Last in a series on the social and political history of key states holding presidential primaries.
CHICAGO - Here the machine once ruled all.
The machine controlled the lives of the workers, tethering them to industrial jobs that moved the rail cars, packed the meat, made the steel, fashioned the electrical components, even set off the atomic chain reactions. This was the hub of the nation's manufacturing, the foundry of the American empire.
A machine of a different sort once governed the lives of the people, too, determining which workers got city jobs, which people got public aid, which businesses got a driveway permit, which neighborhoods got parks and bleachers, which churches got public garbage pickup, even which pupils found places in top parochial schools. This was the glory of urban organization politics, the last place where the hidden hand and the knowing glance created an American city empire beyond all rules, regulation, or reason.
Last week it was impossible to ignore the placards bellowing ''Mayor Daley and the City of Chicago Welcome National Manufacturing Week,'' but this is a different Mayor Daley, and he governs a different city. Here the machine - whether in the political square or in the workplace - rules no more.
Illinois, which tomorrow holds political primaries that are dress rehearsals for the fall presidential confrontation over the critical Midwest region, is no longer the manufacturing hub of the center of the country. The meatpacking industry is shuttered, the steel industry has shed 30,000 jobs, the electronics plants are dark, the factories are automated or, in many cases, closed. Though all the major trunk line railroads still have switching yards in Chicago, and all the major airlines have gates at O'Hare International Airport, Illinois today is the service center of the Midwest, a major center for financial services, pharmaceuticals, printing, plastics, and chemicals.
''The old Rust Belt image doesn't hold,'' says Boro Reljik, vice president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association.
And Chicago is no longer the captive of machine politics. The fabled mayor, Richard J. Daley, is dead, and the current mayor, Richard M. Daley, his son, has no instinct, inclination, or taste for the organization that his father ran and personified. He does not have the patronage base his father possessed, and the social-welfare system and roaring economy of the modern era have supplanted the bucket of coal, cheap medical care, and secure employment that the organization provided.
''It's different now, totally different,'' says Edmund L. Kelly, the 47th Ward Democratic committeeman whose office on Chicago's North Side is full of pictures of the first Mayor Daley. ''The guy on the fifth floor doesn't operate the way his father did.''
And yet - in the new Illinois, still so dependent on commerce in the north and commodities in the south, as in the new Chicago, so shimmery and sophisticated - the ethos of the old days endures. The machines are gone and so, too, is the machine, and yet the values of both remain.
''This was a city that came out of the mud and became the architectural Athens of this country,'' says Studs Terkel, who at 87 is still an avid student of his city. ''Chicago doesn't have grace, but it has always had people with big hands. People work here with their hands, but the important thing is that they work. Chicago's whole history is work.''
It is still true - it may always be true, even when, perhaps in the foreseeable future, the hands of Chicago are no longer calloused - that an employer looking for workers here advertises in shorthand: 50 hands wanted. It is still true - it may always be true, even when the movement to South and West endangers Illinois's power - that this will be the center, geographically, emotionally, spiritually, of the nation.
''Here, mid-most in the land, beat the Heart of the Nation, whence inevitably must come its immeasurable power, its infinite, infinite, inexhaustible vitality,'' Frank Norris wrote in 1903.
This is a state built by pioneers and by lumber, grain, cows, and hogs. It is dominated by land (the Great Plains) and water (the Great Lakes). The founding giants of its businesses - John Deere, Cyrus McCormick, Gustavus Swift, Richard Sears, Alvah Roebuck - are American symbols. The slogan of Chicago - the city that works - was always meant to speak of its governmental efficiency, but in truth it shrieks the city ethos, too.
''We put a lot of emphasis on an old-fashioned thing: the work ethic,'' says Don Turner, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor. ''We believe in it. If we tell someone we're going to do something, it happens. A day's work for a day's pay hasn't gone out of style here.''
But the way people work and the way things work have changed in style.
Finkel Steel Co. still operates a plant in the Goose Island part of Chicago and Caterpillar still is a giant in Joliet, but Xerox, Lucent Technologies, and Motorola have large operations here, and dot-coms are sprouting up in the western suburbs of Chicago. ''We work here,'' says William A. Testa, vice president and director of regional programs for the Federal Reserve Board of Chicago, ''but we're hog butchers no longer.''
