Illinois

Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, is a land of contradictions. It is a center of American excellence given to spasms of public corruption. Its political culture typically has little use for people who aren’t “from here,” yet it spawned three presidents who all came from elsewhere. When Abraham Lincoln’s father chose to go back to Indiana, Lincoln headed west in Illinois. Ulysses S. Grant grew up in Ohio, lived in Missouri and stayed only briefly in Galena before heading off to war. Barack Obama, whose formative years were spent in Hawaii, arrived after law school to be a community organizer in Chicago. It is a state whose political discourse is ordinarily conducted in language that is coarse at best and yet has offered up the spare eloquence of Lincoln and the inspiring cadences of Obama.

Illinois has come a long way since May 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was nominated at the Republican National Convention in the 10,000-seat Wigwam in Chicago, to November 2008, when Obama celebrated his victory before a crowd of 1 million in Chicago’s Grant Park, less than a mile from the old Wigwam site. Chicago had 112,000 people in 1860, and was the nation’s boom city in the next three-quarters of a century, growing to a population of 1.4 million by the time it hosted the Columbian Exposition in 1893. “Make no little plans,” Chicago architect Daniel Burnham exhorted. And the city made vast plans, building grand parks on the lakefront, erecting America’s first downtown of skyscrapers, lining its boulevards with retail palaces, creating a great university from scratch on the Exposition’s Midway Plaisance, and housing union agitators as well as corporate leaders. Chicago hosted the Democratic Convention of 1896 that nominated 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan after his “cross of gold” speech, and was the headquarters of the brilliant campaign Mark Hanna waged for William McKinley, who beat Bryan in the fall. Chicago started with the advantage of a great location, where the Great Lakes meet the prairies of the vast Mississippi Valley, and the city’s entrepreneurs made it the hub of the nation’s railroad network and the center of U.S. trade in lumber, grain, and meat.

A century later, Chicago is the nation’s third-largest metropolis and, although often overshadowed by coastal New York and Los Angeles, is still a creative, world-class city, the center of a metropolitan area of 9.7 million people. In commerce, Chicago remains a prime producer and processor of food products, a major manufacturing center, and the strongest white-collar and service economy between the coasts. In finance, it is the home of the world’s greatest commodities exchanges and futures markets. O’Hare Airport, promoted and nurtured by longtime Mayor Richard J. Daley (1955-76), the father of the current mayor, is one of the world’s busiest airports and one of its great hubs of commerce. Chicago was established not by government but by markets. It has always been a bastion of free enterprise, settled by pioneers from New England and Kentucky, by immigrant Irishmen who dug the first canal connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River, and by railroad promoters who saw its potential as the great connecting point between East and West, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. Its factories were built where iron ore from Great Lakes freighters and coal from inland hills came together. Today, many of the old factories have been closed or demolished, and some of the Chicago area’s biggest corporations have had problems. But the city’s economy, based on finance and commodities, manufacturing and food, and undergirded by thousands of small firms, continues to thrive. The O’Hare area rivals downtown Chicago in the number of jobs. Central-city neighborhoods north and south of the Loop attract affluent residents, many to houses worth well over $1 million. Latinos are thronging to the Chicago area, adding vitality to tired old neighborhoods. Illinois’s population is 15% Hispanic and 15% African-American. In June 2008, Chicago was selected as one of the finalists for the 2016 Olympics.

Illinois produced some crucial votes and important public figures in the 20th century. The list starts with Charles Dawes, a 30-year-old lawyer sent to Chicago by Hanna to manage McKinley’s campaign. Dawes later was a World War I general and Calvin Coolidge’s vice president. Next comes Chicago lawyer Harold Ickes, who was Franklin Roosevelt’s great Interior secretary. Prominent Illinois Republicans have included House Speaker Joseph Cannon, Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, Sen. Charles Percy and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Prominent Democrats have included Gov. Adlai Stevenson, both Mayor Daleys, and House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski. It did not produce a serious presidential candidate in the half century after Stevenson, but when Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield in February 2007, he won almost unanimous support from Chicago’s civic and financial establishment.

For most of the 20th century, Illinois was a key political battleground, closely divided between Democratic Chicago and Republican downstate. Its mixture of blacks and whites and Hispanics, immigrants and pioneers, city-dwellers and suburbanites and farmers, the affluent and the impoverished, heavy industry and high-technology, long made it a rough proxy for the nation. For a century, Illinois was a political bellwether, voting only twice for losing presidential candidates between 1896 and 1996—in 1916 and 1976, when it went Republican while the nation went Democratic. But in the 1990s, Illinois became steadily more Democratic than the nation. In 2000, it was one of Al Gore’s best states. In 2004, it voted a solid 55%-44% for John Kerry, with Kerry leading in metro Chicago 60%-39% and Bush leading downstate 55%-45%. In 2008 with favorite son Obama on the ballot, Illinois was not even close. Obama carried the state 62%-37%, metro Chicago 68%-31%, and he won formerly rock-ribbed Republican DuPage and McHenry Counties, He carried downstate as well by a more modest 51%-47%.

