Chicago’s “House of All Peoples”

Anton Cermak used the enmities of non-Irish Chicago ethnics to build a “house of all peoples,” joining central and east European immigrants with one of several feuding Irish factions.^{Footnote 19} His 1931 mayoral victory made his Democratic coalition dominant, but Cermak could not have accomplished this with only material incentives. Local government lacked sufficient patronage to satisfy expanding immigrant populations.

Individual affectual exchanges were an alternative to material incentives. Precinct workers have been described as proto social workers, exchanging advice for votes. However, in big-city wards, precinct workers were responsible for hundreds of voters, allowing only minimal contact. Furthermore, to focus only on interpersonal relations overlooks a cultural dimension wherein leaders connected to ethno-religious communities. Observers since Gosnell and Handlin have described politicians invoking ethnic identity and symbols to attract immigrant voters.^{Footnote 20} But the examples usually observed were superficial, wearing national colors and eating ethnic foods.

Chicago’s Russian Jewish ward examined here, however, reveals a deeper merger of political leadership and ethno-religious authority than such trivial behaviors. Not every ethnic community’s experience with machines would mimic this case. The norms and practices of different communities should lead to distinctive expressions in public life. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that cultures have norms and expectations through which they replicate their leadership and public institutions. He likens these to the cultural DNA of a community, constituting a “template in terms of which processes external to themselves can be given a definite form. As the order of bases in a strand of DNA forms a coded program . . . so culture patterns provide such programs for . . . the social and psychological processes which shape public behavior.”^{Footnote 21} The methodological barrier to investigation of this article’s subject is the dearth of information about the interactions of machines and ethno-religious communities. Machine politicians did not leave abundant evidence of their work. Their operational code, as one historian writes, was “never write when you can say it, and never say it when you can nod.”^{Footnote 22} Fortunately, Jacob M. Arvey was an exception to that code. He did “write it,” enabling our close investigation of the relationship of his Russian Jewish community to Chicago’s machine.

A Different Kind of Machine Politician

Arvey was a child of Russian Jewish immigrants. In 1923, at the age of twenty-seven, he was elected alderman of Chicago’s 24th Ward and added the job of ward committeeman in 1934. Holding no public office higher than alderman, Arvey reached the top of the machine, becoming “the most influential local Jewish machine leader in American politics.”^{Footnote 23} He mastered the mundane transactions of machine politics, advising, “Put people under obligation to you. Make them your friends.”^{Footnote 24} But Arvey’s leadership also included a rich repertoire of Jewish communal engagement, appealing to his ethnic voters and their collective anxieties through substantive as well as descriptive representation.

The Jewish tradition combines community and synagogue; “religion is not a separate compartment . . . religion separated from daily life would be a self-contradiction,” writes Rabbi Albert Gordon.^{Footnote 25} For leaders to imbibe Jewish ethno-religious authority, their public behavior and agenda must reflect the community’s values. By that standard, machine politicians held low status in Jewish communities, because, as Henry Feingold observes, they “possessed none of the virtues Jews sought in leaders.”^{Footnote 26}

Jacob Arvey stood quite apart from the typical Jewish machine politician of his era. Consider Moe Rosenberg, the 24th Ward’s Democratic committeeman until 1934. He left grade school for work in his father’s junkyard, subsequently serving a prison term for receiving stolen goods. He was an overbearing ward leader. One of his precinct captains admitted, “Moe didn’t want anyone to get any place.”^{Footnote 27} At Rosenberg’s death in 1934, he was under indictment for evading income tax on more than half a million dollars.^{Footnote 28} Or take Abe Ruef, San Francisco’s Republican boss who grew wealthy by protecting gambling and prostitution. Reuf’s greed ultimately gained him a nine-year prison sentence. Then there was Jack Pollack, a leader in Baltimore’s Democratic machine from the 1920s into the 1950s. A grade-school dropout with a long arrest record, Pollak was a bootlegger before turning to politics. A businessman for whom Pollack reduced property tax in trade for bribes said of him, he “did nothing for nothing.”^{Footnote 29} In contrast to these leaders, Arvey cultivated “virtues that Jews sought in leaders.”

