SIX
Violence in the Global City
1968
To many, the roughly two-year period that began with the toxic mob violence surrounding the open-housing marches and ended with the apocalyptic chaos that reigned in the streets outside the Democratic National Convention of 1968 represented the darkest of moments in Chicago’s history. This was a time when American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, regaled in black boots and swastikas, drew admiring crowds of thousands of angry white youths in Marquette Park, when black youths on the West Side took to the streets in a riotous outburst of destruction while Mayor Daley told his police force to “shoot to kill . . . arsonists,” and when Chicago cops savagely beat antiwar demonstrators during the convention, the air thick with choking teargas, nightsticks cracking bones, shouting “kill, kill, kill!” It was a time when political organizations with names like Black Panthers and Young Lords patrolled the streets in color-coded berets and military attire, when ordinary African Americans wore dashikis and spoke in a stylized language about “brothers” and “sisters,” and when college students kept their hair long and greasy, dressed like factory workers or flower children, and swore they really believed the revolution was imminent. It was a time when politics was in the streets, out there for all to see. Many cities had some of this, but Chicago seemed to have it all, which, was, in part, why in 1968 Norman Mailer called it “perhaps . . . the last of the great American cities.” In one of the more enigmatic passages of his masterful reportage for Harper’s on the tumultuous events surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year, Mailer mused that “only a great city provides honest spectacle, for that is the salvation of the schizophrenic soul.”1
While what Mailer meant by “honest spectacle” is a matter of interpretation, he may have been contrasting Chicago’s gritty, kick-in-the-face feel—captured by the blood and entrails on the floors of its packinghouses, its beefy mayor, and the very visceral beatings its police force doled out to those who dared oppose him—to the kind of dishonest spectacle being disseminated by the advertising industry that, according to Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, was distancing people from both “authentic” experience as well as from each other. It was not difficult to see traces of Debord’s ideas on a range of student groups in the United States, who, after years of seemingly futile marches and administration-building occupations against the war in Vietnam, began to look for new methods of combat that would change the traditional endgame of student demonstrators being beaten and hauled away by the authorities. The Youth International Party (commonly referred to as the “Yippies”) was the most high profile group to use alternative forms of association and expression—high-concept pranks and political theater in the streets—to bring about transformations in consciousness, but the whole countercultural student movement was moving in this direction. This was not a movement that had a great deal to do with Chicago, whose campuses never mustered very much newsworthy activism during the peak years of student protest. The national bases of the student movement and of the counterculture were San Francisco, Berkeley, New York City, and a number of midwestern college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. A courageous group of politicos belonging to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had launched the ambitious Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in 1964 to organize working-class whites in Chicago’s tough Uptown neighborhood on the North Side, but the initiative had largely failed to accomplish anything lasting. The “city of the big shoulders” was resistant to the idealism and countercultural ethos of the student movement. The only university of any national prestige within the city limits had been building walls around itself for years, and the city’s tradition of radicalism was far too rooted in a jaded, Old Left, workerist vision of the world to embrace the faddish existential critique circulating around the New Left in the late 1960s. And then there was the racial divide, which, as black power consciousness surged throughout the ghetto, was becoming wider by the minute. With good reason the white middle-class SDS cadres that started Chicago’s ERAP chose to knock on doors in largely white Uptown rather than in the heart of the West Side ghetto.
During the high times of student activism and countercultural expression in the United States, Chicago’s hippie scene thus remained undeniably sedate, confined to a relatively small area around Wells Street in the Near North Side’s Old Town neighborhood, where white flight and undesirable commercial activity had made the area affordable for self-styled bohemian types. Here one could find a handful of head shops, record stores, coffee shops, and music clubs. The national chain Crate and Barrel got its start in this neighborhood around this time, finding an eager clientele of the young and disenchanted in need of affordable home furnishings imported from Asia, India, and Europe to help them escape the painful conformity of American consumer culture. The community had its own newspaper, The Chicago Seed, and with the national headquarters of SDS just down in the Loop, there was enough activity to keep things interesting. Yet Chicago was clearly a “second city” for hipsters; considering the city’s size and its role as the only real refuge for alienated youths and other social misfits looking to escape the suffocating conformity of the suburbs and small towns of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, it is surprising how few folk artists, writers, and activists hailing from Chicago made it on to the national stage. Chicago’s Old Town hippie scene was swallowed into the mainstream before it produced anything to distinguish it. “The aimless young and suburbanites swarm all over this area on weekends,” Studs Terkel mused in his 1967 book Division Street America. “It has the spirit of a twentieth century carnival, in which commerce overwhelms joy.”2 So it is ironic that beginning in the spring of 1968, Chicago became the destination for a generation of young radicals looking to vent their anger against the Democratic Party’s stubborn support of the escalating war in Vietnam, and it is even more ironic that beginning in the fall of 1968, when the show was over, it became the place that Americans would associate with the countercultural excesses and confrontational street politics of the antiwar movement and of the New Left in general.
Chicago was an unwilling participant in the denouement of the student movement, so unwilling that its very reluctance became a crucial element in the plot—a primary reason why the antiwar protest around the Democratic National Convention would be interpreted across the nation as the last gasp of a dying movement. One can argue with good reason that the poor turnout of protesters doomed the Chicago campaign of 1968. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War (MOBE), under the leadership of movement veterans Rennie Davis and Dave Dellinger, had begun organizing for the convention more than ten months in advance, but they made a fatal error of expecting crowds in the hundreds of thousands, numbers that would have overwhelmed the capacity of the forces of order to contain them. Their optimism was based largely on the idea that students from all over the country would pour into Chicago for the event, but they did not come, in part, because of all the rumors about the dangerous tactics being plotted on both sides of the barricades and, in part, because of the multiple fractures dividing the New Left. Their hopes for a momentous show of opposition were also based on the expectation that a number of local protest organizations in black, brown, and white Chicago would participate, as well as students from the city’s colleges and high schools. Regardless of how many itinerant hippies and politicos from out of state made it to town, a city of Chicago’s size could have very well gone it alone.
But when nominating night finally arrived and the movement got a chance to see itself massed in Grant Park awaiting orders to march (in which direction was a matter of debate), it was clear that the movement culture that the Yippies and MOBE had attempted to put together had failed to take root in the city of Chicago. In the days leading up to the convention the Yippies had planned a series of stunts and events to try to attract fellow travelers. They had arrived with a two-hundred-pound pig named Pigassus, whom they declared their Democratic candidate for president, they had circulated ribald rumors about dosing the city’s water supply with psychedelic drugs and recruiting an elite corps of handsome Yippies to seduce the wives and daughters of delegates, and they had planned a “Festival of Life” in Lincoln Park featuring the hip Detroit rock band MC5. Yet, even if the media found the Yippies good for a few laughs and, more importantly, for selling some newspapers, the whole campaign failed to spark much interest in the city. Almost one year later to the day, Woodstock would attract some five hundred thousand participants; most estimates of the crowd at the Festival of Life top out at five thousand. To be sure, many probably stayed away from the Sunday afternoon event because of the wild happenings of the previous nights, when the police had used teargas and brutal tactics to clear Lincoln Park of the thousands intending to use it as a campground. Organizers had been requesting that the city waive its park curfew rules in order to give protesters a place to sleep, but the city had equivocated and ultimately rejected the demand. The request of the Festival of Life organizers to drive a flatbed truck into Lincoln Park to provide a stage for MC5 had also been refused, so only a few hundred in the audience could actually see the band, a situation that led to pushing and flaring tempers. When the organizers attempted to bring the truck in anyway and were stopped by the police, things got out of hand once again, with police roughing up protesters and the concert being called off. That night the police again used teargas and nightsticks to clear the park, with protesters retreating to the surrounding streets to wreak havoc.3
Many of the more than ten thousand demonstrators who made it to the afternoon rally in Grant Park before the big night of the convention, when the Democratic Party was going to name Hubert Humphrey as its nominee, were ex-combatants in this war of attrition. The crowd gathered here for what would turn out to be the final act of the drama included the more clean-cut supporters of the antiwar candidacy of Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy; the scraggly, sleep-deprived, nervy demonstrators from the Lincoln Park battles; and a host of high-profile intellectuals such as Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet. Organizers had been warned that they would not be allowed to get anywhere near the convention proceedings at the International Amphitheater, but police intelligence had learned they were going to try to make the four-mile walk anyway. Bolstered by some seven thousand National Guard troops outfitted with bayonet-tipped rifles, teargas masks, and jeeps mounted with barbed wire, the Chicago police once again moved into the crowd with astonishing speed and indiscriminate violence.
What happened next inarguably played a role in changing the course of American political history—if not in the way one might have expected at the time. After the police had dispersed the crowd in Grant Park, a mass of marchers re-formed at the intersection of Balbo and Michigan Avenue, where the media had set up fixed cameras to cover the delegates leaving their rooms at the Conrad Hilton, and that was when things got utterly and spectacularly ugly. A battalion of blue-helmeted policemen rushed the crowd, and, with no attempt whatsoever to distinguish marchers from onlookers, began smashing heads, legs, and arms. Piecing together a number of eyewitness accounts, historian David Farber describes the scene:
A police lieutenant sprayed Mace indiscriminately at a crowd watching the street battle. Policemen pushed a small group of bystanders and peaceful protesters through a large plate glass window and then attacked the bleeding and dazed victims as they lay among the glass shards. Policemen on three-wheeled motorcycles, one of them screaming, “Wahoo!” ran people over.4
In the midst of it all, people started spontaneously chanting, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.” The delegates, however, did not have to wait the ninety minutes it took for the networks to get the images to television screens. Looking down from his fourth floor room at the Hilton, Senator George McGovern reportedly said, “Do you see what those sons of bitches are doing to those kids down there?” Hours later, on the floor of the amphitheater, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff—a man not known for his oratorical flair—used his nominating speech for McGovern to tell the convention, “With George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” a comment that provoked Daley and his entourage to jump up and shout a litany of barroom obscenities whose precise nature is still a matter of debate. Some close by heard the mayor shout, “Fuck you, you Jew-son-of-a-bitch!”—a phrase that lip-readers not employed by the city of Chicago would corroborate from the video footage of the outburst. Supporters of the mayor would later claim he had called Ribicoff a “faker,” and during the convention’s final session the next day, he made sure to pack the amphitheater with machine diehards who were under orders to engage in rousing choruses of “We love Daley!” Yet, regardless of what the mayor had said and regardless of the show of adoration he had orchestrated, Daley appeared to be in trouble for the second time in five months.
Chicago had been awarded the convention, in part, because it had avoided civil unrest in the summer of 1967, when ghetto riots raged in Detroit and New Haven, and Daley was seen as a man who knew how to keep a lid on things. Even before the summer, Daley’s tough talk on law and order, combined with the growing realization among working-class whites that the open-housing summit had hardly been the catastrophe that hardcore anti-integrationists had feared, had enabled Daley to regain the support he had lost in the Bungalow Belt. The result was a staggering landslide election victory that saw the Boss capturing 73 percent of the overall vote and winning all fifty wards. Even after breaking the promises he had made to Martin Luther King at the summit, Daley had run strongly in the black wards, taking nearly 84 percent of the vote. The mayor seemed as invincible as ever, and many within Chicago’s homegrown left began half-seriously pondering guerrilla warfare. But then in April, he seemed to have gone much too far in his reaction to widespread rioting on the West Side following King’s assassination in Memphis. After Daley had publicly excoriated new police chief James Conlisk for not following his orders to “shoot to kill any arsonist . . . and to maim or cripple anyone looting,” even some of the machine’s loyal black aldermen spoke up against him. After the damage and destruction of the West Side riot—hundreds of arrests, eleven deaths, thousands homeless, and a twenty-eight-block stretch of West Madison Street burned—it was no longer possible to claim that Daley had managed to appease black Chicago with all the money he had garnered from the federal government’s antipoverty programs.
The riot, which broke out after mobs of West Side youths went from high school to high school, disrupting classes and urging students out into the streets, revealed the extent to which the West Side’s working-class black population remained marginalized in Daley’s Chicago despite the best intentions of the federal government’s antipoverty programs. As was the case for the federal urban renewal initiatives of the 1950s, the Daley machine had hijacked Chicago’s Community Action Program, which had expressly sought to bypass the machine by placing power directly into the hands of neighborhood people. Black communities would have their representatives—this, after all, was the law—but Daley made sure that their representatives would also be his representatives and that the black man running the whole program, Deton Brooks, was his black man. By the spring of 1967, the situation prompted a Senate subcommittee to look into allegations that Daley was not adhering to the spirit of “maximum feasible participation” required by the law. But Senator Robert Kennedy, who needed Daley’s support for his presidential run (which would end nearly three weeks later with Kennedy’s assassination), defended the mayor, and when riots ripped through New Haven and Detroit, it was hard to find a liberal in Washington who would support the idea of empowering black ghetto communities.
By the summer of 1967, newspapers across the country were painting every urban disorder and inflammatory black power declaration as evidence of the failure of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and of liberalism in general, and few pursued this polemic more zealously than Chicago’s own Tribune. If, as longtime Chicago columnist Mike Royko has argued, Daley was a “white backlash” mayor years before anyone was even using the term, one could extend this observation to the city that had been so strongly supporting him since his election in 1955.5 Not only was Chicago—despite its Democratic stripes—in the vanguard of the white backlash that decisively captured the American political center with the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968, but the city itself had been the main stage upon which the dramas of a surging reactionary populism played out before the eyes of the nation. It was in Chicago that the black struggle for equality ran into the wall of white homeowners’ rights during the open-housing marches; it was in Chicago that one of the cornerstones of Great Society liberalism—the idea of redistributing power and resources downward to neighborhood people—was shattered by a Senate subcommittee investigating a gang called the Blackstone Rangers for embezzling federal funds; it was in Chicago that a big-city mayor told his police force to shoot at young African Americans for stealing transistor radios and to, in effect, summarily execute black arson suspects; and it was in Chicago that battalions of policemen bloodied and teargassed college kids, hippies, members of the media, and innocent bystanders in front of the whole world. And finally, it was in Chicago that most of the mainstream media and much of the population cheered the mayor’s campaign of repression every step of the way as liberals throughout the nation were decrying it.
