Illinois Politics

A Citizen's Guide

James D. Nowlan, Samuel K Gove, Richard J. Winkel

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252077029, 9780252035203
• eBook ISBN: 9780252092015
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Considered a microcosm of the nation, the state of Illinois stretches almost four hundred miles from its northern limit at the Wisconsin line to its southern tip at Cairo, nestled between Kentucky and Missouri. Its political culture is as intriguing as the state is long.

Illinois has produced presidents and leading members of Congress. It also has a long history of political corruption, including, in recent years, the federal indictments of two consecutive governors. The population of the state is exceptionally diverse, with a significant number of new immigrants. Its political allegiance, once firmly Republican, has trended ever more Democratic. Illinois can be divided neatly into three distinct regions: Chicago, the suburban collar surrounding the city, and the ninety-five downstate counties.

Based on the research and experience of respected veterans of Illinois politics, this book shows how the government runs, how politics operates, and what obstacles and opportunities exist for change. It explains how power is exercised and how parties compete for it. For engaged citizens, scholars, and students, Illinois Politics: A Citizen's Guide is a timely and much-needed roadmap for positive change.

1.

Illinois in Perspective

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Since its earliest days, Illinois has been captive to a political culture that treats government as just another marketplace in which to do business. In turn, this marketplace has provided a fertile setting for corruption, which has flourished. As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, glimmers of reform emanate from assertive good-government groups, and more ethical behavior may be forthcoming in reaction to a series of successful, nonpartisan prosecutions by a forceful, dogged U.S. attorney in Chicago.

The state is also characterized by its diversity. At the center of the nation, Illinois is sometimes referred to as a microcosm of the country. In 2007, for example, the Associated Press, in more prosaic terms, named Illinois “the most average state” in the nation, based on how closely the states matched national levels with regard to twenty-one demographic and economic factors. According to the AP, “Illinois’ racial composition matches the nation’s better than any other state. Education levels are similar, as are the mix of industry and the percentage of immigrants.”¹

Average, maybe, but, as we hope readers will conclude by the end of this book, anything but typical; that is, Illinois is a truly distinctive state in cultural and political terms.

This chapter provides a cultural, demographic, and economic framework in which to understand Illinois. Subsequent chapters view the state’s government and politics from within this framework and in the context of the major institutions of government.

We begin with a brief introduction to the topic of political culture, which, we believe, is central to the understanding of the distinctive cast of Illinois politics.

Daniel Elazar was the leading student of political culture. Elazar has identified three primary strains of political culture among the groups that settled the American states: traditionalistic, moralistic, and individualistic.² For the traditionalistic culture, government’s function is positive but is limited to securing the continued maintenance of the existing social order and its dominating elites. The moralistic orientation tends to view government as a positive instrument for promoting public good, with honesty and commitment to public service as strong values. The individualistic strain sees the democratic order as just another marketplace where individuals and groups may improve themselves socially and economically; ideology—and, in particular, an ideology of the common good or public interest—is of little concern, and because of the government-as-market orientation, profiting from government activity is tolerated.³

All three cultures still exist in Illinois, but the values of individualism are dominant, according to Elazar. “Politics in Illinois,” he writes, “came early to be centered on personal influence, patronage, distribution of federal and later state benefits, and the availability of economic gain of those who were professionally committed to politics as their ‘business.’”⁴ Or, as politicians as well as interest groups and regional interests in the state have been known to ask, “Where’s mine?”

In addition to the individualistic political culture, Illinois can be understood better, we believe, using demographic and economic perspectives. The slow growth of the population, for example, masks a pulsing of people outward from Chicago to an ever-widening suburban growth ring. The decades-long movement of population from Chicago and the inner rings of the metropolitan area to bigger homes and more space on the outer rings has now brought the Democratic Party’s influence and electoral clout to a region long dominated by Republicans.

The state’s economy, though huge, has generally been growing more slowly than that of the nation since World War II. While still a bit wealthier than the nation as a whole, the Illinois economy no longer yields tax revenue sufficient to meet either the wants of its residents or the spending habits of its elected officials. Before turning to each of these conditions, however, we offer some historical perspective.

The “Tall State,” as it was called in a 1960s tourism campaign, stretches almost four hundred miles from its northern limit at the Wisconsin line to its southern tip at Cairo (pronounced “kay’-ro”), nestled between Kentucky and Missouri. The northernmost latitude is on a line with Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and at Cairo, its latitude is close to that of Portsmouth, Virginia.

