By LORI GRANGER

Photo by Antonio Dickey

THE STORY circulated all over City Hall and the County Building the day after Harold Washington won that stunning victory over Mayor Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary. The way you tell the story is this: "See, these two black dudes came into the mayor's fifth floor office. Jane Byrne hadn't arrived yet, the cop on duty told them.

" 'We don't want to see Jane Byrne,' one said. 'We want to see the mayor — Mayor Washington. We're here about jobs.' "

It's just a story. It never happened, or anyway not like that, but it says something about what's going on in Chicago's City Hall these days. Never mind the great personal affection people like Tip O'Neill and Charles Manatt suddenly developed for Harold Washington, or Washington's transition team's worrying about long-range financial planning and new flow charts for city cash. What the payrollers are talking about is this: Who gets the jobs?

Of course, the one consistent issue position repeated by Harold Washington since the beginning of his campaign was that he would end patronage. But can he do it? And will he want to? And if he does, can he still control the City Council and the city's delegation in Springfield?

The fact is that every politician in the state of Illinois is going to have to come to terms with Harold Washington, not just as a distinct personality with a distinct political program, but as a black.

Consider this:
Harold Washington won election as mayor of Chicago, he says himself, not because of a campaign, but because of a "social movement," the movement of black people to get into the political mainstream.

Harold Washington owes victory not to the press (which he very evidently distrusts), not to a media guru like Don Rose or David Sawyer, not to a coalition of ideologically committed reformers, not to a patronage machine. He owes it, quite simply, to the incredible solidarity of blacks who turned out in fantastic numbers to vote down the line for him. And when you owe, in Chicago politics, you pay up with jobs and city services and contracts. It's always been that way.

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Jane Byrne, too, owed her election victory to the dissatisfaction of blacks with the machine. But when it came time to repay the debt, she didn't. This was not sheer perversity on her part. For one thing, it's pretty clear she never became convinced that her election was anything but a fluke — a one-time happening dictated by a snowstorm as much as anything else. You can't pay off a snowstorm to make sure it stays in (or out of) your corner.

She never believed that blacks constituted the new, decisive voting bloc in Chicago. She believed she had nowhere to go but to the old white machine.

Harold Washington cannot believe the black vote is an accident. After all, the black voters of Chicago have turned out in record numbers to assert their own choice for mayor two times in a row. But he may believe something else: that this new black voting bloc can be the start of a new machine.

Clearly, in the Chicago City Council, that's a viable proposition, but it may be less so in Springfield.

Harold Washington is going into the City Council with 16 black aldermen (committed to him. They are committed not just because of their skin color, but because of that social movement. Most of the black aldermen won election as supporters of Washington, and they know that their votes came from constituents who overwhelmingly expect to see them support Washington. This is a crusade, as Washington has called it.

But Washington needs 26 votes to move his programs through the 50-member council. Washington has to reach out from his bloc into the white machine bloc of aldermen. But a black mayor still rankles in many Chicago wards, and it won't be easy. And on the surface, at least, the attempt at conciliation seems stalled. Even the four white independent aldermen, generally counted as Washington votes, seemed restive just days before the mayoral inauguration.

"He hasn't at this point gone out to forge a coalition with allegiance to him in the City Council," says Hyde Park's Ald. Lawrence Bloom, who supported Washington from the beginning. "I've told him that he's got to organize his supporters or else [10th Ward Ald. and County Democratic Chairman Edward] Vrdolyak will take over."

Bloom sighs. "I haven't been directed to do anything on his behalf, and I don't know of anyone who has.

You get down to where you're hoping he knows what he's doing."

If things are complicated in the council, they will be more so in the state legislature. For one thing, Chicago's black delegation is not particularly strong, numerically or in terms of experience. Except for Rep. Carol Mosley Braun(D-25) and Sen. Richard Newhouse (D-13), no strong personality emerged — like the Harold Washington of a few years ago. Although black Democratic delegation from Chiccago would be expected to fall in with Washington's plans, there are a few who are at odds with the new mayor because of their past support for Jane Byrne. Some of the most committed to Washington are the newest members of the legislature, and their ability to work for him in forging a winning coalition is limited at the moment. In fact, an effort to work outward from the black caucus in the General Assembly could backfire by reviving the downstate v. Chicago tensions.

"It's already clear that a number of downstate legislators who are particularly fond of running against Chicago in their own districts are finding that prospect even more attractive with a black mayor," says Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-26), the white independent from Chicago's south side.

If working out from the black caucus in Springfield is a limited strategy, accommodation with the regular Chicago Democrats, in the form of a rapprochement with House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, looks easier to effect than agreement in Chicago with the Vito Marzullos (16th Ward) and the Edward Vrdolyaks of the city Council.

