BackStory; Little Caesars: Local Power in America

This is backstory, I'm Ed Ayers. Earlier this month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Immanuel endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Bernie Sanders responded by thanking Immanuel for endorsing his rival. As a CNN analyst put it, proving once again that all politics is local. One of Immanuel's predecessors, Mayor Richard J. Daley, not only promoted John F. Kennedy for president in 1960, he shaped the very social geography of the windy city. He wanted the neighborhoods to remain intact because the neighborhoods were turning out a big vote for the machine. If there were integration, who knows what would happen? Today on backstory, how local power brokers have shaped American history, including coroners in the colonial era and women in 19th century Boston. They saw garbage in the street, really sick kids, and they wanted to make things better. A history of local power, today on backstory. Major funding for backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show, I'm Ed Ayers. Here with Brian Ballot, Hey Ed, and Peter O'Neal. Hey Ed. We're going to start today in the early 20th century with an election story. It takes place in Memphis, Tennessee's segregated black neighborhoods. Now you can imagine what voting meant for African Americans back then. We're talking about the South in 1920, brutal oppression, racism lynching, all of these horrible things were happening. This is writer Preston Lauterbuck. He says Memphis had a unique black population at the time. It was a powerful voting block of 10,000 people led by a man named Bob Church, and let's just say church was also a rarity in the South.

He was the son of the South's first black billionaire, who's his claim to fame, and it was also the foundation of his legacy and his machine. Bob Church used his personal wealth to build a black-run political machine in Memphis. He christened it the Lincoln League. Political power was his answer to races. There was a lynching that took place in the Memphis area in 1917, right around the time that this league, the Lincoln League, was formed. He believed that the ballot was stronger than the bullet in trying to counter the violence that was taking place against his people. Despite the imposition of poll taxes and a general threat of violence, Tennessee didn't explicitly prohibit African Americans from voting, and so church saw an opening. He made black Republicans the swing vote in the local Democratic primary at a time when the South was solidly Democratic, and the GOP was still the party of Lincoln.

You got two white Democrats. You're generally splitting or close to splitting the regular white Democrat vote. You got 10,000 African American votes on the side, whichever of those two white Democrats can offer the most attractive package in return for those African American votes got them. Talk about strange bedfellows. In smoke-filled rooms, church would play white segregationist Democrats off against each other. There wasn't a cigar-chomping arm twister like other political bosses, dashing and always impeccable be dressed. He was soft-spoken and dignified. He was careful never to overreach in his requests for black policemen and paved roads in Memphis. Because he was a shrewd leader and because he gained the respect and the trust of the white Democrat leaders locally, he was able to build new schools, new health care facilities, upgraded neighborhoods.

There were a lot of jobs that he had control over, so he helped to stabilize what there was of an African American middle class at that time. His Lincoln League was a detailed oriented operation. Church and his lieutenant spent years registering blacks in Memphis. They also raised money to pay poll taxes, taught Memphis residents how to read about it and where to go on election day. They organized the city, blocked by block, house by house, they divided it up, you know, and took their organization door to door. Fast forward to the presidential election of 1920, Republicans were trying to win back the White House. So church decided to take his efforts beyond the city of Memphis. He mobilized the African American vote across the entire state of Tennessee. He expanded his Lincoln League statewide and the number that I found was that he eventually registered 170,000 African American voters in the state. And one Tennessee for the Republican Party.

I know that sounds funny today, but I mean, that would be like Alabama going for the Democrats in 2016. I mean, there was absolutely no precedent for a former Confederate state to go for the party of Lincoln. It was a victory built on church's intimate knowledge of local politics throughout the state. But Letterback says church who never took bribes or gifts cared about more than being a machine bus. This self-funded Republican operative focused his efforts on the local level, using the ballot box to get better roads, parks, and schools for blacks in Memphis. This election year, the 2016 presidential race has dominated the headlines. But on the fall ballot, you'll probably vote for a slate of local officials too. Do you know who they are? Do you have any idea how they're going to affect your life? Today on the show, we're applying those questions to the past by exploring local power in American

history. We'll look at how both elected and unelected officials have changed communities on the local and sometimes even national level. We'll hear about Chicago's machine politics under Richard J. Daley and how Aspen, Colorado almost elected Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson as sheriff and we'll explore why many of America's local coroners are elected officials. Peter, you know I often tease you about there being so few people back in the 18th century and accuse you of knowing each one of them personally. But finally, Jefferson, your moment has arrived. We're talking about local power, little Caesars, you know, communities who was the big man or the big woman in your community laid on me, man. I'll give you a simple example, a couple of simple examples. One would be a town that is dominated by a shopkeeper.

