Monday, May 29, 2023

75 years, 10 mayors: How Sun-Times coverage of City Hall evolved


     Look at the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times for Monday, May 15. Inauguration Day, the day Brandon Johnson would be sworn in as the city’s 57th mayor. What don’t you see?
     Well, no beaming mayoral portrait, for starters. No gushing headline, “A new era” or some such thing. The main page-one story is about a suburban mom with kidney failure.
     The arrival of a new mayor gets a plug in the upper right corner: “HOW JOHNSON COULD AVOID INAUGURAL MISSTEP OF LIGHTFOOT” referring readers to an article pointing out that inaugural addresses are remembered mainly for their gaffes, and inviting political pros to speculate about ditches Johnson should take care to avoid.
     That skepticism is hard-won. Survey the Sun-Times’ coverage of the fifth floor of City Hall since its birth 75 years ago, and what stands out is the progress from credulous mouthpiece to critical observer and relentless investigator, making the waves that rock the mayor’s office.
     The daily Sun-Times began publication quietly — the union of the Sun and the Times was a cost-cutting move — in February 1948, and in the early years could often be found curled up in the lap of Mayor Martin Kennelly, purring contentedly.
     “The public approval of the Kennelly businessman administration reflects the people’s confidence in his integrity,” a purported news article insisted on April 15, 1948. “His policy of good government first and politics last has ‘sold’ Chicago citizens though it has aroused some grumbling among the politicos.”
     Though even in that praise, the unnamed writer pauses to note: “The most significant lack has been in the police department.” Some things never change.
     Kennelly was a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil millionaire businessman, a bachelor who lived with his sister. The Sun-Times did notice shady doings around him. The Democratic paper had no trouble going after a Democratic administration when corruption was involved. Great New Yorker press critic A.J. Liebling, who lived in Chicago during the winter of 1949-1950, noted this about the Sun-Times in his classic travelogue, “The Second City:”
     “It sometimes raises a great row with stories about local political graft. Although Chicago municipal graft is necessarily Democratic, since the city’s government is Democratic, it is the Sun-Times, rather than the Tribune, that gets indignant.”

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3 comments:

  1. Marvelous.

    My dad despised Pa I Daley… because he thought Daley betrayed kennelly. I despised son Daley because he was just as inarticulate as I am.

    John

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  2. Nice work Neil. That was some heavy lifting no doubt. I appreciate how you seamlessly moved from one era to another.

    I'm about to go on the Google but I'd really like to know more about this story where daily the elder had a secret real estate company. I'd never heard that before or if I had a long forgotten

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  3. I was not yet eight when the Elder took office...I dodged the clubs of his Blue Meanies at 21...and I was almost thirty when he died. Voted for the Younger in my early Forties (mostly to keep the precinct captain off my back) and was almost 65 when he left office. A 56-year span that included 43 years of the Father and the Son on the fifth floor of Da Hall. Such was Daley life in Chicago, in the daze of old.

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