"The personalities and the whole question of who gets what leadership position aren't as crucial in Springfield," Currie says. "It's not a machine versus independent thing or black versus white thing the way it is in city politics. The whole Chicago delegation has to be united around the issues of what kinds of funding Chicago needs and what kinds of programs will get support. Harold Washington has a past relationship with the governor and a past relationship with Michael Madigan. They know each other, and they know how things operate."

Braun and Newhouse have long been at odds with Madigan, both philosophically and in terms of major policy

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positions. And yet Madigan holds the key to keeping the Chicago delegation together. "The risk is always that northwest-siders or southwest-siders will start working as free agents. Madigan is the only one who can keep them in line at this point," Currie says. Washington has yet to name a legislation liaison from his own office. Byrne, of course, suffered some signal defeats in this area, partly from lack of experience. She used her patronage threats at a particularly high level of ferocity in the legislative arena, to little effect — once threatening to "cut off Madigan's hands" by cancelling some legal contracts his law firm held with the city.

Monica Faith Stewart, former legislator and feisty machine opponent who worked actively for Washington, has been mentioned as a possible legislative liasion, but Washington's office now denies that this is an imminent appointment. She told one legislator she's calling herself "director of special projects" — about as close as any Washington staffer was to getting an official position before the inauguration. All of this depends of course on whether Washington is going to get along with the regulars. The news media and Washington himself have been quick to declare the old machine dead, but Washington still faces the problem of the blocs of votes that old style leaders like Vrdolyak and Ald. Edward Burke (14th Ward) can still command. Will Marzullo fall into place? Will Vrdolyak continue in his powerful City Council chairmanships? The council's first move — appointing an overwhelming number of regulars to a City Council reorganization committee — seems to point to accommodation.

"If Washington's desire is to accommdate the existing power structure, he hasn't said that," Bloom says huffily. "He continues to say he wants a new order in the City Council. I don't see any evidence of it yet."

All of this is, in a way reminiscent of 1979, when Byrne came into office as a self-proclaimed reformer. Regular aldermen huddled together to discuss ways to get around the mayor's office — even studying Robert's Rules of Order in an effort to find out how to function as a real legislative body instead of a rubber stamp for the mayor. It turned out none of the homework was necessary; when the smoke cleared, the votes continued as they always had, signaled by the old powerhouses like Wilson Frost and Eddie Vrdolyak. Maybe this time it will be different. But not too different.

It would be ironic, indeed, if after being excluded from the pie for so many years, blacks found that when they got into City Hall, their champion steadfastly refused to slice it their way.

In spite of his protestations that there will be revolutionary changes in how city jobs and contracts will be passed out, Harold Washington is no stranger to the mechanics of dividing up the goodies. He has a tough job ahead of him, and he will need every tool available to keep the troops in line.

On April 4 this year, U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Bua ordered the city to end job patronage — even going so far as to require posting of city jobs. But few believe the courts can end Chicago's generations-old system of favors that simply. With the so-called "Shakman III" order's potential effectiveness still in doubt, Harold Washington has already publicly questioned whether it might not hamper him in office. He has his transition team studying the number of policymaking positions exempted from the order, 250 at present, and may go into court to ask the judge to reconsider.

There is speculation, as well, that strict enforcement of affirmative action could be one way for Washington to move some of his supporters into city jobs, without running afoul of the courts. And even if Washington were to give all-out support to Bua's order, a Chicago mayor has more things to pass around to friends than just jobs: contracts, for example, and city services.

There's patronage and there's patronage, as orthodox reformer Ald. Martin Oberman (43rd Ward) says. "It depends on how you define it. I think the kind of thing where an alderman comes in and says, gee, my brother-in-law needs a job — I think that kind of thing will continue. That's just the normal kind of favor that's done in government. The other thing is where each committeeman is allowed 30 or 40 jobs. That kind of thing could go. Of course, I can't say that it will go. I'm just saying Harold Washington could do without it if he wanted to do without it."

Harold Washington spent 16 years in the General Assembly in Springfield, and what better place to learn about the usefulness of patronage? Richard J. Daley got the same kind of lessons in Springfield. And it's acknowledged that Washington did very well in the legislature — that he "knows the ropes." The ropes include more than a knowledge of the local restaurants or even a past relationship with Gov. James R. Thompson when working on such things as the Illinois Human Rights Act in 1979. But on the question of patronage and how exactly it is to be eliminated — as on so many other issues — nobody in the Washington camp is saying very much now.

A number of talks with Washington staffers over the last few weeks have yielded one impression: Nobody's saying anything.

Let's talk, for a moment, about relations with the press. Let's remember Jane Byrne and those first hectic days after the election victory four years ago.

Talk, talk, talk. She wouldn't shut up. Reporters were galloping through those little steno notebooks they carry and sending out for more. The radio people were going crazy trying to edit 49 offhand statements into a report of a few seconds duration for the "drive-time" news broadcast.

