Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [58]
“Paddy, I’ve been to Europe twenty-five times and around the world three times, and I’ve always had a diary.”
“Judge,” replied Paddy, “you can get rid of that with Pepto-Bismol.”
All these individuals are part of a colorful, sometimes seamy stage of politics through which every large city has had to pass. They have left their mark on Chicago – and not always for the better. But anyone who approaches Chicago politics with unqualified condescension is making a mistake. Admittedly, there has been boodle and fraud. But there has also been sound, long-range planning and civic responsibility – as witness our unspoiled lake-front (much of which is set aside for public parks), our Cook County Forest Preserves (nearly fifty thousand acres of woodland stretched in a great, green belt around the city), our parkways, our subways and rapid-transit lines.
Many public figures of national stature have come out of Chicago – Stephen A. Douglas, Charles G. Dawes, Harold Ickes, Frank Knox, Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, to name only a few. And as the leading host to national political conventions for over a century, Chicago has witnessed the nomination of ten Presidents: Abraham Lincoln (1860), U. S. Grant (1868), James Garfield (1880), Grover Cleveland (1884 and 1892), Benjamin Harrison (1888), Theodore Roosevelt (1904), William Howard Taft (1908), Warren G. Harding (1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932, 1940, and 1944), and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952).
It is true that Chicago is the only American metropolis never to have experienced full-scale governmental reform. And it is also true that Chicago is the last outpost in the United States of the big-city political machine. But in the past few years, this machine, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, has provided government comparable to the best among large cities. And with each recent election, the machine has shown an increasing readiness to put forward fresh new faces, to give us first-rate people – at least in the major offices – instead of the usual party hacks. Cambridge-educated Otto Kerner, Illinois’ present governor, is one of its offspring. So are Cook County State’s Attorney Daniel Ward, the former dean of De Paul University Law School; Municipal Court Chief Justice Augustine Bowe, once president of the Chicago Bar Association; and former Sheriff and State Treasurer Joseph D. Lohman, now dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California.
Chicago’s judicial benches include men from both parties-men of whom any city could be proud. In the Federal Courts, we have such distinguished judges as William Campbell, Michael Igoe, Hugh Will, Walter LaBuy, Julius Miner (originator of Illinois’ sixty-day “cooling off” requirement in divorce cases), the controversial Julius (“the Just”) Hoffman, and James Parsons, the first Negro appointed to the Federal judiciary. The eminent jurists who sit over our Circuit, Superior, and Municipal courts are men of great probity and lofty erudition – and many of them offer daily proof that a long face does not necessarily have to scowl out from over that long robe. Judge Abraham L. Marovitz, a collector of Lincolniana, is a pillar of Chicago’s Anti-Superstition Society. Judge Henry Burman is one of my jolliest golfing partners – who raises few points of order with me except in the sand traps. And Judge Jacob Braude has compiled a number of popular anthologies of very funny after-dinner anecdotes.
The late John Sbarbaro was one Chicago jurist who made major contributions to society both as a public official and as a private citizen.