Perhaps more than any other state, Illinois has a history of machine politics and more than occasional political corruption. Lincoln was no stranger to the Republican machine of his day, which rallied thousands of partisans to cheer him at his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 and packed the Wigwam convention hall for him in 1860. Machine politics continued through the Gilded Age, as politicians in a closely divided state competed for public jobs and as politicians of both parties courted the immigrants streaming into Chicago. Both the city and downstate had thriving two-party politics in the early 20th century. It was a Republican mayor, Big Bill Thompson, who threatened to punch King George V “in the snoot” if he came to Chicago and who looked the other way as Al Capone’s goons controlled the speakeasies. During the Depression, Chicago became reliably Democratic. In the decades that followed, the suburbs, wary of Chicago, became Republican and developed machines of their own.

Starting in the 1950s, Illinois’s political trends were set by reactions to the officeholder most visible to the voters, who was not the governor off in remote Springfield and certainly not the senators who have to work “out of town” in Washington, but the mayor of Chicago. It was only through the herculean efforts of mayor and Democratic party boss Richard J. Daley that John F. Kennedy was able to win Illinois by exactly 8,858 votes out of 4.7 million cast. In the 1970s, reaction against Daley was key to the rise of Republican James Thompson, who as U.S. attorney successfully prosecuted machine pols and went on to become governor. For most of the 1980s, the dominant figure was Mayor Harold Washington, the able African-American mayor who was vociferously opposed by white politicians in what became know as the “council wars.” Suburbanites, repelled by the hubbub and fearful that Chicago’s problems might increase their taxes, voted heavily Republican.

The major figure today is Mayor Richard M. Daley, elected in 1989. Like his father, he seems to know the city block by block and has worked to beautify it, planting thousands of trees, encouraging handsome wrought-iron fences, and creating Millenium Park on the lakefront. The old political machine that his father so ably led is no more, and Daley has steered clear of the scandals that have brought down some of his associates as well as the last two governors, Republican George Ryan and Democrat Rod Blagojevich. He has used the powers of office to propitiate the black politicians who at first seemed to be obdurate opponents and has won solid support from Hispanics, lakefront liberals and the burgeoning numbers of young singles and gays in the city’s many gentrified neighborhoods. He has been re-elected five times, by increasingly larger margins each time. He has kept on good terms with presidents of both parties and now presumably has a direct line to the White House. Daley’s luster has extended to his party. His example as the state’s leading Democrat undoubtedly helped ease the way for suburbanites to move toward Democrats over the past 15 years.

Illinois became a solidly Democratic state in the 1990s, but it took some time for Democrats to take a commanding lead in the elections. Republican Gov. Thompson, the longest-serving governor in state history (1977 to 1991), was succeeded by downstate Republican Jim Edgar. In 1998, Republicans scored a double victory when banker Peter Fitzgerald beat ethically challenged Democratic Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and veteran officeholder George Ryan was elected governor. But Ryan was driven from office by scandal in 2002 and convicted of racketeering and fraud in 2006. Fitzgerald, an independent type, was loathed by most Republican officeholders and did not seek re-election in 2004. Their departures led to the election of two Democrats of decidedly disparate reputations. Blagojevich was elected governor in 2002 by 52%-45% over a Republican with the unfortunate last name of Ryan, Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan. And Illinois state Sen. Obama got a promotion in 2004 to the U.S. Senate. Obama profited from scandals, which removed his chief Democratic primary opponent and the original Republican nominee from contention, and from the sensational reaction to his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Obama was elected 70%-27%, the most one-sided Senate victory in Illinois history, after a serious contender, Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw amid allegations that he pressured his ex-wife to go to sex clubs; Republicans could muster as a replacement candidate only Maryland resident Alan Keyes, a social conservative and perennial candidate for public office who moved to Illinois to run. The career paths of Blagojevich and Obama moved in opposite directions—Obama went to the White House, Blagojevich was arrested, impeached, and removed from office amid accusations that he tried to leverage his power to appoint Obama’s successor for political favors and personal reward.

Democrats now have firm majorities in the Illinois Legislature and a 12-7 margin in the state’s U.S. House delegation. Looking ahead to 2010, they may be in trouble. Roland Burris, a longtime statewide officeholder, was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Blagojevich on Dec. 30, 2008, but was soon swept up in the “pay to play” scandal. By the following February, it was plain that Burris had given a misleading impression of his contacts with the tainted governor’s associates about the terms of his appointment to Obama’s seat. Prominent Democrats across the state urged him to resign, but Burris refused. The disarray left an opening in 2010 for a Republican candidate like North Shore Rep. Mark Kirk. On Jan. 29, 2009, when the state Senate voted Blagojevich out of office on a 59-0 vote, Democratic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn became governor.