And lots of villages across the countryside, somebody's got credit and can access to goods and capital. And that person becomes a node in an emerging market. And you see it clearly, you see economic power. You see political power in the burgeoning popular press, political press in the beginning of the 19th century, late 18th century, when a single editor with a single press will be channeling national policy positions and news and also playing a heavyweight role in local politics, getting the voters out. I mean, all the forms of local power are easy to see. And I think we're talking about networks in every case and being connected and having a key position in network is the way you exercise power. You know, I hate to admit that you might be onto something, Peter, because the 19th century really is the story of expanding and multiplying those networks.

Leading people in town, Brian, are the brokers, the people who are able to translate between outside power and local power, right? And they can make the railroad come to our town. Exactly. And those are the ones who were the head of the Chamber of Commerce, something we invent in the 19th century, or the head of the Masonic Lodge. All those men, by and large, are participating that, but you start seeing women taking part in this as well. And so, temperance organizations or any other kind of improvement organizations, movements for the suffrage, all those give women a chance to be brokers in themselves. So it's amazing really to see how this all just burgeons across the 19th century because there's more and more networks to plug into. Yeah. And you spoke to somebody about this, didn't you? Yeah. Historian Sarah Deutsch, she says that those networks helped women get a foothold in local politics. You didn't have to have the vote to be powerful, and women discovered as long as they could organize other people, as long as they really knew what they were after, that they could achieve quite a bit, even in terms of changing the nature of municipal government itself.

Deutsch says that at the end of the 19th century, women became politically active by forming their own civic groups. In Boston alone, there were 1,000 women's reform organizations in the period around 1890, 1900. The women who could join these organizations by and large had to have some kind of resources. They had to not be spending every waking hour making enough money so that they didn't starve. So the women in these organizations tended to be doctors, writers, college professors, or matrons of substance, women who had some money behind them. When I sat down with Deutsch, she told me that these activists used their networks to make city streets safer for women, and they helped them find work. And then they went to the women's settlement house organizers, and these were women who often with the benefit of college education looked around and saw the city as a dirty and unhealthy place, and they decided one of the problems was that neighborhoods weren't organized.

They remembered growing up with their mothers visited their neighbors. And so when they created settlement houses, they met literally that they were going to settle among the working class and poor populations. They would buy a house, they would plop themselves down in it, they would invite other people to join them to study the neighborhood, and they would begin to go visiting. They would visit their neighbors and see what the issues they faced were, what the problems they faced were. They saw garbage in the street, they saw really sick kids, they saw people out of work, they saw the streets as a threatening place, and they wanted to make things better. And they knew they had to do it together, they had to make coalitions and organizations. So what sort of things were happening in turn of the century, Boston, in which women were taking the lead? In these many organizations, they were running employment services, they were running kindergarten, they were running lunch programs, and they were creating pilot programs with

the hope that the city would ultimately take them over and run them on a city-wide basis. So some of this, I imagine, is sitting a good example, is some of it kind of shaming the city into action? Well, I think it was less shaming the city into action than showing the city that there was a dramatic need and that it could be met. I think the view had been that these problems were always going to be there and there wasn't much you could do about it. So what were they up against? Well, it's not so dissimilar from the kinds of debates people get into today about what is the line between what's a government service and what's a handout, what should government be responsible for, what do we want to pay taxes for, how do we minimize how we pay taxes? And politics was the last bastion, at least in Boston, in all male sphere. They saw politics as what happened on election day and who held office, and what happened in party back rooms.

For women, politics needed to do something else. They viewed themselves as more compassionate, making sure people didn't starve, making sure people who wanted to work could work. Now, that's really something men wouldn't have understood, right? For them, politics and government are the same thing. That's right. And so women were opting for a different, more managerial strategy of government and they lobbied City Hall and they trained people how to lobby. They would have interns from Wellesley and other local schools and teach them how to lobby and they would send them down to City Hall and they would lobby until the government agreed to take something over. And it was a very different notion of what urban government should be. Nobody had thought that the city should be responsible for health, education and welfare, maybe education. But to these women, this was essential if you were going to have a prosperous future where you didn't have people going on strike all the time, you didn't have labor unrest, you didn't have crime and where you had decent health. So that's really impressive.

