Slimmer social security

It occurs to me that it's been a long time since I had the idea of talking about Chicago. It is an idea whose time has come. Not, surely, simply because of a local election out there? Well, yes, because of last Tuesday's election, because Chicago has a new mayor, because he is a black man – need I say the first black mayor of Chicago – because he has severely wounded the political machine that has had the city in its grip, or its pocket, for 52 years, but mainly because Chicago is the second city of the United States and is, in some ways, the most vibrant and fascinating of all American cities and what happens there can affect many other cities around the country.

I have no doubt that even though I've been talking for only one minute, you must have in your mind a picture of Chicago. We all have at the back of our minds simple, vivid pictures of a thousand places on earth. They have to be simple because if they weren't, we'd go around in a continual daze admitting that the world was complicated enough to drive us mad.

Hence, the great boon to our serenity and our self-respect of the cliché, the firm preconception we usually pick up in childhood and file away for easy reference later. Say Holland to millions of people and they see at once windmills and tulips, a landscape enlivened, possibly, by a man with his thumb in a dyke. Say Los Angeles and the world still pictures a suntanned girl in a bikini, either on a beach or on a movie set. Say London to a million Americans and I'm afraid the travel pamphlets have successfully done their work of imprinting on our minds the Tower of London, the Household Cavalry, Big Ben and two old gaffers clanking mugs of ale in a country pub with a thatched roof.

And how about Chicago? I'm not sure I can even guess at the present stereotype that most of us refer to. I know very well what the picture was to Englishmen and women 50-odd years ago when Chicago had its last Republican mayor. His name was William Hale Thompson, known as 'Big Bill, the Builder' because he swore he would pave Illinois with hard surfaced roads and he did. His great and rambunctious popularity was due to a sound, if jingoistic, instinct.

Chicago in the Twenties was bursting at the seams with more immigrants from a dozen countries and with the new influx of negroes. Big Bill Thompson decided that to hold them together, to stem any more race riots – there was an appalling one in 1919 – he must find a common scapegoat for everybody to blame and hate. He found it in, of all blameless people, King George V. The British, Bill Thompson said, had seduced America into a European war. The British and the traditions they had passed on to the United States were the enemies of a big, surging, polyglot, industrial city.

We, in England, knew nothing of this at the time but Big Bill Thompson achieved immortality with a single sentence which made headlines in the press of Britain and Europe. 'If,' Big Bill said, 'if King George of England ever comes over here, I will publicly bust him in the snoot!'

Well, King George never took him up on it but we all remembered Big Bill Thompson. He was all we knew about Chicago until, by the middle Twenties, the arrival of prohibition, the national act forbidding the manufacture, sale or consumption of alcoholic liquors, had spawned an underground bootleg industry and competing armies of gangsters. So, throughout the late Twenties and well into the Thirties, you said, 'Chicago' and the penny dropped and you saw Al Capone and his mobsters, wheeling round corners on two wheels of a screeching automobile and gunning down their rivals.

Chicago has suffered so long from the stigma of gangsterism that I doubt the picture is, even now, erased. I'd better say something about what Chicago is and has been to most of the country. Of all American cities, Chicago is THE phenomenon of mushroom growth.

In 1833, a squatter settlement of 200 people. In that year a canal was cut through a sand bar to the Chicago River and Chicago had a harbour. There arrived a hustling mayor from upstate New York who poured money and energy into hundreds of bridges, sewage plants, water systems, parks and seized on a new-fangled sort of house known as 'a balloon frame' – it was the first pre-fabricated house. This was in 1835, by the way, and Mayor Ogden built them by the thousand. The bumper crops from the prairie poured in and within only nine years of that settlement of 200 souls, Chicago was the largest grain market in the world and, in no time, it was also the largest railroad junction. And so on and on and on, its population doubling every ten years till it, also, became the cow slaughterer and meat packer for America and Europe.

Chicago first of all has a splendid lakefront boulevard with green parks in front of it and beyond them the encircling horizon of Lake Michigan which, to the onlooker, might just as well be an ocean since it is just under half the size of England. Chicago has one of the three or four top universities of America, renowned especially for its work in economics, biblical history, linguistics and a pioneer department of sociology. It has an art institute which is a treasure house of, especially, French painting. It has, today, by common consent, the first symphony orchestra of the world. It had the first skyscraper.

It is the city of Frank Lloyd Wright and also of Carl Sandburg and of more gifted writers than I think can be claimed by any other American city. For it is the city of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, of Harriet Monroe and her Poetry magazine, of Vachel Lindsay and Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell and Nelson Algren, and Thorstein Veblen and Saul Bellow, and a whole generation of gifted and racy newspapermen, a clutch of whom moved to Hollywood and gave what we can now see as a brief, but crackling vitality to the best American movie comedies of the 1930s.

But behind the sparkling lakefront facade, the auditoriums and the art institute and the splendid science and industry museum and the parks, there lie miles of, as you move west and north, increasingly dingy neighbourhoods and flimsy slums. In no other American city has the immigrants' pot so noticeably failed to melt. In other big cities, in New York and San Francisco particularly, there are what we used to call 'quarters' – the Chinese quarter, the Italian quarter – but the other immigrant groups have long ago spilled over and intermingled. Black America, everywhere, still packs into the poorest parts of any town, but in Chicago the successive waves of immigrants poured into the city, found their own breeding pond and stayed there. Chicago has been said to be not so much a melting pot, as a chequerboard, a chess board, but you can move and hop around a chess board. It's more like a closed maze where access from one lane to another is not worth the effort.

So, if you look at an ethnic map of Chicago, you're also looking at a political map. For each election district is a small nation and its district leader is invariably of the same national origin as the first immigrants who settled there. So you look down on this maze, you can call off the separate plots from an airplane and see a German Chicago, a Polish Chicago and a Swedish, Italian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Czech, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Irish Chicago and, the largest of the plots, a black Chicago.

Now for the past 50 years, the Democratic party has been quicker than the Republicans in serving the humblest needs of the immigrants and the poor – getting a job, a cast-off suit, paying a court fine, a street peddling licence, hiring a nurse – and, during that half century, the Democrats recruited their healers and captains from each and every section and kept them there to minister to their own kind and, under the benign but iron dictatorship of the late Mayor Richard Daley, it was the Democrats who filled the city government jobs – the police, the firemen, the school superintendents, the sewage workers, the sanitation department. The only and inescapable price to be paid from a dustman or a district leader was to get out the district vote on election day.

Well this year, the retiring Democratic mayor, Jane Byrne, ran in the Democratic primary against the son of old Mayor Daley. A third man, with little hope, a black man named Harold Washington, challenged both of them. Byrne and Daley were, in effect, running against each other for control of the Democratic party machine. It was a fatal error. What they did was to split the vote three ways and to everybody's astonishment, the black man, Washington, won and became the Democrat opposing, in last Tuesday's election, a Republican, a Jew named Epton.

From the start and till the end, the battle was an undeclared but positive race battle. The old white Democratic politicians, the city workers, the police, for one day in their lives deserted and voted Republican. Most of the poor whites and their landlords feared that a black mayor would mean a mass takeover and a general devaluation of their housing, but the desertion of the white Democrats was not quite wholesale.

Upper middle-class white liberals along the lakefront voted for Washington. The qualified blacks voted better than 90 per cent for him.

So, Chicago has a black mayor. The Daley machine is, for the time being, a ruin. The Republicans pretend they've had a blood transfusion. As for the people, white and black, they have no better idea than the columnists and pundits what is to happen next.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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