IN THE SUMMER of 1976, twenty-one years into the Daley era in Chicago, and two years after Mayor Richard J. Daley had suffered a stroke and undergone surgery to open up the artery to his brain, it had become clear that the most important period in Chicago's political history was coming to an end.

Daley had won control of the Chicago political machine in 1953 when he captured the chairmanship of the Cook County Central Committee in 1953, and the mayoralty of the city in 1955. Both the political machine and the city government had enjoyed their most successful and rewarding years under Daley's leadership. But the historical record of the period was shallow; analytical treatment of the era by scholars was lacking; national understanding of the city and its politics was naive; and archival materials — papers, letters and memoirs by the major figures of the period were nonexistent.

Aware of the approaching end of the Daley era in Chicago, and cognizant of the paucity of historical materials, I set out in the summer of 1976 to add to the available source material a collection of tape-recorded interviews with a broad range of people who had been active participants in the politics of the period — ward committeemen, precinct captains, blacks, women, suburbanites, dissidents, critics and opponents of the Daley machine. I originally had not thought of doing a book, but as the interviews accumulated, I decided to transcribe and edit them for that purpose. We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent is the result of that effort.

Professional politicians are a different and unusual specie of homo sapiens. They seek the limelight, pursue power and strive for status. They are generally gregarious, are readily available and will converse at great length with anyone willing to listen. But they tend to say little of consequence, abhor controversy, and propound platitudes. And they will say nothing to anyone about their economic and financial activities. We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent was undertaken with full recognition of the inherent limitations of an oral history compiled from the recollections and interpretations of the people who talked into a tape recorder for the record about the Daley years in Chicago.

But, within those limitations, there is a great deal of information and significant insights to be gleaned from such a record: how professionals get into politics, how the process works for them, what the purpose of political activity is, what the rewards of politics are, what trials are endured, and what political life is like. These are the topics they will talk about fairly freely, and often times at great length, even on a tape recorder.

We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent is thus not a comprehensive history of the Daley era in Chicago, nor a chronicle of the late Mayor Daley's life and career. It is, rather, a book about the politics of those years as seen through the eyes of a broad range of people who were active in the political process in Chicago during those years, and who were willing to share some of their thoughts, recollections and interpretations of how the dynamics of the most successful and long-lasting political machine in American urban history worked. And, hopefully, the book will contribute to a better understanding, not just of politics and politicians in Chicago, but of the universality and dynamics of the political process and of politicians in any place and at any time.

January 1980/Illinois Issues/27