There were times, Harold Washington admitted to friends, when he wished he had remained a congressman. He had put his 60-year-old body through a grueling around-the-clock campaign for a job no sane human being would want. The Council Wars didn’t surprise him, as they did many of his supporters. What else would you expect, he asked, “when you grab the tiger by the tail?” It was the 40,000-employee bureaucracy that seemed overwhelming. “We were like the Sandinistas, rolling into town one day and running the government the next,” said one top Washington aide.
Milt Rakove, in his book Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers, told of a man whom Democratic committeeman Bernard Neistein had sponsored for a city job. A department head phoned Neistein to complain that the man could barely read or write. “Put him to work, I need him,” Neistein supposely answered. Yet the department head told Rakove that Neistein wasn’t so bad. “Bernie Neistein is reasonable. If he sends you five guys to put to work, only two are illiterate. But Matt Bieszczat sends you five illiterates and wants you to take them all!”
From the start, Washington took great pains to project himself as the mayor of all Chicago. Though whites constituted barely 10 percent of his winning coalition, the majority of those Washington named to his transition team were white. His inauguration aimed at projecting a multiracial appeal. One reporter overheard this caution about the band playing at that night’s party: “I don’t want Latinos who look white, Morris. Understand?” Grayson Mitchell, Washington’s press secretary, tallied the mayor’s appearances in the white community to guard against charges that he would slight white Chicago because of resentments over the election.
Washington also muted parts of his persona. A year into Washington’s tenure, Joe Gardner, the head of his political operations, noticed Washington “talking less in a folksy vernacular and more in a more formal style.” Increasingly he spoke in a style he had in the past reserved for talks before downtown civic groups. “A single misplaced ‘right on,’” Gardner said, “and he would lose the 55-year-old white lady living in West Rogers Park.” The Washington who mixed street and soul with the intellectual was gone, or at least restrained.
Jean Mayer, a white woman who lived on the southwest side, was singularly unimpressed with Washington. The picture of Washington she held in her head was of him standing before a black audience thundering about the injustices of white Chicago. “We black people,” Washington would say–and Mayer would cringe. This mayor for all Chicago, Mayer thought, seemed to believe it was only the black community that had suffered over the years.
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Washington spoke before her community group during the campaign. Mayer respected his courage but walked away outraged by his message. He dismissed the scattered-site housing issue even as he mentioned it. A judge had already ruled that public housing must be built in white neighborhoods, Washington said, and as mayor he was bound to follow the court’s wishes. His next comment left Mayer cold. What was the big deal anyway, he lectured them, about the 15 units the CHA had slated for the southwest side? The city is rife with crime and drugs and poverty, he said, and your big issue is two modest-sized apartment buildings. Mayer just about lost it.
The day of Washington’s inauguration, representatives of Mayer’s organization and others like it stood outside the gate to Navy Pier, where Washington gave his speech that day. They had asked his aides to have him stop there to light their “candle of understanding,” but the limousine carrying Washington just sped by them.