I will examine the 24th Ward’s political life in three dimensions. First, I profile its demographic and electoral characteristics. Second, I examine Alderman Arvey’s interlocking roles across three arenas: Jewish communal affairs, the political machine, and city government. Third, I interrogate the crisis of Arvey’s leadership in the 1936 Democratic gubernatorial primary and describe the ethno-religious appeal through which he addressed its challenges. I conclude with some implications of this case study for the study of urban machines.

“The Most . . . Democratic Ward in the City”

During the 1930s, the 24th Ward produced the largest Democratic majorities in Chicago. The Daily Jewish Courier wrote that it is the “most important Democratic ward . . . even better than the [heavily Irish and Polish] stockyards areas.”^{Footnote 30}Table 1 below displays the city’s five most Democratic wards for several offices in the 1932, 1934, and 1935 elections. In each race in each year, the 24th Ward led all others in the proportion of Democratic votes.

Table 1.

Democratic percentage of the two-party vote

Source:

Wesley Skogan, Chicago Since 1840: A Time-Series Data Handbook (Urbana: Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, 1976), table 5e; for the gubernatorial race, see The Daily New Almanac and Year Book, 1933 (Chicago: Daily News, 1933), 727; The Daily News Almanac, 1934, 835; and The Daily New Almanac, 1936, 823.

Voter turnout also indicates the 24th Ward’s organization’s efficiency. The 1935 city mayoral election had no state or national offices on the ballot. Nor was there a strong challenger to Mayor Edward Kelly. Yet the 24th Ward turned out 93 percent of its registered voters, while the 14th turned out 85 percent, the 20th turned out 82 percent, the 11th turned out 81 percent, and the 32nd turned out 78 percent.^{Footnote 31}

Might the 24th Ward’s performance be just an artifact of political realignment rather than evidence of Arvey’s hold on his voters? As with Jewish Americans nationally, North Lawndale realigned between 1928 and 1936.^{Footnote 32} Before that, in spite of the Rosenberg’s Democratic ward machine, substantial numbers of the district voted Republican. In the 1923 city election, Arvey won his first aldermanic race with 5,558 votes, but the Republican drew 2,199 votes and a Socialist had 1,436 votes.^{Footnote 33} In the 1924 presidential race, the 24th Ward gave Republican Calvin Coolidge 4,902 votes to the Democrat John Davis’s 4,567 and Progressive Robert La Follette’s 2,832 votes.^{Footnote 34}

The 1928 election, with New York’s Democratic Governor Al Smith against Republican Herbert Hoover, saw the ward’s voters break toward the Democrats. Smith had 73 percent of the votes to Hoover’s 25 percent.^{Footnote 35} But earlier, in the April 1928 city election, a large partisan split occurred with the Democratic Dever winning 8,174 votes and the Republican challenger, William Thompson gaining 5,361 votes. Yet, hinting at a coming Democratic dominance, in that election Arvey won overwhelmingly.^{Footnote 36}

The 24th Ward’s voters behaved somewhat differently during the 1930s than other Jewish voters. Lawrence Fuchs notes that Jewish voters were generally more likely than others to split tickets, particularly to choose third-party (usually socialist) candidates.^{Footnote 37} Yet the 24th Ward’s voters gave few votes to third-party candidates in 1928 and after. And in comparison to other heavily Jewish districts in Chicago, the 24th was even more Democratic. Edward Mazur’s study of Chicago’s Jews identifies precincts outside the 24th that were predominantly Jewish, allowing comparison between their voting performance and Arvey’s virtually all Jewish ward.^{Footnote 38}Table 2 compares the 24th Ward’s performance to predominately Jewish precincts in other wards.

Table 2.

Democratic percentage of the vote in Jewish precincts for president, 1936

Source:

Mazur, Minyans, table 30, 345. Jewish voters in the 4th, 5th, and 20th Wards were primarily German-Jewish and more Republican than their Eastern European co-religionists.