The current Mayor Daley has achieved a political restoration, but not the one outsiders expected. He has restored stability to Chicago, not the organization. He ran as a lakefront reformer; it was many of those lakefront reformers (and their parents and grandparents) who resented his father most deeply. His roots may be in the Bridgeport section of the city, where he grew up, but even he doesn't live there anymore, and his coalition includes Latinos, blacks, yuppies, gays, and gentrifiers. His appeal may come from the same themes his father emphasized - ethnicity, family, religion - but he practices them, and politics, in a way his father would not have recognized.
''His politics is selective - he'll pick and choose a candidate, maybe two - while his father's politics was all-encompassing,'' says Paul M. Green, director of the School of Policy Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago. ''His father would have a meeting, usually with himself, and that would be that.''
And that was a phenomenon all its own - colorful, surely; cruel, often; efficient, always. The Chicago machine represented the apotheosis of the urban organization, the greatest machine in part because it was the last machine. Organizational politics did not come to Chicago until 1931, with the election of Anton J. Cermak, and thus bypassed all the reforms that punctured machines elsewhere. In fact, the city's mayor at the flood tide of progressivism, in 1915, was William Hale ''Wild Bill'' Thompson, maybe the nation's most corrupt mayor ever.
The first Mayor Daley began his 21-year reign in 1955, when Chicago was riven with vice in the streets and incompetence in City Hall. Daley served as both mayor and county chairman, combining politics and government in his own life and, fatefully, in the life of the city.
''Daley brought a sense of stability to his city during a time of deep troubles in urban America,'' wrote Melvin G. Holli, a political scientist at the University of Illinois in Chicago. ''He projected and often lived up to the image of an in-charge leader whose firm hand on the throttle permitted only orderly and slow change, if it permitted change at all. The effort to slow change to a manageable and controllable pace had a deep and profound appeal to Chicagoans.''
The Daley machine was basically a patronage machine, and though the estimates of how many jobs he controlled varied from 30,000 to 45,000, nobody disagreed that it provided a critical mass.
Those workers, their families and their friends provided the bulwark of Daley's support, a power base that could deliver the difference in elections for positions such as city assessor, clerk of the courts, recorder of deeds and coroner and, just as important, maybe more, a base of support that could perpetuate power year after year.
Thousands of people trooped to the polls and did as they were told, putting an ''x'' in the Democratic circle at the top of the paper ballot or pulling the ''A'' lever in the voting machines that provided the machine with its power.
''Machine politics wasn't only about politics,'' says former Democratic state Senator Jeremiah Joyce of Chicago. ''It was the dominant factor in the lives of 30 percent or 40 percent of the citizens of the city. It was the machine and the churches. They set our lives.''
The machine and the churches - but the machine over all.
''If you were Catholic, Daley didn't mind if you paid your loyalty to the church,'' wrote Milton Rakove, the late University of Illinois at Chicago political scientist and chronicler of the Daley phenomenon. ''[B]ut if it was a choice between what he needed and what the Pope needed, you had better side with Daley, because the Pope might get you later but Daley would get you now.''
He rewarded, but he punished, too. He inspired loyalty, but he inspired fear, too. ''It was a very disciplined organization,'' says Kelly, who for 15 years served as Daley's parks commissioner. ''If there was a call from City Hall, you were there - real fast. There was no question where the authority was. And there was no disloyalty. None.''
No newcomers needed apply, either. Abner J. Mikva, who served as a state representative, congressman, and judge on the US Court of Appeals, likes to tell the story about being inspired by the Illinois Democratic slate in 1948, which had Adlai E. Stevenson running for governor and Paul Douglas running for the Senate. So he walked into the 8th Ward Regular Democratic Organization headquarters to volunteer. The ward committeeman took his cigar out of his mouth and asked, ''Who sent you?''
''Nobody,'' the young Mikva replied politely.
''We don't want nobody nobody sent,'' the ward committeeman said.
And they didn't. Mikva, elected to the state Legislature in 1956 without the support of the Democratic organization, had an uneasy, armed truce for decades with Daley. Blacks, at one time a major part of the Daley coalition, grew more alienated as it became clear that the machine depended on the white vote and the manipulation of the black vote, producing severe segregation in public employment, housing, and education.
