Mayor Daley's
personal media
The roots of Chicago politics RICHARD J. DALEY had his own theory of communications — a definite set of ideas about how people get their information about politics and politicians and how they use this information to form political judgments (especially in the voting booth). Of course, it was not his style to write down these ideas and so create a formal record of his thought, but he did put them into practice as he went along, day by day, for more than 50 years. Moreover, he passed on bits and pieces of them to some of the people around him: friends, family, other ward committeemen and other candidates, political or social audiences, and so forth. It seems fair to use some of this evidence to try to decipher Daley's theory of political communications. Here are some of its leading elements: One: Mayor Daley saw and appreciated and used Chicago's political machine as a communications medium. The machine did not rely much on the technology of modern communications, except for the telephone. It didn't use transmitters or antennas or picture tubes or any of the rest of the electronic paraphernalia of broadcasting, and it made only a limited use of print. Nevertheless, it was (and is) a communications cations medium. It relied mainly on people, or, as people are sometimes known in the parlance of modern political campaigning, personal media. Thus, the machine offered a relatively large network of people who would look and listen and talk and buttonhole and generally persuade others person-to-person throughout the wards and precincts of Chicago: calls on the telephone and face-to-face contacts on the doorstep, the street corner, or the sidewalk in front of the church or the synagogue or the grocery store. The machine was (and is) a personal medium of communication. Two: As a medium, Daley's machine was only one force in a highly competitive media marketplace. It displayed some distinctive strengths — for example, its personal touch and its capacity to tailor its favors and appeals to an individual's values and standing in life. It also displayed some distinctive weaknesses — for example, its relatively high costs and the corruption it used to raise at least some of the dollars to meet those high costs. So, Mayor Daley was obliged to play to its strengths as a medium and protect its weaknesses. Three: As a medium, Daley's machine was (and is) steadily lapsing into March 1978/ Illinois Issues/ 31 obsolescence, as more and more voters began to turn to new or different kinds of sources for cues in forming their political judgments and impressions. Naturally, Daley's machine made some adjustments to these changes. A few of the adjustments were dramatic and visible, but the larger share of them took place quietly and gradually. Perhaps the best place to look for them is in the slow evolution of the role of the precinct worker in the Daley years. For a long time, the culture of Chicago all but invited the Organization to serve as a medium. In a lot of places in this country, needless to say, people didn't like the idea of other people coming to their door and trying to tell them how to vote. One's vote, as the tradition of secret balloting naturally ally suggests, is a private decision, and why should anyone meddle in it? As a matter of fact, for people of this disposition, political talk and political choice can be as intensely private as religious talk and religious choice. In Chicago, political choice did happen to be on a par with religious choice, but religious choice wasn't generally thought of here as an intensely private matter. After all, most of the people in the city were Catholics or Jews or German Lutherans. All three of these religious strains held a belief in common. For them, the relationship of a person to God was a tricky and risky business. It was likely to go a lot better (so they felt) if the person at the human end could get some good advice on how to talk to God. Thus, these religious strains were open to the advice of third parties. Usually, these third parties took the form of a priest or a rabbi or a minister. It was the job of the clergyman to counsel a person on the manner and matter of these conversations with God. Usually, liturgies and rituals and set prayers were used. It was also the clergyman's job to broker the relationship and come back from God with a pretty good deal for the earthly clientele. Face-to-face medium A second influence was commercial. In Chicago (and in every other city in America, of course), people were used as the main vehicle or means for selling goods and services. Peddlers and door-to-door salespeople were everywhere. The milk man, the ice man, the coal man, the Fuller brush man and all of the rest — they filled the gangways or pushed through the alleys or haunted the stairways, usually in back. So, the precinct worker simply fell into ranks with the rest of this large personal sales Daley's machine was perhaps the classic example of the labor intensive model for political communication. It used people to do its campaigning force. A peddler among peddlers, hawking bits of the Organization just as the others hawked liniment or tons of coal. Naturally, precinct workers served