Battle continues against patronage
CHICAGO – The vaunted Chicago Machine was seemingly unstoppable, with a simple, unwritten rule: If you wanted a city job, you had to help get the mayor and his favored candidates elected.
Then came Michael L. Shakman, a mild-mannered attorney who in 1969 began a lonely crusade to destroy the city’s entrenched patronage system – the mayors, ward leaders and precinct captains who doled out jobs, and in the process created a taxpayer-paid army of doorbell-ringing precinct workers so professional at vote-getting they almost always won.
Shakman’s landmark lawsuit eventually led to federal court orders banning patronage and creating a court-appointed monitor to make sure they were obeyed.
But 40 years later, Shakman is still fighting.
Despite considerable progress, “we’ve had widespread disobedience to court orders” because of foot-dragging and fraud at City Hall, Shakman said.
He points to the 2006 conviction of the No. 2 man in the Chicago Office of Intergovernmental Relations, Robert Sorich – known informally at City Hall as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s “patronage director” – as evidence there is still a problem.
Sorich and three other city officials were convicted of taking part in what federal prosecutors describe as a plot to falsify interviews and test scores of job applicants to make sure those who got out the vote on Election Day got the jobs.
The ongoing problem prompted a U.S. district judge three years ago to appoint a monitor, attorney Noelle Brennan, to ensure the so-called “Shakman decree” was followed.
Eventually that job will be phased out and the city compliance office put in charge of making sure the decrees are followed.
But Brennan said in a Sept. 18 report that safeguards still are needed to keep politics out of the compliance office, although “the city has made significant progress over the past two months towards substantial compliance with the accord.”
Just getting this far was a monumental undertaking.
Shakman launched his crusade in 1969 after losing an election for delegate to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention. He says city workers with patronage jobs flooded into his district to make sure his opponent beat him.
He got his first taste of how tough his fight was going to be when his case was assigned to the late U.S. District Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz.
Marovitz had been then-Mayor Richard J. Daley’s roommate when they were both state senators and overnighted in Springfield. And as an after-dinner speaker, Marovitz liked to openly chortle that he got ahead by “climbing Jacob’s Ladder” — Democratic Party Chairman Jacob Arvey’s political ladder.
Marovitz threw out Shakman’s suit immediately. But an appeals court reinstated it. Since then, the suit has been through five judges and 65 lawyers have filed appearances in the case.
But Shakman soldiered on, recalling the doomed delegate campaign.
“I remember one guy came up to me at an Illinois Central (railroad) stop and I was campaigning in the morning and handing out literature and he came up to me and said, ‘Shakman, you’re a nice guy and you’re running a nice campaign, but I can’t support you because I work for the city and I gotta go out and work my precinct,’” Shakman recalls. “He was kind of apologetic about it.”
The whole thing just seemed wrong to Shakman.
“I wasn’t angry, but I was committed to try to do something about this,” he says.
Critics of the patronage system hail the soft-spoken, lawyerly Shakman for striking possibly the most powerful blow ever against the lingering vestiges of the Chicago Machine.
“The insiders at City Hall who benefited from patronage consider him a meddling do-gooder, but the average citizen knows better,” says Andy Shaw, executive director of the nonpartisan Better Government Association of Chicago.
“Every time a job, a raise, a promotion, a perk like overtime or a rigged or padded contract is traded for political work or campaign cash, the average hardworking taxpayer is getting ripped off,” says Shaw.
The patronage system has gotten such bad press in recent years that few politicians speak in its defense publicly. But a few still swear by it.
William M. Beavers, a former alderman who remembers the pre-Shakman era, says he prefers the patronage system because it gave jobs to minorities and immigrants who might not otherwise have gotten them. But he says it’s now over.
“It’s dead,” says Beavers, now a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. “We can’t help anybody. So why would they work for you? I can’t write a letter. I can’t even help them get a job. The process is over.”
Maybe not. Political bias in awarding overtime has been a lingering problem, says Shakman. And he says he doesn’t see any specifics from the city on what has been done to prevent more score faking for favored applicants or the outsourcing of what should be normal city job payroll jobs.
“You ask what’s going on and they give you nonsensical answers,” he says.
Shakman says the patronage system is too deep rooted to be easily ended.
“We have to change the culture,” he says. “If the question is, can we do it, I hope so. Otherwise we’re doomed to a corrupt employment system in Chicago.”
