington’s election was made possible by a breathtaking show of black solidarity and, as such, was a source of inspiration for blacks all over the world. As in the primary, African Americans had turned out in record numbers and voted almost unanimously for Washington, while his opponent had captured an overwhelming share (87.6 percent) of the white vote.