Four years ago, her aides, too, sat in her old campaign office in the same building where Washington's people sit today. They were talking, too. Campaign adviser Don Rose told a reporter he wanted to be in on "the butcher shop floor." That was one of the last official statements he made as a Byrne aide.

Why all the noise? Because Byrne was and is a creature of the media. She owed her rise not to patronage, not to

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the machine; although Richard J. Daley had given her a job and appeared to delight in her spirited defenses of him during her term as consumer sales commissioner, it was pretty clear he had no great plans for her in the corridors of power. The corridors of power were reserved for white males in those days.

Harold Washington is not about to make the mistake of talking too much too soon. The media is beginning to get uneasy about that. After four years of feasting on Byrne's penchant for public confrontation, they are wondering if Washington's administration isn't going to turn out to be even more closemouthed than that of Mayor Daley.

The news media under Daley were strictly controlled. They kept to their little pressroom on the third floor, and for the rare press conferences, they were ushered into the mayor's office sedately, their press credentials (hard to get for anyone not of the major media) carefully scrutinized by armed policemen.

The news media had never done anything for Daley, and he wasn't doing much for them. He didn't think that they had any business in the running of the city.

The media has not done anything for Harold Washington, either.

Quite frankly, they don't cover black politicians much — or at least they didn't. The influence of the media in the black community was obviously very weak. They kept crying out that a black man couldn't win, couldn't run the city — and then blacks turned out and put the black man in office.

The Washington people are very bitter about all that. Washington campaign adviser Al Raby, for example, used it as the basis for a speech about the white establishment. The news media, he said, were part of a conspiracy to "sow self-doubt in the black community" and thus maintain the whites in power.

This criticism is not merely rhetoric. Washington does not pal around with reporters — not like Byrne, who went to the extraordinary length of marrying one and naming several others to top city positions. Reporters are not what social scientists would call Washington's "reference group."

On the other hand, Washington is a skilled performer on the broadcast media, and it's to be expected that he will try to go over the heads of pundits and reporters to project his image to his constituents. Such an effort, however, will be slow to emerge, since it has to be carefully planned and orchestrated. Planning and orchestation has so far not been broadly in evidence at least in what we've seen from his campaign.

Most people you ask about the Harold Washington campaign quickly disavow having had a decisive role in it. Yes, they will say, I worked for him — but I wasn't in on the planning. "I don't really know what went on over there," one precinct organizer told me. "I'm not sure anybody does."

If the mayoral campaign was the first test of Harold Washington's administrative ability, the results are inconclusive. On the one hand, he won. On the other hand, even he admits his victory didn't have a lot to do with the campaign.

That the campaign was chaotic, plagued by personnel changes and an almost paranoid secretiveness is admitted by just about everybody connected with it. One measure of the candidate's dissatisfaction with his campaign is that almost everyone connected with the campaign office has now departed.

There is a black business community of considerable affluence that many outside Chicago are not aware of. There are people like Edward Gardner of Afro-Sheen products, who came up with $50,000 for the registration campaign in the black community last fall, and more for Washington's election. These people are proud of "Harold" and what he has done, delighted to be on a first-name basis with a mayor of Chicago. Yet the middle management people who came into the campaign and could have been the beginning of a new administration team, are no longer in evidence. And Washington seems to have no compunction about doing things like failing to show up at a downtown hotel dinner which Afro Sheen threw to honor him April 13.

In fact, Washington seems to have fallen back mainly on his congressional staff. He does not seem to trust many people — which can be a major handicap in an administrator. Congressioonal staff press spokesman Paul Davis said, "Most of the campaign staff has gone — dissipated, as you might say. That's the way it is with campaign people. They come in for the campaign, and then they're gone." But campaign workers are usually not that nomadic. A campaign is a time for testing people, and though you may not want some of them around after the election, you hope to find some you can work with; it says something if all of them are gone.

It isn't only the media that Harold Washington is not speaking to. It's clear that his own staff and close supporters are in a state of confusion over his plans. But Harold Washington has always played it close to the vest, and that style was one of his considerable strengths as a legislator.               

He favors aides, quite clearly, who don't talk. Bill Ware, a University of Chicago law school graduate who has worked in Washington's congressional office, was named chief of staff and emerged as Washington's chief spokeman. But "emerged" is not the right word since it is almost impossible to reach Ware on the phone, and when you do, he has little to say.

Richard J. Daley liked people like that, too. He played his own game, and except for Jane Byrne, he never did care for people who ran off at the mouth. They were dangerous and didn't last long. People like Mike Bilandic — hardly a garrulous sort — and patronage chief Tom Donovan stayed around longest. They kept their mouths shut. So far, Harold Washington and his people aren't saying much at all. And that may be the hardest thing for Chicagoans to get used to — after four years of Jane Byrne.

Lori Granger is a Chicago writer and political consultant who co-authored with her husband Bill, Fighting Jane, a political biography of Mayor Jane Byrne.

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