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Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois: A Progressive Tackles State Government,1970–2015
Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois: A Progressive Tackles State Government,1970–2015
Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois: A Progressive Tackles State Government,1970–2015
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Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois: A Progressive Tackles State Government,1970–2015

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Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois is an oral history of Aaron Jaffes legislative, judicial, and executive branch careers. It is also a story of how the author met Judge Jaffe and gained wisdom from a master politician operating in one of America's most notorious political battlegrounds.

As legislator, Jaffe changed rape laws to reflect victims' perspectives. Though white, he was recruited to the Black Caucus because of a better voting record than other legislators, black or white. As judge, he presided over divorce laws he passed as legislator and, in Chancery Court, preserved the Auditorium Theatre for Roosevelt University. As chair of the Illinois Gaming Board, he kept Illinois from adding other episodes to its scandal-ridden traditions.

In mutual appreciation, Aaron Jaffe listened to stories of genuine characters in Illinois politics that defy the imagination of fiction writers. Their hilarious foibles, machinations, and insights appear in this volume, alongside Judge Jaffe's witty observations about humans as political animals.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAuthorHouse
Release dateMar 19, 2016
ISBN9781504983846
Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois: A Progressive Tackles State Government,1970–2015
Author

Charles M. Barber

Dr. Charles M. Barber is professor of history emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He taught, researched, and served there from 1967–2000. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University (1960) and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1971). Dr. Barber has presented papers on German-Americans and Illinois politics at history conferences around the Midwest and nation. His work on Chicago’s German-Americans protecting their choral heritage against nativist pressures from World Wars I and II is published in the Yearbook of German-American Studies (1995). His work on Senator William Langer of North Dakota, the American Aid Society of Chicago, and His Eminence, Cardinal Aloisius Muench, Bishop of Fargo, 1935–1959, and Papal Visitator Apostolicus in post-World War II Germany, won the 1999 Editor’s Award of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. His chapter on Senator Langer and German expellees (“The Isolationist as Interventionist: Senator William Langer on the Subject of Ethnic Cleansing, March 29, 1946”) appears in Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe, Steven Vardy and Hunt Tooley, editors (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Dr. Barber also has written forewords for scholarly works and memoirs centering upon the ethnic cleansing of roughly fifteen million Germans from eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II (Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994; Raymond Lohne, The Great Chicago Refugee Rescue (Rockport: Picton Press, 1997; and Luisa Lang Owen, Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered (College Station, Texas A & M University Press, 2003, among others). Charles Barber currently resides in Mandan, North Dakota. Since 2008 he has written an opinion column for an alternative paper in Fargo, North Dakota: The High Plains Reader (http://hpr1.com). This column is written from the perspective of an historian and an activist in the liberal wing of the Democratic Parties in Cook County, Illinois and western North Dakota, and it draws “early and often” on his sessions and experiences with Judge Aaron Jaffe.

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    Judge Aaron Jaffe - Charles M. Barber

    © 2016 Charles M. Barber with Aaron Jaffe. All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

    Published by AuthorHouse 03/19/2016

    ISBN: 978-1-5049-8385-3 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-5049-8386-0 (hc)

    ISBN: 978-1-5049-8384-6 (e)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904100

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Contents

    Preface Aaron Jaffe's Political Prescriptions for Illinois and the Nation

    A Note on Oral History andMy Recorded Conversations with Aaron Jaffe

    Introduction: My Journey to Aaron Jaffe's World

    Chapter 1 Chicago Political Folklore vs. Precinct Reality

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics---In the Wards of Chicago:

    From Sy Sigel to Vito Marzullo, and Ed Vrydolyak

    Sy Sigel and Jake Arvey

    Committeeman Vito Marzullo and Professor Milt Rakove

    Marco Domico and Vito Marzullo

    Eddie Vrdolyak and Judge Jaffe

    Essay on Jaffe and Politics:How to Work a Precinct or a Community: Fact vs. Fiction

    Introduction

    Hustling Votes vs. Rustling Votes

    The Myth of All Politicians Are Crooks

    Journalistic Cynicism = Journalistic Laziness

    Ethnicity and the WASP Bias in American History

    Ethnic Awareness and the Hidden German Vote in Chicago and the Midwest

    Ethnic Awareness in Mayor Harold Washington's Reelection Strategy, 1985--87

    The German Vote, Aaron Jaffe, and Paul Simon's Campaign for US Senator, 1984

    All Politics Is Ethnic As Well As Local

    Chapter 2 Daley and Me: The Regular Democratic Organization: City and Suburbs

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics:It Ain't Beanbag Here Either: Politics in Suburban Cook County

    Scotty Krier and Caucus Party Wars in Skokie

    Working a Precinct in Skokie Like in Chicago: Early, Often, and Hard

    Scotty and Ray Krier: The Old Nepotism

    Jerry Lerner, Cal Sutker, and the New Nepotism

    Teaming Up With the Kriers for a New Democratic Party in Skokie

    Richard J. Daley: An OK Guy

    Jaffe, Daley, and the 1970 Reapportionment.

    Life as State Representative and Committeeman

    Al Hornstein: Skokie's Henry Kissinger

    Eddie Warman

    Influence of Local Papers, Carefully Balanced Tickets, and Other Myths

    Mayor Daley and the Country Towns

    Daley's Myopia Concerning Republican Vote Fraud in Suburban Counties

    A Muskie Delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami

    Notes on Jaffe and Politics:Boss Daley: American Pharaoh, or First Baron in Cook County?

    Chapter 3 Clyde Choate and the Three Laws of Illinois Legislative Politics

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics 1: Clyde Choate---A Fun Politician

    The Uncontrollable Independents

    Clyde Choate: Go-Getter, Wheeler-Dealer, New Dealer, and Mensch.

