HAROLD WASHINGTON,
Late Mayor of the City of Chicago

The Chicago Democratic Political Machine (Part 3)
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I'm going to give another example. When I was first elected to Illinois General Assembly, I went down there starry-eyed, and full of vim and vigor with a lot of gusto, going to change the world! And I had some very good committee assignments. I'm all ready to go in to the committee, I'd stay up all night studying these bills and dotting the "i's" and crossing the "t's" and putting the commas in the right place. I'd say, "I'm going to go in there and give them hell." I walked up to the door and the young man handed me a slip of paper. I said, "What is this?" He said "Those are your orders for the day. Vote "yes" here, "no" there, you have your own choice on this last one, it's not too important." In short, they program you. Well, I didn't buy into those circumstances, we can get into that later, but that's the way they function. No conception of, or concern about the people I'm representing, only "We want this, therefore you do that, or else. You won't be here very long." That was the tacit threat, of course. But at any rate, and I'm skipping over a lot of things, because this thing can get somewhat complicated, the machine in place, simply is dominant, ultra, super-dominant in poor communities where the institutions are weak and where there are no strong basic tradition of leadership. They just supplant everything. For a time, during my incubated periods of politics, the third ward Democratic Organization was everything in the ward. There was no institution that could compete with it, there was no institution that dared compete with it. Everybody who wanted to move something had to come through it. They would dilute it, but they did, and so it practically ran the ward. It cajoled and enticed, and browbeat the merchants to get the largess that they needed to run the operation. It doled out favors based upon a quid pro quo from various people. If you weren't registered to vote, you simply could not come within the pale of those who were going to get favors from the machine. It was the life of the community. This went on for some odd years, I would say from the '40s on up to about the mid '60s when the Civil Rights Movement began to give people a different dimension. In short, the machine simply co-opted and dominated, and eroded everything that it contacted, and also striated, frustrated and prevented the incubation of the development of potential, potent, black leadership. And it goes on almost without change until today.