Read Believer: My Forty Years in Politics for Free Online

fact, he scared the hell out of me.
    “Four years from now, forty percent of you won’t be here,” said Levi, as sober and austere as the institution he led. There were hundreds of students in the freshman class, but, somehow I felt that Levi was speaking directly to me when he said, “The University of Chicago is not for everyone,” as if he had already spotted the B student poseur in the crowd.
    As it turned out, Levi would be gone before
me
. Three years after my frightening initiation, he was recruited by President Gerald Ford to serve as attorney general and restore integrity to a Department of Justice shaken to its foundations by the Watergate scandal.
    The U of C, then as now, had distinguished graduate schools, known for their erudition and Nobel Prize–winning scholars, but the undergraduate college at that time was more of an afterthought, with scant campus life. It was a wonderful school for highly motivated students who were not looking for much more than great professors and an outstanding syllabus, and many of my classmates came eager to settle into the monastic life of the scholar. I did not. I was not the typical U of C freshman. I was still very much the hyper kid, smart enough to get by, but too distracted to sit still for hours contemplating Aristotle.
    Much of what we were required to study, particularly in our first years, was rooted in ancient history. The classes I enjoyed most were the few (such as those offered by sociologists Morris Janowitz and Richard Taub) about contemporary Chicago and its byzantine politics. (Okay, maybe some of that ancient history, for example, that of the Byzantine Empire, was relevant.)
    As interesting as those courses were, what really fascinated me was the community that surrounded the campus, starting with the Hyde Park home of the university. Nestled in the heart of the South Side, the U of C was an island, largely cut off from the low-income areas around it through the creative use of “urban renewal” and the visible presence of a robust security force. Mike Nichols, who attended the college in the 1950s before attaining fame as a comic and a film director, described the Hyde Park community of his day as “black and white together, shoulder to shoulder, against the lower classes.” Yet Hyde Park also had a rich history as the seat of liberal, anti-machine politics in Chicago. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Hyde Park sent to the City Council aldermen who stood up, often alone, for government reform and racial integration. Hyde Park was a world apart from that of the antiquated, rough-and-tumble machine politics that still ruled the city.
    Chicago was a parochial town, divided into fifty wards with strong, ethnic identities and politics that could best be described as tribal. There were the black wards of the South and West Sides; the heavily Jewish wards on the lakefront in the North Side; small but growing Hispanic enclaves (Mexican in the South, Puerto Rican in the North); and the white ethnic strongholds of the Northwest and Southwest Sides, mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish. At times these tribes had warred over political spoils. Richard J. Daley’s great genius was to forge them into a cohesive political whole. Seizing two powerful positions, as party chair and mayor, Daley used the vast patronage at his disposal to harmonize the disparate parts of the machine, and keep it humming. It was a system of interlocking mutual obligations.
    To maintain that system, the mayor relied on the Democratic committeemen, who reigned over their ward organizations like rough-hewn feudal lords.
    Each ward had its chieftain, and Daley would ply them with patronage in exchange for their political fealty to the party’s ticket and, by extension, his public programs. The committeemen, in turn, would build ward organizations made up of an army of patronage workers, who owed their public jobs to their more important work in their precincts on behalf of the local