What was transpiring in Chicago defined the “backlash” structure of feeling and reactionary politics that had taken hold of the country’s political culture by the middle of 1967—and has not relinquished its hold ever since. Students of modern American conservatism usually recognize Richard Nixon as one of the key architects of this approach. Campaigning and taking office in a media landscape inhabited by gun-toting black militants, flag-burning student radicals, bra-burning feminists, and liberated gays and drag queens, Nixon claimed to be representing the “silent majority” of law-abiding, hard-working, patriotic Americans whose voices had been silenced by the clamor of extremists in the streets. And yet, if Nixon was the one who actually uttered the clever phrases, he was taking his cues from Richard J. Daley, who, unlike Nixon, was a pure product of the backlash. Although some scholars have highlighted the importance of hard-core segregationist George Wallace’s surprising northern success in the 1968 presidential primaries, which, according to some, pushed Nixon and the Republican Party towards a “southern strategy” that instrumentalized racial fears in order to lock up the South forever, it was Daley—a northern Democrat no less—who revealed the prescription for backlash politics moving forward.6 It was Daley who showed the nation that most people were bothered more by rioting blacks than by mayors who ordered the use of lethal force to stop them, and that most people identified less with antiwar protesters than with the police officers beating them with nightsticks.7 Facing reporters after the convention, the straight-talking mayor defended the actions of his police force by referring to the nasty insults that antiwar protesters hurled at the police and repeatedly asking, “What would you do?” When anyone mentioned antiwar protesters, he would ask, “What programs do they have?” and “What do they want?” Apparently these were the same questions being posed by Americans throughout the nation. Thus, it was of little consequence that Daley was being slammed in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other major northern media outlets and that a federally appointed investigative commission had blamed the police for the violence at the convention and condemned the mayor for failing to reprimand them for it. By the fall of 1969, a Newsweek poll revealed that 84 percent of white Americans felt that college demonstrators were being treated “too leniently” and that 85 percent felt the same way about black militants.8 Daley had played a critical role in making the backlash, and now it was making him a living legend.
BESIEGED BY LAW AND ORDER
Chicago was thus a backlash city years before anything looking like a backlash had spread across the metropolitan United States, and as such, it was an ill-fated choice for the site of the antiwar movement’s last-ditch battle. The massive scale of Chicago’s black migration in the 1940s and 1950s, which multiplied the color lines throughout the city as well as the border wars that came with them, certainly played an important role in producing its precocious backlash sensibilities. Such circumstances shaped a siege mentality long before the urban disorders of the mid-1960s had normalized such thinking in most major U.S. cities, and this siege mentality created an insatiable appetite for law enforcement and an aversion to the intervention of city government in any other form, especially when it involved constructing housing for the poor. Even the illustrious University of Chicago, which, with so many liberal luminaries on its faculty, could have provided a powerful bulwark against backlash sensibilities, was seized by this siege mentality. This had not always been the case. The Chicago School sociologists were great leaders in the intellectual struggle against racial theories of black and immigrant poverty, and their students were not infrequently arrested while defending blacks against white mobs in the 1940s and 1950s. Saul Alinsky had enrolled here to study archaeology, but after spending four years in UC classrooms had set out to work as a community organizer. But by the time he returned to Hyde Park in 1960 to defend the people of neighboring Woodlawn, his alma mater had switched sides, aligning its interests with the machine and thus becoming his adversary in his fight for social and racial justice.
UC chancellor Lawrence Kimpton, the man who had helped broker the real estate coup that was going to cleanse the area around the university of thousands of working-class black families, it is worth mentioning, was the same man who in 1958 had intervened to forbid the university’s literary magazine, the Chicago Review, from publishing the works of Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Kimpton was thus clearly not keen on allowing the University of Chicago to reach out into the community and become a refuge from the backlash, a role that universities at times played in the late 1950s and 1960s. But more important to Chicago becoming a full-fledged backlash city so early was the enormous power of the Daley machine in co-opting, blackmailing, infiltrating, and, when all else failed, using brute force to stifle any potential opposition to itself and its friends.
In fact, such practices predated Daley’s rule. Starting in the 1930s, Chicago had become, according to historian Frank Donner, “the national capital of police repression,” a reputation that went far beyond the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937.9 The Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad” was rooting out Communists and using intimidation to subvert the labor movement throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The success of these efforts was revealed by the quiescence of its unions during World War II, while its industrial neighbor to the east, Detroit, was a hotbed of labor agitation. But the Red Squad’s purview did not stop at the workplace; it extended into any organization engaged in political activities. “Issues dealing with labor, wages, working hours, strikes, peace, housing, education, social welfare, race, religion, disarmament, and anti-militarization” were all named as sources of “subversive activities” by the Chicago Red Squad’s Lieutenant Frank J. Heimoski in a 1963 speech to a national conference of police intelligence officers: in other words, in the paranoid minds of Red Squad operatives, the very idea of politics itself, when practiced by any person or group not directly affiliated with the Cook County Democratic Party, was subversive. “Our job,” Heimoski claimed, “is to detect these elements and their contemplated activity and alert proper authorities.”10
The extent to which the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad stunted the development of a political and cultural infrastructure for the left in Chicago is one of the great untold stories of American history.11 In 1960, the CPD claimed it had intelligence files on 117,000 local individuals and some 14,000 organizations nationwide, most of which were destroyed after the ACLU and a coalition of local civic and religious groups called the Alliance to End Repression successfully sued it for improper police intelligence activities. The files that survived the shredder, however, were more than adequate to show how aggressively the Red Squad had, through illegal surveillance and infiltration, intimidated, harassed, and effectively neutralized individuals and organizations who dared to think outside the box.
Police repression was thus a deeply established tradition in Chicago in the decades leading up to the great progressive challenges of the mid-1960s. It was as emblematic of the city as the ivy-covered red brick walls at Wrigley Field. But the technologies and methods of repression reached a whole other level during the turbulent years of the 1960s. To keep up with the rapid proliferation of political organizations and individuals with multiple and shifting affiliations, the Red Squad developed a sophisticated cross-referencing system, and to counter the development of threats to the machine’s power in black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican neighborhoods, it deployed an army of undercover operatives to engage not only in intelligence activities but also in tactics of subversion. The Red Squad left no stone unturned. There were even files on the Old Town School of Folk Music, and no small number of them either. But the organizations and activists that drew the most attention were those attempting to build bridges across different racial and ethnic communities, and it is here one can detect a mayoral agenda at work, even if the purge of documents would later cover most of its traces.
The Daley machine had expertly maintained its power by the logic of divide and rule and by fostering a political culture in which the substance of politics consisted of nonideological, neighborhood-level struggles for shares of the patronage pie. Anything that disrupted this status quo set off alarms in City Hall. In the months leading up to the convention, for example, the buzz in the Red Squad revolved around the potential for a concerted mobilization of white middle-class students and ghetto blacks affiliated with supergangs and black power groups—a potential demonstration of cross-class and cross-racial solidarity that would have created a public relations problem for Mayor Daley. Thus, this was not only a matter of police intelligence but also one of special operations. Chicago cops blanketed the South and West Sides, rounding up gang leaders and warning them that they would pay a heavy price if they were seen anywhere near the convention, while undercover police operatives sought to stir up racial tensions among both black power and student groups.
In fact, the Red Squad was a big beneficiary of the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), a holdover from the rabid anticommunism of the 1950s, which funneled manpower and resources to a number of major American cities to help them “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” organizations and individuals viewed as posing threats to national security and social order. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover believed, much like Mayor Daley, that black power organizations were worthy of special attention, and nothing caused more consternation at FBI headquarters than when these organizations began to make alliances and develop their bases.
A bright, charismatic young activist named Fred Hampton, who assumed the leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968, found himself on COINTELPRO’s high priority list around this time. An electric orator and savvy organizer, Chairman Fred, as he was known within his entourage, had shown great promise by organizing hundreds of youths in the suburbs west of Chicago for the NAACP Youth Council. “Power to the people” was his mantra, and as chairman of the Illinois Panthers, the twenty-one-year-old Hampton quickly began forging ties with activists all over the city—black, white, and Puerto Rican. Hampton was in good company for this mission; among the leaders of the Illinois Panthers were several talented activists, including future congressman (and eventual mayoral candidate) Bobby Rush—the man who in 2000 would deal Barack Obama his first crushing defeat in electoral politics.
Understanding that it suited the needs of the Daley machine to keep these communities in competition with each other for resources and power, Hampton set out in 1969 to assemble what he referred to as a “rainbow coalition” that brought his Illinois Panthers together with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican street gang turned political organization under the talented leadership of Jose “Cha-Cha” Jimenez, and the Young Patriots, an enlightened group of working-class whites, many of whom were the children of poor white southern migrants who had settled in a “hillbilly” section of the North Side Uptown neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Their fathers had rallied around Confederate flags, but the radical currents circulating through Chicago in the 1960s had turned these Dixie sons into homegrown Marxists with a nuanced understanding of the interplay between race and class. These were strange and exciting times indeed. And even though the Black Panthers, Young Lords and Young Patriots were, as young idealists who dared to extend their hands across racial lines, not exactly mainstream elements of their communities, this astonishing alignment held the potential of establishing a power bloc that brought together the West Side ghetto, the Near North Side Puerto Rican barrios of Humboldt Park and Lincoln Park, and the white working-class sections of the Far North Side neighborhoods of Uptown, Edgewater, and Rogers Park.
Moreover, in an effort to get Chicago’s more powerful gangs behind his project to bring power to the people, Hampton had also made inroads into the Main 21, the governing body of the federation of neighborhood gangs that now constituted the mighty Blackstone Rangers. Many felt that if the Rangers committed to the cause, the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples would follow, and the Daley administration would be facing the dreaded alliance of supergangs it had feared for years. However, there was still some work to be done to make this happen. Hampton’s efforts to recruit in Ranger territory, for example, had led to the shooting of a Panther and then a heated sit-down with Jeff Fort that culminated in threats and dozens of Rangers bursting into the room with guns drawn. The Rangers were hostile to any encroachments on their turf, no matter how well intentioned. Yet, Hampton was allowed to walk out of that meeting alive, and in view of his charisma and determination, nobody in City Hall could be too sure that he would not be able to eventually get through to the headstrong Ranger leadership. The twenty-one-year-old was, by the winter of 1969, quite likely the most dangerous man in Chicago, and, as such, he was high up on J. Edgar Hoover’s list of the most dangerous men in the United States.
One can only imagine Hampton’s frustration about the refusal of his brothers in the Blackstone Rangers to accept that neither he nor their brothers in the Disciples were the enemies. What he would never know was how much this mistrust had been sown by informants and infiltrators executing stratagems issued from high up in the FBI. The Rangers were trying to make the transition to community activists, but they still lived by the codes of the streets, which told them that threats to their power and pride could not go unanswered, so it was all too easy for FBI and Red Squad operatives to plant all kinds of rumors and doubts in their heads. The Panthers, on the other hand, were less susceptible to such subterfuges; this was a group that furnished new members with readings lists that included works by Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. Stopping Fred Hampton would thus require a different approach.
On December 4, 1969, just before dawn, a heavily armed tactical police unit under the command of state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan burst into the West Side apartment at 2337 W. Monroe Street where Hampton and several other Panthers lived and shot nearly one hundred rounds of ammunition at anything that moved or slept. When the guns fell silent, Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark lay dead and four other Panthers had been seriously wounded. Hampton had been shot in the head at point-blank range, execution style, while lying in his bed. Ostensibly, the police were there to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons and things got out of hand, but evidence from the crime scene strongly suggested political assassination. The police displayed a pile of weapons that “six or seven” Panthers had allegedly used to fire upon them, a story that was predictably backed up by the city’s investigation into the affair. But a federal grand jury report of the incident issued on May 15, 1970, was highly critical of the city’s handling of the autopsies and ballistics tests, which, according to the report, concealed the fact that Hampton was shot in the head from above and falsified indisputable ballistics evidence indicating that only one of ninety-nine bullets fired could not be traced to police guns. The report revealed hardly anything that most people did not already know, except perhaps the extent to which the machine and its hired guns could act with nearly complete impunity. As is often the case in Chicago, utter desperation about the impossibility of challenging the political order gave way to jaded sarcasm. Mike Royko, who, incidentally, was highly critical of the Black Panthers, remarked in response to Hanrahan’s comment that the police had “miraculously” escaped injury: “Indeed it does appear that miracles occurred. The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction—namely, at themselves.”12
Further evidence would surface in the years to come that would shed even more light on the circumstances surrounding Hampton’s murder, and, for that matter, on the entire history of the left during its most pivotal moment on the political stage in the last half century. Reflections on why the left seemed to implode in 1968, opening the door for the backlash and the subsequent conservative ascendency, have often emphasized ideological factors that weakened its ability to rally people behind a coherent, unifying reform project. Some, like SDS veteran and prominent sociologist Todd Gitlin, point to the New Left’s abandonment of liberalism and move to extremist politics, while other, more reactionary commentators lampoon those who took to the streets in the 1960s as drugged-out or sex-crazed freaks driven by senseless rebellion against a society that had bestowed them with only privileges and opportunities. Another interpretation points to the idea that the rise of identity politics in the 1960s splintered the left into so many solipsistic, identity-centered projects—black power, brown power, yellow power, feminism, radical feminism, gay liberation, and so on—that it was no longer possible to build a progressive movement out of blocs that had everything to gain by joining forces against the status quo.13
Largely understated in most accounts of the period is the story of state-sponsored repression, which, as Fred Hampton’s murder so dramatically demonstrates, took the form of a highly sophisticated campaign of countersubversion involving the close cooperation of federal and local authorities. Chicago cops harbored a palpable hostility towards the Black Panthers because they had the audacity to stand up to them with lethal weapons, and Mayor Daley wanted them neutralized because of their increasingly popular breakfast programs in black Chicago and their coalition-building efforts throughout the city. But the FBI, which, like the Daley administration, wanted to see the gangs continue to kill each other off, played a critical role in ultimately closing the book on Hampton and the Illinois Panthers. It was the FBI that had enlisted the help of William O’Neal, who would become the Brutus in Fred Hampton’s very brief life on the political stage. A car thief by trade who had agreed to go undercover to avoid doing hard time, O’Neal was so convincing that by the winter of 1969 he was put in charge of security for the Illinois Panthers. In a story fit for Hollywood, O’Neal furnished the Chicago police with a detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment and, according to his own confession, slipped a powerful barbiturate into Hampton’s drinks the night before the raid, which explains why the normally agile Hampton never made it out of his bed during the raid. O’Neal, who was just eighteen at the time, spent the next sixteen years in a witness protection program, after which he returned to Chicago a broken man. In 1990, in the early hours of Martin Luther King Day, O’Neal’s gut-wrenching guilt finally pushed him to try to make his peace with Chairman Fred by fatally throwing himself in front of a speeding car on the Eisenhower Expressway.14
While there is no easy way to assess the impact that such countersubversive activities had on left politics nationwide, the evidence from Chicago is weighty, to say the least. Hampton’s murder was certainly the most dramatic case—the incident that threatened to blow the cover off the whole enterprise—but one would be hard-pressed to find a single political figure on Chicago’s left who did not feel the heat in the 1960s and early 1970s. In Chicago things got hot enough to, as COINTELPRO intended, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” a generation of activists, some of whom would spend significant stretches of their adult lives in prison on charges they denied.
