Admit The Horse

by P. G. Abeles

  Started in 1864 when a consortium of nine railroad companies purchased a 320-acre piece of land in southwest Chicago for $100,000, the meatpacking companies that comprised the Union Stockyards were the first truly global companies. The scope of their operations was staggering. The railroad cars loaded with cattle and pigs formed an unending stream in—and their meat and by-products—courtesy of the new technology of refrigeration—streamed out.

  By 1870, the meat processing giants—Swift, Morris, Hammond, and Armour—were slaughtering two million animals a year and cleaning, cutting, and packaging their parts. By 1890, the figure had increased to nine million. The system was so efficient that the mechanized killing wheel and conveyors used in the meatpacking plants inspired not only the nascent automobile industry, but every factory assembly line in the world.

  Within 30 years, “The Yards” were the largest factory complex in the world, employing 25,000 people and producing 82% of all the meat consumed in the United States. It is estimated that between 1865 and 1900, approximately 400,000,000 animals were butchered. So much animal waste drained into Chicago’s South Fork River that it became known as “Bubbly Creek”, due to the gaseous effects of decomposition. The yards closed in July, 1971, the river continues to bubble to this day.

  Recognizing an opportunity, savvy entrepreneurs started businesses nearby to take advantage of the by-products created by the slaughterhouses. Factories to process animal parts into leather, soap, fertilizer, glue, gelatin, shoe polish, buttons, perfume, and violin strings all sprang up in the neighborhood. Most women didn’t have the physical strength for the heavy labor required in the stockyards. Many found employment in these ‘affiliated’ enterprises.

  Eventually, with the development of the interstate highway system, access to rail became less important, and new roads made it cheaper to butcher animals where they were raised. After World War II, the meat companies saw their profits decline dramatically. Swift and Armour closed down their operations at the Union Stockyards in the 1950s, leaving thousands of workers without jobs.

  Industry moved on, but one company adapted rather more skillfully than most. Armour had been making soap from tallow —the rendered fat from the butchered animals—for years. After the war, the company had the idea of adding a germicidal agent known as AT-7 to their product. By the 1950s, Dial was the best-selling deodorant soap in the United States. And ironically, one of the dirtiest industries in the world reinvented itself—packaged with a bright golden yellow wrapper— into the ambassador of clean (“Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everyone did?”).

  Harrison’s grandparents spent their entire adult lives working in the Yards, his grandfather on the hazardous and perennially freezing killing floor, his grandmother in a factory whose working conditions were only slightly more humane (to the humans, if not the animals). But with factories closing everywhere, what had served one generation would not support the next. Harrison’s father needed a job. He applied and was accepted by the Chicago Police Department. His parents almost swooned with joy. Most parents might worry about a child joining a big city police force. After all, being a police officer is a dangerous job. Except, of course, if you’d worked on the killing floor of the Union Stockyards—where the combination of cold-numbed hands, huge sharp knives, a floor slippery with blood and excreta, and the endless race to keep ahead of the giant swinging carcasses on the mechanized wheel—put you at risk every minute. No. Times were changing, this time for the better.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rockville, Maryland

  THE KIDS WERE BICKERING IN THE BACKSEAT.

  The cell phone rang. It was Connor in Chicago. She couldn’t hear anything above the din.

  “Sorry, Connor. What? What did you say?” She still couldn’t hear him. Meanwhile, a disembodied voice rose above the ambient noise of warfare in the back seat.

  “Mommy, I don’t want this cheese.” A quick glance in her rearview mirror showed her five year old holding a long flap of pasty cheese that he had carefully extracted from his sandwich.

  She still couldn’t hear Connor. “Sorry, can you repeat that…?” she said into the phone.

  “I’m gonna drop it,” her five year old said conversationally.

  With thoughts of her husband’s displeasure over ground-in cheese living on in perpetuity in the car’s carpet fibers, Lacey sprang into action just as the cheese was languidly poised to drop on the carpet.

  There was panic in her voice. “No!” she shouted, louder than she meant.

  She put the cell phone back to her ear: “Connor, I’ve got to call you back, okay?”

  The child paused mid-drop, recognizing instantly that he now had his mother’s complete attention. He watched her watching him. His mother’s focused scrutiny had suddenly raised the stakes.

  He considered for a moment. “Well, can I put it out the window?” he asked.

  She weighed all the options; none of them good. She sighed.

  “Okay…but just drop it, don’t throw it.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Heedless of her instructions—and his promise—and with a wind-up worthy of a minor leaguer, he threw the cheese. The cheese arced smoothly past his elder brother’s nose, out the opposite window, where it splayed itself in a perfect sheet on the roof of a passing Camaro.

  The outrage from the nearly cheesed nose was palpable and predictably loud.

  The elder child exploded. “Mommy, he threw his cheese at me!”

  “I did not!” said the younger, eyes wide with innocence.

  “You did so!” said the elder.

  The two started wrestling in their car seats.

