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2. CARTER H. HARRISON II: THE POLITICS OF BALANCE Edward R. Kantowicz For a man who served five terms as mayor of Chicago, a man whose father before him had also served five terms, one who lived on well into his nineties , and who wrote not one but two autobiographies, Carter H. Harrison II is remarkably little known or remembered in Chicago. No.monuments or memorials commemorate him. (Harrison Street is named for President William Henry Harrison, a distant relative, and Harrison High School for Carter H. Harrison I.) No scholar has written his life. When I viewed his grave on a historical tour of Graceland Cemetery, the guide simply identified him as, "the mayor who closed down the whorehouses." As we shall see, whorehouses did play a large role in his career, but he deserves to be remembered for more than that.• Harrison's lack of recognition is partly due to the general historical amnesia of our time. In addition, Richard J. Daley so dominated recent Chicago politics , both in fact and in myth, that any politician predating Daley has fallen into the background. Above all, though, Carter Harrison's relative obscurity is due to his style of leadership. Neither a flamboyant politico nor a crusading zealot, Harrison combined some of the qualities of both boss and reformer, thus blurring his image and making him hard to define. In short, Harrison practiced the politics of balance; he was a harmonizer and a unifier. The politics of balance may sound boring, the stuff of safe-and-sane conservatism ; but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, maintaining a political balance in a rapidly growing, factionalized city is a highly dynamic, even daring act. The English writer G. K. Chesterton, in discussing what he called the "romance of orthodoxy," described the Catholic Church as "a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a 16 Carter H. Harrison II (1897-1905, 1911-1915) touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years." 2 The politics of balance is like that, with city hall rocking violently from one seemingly impossible point of equipoise to another. No one performed this balancing act, this juggling extravaganza , better than the Carter Harrisons, father and son. The Age of Harrison Chicago politics, for thirty-five years before the outbreak of World War I, may be termed the Age of Harrison.3 The Harrisons won ten of the seventeen mayoral elections held during that period, each of them serving five terms. Yet, though a Harrison reigned as mayor more often than not, he did not control the politics and politicians of Chicago. No organization like the Tammany machine in New York, or the Daley machine later in Chicago, dominated the scene; Chicago politics was a bipartisan jungle of rival bosses and factions. The Harrisons owed their success to personal skill and charisma, not to the support of a disciplined machine. They were able to accommodate, with amazing dexterity and flexibility, the explosive growth and bewildering diversity ofChicago at the turn of the century. Chicago's growth was astounding. When Carter Harrison I was first elected mayor in 1879, the city held nearly a half million inhabitants; but it was in many ways an overgrown village. The city's physical limits stretched from Fullerton Avenue on the north to 39th Street on the south, and west from the lakefront to Crawford (now Pulaski) Avenue; but much of the land within those boundaries still lay vacant.4 Carter II grew up during the 1860s and '70s in a semirural atmosphere at Ashland Avenue and Jackson Boulevard, "with cows, horses, goats, chickens, [and] turkeys" in the backyard. Young Harrison remembered skating on the frozen prairies west of his home in wintertime; he and his boyhood chums could "sweep over the smooth unmarked ice to Riverside , a good ten miles distant." The elder Harrison avowed that in 1879 "there were not ten miles of paved street in the whole city over which a light vehicle could move rapidly without injury to wheel or axle." 5 By 191S when the younger Harrison left office, Chicago extended out nearly to its present borders and housed over 2,400,000 people. The City Manual published during Harrison's last mayoral year reported 1,800 miles of paved streets, 914 miles of streetcar tracks, ISS miles of elevated railway tracks, and 313,667 buildings which, the Manual remarked, "upon...

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