McAndrew’s mission to align the objectives of public education with the profit-making motives of the business community and his adoption of an autocratic managerial approach could be read as more signs that Chicago was already in the throes of neoliberal hegemony by the mid-1920s. Yet, if it is reasonable to draw a long straight line between McAndrew’s reform project and Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan of 2006—that is to say, to view it as an early manifestation of a privatizing business logic within the city’s modes of governance and political culture—the fierce resistance it confronted in the public sphere warns against any kind of totalizing conclusions. This was a moment, it must be remembered, that witnessed voices like that of CTF leader Margaret Haley taking center stage to defend the public interest in the raging debate over public education. A frequent contributor to the columns of Chicago dailies, Haley hammered away in no uncertain terms at the class agenda behind McAndrew’s policies, decrying the school board for “aping hard-boiled businessmen . . . to whom ‘efficiency’ in the maximum use of ‘plant and equipment’ overshadows the human factor” and declaring that the schools under McAndrew constituted a “mechanized and regimented system which subordinates everything to the industrializing of infants.”62 The class struggle was thus out there for everyone to see, and Thompson was much more adept than Dever at riding the wave of working-class discontent.
And yet the apparent groundswell of class politics in the mid-1920s never translated into any meaningful campaign against social inequalities because the working-class sensibilities that drove it were becoming so thoroughly entangled with the anxieties and injuries of race. Between 1920 and 1928, the number of registered voters in the city increased by some 67 percent, and an overwhelming number of those casting votes for the first time during these years were new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their American-born children—the scourge of moralizing Prohibitionists and bigoted immigrant restrictionists. The new immigrant working class had emerged as the bedrock of Chicago politics, and Thompson’s jibes against Anglo-Saxon snobbery helped to convince enough of these voters—a bit more than 50 percent of them—to make his dominance in black Chicago the deciding factor. In an era in which nationalist discourses of all kinds were drawing boundaries around a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant vision of the nation, Thompson’s “America First” campaign offered an inclusive form of Americanism that, for the excluded, seemed to turn the world upside down. It was populist vaudeville of the first order, but it worked like a charm. And it coalesced powerfully with the resentment these same people felt about the Irish domination of the Democratic Party ticket, a complaint aired frequently in foreign-language newspapers across the city during the 1920s. In the final analysis, few were those casting a vote in the 1927 election, whether for the Democratic or Republican ticket, whose decision was not somehow touched by the forces of racial kinship, resentment, and fear.
These forces were certainly here to stay, but they would ebb and flow in relation to economic, demographic, political, and cultural circumstances in the years to come. In the years following the racial explosion of 1927, they seemed to be ebbing. For one thing, the cataclysmic economic crisis that struck the entire country in 1929 combined with the proliferation of restrictive covenants throughout the city helped to stabilize the situation along the color line. Although the black population did increase by some 44,000 (almost 19 percent) over the 1930s, the vast majority of migrants settled in existing black neighborhoods. “The period of the 1930s, consequently,” according to Arnold Hirsch, “was an era of territorial consolidation for Chicago’s blacks.”63 Moreover, by the turn of the new decade the exclusionary anti-immigrant rhetoric of restrictionists and Prohibitionists seemed to be receding towards the margins, and the Democratic Party’s 1928 nomination of New York governor Al Smith, the country’s first Catholic presidential candidate, had dulled the sting of anti-Catholicism.
