Presidential Vote Fraud and the Chicago Press:
EPSTEIN, JOSEPH
NATIONAL REPORTS Presidential Vote Fraud and the Chicago Press By Joseph Epstein Chicago A PHILOSOPHER of my acquaintance makes two simple demands of a city before he will consent to...
...reform that will smother any chance of irregularity in voting procedures...
...In the text of the news stories the word "alleged" was gradually eased out and replaced by such words as "flagrant," "stolen," "illicit" and "fouled...
...Ordinarily this has no more effect than to make for some extremely dull reading...
...Two men have been indicted by a Federal grand jury for vote fraud, presumably for offering money or dinner to four voters, but thus far neither has been proven guilty...
...From a reading of the "Analysis" it is clear that the Republican party and the Chicago press were joined in the belief that where the Democrats had won a heavy majority there must be fraud, and in the further belief that it was only a matter of a short time before this would be substantiated...
...gave his version of the 1952 election for Illinois Secretary of State...
...Chicago, along with a number of other large cities in the United States, has watched its newspapers swallow each other up like certain tropical fish, till today there are four papers (Tribune, American, Daily News, Sun-Times) under only two ownerships...
...second, that its newspapers be reasonably responsible...
...So the haranguing in the newspapers gradually dissipated to make way for authentic news of the Congo and the national economy...
...The "Analysis" is especially critical of the city's newspapers for the methods they used to sustain the intensity of the fraud charges without really having much in the way of evidence...
...In an editorial comment on the "Analysis," the Chicago Tribune referred to the scholars as "three blind mice" and tried to show that they were working for Chicago's Democratic Mayor, Richard J. Daly...
...Joseph Epstein, a free-lance journalist, is a close observer of the local political scene in Chicago...
...In that issue William H. Fetridge, chairman of the Midwest Volunteers for Nixon-Lodge...
...The Tribune and the other three papers have made no mention of the content of the "Analysis...
...It is doubtful that these methods have been used with such abandon and with such effect since the days of William Randolph Hearst...
...The recent tumult here was an instance where the nation looked to the newspapers of a single city for a sincere and informed effort at getting at the truth...
...or, rather, that the reasons for the disorder have been uncovered...
...there were editorials entitled "Stop Vote Fraud" (Daily News, November 14), and indignant though wholly unsupported articles that told of "a mass conspiracy to steal the election...
...with no opposition press to hold them in check, they preferred instead to add the fustian of intense partisan politics...
...Now the stench arises from Chicago as the evidence piles up that the tremendous Democratic majority was heavily tainted with frauds," the Tribune wrote on November 24, though to this day fraud has not been uncovered...
...Though Finer has offered each of them the opportunity to publish it, he hasn't had any takers...
...At the beginning of December, Senator Thruston Morton, chairman of the Republican National Committee, came to town "to protect the sanctity of the ballot...
...As the Chicago newspapers were quick to point out, if fraud could be proved in Illinois and one or two other states, the outcome of the election could be reversed...
...To keep the cauldron seething, the Chicago press used hyperbolic headlines and sub-headlines that often had little to do with the stories carried under them...
...It is only now, almost three months later, that some sort of order has been imposed on these events...
...If the recent muddle here points up any lesson, it is the need for at least some reform of our election laws...
...When he finished he had more than a thousand...
...Chicago's newspapers were not up to the task...
...The record is innocent of any recount in that election...
...Although the Republican party had made no immediate gains, the Chicago newspapers supplied them with the fraud issue, which probably will be put to use in the 1962 Congressional election...
...As things are now, inaccuracies will crop up in any large city where both election judges and voters are unfamiliar with election laws, where urban renewal and other shifts in population in the city go unreported, where both national and local elections are held simultaneously and where the long ballot is still in use...
...While ordering the chaos, they attempted "to examine the evidence put forward by the Republican party and the Chicago newspapers to support the charges of fraud which they made...
...The officials of the state Republican party were given unlimited space, often to make the most irresponsible remarks...
...They were able to capture and retain the public interest in the chaos which they themselves had created only because of the narrow margin of victory in the Presidential election...
...The three political scientists then concluded that "the charges that wholesale election fraud was perpetrated in Chicago were baseless...
...At the time they occurred, reading the events of the alleged election scandal in the Chicago newspapers primarily induced, a feeling of confusion (though reading them in all four papers interlarded with advertisements for donations to the Nixon Recount Committee gave some hint of what to look for...
...An instance of this appeared in the Daily News of November 12...
...To compound the dreariness of the situation, the tone of both sets of newspapers is decidedly Republican...
...A recheck of Chicago's voting machines, for instance, gave Nixon a net gain of only 312 votes out of 1,780,000—an amazingly accurate reporting of the vote...
...The Senator, a man who lately refuses to defy anyone's expectations, commented that Chicago had "the rottenest election machinery in the United States...
...While this tale may have inspired Volunteers for Nixon-Lodge, it was simply not true...
...It seems clear that both the Republican party and the press were not primarily interested in learning whether or not fraud was committed...
...But the most notorious remark of all came from the defeated Republican State's Attorney, Benjamin Adomowski...
...Not only is reform in this area necessary and good in itself, but doing away with as many voting irregularities as possible would have the additional effect of depriving the defeated party in any close election of the recourse to screaming fraud...
...Although the Daily News must have known this, it didn't bother to mention it...
...Although one of these owners emphatically claims that each of his papers retains its former autonomy, it seems less than cynical to believe that two newspapers owned by the same man will rarely disagree on anything substantive...
...As far as the State's Attorney's office is concerned," he said, "I don't suppose I'd mind if they were just stealing a court house...
...He then joined with two colleagues at the University (Professors Jerome C. Kerwin and C. Herman Pritchett) to do a report on the conduct of the press during the allegations of election fraud, entitled "Analysis of Chicago Newspaper Stories on 1960 Election...
...The other ownership, so far as I know, makes no such claim...
...Because he was planning a book on the election process, Professor Herman Finer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, clipped all the news stories and editorials on the scandal from the beginning...
...But in the huggermugger of allegations of vote fraud in Chicago that followed the national election, this town's newspapers demonstrated once again how deplorable and damaging the absence of a two-party press can be...
...He said the Republican candidate was the loser by "10,000 votes, but a recount made him winner by 9,000...
...they were dedicated to finding it...
...He would last no longer than a week in Chicago, where the water is passable but the city's four newspapers are not...
...Regretfully...
...With a perfectly straight face, it printed the quotation and let it go at that...
...Regrettably, there was no one—certainly not the press—to publicly suggest that, ex officio, his disinterestedness might be challenged...
...As the days dragged on, the Republicans found themselves unable to convert the irregularities that had cropped up into enough evidence for fraud...
...but when manipulations and machinations of a political machine are used to take over the White House, it's a sad day in American politics...
...On December 7, from several hundred miles away in Washington, came the word of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona...
...For if the defeated party should happen to have an unchecked press on its side, as the Republicans had in the Chicago newspapers, they can certainly make a very merry go of it...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Presidential Vote Fraud and the Chicago Press By Joseph Epstein Chicago A PHILOSOPHER of my acquaintance makes two simple demands of a city before he will consent to live in it: first, that its drinking-water be bearable...
...It was not too long before the Illinois Republicans got the support of their national leaders...
...Finer and his colleagues took the jumble of press accounts of the events following the election—beginning on November 8 and ending on December 15—-and arranged them in a chronological narrative...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 11
