Illinois

THE two great national issues, Vietnam and civil rights, are posed in Illinois this autumn, because a Democratic senator more hawklike than President Johnson is up for re-election and because Chicago has been chosen as the target city of Martin Luther King’s Northern crusade. Nonetheless, the significance of the campaign between incumbent Senator Paul H. Douglas and Republican business executive Charles H. Percy may be confused by another development of significance for politicians generally: Percy may, by avoiding a specific stand on either of these issues and campaigning on his youth (forty-seven) and personal attractiveness instead, be the first major victim of the heretofore infallible “personality cult” campaign.

The style — “fresh,” “young,” “sincere” — has been practiced with some success by Percy’s fellow Republicans William Scranton and John Lindsay, and perfected by the Kennedys. But the most profound lesson of this campaign may be that personality devoid of apparent commitments is ultimately an image unappealing to voters and productive of suspicion. It may be that Chuck Percy could learn a thing or two from Martin Luther King, who has shown Chicago that he is, to say the least, forceful.

Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Chicago from Atlanta last autumn little aware of the complexity of racial inequality and poverty in the North. As one of SCLC’s community organizers ruefully puts it, “We were gonna end slums.” That naïveté soon vanished in the depths of the West Side neighborhood where SCLC set up shop in a run-down church building. There, King joined forces with indigenous rights groups which had previously been coordinated into one citywide council, but which lacked the strong leadership of King and talented lieutenants like James Bevel.

SCLC realized early that the usual stereotypes are frequently inaccurate. Housing is the Negro’s most visible major problem in Chicago: with one or two exceptions, no neighborhoods are integrated; a five-room apartment rents for $70 to whites as against $95 to Negroes.

Experiences in the South have made some rights activists susceptible to “devil” theories, such as the one which says that substandard housing is caused solely by rapacious landlords. The shortcomings of this theory became embarrassingly clear when the target of King’s first public action in Chicago, an attempt to institute what he called a “supra-legal trusteeship” over a run-down tenement, turned out to be not a slumlord, but a slumweary eighty-one-year-old invalid who said he would be only too glad to convey the building to King if King would relieve him of the mortgage. Subsequently, the mayor has released figures indicating that 50 percent of all buildings in the worst West Side slums are owner-occupied.

Such reverses caused King to describe the first stage of his sojourn in Chicago as a period of “definition and dramatization.” His stall sought the advice of scholars at neighboring universities in devising more sophisticated programs.

King’s thirty-three demands

The final result, hammered out in long sessions between the many civil rights groups now working in Chicago, was a remarkably specific set of thirty-three demands. Eleven of the demands concern housing, but none relates directly to slumlords; the emphasis has shifted to what King calls “structural changes,” such as more, scattered lowrise public housing and open-occupancy laws to relieve the pressure on Negro neighborhoods.

To date, the movement has little it can point to in the way of direct-action programs. True, in two West Side neighborhoods it has organized some fifty tenant families into a union which has negotiated a contract requiring a major real estate management firm to repair and maintain buildings. Boycotts of local food-producing companies have led to agreements to prefer Negroes in hiring and promotion. Rights workers have met with teen-age gangs, who are in many ways already more organized than the rights groups themselves, to attempt to divert their energies to the movement. But such efforts have yet to make a noticeable impression on the neighborhoods.

The power of the mayor

The movement’s strategy has been largely directed toward forcing significant government action, not on a municipal but on a national scale. Chicago was chosen as the target city in part because Mayor Richard J. Daley is probably the most powerful public, official in the country outside Washington, as his ability to override HEW’s stoppage of federal funds to Chicago’s de facto segregated school system dramatically indicated.

But because Daley is probably also the country’s most efficient bigcity mayor, a total commitment to the solution of city problems, were it made, would be more likely to produce results in Chicago than in other cities.

Examples of promising starts and of distances still to be traveled are plentiful. Largely in response to pressures from civil rights groups, the Chicago poverty program is the best in the country: with federal funds, Daley has begun housing-code enforcement and rodent-control campaigns and has instituted a sizable pre-school Head Start program. Yet there is hardly a pretense that the poor are represented on the governing boards, and legal services for the poor have been stymied because of the mayor’s refusal to permit federal funds to be used in litigation against city agencies.