    Clyde's Campaigns for Speaker of the House, 1973 and 1975

    The Importance of Saying Thank You As Well As Please

    Clyde's Three Laws of Legislative Politics

    On the Road to Carbondale with Clyde

    Clyde Choate, Prizefighter, vs. Dan Walker, Corporation Lawyer

    Clyde Choate, Wheeler-Dealer, Saves Liberal Icon Abner Mikva

    Clyde Choate and Jerry Shea

    Jaffe on Politics 2:Laws and Outlaws in Illinois Politics

    Staying in Touch With Your District

    Baiting the Skokie Chamber of Commerce

    Baiting Illinois Democratic Senator Alan Dixon

    My Kind of Fun: Public Forums in Conservative Territory: Park Ridge

    Essay on Jaffe and Politics:Finding Aaron Jaffe

    Introduction

    Theory vs. Practice: Academics, Students, and Chicago Precinct Politics

    Barber's Flying Squads

    Beating the Boss in 1972

    Change in the Cook County Clerk's Office

    Winning and Disillusion

    Aaron Jaffe and Mike Holewinski: Reformers That Students and Professors Could Believe In

    Chapter 4 Chicago and Cook County vs. Downstate Illinois

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics 1:Life for the Suburban Kid on the Environment and Agriculture Committees

    Possum Politics

    The Racetrack Bill

    Arnold Shure: A Ralph Nader for Springfield, Illinois

    The Importance of Seatmates

    Danny Pierce and Glenn Schneider

    Eugenia Chapman and the Subcommittee on the Blind

    Ralph Capparelli and Bob Terzich: Buddies

    Jaffe on Politics 2:A Tale of Two Speakers: Bill Redmond and Mike Madigan

    Bill Redmond

    Mike Madigan: Detail Man

    Jaffe on Politics 3: Rating the Governors:

    Richard Ogilvie

    Jim Edgar

    Dan Walker [1973--1977] vs. Richard J. Daley, and the Illinois Legislature

    Jim Thompson [1977--1991] and Pinstripe Patronage

    Chapter 5 The Politics of Gender and Rape Legislation in Illinois

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics:The Vietnam Era, Gender Wars and the Fate of Rape Legislation, 1970--1980

    The Vietnam War Comes to Springfield

    No Fault Divorce and Henry Hyde

    Men Addressing Women's Issues: A Thankless Task in the 1970s

    Penny Pullen: Angry at Men, Angry at Women---Just Plain Angry

    Leroy Lemke: The Neanderthal as Feminist

    The Rape Study Committee

    Rape Victims Emergency Treatment Act [1975]

    The Rape Shield Act [1978]

    Rape As Criminal Sexual Assault---At Last!

    Conclusion

    Chapter 6 The Crime of Punishment in Illinois and the US, 1970--Present

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics:Prison Reform and Chief Justice Burger

    Fear of Crime and Fear of Constituents

    Chief Justice Warren Burger and the Push for Prison Industries

    Legislative Hypocrisy on Crime

    Drugs, Poverty, and Crime

    Conclusion

    Chapter 7 An Unseen Rainbow: Aaron Jaffe, Harold Washington, and the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics:Harold Washington, Carol Moseley Braun, and the Black Caucus

    Leland Rayson: The Wildest of the Wild Ones

    The Ward Committeeman as God: Jimmie Bull Jive Taylor and Frank Savickas

    The Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission

    Bill Henry and Jeremiah Joyce

    Taylor Pouncy, Eugene Gene Barnes, and Peggy Smith Martin

    Corneal Davis: Adam Clayton Powell Without the Scandals

    Jesse Jackson

    My Friendship with Harold Washington

    Bernie Epton

    Essay on Jaffe and Politics:Harold Washington and Black Empowerment in Illinois and the Nation

    Introduction

    Enabling Black Empowerment on Chicago's Northwest Side

    Barack Obama's Debt to Harold Washington: The Mayoral Campaigns of 1983 and 1987

    Richie Daley Keeps the Faith

    The Obama Phenomenon vs. the Washington Phenomenon

    Barack Obama's Reenactment in 2012 of Harold Washington's Rainbow of 1987

    Chapter 8 Legislative Combat, Media Myopia, and Other Lessons

    Introduction

    Jaffe On Politics:How to Pass a Bill, and Why the Mainstream Media Never Get It

    The Phenomenon of Zeke Giorgi

    Other Bills: Marriage, Dancing, and Beer

    Other Battles: Taxes, Guns, Pay Raises for Public Employees, and Public Transportation

    Insurance Companies

    The American Medical Association, and Other Labor Unions

    Coping with an Increasingly Irresponsible Media

    Chapter 9 Independent of the Independents

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics 1:Neanderthal Conservatives I've Known and Liked;Liberals I've Loved ... and Some Others

    Kenny Boyle

    C. L. McCormick and Paul Powell

    Webber Borchers

    Roscoe Cunningham

    John Dunn and Joe Lucco

    Frankie Smith, Henry Lenard, and Sam Maragos

    Dick Mugalian and the Power of Prayer

    Reasonable and Hard-Headed Liberals, Moderates and Conservatives

    Larry DiPrima: The Dark Side

    Robert Mann: The Bright Side

    Jaffe on Politics 2:The Short Happy Life of Independent Democrats and Republicans

    Keeping One's Word

    The Democratic Study Group [DSG]

    Conclusion: Reform That Wasn't Reform

    Chapter 10 Epilogue: The Wisdom of Chairman Jaffe

    Introduction

    Jaffe on Politics 1:Life as a Cook County Judge

    The Appointment, 1985

    Divorce Court

    Law Jury Court (Civil Court)

    Chancery Court

    Essay on Jaffe and Politics 1:The Roosevelt University--Auditorium Theatre Case

    Jaffe on Politics II:Chair of the Illinois Gaming Board

    Introduction

    The Appointment, 2005

    Removing Clouds of Corruption and Doubt

    Essay on Jaffe and Politics 2:Vindication and Rejection

    Conclusions: What the Wisdom of Aaron Jaffe's Politics Can Teach and Reteach Us

    Bibliography

    For Meredith, Michael, and Mary Stewart

    Acknowledgments

    It was a blessing to be teaching contemporary history in a setting like Chicago, where so much American history was being made in the latter third of the twentieth century.

    My thanks most of all to Aaron and Charlotte Jaffe for their patience and persistence in allowing me access to their home and their lives. Thanks also to my lawyer and agent, Jack Breen, for helping me see this project through; and to the staff of Author House, especially Steven Cortez, for taking a chance on me.

