Deus ex Machine

...There are too many choppy sentences, too many scenes hastily set with stock phrases, too many stale signs of writing from the clips...

...Reformers-ever earnest and sometimes insufferable-have become stock figures in all big cities, but "da Mare" and many other Chicago figures are unique...

...On the other hand, reformers have learned that political salvation comes from good works, not from faith alone...

...Then the troops were hardened by Mayor Daley's marauding police during that year's bloody Democratic National Convention...

...That was also the year Dan Walker, a corporation lawyer who had managed the Stevenson campaign, beat the organization's candidate in the primary and defeated Ogilvie to become governor...

...Unfortunately, little of this is captured by Mathewson...

...and Republicans started touting State's Attorney James Thompson as an attractive candidate for the usually moribund Chicago GOP...

...Moreover, as Mathewson notes, there is now a battalion of experienced, dedicated independents ready to wage total war against the Daley machine...

...Still, for the uninitiated, he shows a fascinating city headed toward what just might turn out to be Richard J. Daley's last hurrah...

...Finally, blacks deserted the machine because of State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan's controversial raid on the Black Panther party headquarters, and that office fell into Republican hands...

...With Hyde Parkers providing the leadership and old McCarthy hands supplying the manpower, the reformers fought the Daley organization door-to-door in a bitter battle with anti-Semitic overtones, and installed Singer in the City Council...

...But its ranks remained small until 1968, when Eugene McCarthy's Presidential bid brought many middle-class young people into politics and taught them basic organizational skills...

...Though Daley is 72 and was away from his office for an extended period following a stroke early this year, there is a dearth of heirs apparent now that several of his top associates have been convicted of stealing votes or money...

...Mathewson reports, for example, how one reform campaign, borrowing a page from the old politics, had its candidate's picture taken in a synagogue so voters in the heavily Jewish ward would know that despite his name, Dr...

...And Mathewson comes up with hardly anything new for those who follow Chicago politics...

...Whatever they may portend for the future, the political winds sweeping across Chicago offer a colorful story, with a cast of characters worthy of Jules Feiffer or Damon Run-yon...

...The movement got its start there in Hyde Park, the urbane South Side home of the University of Chicago, an area that had produced such early reform aldermen as Charles Merriam and Paul Douglas...

...In the spring of 1969, William Singer, a young lawyer who had worked on Paul Douglas' Senate staff and Robert Kennedy's Presidential campaign, announced that he would run against the machine alderman in a North Side ward...

...Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Contributor, New York "Times Magazine," "Saturday Review," Chicago "Daily News" Richard J. Daley, Cook County Democratic Chairman since 1953 and Mayor of Chicago for nearly 20 years, has announced his decision to be his organization's mayoral candidate against reform Alderman William Singer in the February primary...

...In the Windy City these people have loosely organized as the Independent Voters of Illinois and the Independent Precinct Organization, and Mathews accurately observes: "Sometimes between the two major parties, sometimes to the Left of them, this force is bringing new blood and new vitality into politics and government in Chicago and Cook County...

...several blacks indicated their interest in joining the race...

...But Stevenson, more Hamlet-like than his father, eventually made his peace with the Mayor, who happily slated him to run for the U.S...

...In 1972, however, the reformers drew blood on national television when the Democratic National Convention in Miami voted to oust the Daley delegation for being unrepresentative of women and minorities, and replaced it with one headed by Singer...

...Like some books by other former newspapermen, Up Against Daley often sounds as if it were dictated over the phone to the night rewrite desk...

...Then the candidate who started it all, Bill Singer, announced his decision to run for mayor in 1975...

...Bruce Douglas was a landsman, not a Scotsman...

...Mathewson-a former Chicago newspaperman, television reporter and press secretary to Republican Governor Richard Ogilvie-designates as "the third force" the increasing number of middle-class voters in the U.S...

...As so often happens in politics, the third force has in some ways become what it beheld...

...With unsympathetic state and Federal officials keeping an eye on City Hall, with patronage jobs dwindling, with white ethnic groups moving to the suburbs and being replaced by apathetic blacks and independent whites, the regular Democratic organization began to find itself hard-pressed in ward after ward...

...The following year, Singer's experienced minions fanned out into other wards and helped elect reform delegates to the Illinois Constitutional Convention...

...Even in the once docile black wards, several independent aldermen emerged to challenge the machine...

...who tend to coalesce around particular issues and candidates, scorn patronage, and cross party lines...

...Senate, where, like Douglas, he wouldn't bother Cook County and Cook County wouldn't bother him...

...that it's not enough to be on the right side of the issues, you have to get out your votes...

...For a while, it was hoped that Adlai Stevenson III would assume command of the anti-Daley forces...

...All of which lends strains of Gotterdammerung to Joe Mathewson's chronicle of the rise of the reform movement that is threatening to topple the nation's last great political machine...