By now, most people (unless they are living under a rock) in the United States has at least heard of the corruption of the political system associated with Chicago and we had the opportunity to meet with one of the few "good guys" in that system. We (the ACM program) have a great contact with one of the Aldermen for the city of Chicago and he was gracious enough to give us a brief summary of the job he does. His name is Joseph Moore, who was a Knox College graduate (woop woop!) of 1978 and participated in the ACM's Urban Studies Program while at working on his undergraduate degree in Political Science at Knox. He is an Alderman for the 49th ward of Chicago, but let me give you a little introduction to what we have learned. In Chicago, there are a total of 50 different wards, where each ward is assigned one alderman. The aldermen of these wards are appointed by elected officials, so each aldermen are, in essence, mini-mayors of those wards. It was amazing to me the way this political system (in Chicago) is controlled, because it is unlike any other city in America (and probably why there is so much corruption. Joseph referred to the political system of Chicago as actually being in a Fuedal State. This is because the aldermen of the city are comparable to being lords over their "serfs" and the mayor would be comparable to the King. Each ward is populated by around 60,000 people, so each ward has equal political power, but we were told has had much controversy around this idea of equal power. In part of his speech, we were informed that EVEN DEAD PEOPLE have historically voted in Chicago as part of political fraud. In order to control more votes in Chicago, many corrupt politicians used dead people's information to win elections or they would "hire" homeless people to vote in many different wards in return for a cash payment. There was a lot of controversy of this when Mayor Daley (Richard Sr.) was in office. Here's a great article talking about the corruption when Richard Nixon was running for office if you have time. Another amazingly awful fact about previous aldermen in Chicago was...in the past 30 years, 27 (rough estimate) of the aldermen were sent to jail. Those odds are...well... not exactly too great.
Friday afternoon we went on a Chicago Film Tour, where we were taken around the whole city in a charter bus and toured the places where many of the famous films have been taken. The city of Chicago was not well known for movies during Mayor Daley's (Sr.) term. The big film industry in Chicago was almost non-existent until around 1970, when Mayor Daley died in office. He didn't want that kind of exposure on the city because he was afraid the film industry would attack and point out the political corruption within the city and didn't want Chicago seem like the gang and mafia (even though it actually was) center of the U.S. Aside from the corruption, the movie that really jump started the Chicago film industry was the Blues Brothers which opened many more opportunities for films to be hosted by Chicago.
I read part of what I think would have been a great book (had I read all of it) on Chicago politics for a project I did when I was at U of Iowa for that summer...remember? That was fun...anyway. In one of the many chapters addressing corruption, the book talked about an extremely idealistic young African-American entrepreneur(spl?) in C-hicag-o who evetually became alderman of his ward. He was clean as long as he could stay that way, but as they say, "ultimate power corrupts absolutely" and he eventually was convicted of a crime (accepting a bribe I think) while in office.
ReplyDeleteI wish Mr. Moore the best of luck.
Maybe things will change somewhat now that there won't be one of those darned Daley boys in the Mayor's office.