    And gratitude to my mentors and friends at Northeastern Illinois University: Professor Charles Nissim-Sabat, who taught me my first useful lessons in campus politics; Dr. James H. Cunneen, who taught me the street smarts of my students before moving on to becoming a distinguished educator in the Chicago area; and Professor Anthony Schimpf, who helped me develop the fine art of being a political finisher when a nasty job needed to be done.

    Thanks as well to Professor Elyse Mach in Chicago, as well as numerous colleagues of the Northern Great Plains History Conference, who have encouraged me to keep up my writing on politics over the past twenty-five years.

    Preface

    Aaron Jaffe's Political Prescriptions for Illinois and the Nation

    I do not believe that we are helpless. We can turn things around. In order to do so, the American people must counter malaise with an open and honest national conversation about the issues that confront us today. Then we must unite and act.

    ---Aaron Jaffe¹

    Aaron Jaffe is my first and foremost political hero.

    From 1970 to 2015, Judge Jaffe has served the people of Illinois in all three branches of government. I first met him in the early 1970s, while he was vigorously engaged as a liberal, candid, and effective state representative. I was a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Along with some of my politically active students, I was in search of a politician who was both visibly committed to reform in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois, and visible to ordinary citizens.

    Aaron Jaffe was that person. He never disappointed us in his fifteen-year career in the Illinois General Assembly. And he never disappointed committed reformers like ourselves in his twenty-year career as circuit court judge in Cook County from 1985--2005, and for ten years as chair of the Illinois Gaming Commission, 2005--15.

    Although his professional training is in the law, Aaron Jaffe has always appeared to me to be a very special kind of physician.

    A political doctor.

    He does no harm, and he successfully fought diseases of cynicism, venality, ignorance, and arrogance in Illinois as a state representative from 1970--85.

    Most physicians today have all they can do to treat disease and often leave treatment of the patient, their bedside manner, to the nurses, unlike country doctors of old, who had the time to make you feel better, as well as make you better.

    Nowadays, however, with complicated technology and specialization, a doctor who makes you feel better when he talks to you, may not necessarily be making you better. That has, alas, traditionally been a problem in politics. Politicians who make you feel the best about yourself are often the ones doing the most harm.

    Aaron Jaffe talked straight and candidly to his constituents in Skokie and Niles Township, whether it made them feel better or not. They rewarded him with as many terms as he wanted. He saved his political bedside manner, a sense of humor and irony, for his colleagues in the legislature.

    Aaron's straightforward personality and offbeat humor charmed the hard-boiled and the confused alike in Springfield, Illinois. Most of his fellow legislators were polar opposites from this Chicago-and-suburban, independent liberal in their political philosophies or geographical origins, but they oftentimes put differences aside to vote for Aaron's bills simply because they liked him---one of the most important prescriptions in politics anywhere and at any time.

    There is nothing new about this phenomenon in American politics of opposites attracting. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were polar opposites in their temperaments, their political philosophies, and their geographical origins, but they found they liked each other when they first met in the Second Continental Congress, and even though they quarreled bitterly later on, the nation benefitted enormously from their lifelong friendship.²

    Many of Aaron's views were anathema to his colleagues, and he had little use for some of theirs. However, he was taught by wise men in Illinois politics, like downstater Clyde Choate, not to unnecessarily challenge fellow legislators in their political philosophies, and he did not, except when occasion demanded in formal debate. This style differed greatly from the openly contentious but more socially closed corridors of the Founding Fathers---a more democratic approach for a more democratic time.

    Despite good-natured tolerance of his fellow legislators, Aaron Jaffe was no Mr. Congeniality. He could not be steamrolled as overconfident Chicago machine creatures and arrogant leaders in both parties found out early and often.

    Aaron Jaffe also appreciated intelligence in politicians of every stripe and in every corner of Illinois where he found it. This endeared him to those whose cleverness went unrecognized within and without the not-so-friendly confines of one of the most venal political cultures in the country, one which Molly Ivins was tempted to compare to Texas.³

    Judge Jaffe is so clean that he was never made an offer that he would have refused. Long after his legislative career, he was recommended by the Chicago Tribune to the infamous Governor Rod Blagojevich as the only honest man who could save the situation with the Illinois Gaming Board, which was agonizing in 2005 over which consortium should be the recipient of the last of the riverboat casinos.

    While Aaron himself is extremely intelligent, he never let it show to colleagues who might resent it. This political prescription stems from the fact that Aaron just likes people---as much as the cafeteria food he enjoys. His is the temperament that Shakespeare had in mind when King Lear spoke: None does offend, none---I say, none.

    Aaron Jaffe could be offended, however---by bigotry, ignorance, venality, or indifference. He was a fighting liberal at a time and place where such a phrase was considered an oxymoron by the media.

    Representative Jaffe changed rape laws in Illinois. Before his reform legislation, these laws had forced women to revisit the horrors of their experience, owing to a fixation upon sexual desire more reflective of men's notions of rape than women's. The Jaffe Bills, which were passed in the 1970s and early 1980s, defined rape in terms of crimes of violence, and provided support for women in all aspects of law enforcement and legal representation that had previously been missing in Illinois and much of the nation.

    A white man, Aaron Jaffe was asked to sit on the Black Caucus by Harold Washington because his voting record on behalf of minorities was better than most other black legislators at the time.

    Representative Jaffe also steered an education bill, benefitting children and teachers all over the state, through a legislature bitterly divided against itself and its governor.

    In 1985, a vacancy on the Circuit Court of Cook County occurred, and Aaron accepted it, requesting the rather unpopular Divorce Court so that he could see how much of his legislation in favor of greater equity for women was making its way through the courts. He later was transferred to Chancery, where he took on some tough cases and handled them with the same integrity and courage that had characterized his service in the legislature.

    Although officially retired from the judiciary, in 2005 Aaron once again became active as chairman of the Illinois Gaming Commission. For ten years Judge Jaffe continued to confound politics as usual, with the full support of Chicago's two major newspapers, and the Chicago Crime Commission, among others.

    The bulk of this volume concentrates on Judge Jaffe's legislative career in Illinois and the ways in which he mastered the art of politics there. But because Aaron Jaffe carried his same spirit of independence and iconoclastic style into the judicial and executive branches of Illinois government, a concluding chapter is necessary to properly appreciate his impact on Illinois, both in the form of his effective political skills and the substance of legislation he initiated.