Although we will never know the entire truth, in view of what Fred Hampton’s murder reveals about the lengths authorities were willing to go in their war on the left, it hardly takes a stretch of imagination to believe that the FBI and CPD would also engage in an extensive campaign of frame-ups. Just three weeks before the raid on the Panthers, Vice Lord leader Bobby Gore, one of the main forces behind the West Side gang’s successful turn towards political activism, was arrested for a murder he maintained he did not commit until his death. Around the same time, State’s Attorney Hanrahan managed to get eighteen indictments (mostly for easily contrived charges of assault and battery on police) against Jose Jimenez in the span of six weeks, an offensive that coincided with Jimenez’s efforts to mobilize the Young Lords against a redevelopment plan in Lincoln Park that would lead to the displacement of thousands of Puerto Rican residents. This was just a few months after United Methodist pastor Bruce Johnson, who had provided his Chicago People’s Church as headquarters for the Young Lords, was viciously stabbed to death in his Lincoln Park home, along with his wife, Eugenia. While we may never know for sure the truth about such incidents, the pieces seem to fit together.
What the events of 1969 tell us is that the brutality on display at the Democratic Convention of 1968 was far from aberrant; it was merely the spectacular coming out of a systematic, banal campaign of political violence that flourished in the new national backlash context of the post-1968 years. Some New Left leaders felt there was something to be gained by flushing this campaign out into the open for “the whole world” to see, but such hopes ultimately proved to be naive. Writing in this precise moment and with the unfolding Chicago story clearly in mind, Hannah Arendt warned in her essay On Violence that “since violence always needs justification, an escalation of the violence in the streets may bring about a truly racist ideology to justify it, in which case violence and riots may disappear from the streets and be transformed into the invisible terror of a police state.”15 This was a fairly accurate way to view what was transpiring in Chicago in the years following the convention. The war on gangs declared by Mayor Daley and his right-hand man Edward Hanrahan in the spring of 1969 represented the symbiotic relationship of racist ideology and police terror; notions of ghetto pathology reduced all black youths to gang members, and, as gang members, youths were thus deemed incapable of anything other than criminal behavior. This, in turn, justified a merciless wave of police repression, which, by criminalizing youths out on the streets, served to prove the point that all black youths were gang members, and all gang members were criminals. Once again, Chicago was in the vanguard of conservative politics. A little more than a decade later, during the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs in the 1980s, municipalities all over the country would seize upon similar antigang offensives to garner federal funds for law enforcement initiatives and win over fearful white middle-class voters.16
And yet, if, as Arendt claimed, violence could destroy power, it was not the only force that was working against the project of bringing “power to the people.” The politics of identity was a double-edged sword for the left in Chicago during this epic moment. The streets of Chicago had always been the place where young people constructed, performed, and negotiated the meanings of their ethnoracial identities—in rituals of play, war, and love. By the early 1960s, during the high times of the civil rights era, these rituals took on an increasingly perceptible political feeling; with the circulation of images and ideas associated with the struggles of young blacks in the South against forms of discrimination at school and in venues of commercial leisure, kids out on the streets defending their communities and their identities began to see themselves as political actors, and local activists were quick to capitalize on this to get people out on the streets for more formal political causes. British sociologist Paul Gilroy has observed that “collective identities spoken through race, community and locality are, for all their spontaneity, powerful means to co-ordinate actions and create solidarity,” a situation that by the end of the 1960s had made a fetish out of the city’s most visible ethnoracial identities.17
The spiritual, magical, salvational qualities that people attributed to these identities pushed them out into the streets of their neighborhoods to engage in quasi-religious rituals of collective identification. Some of the violence between gangs around this time loosely fit this description, as did uprisings against the police, which could very quickly turn into potent demonstrations of community pride. Such was the case in the often overlooked Division Street riot of 1966, when the Puerto Rican barrio in Humboldt Park seemed to discover its sense of self as it took to the streets to protest the shooting of a local youth by a policeman breaking up a gang scuffle. This was also the context that gave rise to the Chicago mural movement of the early 1970s, which saw aspiring artists in black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican neighborhoods spreading broad swaths of bright paint over drab walls to create vivid scenes of everyday community life that harkened back to the New Deal–era murals influenced by artists like Diego Rivera. The “community mural movement,” as it has come to be known, began in black Chicago before spreading, most notably, to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. More precisely, it began with the once-famous Wall of Respect at 43rd and Langley—a kind of Mount Rushmore for the black community—which included the faces of fifty black writers, musicians, and political leaders considered to be “black heroes” by the fifteen artists who collaborated on the project in 1967. The Wall became a meeting point for black power groups around Bronzeville and the Kenwood area, a place where the maxims of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown (Martin Luther King’s head was conspicuously absent from the Wall) filled the air, and in 1969 and 1970 it became a rallying point for its own sake, as the city devised an urban renewal plan that would have meant the Wall’s demolition. However, a fire “of unknown origins” rather than urban renewal ultimately destroyed the Wall in 1971, but by then one of its principal creators, William Walker, had already met up with some Mexican and Puerto Rican artists to form the Chicago Mural Group—a multiracial artists’ cooperative that sought to fill the urban landscape with billboards displaying racial and social injustices. One of the finest examples of the work of this collective can be seen today in the Humboldt Park barrio at the corner of LeMoyne and Rockwell, where the mural Breaking the Chains covers the wall of a well-maintained three-story walk-up. Painted by John Pitman Weber, the cofounder of the Chicago Mural Group, along with a number of Puerto Rican residents, the mural depicts black, brown, and white hands breaking chains and reaching up towards the sun.18
FIGURE 13. The Wall of Respect, a site of frequent gatherings in the late 1960s. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images.
Such celebrations of “race, community, and locality” created a level of political engagement by average people in the context of everyday Chicago life that has seldom been approached since. The problem was that the same primordial feelings and attachments that were bringing people into the streets were also reinforcing a logic of ethnoracial difference—a logic already embedded within the city’s ethnoracially balkanized social geography—that made the development of powerful multiracial coalitions a nearly impossible task. We will never know how far Chairman Fred might have taken his “rainbow coalition,” but we do know that, at the time of his death, such notions had, for the most part, captured the hearts and souls of only an avant garde fringe of activists, intellectuals, and artists.
More indicative of how the politics of identity were shaping grassroots progressive politics was the student-led movement to reform Chicago’s high schools in the spring and fall of 1968—one of the last of its kind. Emerging out of a general spirit of discontent about the sorry state of Chicago schools, this movement took the form of two parallel mobilizations—one black and one Latino—from its very first days. Ironically, black and Latino students had similar complaints regarding the Chicago Board of Education’s refusal to recognize their cultural identity and deal with the discrimination they faced at the hands of white teachers, but their demands never found common ground. White students, for their part, largely stood on the sidelines when they were not actively, even violently, opposing their fellow black and Latino students. Harrison High School, located on the 2800 block of West 24th Street, along the border between the Near West Side and Pilsen, found itself in the center of things. The leaders of the militant black student organization the New Breed went to school at Harrison, and the most vocal Latino student organization, a group that included famed Mexican activist Rudy Lozano, also formed here. Harrison was one of the only schools in the city at that time that mixed significant numbers of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and whites, so it could have served as a stunning example of multiracial cooperation against the machine. But this was not to be. The black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and white youths at Harrison had come of age in a street culture that placed a premium on defending the boundaries of their ethnoracial communities against outsiders, and these were hard habits to break. If, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, the self achieves identity and meaning through the detour to the other, this process, in the context of Chicago politics, had profound consequences.19 In the end, the board of education had little reason not to accede to the demands of black and Latino students. And so Superintendent James Redmond pledged to extend the half-year Afro-American history course being offered in thirty-six high schools to a whole year, to purchase new textbooks that “placed greater emphasis upon contributions of minority groups,” to pursue “efforts to achieve a racial integration of staff throughout the system,” and to strengthen relations with parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and student groups.20 The board of education had effectively institutionalized the politics of identity, a situation that did little to change the fact that public school system was heading straight towards the precipice.
SKYSCRAPERS, MARTINIS, AND FUTURES
Perhaps more than any other city in the United States, Chicago today captures with stark clarity the contrast between wealth and poverty that American-style free-market capitalism produced over the long twentieth century. What makes the contrast so vivid is the spatial proximity of the two extremes. In Chicago, one can board an “L” train amidst the bustling avenues of the Loop business district, where an army of chauffeurs, valets, and doormen expedite business executives through revolving doors and into the stately lobbies of firms whose influence stretches to the far corners of the world, and minutes later be looking down from the elevated tracks at the hyperghetto, where boarded-up buildings and litter-strewn vacant lots mark a land that time forgot. In some areas of the hyperghetto, the main signs of commercial activity are hand-to-hand drug sales, liquor stores, and currency exchanges, where those without proper bank accounts can cash checks and pay utility bills for hefty fees. The only institutions competing with liquor stores for customers in need of medicine for the soul are storefront churches.
Chicago’s hyperghettos are not so different from ghetto neighborhoods in several of the other midwestern and northeastern cities that constitute the American Rust Belt, and they share a similar story of deindustrialization, urban decline, and white flight that reshaped much of the northern metropolitan United States in the postwar decades. Between 1947 and 1982, factory employment in Chicago dropped from 688,000 to 277,000 (59 percent), a period that also witnessed a steep decline in Chicago’s middle- and upper-income families—some 30 percent between 1960 and 1980 alone. Between 1947 and 1982, moreover, Chicago’s share of the metropolitan-area job market dropped from 70.6 percent to 34.2 percent, a decrease that was due not only to the loss of manufacturing work in the city but also to the increase in suburban jobs.21 Some of these losses of jobs and people were associated with the suburbanization that the federal government had set in motion with a range of subsidies that placed homeownership within the reach of middle-class citizens who before the 1940s could have only dreamed of owning a home. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rapid growth of Chicago’s posh North Shore railroad suburbs, as well as the suburbs of DuPage County to the west.
Already by the end of the 1960s, these processes had caused Chicago to lose its place as “second city” to Los Angeles, whose population of 10 million easily surpassed the 7.8 million inhabitants in its greater metropolitan area. But things took a sharp turn for the worse in the 1970s, when, within a national economy disrupted by oil shocks and stagflation, Chicago lost 15 percent of its retail stores, 25 percent of its factories, and 14 percent of its jobs, and Chicago families experienced a 10 percent fall in real income.22 Moreover, while per capita personal income did still rise during this decade, the pace lagged behind Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and St. Louis, and by 1981 it was just 4 percent above the national average (whereas in 1965 it had been 30 percent higher than the national average).23 The devastation wrought during these years was made visible by the 1980 census, which indicated that ten of the country’s sixteen poorest neighborhoods were in black Chicago. If times were hard in the 1970s, black Chicagoans bore the brunt. Between 1963 and 1977, when the city as a whole lost 29 percent of its jobs, black Chicago’s drop was 46 percent.24
Yet it is misleading to think of this decade and the turbulent years leading up to it as a period of doom and decline. By the early 1970s, one could behold in the Chicago sky a number of majestic steel and glass structures stretching towards the clouds—symbols of a city on the rise. Between 1968 and 1975, work was completed on five of the ten tallest buildings that would define the contours of Chicago’s skyline at the end of the twentieth century: the John Hancock Center (1968), the Chase Tower (1969), the Standard Oil Building (1972), the Sears Tower (1973), and Water Tower Place (1975), along with what was at the time the tallest residential building in the world, Lake Point Tower (1968).25 Just when the action on the streets was at its hottest, the city, with the help of the internationally renowned architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was doing all it could to move its precious white-collar professionals into secure, air-conditioned cubicles in the sky. If the 1920s witnessed the first great vertical move of American cities, a second wave of skyscraper construction occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, when work was completed on a number of the buildings that would become the well-recognized landmarks of the country’s great urban centers—the World Trade Towers in New York City, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the John Hancock Building in Boston, and the Sears Tower in Chicago.26
FIGURE 14. The Chicago skyline looking north from the South Loop lakefront, 1974. C. William Brubaker. C. William Brubaker Collection, bru005_11_oF, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
At first glance, the timing of this skyscraper boom may seem rather enigmatic. Normally, such capital-intensive projects thrive in relatively risk-free market circumstances, and, while credit had been lined up and ground had been broken on some of these buildings a few years prior to the global economic doldrums that followed the Arab-Israeli War and OPEC oil embargo of 1973, the U.S. economy had already been showing signs of instability by 1966, when corporate productivity and profitability began to decline, provoking a credit crunch in 1966 and 1967. With increasing competition from Japan, Western Europe, and a number of newly industrializing countries, the U.S.-dominated international economic order that had been established by the 1945 Bretton Woods agreement broke apart at the end of 1971, and with it, its system of fixed exchange rates that tied currencies all over the world to the gold-backed U.S. dollar. These were thus precarious times to be investing in large-scale infrastructural projects whose success depended on strong economic growth. New York City was facing bankruptcy and Chicago’s financial condition was hardly rock solid. In 1971 the stockyards closed down for good and the steel mills were on the verge of a significant decline. Moreover, Illinois was struck with a sharp drop in defense contracts in the 1960s and 1970s, another factor that weighed heavily upon the local economy. By the end of the 1970s, the credit-rating agency Moody’s downgraded Chicago’s bond rating, and the school system was facing a major budget shortfall. And yet, despite all this, the buildings kept moving skyward.