as a prime source of political information, just as the peddlers served as a prime source of product and service information. The third influence was the posture of the Chicago press. Republican families owned the daily newspapers. They used the news columns and the editorial pages alike to shape and carry and peddle the Republican party line. Often, they did it crudely, with little regard for truth and none for balance. (The old Times, a workingman's paper, was an exception.) Indeed, the outer wards of the city — these were the suburbs-in-the-city, like the neighborhoods of Beverly and Ravenswood, where white middle-class families lived comfortably — were called the newspaper wards, since the people there followed the political lead of the newspapers, not the ward heelers of the Organization. Naturally, the men at the top of the machine had to adjust to these realities. One method was to cut a deal with one or more of the Republican publishers. While Edward J. Kelly was the mayor, during the Depression and World War II, he occasionally traded away the top of the ticket to Colonel McCormick's man, be it Wayland "Curly" Brooks for the Senate or Dwight Green for governor. In return, the Tribune would grant a pass Kelly's local slates. For the Cook County offices, it usually was a showdown — the press lords against the bosses, as the stereotypes would shape up. So, the Organization responded to a hostile press by digging in deeper and playing up its own medium, the person-to-person forms of persuasion that its patronage force could apply. If the Republicans controlled the front page, the Organization would control the front doorstep. Of course, the force and shape of all these influences had largely evolved before the Daley years. The religious basis for the political canvasser naturally weakened as the weight of the religious heritage grew lighter, generation by generation. At the same time, the groups it affected — Catholics, Jews and German Lutherans — were leaving the base of the machine and pushing into the suburbs. Personal selling also lost its commercial footing It was steadily undercut by the advertising industry, as advertising's trade press and other business publications carried arguments against the value and common sense of using salespeople in the stores or on doorsteps: a sales force is susceptible to high turnover, for instance, or to trade union sentiments. Moreover, the advertising campaign against personal sales tried to show how expensive they could be, given the rising costs of labor. Advertising, with a full range of strategies and tactics, offered far cheaper forms of persuasion. Finally, the posture of the press changed. Television added dramatically to the scope of the press — or the media, as the term came now to be. At the same time, and for a variety of reasons (the competition of television was one of them), the newspapers became far more balanced in their appraisals of political issues, political candidacies and even political parties. The newspaper's old partisanship gave way to what might be called a professional model for coverage and editorial advocacy. Republicans still owned the papers, and the news columns didn't bite the feeding hand. but the old stridency was long past. Richard Daley made adjustments in his medium accordingly. He found a perennial rationale for precinct work 32/ March 1978/ Illinois Issues under the rubric of community service. He made it clear he'd pay the price to keep his door-to-door sales force in the field — although he lightened its burden at the same time by shaping the Daley mystique, a potent form of advertising at little or no cost to him of the Organization. And, for at least 10 of the years he spent in City Hall, he set aside the old cleavage of Them-and-Us, the Republicans and the Democrats, the publishers and the bosses. As the Mayor gave the media reasons why he was worthy, media passed on the reasons to their readers. Richard Daley enjoyed an exceptionally good press for almost a dozen years as the Mayor. As a campaign medium, Daley's machine suffered at the hands of the competing media: newspapers, radio and television. For campaign purposes, these other media have proven to be far more efficient than the person-to-person medium. The new media don't always come up with results as good as the machine's results, but the results they do get come at a far cheaper cost in time and money and energy. Moreover, the competing media can accomplish far more than the Organization can in a campaign, and in a far shorter time. Daley's machine was perhaps the classic example of the labor intensive model for political communication. It used people to do its campaigning, not labor-saving technologies. As a result, it was very expensive, at least in the long run. In the short run, it can be cheaper to do a job by hiring a work force and thus avoiding the large initial costs of buying labor-saving technology to do the job. In the longer run, though, as inflation drives up salaries and adds to the pressures for fringes and pensions, the costs will be far greater. Today, more and more campaigns are turning to a capital intensive model for political communication. They are Continued on page 34.