Is Boston unusual? Boston is not at all unusual in this regard. Almost every city of any size at all had women making these same kinds of efforts. So let me ask you a kind of a loaded question. So did these women make local politics better than it would have been otherwise? They made local politics different and they made women's politics different than they would have been otherwise. They created a new model of what a city should be and they did it across the country and they provide employment services for women and they think there should be kindergartens that are free and they think there should be school lunches. And so this was a new thing. Who thought government should do that? Well, these women thought government should do that and they were able to make these changes. And to me, yes, those are positive changes in the nature of what government should be definitely. They were the authors of a particular kind of welfare state that hadn't existed before. Now, when I walked into the studio today, we had not yet had a female president at the United States and I'm assuming it hasn't happened while we're in here today. So it seems striking that there was so much power of women on the local level, but that

it's taken a very long time for it to seem to move higher up the ash line. Is there a reason that it flourished at the local level? Well, in some ways, the way these particular women organized, it could flourish more easily, ironically, when they didn't have the vote. They could assume that they had similar interests. Some women could assume that they could speak for other women and these middle class and elite women who were so used to speaking on behalf of everyone else, found that other women, they had their own ideas of what they wanted and they were impatient with people trying to speak for them. They were blindsided by the ways in which they were not needed to be the spokeswomen for these other women any longer. And at the same time on a national level, I think they were blindsided by the hostility of men in power. So there was just this tremendous level of defense on the national level and even the state level that didn't exist on the municipal level.

Women hadn't built the same level of organizations, they didn't love trust and respect on that level. And there was much more stake in terms of the men's political power. Sarah Deutsch is a historian at Duke University. She's the author of Women in the City, Gender Space and Power in Boston, 1870 to 1940. We also heard from Preston Lauterbach. He's the author of Beale Street Dynasty, Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Sex. Hey guys, we got a call from the big Apple New York City. It's Tony. Tony, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you. I'm honored to be. Okay. Well, we're honored to take your question. Lay it on us. Well, the thing that it's been on my mind lately being a history teacher of high school

students. Right. It is graphed in local government in New York City here. We mentioned Tamini Hall and Boston Tweed and many of our students sometimes might think, oh, that's something from the past. But in New York City, we've had quite a few well-known politicians who have been indicted on crimes of graphed, and it leads me to ask a question that I know some students have on their mind, is graphed necessary? Is it something that is important in order for the wheels of government to move? Great question. Does it lubricate the wheels of government, guys? Well, Tony, I first of all confess that I used to work in New York City for City Council President Carol Bellamy, a position so crucial. I remember. It's been eliminated that position, and it helps explain why you have those not shoes right?

Exactly. And when I worked in New York City, I worked in the Tweed Courthouse, and it was a very elegant building. It cost a lot of money, and I don't remember exactly how many millions of dollars the cost overruns were, but a lot of those cost overruns were graphed. So clearly, your students need to know that very often, graphed and corruption does nothing for the public. However, there is a school of thought among historians that graphed gets things done. When I think about the late 19th century, in cities like New York City, putting in sewers, being in subways, building roads, trying to get things done really, really quickly, the ability to grease the wheels by paying somebody to get things done, to make things happen quickly, even if someone comes home with a little extra money than they should in their pocket,

helps explain perhaps how our cities were able to build these incredible projects, subways, viewers, something like Central Park in New York City. So I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for corruption, but if you'd like to talk to me after the show and send me a couple hundred bucks, you can be on every week, Tony. I have a question for you. Is there any difference between graphs and corruption? You know, that's something that my students have posed to me. All right. So when you tell them, I'm curious. I always try to cover my response by restricting it to the period we're talking about. It's funny that you mentioned the late 19th century, very early 20th century, and the immigrant population that's growing, and the rise of tenements, and how these very, very poor conditions, often relegated these immigrants, many of whom could not perhaps speak English, to try whatever they can to convince someone who does have some kind

of authority to bring some attention to their needs. So I try to skirt around the issue without being a preacher to them. I think you've skirted out there, Tony. I think you actually answered my question, which is, why would it be necessary to have graphed corruption to build subways in parks? We assume other cities did it without it. But I think Tony pointed to the right answer, which is that at this time, constituents outside of power had to find ways to get in power. What do you guys think? Is that historically specific because of the configuration of immigration? I think that's one dimension of it. Another is the tendency of the machinery of government to lock down. The default situation for government is to do nothing because countervailing forces are always getting in the way. So I noticed that this seems to be at the municipal level, Brian, and our show is about local power.

