HAROLD WASHINGTON,
Late Mayor of the City of Chicago

The Chicago Democratic Political Machine (Part 2)
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We have, also, not just a machine, but we have what O.W. Wilson, or Q. Wilson, I can never remember his initials, labeled as the sub-machine, a very apt phrase, a very adroit phrase. That sub-machine applies to the various subordinate communities, ethnic groups, but particularly to the black community. The black community is considered a sub-machine, not a partner, not a coalition or an operator, but a machine, a subordinate to the major machine. In order to do that, they have to have someone to front for them, to handle that sort of thing. So they reached into our community and plucked out a genius at organization, and a master builder, one Bill Dawson, who was my predecessor by some twelve years in the United States Congress and used Bill during that transitory stage when blacks were coming out of the Republican Party and moving not in mass, in one fell swoop, into the Democratic Party. Many people felt that the Democrats in this country and in Chicago, at the advent of Roosevelt, just moved lock, stock, and barrel, out of the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party. No, that wasn't true; that was about a twelve-year period. In 1932 when Roosevelt defeated Mr. Hoover, the majority of blacks voted for Mr. Hoover, because they were traditional Republicans. There was an old salt that says "the Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea, and we as black people don't want to be in the water, so we're in the Republican Party ranks." But at any rate, Mr. Dawson's rise can be traced and tracked very closely to the movement of blacks from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. And in so doing, Mr. Dawson was used in putting some of these wards together under the control of Mr. Dawson, as a sub-machine agent, for the benefit of the dominant machine. And that has been the case for years and years and years and years. I'll just duck some of those years, and deal with the problems attendant to that kind of control.

For example, if one wants to be an alderman in one of the black wards, or the white wards, for that matter (we were just talking about the black wards), one has to be screened and sifted through the ward committeeman in that ward, even though the automatic position is a non-partisan position. If he didn't get screened or sifted through that committeeman, chances are he wouldn't run and if he did, he would be defeated, because the machine was just that awesome. But at any rate, having been sifted through and approved of, that individual alderman could not say that he represented the people of that ward because he did not and could not really. He actually represented the machine.

So when people ask "why is it that certain black legislators, and whites, for that matter, consistently vote against the best interest for their own community as clearly manifested many, many times?" The answer is simply this: that person was weaned and honed in the bowels of the machine, pays it total allegiance to the machine operation, and skews any direction, control or influence from the community. Another question is "How do they sustain themselves in light of the fact that they are going against the public will?" And here is where the patronage thing comes in.

Patronage on the narrow employment sense, is just a group of people who have city or county jobs, and who have as an extraordinary responsibility along and attendant to that job, the responsibility of bringing in that precinct. It is their responsibility to organize that precinct, select the judges who will make the counts, get people to pull out the voters, get the literature out, do the little incidental, innocuous favors that make poor people primarily feel beholden to you, like fixing traffic tickets, or holding your hand when you're sick, or help raising bail money and that sort of thing, nothing really serious, because the machine over the past thirty years has not been able to do anything really meaningful for anyone. That was co-opted by the federal and state government with all these programs, human service programs. But they do all these nice little things or used to do these nice little things, and the net result is they were always able to influence a substantial amount of voters in their favor.

At the same time, the machine got a reputation of being not the thing you fight, you don't fight City Hall. People were always fearful that dire things would happen to them if they didn't go along, or keep their mouth shut. For example, the canard was perpetrated throughout my community for many years that unless one functioned according to the dictates of the local machine, if they were on welfare they might be taken off, which was not true; if they wanted to be on welfare they could be put on which is not true if they weren't entitled to it. But people believe that. One thing about politics if not life is that it's ridiculous to talk about myths and unreality. If somebody believes it, that's it, and you have to deal with it on that level or you just don't deal. The educational process is a long one, but you have to deal with people on the level of their conceptual reality or else you simply cannot relate to them. That's one reason why so many people never succeed in public office. Their definitions are sacrosanct and immutable and they won't switch them and change them they just deal with them.

But at any rate, that's one reason why the Democratic machine has maintained such awesome control, because it controlled the selection of the people who were sworn to represent certain given individuals.