The recent indictment of the governor of Illinois seeking to sell the senate seat vacated by the president-elect was only surprising in its brazenness. In the last fifty years, five governors of Illinois have been indicted. Chicago/Cook County was empty prairie in 1840 and fifty years later had one million people, mostly immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Chicago at the end of Lake Michigan was centrally placed to be a railroad meeting point. Meat-packing and steel-making required labor. Chicago politics has been a bye-word for corruption by Republicans and Democrats.
The Republican Blond Boss of Chicago, William Lorimer, stood out. Born in Manchester, England in 1861, his family immigrated in 1866. He was self-educated and worked as a sign painter, meat-packer and street railway operative. Lorimer created a bastion on the West Side of Chicago among the immigrant voters. He led the Cook County Republicans against his rival, later US vice-president, Charles Dawes. Lorimer had two six year terms in the US congress, and in 1909 he was elected to the US Senate by the Illinois legislature. Under the 1787 US Constitution, US senators were elected by the state legislatures. The system had become corrupt with buying of votes of the legislators. Lorimer was accused of buying votes of legislators, and after several investigations, the US Senate declared his election invalid in July, 1912. The state legislatures were in the process of ratifying the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, completed in 1913, which provided for the popular election of US senators. (At the same time, the 16th Amendment was ratified legalizing the income tax; and legislation was passed establishing the Federal Reserve System.)
The Roaring Twenties was the tenure of Chicago mayor Big Bill William Hale Thompson. Thompson was ambivalent about the federal government´s enforcement of the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcoholic beverages which had been introduced by Woodrow Wilson. The national Republicans adopted this Democratic yoke. Against Republican prohibition the local Democratic party recruited new voters daily. Continuing the view among immigrants that: one should not make a sin which God had not made a sin, the Democrats organized municipal plebiscites and patriotic parades.
The chief organizer of these mass anti-Prohibition demonstrations in Cook County was Anton Cermak of the Board of Alderman. Cermak was born in 1873 in Kladno, Bohemia and immigrated a year later with his parents. When attacked in elections, Cermak responded, he might not have arrived on the Mayflower, but he came to America as soon as he could. Cermak created a solid machine of the many ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago and was elected mayor in 1931. He assisted the election of F. D. Roosevelt and accompanied FDR on a post-election vacation to Miami. At a ceremony, an assassin missed FDR and killed Cermak. His Democratic machine continued and became the Richard Daley machine. Among his feats, Daley stole the 1960 presidential election for John Kennedy and from Richard Nixon. One Daley son is the current mayor of Chicago; another son was secretary of commerce under Bill Clinton. Cermak´s son-in-law, Otto Kerner, was governor and US court of appeals judge.
Among the colorful turn-of-the century politicians was Blue-Eyed Billy Sheehan, born in Buffalo in 1859. He was a New York assemblyman, 1885-91; speaker of the assembly in 1891; and Lieutenant Governor of New York, 1892-94. In 1905 Sheehan became the law partner of Alton B. Parker, a judge of New York´s highest court, who was the Democratic candidate for president in 1904 against Theodore Roosevelt. After McKinley twice defeated William Jennings Bryan´s inflation campaigns, Parker represented the return of Grover Cleveland´s Gold Democrats. Bryan ran again in 1908 against William Howard Taft.
Illinois has had some highly respected politicians, such as Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and his unsuccessful challenger in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858; and Abraham Lincoln´s minority election as US president against Douglas in 1860. More recently there was Senator Joseph Medill McCormick (1918-25), the brother of Robert R. McCormick (publisher of the Chicago Tribune), and a leader of the Irreconcilables in the US Senate in 1919 who defeated Woodrow Wilson´s desire to ratify the Versailles Treaty. His wife, Ruth Hanna McCormick (daughter of Senator Mark Hanna who managed Wm. McKinley´s 1896 presidential victory) was a US representative (1929-31) but defeated for US Senate in 1930, a bad year for Republicans.
In 1940 G. Wayland Curley Brooks won the US Senate seat for the Republicans and was re-elected in 1942 (when the public reaction against FDR´s entry into World War II led the Republicans to come within five votes of control of the House of Representatives). Unfortunately, Curley Brooks suffered a particular Republican defeat in 1948. The Republican controlled Illinois state legislature decided it would win the Cold War single-handedly by banning the left-wing Progressive Party of former FDR vice-president Henry A. Wallace, which had a large following in Illinois. Thus, those voters voted for the Democratic ticket, helping to give Harry S. Truman re-election to the presidency and sending left-wing University of Chicago economist, Paul Douglas, to the US Senate. Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson was elected Illinois governor. The Republicans deserved John Stuart Mills label for the Tories the Stupid Party.
Truman handed the Republicans the opportunity to re-gain popularity when Truman sent US troops to Korea without the authorization of the Congress. Senator Robert A. Taft campaigned against Truman´s unconstitutional acts and was strongly re-elected to the US Senate from Ohio. In Illinois former Representative at Large, Everett McKinley Dirksen, was elected to the US Senate defeating the Democratic leader in the Senate, Scott Lucas. A number of other senior Democratic senators were defeated in 1950.
The current scandal plagued governor began as a political captain for Alderman Fast-Eddie Vrdolyak and his ally Alderman Dick Mell. Dick Mell´s power base is the Polish American Alliance and has been an Alderman since 1975. Mell became the political mentor of the future governor who married Mell´s daughter. Once elected in 2002, the new governor tossed aside Dick Mell and tried to gain a reputation as a reformer. If he had not rejected Dick Mell, the governor would have been protected by his father-in-law from direct scandal.
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