Police brutality charges in Chicago lack some of the credibility they carry in other cities because of the good faith and competence of Orlando W. Wilson, who has won acclaim both for the swift efficiency with which his police department produced a suspect in the murder of eight student nurses and for the tact he displayed in integrating every two-man patrol, insofar as the number of Negroes on the force permits. But Negro and Puerto Rican minority groups remain bitterly conscious that physical abuse and harassment are still standard operating procedure in some lower echelons of the force, and the need for a full-fledged civilian review board is emerging as an issue.

Although in 1963 Daley won barely half of the votes of Chicago’s whites, since then he has been careful that his every move to the left should appear to be in response to irresistible pressure, and it is unlikely that he has lost support among the conservative ethnic groupings — the Poles, the Germans, the Irish — that constitute much of Chicago’s white population.

For example, by stalling before retiring “Big Ben” Willis, the controversial school superintendent who kept Chicago’s schools largely segregated by rigid adherence to the neighborhood-school concept, Daley appeased white groups who feared Negro inundation and deflected the criticisms of civil rights leaders to Willis. In the June election he mobilized a massive campaign for a $195 million bond issue that carried by more than two to one. He has the solid backing of the business community because he has improved transportation facilities, encouraged business expansion, and ensured that the various city agencies are more honest and efficient than in recent memory. With the Republican Party in Cook County so moribund that it has no workers in a quarter of the city’s precincts, Daley has a control so absolute that serious challenge, if he chooses to run again in 1967, is nearly unthinkable.

Hence the civil rights groups are hardly able to treat with the mayor from a position of strength. SCLC did not commit itself in the primaries in June despite the fact that several insurgents were running against the city machine specifically on civil rights issues. SCLC knew that Negro bosses such as Congressman William Dawson would make certain that the primaries produced negligible protest votes from the Negro poor, 90 percent of whom voted for the mayor in 1963, and who remain the backbone of the Democratic machine. What worries the mayor is not challenge at the polls, but more protest, Watts-style, in the streets.

Rallies instead of anarchy?

When mobs grew so irrational during the July disorder that they pelted rocks and Coke bottles at firemen fighting fires in a Negro area, conservative businessmen with no previous concern for the movement began to grasp at civil rights rallies as a desirable alternative to anarchy; in the words of one of them, “They’re a better way of letting off steam than rioting.”

The anomaly is that with the exception of certain gangs, persons likely to riot do not attend civil rights rallies. Of the forty thousand in attendance at the Freedom Rally on July 10 the great majority were middle-class Negroes and sympathetic whites. The atmosphere was friendly, and the sullen and alienated poor, who are almost as far removed from the Negro leaders’ control as they are from the white city officials’, were not in evidence. But both city officials and rights leaders know that if demands once made are peremptorily and publicly denied, frustration in the ghettos will spur new violence.

This is the trump that King and the others hold, and it is why Daley has been careful not to permit the sides to polarize. A top Daley aide summed up both the core of the mayor’s strategy and the reason why King has had difficulty in finding a focus for his campaign when he said, “In the South, King gave them love, and he got back hate. Here he’s giving us love, and we’re giving him love right back.”

If the Democratic machine in Chicago does founder, it will be because it loses the votes of middleclass Negroes such as those who attended the Freedom Rally. The mayor himself claims that because 35 percent of Chicago’s Negroes own their own homes, have college educations, or earn more than $6000 a year, Chicago has the largest number of middle-class Negroes of any city in the world — but he cannot claim them as his supporters.

In the June primaries, independent Democratic candidates ran strongest in middle-class Negro districts, where loyalties based on patronage are no longer relevant and voters are apparently anxious to assert their independence of unpleasant associations. Just as the move to the suburbs changes the voting habits of many a good Democrat, the climb to respectability encourages new habits among urban Negroes.

Percy’s chances

Because the Percy challenge has caused Senator Douglas to cast his lot more closely with Daley than with any previous Democratic boss, Percy could attract a substantial number of these middle-class Negro votes despite Douglas’ record as a leader in the fights for liberal civil rights legislation in Congress.