''Under Daley there was very tight control,'' says Leon M. Despres, who served as a Chicago alderman for 20 years in the Daley era. ''He was an interesting person, but he was autocratic. We had a form of municipal totalitarianism. He won all the elections. He kept things quiet. It was a very tight regime.''
And then he died in office, in 1976, and with him died a machine for the ages. It was faltering, to be sure, at the end of his reign, mortally wounded by federal court decisions prohibiting political organizations from taking jobs away from their opponents. Two years after Daley's death, Harold Washington recognized there was, as he put it, ''a sleeping black giant in Chicago.'' And, he said, ''If this sleeping black giant, the potential black vote, ever woke up, we'd control this city.''
By 1983, after brutal internecine warfare (and poorly plowed wintry streets) took down the administrations of Mayors Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne, Washington was elected mayor. But with Washington's death in 1987, the way to the Daley restoration was clear.
But Chicago was different in 1989, when the new Daley arrived in City Hall, and so was Illinois. For years the Chicago Democratic machine got the attention, but the Illinois Republican machine, based in Springfield and deriving its power from the county courthouses and the state government, worked nearly as effectively, nearly as efficiently, nearly as seamlessly. ''The Republicans didn't have as tight a control, but it was basically the same idea,'' Mikva says.
''All those Republican governors had as many jobs to hand out.''
The result was an upstate/downstate resentment rivaled only by that in New York. ''Illinois,'' says the Rev. Andrew Greeley, priest, novelist, and observer of the Chicago scene, ''is a burden that God has imposed on Chicago for its sins.''
Downstate, of course, the view is that Chicago is synonymous with sin, and that the rest of the state is Illinois's saving grace.
By 1989, however, it was clear that the old world was disappearing forever. Chicago's suburbs were extending outward into the Illinois countryside, the old boundaries becoming less distinct. In recent memory, television broadcasters used to speak of the suburbs as ''the country towns.'' They are not country towns anymore.
Indeed, the rise of the Chicago suburbs, often called the ''collar counties,'' is one of the most significant political events of the era. Their emergence is personified in Springfield by two of the most powerful figures in the capital, House minority leader and former speaker Lee A. Daniels and Senate majority leader James ''Pate'' Philip, both conservative Republicans from large, wealthy DuPage County, west of Chicago. The collar counties are one reason why there hasn't been a Democratic governor in Illinois since Dan Walker left office in 1977.
The first Mayor Daley controlled the politics of Illinois by controlling the politics of Chicago's Cook County. ''That's not possible anymore,'' says Don Rose, a veteran Illinois political consultant and social activist. ''A third force - the suburbs, and they're Republican, at least for now - has risen.''
In 1948, when the Chicago Tribune incorrectly trumpeted Thomas E. Dewey's victory over Harry Truman, Chicago accounted for half of the vote of the state of Illinois. By 1996, when President Clinton came to the city to claim renomination for his second term, it accounted for only a fifth of the state's vote. The most vivid example of the change: Senator Carol Moseley-Braun won a historic margin of 407,189 votes in Chicago in her reelection bid in 1998 - and still lost the state by 98,545 votes.
Illinois remains a major agricultural producer, accounting for some 200 billion ears of corn a year, the nation's top soybean crop, huge amounts of hogs, cattle, and chicken. But even the harvest and the market have changed.
Chicago had borrowed the grain elevator from Buffalo and had adapted advanced butchering and pig-packing techniques from Cincinnati, but it was the use of ice in packing houses and refrigerated rail cars that transformed the city. The railroad made Chicago central, and the railroad made Chicago great. ''It would rapidly emerge as the chief link connecting Chicago with the towns and rural lands around it,'' William Cronon wrote in ''Nature's Metropolis,'' his classic 1991 chronicle of Chicago, ''so the city came finally to be seen like an artificial spider suspended at the center of a great steel web.''
Raw materials still flood into Chicago, but not for steel or meatpacking anymore. There are more accountants than butchers, and the profits aren't as lean. ''Illinois has made a transition from heavy manual labor to work heavier on creativity,'' says Marcus Alexis, an economist at Northwestern University in Evanston.
''There's not as much made here that requires big muscles.''
And so what is the biggest economic problem throughout the state, from the exurbs of Chicago, to the southern tip of Illinois? Finding workers and retaining them. The age of the machine - the time when the jobs came from the machine, the time when jobs meant operating a machine - is gone.