Might the 24th Ward’s electoral performance be explained by the Democratic organization’s use of patronage and favors? The ward organization distributed jobs, rent money, and food baskets, but such benefits could reach only a small proportion of the ward’s roughly seventy thousand residents.^{Footnote 39} Moreover, the residents were largely working and lower middle class, most not needing the machine’s food baskets and coal deliveries. In the mid-1930s, the ward’s average rent was in the mid-quintile of the city’s rents.^{Footnote 40} In 1935, Alderman Arvey said of the ward, “We have a lower percentage of people on relief than any similar district in Chicago . . . most of them are working, I am happy to say.”^{Footnote 41} Also signifying its well being, the ward had the lowest infant mortality rate of all the city’s wards.^{Footnote 42}

Arvey had only a limited supply of patronage jobs to distribute, and these could not cover even all of those in his organization. In 1934 his ward’s workers held 284 city, county, and state jobs.^{Footnote 43} Additional private-sector jobs were available to him through his capacities to favor or penalize businesses. For example, one of his constituents related that in 1938: “I applied for a job with Sears, Roebuck . . . whose headquarters was . . . in the Twenty-Fourth Ward . . . The employment office refused to give me an application. My precinct captain then secured a letter from Alderman Jacob M. Arvey. . . . Upon presentation of the Alderman’s letter, the Sears employment office promptly produced a job application for me.”^{Footnote 44} Sears, Roebuck was the ward’s largest employer. Its decentralized hiring procedures during the 1930s allowed Arvey to insert his influence into the process.^{Footnote 45} But while Arvey’s private-sector patronage supply was sure to be larger than his supply of public patronage, it would have been small in relation to the ward’s population.

Perhaps vote fraud determined the 24th Ward’s performance. Fraud and campaign-related violence were infamously common in Chicago during the 1920s and 30s, and there were instances of both in the 24th.^{Footnote 46} For example, in machine wards, the Republican election judge was often appointed by the Democratic ward organization, enabling collusion. Colorfully illustrating that practice, in 1923 workers in a precinct of the 27th Ward discarded the legally voted ballots and marked 335 ballots for the local faction’s candidates.^{Footnote 47}

However, occasional fraud in one or another of the 24th Ward’s fifty-four precincts cannot explain its outsized Democratic majorities. There is no evidence that Jacob Arvey encouraged fraud. The primary motivation for fraud was intense pressure on precinct captains to perform, particularly for local offices.^{Footnote 48} As Jacob Arvey said of his precinct workers, “They would have . . . two swords hanging over their heads . . . the axe may fall from either direction,” either they could lose a job because of poor electoral performance in the precinct or for inadequate performance in their patronage job.^{Footnote 49}

That there was not a high incidence of vote fraud in the ward is revealed by a 1938 report of the County Board of Election Commissioners. It listed all the cases of election fraud indictments and their court disposition, by precinct and ward, for 1934 through 1937. There were eighty-two cases from the city’s fifty wards, and only one of those was from the 24th ward.^{Footnote 50} Undoubtedly there were instances of fraud in the ward that went undiscovered. But the fact that its arrests for fraud were far lower than other machine wards implies fraud was not a major factor in its performance. There were a few notorious cases of political violence in the 24th Ward during Arvey’s career, triggered by factional struggles before the machine’s consolidation. The most prominent instance was the bombing of the ward’s headquarters on November 9, 1926, following upon the bombing of the home of Morris Eller, the Republican 20th Ward committeeman. With Michael Rosenberg, the 24th Ward committeeman, Eller was a trustee of the county Sanitary District. It was reported that the cause of the bombings was Rosenberg’s falling out with Eller over candidate endorsements in the just completed election.^{Footnote 51}

“A City in Itself . . . the largest Ghetto in the world”

Ninety-one percent of the 24th Ward’s residents were immigrants or children of immigrants, virtually all Eastern European Jews.^{Footnote 52} The ward contained the largest proportion of foreign-born residents of any Chicago ward, and a third of the city’s Jewish population were resident in the ward.^{Footnote 53} These immigrants had left Europe’s oppression only to find discrimination here as well.^{Footnote 54} It was not yet clear if Jews would discover “here in America the safety that had eluded them everywhere else in their wanderings?”^{Footnote 55} Illustrating the threatening environment perceived by this population, during the 1930s every issue of Chicago’s Jewish Sentinel headlined threats to Jews in the United States as well as Europe.