Such circumstances opened the door for Czech immigrant Anton Cermak—a man who had begun his career as a horse-and-wagon teamster before building a power base in the West Side Pilsen area and then using it to climb the ranks of the Cook County Democratic Party—and the timely death of Irish party boss George Brennan pushed him across the threshold. In 1928 Cermak became the party’s new chairman, and by 1931 he was running unopposed for the Democratic nomination for mayor. Taking on the incumbent Thompson in a general election that saw surprisingly little discussion of the problem along the city’s color line, Cermak used his “wet” stance on Prohibition and his promise to break the Irish stranglehold on the Democratic Party to build a multiethnic coalition of Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Jews, and of course Czechs. And Thompson, making one of the worst miscalculations in the history of American politics, chose to play the anti-immigrant card in a city overwhelmingly dominated by immigrants and their children. In his classic vaudeville style, he poked fun at Cermak’s name, referred to him repeatedly as a “bohunk,” and ridiculed his modest working-class immigrant origins with the oft-quoted jibe: “Tony, Tony, where’s your pushcart at?” He also tried to exploit Cermak’s alleged rift with the Irish, another tactic that fell flat on its face. Cermak had certainly made a number of enemies among Irish machine politicians on his way up, on at least one occasion even challenging one to a fistfight. But he had also formed an alliance with a dissident Irish faction led by the formidable Pat Nash, who would go on to run the party until his death in 1943, and the respectable number of Irish names appearing on Cermak’s ticket belied Thompson’s claims. The Irish still had a place in Cermak’s “house for all peoples,” whose multiethnic structure would even, in the years to come, accommodate the city’s rapidly increasing black population. It was Cermak, in fact, who began the practice of grooming black leaders and distributing just enough patronage to the black wards to secure their loyalty to the machine without provoking a backlash among the party’s white base—a balancing act that would challenge his mayoral successors in the decades to follow.
Few at the time could have imagined that Cermak’s decisive victory over Thompson by nearly 200,000 votes would enthrone the Democratic Party for all of eternity. Killed in storybook fashion by an assassin’s bullet intended for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in February 1933—“I’m glad it was me instead of you” he apparently uttered to the president while being rushed to the hospital—Cermak occupied City Hall for not much more than a year. But during his short time on the political stage, he had identified the formula that would, in the hands of Pat Nash and the party bosses after him, effectively transform Chicago into a one-party city, emptying politics of its ideological substance and reducing government to the management of power struggles between party rivals. Chicago’s machine was powerfully taking form just as others across the nation were being dismantled, straitjacketing the vibrant working-class upsurge that had been building in the 1920s. And all this was happening when the system of free-market capitalism and the stark inequalities it generated had never been so exposed to public outrage. As Chicagoans packed into downtown hotels on December 31, 1931, to celebrate the new year on a cold, dreary night, flaunting Prohibition with a vengeance, Chicago’s unemployment rate was hovering around 30 percent and the city remained unable to pay its schoolteachers, as well as a good many of its policemen and firemen. Government at all levels struggled to retain credibility. In 1931 the city’s celebrity-gangster-turned-Robin-Hood, Al Capone, a loyal ally of Big Bill Thompson, opened a soup kitchen in the heart of the Loop, boasting that he was doing more for the poor than the whole United States government. The following year, the Chicago Teachers Federation drew over 27,000 people to Soldier Field on January 4 to demand their unpaid wages, and the Communist Party and the Chicago Workers’ Committee on Unemployment (CWC) cosponsored a hunger march in October that drew some 50,000 demonstrators to the Loop to protest cuts in relief payments and the threatened closure of relief stations.
While Thompson had waffled in the face of the crisis, referring to the economic downturn as “psychologic
al,” Cermak acted much more decisively. He lobbied both the Illinois legislature and President Herbert Hoover for relief loans, got to work on procuring a public works loan from Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation to build a subway system, and began planning for a world’s fair to take place in 1933—all this while marshaling the city’s forces of order against Capone and the other gangsters who had been given free rein under Thompson. He also kept pushing for an end to Prohibition. And yet, despite his stand on Prohibition and his efforts to procure relief loans for the bankrupt city, Chicago’s first immigrant mayor—a man who had looked like a working-class hero in the face of Thompson’s jeers about his humble origins—was, during his short stint in office, no champion of the working man.
