I am grieving for my favorite American city, Chicago.
I should say it was my favorite American city. It’s fallen on hard times now, very hard times.
Not really fallen either. It’s been driven down by a series of feckless mayors and an unharnessed woke culture that perverts the brusque brawn and historic broad-shouldered, productive prominence of the Windy City.
I’ve lived and worked there several times over many years with numerous fond memories of which more later. It’s a beautiful place that has preserved an 18-mile lakefront for people, not industry, with beaches, private boat harbors, parks, museums, a zoo, and a paved path.
Once the nation’s second most populous city, Chicago’s now fallen to third as thousands flee it and a Cook County riven with crime and violence, high taxes, and a hopeless financial outlook crippled by the award of exorbitant public pensions. Companies like Boeing have relocated elsewhere.
The Obamas have taken their many millions out of their adopted town for far-away waterfront estates. And even the Chicago Bears, the bruising Monsters of the Midway, have purchased a vast tract of land for a new stadium in suburbia.
And yet, the Democratic National Committee has just passed over Atlanta to select Chicago once again as the site of its 2024 national convention.
Interesting to see if these fractious political times and addled party leader recreate the Democrats’ divisive and violent 1968 convention there that nominated Hubert Humphrey and introduced me to the experience of teargas.
The 2024 convention will also be a dubious opportunity to showcase a once-grand city where residents and savvy tourists now fear walking on the formerly “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue. The store vacancy rate there is nearing one-third.
Stores have been looted on that street, some were boarded, and others simply gave up. Macy’s, Old Navy, The Gap, Banana Republic, and Timberland, among others, have departed for safer zones.
So bad have things gotten in Chicago that Democrats un-elected the incompetent Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot in favor, not of a reformer, but another Democrat progressive, controlled by the powerful teachers’ union who promises more failed policies.
He’s Brandon Johnson, a teacher’s union organizer who’s called for a vast expansion of city social programs and, since he’s also a devout Democrat, new taxes on city residents.
Outsiders can say, “Have fun, people. You get what you elected.” But that disregards the large number of decent residents without political clout (a Chicago kind of word) who just want a safe place to live and perhaps cannot flee.
I’ve lived in several large U.S. cities run by Democrats. Such immense urban failures are sad, too familiar scenarios suffused with hopelessness.
Their mayors don’t really run these metropolitan areas festering with poverty, crime, and homelessness. They just sit atop them, presiding over ongoing decay and milking what they can for themselves and supporters.
Chicago has been governed almost entirely by Democrats for nearly a century. Back in the 1930s, Mayor Anton Cermak was a pioneer in building a modern urban political machine and fighting criminal gangs.
He did well. But he was assassinated, perhaps by accident (he was sitting next to newly-elected President Franklin Roosevelt), perhaps on orders from a fellow Chicagoan, Al Capone, who looked on government reformers with disfavor.
No loose ends. The homicide case was conveniently and swiftly closed when the assassin was tried, convicted, and executed all within a month.
From its beginning in 1837, the rough-hewn city lived up — or down — to its name. Chicago is an Indian word for a wild, smelly onion that used to live there too.
The 1987 movie “The Untouchables” had an apt Chicago scene with Sean Connery playing a local Irish cop and Kevin Kostner a young federal agent seeking advice on operating the Chicago Way.
Chicago’s openness on the verge of vast prairies fostered an innovative spirit that spawned inventions such as the skyscraper, the Ferris wheel, the mobile phone, the first radio soap opera, the roller derby, deep-dish pizza, railroad sleeping cars, Twinkies, and the zipper. You’re welcome.
Also homed in Chicago was Sears-Roebuck, the mail-order precursor of Amazon. Personally, I’ve especially appreciated Chicago’s Cracker Jack.
Television commandeered U.S. politics with its first coverages of national political conventions, both of them in Chicago in 1952 from the International Amphitheater, now deceased. Likewise, the CBS television program that came out of Chicago eight years later and changed American politics forever.
With its central location, Chicago quickly became a hub for agriculture and transportation — railroads, trucks, Great Lakes shipping, and later, airplanes first with Midway, then O’Hare Airport, once the nation’s busiest.
Mayor Richard J. Daley ruled for nearly a quarter-century overlapping my university years there. (His son Richard M. Daley later reigned almost as long.)
Richard J. saw the economic future coming. So, he instructed the obedient Democrat state legislature to annex a thin strip of land from the city out to a 10-square-mile mega-field and plot it inside Chicago to become O’Hare.
The airport is actually named for a St. Louis native, Butch O’Hare. He was a World War II Navy pilot who became a fighter ace and Medal of Honor recipient by downing five Japanese planes in one day. (His father was for a time a lawyer for Al Capone, who turned on the gangster and was later gunned down on the street by someone.)
Yes, Chicago has been corrupt. Legendary local columnist Mike Royko once suggested the city’s motto — “Urbs in Horto” or “City in a Garden” — be updated to a more accurate “Ubi Est Mea” or “Where’s Mine?”
But the political trick in years gone by was, the city also worked for residents. Dutiful party precinct captains saw to that, helping elected leaders earn their votes.
My Chicago secretary was robbed in the 1970s returning from the grocery store after work. The next day she asked a city garbage crew if perhaps they’d seen her new red-suede purse discarded by the fleeing thief. They had. It was in their truck.
The city workers boosted her into the cab, called the precinct captain, and met him at their garage. He ordered the garbage dumped until the purse appeared.
The captain took my secretary to her dry cleaners, paid for the cleaning, gave her the receipt, and delivered her to our office to explain her tardiness to me in person.
Months later, the Saturday before elections, the same captain appeared at the secretary’s apartment, you know, just to see how she was and, by the way, don’t forget to vote next week.
The result: The young woman who’d lost $60 at knife-point enthusiastically voted to reelect the man who presided over Chicago the night she got mugged.
That’s also the Chicago Way, the old Chicago Way.
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