On many nights during his long career as alderman of the 43rd Ward, Mathias “Paddy” Bauler would hold court in the North Avenue tavern that served as his headquarters from the 1930s into the 1960s. Often with a beer in hand, he would loudly proclaim, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
He might as well have said or added, “Chicago is always ready for corruption.”
This city, and by extension the state, have long been and remain what a University of Chicago political science professor – and many others, from writers to late-night television hosts – have derided as “the only completely corrupt city in America.” As one local, the late Studs Terkel, charmingly put it in 1986: “Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.”
How did we get so “lucky”?
Political wrongdoers have come at us in a steady stream just about from the time the first settlers arrived. Since then, we have watched (or withstood) all manner of scandals and crimes, orchestrated by boodlers, bandits and outright crooks.
According to a report the University of Illinois at Chicago’s political science department issued last year, Chicago was the country’s most corrupt city for the fourth year in a row. The most recent examples of infamy – convicted former Ald. Ed Burke and accused former Speaker of the House Michael Madigan, two of the most powerful politicians in this city’s long history – have been prominent in newspaper headlines and on television. And, depending on your age, you surely remember some of the better-known names of scandals and those involved.
Burke and Madigan are the latest additions to a list the Tribune has compiled of roughly 200 convicted, indicted or otherwise notorious politicians. It is a stunning gathering really, almost exclusively men elected or appointed to varying positions – most predominantly aldermen (more than three dozen of them convicted of crimes since the early 1970s), but other offices too. Have a look.
Historian Richard Lindberg told me: “This was a city and state that first drew people who were adventurers, rogues and men of large ambitions and this was for a time a place with no rules and flexible morals and ethics. And as each succeeding wave of immigrants arrived they would look at what others had done before them and wanted to grab a slice of the action by whatever means they could concoct.”
One obvious road to such “success” was getting elected to public office, and it is here one can hear the echo of something said by a long-gone English historian, Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
True enough, and it’s important to remember that temptation is all around us and has the ability to touch not only politicians but also those in the realms of business, sports, religion, law enforcement, the military and on and on.
With variations and embellishments, political corruption takes two principal forms. There’s using public authority or resources for political gain (such as buying votes or rewarding campaign workers with taxpayer-funded jobs), and there’s using one’s position for private gain (think of taking bribes, or of putting Uncle Harry into a ghost-payrolling job where he doesn’t even have to show up to get paid).
Many see political corruption as an inevitability, a fact of Chicago life, tied to the patronage system that began in the early 20th century and flourished during the decades that followed.
“You’ve got to mention Lorimer,” said Mike Flannery, a political reporter for newspapers and television for more than three decades. He retired last year but was called back for Democratic National Convention duty for WFLD-Ch. 32.
His mention of William Lorimer goes back to the early years of the 20th century, when U.S. senators were still not elected by the popular vote of citizens but rather appointed by state lawmakers. That ended forever in 1913 with the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which provided for direct election of U.S. senators by vote of the people. Part of the impetus was the revelation Lorimer attained his Senate post in 1909 by bribing legislators. His “election” deemed invalid, he was booted from the Senate.
Jail? Are you kidding? He came back to Chicago and was greeted with a parade.
“Lorimer was one of the first statewide bad guys,” Flannery said. “But you can see how past corruption echoes and has influenced generations, convincing many that they could get away with plenty. Much of it has been nickel-and-dime stuff but with some big-name crooks. It’s really been a culture of corruption.”
Since the city’s earliest days, there have always been people who railed against the corruption they were witnessing, with some of the loudest voices coming from the pages of various publications.
In the early 1890s, the Herald newspaper put it this way: “The average representative in the City Council is a tramp, if not worse. … He is in nine cases out of ten a bummer and disreputable who can be bought and sold as hogs are bought and sold at the stockyards.”
Around this same time, the weekly magazine Graphic complained: “It has been an open secret for many months that the council is controlled by a gang of corruptionists and that municipal franchises are as clearly matters of bargain and sale as goods at a bargain counter … from year to year men of notorious official and political corruption have been reelected as lawmakers for the people.”
The men who set the bar for aldermanic corruption were a couple of characters named John “Bathhouse John” Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who served as aldermen of the First Ward at a time when the city was divided into 35 wards and each was run by two elected aldermen.
The tiny, cigar-chomping Kenna was a genius at political organization and the owner of the Workingman’s Exchange, a popular saloon near Clark and Van Buren streets. Coughlin had been a bathhouse masseur, wrote terrible poetry and wore garish clothes. He blustered while Kenna said little. They shared the duties for an area that included dwellings of the rich, tenements for the poor and the notorious Levee, home to pimps, prostitutes and pickpockets. (The area is bordered today roughly between 18th and 22nd streets and Wabash Avenue and Clark Street.)
In City Council, the two were eagerly abetted by others who included Ald. John “Johnny de Pow” Powers of the 19th Ward, about whom the Times-Herald newspaper wrote, “He is bloodless, personally unattractive … autocratic, arrogant and insolent.”
Dubbed “the gray wolves” by muckraking reporter Lincoln Steffens “for the color of their hair and the rapacious cunning and greed of their natures,” these men and a few cronies exercised wicked control of the City Council.