As the old industrial order was crumbling, a new economic order was already rapidly taking shape, and Chicago was vying for a central place within it. Scholars like David Harvey and Saskia Sassen have described this moment as one of deep structural transformation for the world economy, as the postwar framework of Fordism and state managerial Keynesianism collapsed and out of its remains emerged a new system characterized by more flexible labor arrangements and new sectors of production based on the provision of specialized financial services for an increasingly globalized economy.27 For Sassen, in particular, such momentous changes would have major consequences for a group of new “global cities” that would take on strategically critical roles “as highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy” and “key locations for finance and for specialized service firms.”28 FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) activities would come to dominate the new “producer services” orientation of these global cities, along with marketing, advertising, employment, and legal services. The rise of these new service industries, in turn, would have a powerful impact on urban form, especially on the spatial layout of downtown business districts. Although many observers of the urban scene at the time believed that recent advances in telecommunications technologies would make high-density business districts obsolete, a very different scenario came to pass; the internationalization of corporate operations instead transformed the cores of global cities into dense concentrations of service providers capable of exercising centralizing functions over sprawling commercial activities.
The consequences for Chicago—once the “city of the big shoulders” and “hog butcher to the world”—were nothing short of spectacular. By 1980, Chicago’s central business district, which covered just 3.5 percent of the city’s total surface area, accounted for roughly 40 percent of the city’s property taxes. Moreover, while the city as a whole lost nearly one-quarter of a million jobs during the 1970s, white-collar employment in the Loop rose at a respectable pace. In effect, Chicago was turning the corner towards its future as the nation’s third-ranking global city, with a (4.2 percent) share of the total national employment in producer services that placed it close behind Los Angeles (with 4.6 percent) and far ahead of fourth-place Houston (with 1.7 percent).29 In the insurance sector, it was second only to New York—a position symbolized by the black fortress-like tower that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed for its developer and tenant, the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. At one hundred stories and 344 meters, it was at the time of its completion the tallest building in the world outside Manhattan, and, although credit problems halted its construction in 1967, it was ready to serve as a backdrop to the combat that reigned in the streets during the summer of 1968. This was, in part, its function, even if few involved in its construction would have thought of it in this way at the time.
Guy Debord seized upon the notion of “spectacle” in 1967 because it was elemental to the epic struggle that was transpiring in this pivotal moment in the history of capitalism. “The period from 1965 to 1973 was one in which the inability of Fordism and Keynesianism to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more and more apparent,” David Harvey has argued.30 In the United States a range of protest movements had made the streets and neighborhoods of American cities into spectacles of this crisis, notably during Chicago’s Democratic National Convention of 1968. As ineffectual as the Yippies may have seemed to many, they helped hijack the Daley administration’s attempt to create a spectacle of prestige and power and to transform it into one of ignominy, violence, and disorder. This posed a potential threat to the city’s livelihood in a moment when its political leadership was trying to project an image of order and progress to all the investment capital beginning to fly around the globe.
To understand the stakes, one needed only to cast a sidelong glance at Detroit, where the spectacle of rioting and black power anger prevailed in the years after the 1967 riot, a situation from which the city never recovered. Thereafter, the name Detroit—previously known as the “arsenal of democracy” and the “Motor City”—evoked images of burning ghettos and middle-class whites taking target practice in the suburb of Dearborn, preparing for the race war to come. That the city was never able to counteract this spectacle explains a great deal about why Detroit failed to keep either its white middle class or the companies they worked for within its limits, and why it would never attract enough service firms to make it into a global city. Chicago, on the other hand, had as much ugly spectacle as Detroit to contend with, but it seemed able to repel the stigma of each seemingly disastrous episode with astonishing ease. Chicago made it through the late 1960s and 1970s with its sense of civic pride intact, even if its civic pride had become an exclusively white feeling. But even to maintain the civic pride of the white middle class was a feat during this period of urban decline and white flight, when the American dream lay beyond the noisy, polluted urban landscape in the leafy outlying suburbs, and Chicago’s ability to accomplish this owed a lot to its mayor. Every time the city seemed on the verge of falling apart, Chicagoans rallied around their mayor. And their mayor seemed to understand just what needed to be done to take his city into the global age.
Daley was ferociously proud of his city, and his pride was infectious, but the resilience of Chicago’s civic spirit was due to the fact that it was embedded within the city’s physical environment. Between 1960 and 1965, Chicago became the kind of city that middle-class whites could feel good about living and working in, and Daley played a key role in making this happen. In fact, he was merely following the blueprints of the 1958 “Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago,” which had singled out for “special emphasis . . . the needs of the middle-income groups who wish to live in areas close to the heart of the City.”31 In the context of 1958, the phrase middle-income groups meant white people, and the “needs” being referred to were luxury housing and the kinds of leisure and retail resources that would keep these people happy. The idea being voiced by Loop business leaders, especially retailers and developers, was that the central business district was in danger of being overrun with black pedestrians and shoppers and desperately needed an infusion of white middle-class residents. Developer Arthur Rubloff, a major player in the transformation of Chicago’s Near North Side, captured this view perfectly when he famously remarked, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the Loop, it’s people’s conception of it. And the conception they have about it is one word—black. B-L-A-C-K. Black.”32
Rubloff, who, at the time of his death in 1986 possessed a wardrobe that included one hundred hand-tailored suits, forty cashmere coats, five hundred silk ties, one hundred pairs of shoes, and fifteen tuxedos, had been eyeing the area north of the Loop since 1947, when he had coined the term Magnificent Mile to capture his vision for a major upscale commercial strip to be built along North Michigan Avenue, from the Chicago River to the ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood. In 1960 Daley moved to make Rubloff’s dream into reality when he cleared the way for a massive redevelopment project to the southwest of the Gold Coast, using $10 million of federal grant money to acquire and bulldoze a sixteen-acre strip bounded by North Avenue and LaSalle, Clark, and Division Streets. Of course the city made a call for tenders on the project, but, predictably, the Rubloff Company landed the contract with its plan for a $40 million middle-class housing development, complete with town houses, high-rises, swimming pools, tennis courts, and playgrounds. The development would be named Carl Sandburg Village—after, ironically enough, the poet who had so brilliantly evoked the hopes and frustrations of the kind of working-class people the project would be displacing. The overwhelmingly white middle-class Sandburg Village made the area a lot less diverse, replacing a sizable community of Puerto Ricans and the small Japanese “Little Tokyo” neighborhood around Clark and Division, but that was precisely the point. The city now had its barrier protecting the Gold Coast from the Cabrini-Green housing project, and the Loop, along with its Magnificent Mile extension, had a vital infusion of white middle-class residents and shoppers. And this was only the beginning.
Around the time that bulldozers were making way for Sandburg Village, builders were breaking ground at the other end of the Magnificent Mile on Marina City—a $36 million residential complex consisting of twin corncob-shaped, sixty-five-story towers on the north bank of the Chicago River at State Street. Advertised as a “city within a city” with such built-in amenities as a marina, a gymnasium, a movie theater, a swimming pool, an ice rink, a bowling alley, restaurants and bars, a parfumerie, and a gourmet shop with “items gathered from all over the world,” Marina City was a monument to the slick, sophisticated urban lifestyle that Madison Avenue was concocting in the mid-1960s to sell everything from automobiles to hi-fi stereos.33 The idea was a smashing success. Marina City’s nine hundred apartments were fully rented before the building even opened in 1965, providing the Loop with another concentration of solid middle-class residents on its northern border and thousands of shoppers perched at the southern edge of the rapidly developing Magnificent Mile. And once again it was Daley who worked behind the scenes to close the deal. In fact, the whole thing was a classic machine boondoggle, with the city selling the riverfront property at a considerable discount off its market value to CHA board chairman Charles Swibel, who then procured financing from the Janitors International Union, whose president, William McFetridge, was a close friend of Daley.34
The same year Marina City was completed, work began on Lake Point Tower, another utopian “city within a city” development that would further guarantee that the Near North Side would be filled with well-to-do white professionals into the foreseeable future. Overlooking Navy Pier just north of the mouth of the Chicago River, this two-hundred-meter-high, black undulating glass tower was designed by two students of Mies van der Rohe who were inspired by his 1922 design for a glass-curtained skyscraper in Berlin. In addition to offering truly breathtaking views of both city and lake, residents there enjoyed their own two-and-a-half-acre park that included a playground, swimming pool, duck pond, and waterfalls.
FIGURE 15. Daley, the builder, ca. 1958. Richard J. Daley Collection, RJD_04_01_0040_0005_0122, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
Carl Sandburg Village, Marina City, Lake Point Tower, and the swanky stores opening up on North Michigan Avenue represented the new corporate image of white-collar Chicago and the suave lifestyle of urban consumerism and indulgent leisure that came with it. Every day at 5:15 P.M. the bartender at the Marina City bar rang a bell signalling that customers could claim 5-cent refills. Chicago was quickly redefining itself as a city that knew how to swing—a public relations coup that owed a lot to Frank Sinatra’s popularization of the song “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” in 1964 and Hugh Hefner’s opening the first Playboy Club on Walton Street in the heart of the Gold Coast. During its first three months in 1961, Hefner’s club attracted 132,000 guests; by the end of the year, it had 106,000 members, each one possessing a metal key topped with Playboy’s trademark bunny head. An astonishing number of people were thus flashing bunny keys around the city, and, even if a good many were out-of-towners who frequented the club when in town on business, the implications were the same. Chicago was a corporate city on the make, and this had profound consequences for its public culture and for its politics.
MAP 6. Major Loop building projects, 1963–1977.
Symbolic of the broader cultural change under way was Playboy Magazine’s 1965 move into the thirty-seven-story art deco Palmolive Building, replacing, ironically, toothpaste- and soap-maker, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet. With its prominent location behind the famed Drake Hotel at Lake Shore Drive’s sharp Oak Street Beach bend, the prestigious 1929 building became a billboard for Playboy, whose name was spelled out on its top floor with nine-foot-high illuminated letters. Playboy was on the rise—in 1972 an estimated one-quarter of all American college men bought the magazine every month—and its genesis in Chicago was critical to its mass appeal. It was further testament to the fact that the cultural essence of Chicago was not to be found in coffeehouses and folk clubs but rather in the bars and nightclubs on the Gold Coast’s Rush Street strip, where many of the top jazz and blues performers played and got paid. This explains why in 1969, the Weathermen, an SDS splinter group advocating violent tactics to shake the country out of its self-satisfied stupor, attacked nightclubs on Rush Street in the infamous “Days of Rage” riot; such radicals understood, if perhaps only subconsciously, that these nightclubs were somehow as emblematic of the capitalist order they were opposing as banks and military contractors.
Although Chicago earned its credentials in the 1960s as a city that could play, it would soon come to be known as “the city that works.” The description, first used in a 1971 Newsweek article lauding Mayor Daley’s ability to create an efficient infrastructure for business and everyday urban life when other cities were floundering, conveyed a double meaning: that Chicagoans worked hard and that their mayor made the city work efficiently for them. “But it is a demonstrable fact,” Newsweek reported, “that Chicago is that most wondrous of exceptions—a major American city that actually works.”35 The phrase began appearing in local newspapers by 1972, and then in the Washington Post and New York Times in 1974 and 1975. Chicago had defined its brand, so much so that by the time Mayor Daley died of a heart attack in office in 1976, the phrase was run at the top of his obituary in newspapers nationwide. Yet the nickname was not merely the result of some kind of brilliant public relations campaign. Chicago became “the city that works” by the early 1970s in part because while other cities were dealing with crumbling infrastructures and deficient services in the midst of a generalized fiscal crisis, it had already managed to upgrade—often with the use of other people’s money—its transportation and municipal infrastructures.
By the end of 1960, Mayor Daley had overseen the completion of the badly needed Northwest Expressway (renamed the John F. Kennedy Expressway in 1963) out to O’Hare International Airport, most of which had been paid for with federal highway funds, and by 1970 the Blue Line of the “L” was conveying commuters out to the airport on its median strip. In 1961, moreover, O’Hare got a $120 million makeover financed without a penny of taxpayer money; Daley had driven a hard bargain and forced the airlines themselves to put up a forty-year bond to pay for the project, which helped make O’Hare the busiest airport in the world. And many of those arriving in Chicago would be there to attend a convention at Chicago’s new McCormick Place convention center. Then, in 1964, work was completed on a spectacular modernist federal government complex at Jackson and Dearborn, designed by Mies van der Rohe in the International Style, consisting of the thirty-story Dirksen Federal Building, the forty-five-story Kluczynski Federal Building, and a United States Post Office station around a spacious plaza. Once again, Daley had marshalled considerable federal funding to get the work done.