Eastern European Jewish immigrants settled first in Chicago’s Maxwell Street area, and about 1914 began migrating to North Lawndale, three miles west. Louis Wirth described the migrants bringing with them “the anxieties that plagued the old ghetto.”^{Footnote 56} The historian Jonathan Sarna, describing Jewish-American communities of the period, wrote that they “gave every appearance of being ‘at home’ in America but . . . actually inhabited a . . . self-contained subculture, a parallel universe.”^{Footnote 57} Yet, while marginalized, these immigrants naturalized and then voted at a significantly higher rate than other immigrant groups of the era.^{Footnote 58}

In a mid-1934 speech, Jacob Arvey defiantly described his ward as the “ghetto.” He spoke of his constituents’ social isolation and the prejudice they encountered. But, he continued, the ward was also a place of safety. Its ethnic cohesiveness, fortified by political strength, was its protective wall. This new ghetto, he said, was a consequence of “the natural urge of the heart of the Jew to be with his co-religionists. . . . It is a subconscious mind of the Jew which tells him that the Jew is always in a Ghetto, surrounded by the invisible wall . . . of intolerance, prejudice, bigotry and hatred.”^{Footnote 59} In this remarkable speech, Arvey described his political organization as a force protecting the ghetto. Therein was an allusion to the legend of the Golem as a metaphor for the Democratic machine. In the legend, a righteous person could create from clay a powerful, artificial being, the Golem, to protect the ghetto’s Jews.^{Footnote 60}

Arvey called his ward “a Jewish city . . . in itself . . . the largest Ghetto in the world.”^{Footnote 61} The political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg observes: “Everywhere that a sizeable Jewish community has existed, Jews have also established a complex of religious, education, and communal institutions that collectively serve as a Jewish government in exile.”^{Footnote 62} North Lawndale’s “Jewish city” began with the erection in 1913 of the great Romanian Synagogue on its central boulevard, the sanctuary seating thirty-five hundred. In 1921, the Hebrew Theological College established a campus nearby, and a large community center, the Jewish People’s Institute, was built across from the college. Mount Sinai hospital was founded to be the only Chicago hospital observing Jewish dietary laws. Two Jewish orphanages and homes for the elderly, Jewish labor unions, the Yiddish-centric Workmen’s Circle, Yiddish theaters, and the Midwest office of The Daily Forward, America’s largest Yiddish paper, were all within the ward. By 1930, the community contained forty synagogues.

Leadership Across Three Arenas: Community, Machine, and City

Effective leadership requires a balance between the leader’s self-interest and the interests of the led.^{Footnote 63} At best, that interaction heightens the leader’s power while enhancing the led. As we shall now see, Jacob Arvey was virtually an alchemist in transforming attentiveness to his community’s values and interests into enormous personal authority and power.

The 1936 Primary: The Machine vs. Governor Horner

It is a commonplace of urban scholarship that machine politicians were disinterested in public policy and focused, rather, on material rewards. It was supposed to be middle-class reformers, not machine politicians, who pursued policy solutions to urban problems.^{Footnote 106} Yet Alderman Arvey’s representation of his Jewish constituents entailed substantive work at a policy level as much as it did descriptive representation. He worked for better transportation to his district, to improve public schools, to oppose objectionable national immigration policy, and, as we shall see now, to gain desperately needed funds for the city’s poor relief, even when it led to a break with a Jewish governor popular in his own ward.

Nominated by Cermak’s organization, in 1932 Henry Horner was elected Illinois’ first Jewish governor. Chicago’s leaders expected Horner to ease the city’s fiscal woes with state aid. The Depression, along with a corrupted tax assessment system, cut the city’s property tax revenues in the face of increased demands for relief.^{Footnote 107} During 1933 and 1934, federal relief money helped fund the state’s relief commission, which in turn passed money to the city. However, the city’s needs were greater than available federal money, and the fiscally conservative Horner decided to repair the state’s budget by curbing its role in relief. In the resulting crisis, Alderman Arvey proposed to Mayor Kelly the creation of a city emergency relief committee with the Jewish Federation’s Samuel Goldsmith as chairman. Kelly complied, appointing Arvey as a member of the Mayor’s Committee on the Relief Problem along with Goldsmith as chair.

