Political history of Chicago

In 1855, Chicago Mayor Levi Boone threw Chicago politics into the national spotlight with some dry proposals that would lead to the Lager Beer Riot by the wets.

The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated home-state candidate Abraham Lincoln. During the 1880s and 1890s, Chicago also had an underground radical tradition with large and highly organized socialist, anarchist and labor organizations. The Republicans had their own machine operations, typified by the "blonde boss" William Lorimer, who was unseated by the U.S. Senate in 1912 because of his corrupt election methods.

The political environment in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s let organized crime flourish to the point that many Chicago policemen earned more money from pay-offs than from the city. Before the 1930s, the Democratic Party in Chicago was divided along ethnic lines - the Irish, Polish, Italian, and other groups each controlled politics in their neighborhoods Under the leadership of Anton Cermak, the party consolidated its ethnic bases into one large organization. With the organization behind, Cermak was able to win election as mayor of Chicago in 1931, an office he held until his assassination in 1933. The modern era of politics was dominated by machine politics in many ways, and the Cook County Democratic Party became was honed by Richard J. Daley after his election in 1955. Richard M. Daley, his son, is a former mayor of Chicago and had served for 21 years as mayor and 38 as a public servant. Daley announced on September 7, 2010 that he would not be seeking re-election. Daley was succeeded by former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

The New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s gave the Democratic Party access to new funds and programs for housing, slum clearance, urban renewal, and education, through which to dispense patronage and maintain control of the city. Machine politics persisted in Chicago after the decline of similar machines in other large American cities. During much of that time, the city administration found opposition mainly from a liberal "independent" faction of the Democratic Party. This included African Americans and Latinos. In the Lakeview/Uptown 46th Ward. The first Latino to announce an aldermanic bid against a Daley loyalist was Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, the Young Lords founder.

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