The state’s diversity is due in great measure to U.S. territorial delegate Nathaniel Pope, who in 1818 succeeded in passing an amendment to the Illinois Enabling Act that moved the new state’s northern boundary forty-one miles to the north. This area of eight thousand square miles—mostly empty at the time—today encompasses metropolitan Chicago and almost 80 percent of the state’s population; without it, Illinois would never have become the powerhouse that it is.⁵

Settlement of the state was facilitated by natural factors, ingenuity, and human achievements. The Ohio River offered a convenient super-waterway, and the state’s generally level topography made the prairie relatively easy to traverse on foot. The opening of the Erie Canal in New York in 1825 facilitated the flow of Yankees and European immigrants via the Great Lakes. The early development of Illinois as a railroad center helped disperse the newly arrived throughout the state; later, the main line of the Illinois Central Railroad, running from New Orleans, would bring tens of thousands of blacks to jobs in Chicago.

The platting, or dividing, of Illinois into townships of thirty-six uniform parcels of one-mile squares, as decreed by the U.S. Congress in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, was designed to transfer public lands efficiently into private hands.⁶ This it did. Each mile square represented a “section” of land of 640 acres. Township roads were laid out along the sections. The township plats made it simple to survey and sell virgin land with a minimum of confusion and dispute. Even today, for the airplane traveler crossing Illinois, a geometric checkerboard pattern passes below.

There was a hunger to develop this rich flatland, but, first, transportation infrastructure was needed to get the settlers in and the bounty of the fields to market. When Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas served as state lawmakers in the 1830s, the legislature embarked on an ambitious scheme of “internal improvements,” but the dreamed-of network of wood-plank roads, canals, and railroads collapsed under the weight of poor planning, a weak national economy, and a lack of both capital and engineering capacity.⁷ Lincoln and Douglas later became U.S. congressmen and revived the idea, this time convincing the U.S. government to assist by providing huge land grants for private investors. In 1851 the federal government offered 3.75 million acres of railroad right-of-way and adjoining land to investors in the Illinois Central Railroad. Within five years, 705 miles of track had been laid from Cairo to Galena, with a spur to Chicago. The Illinois Central became the longest railway in the world and the nation’s largest private venture to date.

Railroads served as the interstate highways of the nineteenth century. If a town was on a rail line, it generally prospered; if not, the town was often abandoned. Railroad trackage in Illinois increased from 111 miles in 1850 to 2,800 miles in 1860 to 7,000 miles by 1875. In part because of its railroad grid, Illinois was the fastest-growing territory in the world by the middle of the nineteenth century.⁸ The thirty-six million acres of land in Illinois were enough for about a quarter-million quarter-section (160-acre) farms. One-fourth of those farms had been taken by 1850 and nearly all by 1875. Three in four farms were within five miles of a railroad, and only 5 percent were more than ten miles distant.⁹

Early Triumph for the “Modernizers”

In the free-for-all environment of the state’s early days, no one culture held sway. This northern state had been settled first by southerners, primarily poor, land-hungry northern British and Scots-Irish pioneers from the uplands of Virginia and the Carolinas and from Tennessee and Kentucky.¹⁰ James Simeone describes the first settlers as the “white folks” who saw the West (Illinois Territory) as a place of opportunity and feared the reestablishment of an economic aristocracy by English and old Virginia families.¹¹

A second surge came in the 1830s via the new Erie Canal, primarily from New England and the Middle Atlantic states. These Yankees, who mostly settled in the central and northern parts of Illinois, generally brought more assets with them and put down roots into richer farmland than did those farther south.

These settlement patterns set the stage for a struggle between the “white folks” in southern Illinois and the “modernizers,” primarily Yankees, in the north.¹² The genius of the modernizers, according to Richard Jensen, lay in a combination of values: faith in reason, a drive for middle-class status, equal rights, and the sense of having a mission to transform the world in their image. Education was their remedy, efficiency their ideal.