  From the height of the SUV, Lacey looked down at the owner of a pavement-hugging Camaro. Sitting in the low-slung seat was a middle-aged Latino in a do-rag, who raised one eyebrow in a come-hither look that transcends all linguistic boundaries. He was blissfully unaware that the sleazy black coolness of his conveyance was hopelessly neutralized by a dewlap of provolone starting to bead and sweat in the sun’s heat on the car’s roof. Lacey smiled back at him, over-brightly, overcome by guilt.

  When she spoke to Connor later that afternoon, she learned that the reports filtering back from Super Tuesday were discouraging. As expected, McCracken had won the big state primaries, but the caucuses were a bloodbath. The McCracken supporters already knew that McCracken had lost all but one. They were now starting to learn how. Mostly, campaign observers reported, it had been chaos. Time after time, local organizers were reporting that they had been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Okono supporters, who had turned out in numbers never before seen, and for which the local election boards were completely unprepared.

  Because of the sheer volume of people (where had all these people come from?!), election officials weren’t able to properly authenticate residency requirements—or much else. When people were challenged, things got ugly, with the veiled threat of lawsuits for racial discrimination. Urgent calls to hire last-minute poll workers had uniformly brought in obviously partisan Okono supporters in such a systematic way it was hard to believe it was coincidental.

  Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said all politics are local. But nowhere is this more evident than in the way state boards of elections handle the voting process. What most people taking part in the process don’t realize is that every state, every municipality, is terrified that some inadvertent mistake by one of the mostly elderly poll workers will lead to a lawsuit—for harassment, for discrimination, or infringement of civil rights.

  This fear is not entirely unreasonable. Because of abuses in the South since Reconstruction, many African Americans and poor whites were villainously and illegally prevented from exercising their franchise due to the now infamous Jim Crow laws. As a result, every state official is all too aware that watchdogs for civil rights groups routinely inspect polling places. Mistakes, even inadvertent, may provide fodder for a costly publicity-generating lawsuit. Therefore, officials carefully
instruct election judges and poll watchers—all of whom are volunteers— that they must be scrupulous in following the regulations exactly. But there is an undercurrent that any voter who complains about the process be assuaged in almost any way necessary.

  The job of the poll worker seems relatively simple. In a primary, they are tasked with setting up the voting equipment, greeting voters, verifying the registrations, and providing voters with appropriate ballots. When voting concludes, they close the precinct (usually a school gymnasium, civic center, or church), tabulate and collect voting materials, and deliver them to the county elections office.

  However, what might seem simple is complicated by a number of factors. In a general election, the United States has more than 200,000 polling places staffed by more than 1.4 million volunteers. At most, the volunteers attend training sessions for a few hours. Workers arrive at 5:30 a.m. and are required to stay in the building until polls close—usually around 7 p.m. They then start the process of putting away the tables and chairs, closing down the machines and tabulating the ballots. For a workday of approximately 16 hours they are typically paid $100.

  But that was only the beginning of what was wrong with the process. The median age of most election workers is 72. And the potential pool of volunteers is mostly limited by circumstances to retired people and the unemployed—many of whom struggle with the new machines and procedures. The overwhelming percentage of volunteer poll workers are women.

  The consequences of the lack of training were sometimes comical. In the state of Washington, long lines were reported as voters waited for hours after poll workers supposedly hid the electronic voting machines because they could not operate the touch-screen devices. In Chicago, poll workers inadvertently passed out computer styluses to use on paper ballots. When they didn’t write, poll workers reportedly assured voters the pens were full of invisible ink.

  Desperate for help, the states are constantly trolling for workers. Idaho and Wisconsin don’t even require poll workers to be registered voters, others have minimal or no residency requirements. In Indiana, poll workers as young as sixteen are accepted. SEED, with its 120,000 dues-paying members, wasn’t slow to seize the opportunity through various affiliates like Election Workers Now! Particularly in a caucus, where voters are required to provide minimal identification, if any, and with same-day registration states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Maine, installing your supporters as poll workers provided a perfect opportunity to game the system.

  McCracken supporters were prevented or discouraged from participating in the caucuses in every way possible. Controlling the process made it all rather easy. Phone lines at McCracken party headquarters rang off the hook as staffers heard the same specific allegations over and over, contest after contest. Letters from attorneys representing the McCracken campaign complained of “evidence of a premeditated and predesigned plan by the Okono campaign to engage in systematic corruption of the Party’s caucus procedures.”

  In Arapahoe County, Colorado, caucus chairs asked all Okono supporters to step out of the long lines. When they did so, they were moved to the front of the line to register. McCracken supporters in line, but not registered by the deadline, were illegally turned away.

  In Ramsey County, Minnesota, caucus chairs went down the long lines outside the polling places and informed McCracken supporters via bullhorn that that location was for Okono caucusing only, McCracken supporters should go to another high school across town. With so many McCracken supporters congregating at these other facilities—it took them a while to realize they’d been duped. By the time some of them returned to the original site, they were informed they were too late to be admitted. McCracken supporters later gave testimony that they stood and watched in frustration and fury as the poll worker manning the door continued to admit Okono supporters, even as he barred them from entering. Others, of course, never made it back to the polling place. After driving all over town trying to find the caucus site, many just gave up and went home.

