How That Daley Machine Rolls

Down Chicago's State Street in their annual show of strength moved some of the biggest wheels in the nation's most powerful political machine. It was the annual St. Patrick's Day parade, but regardless of ethnic, racial or religious stripe, practically every precinct captain, ward committeeman and patronage worker was there. At the head of the throng--which included members of the city's bureau of forestry, bureau of electricity, bureau of sanitation and bureau of equipment service--stepped His Honor himself. Sporting an emerald hat and a shillelagh, Mayor Richard Joseph Daley marched jowl by jowl with the machine's new hero, Michael Hewlett. The reason for this celebration was that Hewlett had just preserved the machine's supremacy by knocking off its bitterest enemy, the incumbent Illinois Governor, Daniel Walker.

The state Democratic primary had been rough and shrill. Hewlett, the Illinois secretary of state, called Walker "a bum" and an "irresponsible son of a bitch." Walker countered with angry charges of "bossism," saying that the issues all boiled down to whether or not the Daley machine "puppets" would control state government. In fact, Hewlett's victory--by 54% to 46%--reasserted Daley's power over the whole state and enabled the mayor to humble Walker, who had been feuding with the machine ever since he upset Daley's candidate for the governorship in 1972.

From city hall, the word went out to many of the machine's 25,000 patronage workers: turn out the votes for Hewlett or lose your city job. The ward committeemen got the message, and so did the precinct captains, who perform every service from bailing kids out of jail to helping faithful Daley followers find city jobs to assuring that garbage pickups and street repairs are made. On election day, the precinct captains strove mightily to meet the voter turnout quotas expected of them. The captains pointedly greeted voters by their names, while lesser machine workers carefully checked off against neighborhood lists those people who showed up at the polls. By midafternoon, if a "safe" voter had not shown up, a runner was dispatched to bring him in before closing time.

The machine did not win them all.

U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, 65, the former track star who placed second to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics, won re-election with 72% of the vote in a largely black area of Chicago's South Side, beating off a challenge by a Daley man. A onetime loyal lieutenant of Daley's who broke with him seven years ago over police misconduct in the black community and in 1975 supported former Alderman William Singer in his unsuccessful attempt to oust The Boss from the mayor's office, Metcalfe ran solely on the issue, "the liberation of the people from the Daley plantation." Thus, though Daley still is supreme, his hold on the city's black vote may be weakening.

Daley's Dragnet. That, however, appears to be the only part of the machine that is weakening in Chicago. True, Daley's dragnet was not the only cause of Walker's loss. The prickly Governor had managed to alienate almost every organized power in the state--the legislature, unions, the teachers and especially the political liberals, who could not forgive him for supporting capital punishment and cutbacks in state aid to education. Walker also failed to gain the backing of any of Chicago's three daily newspapers. Democratic Senator Adlai Stevenson III described the Governor as a man of "consuming personal ambition" who had "paralyzed the state by a failure of leadership."

Walker's defeat leaves Hewlett to face the Republican primary winner, James "Big Jim" Thompson, 39, the former federal prosecutor, who has sent many officeholders--Democrats and Republicans alike--to jail for corruption. On primary night, Thompson staked out his theme for the November elections: "I'm going to talk a lot about one-man rule--and I don't mean Mr. Hewlett." In short, Thompson's main target will be Daley. Thompson is popular, but anybody who tries to topple Daley's men faces quite a job. Just ask Dan Walker, the only incumbent Governor to be knocked out in an Illinois primary in almost half a century.

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