The following year was the occasion for another ribbon-cutting ceremony, when the city opened its magnificent new Chicago Civic Center (renamed the Richard J. Daley Center in 1976) between Randolph and Washington, across from City Hall. Yet another International Style skyscraper with an expansive modernist plaza, the center, which would house the county court system along with office space for both the city and county governments, was constructed with a special steel that was designed to rust, giving the building its distinctive red and brown color. Two years later, in 1967, Pablo Picasso completed a fifteen-meter-high, 162-ton cubist sculpture, made of the same material as the building it fronted and paid for with grants from local charitable foundations, to adorn the Civic Center plaza. When asked to approve the choice of Picasso for the project, Mayor Daley allegedly replied, “If you gentlemen think he’s the greatest, that’s what we want for Chicago, and you go ahead.” The “Chicago Picasso” was the first of a series of high-profile works of art that would bring a sense of worldliness to downtown Chicago. This was important for a city trying to cast off its image as blue-collar and obtuse. In 1974 the Federal Plaza got its own artistic landmark—Alexander Calder’s 16-meter-high, red steel Flamingo.
The Loop thus morphed into a vision of modernity, efficiency, and prestige at the very moment when American corporations were seeking to project these same attributes, and thus feared getting trapped within decaying cities stigmatized by high crime rates and racial tensions. Hence, with companies looking to the inviting suburban environs of Cook and DuPage Counties, where the McDonald’s Corporation would move its Loop headquarters and open its Hamburger University training center in 1971, Daley was able to make a viable case that Chicago was a good place to do business. But even with elegant Miesian skyscrapers, internationally recognized artworks, state-of-the-art residential developments, a burgeoning shopping district, a first-rate airport, and a highway network that enabled Loop professionals to make the daily commute from the desirable towns to the west and north, the mayor was working against strong forces pulling towards greener suburban pastures. DuPage County’s labor force doubled during the 1970s, and its population grew by 34 percent as numerous research facilities and corporate headquarters joined McDonald’s, AT&T, and Amoco along Route 5. During this same period Cook County’s “golden corridor” of high-tech companies quickly formed to the northwest, with Motorola, Pfizer, Honeywell, Western Electric, and Northrup Defense Systems setting up operations along the Northwest Tollway by O’Hare. Similar suburban high-tech corridors were taking shape in many of the nation’s metropolitan areas, a phenomenon that sucked tax dollars out of inner cities at time when they were most in need.36 In Chicago, Mayor Daley approved an 18 percent increase in property taxes in 1971, but this was not nearly enough to offset the loss in tax revenues from the flight of residents and businesses. In 1970, property taxes funded 39 percent of the city’s budget; by the end of the decade this figure had dropped to 27 percent.37
Such circumstances required extraordinary measures, and Mayor Daley, “the builder,” as some referred to him, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to close deals, get tall buildings constructed, and keep major corporations within the city. In 1964, he expedited the sale of a piece of land owned by the city so that work could begin on the First National Bank Building (now called the Chase Tower), a sixty-story curved granite building that opened in 1969 on Madison Street, between Dearborn and Clark.38 In fact, 1969 was a banner year for the Loop, with the opening of eight new buildings that provided an additional 4.6 million square feet of office space. It was also the year that work began on the city’s next tallest building, the $100 million, eighty-three-story Standard Oil Building, the result of another successful campaign by the mayor. Daley had moved quickly to arrange the company’s purchase of vacant land just north of Grant Park after being informed by Standard Oil’s chairman, John Swearingen, that the company had outgrown its South Michigan Avenue headquarters and was looking to move elsewhere. Around this same time, Daley also heard that Sears, Roebuck and Co., the largest retailer in the world, was considering new headquarters in the suburbs, and again went to work on preventing this from happening. After a sit-down with Daley, Sears’s chairman, Gordon Metcalf, announced plans for constructing the world’s tallest skyscraper just west of the Loop. The only problem was that the parcel it wanted was bisected by a segment of Quincy Street. Faced with this dilemma, Daley ordered the city council to hastily authorize transferring ownership of the street to Sears for a very low price, and to make the deal even sweeter, he assured Metcalf that the city would cover the costs of relocating water and sewer lines for the new building. The offer was accepted: when the Sears Tower opened its doors in 1974, Chicago possessed a skyscraper that reached higher than the World Trade Center towers. Not only did this give Chicago a new symbol of prestige, but the $150 million it took to build the tower would also irrigate the local economy, and thousands of white-collar jobs, along with a good many of the professionals who worked them, would remain within the city.
In Metcalf, Daley now had a powerful ally in his quest to fortify the Loop—a job that was seemingly never finished. Thus, as workers were still welding girders on to the Sears Tower, Metcalf was already spearheading—along with Donald M. Graham, CEO of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust, and Thomas G. Ayers, president of Commonwealth Edison Company—the ambitious Dearborn Park project to transform six hundred acres of blighted railroad yards in back of the old Dearborn Station on Polk Street into a mixed-income development that would house 120,000 people. The idea was part of the Chicago 21 Plan, which was drafted in 1973 by the quasi-public Chicago Central Area Committee, with the assistance of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Like the 1958 plan before it, Chicago 21 focused on the need to make the central business district attractive to middle- and upper-class residents through the development of upscale housing, playgrounds, parks, and high-quality retail resources. After all of the recent development on the North Side, the CCAC viewed this need as most pressing on the southern edge of the Loop, where the Sears Tower rose out of the ground like a hulking black sentinel.39
In the minds of the business leaders who had collaborated on Chicago 21, this was the soft underbelly of the Loop, exposed to the dagger of black poverty jutting up from the north end of the “State Street corridor.” Dearborn Park would provide the South Loop with the “protection” it needed, and Daley was of course on board with the plan, guaranteeing the city would bankroll the project’s eventual infrastructural requirements. So, in a striking example of the new face of unrestrained corporate power in Chicago, a group of downtown business executives formed the Chicago 21 Corporation and raised $14 million in investment capital to acquire land and build a massive “mixed-income” housing development on the Near South Side. There was no hiding the fact that Dearborn Park was intended to serve as a barrier between the poor blacks of the Near South Side and the suits and ties of the South Loop—the apartment buildings all faced inward, the parks would be fenced off and reserved for residents only, and all the streets running north-south within the development were cul-de-sacs.40 As for the “mixed-income” aspect of the project, the Chicago 21 Corporation planned on reserving one building for low-income, subsidized housing, but it would be for the elderly rather than for families.
Even if its founder and boss was not alive to see it, Dearborn Park suggested that the Daley machine seemed to have finally achieved what it had been aspiring towards since the late 1950s—a system that produced patronage capital without any of the bothersome politics that usually comes with it. Dearborn Park would bring in a handsome sum in annual tax revenues for the city, and some serious injustices had been committed in its development: minority-owned contractors had been left out, and, given the project’s design, it was difficult to deny the allegations made by various black community groups that it was, in the words of the Chicago Defender, “a white-only fortress to protect the financial district from blacks.”41 And yet the city was in a position to collect on the financial advantages of the project without having to deal with any of this negative political fallout. In fact, the fallout was not “political” per se because the project was a seemingly private venture, and the notion of private accountability had yet to be incorporated into the idioms and tactics of oppositional politics in the neoliberal city.
While, as this chapter has shown, the divisive tendencies of the politics of identity played an important role in undercutting the reformist challenges of the late 1960s, the story would be incomplete without a consideration of how the new neoliberal political order of the global city disoriented the forces of reform and transformed the battleground of political confrontation. Suggestive in this sense was a 1978 Defender editorial on the Dearborn Park issue that began by asking, “What is the obligation of the private sector toward solving racial inequality? Is financial profit the sole criterion for determining action or inaction? Should banks and independent retailers and manufacturers be required to solve the problems they helped to create?” In the text that followed, not a single elected or appointed city official was named as accountable, and the only political response to be recommended, if the “bankers, retailers, and manufacturers” did not live up to their “sense of social responsibility,” was a consumer boycott.42 The role of this privately driven development in reinforcing racial inequalities thus represented an early example of a phenomenon that sociologist Lawrence Bobo has referred to as “laissez-faire racism”: a system in which “modern racial inequality relies on the market and informal racial bias to re-create and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality.”43 The incoherent and ultimately weak response of the black community in the face of this situation was symptomatic of the power of the neoliberal order to depoliticize the very forces that were reinforcing racial and social inequalities in the city.44
Moreover, since Dearborn Park was not financed with federal funds, opposition could not even rally around the affirmative action requirements established by Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order No. 11246.45 Such mobilizations for greater minority representation in the city’s construction workforce had occurred in 1969 and 1970, when the Coalition of United Community Action (CUCA), an umbrella organization including Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket and some sixty other black community groups, forced work stoppages at several Loop construction sites to demand more blacks be admitted into the overwhelmingly white Chicago Building Trades unions. Marshalling the brawn of the three most fearsome street gangs—the Vice Lords, Blackstone Rangers, and Black Gangster Disciples—CUCA managed to shut down several sites, forcing the city to agree to the 1970 Chicago Plan to integrate the city’s construction industry.46 Yet, as the Dearborn Park controversy revealed, the solution was far from satisfactory, and with an increasing number of smaller firms getting into the construction business—contractors who did not do enough government-sponsored business to be covered by affirmative action requirements—it would become increasingly harder for blacks to press their claims for more employment opportunities. Moreover, with the pullback of federal funds from the construction market, minority-owned businesses were in the process of losing their legal basis for demanding their rightful share of the pie.
Although Daley began to lose support in minority communities around this time, the persisting lack of financial clout in black and Latino Chicago by the early 1970s prevented this rancor from ever loosening Daley’s hold on power. The presence of strong minority-owned businesses in black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican communities could have helped bring the kind of employment opportunities, political capital, and leadership that would offer an alternative to the meager patronage resources the Daley machine was funneling to them to buy out just enough support. But during the 1970s, Mexican and Puerto Rican Chicago had not yet arrived, and black Chicago was moving in the other direction, with some of its older former centers of commercial activity turning into ghost towns and new ones slow to develop. Revolution was for radicals; bread and butter drove politics in the Windy City. And all the investment capital that was flowing into Chicago was not buttering much bread outside the Loop and its surrounding middle-class residential neighborhoods. Few working-class Chicagoans were qualified for the highly skilled jobs in the rapidly growing FIRE sectors, and while there was plenty to go around in the booming construction sector, the machine and the unions had already fixed the game so as to exclude those most in need of the work. By the time Daley died of a heart attack at the age of 74, the patronage model of machine politics he had championed for more than two decades seemed to have become as natural a feature of the world around him as the air he breathed. There was still work to be done in order to keep the city clean, safe, and ready for business, but the corporations were driving things now, and why would anyone raise any objections to what they were doing for the city?
Ironically, it was at this very moment, when its opposition seemed at its weakest, that the traditional machine system finally began to fall apart. Although Daley had coasted to victories in his final two mayoral elections in 1971 and 1975, his final half-decade in office was ridden with headaches, defeats and scandals. First, due to the 1969 ruling of a federal court in the Gautreaux case, which found the Chicago Housing Authority guilty of discriminating against blacks for decades in the location of housing projects, the city, it seemed, would now have to abandon its practice of building low-income housing in African American neighborhoods. Then, another federal court decision threw a wrench into the cogs of the machine when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in the Shakman case that average city workers could not be fired based on their political affiliations. Beginning around this time, moreover, a series of corruption scandals revealed in sensational fashion the extent to which the machine had been misallocating and at times stealing public funds. In 1972 an investigation by the Chicago Tribune into the city’s use of its $53 million antipoverty grant from the federal government’s Model Cities program found that nearly half of the money was being spent on bogus administrative costs that lined the pockets of machine cronies. The following year, a story broke in the local press proving that the city had offered a contract worth nearly $3 million dollars to an Evanston insurance firm after Daley’s son John had joined it, and then in 1974 Daley’s longtime right-hand man on the city council, Tom Keane, was convicted of using his political influence to purchase parcels of tax-delinquent land and then sell them back to the city at above-market prices. The police department was not spared from the blowup. In 1973, Police Superintendent Conlisk announced his resignation amidst two sets of allegations: the first involving a number of his officers shaking down tavern owners and the second, and more serious, revolving around complaints that Chicago policemen were guilty of a pattern of physical and verbal abuse against blacks. To make matters worse, this latter criticism came from former Black Belt machine loyalist Ralph Metcalfe, who, after winning William Dawson’s vacated seat in the U.S. Congress, began distancing himself from Daley. Each day seemed to bring a new scandal. And yet, through it all, deals kept getting made, buildings kept getting built, and Daley kept getting elected.
Although Richard J. Daley would have felt out of his element in discussions about telecommunications capacities, subcontracting, or the vagaries of global financial markets, his patronage instincts told him that what was good for John Hancock, Chase, and Sears was good for Chicago, and what was good for Chicago was good for him and his friends. Daley gazed at the conservative backlash he had helped create and understood that it meant that the well of federal government resources was about to run dry, especially after Democrats had given up the White House. And he knew from experience that Chicagoans, like Americans elsewhere, were getting increasingly irritable about paying their taxes; in 1962, he had seen voters reject his $66 million city bond issue because they did not want to pay higher property taxes to fund urban renewal and improve the city’s sewer system. The new sponsors of tax revenues and patronage capital were the transnational corporations whose headquarters were bursting into the skyline, and his early understanding of the fact that he needed to do all in his power to make sure they did not leave his proud city once again made Daley the right man for his time and place. He had been unwittingly greasing the wheels of neoliberalization every step of the way—turning over the job of charting the city’s future to a cabal of developers and businessmen in the 1950s, working tirelessly to create an urban environment and business infrastructure that would attract private capital downtown while many of the city’s working-class neighborhoods decayed throughout the 1960s, and using generous public subsidies to keep that capital within the Loop in the early 1970s. Municipal governance during these decades had become progressively unhinged from any notion of the public interest and increasingly aligned with the interests of corporate capital, which, for Daley, were synonymous with the interests of all Chicagoans. Daley’s unwitting genius not only told him what needed to be done but also how to get it done in the new age of globalization. Back in the 1950s when Daley was sinking tax dollars into new technologies to sweep the streets and sidewalks of the dingy, downtrodden Loop, he seemed somewhat compulsive; now, it all seemed to make perfect sense. Daley’s patronage instincts led him to the idea that attracting private capital was the new game to win, and his near-obsessive concern about Chicago’s image gave him the right idea of how to win it. In an age when the telecommunications industry was rapidly making place, in a geographical sense, less important, it was necessary for cities to brand themselves as good places to do business, and part of this branding involved projecting to the world an image of a city on the rise—a city that people were proud to be part of. And a city on the rise was certainly not a city in the throes of fiscal crisis, which Chicago, in some sense, really was in the 1970s, even if nobody seemed to know it. And nobody knew it, Chicago journalist David Bernstein has revealed, because Daley’s finance people were using a number of “budgetary gimmicks” to hide mounting deficits. They had the city borrowing to pay off past debts and then using the new funds for operating expenses rather than for debt repayment, all in the name of keeping up the appearance of financial health.47 Yet again, Daley was on the cutting edge—this time of the debt-financed modus operandi and accounting sophistry of the future.