March 1978/ Illinois Issues/33
Continued from page 33. "Toying with possibilities of a future need. Brown hired some experts at grass roots organizing, but no such drive materialized. Instead, available money was used to increase television advertising." The manager of the Brown campaign, Thomas Quinn, felt the decision was a sound one. "Maybe in the old days, when there were fewer people around, you walked precincts or rang doorbells and handed people a brochure," said Quinn. "I think traditional organizational politics is an anachronism. There is a better way of communicating with people." Actually, the Brown campaign took the form of a small but a sophisticated communications complex. It served as a center for planning and for producing a series of messages. Some were paid, others were unpaid, some were controlled, others were uncontrolled, some were scheduled far ahead of time and others were ad libs or quick shots taken at targets of opportunity — but all of them allowed Brown to address the voters directly and cheaply. The campaign carried very little baggage, and this was an advantage for Brown.
Clash of media A year later, Thompson held a 25-point lead in the polls as a Republican in a state where barely one fourth of the voters describe themselves as Republicans. Many factors were at work here, of course, but the media choices the campaigns made were surely one of the major influences. Thompson chose the new and competitive media and used them fairly well. Howlett was tied to the old face-to-face assumptions and they only did him damage in the general election. As a candidate for mayor, Daley seemed more than willing to use the competing media for his own campaigns. This way, he got the benefits of the full range of channels, through people and technologies alike. Yet, as a professional campaign manager — as the chairman of the Organization and as the man responsible for running its countywide and statewide campaigns — he was either blind or indifferent to the use of modern media. "You know how Daley was," one of his aldermen said recently. "If you can't look 'em right in the eye, you can't know you've got their vote." Consequently, the Mayor pushed the face-to-face medium until it reached the point of diminishing returns. Then, apparently, he just kept on going, even though he could have shifted the Organization's resources into more efficient channels. Take, for example, the case of the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization. Vaunted as it might be, it is perhaps the least effective political organization this side of Manila, pound-for-pound and job-for- job and dollar-for-dollar. If the 11th has as many jobs as the newspapers say it has — and let's stay on the safe side and give it only 2, 000 jobs — it isn't able to do much with them, the record shows. The 11th's vote count is roughly 20, 000, or 10 votes per job, or roughly $1, 000 per vote, if the jobs go for as little as $10, 000 per year. If Daley was a fiscal genius in City Hall, surely he showed little of the same talent as a ward committeeman, since he was spending massively for so slight a return. Compare the record of William S. Singer in the 43rd Ward, where he was the de facto ward boss in 1971. There, with only one job — the standard aldermanic secretary — Singer pulled roughly 12, 500 votes. Daley could have modernized the chairman's office by turning it (at least in part) into a modern political consulting firm, with a good deal of expertise lodged there. The Bismarck Hotel could have been the appropriate base for a modern communications complex, similar to Brown's. But it never happened. Moreover, Daley did little or nothing as a dangerous cleavage began to appear in Illinois politics. More and more, the Democratic party — or, at least, the dominant wing of the party, the machine wing — became frozen in its role as the party of the face-to-face medium. At the same time, the Republican party — or, at least, its dominant wing, the suburban and managerial wing of Percy, Thompson, Scott and others — became more and more powerful as the party of the new media. Originally, this drift by the Republicans reflected a weakness: they didn't have the door-to-door troops on the ground, so they took to the air. But today, as more and more citizens are willing to turn to the air, so to speak, for their political cues, the Republicans are already there, well in place, and doing fine. Illinois has perhaps the strongest Republican party in the industrial states, and this media split is one of the leading reasons why, I'd argue. Variations in the medium It's hard to come up with a sound and detailed appraisal of the face-to-face medium of the Daley machine, since so many local and individual influences are involved. With more than 3, 200 precincts in the city, and with anywhere from three or four to thirteen or fourteen workers per precinct, it's