Percy has made much of the facts that under his wunderkind presidency of Bell and Howell, the company adopted a strict fair-employment policy long before such policies became fashionable, and that he was instrumental in the passage of Illinois’s first FEP law. But he opposed open-occupancy laws in his unsuccessful 1964 campaign for governor, and his subsequent change of position, purportedly because he became convinced that real estate dealers would not voluntarily abandon their discriminatory practices as he had previously expected, seems insincere to some because he has hedged before committing himself solidly behind any particular legislative proposal. There is a general feeling that the Republican strategy is to smother the problem in platitudes: so long as Percy is seen shaking hands with Floyd McKissick of CORE, he can afford to ignore the movement’s specific demands.

The lack of credibility that may deny Chuck Percy the substantial portion of the Negro vote which he needs in order to win is not an isolated phenomenon. Percy began the 1964 gubernatorial campaign with the enthusiastic support of many moderates and liberals of both parties, who saw in him an opportunity to retire antediluvian GOP wheelhorses and revive the twoparty system in Illinois. He would undoubtedly have defeated incumbent Governor Otto Kerner had it not been for Goldwater, as Percy ran 650,000 votes ahead of the national ticket and lost to Kerner by less than 200,000. But time and time again since that first race, he has alienated people by protesting his sincerity to excess.

Yet it is the very vagueness of his 1964 anti-Goldwater position which has him in a dilemma, for it did not save him from the wrath of the conservatives, and it has not made him a hero to liberals. He has only lukewarm support from the business community and from conservative Republican politicians, and he has had to rely on a small group of amateurs for campaign staff. And in terms of “image,” he is haunted by the lact that his 1964 strategy was to campaign largely on the innocuous platform plank of bringing more business to Illinois, avoiding altogether the issue of Goldwaterism.

Douglas and Vietnam

Where another candidate might not have to declare himself, Percy may be compelled by the general suspicion that he is a man without political convictions to come clean on the most complex of all current political issues, the war in Vietnam.

Even in downstate Illinois, where troublesome questions of foreign policy are generally rapidly resolved in the simplistic syllogistic terminology of the Chicago Tribune, frequently the only questions asked of the candidates at a stopover concern Vietnam. In a statewide study for which people were asked to name the major political issues of the November elections, 80 percent specified Vietnam, with the next most frequently named issues mentioned only 20 percent of the time. More than half the people questioned in the same poll did not believe that the national security is involved in Vietnam, and a comparable number were dissatisfied with the Administration’s conduct of the war.

The Administration’s defender, Paul Douglas, is, at seventy-four, one of a disappearing breed of hard-line anti-Communist liberals — Humphrey is another. At fifty-one, he quit his University of Chicago professorship during the Second World War to enlist in the Marines, and was decorated in the Pacific. As a senator in 1950 he advocated a preventive war in the form of an atomic bomb dropped on China, and has since been an enthusiastic sponsor of the Committee of One Million, which was created to keep Red China out of the UN. His constant theme has been the need to “probe, needle, and press the Communists.” He said last year, “the equation is simple: either they obliterate us, or we obliterate them.”

How this style of rhetoric will go down this year remains to be seen. His stock phrase now is that he “does not see what else the President could have done.” He has gone on record as opposing negotiations of any sort, and has privately said that though he recognizes his stubbornness on Vietnam may be his Achilles’ heel, he will stand by his earlier statements. Percy’s contribution thus far has been to suggest that the dilemma might be resolved by an All-Asian Peace Conference. The proposal has been received with less than enthusiasm in some circles as it would not only include the Red Chinese but would absolve all Americans, including Chuck Percy, of responsibility for a resolution.

With a sizable anti-war vote and substantial middle-class Negro support, neither of which he has yet courted effectively, Percy could both win his election and breathe life into Republicanism in Illinois. But if a sizable peace vote or dissatisfaction with the Johnson Administration spells defeat of the Democratic ticket, down with it may go a more promising young Illinois political figure, Adlai Stevenson III. Although Stevenson refused to side with Daley on several major issues, Douglas insisted that he be slated as the Democratic candidate for state treasurer because of his 1964 tour de force at the polls when in an atlarge election he led 176 other candidates for the state House of Representatives. In the House he earned a reputation as a hardworking and competent legislator.

On the hustings this autumn he has seemed less articulate and witty but perhaps more approachable than his father, and has begun to amass the independent support that his father never quite built in his home state. If Stevenson runs ahead of Douglas and wins, he will become a leading figure in Illinois politics, a possible candidate for governor in 1968.