I'm a US history buff. One field I'm obviously very interested in is politics. I don't mean the broad sociopolitical movements, but the gory details, like how did they do it?
For instance, up until the late 1800s, we didn't have a secret ballot for voting in the USA. You picked and submitted a ballot by color -- the color corresponding to the party and/or candidate, provided by the party and/or candidate -- and everyone knew who you were voting for. This gave rise to all kinds of political thuggery and intimidation.
For example, Baltimore was pretty well known for political gangs -- most of which had no particular ideological preference, they just worked for whomever paid them the most. And apparently they were quite creative. One gang was known as "The Blood Tubs" for an innovation they put into place during an election. That is, a couple gang members positioned themselves outside the polling place with a big washtub full of pig's blood. Depending on who you voted for -- or didn't vote for -- you might be dunked in the tub.
Baltimore in the 1860s was very conflicted. Maryland was a slave state, but Baltimore was north of Washington DC, the Union capitol, and the city was host to as many northern industial interests (shipping, manufacturing, transportation) as it was to southern interests (growing tobacco and hemp, raising horses.) So when the bombardment of Fort Sumter set off the Civil War, and Abe Lincoln made his initial appeal for 75,000 volunteers "to put down the rebellion," many of the volunteers from the northern states had to take the trains through Baltimore to get to Washington. Maryland, being a slave state and at the time not committed to the Union or Confederacy either way, was in a quandary.
On the one hand, the railroads ran through Baltimore, no way around that; on the other hand, no one in the federal government even bothered to ask Maryland or Baltimore if Yankee soldiers could swarm across their boundaries. So when the first trainloads of soldiers began traipsing through Baltimore, riots broke out. Really bad riots. One Yankee soldier was beaten to death on the street and something like 100 other people were killed or wounded.
Supposedly the riots were set off by one or another political gang. Quite possibly The Blood Tubs, though the Blood Tubs ended up eventually supporting the Union. They policed the harbor, as I understand it.
Martin Scorsese's movie, "Gangs of New York," was about this very subject. As factual history, the movie was only so-so, but New York City did have gangs, like most other northern cities. In New York, many of them provided labor pools for Tammany Hall politicians who recruited gangs either to strong-arm political opponents in the fashion of Baltimore's Blood Tubs, or to take patronage jobs and support Boss Tweed and his pals.
Anyway, supposed "Chicago-style politics" is nothing new in the USA and the phenomenon never was confined to Chicago. Chicago may be one of the last really great practitioners of it, but from what I've heard from friends in other cities, I doubt it.
So I'll impart a few things that go on pretty routinely in Chicago politics, but always with the reservation that these are not exclusively Chicago tactics. In fact, Chicago probably learned them from older cities Back East. Oh, and by the way, for all intents and purposes, there is only one political party in Chicago -- the Democrats. Chicago goes through the motions of campaigns and elections and all, but really, whoever wins the Democrat primary in virtually any election is for all intents and purposes, The Winner.
Suppose you have a Democrat running uncontested in one ward or congressional district. Then maybe someone calling himself a Republican or Green Party candidate, or Libertarian, manages to collect enough petition signatures to get his/her name on the election ballot. There are several things the Democrats can do:
1.) Offer the potential opponent a city job. This is essentially a pay-off. It will be a do-nothing job, probably, but I would guess about half of all city workers in Chicago don't do much of anything.
2.) Challenge the signatures on the petitions. It's free. Any ol' citizen can stroll into City Hall and claim that the Green Party candidate has a lot of phony signatures on their ballot petitions. So the Green Party then has to check all the signatures -- maybe 25,000 of them for a congressional district -- against voter registration records. You might have 15 or 20 signatures on a page, and if any one signature is proven bogus, the whole page gets discarded. So it's usually a good idea to collect about 25% or more signatures than are required. Both getting the signatures and checking them takes time and can cost a lot of money. One way to make your opponent go broke before the campaign begins. It strangles the opposition in red tape.
3.) Whisper Campaign. If the opponent actually gets on the ballot, or even if s/he's a Democrat challenging the established Machine, you can tell some whopping big lies about him/her to derail their campaign. The Machine did this to Harold Washington when he ran for mayor. The Machine didn't want him -- in Chicago, African-Americans don't call the shots; they're supposed to just tow the party line. Anyway, I know people now who still believe Harold Washington wore ladies' underwear. That was one element of the whisper campaign against him. This type of thing is especially hard to defeat because no one makes any accusations out loud, they just spread rumors. The candidate usually doesn't want to repeat and publicize the rumors, so the lies create a sort of perennial cloud of uncertainty around him.