    Throughout his legislative, judicial, and executive career, Aaron Jaffe has challenged the assumptions of machine creatures, anti-machine liberals, and downstaters alike that You can't [successfully] fight city hall, that you couldn't be civil about it if you did, and that you couldn't enjoy yourself along the way. But he did.

    Honest, liberal, tough, resilient, and with an abiding sense of humor that confounded his adversaries and delighted his friends, Aaron Jaffe has thus been an oasis of honesty in a desert of deceit in all three branches of Illinois government for five decades.

    Above all, Aaron is a great storyteller---not just of aphorisms, anecdotes, or after dinner entertainments, but of thoughtful, even lengthy true stories that make us laugh and teach us at the same time.

    Not bad. Not bad at all.

    Although when I first met Aaron Jaffe in 1972, I was on the same fighting liberal page, our religious, ethnic, and geographical background and political upbringings were polar opposites. Nevertheless, we rarely differed on our political goals, or the means to get there. On the few occasions when we did, I found out later on almost invariably that he had been right.

    This book also, to a much lesser extent, includes part of my own story: How I came to respectfully reject the political world of my Republican parents and a comfortable establishment existence as a well-connected LaSalle Street lawyer or businessman. How I came to embrace the world of a fighting liberal, up against cynics in Chicago's Democratic machine. How I came to the knowledge that would make it possible for me to appreciate the intellectual integrity, good-humored resilience, and consistent courage of an Aaron Jaffe.

    I am a partisan liberal Democrat and an activist who feels obliged as a professional historian to say positive things about Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon when the documentation indicates (as it often does) that I should.

    I have participated in politics for forty-five years as a citizen, mainly out of a sense of civic duty, first to my students, and then to myself and my children. I have spent a great deal of time and money on the process of politics in Chicago, suburban Cook County, and later in North Dakota, but I have never made any money in return---never received a salary, or even a tax break in return for my labors. In fact I have always considered my monetary contributions as investments in democracy rather than to a bottom line. This all sounds noble, and more than a little pompous, but, while it might make it easier for me to face myself in the mirror each morning, the truth is that I have benefitted immeasurably from being an activist. My career as a history professor, writer, and opinion journalist has been substantially enhanced from participation in the political process. Unless this volume is a big seller, my material gains will be negligible, but my insights as a teacher, my topics and directions as a scholar, and my style as a writer have all benefitted from my decision in 1968 to heed the challenge of my students to participate in politics.

    Above all, I learned how difficult it is to survive psychologically, and even physically, as a political candidate and office holder. Unlike Aaron Jaffe, some who run for office may not have strong backbones, or even strong characters or intellectual substance; but every one of them has a strong stomach lining, or they don't last very long.

    As I approach my seventy-seventh year, and he enjoys his eighty-fifth year, I can proudly say that Aaron is still my number one political hero. He has never disappointed me, and he continues to amaze me.

    But this book is not about hero worship. More than anything, it is offered as a political handbook, of use and hilarity for those who inhabit, study, or are fascinated by the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of our amazing experiment in American democracy.

    The chapters are often divided into two parts, therefore, in order to explain how I came to appreciate Aaron's political wisdom, how he had attained it, and how I was able to put it into practice in my own semi-professional political career in Illinois from 1970--2002.

    In 2012 Judge Jaffe, with Marda Dunsky, published his own book, Goodbye American Dream? How We Got Here and What to Do About It.⁵ This volume effectively states his worldview and the reasons why he became such a passionate public servant. It contains many prescriptions for a common-sense approach to American politics in the twenty-first century that were developed and employed in Aaron Jaffe's years in Springfield, Illinois, and which we would recognize in other fountainheads of human and political wisdom such as Aesop's Fables, Shakespeare, and Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac.

    Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois deals mostly with the process of politics in Aaron Jaffe's legislative years from 1970 to 1985. Goodbye, American Dream?, in addition to philosophical and ethical issues, also deals extensively with Aaron Jaffe's distinguished career on the bench from 1985 to 2005, and as chair of the Illinois Gaming Board from 2005 to the present. It therefore should be read as a companion volume to Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois in order to fully understand his concerns for our country and what Judge Jaffe thinks others must do to solve problems that he so fearlessly has dealt with all of his life.

    Because of its importance, and with the kind permission of its authors, excerpts from Goodbye American Dream? that deal with Judge Jaffe's background and the tactics he used to promote his worldview in all three branches of Illinois government are integrated into this work in quotations in both the main text and footnotes.

    Most anything I get right in this book can be credited to political skills imparted to me by my students, and political wisdom imparted to me by Aaron Jaffe. Mistaken references and judgments are mine.

    ---Charles M. Barber, Mandan, North Dakota, April 30, 2015

    A Note on Oral History and

    My Recorded Conversations with Aaron Jaffe

    This book is, for the most part, an oral history of Aaron Jaffe's experiences in Illinois politics from the 1940s to the present time. It takes the form of a series of conversations between Judge Jaffe and myself on tape, identified in the footnotes and the bibliography as The Jaffe Tapes. The conversations are entitled Jaffe on Politics and appear at the beginning of chapters 1--3, 7, and 10, and throughout chapters 4--6, 8, and 9.

    While Aaron Jaffe does most of the talking, my questions and responses to him in Jaffe on Politics are in the context of a dialogue and reflect reminiscences on both our parts. My parts of these conversations, as well as any other parenthetical explanations of various details pertaining to the oral history, are indented, separated by three asterisks, or in a different typeface (font).

    This book also is autobiographical, in that I narrate the journey I took into politics, how I discovered Aaron Jaffe, and how I employed the lessons I learned from him. These explanations are found in introductions, conclusions, and in separate sections of chapters 1--3, 7, and 10, following Jaffe on Politics. They are designated either as Essay on Jaffe and Politics, or Notes on Jaffe and Politics.

    Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois also contains the views of a professional historian, trained in both the documentation of, and participation in the political process in the United States. Several sections contain observations about the wisdom of Aaron Jaffe in its historical context and in its application to his time and for the future. As is the case with my autobiographical narrative, these remarks will be found in headings marked Introduction or Conclusion, as well as in parts of the Essays and Notes on Jaffe and Politics.

