SECOND OF A TWO-PART ARTICLE By LAWRENCE N. HANSEN
Special assistant to Sen. Adlai Stevenson, he is a graduate of the University of Illinois.

Mayor Daley and the suburbs

SPECIAL FEATURE

Last month Illinois Issues began a special series of articles assessing the influence and achievements of Mayor Daley. These reports were first presented at a conference entitled "Richard J. Daley's Chicago," sponsored by the History Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and the Chicago Historical Society on October 11-14, 1977. With grant assistance from the Illinois Humanities Council, Dr. Melvin G. Holli, conference director, assembled forty-odd journalists, academics, city officials and neighborhood leaders to present their views on the late mayor and his city. The second half of Lawrence N. Hansen's article, "Mayor Daley and the suburbs,"appears in this issue. The first half appeared last month along with Eugene Kennedy's "A portrait of the Mayor as a political chieftain." Articles to be published in future months include an analysis of Mayor Daley's strength as a politician and public official by Milton Rakove, and Ralph Whitehead's article on the Daley machine as a communications medium. Professors. Holli and Peter d'A. Jones are editing the proceedings of the conference for publication in book form.

SUBURBAN suspicions about Daley's designs on the suburbs became so intense and, in my view, so exaggerated in the late 1950's and 1960's that I am not certain Daley, even if he had been so inclined, could have placed the city-suburban relationship on a sounder, more constructive footing. In the late1950's Republicans began accusing Daley of being the boss of a corrupt and rapacious machine whose ultimate design was to swallow up the defenseless suburbs. Because of who Daley was and what he stood for, the movement to "save our suburbs" (S.O.S.) gained a momentum which was not entirely warranted.

On the other hand, suburban Democrats — mostly former Chicagoans —tend to acquiesce to this hysteria, finding it fashionable in their new surroundings to disassociate themselves, at least publicly, from an organization whose inner city orientation and well-known political methods no longer seemed relevant to their needs. Those who were better educated and financially secure, for example, transplants from Chicago's Lakefront and Hyde Park neighborhoods, clung for the most part to their Democratic heritage but moved to the forefront in demandingparty reform and more quality candidates. That these various forces had a leavening effect on suburban politics cannot be doubted. For while they produced little in the way of real reform, the result was consistently larger voter turnouts for those Democratic candidates who were not demonstrably associated in the public's mind with the Chicago Democratic organization. None of this was planned by Daley or anyone else, of course. But suburban neglect was bearing fruit, and, ironically, suburban Republicans were finding the fruit as distasteful as the Daley Democrats.

I am not certain one can pinpoint with precision which single event, if any, aroused Daley's dormant curiousity about the suburbs. Certain political vicissitudes in the 1970's must have raised doubts in his own mind about the strategic wisdom of having left the suburbs to their own devices for so long. Adlai Stevenson III's election to the U.S. Senate in 1970 was one such event. Not only did Stevenson win with an impressive 73 per cent majority in Chicago, but he gathered in 53 per cent of the vote in suburban Cook County and beat his opponent in 14 of 28 townships. However, a month later in a special election to adopt a new state Constitution, Cook County in addition

12/ February 1978 / Illinois Issues

to ratifying the proposed Constitution overwhelmingly, also voted narrowly in favor of a separate proposition providing for gubernatorial appointment of judges. While the proposition was opposed by the Chicago Democratic organization and lost statewide, its favorable reception in Cook County was undoubtedly an embarrassment toDaley, who had vigorously insistedthere was something insidious about depriving voters of their right to elect judges. While Chicagoans had only voted by 44 per cent for the amendment, suburbanites tipped the scale by casting 66 per cent of their ballots in favor of Proposition 2B.

In the spring of 1972 the Chicago Democratic organization delivered a majority of the city's primary vote for the party's endorsed candidate for governor, Paul Simon, but only by a slim margin of 85,000 votes. Dan Walker, the challenger — insisting that the central issue in the campaign was Richard Daley and political bossism — amassed 64 per cent of the vote in the townships. Simon, having been thoroughly victimized by Walker's demagoguery and Daley's long-standing neglect of the suburbs, limped out of Cook County with a 21,000-vote plurality, and, to the surprise of many observers, a promising political career suddenly came to a grinding and unceremonious halt.

Reasons to reassess
As a result of these events, Daley had more than enough reasons to reassess the potential of suburban Democrats as purveyors of political goodness or political mischief. He was inclined, of course, toward the latter view, believing, I am sure, that once Gov. Walker was retired, suburban political behavior would assume again a more familiar, more predictable pattern. Painfully, Daley was to learn otherwise. His two candidates for the Illinois Supreme Court were defeated in the 1976 Democratic primary. While neither Judges Power nor Dieringer did especially well in Chicago, it was the townships of Cook which applied the coup de graceby voting for the challengers — Dooley and Clark — at a better than 2 to 1 ratio. Whatever sorrow Daley felt at the moment was more than amply compensated tor by the knowledge that suburban Democrats had joined him this time in deposing Dan Walker, the first incumbent governor in the state's history to be turned out of office by his own party.