Was corruption and graph mainly a local issue, or did we see it on a larger scale? Well, it wasn't exclusively local, but it was mainly local. Number one, that's where most services were and still are provided. Number two, that's where you have a thick web and overlapping of family ties and ethnic ties, even racial ties. These networks, it's extended out literally from families, and at some point connected with the political parties, they were thickest and most prominent at the local level. And that is the parties were, in many ways, sorry, Tony, they were the conduits for this graph and corruption, in many ways, it's what made them run, or at least helped them run. So what grade did we get on our answer, Tony? You're a high school teacher. I would definitely give it an eight. No, that's before a great inflation, right? Absolutely.

Right? We don't inflate grades at all. I'd like to point out, I agreed with your answer most enthusiastically, so I do think that's where it takes to cut it. Hey Tony, thanks very much for joining us today with that great question. Hey, thank you Tony. But thank you once again to all of you. There's one 20th century machine politician who towers above all the others, Richard J. Daley, Daley was mayor of Chicago from 1955 until 1976. He was also boss of the city's Democratic political machine during those years. He wasn't necessarily the smartest guy in the city in terms of book knowledge. He wasn't the most articulate, but he understood the way the levers of power were. That's journalist Adam Cohen, co-author of a biography of Daley. He says when it comes to local power, Daley was in a class by himself. There's been no political machine of the size and influence of the Chicago machine anywhere else in the country

And daily was head of it when it was at its greatest power in terms of patronage employment Ability to turn out the vote for candidates for local and national office Now we just spoke with a listener about how machine politics shaped 19th century New York That same was certainly true for 20th century Chicago The daily machine brought physical changes to Chicago including an expanded O'Hare international airport and elevated expressways that Crisscross the city But Cohen says daily had an essentially conservative vision for how his city should run He had no interest in modernizing Chicago's politics He started at the very bottom of the machine as a as a foot soldier in Bridgeport. I see so he really knew it inside out That's right. The machine was hierarchical. There was the boss at the very top There were precinct captains and aldermen and other people below down to the real foot soldier who you know knocked on his neighbor's doors

The aldermen who really delivered for the machine got more patronage jobs The aldermen who didn't deliver for the machine got fewer or none if you were just a resident of a local neighborhood You wanted to know your local guy in the machine and somewhere up up up the chain going all the way up to the boss Would be the benefits that would eventually be decided on then come back down to you Cohen says daily's impact on the city is especially visible in housing The city was split between white neighborhoods on the north and west sides and black neighborhoods on the south side Daily was determined to keep it that way Especially since his own Chicago neighborhood Bridgeport sat right on the dividing line Daily was a big proponent of segregation a big supporter of segregation and the pragmatic reason was that he wanted to keep the city Operating the way it was because it was what put him in power So he wanted the neighborhoods to remain intact because the neighborhoods the way they were were turning out a big

Vote for the machine if there were integration who knows what would happen Maybe a lot of whites would flee the city maybe end up with a black mayor So he wanted the status quo and daily very shouldly use urban renewal sometimes in Chicago They called it Negro removal to take black areas that were near white areas or near the downtown and Pave them and then put some kind of highway or some big new building there So he was actually building segregation into the very Concrete of the city an example that is the Dan Ryan Expressway which was a dividing line between the state street corridor the Largest concentration of public housing in the country on one side and then the bungalow belt on the other side Which was the you know white ethnic neighborhoods that daily himself came from the Dan Ryan really followed that line Well, why did blacks go along with that? Why did they participate in the larger machine if one of its purposes was to maintain that segregation? It was important for the machine to continually co-opt everyone who had votes in order to stay in power

so they needed to have a strategy for the black population and that strategy was The black submachine which was a part of this of the machine, but a lesser part blacks also wanted patronage jobs They wanted to be able to feed their families They wanted help if they couldn't pay their electric bill There were a lot of things that they wanted that the machine that the word healer in their neighborhood Provided and in exchange they provided their votes and they didn't quite get as much patronage They didn't have as much influence in city hall But they got some patronage and they had some influence. There was a congressman on the south side named Bill Dawson who was Put there by the machine and kept an office by the machine and he presided over a black submachine that Reliably turned out huge votes for the machine and for mayor daily when he personally ran and got back things in return So you know, it's ironic because people do think of daily as being you know someone who is not well inclined towards blacks And certainly not in favor of civil rights, but he was very strategic with the black submachine in giving the community enough to turn out a strong vote