    The Jaffe Tapes were also used extensively in the compilation, writing, and delivery of five academic papers by myself (Charles M. Barber) between 1994 and 2009. (See the bibliography.) These academic papers, in whole or in part, are incorporated into the book. A sixth paper from 1996, also incorporated into the book, was compiled from other oral history sources I interviewed.

    Introduction:

    My Journey to Aaron Jaffe's World

    Tell me what company you keep and I'll tell you what you are.

    ---Cervantes

    Unlike Aaron's Jewish, East European heritage and Great Vest Side origins, I was born into a WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) environment in Evanston, Illinois, the first suburb to the north of Chicago along Lake Michigan.

    Although the acronym WASP often has been used pejoratively to describe privilege in America's past, with echoes in the present, I find it to be perfectly accurate as far as my racial, ethnic, and religious origins are concerned.

    I am neither particularly proud nor ashamed of association with the term WASP, but it was a long time before I realized that this everyday lack of class and racial consciousness was responsible for a number of bewildering difficulties I encountered while growing up.

    Evanston is connected to the city of Chicago by light rail, and I had easy access as a kid to Cubs and White Sox baseball games. But socially and politically, compared to Aaron Jaffe's upbringing on Chicago's West Side, I might as well have been raised on another planet.

    My late father, Henry P. C. W. Barber, was an honest man, a corporate lawyer on Chicago's LaSalle Street, and an Evanston alderman, about as oxymoronic as one could get. He told me that as an alderman he once kicked a man out of his office who offered him a cash bribe and that it never happened again while he served the City of Evanston as alderman or on the Zoning Board.

    I believed him because his civic courage had cost him and his son choice seats at Northwestern University's Dyche Stadium, when they had a football team worth watching in the late 1940s. My father and a handful of fellow Evanston aldermen had challenged Northwestern University's attempts to expand at the expense of that city's downtown area. The University elected instead to build into Lake Michigan at a time when that was not considered an ecological negative. As Dad explained it, Northwestern retaliated by canceling his complimentary allotment of prime football tickets given to Evanston aldermen at the time, something that bothered me at the age of ten a lot more than it did my Dad. He felt better paying for the tickets anyhow. Turning them down earlier, since they were (in his eyes) a form of bribery, would have been too much grandstanding, and that was not his style.

    My father considered himself a conservative and a moderate Republican, not a strange thing back then, but virtually impossible nowadays, except in certain places in New England and some metropolitan areas. He also often told me that it was better to let a guilty man go free than to convict an innocent one. While I was later sometimes chagrined at his astonishing success in keeping some corporate criminals out of jail who really belonged there, I accepted his sentiments at the time, and still do.

    Some of my father's friends were much more vocally Republican and hard-line conservative than he was---real New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt haters, like the Chicago Tribune's Colonel McCormick.

    One of them introduced me early to swear words I never heard from my father. My big little ears gobbled them up with my morning Wheaties as he launched into his favorite target, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. For years as a kid, I only heard Eleanor as her third name, with her first two names being That Goddamned.

    It was also in family settings that other deep prejudices were revealed, such as at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when the ass end of the turkey was frequently and offhandedly referred to as the pope's nose.

    My family was certainly not the only one in the Chicago area to let anti-Catholic sentiments spill out in dinner discourse over the various parts of a turkey. In his A Reporter in Sweet Chicago, Len O'Connor relates his own boyhood awakening to this deep religious prejudice.

    Some of the kids thought it was sacrilegious for Uncle Phil to refer to that lowly part of our turkey as the pope's nose. I got a reproachful look from my father when I boldly asked Uncle Phil why he called that private end of the turkey the pope's nose. Uncle Phil looked a little uncomfortable and said, What do you call it?

    With all eyes on me, I gulped and said, The kids call it 'the part that went over the fence last'.

    Uncle Phil nodded. I've heard the expression, he said, and I must say that there is some logic to it. I suggest, though, that if you study the pictures of our Italian popes, you'll discover a striking resemblance between the pope's nose and this particular part of the turkey's anatomy.

    As one of the stops on the Underground Railroad in the Civil War era, Evanston had a long tradition of anti-slavery Republicanism, but the town was still segregated in housing and most other ways when I grew up, except for its public schools. There, blacks could and did excel in academics and sports. Evanston Township High School (ETHS), in fact, became a popular national source in the 1960s for elite colleges to draw on when integration became a necessity for their bottom line involving federal dollars, a more important factor than any discomfort to alumni prejudices.

    The issue of swimming pools was avoided by Evanston Township High School not having one. In the 1950s, its state championship swimming teams trained at the Evanston YMCA---the white one. Blacks swam at the Y over on Emerson Street.

    One of my father's neighborhood friends, however, was quite liberal---in the sense of being rational and tolerant regardless of politics. He was Dr. Lloyd J. Michael, principal of Evanston High School, superintendent of public schools in Evanston, and a major progressive force in the 1940s and 1950s.

    Lloyd Michael made a point of visiting Harvard's School of Education most every summer to catch up on the latest in educational theory and practice in the US, whether it be the need for college level advanced placement courses, or racially sensitive faculty training. When I later entered the master of arts in teaching program at Harvard in 1961, we were able to share some thoughts about that school's role in advancing equal opportunity in this country.

    While there is no doubt that educational leadership like Dr. Michael's created greater opportunities for desegregation, the schools' cafeterias were another matter, and the same was true long after Dr. Michael's tenure. My sister, Mary Stewart Barber, a protégé of Lloyd Michael, taught science at Nichols Middle School in Evanston from 1982 to 1999. From her experience, she is convinced that a trained sociologist would have a field day studying patterns of integration and segregation in public school cafeterias with a preponderance of racial diversity.

    During her years at Nichols, Mary Stewart noticed almost invariably that black students sat separately from whites, with two exceptions---the jocks and the nerds.

    In my day, the forties and the fifties, even the jocks and the nerds were segregated in Evanston, except in the classroom. This was confirmed by a number of my black and white 1956 classmates at our fiftieth reunion. The late pastor and bishop William Brother Williams, a former classmate of mine at Dewey Elementary School in central Evanston, and an occasional playmate on playgrounds nearby, remembered this reality of our childhood without rancor in 2006. Pastor Williams maintained a parish in his native Evanston until his recent passing.

