Correspondents' Correspondence Chicago's Rusty Machine
SHAPIRO, HARVEY D.
correspondents' corresponaence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Chicago's Rusty Machine Chicago—The Windy City's...
...The Daley organization stood on two legs: blue collar whites and inner city blacks...
...And many of them—burning with a cabin fever born of weeks of high snow and low temperatures—voted with a vengeance...
...After two years in office, Bilandic—heir to the political organization nurtured for 20 years by the late Richard J. Daley?was denied a full four-year term...
...People will start making plans to run for public office, and those plans will no longer depend solely on the decisions reached by the slating committee of the Cook County DeWio-cratic Organization.—Harvey D. Shapiro...
...The conventional wisdom is that Byrne beat the man who fired her as Commissioner of Consumer Sales through a combination of good weather and bad...
...But mother of mercy is this the end of the Chicago machine, too...
...After next month's mayoral election —against an obscure Republican investment banker named Wallace D. Johnson—it seems likely that Byrne will assume command of the army of Democratic patronage workers and precinct captains...
...The upstart former city commissioner had decisively defeated Mayor Michael Bilandic and his patronage team of vote pullers by nearly 17,000 votes out of 800,000 cast...
...Since the machine's voters get to the polls come hell or high water, it was the newcomers who provided the Byrne margin...
...Thus Byrne was able to get two-thirds of the black vote, carrying 14 of the 16 predominantly black wards, and at the same time she garnered 48 per cent of the white vote...
...Although in the campaign she often cloaked herself in reformist rhetoric, she entered local politics as a devoted follower of Daley...
...Everyone knew, after all, that it was merely a tuneup for the legendary Democratic machine...
...There was a rare good spell on election day, swelling the turnout to 59 per cent of those registered —a good 10 points higher than usual for recent primaries...
...More fundamentally, though, the primary reflected a shift in Chicago's electoral balance that has been taking place for a number of years—a shift that has already destroyed the Democratic machines of most other cities...
...As in the exhibition games the major league baseball teams play against their minor league farm clubs in Florida, the thing to watch was not the score, but how well the superstars performed at the start of a new season...
...correspondents' corresponaence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Chicago's Rusty Machine Chicago—The Windy City's political pundits and camp followers are still reeling from the outcome of the mayoral primary early this month...
...Jane Byrne is no wild-eyed reformer...
...Well, no and yes...
...The whites have left the city for the suburbs, and even those who have stayed now lean less heavily on the city for jobs and assistance...
...Nevertheless, by demonstrating that the machine is no longer invincible, her victory has damaged it irreparably...
...As for the city's expanding black population, it was never really comfortable with the machine, largely because the whites who ran it were never really comfortable with them...
...When the Chicago Tribune trumpeted "Jane Byrne Wins," however, the headline was not a successor to its celebrated "Dewey Beats Truman" banner—for Jane Byrne had indeed won...
...She is, in other words, likely to remain what she has been for most of her two decades of political activism—a believer in the Democratic party as an institution, not as an instrument of ideology...
...With victory in Chicago's Democratic primary tantamount to election, those who depend on the city government for their income or status, or both, are frantically courting Byrne these days...
...They are also trying to discern just what happened...
...Yet a new era in Chicago politics will be launched not only on the fifth floor of city hall, where Jane Byrne will become The Man on Five, but also in living rooms across the city...
...Both legs have withered, while the numbers of independent voters has grown...
...For during the bad weather, the Bilandic administration had done a poor job of snow removal, and had earned the ire of the blacks by ordering transit authority trains to bypass stations in black neighborhoods in order to deliver outlying whites directly to the Loop...
...He rewarded her by making her the first woman to hold a city cabinet position and named her co-chairman of the Cook County Democratic Organization...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 7