How did daily's actions differ from those of any other big city mayor when it came to racial segregation and what are the longer term consequences of the power of the daily machine? Yeah, I mean you could contrast it with New York City where for part of the time that daily was in office There was you know mayor Lindsey who was elected, you know on a much more liberal platform and much more supportive of integration Daily really represented the old order till the very end he believed that the neighborhoods should remain Ethnic enclaves and he was not interested in fair housing and as I say he was building these barriers You know everywhere to keep the black neighborhoods where they were and You know, there were two ramifications of this one is that um it did keep the population more stable We didn't see the white flight in Chicago that we saw in places like Detroit where Chicago really retained its white middle class

But the cost of that was that it Chicago also became the most segregated major city in America So these walls were very real and it's something that one can see sometimes just walking around Chicago It is just less of a mix in a lot of places than there are in other big cities Daily is seen as a Master of wielding Political power. What's the biggest mistake he made? I mean, I think the biggest mistake he had I would say was really a moral one that you know at his core Daily really was a tribal guy He was a man from Bridgeport who believed in Bridgeport and believed in his neighborhood And he was really never able to empathize with the other and the other in this case were you know In many case African-Americans who live just a few blocks away from where he was born That's fascinating Adam. So you're saying that in a way he was too local He surely was a local power, but he was a man almost of his particular neighborhood

Rather than the entire city not to mention metropolitan area I Think that's exactly right. He really was always a man of Bridgeport You know, it to be a truly great man the sort of person we would like to be mayor He would really have an understanding of all the people of Chicago and try to help all of them So um if we see him as a political creature he did pretty well But as a leader of a city to to be so indifferent to the needs and legitimate wishes of about half of the city That's a huge moral failing and that is part of his legacy Adam. Thank you so much for joining us on backstory. Oh, sure. I enjoyed it. Thank you Adam Coden is a journalist and co-author of American pharaoh may a Richard J. daily his battle for Chicago in the nation Richard J. daily died in 1976 during his sixth term in office

By then black Chicagoans had begun moving from the segregated south side to white neighborhoods on the city's west side The Supreme Court had also struck down restrictive covenants that barred blacks from living in certain neighborhoods As they settled in new neighborhoods blacks encountered plenty of racial hostility followed by a slow rolling wave of white flight and resegregation reporter Stephen Jackson has the story of one suburban community just west of Chicago that welcomed African Americans Moving to a park for me was like a Dorothy waking up in the land of us Suddenly she wakes up in everything's in color This is crystal shan in morla She was just seven years old when her family came to oak park It was 1968 and they had just moved out of a low-income hyper-segregated African-American neighborhood on Chicago's west side Everything looked different the houses were bigger the people looked different

This is the first time we ever saw white people in real life On the first day she and her sisters were playing in the backyard when they saw the neighbor kids out in their yard There was a moment where all the kids Me and my sips in the kids next door just sort of came up to the fence and stare at each other And it's like we were just Quiet staring at each other it seemed like forever And and then my sister says that that boy he has blue eyes she said can you see out of those eyes And they were just quiet their mouths dropped. I imagine what they were thinking also was there looking at our skin Look at that skin and they're like chocolate whatever and then we just went back to playing Shannen Morla and her family were one of the first African-American families to move to oak park around this time She didn't know it, but they were pioneers or maybe guinea pigs in an ambitious social experiment It was spearheaded by a housing activist named Roberta Raymond

She didn't like what she saw happening in Chicago Neighborhoods re-segregating from white to black with disinvestment and blight close behind In many people's minds Integration was that brief period of time Between when the first black family moved in and the last white family moved out And oak park had to really look and say What can we do to make this different? Raymond founded a nonprofit called the oak park housing center and started working with local government and community groups and law enforcement To develop an integration strategy It was based on the idea that you couldn't just let the housing market do whatever was gonna happen That you had to intervene So the village passed a fair housing ordinance and unlike other towns they trained realtors and landlords to follow it If someone felt that they had been discriminated against there was a village staffer to feel that complaint Raymond's housing center also did what you might call reverse steering