Corruption continued and thrived with the 1915 election of Republican Mayor William Hale Thompson, a former cowboy and athlete, who launched the city into one of its most politically raucous eras. The day after his election, he bellowed: “The crooks had better move out of Chicago. In no manner is this to be a political machine-building organization. I am my own man!”
Well, nonsense. My father, Herman, and his newspaper pal Lloyd Wendt wrote a Thompson biography, 1953’s “Big Bill of Chicago,” and in it one can read about the close alliance Thompson had with a fellow named Al Capone.
“From the start, Capone’s money rolled into Big Bill’s campaign coffers,” they wrote. One of Capone’s associates, “an oily pimp and gambler named Jack Zuta proudly proclaimed, ‘Big Bill’s for me hook, line and sinker.’”
I read “Big Bill” when I was 12, when I already knew my 43rd Ward alderman, Bauler, and our precinct captain. I was like many who grew up here, living where politics was close by and knowledge of corruption came early. Who among you did not learn, when you were old enough to drive, how to beat a speeding ticket?
“If you’re caught, just wrap your driver’s license in a $5 or $10 bill when you hand it to the cop,” your father, uncle, big brother or maybe even your mom would tell you. “Do that, smile and say, ‘Sorry,’ and you’ll soon drive away.”
Few knew the pervasiveness of political corruption better than columnist Mike Royko. He knew it from its humblest level, growing up above his parents’ Milwaukee Avenue tavern, the Blue Sky Lounge. He knew the aldermanic foot soldiers known as precinct captains and would later write: “A decent precinct captain used to be out there with a wad of bills big enough to choke his clout, handing a few dollars to every needy voter. And there was nothing wrong with that. With the kind of aldermen Chicago has had, people should be paid to vote for them.”
Royko also noted, “I wouldn’t call any alderman a loudmouth because it wouldn’t be accurate. Most of them have prudently learned to talk in a whisper. A whisper is harder for a listening device to pick up.”
And he once suggested that the city’s motto be changed from the Latin phrase “Urbs In Horto,” meaning “City in a Garden,” to “Ube Est Mea,” which means “Where’s mine?”
You will notice that the Tribune’s “Dishonor Roll” is dominated by aldermen, but you should also know that many on the list have never been convicted of a crime. Some of them, including Bauler, Kenna and Coughlin, are filed under the label “notorious,” which is also to say “colorful.” Bauler, for instance, used to amuse Mayor Anton Cermak, who laid the foundation for the city’s Democratic machine, by rolling around the City Hall floor in wrestling matches with his 275-pound self.
John Davies made a recent movie about corruption, an hour-long documentary, called “Lincoln Is Crying: The Grifters, Grafters and Governors of Illinois.” It covers a lot of bases and bad deeds and does so in a purposefully lighthearted way. One critic called it an “entertaining take on the state’s history of systemic political corruption.”
“When people from other states see this film they are shocked,” Davies said. “The idea came to me over the years. Look, I am not a serious news producer, so with some advice from people at The Second City, we decided to take a humorous look at corruption. Yes, it is a serious matter, and there are many places and sources where that can be explored.”
He continued, “This could easily have been a 10-hour miniseries with endless cases of bribery and thievery or attempted bribery and thievery by Illinois politicians representing both parties.
“But many of my friends and those who live here have become so used to this corruption they just think it’s the way it’s been done for years so why worry about it? ‘Besides, it’s funny,’ one friend told me. That’s the comment that made me decide to tell this story with a sense of humor. It’s so ugly and so depressing you probably couldn’t watch or listen to it otherwise.”
Writer Bill Bryson once wrote that “Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment.”
There are undoubtedly people who take a strange pride in the city and state’s blatant wickedness. But others have fought for reform.
“There is great value in being loudly anti-corruption,” Flannery said. “And those on the federal level have more tools, power and resources.”
James Thompson, after becoming a federal prosecutor in the early 1970s, energetically went after political corruption and, among other high-profile targets, obtained a conviction against former governor Otto Kerner for his use of improper influence on behalf of the horse-racing industry.
He also secured the indictments of powerful alderman Thomas Keane, County Clerk Matt Danaher and others, setting the corruption-seeking tone for those who followed him into the office of U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
His cases established a heroic image that helped keep him in the Illinois governor’s office for four terms. But other reformers have not been particularly effective. The first ethics reform ordinance in the history of Chicago wasn’t passed until 1987, and progress has been incremental at best.
Many fine books detail the dark side of the city. The aforementioned Richard Lindberg has a shelf full, including such titles as “To Serve and Collect,” “Gangland Chicago” and “Whiskey Breakfast.”
Dick Simpson was a reform-minded alderman of the 44th Ward from 1971 to 1979. He also was a professor of political science (now emeritus) and the author of many fine books, among them 2001’s “Rogues, Rebels, And Rubber Stamps: The Politics of the Chicago City Council from 1863 to the Present” in 2001.
Few have observed city and state politics more closely or spoken about them more articulately.
Some years ago, sitting with me in a bygone local tavern, he said, “I have always been – and remain – hopeful that our better angels will win out. There is great power in the people, and we must trust the people to help make Chicago not just a global city but a livable and humane city.”
The new edition of “Illinois Politics: A Citizen’s Guide to Power, Politics, and Government,” published by the University of Illinois Press, has a fine chapter titled “Political Corruption.” In it the authors write, “Illinois cannot change its history of political corruption, but it does not have to constantly repeat it.”
Really?
Really?
