In part one of this article, I cited Boss, Mike Royko’s authoritative book on the Chicago political “Machine” that had a stranglehold on everything political and almost everything economic in the Windy City for many decades. It was a tale of corruption so vast, lucrative, and stable that even though everyone knew about it, FBI agents never parachuted into City Hall and frog-walked city officials to jail.
Yet it had real, negative impacts on the quality of people’s lives and their ability to live safely in their own homes. Every big city in the middle of the 20th century underwent ill-conceived (and ill-received) attempts at “urban renewal,” which usually meant dislocating a neighborhood community and replacing it with some large-scale development, almost guaranteed to consist of terrible architecture. In San Francisco, people are still smarting over the displacement of thousands of mostly Black residents, leading the writer James Baldwin in 1963 to say that urban renewal “means Negro removal.”
In the early 1960s, Chicago’s Machine threw itself behind the mayor’s effort to build a new university campus, and that effort ended up displacing a historic ethnic neighborhood in the city. In this case, it wasn’t Blacks who lost out; it was Italians.
“City Hall had promised that urban renewal would be used to help restore and stabilize the community,” Royko wrote. “Some of the oldest blocks had already been torn down with the promise that new, moderate-income housing would be put up. The people believed, and many of them were putting money into improving their homes, modernizing their small businesses. The Chicago archdiocese had built a big, new, modern school. The future looked good for the [neighborhood], and at a time when people were rushing to the suburbs, it looked good for the city to have a neighborhood get better instead of worse. Few were.”
But the residents of Little Italy, aka “The Valley,” “didn’t know that City Hall had made another decision. The Valley had to go. [Mayor Richard J.] Daley needed a site for a University of Illinois campus, and the Italian community was it,” wrote Royko.
Daley, of course, got his way. (There’s even an argument that he did this because he had lost the Italian vote in a recent election.) Even though he didn’t build the campus in a historically Black neighborhood, Black Chicagoans also fared poorly during his tenure. And yet, during one of his reelection campaigns, “the enormous black vote had given Daley his victory,” Royko wrote. “The people who were trapped in the ghetto slums and the nightmarish public housing projects, the people who had the worst school system and were most often degraded by the Police Department, the people who received the fewest campaign promises and who were ignored as part of the campaign trail, had given him his third term. They had done it quietly, asking for nothing in return. Exactly what they got.”
How it works
A couple decades ago, I worked for a magazine publisher who had made his name in journalism by exposing corruption in federal housing programs. He told me how when the story broke and the bad guys were being brought to justice, he was sitting in his office enjoying the feeling of a job well-done — corruption exposed, truth and justice prevailed. Then he got a call from a developer who rained on his parade; the developer just wanted to know, “How does this work?” He just wanted to get in on the game.
The Black vote had given Daley his victory. . . . They had done it quietly, asking for nothing in return. Exactly what they got.
Mike Royko, Boss
Corruption has always been around, and it always will be, because there will always be people trying to rig the system (whether the political system, economic system, or anything else) so they have an unfair advantage.
How do we fight it? The famous saying by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman,” sums up one approach, and a good one: Use transparency so members of the public (and prosecutors) know how government contracts were awarded, how votes are counted, how companies got permits.
The news media has in the past century worn the jacket of the corruption buster, the muckraker. But the news business isn’t what it used to be; many newspapers have lost their business model and fallen into penury, purchased by firms that are really only interested in their real estate.
Some news outlets still fight the good fight, and it’s part of our mission here at the Voice, too.
But the best way of fighting corruption and all of its negative effects in a liberal democracy is to double down on the “liberal” in democracy. I’m using liberal here not in the left-right sense but in the more classic sense. The classic definition is that liberal refers to a political and social philosophy based on support for individual rights, democracy, civil liberties, and free enterprise. Those are systems that flourish not just while they allow greater diversity of ideas and competition but because they have greater diversity of ideas and competition.
If one party is prevented from having a real chance of winning (like in Russia or Iran today, or Chicago during the Machine era), it means those on the outside of power aren’t getting fair treatment, and those in power aren’t under any obligation to govern better. Liberal politics means trading power (as Thomas Jefferson said in 1800, declaring his victory in that year’s presidential race to be nothing less than a second revolution). It’s the same with business. Companies should compete for your dollars; but companies love to have monopolies, so the unprincipled among them will buy or rent senators and representatives to write laws to their benefit. Liberal economics means competition. It’s the same with academia; ditch the political straightjackets and have a real competition of ideas.
Liberalism therefore depends on free economic, social, and political systems that are forever open to change. Don’t like the Republican governor? Elect a Democrat next time. Is your dry cleaner not giving you good service? Go to a competitor. Had a falling out with your pastor? Go to a different church. (Unsatisfied with how the local news is covering things? Start a nonprofit news organization.)
The real victim of corruption is liberal democracy. It eats away at the practices that have produced in this country the most spectacularly powerful and economically successful nation in history.
In short, only liberalism can save liberalism.
If this ended up sounding a bit too much like a political discourse, then my apologies. Maybe it’s better if it sounds more like a book review, so: Read Mike Royko’s Boss. Four stars.