Cermak’s policies revealed that he was more attuned to the gospel of business than to the struggle for social justice. Most chalked it up as political payback when Cermak cut Thompson’s patronage appointees from the city’s payroll, but his handling of the school budget crisis revealed that the move was also consistent with a broader austerity program supported by many in the business community. Working closely with a citizens’ committee of bankers and businessmen organized by Chicago and Northwestern Railroad president Fred Sargent to lobby for the reduction of government expenditures, the mayor promptly cut 17 percent from the 1933 school budget, a move intended to punish the board of education for resisting his campaign to cut costs and bring a businesslike efficiency to all branches of city government. Cermak also solicited the assistance of the business community for his civil service reform campaign, appointing Richard Collins, a former director of First National Bank, to join University of Chicago professor of public administration Leonard D. White, and ward committeeman J.V. Geary on the three-member civil service commission. Such measures earned the mayor praise from the editors of the Chicago Tribune, the good government types who had rallied around Dever, and the Commercial Club crowd, helping to build what amounted to nothing short of a cross-class multiethnic consensus.
Cermak had essentially neutralized the forces opposing the capitalist order, and he had been able to do this, in large part, because his working-class immigrant origins had disarmed his working-class base. To be sure, there were still plenty of hungry, disgruntled folks in the streets, and the teachers were certainly not lying down as the city continued to withhold their wages, but few seemed to recognize how much Cermak was picking up on McAndrew and Dever’s program of imposing austerity and bringing a business rationale to municipal governance. Cermak’s kinship with Dever as a crusader against organized crime and municipal corruption, for example, did not lie merely in the fact that he, like Dever, was cast in the ring against Big Bill Thompson and the gangsters and cronies in his corner; it also reflected a similar understanding of the role of city government in the capitalist order. Indeed, reform and law-and-order politics diverted attention from the structural forces that had filled the streets with the destitute and unemployed. The rhetoric of reformers pointed more to the moral failings of the people within the system than to fundamental flaws in the system itself—an ideological function performed on the terrain of popular culture by the blockbuster gangster films of the early Depression years, such as Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). But whereas Dever was never really able to rein in the forces of opposition, Cermak’s multiethnic machine was the perfect antidote to the class struggle that had animated Chicago’s political culture in the previous decade, when the injuries of class converged with the dilemma of ethnoracial exclusion. This was a moment when notions of social justice clashed directly with the market-driven rationale of the business community in debates over the role of the city’s schools and the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Cermak’s incorporation of the formerly excluded ushered in a new era in which the power of ethnoracial bonds was placed squarely in the service of the machine. The man who had attended business school at night while spending his days hauling food waste from International Harvester and peddling it to the poor managed his party like a business. After the general election of 1932, he developed a statistical system that graded each ward’s “vote getting” ability based on vote margin, turnout, and the percentage of straight Democratic Party voters.64 Those producing for the machine stood to gain larger shares of the party’s resources, and producing invariably meant rallying residents behind ward leaders who appeared to represent them—an appearance achieved as a natural consequence of ethnoracial affinities.