But as gifted as Daley was at making his city a highly competitive player in the new global economy, other factors that had little to do with the machine conspired in Chicago’s favor in the 1970s. An outgrowth of the city’s historical role as the financial, marketing, and insurance center of the Midwest agro-industrial complex was its development of long-standing markets in agricultural commodities futures—namely, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (known as the Merc, or CME).48 For farmers worried about fluctuating crop prices, futures contracts traded on these markets offered a guarantee that they could sell their harvest at a fixed price within a designated window of time in the future; these futures contracts were also attractive to speculators gambling on commodity price changes. For most of the 1960s, Chicago’s commodities exchanges experienced some difficulties as a result of stock market declines and a lack of investor interest in contracts for commodities like pork bellies, Idaho potatoes, lumber, and shrimp. But things changed dramatically in 1969, when commodity trading had its most active year in the history of the exchanges, and then again in 1972, when the CME introduced the first futures market in foreign currencies. The idea was the brainchild of none other than Milton Friedman, a founding member of the famed Chicago School of economics at the University of Chicago, which, in the early 1970s, was engaged in replacing Keynesianism with monetarism—a theory that correlated unemployment and inflation rates to changes in the supply of money. Monetary policy, Friedman argued, could have prevented the Great Depression, and it was now the only prudent way to ensure economic growth while stabilizing inflation. Around the same time he was educating the famed “Chicago Boys” on how to bring such free market magic to Chile, Friedman accepted a consulting deal from the CME to investigate the possibility of doing business in foreign currency futures. Having determined that the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 would bring about an enormous need for a futures market in which increasingly volatile currency valuations could be hedged so as to minimize risk, Friedman recommended that the CME take the lead in establishing this exchange in Chicago.49 The CME took his advice to the bank, extending the idea to gold futures in 1974, Treasury bills in 1976, and Standard & Poor’s stock index futures in 1982. Meanwhile, the CBOT was carving out its own niche in protecting investors against increasingly sharp fluctuations in interest rates by offering futures on mortgage-backed certificates in 1975 and U.S. Treasury bonds in 1977.
The combined effect of these exchanges on Chicago’s financial sector was staggering. In 1972, for example, the CME recorded $66.1 billion worth of transactions and the CBOT tallied $123 billion worth, and each day the two exchanges combined made margin deposits of well over $300 million into Chicago banks. “Can we fully evaluate what this means for Chicago?” asked Leo Melamed, chairman of the CME, before an audience of Chicago management professionals in 1973.50 But the answer was not forthcoming—in part because nobody really knew the answer, and in part because most sensed that the truth behind the answer was hardly comforting. The previous year, the first one after the closing of the stockyards, 48 million head of cattle worth some $20 billion were exchanged on the CME with scarcely a single cow turd dropping on Chicago soil. In the 1970s, sublime sums of money began traveling to Chicago from all over the world as figures and codes transmitted through telecommunications pipelines into the control centers of skyscrapers, but like the millions of phantom cattle being herded through the city, all this wealth never left a trace in large swaths of the black South and West Sides. Meanwhile, as Milton Friedman sat in his office in Hyde Park concocting the ideological justifications that would naturalize all of this, he was seldom out of earshot of the wailing sirens in the neighboring Woodlawn ghetto, just across the Midway, where unemployment and homicide rates were rising much faster than the stock indexes.
THE BLACK MESSIAH IN “BEIRUT ON THE LAKE”
Some very odd things were happening in Chicago in March 1983. In a city that had not elected a Republican mayor for fifty-six years, in a city in which Republicans occupied a starring role, along with Jews and blacks as the butt of barroom jokes in some white working-class precincts, Democrats were volunteering in droves to work in the Republican mayoral campaign. The first sure sign that Chicago had been turned upside-down came during the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, an event that traditionally served as a ritualistic reaffirmation of the bonds of solidarity and loyalty that held the Democratic Party together. Each year the city colored the Chicago River fluorescent green with gallons of dye, and the machine’s leading figures paraded by the party’s rank and file wearing green ribbons and leprechaun hats; in election years, as this one was, the parade took on an even greater significance, with the party using the occasion to showcase its ticket. But 1983 was a year that broke with precedent in a number of ways. First, the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate, Harold Washington, who had recently prevailed in a hard-fought primary, did not march at the front of the procession, as was tradition, and when he arrived before the heart of the crowd, one heard not the usual enthusiastic applause but an intermingling of hushed tones and deflated, seemingly forced cheers. Then, in a truly strange state of affairs, the same crowd greeted the Republican mayoral candidate, Bernard Epton—an anti-machine reformer, a rich guy, a Jew, a resident of Hyde Park, a graduate of the University of Chicago, a composite of all of the qualities that should have rankled the sensibilities of South Side Irish machine loyalists—with a rousing show of support. In one episode later reported in the Chicago Tribune, a woman called out to Epton and when he turned to look, she opened her coat to reveal a bright green shirt emblazoned with the phrase, “Vote Right, Vote White.”51
What had upset the natural order in Chicago was the fact that a black man born and raised in Bronzeville—a former member of the Illinois House and Senate who had managed to get himself elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1981—was, in all likelihood, going to be elected Chicago’s next mayor. Normally, the Democratic primary was the mayoral election, with the general election a mere technicality, and Harold Washington began preparing his transition team soon after his startling victory in a three-way race against the incumbent mayor Jane Byrne and the future mayor Richard M. Daley. The Chicago political scene had already been shaken up in 1979 when Byrne had upset Richard J. Daley’s successor, Michael Bilandic, to become Chicago’s first female mayor and the first in any major U.S. city. This was a tremendous feat in an era still touched by the contentious feminist challenges of the 1960s and 1970s; Illinois, it should be pointed out, was one of the fifteen states that had refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet Byrne’s gender was never really a major issue. By contrast, faced with the possibility of a black man in the top office at City Hall, white Chicago, with the exception of the Lakefront liberal wards around Hyde Park, became gripped by racist hysteria. Addressing a Byrne rally on the Northwest Side days before the primary, Edward Vrdolyak—Tenth Ward alderman, chairman of the Democratic Central Committee, and close advisor to Jane Byrne—summed it up in one of the more notorious public expressions of unabashed racism outside the Jim Crow South: “A vote for Daley is a vote for Washington. It’s a two-person race. It would be the worst day in the history of Chicago if your candidate . . . was not elected. It’s a racial thing. Don’t kid yourself. I’m calling on you to save your city, to save your precinct. We’re fighting to keep the city the way it is.”52 Because of Vrdolyak’s stature, this was big news, but Vrdolyak and many Chicagoans seemed puzzled when his remarks became material for political scandal; for weeks such expressions had been circulating around street corners, taverns, precinct headquarters, and kitchen tables in much of white Chicago—especially on the city’s Northwest and Southwest Sides.53
And yet, although Vrdolyak’s remark was indicative of a broader wave of racial hate that would wash over white Chicago in the months to come, it also may have blown the election for Byrne. This might seem like a curious conclusion in view of the fact that this was Chicago and this was the Reagan era, when Republican politicians, North and South, made convenient use of popular notions of black cultural dysfunction and ghetto pathology to justify their cries for welfare reform. Moreover, Chicago, in particular, had a special role to play in the antiwelfare backlash. Perhaps the most conspicuous catchphrase echoing through the attack on the welfare state during the 1980s was “Chicago welfare queen,” an image Ronald Reagan had conjured up during his 1976 presidential campaign. The Chicago welfare queen, according to Reagan’s hyperbolic tale, had cheated the federal government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by having illegitimate children and creating multiple aliases. While Reagan never mentioned explicitly that the woman in his sordid tale was African American, he did specify that she lived on Chicago’s South Side, a detail whose significance was missed by few. This was typical of the rampant coded or ventriloquized cultural racism during these years. By the mid-1980s, universities and corporations alike were instituting cultural sensitivity training programs, and even conservatives, who were increasingly appealing to values of colorblindness, meritocracy, and free market individualism, were beginning to understand that racism made them look bad. Furthermore, to confront the demands of minority groups for race-conscious policies, many conservatives had taken to minimizing the presence of racial discrimination. If racism could be eliminated as a cause for poverty, then one could only conclude that some combination of cultural deficiencies, individual failings, and the negative effects of the welfare system itself were to blame for the ghettos and barrios that persisted in American cities.54 There was thus much to be gained in planting culturally racist notions in the minds of middle-class whites angry about their taxes, but the trick was to do it without opening oneself up to charges of racism. This was why the overt forms of racism that ran wild in Chicago around Harold Washington’s rise ended up working to his advantage by shocking outside observers, turning the stomachs of just enough white liberals, and erasing much of Byrne’s remaining support within the black community.
This last effect was perhaps the most critical of all, for it was the astonishing mobilization of the black community that ultimately pushed Washington over the top. Black organizers conducted an aggressive registration campaign that had added over one hundred thousand black voters, enabling Washington to capture a startling 84.7 percent of the black vote, which constituted 92.1 percent of his total citywide. In view of the machine’s patronage leverage in black Chicago and the reluctance of many longtime residents to believe in the electability of a black candidate, this was a remarkable feat.55 In fact, it was common knowledge among political insiders that the machine owned a certain percentage of the black vote, regardless of the candidates vying for election. Famed Chicago campaign manager Don Rose, who had helped Jane Byrne take black votes away from the machine in 1977, estimated the figure to be 20 percent. “This is the vote,” Rose joked, “the machine would deliver for a George Wallace against Martin Luther King.”56 But against Washington, Byrne had garnered the support of a mere 8 percent of registered black voters. The Washington campaign had accomplished this, according to historian and political consultant William Grimshaw, by developing a “carnival” and “movement” atmosphere that helped transform its candidate into a “messiah.”57 Some of this was orchestrated by Washington’s skilled campaign manager and Chicago civil rights veteran Al Raby, but the real magic was in the movement’s more spontaneous moments, when street rallies pulled thousands of observers off sidewalks and into swirling, singing, dancing masses, and groups of young people swept through neighborhoods chanting “Harold, Harold, Harold” and knocking on random doors to urge people to vote. It all came together just days before the primary, when more than twelve thousand supporters defied a driving snowstorm and packed into UIC’s basketball arena for an electrifying two-hour rally. Days later, after the votes were tallied, Washington had garnered 37 percent to Byrne’s 33 percent and Daley’s 30 percent.
FIGURE 16. The carnival atmosphere of the Harold Washington campaign. Photo by Jacques M. Chenet/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.
But after a raucous victory party, all the carnival jubilation began to ferment into consternation when Washington’s supporters began to realize that, unlike in past years, the Democratic machine was not going to marshal its forces for this particular candidate, and victory in the general election was far from assured. In fact, at first there was a great deal of confusion among the Democratic Party’s committeemen. In the immediate aftermath of the primary, Vrdolyak told the press that the party would give its full support to the Democratic candidate, and longtime alderman Vito Marzullo, the boss of Little Italy and the Near West Side since 1953, declared Washington “the Mayor of Chicago.”58 Then the defections began. Before the end of February, Alderman Aloysius Majerczyk, whose ward encompassed the Polish neighborhoods around the McKinley Park area to the north of the old stockyards, had announced his support for Epton. Referring to the “message of racial pride” his constituents had been giving him, Majerczyk told the Tribune, “We’re against open housing in my ward, and we always have been.”59 Indicative of just how much Washington’s candidacy was galvanizing whites of all ethnic stripes, Majerczyk’s endorsement of Epton was quickly seconded by Ivan Rittenberg, alderman of the traditionally Jewish Fortieth Ward on the far North Side. Days later, the Tribune was reporting that Epton’s campaign headquarters in Irish Bridgeport was being overwhelmed by Democratic volunteers, and that in the heavily Italian and Polish neighborhoods of the Northwest Side, buttons reading “Italians for Eptonini” and “Polish for Eptonski” were being passed around.60 Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian—these were groups that had quarreled almost incessantly over power, place, and resources since before the turn of the century. Certainly ethnic ties had progressively attenuated in the postwar decades, but it was hard to deny that business relations, real estate dealings, and friendships still tended to work best when the parties involved were of the same ethnic ilk. This was a situation, moreover, that the machine system had promoted with its divide-and-rule style of governance. It is therefore somewhat ironic that many of the Democrats who defected to the Republican camp justified their decision by claiming that Epton would be somehow better at uniting the city. In fact, whites in the city had never been as unified as they were in the spring of 1983, except perhaps in the months after Chicago’s own Jack Johnson became the first black boxer in history to win the heavyweight crown, and the call sounded across the nation for the “Great White Hope” who could beat Johnson and thereby restore the supremacy of the white race. Epton was regarded as the next great white hope. Outside of a handful of Lakefront liberal and racially mixed wards, the only question for Democratic committeemen was whether to openly oppose Washington or to remain publicly neutral while working behind the scenes against him.