The results of the 1976 primary illustrated the fiercely independent nature of the suburban electorate. It was discriminating and blindly loyal to no political party. Suburbanites were not going to be dictated to by a Richard Daley or a Dan Walker. When Democratic or Republican candidates and causes merited the support of suburban voters, they would get it. Two years earlier the principal beneficiaries of this enlightened politics were Adiai Stevenson III and Alan Dixon, both of whom triumphed in the townships of Cook and did unusually well in the five surrounding suburban counties. The loser in all of this was Daley, who must have begun to realize that a new era was dawning — an era in which Illinois' balance of political power was gradually shifting from Chicago to the vast suburban region surrounding the city. Two years later, as a candidate for secretary of state, Alan Dixon became the first Democrat ever to win more votes in the suburbs than in Chicago — an unprecedented achievement which could only have confirmed Daley's worst fears.

Gov. Stevenson once observed that some people never see the writing on the wall because their backs are up against it. I think this aptly describes the predicament in which Daley found himself. The signs pointing to dramatic changes were there to be read and acted upon, and presumably they would have been had Daley but turned around. But he was immobilized by a preoccupation with Chicago politics and by an adherence to outdated notions about the political impotence of the suburbs.

The writing on the wall could not have been clearer. Between 1950 and1970 the suburban region absorbed two million new people, the vast majority of whom had migrated from Chicago. And, of course, the city, despite a steady stream of newcomers — mostly Black and Latin — lost population. Forty percent of Cook County's population in1970 lived in the townships compared with only 20 per cent 20 years earlier. For the first time the number of people living in the suburban region exceeded by one-quarter million the number living in Chicago.

Not only did Chicago have less people in the 1970's, but less voters. Between 1968 and 1976, total registrations in the city dropped 15 per cent. During that same short eight-year period voter registration in the suburban region increased 26 per cent (22 per cent in the townships of Cook). When Daley was running for a sixth term as mayor in 1975, it could not have escaped his attention that there were 30 per cent fewer Chicagoans registered for that election than in 1955, the first year he campaigned for that office.

Suburban voters were participating in Democratic primaries in numbers no one could have reasonably anticipated a decade ago. In the ring counties, Democratic primary participation jumped 347 per cent between 1968 and1976 and in the townships of Cook by 274 per cent. This development impacted not only on city Democratic preferences, but also on suburban Republican politics, because proportionate participation by suburban Republicans in primary elections declined sharply.

Fifteen years ago, Chicago normally provided statewide Democratic candidates with 40 to 45 per cent of their total vote. By 1976 that percentage had slipped to between 30 and 35 per cent. The suburban region, including the townships of Cook, now provides Democratic candidates with almost a third of their statewide vote.

There was a time when all areas outside of Cook County were referred to as "downstate." The designation comported with the general rule that political power in Illinois was equally divided between Cook County and the state's remaining 101 counties. In the last decade, however, the suburbs have emerged as a separate and distinct political entity, and I believe it is only a matter of time before they will be wielding more political authority than either Chicago or the balance of the state. Illinois, like ancient Gaul, is now divided into three parts, and that is a reality with which Richard Daley never came to terms.

Actions of frustration
In the final year of his life, when it was really too late to reverse the events of 20 years, Daley initiated two actions which illustrated his now growing frustration with the suburbs. For years large numbers of the city's 35,000 employees had moved out of the city and into the

13/ February 1978/ Illinois Issues

suburbs. Many continued to contribute financially to the city Democratic organization and to work city precincts on election day, but most did so as a condition of their employment rather than as an expression of faith in the city's future. This geographic displacement of much of the organization's muscle and sinew was unacceptable to Daley, and in the spring of 1976 a policy was enacted requiring city employees to live in the city. The publicly stated rationale for the residency policy, of course, did not allude to politics or to the suburbs, but the policy was thoroughly political. "In order for a city employee to be most effective," read the policy, "he or she must identify with the needs and aspirations of the residents of the city of Chicago .... As a city resident an employee participates directly in the activities of a neighborhood of the city. This participation and commitment is essential to the development of a strong sense of public service as it relates to the citizens of Chicago. "Many employees moved back to Chicago because their livelihoods depended on it, but in the end, the policy neither reduced the attractiveness of the suburbs for them or their families nor even remotely stemmed the larger outmigration of Chicagoans.

The second action was a clumsy effort, spearheaded by the mayor's director of consumer affairs, to create suburban political clubs to rival existing Democratic township organizations. The purpose was obvious: to either takeover these organizations outright or at least reshape them into the image of the Chicago organization, and in the process to exact through various measures a larger degree of party discipline. While the effort failed, old tensions between city and suburban Democrats were revived, and mutually-shared suspicions exacerbated.

Changes after Daley
The mayor's death seems to have emancipated some of the organization's younger leaders who for years have envyingly viewed the suburbs as an ideal (and perhaps the only) outlet for their own ambitions. They have recognized for some time that the Democratic grass was becoming greener and more lush on the suburban side of the fence, but felt constrained while the mayor was living to pretend at least that their futures were bound up with the city — a city in which there was no room for some of them to move up and prosper politically. Two powerful city-based Democrats — state Sen. Philip Rock and Circuit Court Clerk Morgan Finley— have moved to the suburbs recently, and both intend to challenge incumbent township Democratic committeemen next spring. Others may soon do the same. This marks the beginning of a new and curious period in the relationship between the city and the suburbs, and it raises a serious issue for the once ignored and abused suburban Democrats: will they take the initiative in the future to redefine their relationship to the Democrats of Chicago, or will they leave such matters exclusively to Chicago and its recent emigres.

As one looks ahead a quarter of a century, the imagination is staggered by the political probabilities and possibilities in the post-Daley era