Subways Run on Time
"Chicago ain't ready for reform" is a piece of raffish political analysis that never seems to lose its precision, as the city's voters proved again on Feb. 28. Though Watergate supposedly has fostered a new political morality in the nation, Richard J. Daley overcame scandals which sent nearly 50 policemen and many of his closest cronies to jail and won the four-way Democratic mayoral primary race with a triumphant 58 per cent of the vote. He beat his nearest rival, Independent Democratic Alderman William Singer, by two-to-one. Since the independent movement is Chicago's second-strongest political force, Daley's Democratic victory assured him of election to a sixth four-year term. On April 1, he polished off his Republican opponent with 78 per cent of the vote.
Joe Mathewson, who has watched Chicago politics from the vantage points of television reporter and press secretary to a Republican governor of Illinois, clearly hoped for a better performance from the Independents, alluding once even to the possibility that they might "administer the decisive blow destroying America's last big city machine." He was not alone in that estimate, and the error does not detract from the usefulness of his book, the best yet written on the anti-Daley group.
As Mathewson accurately portrays the Independents, they tend to be well-educated, idealistic, youthful, and dedicated to ideals such as democracy and freedom of expression. The reformers' problem is that the bulk of Chicago voters chiefly want the subways to run on time, and they have been persuaded that only Daley's machine can give them a city that "works." One place I think Joe Mathewson has it wrong is in blaming much of Daley's success on the "defection" of Senator Adlai Stevenson III, who has sided with Daley despite his father's liberal record and his own reformist inclinations. I think that the single person most responsible for the Independents' plight is a man who doesn't even live in Chicago. He is John V. Lindsay, the liberal whose record of not getting garbage and snow picked up in New York City probably set reform back 20 years in Chicago.
Well, perhaps not 20 years. Daley's sixth term will be up in 1980, and he will then be 76 years old. Mathewson correctly observes that an independent tide is sweeping the country. Perhaps he will be only four years early in predicting its arrival in Chicago.
UP AGAINST DALEY. By JoeMathewson '55. The Open CourtPublishing Company, 1974. 299 pp.$9.95.
Mr. Kondracke, a member of the WashingtonBureau of the Chicago Sun-Times, has recentlyreturned from a round-the-world expeditionduring which he interviewed Hitzhak Rabin,King Hussein, and Indira Gandhi.