Everyone in Illinois recognized the difference between modernizers and white folks, or “traditionalists,” as Jensen identifies them, although nobody used those words. Each group thought the other peculiar. Fast-talking Yankee peddlers were distrusted—one county even set a prohibitive fifty-dollar-per-quarter license fee for clock peddlers. One Yankee woman was amused by the drinking, horse trading, and quaint, slow drawl of the southerners. She talked with one who allowed that “it’s a right smart thing to be able to read when you want to” but who didn’t figure that books and the sciences would “do a man as much good as handy use of the rifle.”¹³

Strong commitment to education was the hallmark of the modernizers. By 1883 the northern part of the state provided its children with one-third more days of schooling than did the schools in “Egypt,” as deep southern Illinois was called, with its towns of Cairo, Karnak, and Thebes.¹⁴ Jensen quotes a nineteenth-century governor on the values in northern Illinois: “Is a school house, a bridge, or a church to be built, a road to be made, a school or minister to be maintained, or taxes to be paid? The northern man is never to be found wanting.”¹⁵

By 1860 the Yankee modernizers dominated northern Illinois politics, while traditionalists held sway in the south. Central Illinois became the uncertain political battleground. With Lincoln’s election and the Civil War, the modernists triumphed and, through the Republican Party, controlled Illinois politics almost continuously for the following seventy years. (In order to emphasize that generalizations about traditionalists and modernizers are just that, we note that Lincoln the modernizer came from southern traditionalist roots while Stephen A. Douglas, who represented the traditionalist viewpoint in the 1860 presidential election, came from upstate New York.)

Chicago and the Great Midwest

In a compelling synthesis of the organic relationship between a great city and the vast prairie that envelops it, William Cronon explains that neither Chicago nor the rich countryside of the Midwest would have developed its great wealth if not for the symbiosis between the two: the urban center contributing creativity, energy, and capital and the farmers and small towns providing ambition, intelligence, and the harvest from incredibly fecund soils.¹⁶ Plentiful water and easy waterborne transportation provided further economic stimulus. The Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers formed Illinois’s natural boundaries, while the Illinois River traversed the middle, positioning the state at the heart of the young nation’s economic expansion.¹⁷

At the southern tip of Lake Michigan, Chicago sat astride the boundary between East and West. Chicago’s meatpackers, grain merchants, and manufacturers showed extraordinary drive and creativity, not to mention a knack for attracting capital. The railroads were eager to carry their goods, and these capitalists put the Midwest’s natural resources to use to create an unprecedented hive of economic development by the end of the 1800s.

Almost all the Chicago capitalists were Yankees such as the meatpackers Philip Swift and Gustavus Armour. These two men and their collaborators systematized the market in animal flesh. Building on the adage that “the hog is regarded as the most compact form in which the Indian corn crop . . . can be transported to market,” they created hog slaughtering lines that were the forerunners of the assembly line.¹⁸ Cattle were standardized as grade no. 1, 2, or 3. Rail cars were refrigerated so that dressed beef from Chicago could be marketed in the East.

According to Cronon, the overarching genius of Swift and Armour lay in the immense, impersonal, hierarchical organizations they created, operated by an army of managers and workers who would outlive and carry on after the founders. By 1880 Chicago had more than seventy-five thousand industrial workers, the largest such labor force west of the Appalachians.¹⁹ To quote the muckraker Frank Norris: “The Great Grey City, brooking no rival, imposed its dominion upon a reach of country larger than many a kingdom of the Old World.”²⁰

By 1890, Chicago, with more than one million residents, was the nation’s second-largest city. It promoted itself in 1893 by presenting the World’s Columbian Exposition to twenty-seven million visitors. From a one-square-mile tract of marshes and scrub pines on the south side of Chicago arose a fairy city that hosted the exhibits of forty-six nations, a single exposition building said to seat three hundred thousand persons, and an amusement park ride built by George Ferris that could carry forty persons in each of thirty-six cars on a 250-foot-high revolving wheel.²¹ Visitors were equally impressed by the real-world development a few miles up the lakefront in the city center. At twenty-one stories, the Masonic temple was the world’s tallest building, a so-called skyscraper.

There was a tension betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Illinois in Perspective
• 2. Power, Parties, Groups, and the Media
• 3. Elections Kent D. Redfield
• 4. Constitutions
• 5. The Legislature
• 6. The Executive
• 7. The Courts
• 8. The Intergovernmental Web
• 9. Education
• 10. Taxing and Spending
• 11. Illinois: Strong but not Achieving
• Notes
• Index