    My family lived quite close to one of Evanston's two black enclaves in the 1940s and 50s, and I had several black playmates, like Brother Williams, especially in grade school. My mother later told me that she and my father worried about my bringing black friends home, but never mentioned it for fear that I might bring home even more. My parents figured I would just grow out of it. I didn't, but I never thought of myself as that contrarian until much, much later.

    Although Aaron Jaffe's Skokie lay immediately to the west of Evanston, my suburban world was as different from his as night and day.

    My father actually lived in four different worlds, not counting his life-long emotional attachment to Princeton University. (In October 2001, in accordance with his wishes, my sister and I scattered his ashes around Nassau Hall.)

    Dad's first world was the world of legal affairs as a corporation lawyer, and service to the Establishment,⁹ in downtown Chicago at the firm of Eckert, Peterson, and Leeming on La Salle Street.¹⁰

    His second world was the world of civic affairs in Evanston, as alderman, Zoning Board Member, and strong supporter of the public school system there with his friend Dr. Lloyd Michael.

    As would surprise no one who grew up in these circumstances, these worlds were closed off to women like my mother, Mary McElwain Barber, except in a social sense, when she would get to be the hostess with the mostest [sic] by entertaining the men and wives from these elite environments.¹¹

    My most dramatic remembrance of my mother's isolation by gender came with each visit I would make to the exclusive University Club on Michigan Avenue as a boy. When I went in there with my father for lunch, or by myself to use the pool, I would go in by the main entrance. Whenever I went down there with my mother, we went in by a side entrance, the women's entrance.

    The University Club was not the only elitist culprit in Chicago's Loop.

    Len O'Connor has a marvelous rendition of Richard J. Daley's first visit to the Tavern Club upon becoming mayor in 1955 that perfectly describes the snootiness of this milieu, and the discomfort it could cause in those who were made to feel that they didn't belong and had every reason to resent it.

    Although he could not have missed the insulting treatment, Daley took the self-effacing approach, well aware of the skittishness of his new business establishment backers.

    [Daley] went alone and quietly took a seat close to the elevator. For some minutes the chief executive of Chicago sat there, hardly drawing a glance from the members who heartily greeted each other. Finally an officer of the club---Jules Herbuveaux, general manager of NBC in Chicago---beckoned to the maitre d' and, pointing to Daley, asked why someone was not taking care of him. The maitre d' replied that he had asked Daley if he were waiting for someone and that Daley had simply said no. Herbuveaux said the mayor had obviously dropped in for lunch. He's not a member of the club, the maitre d' explained. Herbuveaux exploded: Not a member of the club? Listen, you dumb bastard, that's the mayor of Chicago. Give him a table. They did better than that: They gave him an honorary membership, which he still uses, strutting into the place on frequent occasions as if he owned the club.¹²

    My mother, of course, did not have the resources of a Richard J. Daley to combat this undemocratic thinking and, like many women in the WASP world of my time, never really was able to cope with the inadequacies it could produce.

    By contrast, Aaron Jaffe's wife, Charlotte, has always been an equal partner in his political world, taking on his adversaries with hammer and tong, and often joining him in Springfield. Her confidence, intelligence, and grace have always been a comfort to those who have worked with him. By the time I met the Jaffes, my mother had passed on, but I could not help but reflect on the world she had missed just a few miles from her doorstep.

    My mother was able to be a somewhat equal partner in my father's third world, that of Glenview Country Club in Golf, Illinois, as pretentious an address as one could dream of to describe the social world of establishment figures in the Chicago area. The golf course was wonderful and challenging, but none of my friends from the public school system in Evanston were allowed to go there. Only a few Social Register friends could join me whenever they were back from prep school in the East. So I mostly played alone, or occasionally with my Dad and his friends (no real fun for a teenager), or at the less challenging Evanston public course with my friends that I deemed worthy, but my father's society did not. Fortunately, my golf game was bad enough that athletic sensitivities did not suffer, but it was a lonely existence for a boy who was smart enough to detect hypocrisy but not mature enough to figure out what to do about it.

    Glenview Country Club is also where I learned the casual term mulligan to describe the practice of taking another shot off the first tee besides what was allowed by the rules, a dig at the Catholic Irish playing a game invented in Scotland, adapted by WASPs as their sport of choice. This ethnic slur has made its way into golf's lexicon with much of the original ethnic sting removed by the amnesia of time and ignorance.

    In the 1950s at Glenview, however, I also heard the term ginsburg regularly used to describe taking an extra tee shot on the tenth hole, a term as raw in its anti-Semitism, as mulligan once was in its anti-Catholicism.

    My father's fourth world revolved around St. Mark's Episcopal Church of Evanston. It was in this context that he had met my mother, whose father, the Rt. Rev. Frank Arthur McElwain, served the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota, as suffragan (assistant) bishop from 1912, and as diocesan bishop from 1917 until 1943.¹³

    Also serving as dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary¹⁴ at that time, Bishop McElwain was active in the successful endeavor to remove that teaching institution from Faribault, Minnesota, to the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston. The idea was that young seminarians would be better exposed on the shores of Lake Michigan to the more cosmopolitan world affected by proximity to Chicago.

    While my grandfather's thinking was uniquely modern in its own Midwestern way, his policies resonated with thinking in a Church of England that was witnessing the passing of the British Empire and the independence of former colonies like India.

    One of my Grandfather McElwain's colleagues was the Right Reverend Bishop John Aaron from India, who was a visiting scholar at Seabury-Western on the Northwestern campus in the 1950s. As such he was an occasional visitor to my parents' home. The fact that he was black was a question of exotic interest to my parents, with varying degrees of acceptance from those who attended their social gatherings.

    Glenview Club was another matter, and when a reception for this prelate from India was scheduled there, the American segregation of that time hit the fan of the Episcopalian ecumenical movement. While Evanston was segregated mentally and in housing, African-Americans were visible in a way that could not be easily dismissed at a lily-white country club in a lily-white suburb like Golf, Illinois.

    There was no public fuss, however. John Aaron made his appearance at Glenview Country Club in way that allowed him not to pass for white---his skin was too dark for that---but to pass for not being a local African American. John Aaron wore a traditional turban, something he rarely did in daily life in the US, or at my parents'. The factotums of de facto segregation on Chicago's North Shore were thus assuaged and could be sure that Bishop Aaron's stay in their presence was neither a subversive nor a long one.