4.) A simple suggestion. About 30 years ago, after the 1980 census if I recall, a new congressional district was gerrymandered in Chicago to create a Hispanic district. Kinda strange, because Chicago is host to several different cultural groups that are Spanish-speaking, including South Americans, Cubans and Mexicans, and these groups don't have much else in common except that they speak Spanish. Anyway, there was no incumbent in this brand new district, and about five people threw their hats in the ring for the Democrat primary. (Remember, the person who wins the primary, wins, period.) Anyway, a friend of mine volunteered to work for one of these candidates. She wasn't especially interested in politics, but was getting college credits for participating. So she answered phones and stuffed envelopes at Candidate X's storefront campaign HQ.
One evening some guy came in and started chatting with the campaign workers. He was saying Candidate X didn't have a shot against Candidate Y, who was backed by the Machine. He said Candidate X was just wasting everyone's time and misleading the public and he should just drop out of the race. It was hopeless anyway. I suppose he got some happy talk back from the volunteers -- some of them were committed to Candidate X. And the guy didn't seem too ruffled by it, just went on and on about how Candidate X should drop out of the race. He wasn't convincing anyone, but wasn't really causing a problem... they were just talking.
Then the guy just opened his overcoat to show that he had a gun in the waistband of his pants. He didn't say anything about it, just wanted to make sure all the volunteers saw it. Then he said a pleasant "good night" and left, having delivered his message. I figure the candidate must have looked like he could have successfully challenged the Machine's favorite, but we'll never know....
5.) Public protests. This tactic usually works best for labor unions or organizations like Jesse Jackson's old Operation Push. Basically you organize a noisy and embarrassing public protest -- usually around lunch time in The Loop downtown when there are a lot people on the streets and TV news crews can film the protest and interview the leaders in time to get on the evening news. This is done all over.
One case I know of firsthand, because I covered it as a journalist, involved complaints about a large Chicago-based company laying off a bunch of mostly African-American workers. OK. They'd been hired for only a few months for one particular project. In fact, every year for more than 10 years the company hired workers for this one particular project. If the workers were black, that was probably not by design; those were the people who applied for the job. Anyway, one or another organization protested and accused the company of racism and all that, and even threatened to boycott this company's customers.
As a journalist, I interviewed one of the company executives some time later, after the company had met with the protesters and their leaders and "come to an agreement." The agreement was, the company donated $5 million to this organization. The company didn't create any permanent jobs for the workers; in fact, the company shut down the facility and moved out of the city a couple years later. But the organization -- or its leaders, anyway -- got its $5 million. The settlement wasn't publicized, and the executive I interviewed told me the terms only after I promised not to report them. The company was fearful of some kind of reprisals from the protesting organization.
And you see, none of this type of thing is limited to Chicago. It's extortion, thuggery, strong-arming, intimidation, bribery.... It's just politics as usual.
Matter of fact, Mike Royko, a Chicago newspaper columnist who wrote a lot about local politics, used to say that Chicagoans didn't give a damn what kind of games the politicians played, as long as the city picked up the trash and plowed the snow in winter. He was right. Nobody cared who was being pummeled or ostracized as long as the politicians left the public alone. And that seems to be the key: Leave the public alone.
What I find interesting about the current nationwide conflict over socialized medicine is that -- none of these politics-as-usual tactics seem to be working, and The Comrade doesn't seem to understand why not. Socialized medicine is, in its own way, a sort of huge bribery scheme to win the support of the middle class and keep them voting for you. Like Tammany Hall hiring the Irish gangs as New York City cops 130 years ago or so.
But the middle class doesn't seem to be buying into the scheme. They mainly just want to be left alone with their existing health insuance, or lack of it. So now The Comrade, Pelosi, and all their Merry Men are going around trying to browbeat and initimidate the insurance companies, AARP, etc etc... But the general public still isn't buying into the program.
What's a gang of scheming, corrupt, self-serving, lying, arm-twisting thugs to do in such a case?
Maybe just give it up, get real jobs, and -- yes, please -- leave the rest of us alone.
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