HAROLD WASHINGTON,
Late Mayor of the City of Chicago

The Chicago Democratic Political Machine (Part 5)
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In 1977, as you recall, Daley had died and his replacement interim had been placed there, but there had to be a special off-election. I ran for mayor in 1977, and some people said I was crazy. I said I was just half-crazy because I knew I couldn't win, but I could put some things in place. We felt it should be a building process and sort of a dry run to get together for the future, so we ran. And without going into all the details, we did put some wards in place, and some aldermen and committeemen in place. A further development of this continuum of the comeback from being turned off to becoming involved.

Other things have led to what I consider to be the erosion of the Democratic machine. We have what is called a series of cases called the "Shackman Decisions." The federal district courts in Chicago have simply told the Democratic Central Committee that you cannot force anyone to do political work in return for a job, and that's enforced. They have also been told that they couldn't force anyone to pay dues in return for a political job, and lastly they have been told that you cannot fire anyone who refuses to do political activity. So you can see that wrecked havoc with the machine. They could no longer extract the kind of discipline from a city worker, who as a part of his return for that job had to do political work. So people being like they are, never doing any more than they have to do, and so many of them simply not doing any political work, and the machine began to go through some further erosions.

Not only that, the age level of the Democratic Party Precinct Captain is going up, up, up. It simply has nothing meaningful to offer to young people, men and women, so they're not attracting those young people. And the machine is getting old and can't climb those four story walk-ups and talk to the voter and leave the literature. So the net result is, not much is being done within these various wards.

Superimposed on that is the growing and increasing desire on the part of the black community to join issue with the machine in the primary. At this point, I would say the black community is roughly eighty-five to ninety percent Democrat. The difference between now and twenty years ago is that it is independent Democrat and exercises that independence in the Democratic primaries. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, frankly.

In 1979, for example, after going through a long series of insults from Mayor Bilandic, the black community gave sixty-five percent of its vote to Mayor Byrne. Mayor Byrne got confused, and she thought that the vote was for her. It was not for her; it was against Mr. Bilandic. Had she taken the polls, and the polling techniques were there for her to take, she would have found out very quickly. Now had she done that, she would not be making the serious blunders, nay, perpetrating insults that she has. But anyway, we elected her. She won by 15,000 votes and turned around 180 degrees, and began to do things that she promised not to, and not to do the things she promised to do. For example, she had promised that she would open up city government, which meant that there would be a fairer share of the cabinet positions, we don't have any now, never have had any, a fair share of the cabinet positions. But even more important, we felt that based upon our numbers, our middle management people should proliferate, and that the programs coming out of city hall should be more directed, not just to the black community, but to the inner cities, the neighborhoods that the city services in what you pay taxes for, and which had been programmed a year before you get them, should have been more fairly distributed. She turned her back on that. She refused, for example, to accept our recommended black Superintendent of Police, refused to accept our recommended Superintendent for the Board of Education. In the Illinois General Assembly, we just fired all the members of the board, and I was proud to handle the bill, so that she would have the opportunity to refill that board. She did, and did a good job. And then when the board sat down and elected a black president, she refused to recognize that president, and two years later, she refused to re-appoint two of her best members, two young black men, and replaced them with two white women. I'm not opposed to white women, but these two particular women were head to toe, hip to hip, confirmed racists and opposed desegregation of public schools and they were on record for it. This created another great furor. So she has consistently just refused to go along and has insulted the community, but notwithstanding, we did elect her.

No one has any regrets for that vote because we learned from the experience. What we learned was this: that based upon the way she has operated city government over the past three years, it was clear that several things had developed in the city that we were never aware of. One, Daley was a massive, three-card Monty operator. He was a phony-baloney from the heart. We knew he was a racist, we thought he was a skilled administrator, but he was just shooting the business to people. The city was not bankrupt, but it was $100,000 in the red and we didn't know about it. He had been playing games with the money. He had given in too much to the various interest groups. For example, the craft unions had simply raped the city completely. They were using the Board of Education as a market. The bond merchants, the LaSalle Street and Wall Street bond merchants had just adopted the Board of Education and were ripping it dry to the tune of interest rates of about a hundred million a year, while that was not necessary. When Mr. Daley should have gone to the public to raise the funds; he played fiscal and financial games with the city. The infrastructure was eroding, sewers were going down, no plans had been made to develop them, the transportation system was bad, they were playing funny games with the system. The educational system was bad. The schools were not rehabbed, even though the Illinois General Assembly had on two occasions passed a bond, floated bonds to the tune of a half million dollars to sustain them, the monies had not been used. All this came out in Mayor Byrne's fights with the various elements of the city. So she educated the entire community as to just how corrupt the machine had been over the years, and she educated us also as to her own administrative ineptness in dealing with the problem, but above all, the dark side of her came out, and it spelled racist. So we do owe her a debt.