    My father's loyalty to Evanston saved me from the fate of moving with many of their friends to the lily-white suburbs to the north and northwest. I was thus able to reach my teenage years having met kids from almost every conceivable ethnicity and religion, a precursor to race, class, and sectarian treason. My cultural shock came in reverse from much of the rest of the country in 1956, when I left multiracial, multiethnic and multireligious Evanston Township High School for a university in Princeton, New Jersey, that did not admit women and whose undergraduate body's social life practiced as much racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism, as it did in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald.¹⁵

    The 1960s changed Princeton as much as it changed any elitist institution in the United States. By the 1970s they were admitting women for the first time, and blacks and Asians in far greater numbers. Jews and Catholics also were finding the place far more comfortable. But some of the old WASP attitudes were difficult to dissipate, as First Lady Michelle Obama (1985), and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (1976) have testified. In addition, a certain kind of preppy ambiance remained---a charming gentility, but disconcerting, even intimidating, to many young men from public high schools in the Midwest and West. Including myself. A colleague of Princeton mathematician John Nash, from Colorado, put it best in describing this Ivy League citadel in the late 1940s and 1950s: I always felt like my fly was open.¹⁶

    Nowadays, though, Nassau Street and its environs are more comfortably raucous. Returning there in reunion years of the 1990s, I began to recognize an openness that reminded me favorably of the University of Wisconsin's State Street in the 1960s.

    Academically, Princeton was, fortunately for me, a different story. The professors were superb, and much more interested in teaching you how to think rather than what to think. When I left in 1960, I had adopted teaching as my goal, in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson's Princeton in the Nation's Service. Had I left a year later, I might well have tried to enter JFK's Peace Corps. I was well on my way toward the kind of heretical thinking that would make Aaron Jaffe's world seem both familiar and congenial.

    In 1965 my personal life also took a turn in the direction of Aaron Jaffe's world.

    I married a Jewish woman, but not into the Jewish faith. Although some members of each family were shocked in varying degrees from mild to distinctly unhappy, many on both sides were quite accepting. It was the 1960s, after all, and, as Bob Dylan put it, the times were a-changin'.

    When Maxine and I divorced in 1980 for reasons that had nothing to do with religion, she brought up our children, Meredith and Michael, in the Jewish Reform tradition, which I fully supported. Aaron and Charlotte Jaffe attended Michael's Bar Mitzvah.

    I had attended Princeton to honor my father (Princeton 1928), and his wishes that I continue a family tradition of going there. To honor myself and my Midwestern roots, I did my graduate work in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wisconsin had a reputation as a haven for left-wingers and as a party school. Both were true back then, but it was really quite possible to think and act in any direction, a truly cosmopolitan intellectual environment, ensconced in one of the most beautiful state capitals in the nation.

    While living in Portage, Wisconsin, from 1966 to 1967, in my last year of residence for the PhD, I wrote to Wisconsin-Madison's embattled president, Fred Harvey Harrington. I referred to Wisconsin-Madison's widely varied intellectual atmosphere as a hotbed of tolerance, not a hotbed of Communism, a popular epithet around Joe McCarthy's parts of the state, including Portage. President Harrington responded graciously and gratefully that he had used my letter in speeches to alumni around more skeptical parts of Wisconsin at that time. By then I was headed for Chicago, as racially diverse as Madison was intellectually diverse, and a completely different world.

    As a graduate student in Madison in 1967, I had been anti-Vietnam War, but my activist skills were nil, and direct action in Madison was more than I was willing or competent to engage in. My studies of Weimar Nazi Germany and the blowback of the French and Russian revolutions also bolstered a determination to eschew violence in a country that still protected citizen action with habeas corpus, a ballot box, and a Bill of Rights.

    My advocacy of practical nonviolence in 1966, common knowledge to students of Saul Alinsky,¹⁷ put me at odds with many activists in Madison, before they found out three years later---to their sorrow, in the matter of the bombing of the Army Math Research Center---what advocacy of violence could do.¹⁸

    By accident of employment as an historian of German and European history, I landed at another hotbed of political tolerance known today as Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in 1967, on Chicago's Far North Side.

    It is fair to say that Northeastern Illinois was what many college educators in the 1960s called a Sputnik school. Under its old title of Illinois State Teachers College---Chicago North, it had been a normal school, with a mission to train K--12 teachers and little else.

    When I arrived in 1967, this former normal school was in the process of changing its name to Northeastern Illinois State College. We now had a College of Arts and Sciences, separated from a College of Education, with a mission to turn out bachelors of arts and sciences in addition to quality K--12 teachers. The reaction to the successful Russian space launch in 1957 had unleashed a flood of funding for higher education from Congress and the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, hoping to underwrite as many best and brightest from American youth and immigrants in order to catch up with America's deadly rival in the Cold War space race.

    Higher education in general benefitted enormously from the loosening of congressional purse strings to fund brains as well as weapons in the struggle with Communism, and with the addition of graduate programs for its two colleges, Northeastern Illinois State College soon became Northeastern Illinois University.

    Because of its location in the Thirty-Ninth Ward and its new academic missions, Northeastern Illinois became an island hotbed of ethnic and racial tolerance, where white students from the North and Northwest Sides met black students from the South and West Sides, and found out, for the most part, what the fuss was not about.

    White students learned that their families had been lying about blacks, who were as motivated as they were to get ahead in post-secondary education, and willing to work the various full- and part-time jobs needed to foot the bill.

    Black students, after enduring glares on their bus rides northward, thought they had landed at a country club, according to my NEIU colleague and black student counselor, Roosevelt Gordon.

    My university country club, in fact, was open to any and all ethnicities.

    After the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding came out, it was easy enough to explain my campus to other scholars and acquaintances around the country:

    Have you seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding?

    Sure.

    Well, those are my students ... both generations.

    I would then add that the movie could also have been My Big Fat Pakistani, Palestinian, Iraqi, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, etc. Wedding, given that the greater North Side of Chicago contained close to a hundred nationalities.

    These first generation college students decanted into my four-year university with brand new masters level programs for many reasons, not least the fact that the tuition was quite low compared to better-known universities in the city.