That committee worked with county, state, and federal officials to patch together funds to meet the city’s needs. Then Horner escalated the crisis by ordering the Illinois Relief Commission to cease distributing state monies to localities as of mid-1936. That decision, in turn, stymied the city’s ability to administer its relief program. Chicago was allowed to use a portion of sales tax revenue for relief, but state law prohibited those funds covering the administrative overhead of relief distribution. Arvey appealed to Horner to continue funding administration, but Horner was adamant that state support would end. Mayor Kelly advised Arvey: “Go ahead raise money any way you can.”^{Footnote 108} In desperation, Arvey successfully solicited contributions from fellow political leaders and businessmen to cover immediate overhead for distributing relief checks.

The city’s hoped-for solution for its fiscal crisis was state legislation legalizing horse-racing books within Chicago, licensing fees and taxes to provide a new revenue stream. That solution also reflected the longtime alliance of Chicago’s machine politicians to organized gambling. The Illinois legislature passed the city’s bill, but Horner called gambling immoral and vetoed it.^{Footnote 109} Chicago Democrats countered by refusing to support Horner’s renomination in 1936, choosing instead Dr. Herman Bundesen, the city’s health commissioner.^{Footnote 110} Bundesen was known locally but was unknown outside the city. As if denying support for Horner was not sufficiently troubling to Chicago’s Jews, in the climate of the 1930s it was an additional insult that Bundesen was of German birth.

The Horner-Bundesen primary race was a crisis for Arvey’s leadership and his authority. Horner had won 96 percent of the 24th Ward’s vote in 1932, while Roosevelt had only 86 percent, and he remained very popular in 1936. To reject Horner undermined Arvey’s premise that Jewish concerns were compatible with the machine’s interests. He sought to finesse the issue by convincing Horner, a former Cook County judge, to accept a federal judgeship offered by President Roosevelt.^{Footnote 111} But Horner pursued reelection.

The Jewish press denounced the machine, and Arvey, for dumping Horner. The Sentinel editorialized: “Failure . . . of the Democratic organization to stick to Gov. Horner . . . can only . . . mean that the party in this state has sunk to the lowest depths of political depravity.”^{Footnote 112} In each issue, from March 5 until Election Day, the Sentinel’s editorial page had Horner’s photo and an endorsement. Despite his constituents’ sympathies, Arvey could not break with the machine. To do so would end the patronage sustaining his organization and cost him his ward committeeman post, his influence within the machine, and perhaps his city council seat.

Rabbis and constituents appealed to Arvey.^{Footnote 113} An old friend, Julius Klein wrote: “Horner . . . is a credit to our race. . . How will you explain this to Chicago and American Jewry? Do you realize what will be the effect all over the world if Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, born in Berlin, Germany should defeat the Jew, Horner?”^{Footnote 114}

The campaign distressed Arvey. A local newspaper reported, erroneously, that he would resign as ward committeeman.^{Footnote 115} His challenge was to explain to his voters and party workers why they should oppose Horner and support Bundesen. The workers got a primarily material explanation. Judge Harry Fisher told the Progressive Democratic League the stakes are “the jobs of thousands of Jews in public life.” But he added, “What a terrible thing it would be if the Democratic party turned against us Jews.”^{Footnote 116}

To his voters, Arvey used an ethno-religious appeal. He described his organization, within the machine, as a protective fortress for Jews. Before the election he spoke on “The Jewish Hour” broadcast explaining that rejecting Horner was a matter of policy, not religion. Referring to criticism of himself, he said, “[I am] jealous of my standing as a Jew” and would not let critics “tear down a reputation gained by twenty years of faithful service. . . . Long before I aspired to public office I was actively participating in Jewish activities, and upon my election to office, I felt I ought to use the prestige and influence of my position . . . for the benefit of the people from whom I spring.” Then he stressed that Jewish security was ensured by inclusion in the multi-ethnic, Irish-led Democratic party: “We Jews, as a minority group, could not elect our men to office unless we belonged to a party, and that only by staying with the party could we hope for political success. When the Democratic Organization . . . decided that the present Governor should not be endorsed . . . it was my duty . . . to support that man . . . endorsed by the party organization—the present governor knew that.”^{Footnote 117}