Cermak’s successor, Edward J. Kelly, who, as the chief engineer of the Sanitary District had enriched himself with rampant cronyism during the so-called Whoopee Era, picked up exactly where he had left off. The Kelly-Nash machine cultivated a number of key ethnic middlemen to solidify their multiethnic coalition. If Jews, for example, had rallied behind Cermak after he had backed the election of the state’s first Jewish governor, Henry Horner, in 1932, decades of tense relations between the Jews and the Irish in Chicago made them wary of losing what they had gained under the new mayor. Kelly and Nash moved quickly to assuage such fears, appointing West Side Jewish leader Jacob Arvey as chairman of the powerful city council finance committee and naming his law partner Barnet Hodes, another influential Jewish community leader, as the city’s corporation counsel. As for the city’s sizable German community, the Kelly-Nash machine continued the job begun by Cermak of eroding long-standing German loyalty to the Republican Party by elevating North Side German leaders like Forty-Third Ward alderman Matthias “Paddy” Bauler and Forty-Seventh Ward alderman Charlie Weber. Such tactics paid big dividends in the mayoral election of 1935, when Kelly confirmed the new dominance of the Democratic machine by crushing his Republican opponent, Emil Wetten, in the most lopsided election in Chicago’s history. Surprisingly, Kelly had achieved this broad popularity despite having imposed sharp budget cuts that led to the dismissal of nearly 1,400 teachers while fending off scandalous accusations regarding the sources of the more than $570,000 he had made on top of his salary between 1919 and 1929.65
In his inaugural address following the election, Kelly assured the business community that had rallied around him that he would oppose increases in personal property and real estate taxes. But Kelly’s fiscal conservatism was not all that explained his appeal with the business crowd. The mayor also demonstrated that he was ready to carry the union-busting torch. Under Kelly’s watch, strikers in Depression-ravaged Chicago encountered systematic and often violent police repression, especially after 1935, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was making its push to organize the city’s industrial workforce. In February 1937, a massive sit-down strike at Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. ended with police forcibly removing strikers from the building with tear gas. Then at the end of May, several weeks after a successful unionization drive by the Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) at U.S. Steel’s Carnegie-Illinois plant, strikers at the Republic Steel mill in southeast Chicago felt the full brunt of the antiunion tactics countenanced by Kelly. After gathering on a humid Memorial Day afternoon at Sam’s Place, a local tavern that served as the headquarters for the SWOC’s organizing drive, well over a thousand strikers set out across a prairie towards the Republic Steel mill. If Mayor Kelly had issued a statement days earlier defending the right to picket peacefully, the forces of order that confronted the strikers before they arrived at the mill seemed unaware of it. They opened fire and then moved in with billy clubs swinging. When the dust settled and the tear gas cleared, ten strikers lay dead and many more were seriously injured. Kelly was on vacation in Wisconsin at the time, but his initial reaction to the news suggested where his priorities lay. He immediately defended the actions of police and blamed outside troublemakers for inciting the violence. Chicago’s ideological apparatus quickly followed suit. The reactionary Chicago Tribune under the rabidly antilabor Republican Colonel Robert McCormick covered the event as a frontal attack on police officers by communist agitators, and the city’s coroner’s jury ruled the shootings “justifiable homicide.�
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Such a reaction by the Kelly-Nash machine and its allies created ripples of discontent within the CIO’s burgeoning labor movement in Chicago, which by 1939 counted some 60,000 members. In retrospect, however, what is most striking about the Memorial Day massacre is how limited its consequences were for the Kelly-Nash machine. To be sure, Kelly had closer ties with the city’s American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, which possessed well over 300,000 members at the time, than with the rival CIO, but this does not tell the whole story of how Kelly was able to retain the support of the city’s laborers in the wake of the Memorial Day massacre. Part of the explanation lay with Kelly’s association with the Democratic Party and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, which had reached out to organized labor in unprecedented ways, beginning with its sponsorship of the landmark Wagner Act of 1935 and its commitment to labor’s right to organize free of harassment by employers. Kelly had worked hard to get out the vote for Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1936, helping the president to win an impressive 65 percent of the vote in Chicago—a margin of victory that the Kelly-Nash machine hoped would assure the continuing flow of federal work relief funds into the city. The Kelly-Nash machine had quickly capitalized on the federal funds funneled into the city through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), transforming these relief programs into political capital in the form of tens of thousands of patronage jobs. Certainly Kelly saw the need to mend his relations with the CIO in the wake of the Memorial Day massacre, intervening in a labor dispute on behalf of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) in 1938 and guaranteeing no further interference from the police. But the CIO’s active support for Kelly in the mayoral election of 1939, which was critical to his surprisingly tough victory over Republican Dwight Green during a moment when Democrats nationally were on the defensive in the face of a middle-class backlash against the New Deal’s prolabor stance, was largely secured by the mayor’s ability to make workers and their families across the city indebted to him for their livelihoods. The machine had not fared well in the Bungalow Belt, but the working-class “river wards” had carried the day.
Chicago on the Make Page 8