    It wasn't long before Northeastern students realized that they had not sacrificed quality of education for the sake of their pocketbook, either. Their classroom instructors were professors whose PhDs were from the same Big Ten and Ivy League Universities that supplied the rest of the country.

    Most of my students were certainly not oblivious to the conflicts of the 1960s. They were just too preoccupied with personal survival to pay those issues the attention they got at Northwestern, Loyola, DePaul, and the University of Chicago.

    In return for showing them they were more intellectual than they realized, a number of my students taught me skills of a hardened precinct captain in Chicago's neighborhoods, as well as how to beat a speeding ticket legally.

    Oh, Professor Barber, was that your first speeding ticket? Don't pay the fine; just go downtown and plead guilty, and all they will do is make you watch a movie.

    I didn't get that many speeding violations, but such political street knowledge became very useful when, after the shock of the violence at the Democratic Convention of 1968 in Chicago's Grant Park, I accepted my students' challenge to make our democratic system work by taking on the Daley machine as their leader at NEIU. I wasn't quite ready to do that in 1968, but by 1971, I had learned enough both on and off campus to be effective.

    In fall 1968, my large lecture class in Western civilization was taken over by black students who were advocating a position for the teaching of black history, which I agreed with. As they had taken over my class without my permission, however, I simply invited the students in the auditorium to follow me out into the hallway where I would complete my lecture, and those that wished to stay could do so if they wished.

    Some of the leaders of the takeover were my own enrollees that semester, but they were betting that I was the kind of white liberal who would not turn them in. They were correct, but they had little idea that my academic tenure might be endangered by such inaction.

    Being comparatively young and very dumb, neither did I.

    The administration, including the history chair and the academic vice president, were furious. They wanted me to file assault charges, but as I had not been physically touched in any way, I could not do so in good conscience. Three other of my colleagues (one of them black) also had had their classes taken over in a similar non-violent manner, and so I was covered in some way, but my advocacy of black history taught by a black man or woman put me on the point, politically speaking, tenure or no tenure.

    Fortunately, Northeastern Illinois was blessed at the time by a uniquely wise and experienced black student counselor, William Doc Speller. Some of my history department colleagues would long and deeply resent the honorary doctoral nickname proffered on Speller by his students, but Bill was well read in the area, and more than capable of offering an introductory class on African-American history. This became quite clear to me when he took one of my colleagues and me to a conference on African-American history at Northern Illinois U. in DeKalb, Illinois, where the keynote speaker was Winthrop Jordan, the author of White Over Black.¹⁹

    The scramble by institutions of higher learning in 1968 for credentialed professors of African-American history who were also African Americans had begun in earnest and had its comical aspects only for those who were not involved.

    Academically respectable African-American scholars had been around for decades, but were dismissed by a Jim Crow mentality in place at all levels of American society throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A major work by an African American on the only successful slave rebellion in history (in Haiti) had been produced by C. L. R. James in 1938. He was first ignored and then incarcerated on Ellis Island as a threat to American security in the 1950s for his political views rather than honored as the asset to American academia and civilized political discourse he truly was.²⁰

    The difficulties of John Hope Franklin, the first African-American scholar to be offered a full-time tenure track position in the 1950s (at University of Chicago) had been an obvious rebuke to those who preferred debate to action.²¹ A decade later, rational racial progress had still been unconscionably slow, until the full effect of the civil rights movement was felt in academia as well.

    The frantic haste with which universities were trying to make up for centuries of racism, and academic complicity in that historic evil, helped make my case for political expediency to temporarily rule over intellectual consistency. I was learning fast.

    I knew very well that it was pointless to debate two issues, which I knew to be true just as well as those who argued them as a defense for doing nothing about the desire of black students for black history taught by black teachers:

    1. History at the college level should be taught by scholars who are credentialed (with PhDs) as well as competent in the classroom.

    2. A knowledgeable and credentialed white scholar was intellectually just as well equipped to teach black history as a black scholar.

    I also knew that political conditions on American campuses and the laws of supply and demand made both options impractical in the extreme.

    The lesser prestige of a newly-converted normal school like Northeastern made the first option unlikely for several years.

    The second option would remain politically and racially toxic for at least a decade.

    Our solution was to create a course for Bill Speller to teach called The Black in World History, and to make a serious effort at administration support for a tenure track position in African-American history. We knew we would interview candidates regardless of race, but we also knew tacitly, just like insiders in the Chicago machine or at the Board of Trade, that African-American candidates had the inside track.

    Our immediate reward was that Bill Speller engaged his good offices with African-American students on campus, and a distressingly large number of my colleagues assumed that the problem was solved.

    I knew better, both as an academic and an activist. My relationship with Bill Speller continued on a personal and professional basis, and I learned vast amounts from him about black anger and anxieties that put a face on what I had been reading since I first picked up James Baldwin in 1960. What I also found out from Bill and his colleague in student counseling, Roosevelt Gordon, was that black students viewed our campus on the far North Side of Chicago as a kind of promised land of opportunity.

    It wasn't so much that white students there in the 1960s welcomed blacks with open arms; they were just too busy with their own lives to care one way or the other. One hundred percent of our students were commuters, with one or more part- and full-time jobs to help themselves through school. Many, if not most, were the first in their families to attend college, and they didn't have the time or inclination to indulge in any racism that might consume their parents' generation in the bungalow belts.

    As noted by Mike Royko (among others), Chicago's neighborhoods were extremely segregated in the 1960s.²² Roosevelt Gordon experienced this on a daily basis. In fall 1968, like many of his black student advisees, he would board the Kimball/Homan Avenue bus on the far West Side of Chicago, recently burned in riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the area had gone black in the 1940s and 50s, its ward committeemen still included holdovers like Bernard Neistein from the Jake Arvey era that had nurtured Aaron Jaffe's father in the Twenty-Fourth Ward. Most Jews from the Great Vest Side of that day had migrated elsewhere. Many, like Aaron Jaffe, had moved to Skokie, or to Chicago's lakefront. Others stopped short of Chicago's northern border in communities around Northeastern Illinois University in the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Wards.

    It is a commonplace in American urban history that blacks, whether in Chicago or Boston, experienced less violent reactions for moving into or through Jewish communities rather than Irish, Italian or Polish ones. This was palpably true

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