In 1999, the writer Malcolm Gladwell wrote a famous, later-anthologized New Yorker article about a Chicago grandmother named Lois Weisberg. In the subhead to the piece, entitled “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” Gladwell wondered aloud whether she ran the world.
That was tongue in cheek, but Gladwell’s point was that Weisberg was one of the world’s great connectors, making things happen by putting people together. If you asked Weisberg for a job and she liked you, Gladwell wrote, she would want to “recruit you into one of her grand schemes, to sweep you up into her world.” Among other things, Gladwell credited Weisberg with bringing about the founding of Friends of the Parks, the saving of the South Shore Line and the formation of Gallery 37 (an arts program and a youth job creator). He reported that she put two Chicago visitors named Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov together and that she greatly intimidated the powerful developer Al Friedman, persuading him and other developers to do more for the city. Gladwell also said that Weisberg, more than any other Chicagoan, made Blacks and whites living on the North Side more likely to socialize together. He quoted Helen Doria as saying that Weisberg was “the epicenter of the city administration.” And at the time that article came out, few of us disagreed. Certainly not her boss, Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Weisberg died in 2016 at the age of 90. Why is her story relevant now? It’s that her job was commissioner of Cultural Affairs, a position from which she greatly bettered her city.
How? By bringing people together.
When she wanted attention for something, her Rolodex was filled with reporters from this and other newspapers. She knew what made for a good story, and she made sure plenty got written to advance her agendas.
Chicago still has a commissioner of Cultural Affairs — in fact, the role has been expanded since the Weisberg days to include special events, such as big festivals. The post currently is occupied by Clineé Hedspeth, formerly legislative director for Mayor Brandon Johnson when he was a Cook County commissioner.
Her portfolio includes most everything that makes a city fun, not to mention the stuff most likely to bring in tourism dollars. Hedspeth, who was hired after Johnson fired her predecessor, Erin Harkey, has been in the news of late not for putting people together but pulling people apart.
Hedspeth mostly has refused to engage with the media. In May, she declined to talk to a writer representing this newspaper about her specific visions and goals, despite being more than two months into the job. Morgan Elise Johnson, founder of the news site The Triibe, said on X this week that Hedspeth had been unresponsive to that organization’s desire to profile Black leaders in the Johnson administration, which hardly was something intended to make her look bad. And, on Monday, WBEZ published a story outlining an open secret around town: senior Cultural Affairs staffers have been fleeing the office, with the implication that it had to do with their new boss. Not ideal, especially when Johnson has announced a citywide hiring freeze in the face of a yawning budget gap. Assuming that’s a hard freeze, Cultural Affairs could be seriously depleted.
Hedspeth’s reported reaction to the WBEZ claims? “A DCASE spokesperson said she was not available for an interview and did not reply to emailed questions.”
A new commissioner arguably is entitled to bring in her own people and rebuild an office as she sees fit. So that might not in itself be an indication of a major problem. And you could argue that Hespeth still is new(ish) in her role and that no one should be forced to talk to the media at times when they would rather not. But the contrast between this aversion to public engagement and Weisberg’s legacy is striking. Very much so.
On the face of it, Cultural Affairs may not look like the city’s most important office. Certainly, Johnson has other personnel problems to worry about, including the Monday resignation of the clearly talented and hard-working Sydney Holman as deputy mayor of intergovernmental affairs, otherwise known as the mayoral bridge to City Council.
Now a moat.
Not good at all as Johnson heads into a particularly fraught budget season, and some of the aldermen are determined to fight Johnson’s decision to remove the ShotSpotter gun detection technology.
But mayors have to keep many balls in the air at the same time. And Cultural Affairs is not just about supporting the arts and putting on festivals: it’s a bully pulpit for the city’s culture, which means cultivating Chicago’s identity as a producer of film, theater, visual arts and music and not just a consumer of such products from the coasts.
Cultural Affairs is the city department that has the most do with tourism but also that most shapes what Chicagoans can and will do when they are not working. A city’s culture is why many people choose to stay or leave. And that noun includes who is having dinner with whom, who feels included and who does not. In short, the position should be held by the city government’s number one connector.
At the end of the New Yorker piece, Gladwell describes Weisberg taking him to the Museum of Contemporary Art (a good thing in and of itself). He leaves her for awhile to look at the current exhibit and returns to find:
“Her little corner had become a crowd. There was her friend from the state legislature. A friend in the Chicago Park District. A friend from her neighborhood. A friend in the consulting business. A friend from Gallery 37. A friend from the local business development group. … And on an on. They were of all ages, and all colors, swirling and turning in a loose circle.”
Weisberg, he wrote, was at the center and the happiest person in the room.
Who would not want to live in such a city?
So who is this person in Johnson’s world?
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