Recall Arvey’s 1934 “ghetto” speech. He had urged his voters to “Vote consciously . . . and have in mind the preservation of Jewish ideals.” He said that the Jewish elected official is their best protector; “the more Jews there are in high public office . . . the stronger is our line of defense.”^{Footnote 118} Now he urged his constituents to abandon the Jewish governor. Arvey weighed the benefits for the community of a Jewish officeholder on the one hand against the dangers arising from widespread hatred of Jews. North Lawndale’s residents were a small minority, but Arvey explained that through his organization his voters became an important bloc in a powerful machine and nationally dominant party. Jewish safety, he argued, required that Horner be abandoned.

The machine secured winning vote totals for Bundesen in Chicago, but Horner won statewide. Arvey carried Bundesen to victory in the 24th Ward with 11,897 votes against Horner’s 6,785.^{Footnote 119} Horner’s 35 percent was a poor performance compared to his 1932 vote, but he sharply reduced the ward’s usual total for the machine’s candidate. Still, Arvey could claim success in containing Horner.^{Footnote 120} Pat Nash, the county party chairman, praised Arvey’s performance, writing, “You may have forfeited some admirers, you have more than earned the respect of most of your fellow Committeemen for the courageous stand you took.”^{Footnote 121}

But the 24th had produced a win primarily for its own leader. Arvey had convinced his voters of a Jewish interest in backing his candidate. In his biography of Horner, Thomas Littlewood describes Arvey meeting an elderly Jewish man on primary day. The man said, “You did a terrible thing to me today. . . . You made me vote against . . . our Henry Horner.”^{Footnote 122} Littlewood interprets this as evidence for voter coercion. But it was persuasion, not force, loyalty to Arvey and not a material benefit, that forced that man’s vote. A precinct worker wrote to Arvey, “The campaign was not between Horner and Bundesen. It was between Horner and Arvey and the . . . votes cast . . . were cast for you.“^{Footnote 123}

In 1940, at the age of forty-five, Jacob Arvey left politics for a captain’s commission in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. In a radio address before leaving for training, Arvey spoke of his decision for military service. He said, “History is . . . marching backward, and the days of barbarism and darkness can be reenacted in our days. . . . I shall leave my home, my family, my friends. . . . I go with the proud resolve to serve under any conditions—with gratitude for that opportunity.”^{Footnote 124} Later, from training camp, he wrote to the Yiddish Forward’s Chicago editor, who was his friend and frequent critic: “Feeling that I may be contributing toward a better day for the people from whom I spring makes me contented.”^{Footnote 125}

Attuned as Alderman Arvey had been to his constituent’s values and culture, so his enlistment reflected their anxieties about the world. In July 1941, the Chicago Tribune polled readers, asking if the United States should enter the war against Hitler? Seventy-eight percent of Chicago’s respondents said no, but one ward supported war. The Tribune wrote: “In the 24th Ward . . . presided over by J.M. Arvey, now with the army . . . a majority vote is being cast . . . for intervention.”^{Footnote 126}

Arvey returned from war in 1946 and regained the chairmanship of the Democratic county committee. The machine had weakened greatly during the war, and Mayor Edward Kelly’s support had eroded in the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods, in part because he had attempted some measure of racial justice in postwar housing policy.^{Footnote 127} Arvey’s challenge was to revive the machine, and he set out to do so by remaking it in the image of New Deal liberalism.^{Footnote 128} He chose a clean, civic-minded businessman, Martin Kennelly, to be mayor and promoted the liberals Paul Douglas and Adlai Stevenson, the former for the U.S. Senate seat and the latter for the governorship. But Arvey’s hold on the machine was short lived. He resigned as county chairman after promoting a flawed and losing candidate for county sheriff in 1950. Subsequently, County Clerk Richard J. Daley led a movement to return the machine to Irish control. Daley became county chairman in 1953 and Chicago’s mayor in 1955. Arvey, meanwhile, was shunted onto Chicago’s Park District board and semiretirement.