Chicago Political Folklore vs. Precinct Reality

Illinois has a storied history of political corruption, not the least of which has played out in Chicago and the rest of Cook County. What's not widely known or understood though, is that at one time the county's underlying political structure went a long way toward keeping the people strongly connected to their politics.

Over time ... the public began to view precinct captains as hacks who did the bidding of political parties. ... There was more to it than that, though. There were hacks, but precinct captains went out and talked to people in the community about the party and its candidates. And if precinct captains were good at what they did, they would find out what people were thinking, and they would come back and report to the committeeman. Because the party wanted your vote, you could be sure that if people felt a certain way, the party would fall in line.

— Aaron Jaffe

Introduction

Aaron Jaffe was born on May 16, 1930, to Karl and Dora Jaffe, who had migrated to Chicago's Lawndale neighborhood after World War I, seeking a new life, also fleeing the systematic persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe, known as pogroms.

In his book of reflections, Goodbye American Dream?, Aaron recounts the dreams his parents allowed themselves to dream in a land that promised opportunity despite economic hardship. Although many professional doors were still closed to Jews in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the vicious, state-organized anti-Semitism that presaged the Holocaust was absent. A tailor and his wife could therefore provide food and shelter for themselves and their children without fear of state-organized violence to rob them of life and limb. Also, despite hardships that characterized the Depression years, they could dare to plan for their family's future, especially the education of their children.

In the predominantly Jewish and partially Catholic environment of Lawndale, in which Aaron grew up, his parents were very neighborly and opened their doors to everyone. Their willingness to talk to almost anybody who came in or near their doorstep provided a direct link to social skills so necessary in the profession of politics their son would eventually enter. Like their neighbors, the Jaffes were also willing to help anyone in need in those tough times, and this sense of community and their unflagging work ethic nurtured their son in the values he would carry into his personal and professional life.

Aaron Jaffe also benefitted from the Roosevelt–Truman era of support for public higher education that made it affordable to ambitious sons and daughters of immigrants — a frame of mind and set of policies that came under increasing attack in the self-centered political world ushered in by President Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Back then [the 1940s and 50s] higher education was affordable. I went to the University of Illinois and UCLA and then attended law school at DePaul University. Tuition cost a couple hundred dollars a semester, not the fortune that it costs today. This made higher education accessible to most people, providing race or religion didn't get in the way at universities that had quota systems. Those barriers have largely disappeared, but today they have been replaced by economic barriers that have the same effect of excluding people.

A product and a beneficiary of the New Deal, Aaron Jaffe would engage in an intellectual defense of those ideals, using the practical precinct-level weapons he acquired in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago and Illinois politics.

Jaffe on Politics — In the Wards of Chicago: From Sy Sigel to Vito Marzullo, and Ed Vrydolyak

Sy Sigel and Jake Arvey

Although I made my political reputation in Skokie and the northern suburbs, my real training took place in the city of Chicago. I grew up in the Twenty-Fourth Ward on the West Side, or the GVS in Chicago Yiddish parlance — the Great Vest Side — with renowned bosses like Jake Arvey.

Our family never owned a home then but rented at places like 1251 S. Avers and 1319 S. Komensky.

My father was a tailor from Poland.

He came to America as a young man ... put his pennies together and eventually was able to bring his mother and several brothers and sisters over from the old country. ... He had a little shop of his own, the Karl Jaffe Tailor Shop on Pulaski Road....

During the fall and winter he also worked in a women's coat factory. ... He did piecework and was paid per garment. There was no such thing as minimum wage.

My mother came from Lithuania.

Dora had lived through pogroms in Lithuania and would tell stories about how a chicken had saved her life. "One day I bent down to pick up a chicken ... and a bullet went over my head."

In my home today hangs a photo of her brother's wedding in 1913 or 1914. All those in it would perish in the Holocaust except my mother....

As a child I lived in a building where each apartment was heated by a stove — but this was a land where you could advance from living with stove heat to living in an apartment heated by steam from radiators.

I always had a fascination with politics as a young man, although I didn't do anything actively in high school at Chicago Marshall. When I was eighteen [in 1948], Harry Truman was running for president, and I wanted to see if I was a Democrat because my parents were Democrats or because I really believed. I looked at all of the other party platforms — Socialist, Republican — and concluded that the Democrats still had an edge when it came to the issues that counted in this country:

I had the good fortune to come into my political awareness at a time when there were a few great men. During the Depression [Franklin] Roosevelt instituted programs that would change the country dramatically. Then along came Harry S. Truman, a man who had been a farmer, a haberdasher. ... He was not a college graduate, but he was self-educated. He had read his way through the Independence, Missouri, public library.

Truman became an army captain in World War I, and his troops adored him because he was...