  In Elmore County, Idaho, Okono supporters not listed on voter rolls or from different precincts were registered without question. McCracken supporters were told they were ineligible and required to leave.

  In Wyandotte County, Kansas, the preference cards on which the caucus-goers were supposed to record their vote were all pre-marked for Okono. At other caucus sites, Okono supporters were invited to step out of line to receive cards. McCracken supporters, even those at the front of the line were told there were no preference cards left.

  In Cass County, North Dakota, caucus chairs deliberately miscounted votes to favor Okono, and counted unregistered people, people registered in other precincts, and small children in Okono’s tally. In more than one precinct, caucus chairs ‘counting’ votes for Okono counted those in line, then patiently waited for them to reassemble—and then counted them again.

  Precinct by precinct, county-by-county, state-by-state, the same allegations were made over and over about how the Okono campaign was contravening the process.

  In Las Vegas, Nevada, unions supporting Okono refused to give McCracken supporters time off to caucus. Workers were offered lavish buffets, but attendance was conditional on registering for Okono. Other employees claimed their jobs were threatened if they caucused for McCracken.

  Perhaps most disturbing, more than one mainstream media news outlet received reports from their own employees that large chartered interstate buses were dropping off hundreds of people at polling places on caucus days. The buses were all registered out-of-state. More than one of the “bus people” proudly told a network news reporter on-camera that he’d caucused more than five times for Okono—in different states—in addition to voting in his own primary. The network never aired it.

  People later wondered why McCracken supporters had allowed the cheating to happen. The first, most obvious explanation was confusion. With so many people gathered in such relatively small spaces—caucusing frequently took place in multiple rooms of a building rather than all in one central location—it was hard to tell what was going on. For example, in multiple polling places when caucus chairs instructed the Okono supporters to move to the front of the line—there was some murmuring—but people hesitated to complain, since no explanation had been given. Many Okono supporters didn’t even realize what was going on—they simply followed instructions.

  At other polling places, when the McCracken supporters had specific problems with poll workers—who wouldn’t give them preference cards or credential them, for example—they didn’t realize ALL McCracken supporters were having these problems (how could they?) and they didn’t realize the extent to which the poll workers were willing to shift things for Okono.

  When McCracken supporters complained—particularly about the counting—the Okono people ignored them. They were in charge. There was no appeal.

  The second explanation as to why the McCracken supporters allowed the Okono campaign to cheat may have been who they were. McCracken’s biggest demographic support came from women and the elderly. Confronted at the caucuses with the aggressive in-your-face tactics and physical intimidation of the Okono organizers—McCracken supporters simply folded. Community organizer Saul Alinsky, whose foundation had trained Okono, was infamous for his cynical calculation as to how to secure an advantage over your opponents. One method he advocated was to put the opponent in an uncomfortable or unusual position. “Go outside the experience of the enemy. Cause confusion, fear, retreat.” (Rule # 1) When the elderly white women raised questions about improper procedures and counting, they lacked the self-confidence to challenge the combative college-age African American and white males who called them names and brusquely told them they “didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  Even as a pattern started to emerge of the tactics that were being used—it was too late for the McCracken campaign to mount a counter-offensive. The campaign seemed paralyzed by the bullyboy tactics—even as their hands were tied by supporters living in Happy Democratlan
d—who constantly reminded everyone how lucky they were to have two such great candidates to choose from and warned the campaign sotto voce that they wouldn’t countenance a strong pushback against Okono. Too many of them were still acting as if Okono’s campaign was about positioning for a plum cabinet office—instead of what it was—war—total war— designed to win (as theirs should have been) the nomination.

  With Claire McCracken’s lifetime ties to the African American community, the campaign had built their coalition on the early presumption that Claire would receive significant African American support. Most assumed Okono’s skimpy credentials —and stingy support in the past for issues affecting African Americans— essentially predicated against a strong run. But by not highlighting his inexperience and his changeable position on hot button social issues at the beginning, the McCracken campaign allowed Okono to gain traction that would not have been otherwise possible.

  Curiously, the ambitious and carefully coiffed white men running in the Democratic primary had no problems piling on the one woman running—but they pulled their punches when it came to the black man. The Okono campaign wasn’t foolish —or gentlemanly— enough to protest. In fact, the McCracken campaign suspected they encouraged a kind of locker-room camaraderie. “Bro’s before Ho’s,” as one of the Okono campaign stickers read.

  Okono’s race operated as both sword and shield—allowing him to do and say things the others couldn’t get away with, and protecting him from scrutiny on issues that would otherwise have been considered fair game. As his campaign made support for Okono a kind of racial litmus test of pure liberalism among Democrats, his African blood washed away the sin of his white family’s slave owning past—with the strangely ironic result that the first viable African American candidate for president was not a descendent of slaves—but of slave owners.