all but impossible to account for how well any or all of them might be doing in a given campaign or at a given moment. Worker by worker, precinct by precinct, and ward by ward, there can be wide variations in the size and shape of the work that's done. For the machine itself, this varied pattern is both a strength and and a weakness . Its flexibility can be a strong point. White captains can go and talk white talk to white votes, for example, while black captains can talk black talk to black voters. Thus, the machine needn't rely on a set of standardized messages that go to hundreds of thousands of households at the same time and can be overheard across the lines of race, class religion, neighborhood and ideology. The variations can also be a weakness, though. If Sen. Charles H. Percy comes into our living rooms through the television set, the same man and the same age will appear everywhere: the same razor cut, the same strong jaw lines, the same modulated tones, the same earnest brow and fastidious grooming. Here, there's little room for human error- Percy's image and words are constant and undiluted, and needn't be filtered through the red and beefy prescence of Old Joe Gavin in the 51st precinct, or the smoky breath of Morrie Ginsberg in the 18th, or the garlic ambience of Patsy DiLito in the 1st, and so on.
Modern alternative media At the same time, of course, other media were also making a powerful showing. They were offering news of the nation and the world and even the universe. They were celebrating their own technologies and promoting themselves relentlessly. They were dishing up diversion, the weather, the funnies, situation comedies, football and baseball games, helicopter reports on the traffic, the stock quotations and literally hundreds of other kinds of hard news or entertainment. For all of these things, naturally, more and more people turned to the competing media. It was all too good to miss. For politicans — especially for new faces or Republicans or people who had come up outside of the Organization — these alternative media were an appealing buy for campaign purposes. These candidates didn't have at their disposal a citywide political organization with a work force as large as the payroll of CBS. The chances of duplicating such an organization were slight, and these candidates knew it, particularly if they hoped to run within the next couple of years. So, reasonably enough, they were buying into the competing channels. Then, if people were turning to Fahey Flynn or Ann Landers, they were likely to come across these candidates, too, and lend them an eye or an ear. Needless to say, there was little for Mayor Daley to do to stop this shift by voters and candidates alike into different channels for persuasion; the newspapers couldn't put a stop to radio, radio couldn't put a stop to TV, TV won't be able to put a stop to cable TV, and the personal medium of the Organization wasn't able to put a stop to the impersonal political media of print and radio and TV. Yet, if the machine simply followed the slant of the ground and fell in line on the tube and in print, behind the Percys and Walkers and Thompsons and Ogilvies, it would be creating problems for itself. For one thing, it would be competing against these people on their turf, not the Organization's; the face-to-face medium of the captains was impossible, after all, for the opponents of the machine to duplicate. Moreover, the Organization might also wind up competing with its own captains and undercutting their standing as street corner experts on who to see and how to get things done, and the rest. So, the Mayor was caught. His problem wasn't unlike the problem faced by newspaper and magazine executives during the 1950's and 1960's, as television cut into their audiences and advertisers. It took a long time, many trials and many errors and many failures, before print finally began to contrive a relationship to TV. For years, some newspapers wouldn't even carry the TV listings. Now, most newspapers give elaborate coverage to television in order to assert and then try to hold a service role for themselves: see, we help you watch and follow TV and get more out of it — so say the newspapers implicitly. The mass circulation magazines were, of course, casualties of television — Life, Look, Colliers, the old Saturday Evening Post. Today, the leading mass circulation magazine in America is a TV magazine, TV Guide, and two of the most dramatic circulation successes in the last 20 years. People and US, bill themselves as magazines that are edited for the television generation. So, it can be done, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of risks. Richard Daley surely can't be faulted for courting failure where so many others not only courted her but won her. March 1978 / Illinois Issues / 35 |
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