One year ago, on the day before Thanksgiving, Mayor Harold Washington slumped to the floor of his City Hall office. At the peak of his political power, he was dead.
But others are unyielding. “I can’t point to any kind of lasting successful initiative,” said alderman and now mayoral candidate Ed Burke, Washington’s still implacable foe. “I think it was just another chapter in Chicago’s history that opened and closed with a great deal of media attention but had little or no lasting impact on Chicago.”
First, he forged new political relationships. Second, he created new relationships within city government itself and a new relationship of that government to the neighborhoods and to the public at large. Third, he sketched the outlines of a new relationship with business. Finally, and most problematically, he changed race relationships in Chicago.
Washington had to overcome west-side versus south-side tensions, class tensions, machine versus independent tensions, and above all competition among a roster of strong personalities, none of them trickier to handle than Jesse Jackson.
Nevertheless, to most blacks Washington primarily represented “power, respect, competence,” says Alderman Danny Davis, probably the council member ideologically most like Washington. “A lot of people in the black community don’t have a feel for progressive versus nonprogressive government or patronage versus nonpatronage or fiscal conservatism versus free spending. But Washington gave them hope.”
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The politics of race, reform, and machine control have never been straightforward in Chicago. Depression-era mayor Ed Kelly indulged rampant corruption, allied with organized crime, and let city operations go to pot. Reformers, mainly middle-class white Protestants, loathed the corruption, inefficiency, and patronage. But New Dealer Kelly also brought traditionally Republican blacks into the Democratic fold.
The last emperor of the machine, Richard J. Daley, relied on overwhelming black voter loyalty (despite a declining black turnout) to stay in power. He rewarded blacks with a few low-level jobs and new federal antipoverty money (which he channeled through his patronage machine, undercutting the congressional intent of directly aiding poor communities and encouraging “maximum feasible participation of the poor”). Meanwhile, he maintained a solidly segregated city, shortchanged black neighborhoods on most important services, and attempted to stifle independent black voices.