However, to say that race was the only issue for many Democratic defectors would be misleading. There is reason to believe that had Washington not run an uncompromising antimachine campaign, a good many committeemen and aldermen who ended up endorsing Epton would have grudgingly supported him instead. In fact, Washington was something of a machine insider. After earning a law degree at Northwestern University, where he was the only African American in his graduating class, he had worked for Third Ward alderman Ralph Metcalfe between 1951 and 1965, a time when Metcalfe was still cozy with Daley. Although some hoped that this political experience would make him come around and play ball with the machine, Washington never backed off his promise to rid the city of a system that he claimed perpetuated “outdated politics and pie-in-the-sky financing,” while providing “fat consultant contracts for a few politically connected firms and jobs for a few patronage workers.”61 He was therefore a threat to the aldermen and committeemen, whose power rested in their ability to lubricate their precincts with patronage. If, as Milton Rakove had observed, the men who dominated the Chicago machine were, above all else, “practical, pragmatic, parochial, and nonideological,” then the color of Washington’s skin should have made little difference.62 But it did—alas, it did.
Why it did, however, had to do more with culture than ideology, and it had less to do with machine cadres than with ordinary Chicagoans infusing the normally staid conduct of mayoral politics with a new energy, anger, and urgency. When Rakove wrote his scathing indictment of the machine in the early 1970s, the system he was attacking was still working to keep the city’s political culture impervious to the ideological challenges of the era—liberalism, democracy, conservatism, you name it. Its ability to do this with such efficacy had allowed it to outlast all the other big city machines by decades. But what Rakove could not see as he was completing his manuscript was the role that grassroots cultural struggles would play in the coming years. By the early 1980s, the national political landscape was increasingly characterized by seemingly irreconcilable conflicts over cultural issues and moral values. Abortion rights, censorship of obscenity, and gay rights constituted the first wave of “culture wars” to grip the country. But beginning in the early 1970s, a new set of cultural issues revolving around the lingering questions of racial segregation and inequality had moved into the political sphere, as white Americans debated policies like busing and affirmative action and responded to minority claims for greater cultural respect and recognition in institutions of higher learning.
Such issues did not seem to translate into what one might call “politics” in Chicago. Aldermen like Vito Marzullo and Roman Pucinski, the “leader of Chicago Polonia” since 1959, knew little, if anything, about the politics of recognition and “political correctness”; politics to them was filling potholes, fixing parking tickets, and doling out jobs and contracts to key constituents. However, whether they knew it or not, the cultural politics of race was overtaking them, even if it would not remove them from power. One of the first things they learned was that they would have to watch what they said much more than before. One of the signs that Chicago was merging to a greater extent with mainstream political culture were the many allegations of racism that were flying around the city’s newspapers. While many of these charges were, of course, warranted, some white Chicagoans began complaining that black leaders were construing as “racist” any opposition to Washington. In the face of such allegations, the Epton campaign and its supporters began throwing around charges of “reverse racism,” claiming that the blacks accusing them of racism were, in fact, the racists, not them. These were sentiments that would be increasingly heard on college campuses in the coming years, as minority groups pressed their demands for greater cultural recognition and conservatives decried the censorship and factionalism of “political correctness,” but such circumstances had seldom been witnessed in big city politics.
In retrospect, it now seems clear that Chicago was in 1983 staging one of the first major dramas of the new era of culturized politics, when all that separated whites from blacks—space, wealth, ideology—would be reduced to ethnocultural factors. By the 1980s a politics of resentment was clearly taking hold on both sides of the color line across the United States. Blacks were resentful about all the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights era, and whites about what they perceived as the stubborn refusal of blacks to let the race issue drop after the civil rights victories of the 1960s. But white resentment, in particular, went beyond this. White resentment, as Chicago ’83 demonstrated, was not only articulated in cultural terms, it was about culture itself. As whites in Chicago gazed at the expressions of cultural pride and solidarity on display in Washington’s messianic movement, they understood, on a palpable level, that blacks possessed something they lacked. As one Epton supporter so poignantly lamented about the dilemma of opposing Washington, “We’re racist, and he has cultural pride.”63
Such expressions of cultural envy and resentment explain a great deal about the violence that was entering Chicago’s mayoral election around this time. Even if most operatives within the machine still tended to view the stakes of the election in terms of controlling political power and patronage, the groundswell of opposition to Washington was taking the whole affair into an entirely new realm. What was behind the bitter racial hatred exploding into public life in Chicago resembled, on some level, Slavoj Zizek’s description of the dynamics underlying the ethnoracial tensions that tore the Balkans apart in the late 1980s and 1990s. Critical to Zizek’s perspective is the idea that what drove the nationalist fears of ethnoracial others were imagined “thefts of enjoyment”—the idea that racial others threatened to take away the dominant group’s “way of life.”64 This seems an apt way to explain what was transpiring as more and more Chicagoans were articulating the feeling that defeating Washington in the election was a matter of “saving” their neighborhoods and their city—a sentiment Epton sought to capitalize on by choosing the incendiary campaign slogan “Epton, before it’s too late.” Epton of course denied the phrase had any racial implications, insisting it related to the city’s impending fiscal crisis, but this was disingenuous. Epton understood very well that in the eyes of many white Chicagoans, a victory by Washington meant the loss of their city as they knew it. Not only did they fear that blacks would finally get their rightful share of the patronage pie, but for many whites, a city run by blacks would be a city of immorality, corruption, and danger, where public culture would become synonymous with some nightmarish vision of the black nationalist ghetto. Under such conditions, racism ran wild throughout the city in the most virulent forms, seemingly unrestrained by any codes of propriety or civility.
The first sign that things were getting out of control occurred on Palm Sunday, March 27. Washington and former vice president Walter Mondale had planned to attend religious services at St. Pascal’s Catholic Church on the Northwest Side, but when they arrived, they discovered “NIGGER DIE” painted on a church door. Later, upon leaving the church, the two were mobbed by hundreds of frenzied Epton supporters screaming racial epithets and other insults. Around this same time, a number of racially vicious flyers began circulating in many white neighborhoods. One suggested facetiously that if Washington won, the name of the city would be changed to “Chicongo” and that the city’s official police insignia would include images of a watermelon slice and a rack of ribs; another joked that Washington would place basketball hoops on the Chicago Picasso and rename the CTA “Soul Train.”65 While Epton of course stayed clear of such low tactics, he nonetheless engaged in a smear campaign loaded with thinly veiled cultural racism, all the while accusing blacks and the local media of playing the race card. Understanding the propensity of whites to buy into “welfare queen” notions of black corruption and criminality, Epton exploited some minor legal problems in Washington’s past to impugn his integrity. Washington, it was true, had been in legal trouble in 1972 for failing to file income tax returns, and in 1970 he had his law license suspended for billing a client for services he did not perform, but the amounts of money in question in both instances were insignificant. In a city like Chicago, where corruption was more the rule than the exception, such attacks against a white candidate would have been laughable. Of course Epton never said anything racist per se, but he knew where his comments would lead. By the time Chicagoans cast their votes, Washington had been forced to publicly defend himself against the baseless charge that he had been convicted for child molestation.
However, once again, on the eve of the election as in the primary, the expression of such ugly racism actually worked in Washington’s favor. In what was the closest mayoral election in Chicago since 1919, Washington managed to prevail by just 46,250 votes out of a total of 1.29 million. The event was one of not just national but international importance. Black mayors had headed major American cities since 1973, when Tom Bradley was elected in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, but this was Chicago—the city with the second largest black population in the United States, where the saga of black struggle was particularly well known. Moreover, it was an event of great significance for the black diaspora—of lesser magnitude, of course, but not unlike the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. Indeed, Washington’s election was made possible by a breathtaking show of black solidarity and, as such, was a source of inspiration for blacks all over the world. As in the primary, African Americans had turned out in record numbers and voted almost unanimously for Washington, while his opponent had captured an overwhelming share (87.6 percent) of the white vote.
Washington had once again garnered his strongest white support in the Lakefront wards, where roughly one in four whites voted for him. The main difference, however, was that Latinos had moved into his camp in decisive fashion. While Washington had captured a small percentage of Puerto Rican and Mexican votes in the primary, he had outrun Epton among Latinos at a rate of roughly 4 to 1.66 A major reason for this shift was the fact that since few Latinos believed in Washington’s chances in the primary, many found it prudent to go with their best bet for patronage down the line. But there is also good reason to believe that Latinos were responding, at least in part, to both the vitriolic racism that exploded onto the political scene as well as Washington’s promises to make Chicago a fairer city. Nonetheless, the black-Latino alliance that crystallized during the general election had not sprung up overnight but was the product of a somewhat long process of negotiation and cooperation that grew out of the civil rights challenges of the 1960s. Glimpses of it had been seen in 1966, when black civil rights activists tried reaching out to Puerto Ricans after the Division Street barrio riot of that year; in 1968, when black and Latino high school students mobilized to change their schools to better suit their needs; and in 1969, when the Young Lords and Black Panthers joined forces to try to bring about a “rainbow coalition.” Although these efforts had not been enough to overcome the legacies of intergroup conflict and divisive politics by the end of the 1960s, veterans from these struggles continued to carry forward the project of a multiracial struggle for justice and equality during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Black and Latino activists were thus joining forces on the grassroots level to tackle a range of issues related to high unemployment, diminishing welfare entitlements, poor housing, and low voter registration into the early 1980s, when the tide turned quickly against minority interests on both the federal and local levels. Nationally, the Reagan Revolution’s antiwelfare crusade provoked a new wave of grassroots activism in black and Latino communities feeling targeted by its coded cultural racism. But even more important was the local situation, where Jane Byrne’s apparent antimachine challenge had quickly turned into a big disappointment for minority groups. Byrne had snuck into the mayor’s office by promising to root out the “cabal of evil men” she claimed had betrayed Daley’s legacy and by having the extremely good fortune of delivering her message of machine inefficiency during a massive snowstorm that crippled the city’s infrastructure for weeks in January 1979. In one instance, Mayor Bilandic closed several CTA stations in order to improve service without realizing that all of these stations served black communities, a situation that paid dividends for Byrne on election day, when her 45,000-vote edge among blacks allowed her to prevail in a tight race.
Once in office, however, relations between the mayor and Chicago’s black leadership became strained. It did not help her case that she publicly supported President Reagan’s policies when blacks across the nation were voicing sharp criticism of them. But even more destructive to her support in the black community was her replacement of several high-level black officials in the Chicago Housing Authority and on the Chicago Board of Education with whites. Then, as she was fending off charges of perpetuating the old “plantation politics” of the past, Byrne poured fuel on the fire by using her political funds to make cash contributions to black churches and to distribute small Christmas trees and hams in low-income black communities—gestures that vocal black community activist Lu Palmer criticized as “patronizing.” Finally, with her support among blacks dwindling and talk of a mayoral run by Richard M. Daley increasing, Byrne made yet another political miscue when she and her husband enlisted a brigade of bodyguards and moved into the notoriously crime-ridden Cabrini-Green Housing Project. The stunt was intended to publicize Byrne’s commitment to fighting gang violence and crime in black communities, but once again the mayor looked insensitive and out of touch with African American concerns—a point that was hammered home during an Easter celebration in front of Cabrini-Green, when a group of protesters led by fiery community activist Marion Nzinga Stamps confronted the mayor with shouts of “We need jobs, not eggs,” and bodyguards wrestled one protester to the ground amidst shouts of “Assassin!”67
The new movement for black empowerment that would sweep Harold Washington into office the following year first took form within this context. Looking for a way to strike back at Byrne, Jesse Jackson and other black community leaders came up with the idea of organizing a boycott of the city’s annual summer musical festival, ChicagoFest, an event Byrne used to showcase her role in promoting a vibrant social life for the entire city. After taking office, Byrne had renamed the event “Mayor Jane M. Byrne’s ChicagoFest” to make sure everyone got the message, and her name was prominently displayed on the seemingly countless posters for the event throughout the city. In 1982, Byrne had authorized big money to bring in the popular black performer Stevie Wonder, who, upon hearing about the boycott, promptly agreed to cancel and forfeit his pay. Attendance and revenues dropped dramatically as a result, but, more importantly, blacks had won a symbolic victory.
A new sense of energy and purpose began to circulate within black Chicago, and from there it spilled over into Puerto Rican and Mexican communities. Quick to capitalize on this new movement spirit, for example, was People Organized for Welfare and Employment Rights (POWER), a coalition of sixteen black and Latino community organizations that had just launched a massive voter registration campaign. While Chicago’s Latinos felt some resentment about all of the attention being paid to black injustices—Latinos, it must remembered, had even more reason than blacks to protest their second-class status in city government—a group of activists in both Puerto Rican and Mexican Chicago began to take inspiration from the new sense of militancy that was emerging on the South and West Sides. Thus, by the time Harold Washington was beginning to look like a credible candidate, veteran community organizers like Cha-Cha Jimenez and Rudy Lozano were eager to sign on to his campaign and begin convincing reluctant Puerto Rican and Mexican voters that a Washington victory would mean expanded opportunities for Latinos as well. It was Jimenez who introduced Harold Washington in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the first event of the city’s new program of “neighborhood festivals,” put together to demonstrate Mayor Washington’s commitment to including all ethnoracial groups within his administration, when the new mayor assured the appreciative crowd of Puerto Ricans that they would finally get their rightful share of power and resources.
