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96  Chapter 5 Neighborhood Background and the Campaign in Chicago Harold Washington was a well-known African American mayor,but he was also notable because he was a reform mayor and, more than that, combined the ideals of reform with a community development program so that reform had a substance it had not had in a century of previous incarnations. That substance came from the social movements of the 1960s: civil rights, women’s rights, and community empowerment. It was refined by the experience of diverse community organizations through the 1970s and was connected to important intellectual and academic support . This substance,when tried out under Washington and connected to the authority of city government, then rose to a different level. Political Background and Neighborhood Organizing Most accounts of Chicago politics stress the long history of its “machine”type political organization, longer lasting than those in other large U.S. cities. The political culture,which had an exemplary spokesperson and theoretician in University of Chicago (later Harvard) political scientist Edward Banfield, held that political values grew out of material self-interest, and that any overarching aggregation of interests needed to be held together by mutual gain. Banfield’s point, a good one, was that cities tended to have a fragmentation of formal authority, and the only way overall policies could NEIGHBORHOOD BACKGROUND AND THE CAMPAIGN IN CHICAGO 97 be made, or problems solved, was through the aggregation of authority by other means. In the first half of the twentieth century that meant the urban political party, an organization put together to win elections and nourished by the rewards of victory—the “spoils” of political campaigning—in the form of patronage and control of city contracts and other financial resources. Careful distribution of these rewards was the main way to create and maintain such authority. Furthermore, attempts to substitute a “moral” basis for a financial one were not only impractical, Banfield argued, but less representative of the real plurality of city interests than were the concretely ward-based ones.1 In Chicago,this view had been reinforced by a political organization—the “machine”—devoted to a similar style of governing: ward bosses had a large hand in controlling development decisions, in particular approval of zoningchange requests, and allocated city jobs as rewards for loyal service, while the longtime (1955–76) mayor and head of the machine,Richard J. Daley,made whatever big decisions were needed but put the purpose of maintaining the organization above all others. Nationally, the machine delivered liberal presidential candidates like Adlai Stevenson and presidents like John F. Kennedy . Locally,it accommodated migrations of southern blacks into segregated neighborhoods,and into segregated but massive public-housing projects,and it co-opted black city council members while resisting serious reforms or sharing of power. Meanwhile, the machine assiduously promoted an image of efficiency. But at its core it was an informal structure, accepted and even celebrated in local opinion: machine operatives in thousands of precincts bringing valuable favors and expecting votes in return.2 What was remarkable was how the machine persisted after the 1950s, a decade or more after those in other cities went into eclipse. How this happened is an intriguing story,but simply put,there were two main reasons,one related to the city’s black population, the other to Mayor Daley himself. The machine adapted to—cultivated and co-opted—Chicago’s black population. Black population increase was startling after the 1930s. As the white population left the city for the suburbs, black votes became increasingly important. Machine recruitment of blacks took a dramatic turn in 1940 when Edward Kelly,then Democratic mayor and machine boss,got black Republican leader William Dawson to switch parties. Dawson remained a power until his death in 1970, all the while operating within the machine culture, delivering votes to the machine. William Grimshaw tells a more complicated story: Dawson never had the empire he sought among Chicago’s black voters—he was held in check by Daley and factional competition within the machine. Moreover, while the black population increased, its civic and political organizations 98 ACTIVISTS IN CITY HALL declined, leaving it divided and unable to mount a serious challenge to machine control until the 1970s.3 Also important to the survival of the machine was Daley’s good fortune in coming to power as the city’s and nation’s growth was peaking in the 1950s. This made it possible for him to undertake a real estate development...

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