Whose Turn Is It? The Alienated Generation Uses Voice & Exit in Chicago

• In Event: Voting Behavior and Elections in Cities

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project begun by the late Prof. William J. Grimshaw, which analyzes whether four key institutions in Chicago (labor unions, the public schools, the Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party machine) provided or thwarted avenues for upward mobility for African-Americans in the period from 1900-2016. Grimshaw divided the period into three distinct eras: the Pioneer Generation (approximately 1900-1945); the Activist Generation (1946-1972); and the Alienated Generation (1973-2016). This paper will focus upon whether and how African-Americans were able to achieve upward mobility in the political realm through the Democratic Party during the latter period.

At the beginning of the Alienated Generation, African-Americans in Chicago were reaching their numerical peak in terms of population size and voting strength. This paper will detail how black Chicagoans mobilized in the early 1970s to become a strong force challenging the Democratic Party machine (through the use of Hirschman’s conception of “voice”), but did not have the ability to institutionalize their gains over the long-term. In the face of the increasing numerical and voting power of African-Americans, the machine engaged in a perverse counter-mobilization strategy, turning blacks from strong supporters of machine candidates to ardent foes. While the African-American vote was sufficiently mobilized to elect an anti-machine Mayor, Harold Washington, it did not survive his death and the subsequent rapid and definitive reassertion of machine control. African-Americans responded to the closing of political opportunity by engaging in “exit” behavior, both through drastically decreased turnout in elections and, ultimately, withdrawal from the city itself, creating a Great Migration in reverse.

This paper will move beyond notions of successful or unsuccessful electoral outcomes as exemplars of how voter preferences are expressed and will instead highlight how alienation is itself an expression of political behavior which can shape what policies and practices are enshrined in a polity as surely as victory in high-turnout elections

Author

• Raymond M. Lodato, University of Chicago