But not even three months later, Washington was under fire for not keeping his promises to Latinos. The first attacks came from Mexican members of Washington’s transition team, after the mayor passed over a qualified Mexican American candidate, Matt Rodriguez, for the position of police superintendent. Some of the criticism seemed to develop out of a sense that Mexicans were being given a back seat to the city’s somewhat smaller Puerto Rican population—a feeling that had the president of the Mexican-American Organization of the Democratic Party of Cook County, Arturo Velasquez, reminding Washington that the “Hispanic community” is a generic term for numerous Spanish-speaking groups.68 Before long, Puerto Ricans as well were complaining about unfulfilled promises. In October 1983, Reverend Jorge Morales, a leading activist in the Humboldt Park barrio area and the spokesman for a group known as the Commission on Latino Affairs, complained about the lack of Latinos appointed to key positions.69 This was merely the latest in a series of problems between Puerto Ricans and the mayor. Even more troubling for Washington was the decision by Miguel Santiago, the newly elected alderman of the heavily Puerto Rican Thirty-First Ward, to side with “the Eddies”—Edward Vrdolyak and Edward Burke—and twenty-six other white alderman in the “council wars,” which saw a unified bloc of white city councilmen (with the exception of Santiago) opposing the mayor’s every move over the next three years. Santiago justified his decision by claiming that Washington was interested in helping only the “right minorities” and by arguing that he had failed to give Latino businesses their fair share of the contracts associated with the new project to expand O’Hare. But this was more politics than truth; in actuality, Latino businesses had obtained nearly 10 percent of the contracts at O’Hare compared with just under 14 percent for the much larger black population. Yet, Santiago’s ability to play this game revealed how fragile Washington’s rainbow coalition actually was.70
While the notorious council wars would come to characterize the Washington era, earning the city the nickname Beirut on the Lake, too much attention to the legislative battles of these years gives the misleading impression that the factionalism that reigned during Washington’s term was merely a matter of whites versus blacks.71 The fact was that the politics of identity that had emerged out of the progressive challenges of the 1960s still cast a large shadow over the city’s political culture. If Washington was not reaching out enough to Latinos, it was in part because he was somewhat beholden to a vocal group of black nationalists who opposed any gesture of cooperation with whites and who saw no reason why, with Washington in the mayor’s office, blacks should not behave precisely as the Irish had for much of the city’s history. Upon arriving in Chicago in 1985 to take a job as a community organizer, Barack Obama was immediately awestruck by what Washington had accomplished, but he was also deeply dismayed by what he viewed as the destructive black nationalist sensibilities that produced “a Hobbesian world where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race.”72 Even Jesse Jackson, the man who would market the idea of a rainbow coalition on the national political stage during his Democratic presidential primary runs in 1984 and 1988, had never had particularly good relations with either liberal whites or Latinos in Chicago. He had made a point of provoking Jews by calling Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin a “terrorist”; his organization Operation PUSH had never reached out meaningfully to Latinos; and in the late 1970s he had been publicly attacked by Latino leaders for entering into negotiations over a school desegregation plan without inviting Latinos to the table. Jackson may have fought beside Martin Luther King for racial integration and thus was certainly no separatist, but his actions were symptomatic of a widespread reluctance among Chicago’s black political leadership to leave behind the cultural nationalism of the civil rights era.
Yet such inclinations were hardly restricted to the black community. A similar situation was also unfolding in Puerto Rican Chicago in the early 1980s, when a number of activists turned away from organizing working-class Puerto Ricans to fight against the injustices they faced in their everyday lives and towards the project of an independent Puerto Rican homeland. The Young Lords had already begun mobilizing behind Puerto Rican independence in the 1970s, but by the early 1980s a radical organization called the Fuerzas Armadas para la Liberacion Nacional (FALN) was leading this struggle. When, in the mid-1980s, thirteen residents of the Humboldt Park barrio were sentenced to long prison terms for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, it was clear that the independence movement was opening up cleavages in Puerto Rican Chicago between those invested in such nationalist dreams and those looking to carve out a decent living in the barrio.73 This nationalist project, moreover, reinforced cultural nationalist tendencies that drove a wedge into potential alliances between Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, who, themselves, began to imbue their communities with a strong racialized sense of Mexican cultural identity beginning in the early 1970s. Despite some significant cooperation between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans based on appeals to “Latinismo”—the mixed-Latino-majority Fourth Congressional District, for example, elected the first Latino congressman from the Midwest in 1992—the trend was towards separation. The situation had degenerated so much by 1995 that both Puerto Rican and Mexican activists began calling for the breakup of the shared congressional district their predecessors had struggled to create on the grounds that they were racially distinct groups with only a language in common.74
All this explains why the so-called rainbow coalition of blacks, Latinos, and progressive whites that had so spectacularly vanquished the old guard in 1983 seemed to vanish after November 1987, when Harold Washington died tragically of a heart attack while sitting at his desk in City Hall. While news of the mayor’s sudden death shocked the black community, nobody who knew him well was very surprised. The sixty-five-year-old Washington had been a longtime heavy smoker before quitting the habit during his campaign, and after giving up cigarettes he began quickly gaining weight with his steady diet of greasy food. According to staffers, the mayor would eat a healthy lunch and then wolf down a triple cheeseburger and French fries for an afternoon snack. According to the Cook County medical examiner, he was one hundred pounds overweight when he died. Moreover, Washington’s constant wrangling with Vrdolyak and the “Vrdolyak 29” bloc no doubt raised his blood pressure. The conflict between the two had gotten so rancorous at times that it had even led to physical threats made on the city council floor.
Regardless of the mayor’s combativeness, the Vrdolyak 29 bloc had the upper hand for the first three years of his term, voting down most of his attempts to reduce the city’s deficit and controlling the key committees, like Zoning and Finance, through which much of the city’s power and resources flowed. While the twenty-eight white and one Puerto Rican aldermen that made up this bloc were largely fighting to keep the old patronage system intact, they did not hesitate to mobilize their constituents with racial appeals—as, for example, when they argued that white middle-income communities should get their fair share of federal Community Development block grant funds, which were legally designated to go to low-income neighborhoods.75 Bosses in Chicago had always dominated their city councils, but now the shoe was on the other foot. Despite such difficulties, however, Mayor Washington could claim some accomplishments. He officially outlawed patronage hiring and firing, created a freedom of information act that opened city government up to public scrutiny, promoted the economic development and infrastructural improvement of all of the city’s fifty wards, and, the complaints of some disgruntled Latinos aside, had managed to hire far more Latinos, blacks, and women than any mayor before him. He also became the first mayor in Chicago’s history to embrace the issue of gay rights by creating the Mayor’s Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues (COGLI), which selected its members through a community-based process.76 And yet all this was not nearly enough to build the kind of movement culture that it would have taken to overcome the legacy of intergroup conflict and install a durable “rainbow” coalition capable of moving the goal of a fair and open city forward after Washington’s death. A reform revolution of this kind would have required a deeper cultural transformation.
There is reason to believe that such a transformation was in the works when Washington slumped over his desk on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. By the start of 1986, the city had seemed to be turning the corner on its racial troubles. The first sign came from its vaunted football team, the Bears, which possessed a broad base of support that extended across racial lines. The Chicago Bears of 1985 were arguably one of the greatest football teams of all time, and as they coasted towards a victory in the Super Bowl in late January 1986, some of the team’s black and white stars recorded a facetious rap video called the “Super Bowl Shuffle”—a symbolic expression of racial harmony that was not lost on the team’s massive following. Soon after that came the break the city needed to free itself from its legislative straitjacket. A federal judge ruled that Mayor Byrne’s redrawing of the Chicago ward map had violated the voting rights of blacks and Latinos and ordered that the boundaries of seven wards then controlled by the Vrdolyak 29 be redrawn and new elections be held to elect aldermen for them. Four pro-Washington candidates—two blacks and two Latinos—prevailed in these elections, creating a 25–25 split in the city council with the mayor casting the tie-breaking vote. One of the Latino aldermen joining Washington’s bloc, moreover, was the talented Luis Gutiérrez, a future United States congressman who was outspoken about his alliance with black reformers, shunning the idea of forming a “Latino bloc” with two pro-Vrdolyak aldermen.77 And the other pro-Washington Latino alderman, Jesús “Chuy” García, who represented the heavily Mexican ward surrounding Pilsen, was voicing similar support for the reform revolution. Washington’s momentum carried into the 1987 mayoral election, when he gained an indisputable multiracial mandate by soundly defeating Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary and Vrdolyak in the general election, each time with over 53 percent of the vote.78 Even better still, the election also saw Miguel Santiago losing his aldermanic seat to a pro-Washington lawyer named Raymond Figueroa. Meanwhile, Washington’s endorsement of gay rights was strengthening his support in North Side lakefront neighborhoods, bringing new white voters into his base. “It’s Harold’s Council Now,” the front-page headline in the Chicago Sun-Times read. Black alderman Timothy Evans promptly replaced Edward Burke as floor leader, and the new city council quickly passed an ethics ordinance and a tenant’s bill of rights. The future seemed wide open. Washington had always joked that he planned to occupy the mayor’s office for twenty years, and now that idea did not seem so far-fetched.
But just several months later, the “Washington bloc” and its progressive brand of politics was finished for good. Somewhat ironically, the fatal fault line lay not between black and Latino aldermen but rather between reform-minded black aldermen and the black machine loyalists who had supported Washington out of necessity rather than choice. In fact, in the city council vote to determine which of the two black candidates—the Washington bloc’s choice, Timothy Evans, or the opposition bloc’s choice, Eugene Sawyer—would finish out Washington’s term, the four Latino aldermen (including the independent, Juan Soliz) backed Evans as the rightful successor to Washington’s reform project. Yet it was not enough. Although some of the old, compromised councilmen from the plantation politics days had been ousted and a new generation of committed reformers like former Black Panther Bobby Rush and civil rights activist Dorothy Tillman had arrived, the mayor had never thought it necessary to try to clean out the remaining handful of old Daley loyalists from the middling black wards—Eugene Sawyer, Wilson Frost, and John Stroger. Now they cut a deal with three wavering black alderman and most of what remained of the Vrdolyak 29 to pull together enough votes to make Sawyer the next mayor.
A young Barack Obama had gone to City Hall that frigid December night to join thousands of other dazed African Americans who felt that their presence might somehow help to avert the ending to the story that was beginning to seem destined. He had watched the crowd wave dollars bills at Sawyer and shout “Sellout” and “Uncle Tom,” and he had left after midnight, several hours before the final vote, with a sinking feeling that “the fleshy men in double-breasted suits,” as he referred to them, would seize the day. Walking across the Daley plaza to his car, he gazed with a sense of bitter irony upon a handmade sign that read “HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON.”79
Obama had been working on the far South Side of Chicago since 1985 as a community organizer for the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC), a grassroots Alinskyite organization that was attempting to bring together churches, labor unions, and other community organizations to give working-class blacks, whites, and Latinos greater leverage in solving the problems of high unemployment, poor housing conditions, inadequate schools, and violent crime. In the Alinskyite way, Obama’s job was to interview folks, listen to their complaints, and figure out ways to use the data he collected to formulate strategies of mobilization. He conducted much of this work in the Altgeld Gardens housing project, a horribly maintained set of two-story brick buildings located next to the chemical waters of the Calumet River and just across the street from a sewage treatment plant that blanketed the area with putrid odors when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. The residents of Altgeld were casualties of the sharp contraction of the city’s steel and manufacturing sectors in the 1970s and 1980s, a situation that had largely unfolded outside the purview of city politics. No mayoral candidate had ever promised to save production jobs; the forces that had led to the collapse of steel and manufacturing in Chicago were located in Washington and in the corporate command centers of global cities. But Chicago could play a role in lessening the blow of plant closings by providing better services and better schools and promoting development and investment that would lead to the creation of the kinds of jobs that former production workers could fill. In his work for the CRCC, Obama was trying to make this happen, and by the end of his nearly three years as a community organizer he could claim some modest victories.
And yet by the time that Harold Washington died, Obama had submitted his application to Harvard Law School and was eagerly awaiting the admissions decision. Indeed, his experience as a community organizer told him what he probably already suspected, which was that he would be more useful to the people of Altgeld Gardens from a high position within the system. Much has been made about the political education Obama took from his first stay in Chicago in the mid-1980s and of the influence of the Harold Washington era on his ambitions. To be sure, Obama was inspired by Washington’s ability to unite blacks, Latinos, and whites in a city where this had seemed impossible just years before, and he admired the fact that the mayor had accomplished this while gaining the support of big business, stabilizing the city’s financial situation, and restoring its Moody’s bond rating. However, what might have been most important to Obama, even if he was not entirely conscious of it at the time, was his perspective on all that did not happen with a dedicated reformer like Washington in power. He saw at the grassroots level that Washington’s ascendency had little impact on mending the fractures between blacks, Latinos, and whites in low-income neighborhoods, and that even with a mayor committed to spreading resources throughout the city, very little seemed to be changing in the material conditions of life for the people he had gotten to know in the working-class neighborhoods of the Pullman and Roseland areas.80
A cruel twist of fate has left us with only speculation about what might have been had Washington’s heart not given out in 1987. Washington was one among a new generation of black politicians elected mayor in the 1970s and 1980s, but as scholars like Adolph Reed Jr. have argued, most of them arrived to find that the prize they had struggled so hard to possess had been emptied of value.81 Their hands were tied by budget shortfalls, the drying up of federal funds, and a neoliberal order that required them to cater ceaselessly to the demands of developers and business elites to maintain the flow of tax revenue. Even if he would continue to hold on to the dream of one day sitting in the mayor’s office as he moved to Cambridge to begin his studies at Harvard in the fall of 1988, Obama’s years in Harold Washington’s Chicago had certainly dampened his idealism about what could be accomplished on the municipal level. He left Chicago with a new understanding of the extent to which the “the fleshy men in double-breasted suits” ran things—a revelation that probably made him start thinking seriously about ways of taking his mission to another level. And yet, upon reading Obama’s rather terse account of Harold Washington’s impact on Chicago politics in Dreams from my Father, it is hard not to feel that young Obama had missed something essential.82 Somewhat curiously he made little mention of one of the key principles at the core of Washington’s reform “revolution”: a commitment to community participation in formulating and implementing public policy. So devoted was Washington to this goal that he had even opened up the city budget-making process to public scrutiny and input—a move that reveals just how radically Washington’s approach to governance had departed from the machine tradition.