Encouraging newcomers to spread throughout the village instead of clustering by race And they bought ad space in national magazines promoting oak park as a safe racially integrated community This was a new idea using diversity as a marketing tool you have to send this message That racial change in a community can be a very enriching experience It can make a better community That is a hard lesson for a lot of people to learn For some people racial change felt like an invasion They didn't want African-Americans in their town and Raymond was telling them they were wrong She got a lot of threatening midnight phone calls. Oh, yeah, I mean these would be people call and say Um, I can remember one call it was like, you know nigger lover you better get out of town before we You know take care of your things, you know very threatening phone calls and I had a file at the housing center of hate mail And it was vicious

But most people weren't vicious. Most were just uncomfortable with change There were probably lots of dinner table conversations like this one from a 1974 documentary about oak park I think another interesting question is when would we hear any of us if what percentage would we move Um, when a certain percentage of blacks move in when would we consider reading not out of fear Just because it's um uncomfortable to be in the minority And I think myself it would be somewhere in the neighborhood between 15 80 percent I wouldn't disagree with that, but I think the rate of change is a big factor too If it had become only 40 percent but was changing 15 or 20 percent here I might be inclined to leave sooner if I were inclined to leave it all As it turned out a lot of white people were inclined to leave in the 1970s about 10,000 whites left in a village of 60,000 But over time oak park's integration strategy worked Amanda Seligman is a historian who has studied racial change on Chicago's west side

And she says oak park enjoyed certain advantages that made integration easier One is that they were their own municipalities so they could do things that the city of Chicago as a whole couldn't do Like enforcing the fair housing rules and shaping the local housing market The village was also pretty liberal so Raymond's strategy had a lot of local support And ultimately also it was wealthier And so that those African-Americans who were going to be able to buy into oak park were just a much smaller proportion of the population So the tolerance for a few African-Americans of wealth was greater than it might have been for a larger population of poor black people Today the population is about 64 percent white, 22 percent black and 7 percent Latino Demographically that's similar to the metropolitan area although Latinos are underrepresented And while other towns have racial and ethnic enclaves oak park is integrated almost block by block In the nearby suburbs it's a different story

Maywood is mostly African-American Cicero is mostly Latino Elmwood park mostly white Some of these towns have gotten more segregated in the last 20 years And Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in the country Here's Roberta Raymond again Segregation is so in broad in American life that the opportunity that oak park affords A family, a child growing up is invaluable My grandson is 10 years old And he doesn't think about the fact that he has kids of all races in his school That is not something he thinks about And I think if children throughout the country grew up that way You know we wouldn't have to have some of the things that go on in the society Raymond thinks big social problems like mass incarceration and generational poverty Wouldn't be so big if more communities were integrated Again, Crystal Shannon Moorla

It made every difference in my life Literally my life will be different now Growing up in oak park she had white and black friends She went to a good school where she had access to extracurriculars that just didn't exist in her old Chicago neighborhood And she grew up being comfortable around people of different races She's grateful for that I'm always aware of that I'm always aware of that so it makes me want to contribute and give back Today she's a psychologist and a mentor at an after-school program in oak park Trying to help academically struggling students catch up Because even though oak park is diverse It's grappling with a racial achievement gap These are big problems and so we have to continue to come together and as a community and Work on these things and not give up. There's more work to be done Now she just has to do what Raymond and others did 50 years ago Organized from the ground up look for new strategies and hopefully lead the way for the rest of the country Steve and Jackson is a freelance reporter and producer If you want to hear more about oak park head to our website

We'll link to a story steven reported with the radio show and podcast curious city at WBEZ in Chicago We partnered with them on this story If you like backstory you should check them out They often cover the history of Chicago while answering curious questions about the windy city Head to backstoryradio.org to find out more We're going to turn now to a local job that you might not think matters much the corner Corners investigate violence suspicious or sudden deaths and their basic job description hasn't changed But their power and how they get the job varies widely

Some corners are appointed some are elected and some have been replaced by forensic experts Kelly Jones one of our producers decided to look into the history of corners And she's here to tell us what she found. Hey Kelly. Welcome to the studio. Thanks Brian So Peter's right the basic job of the corner is to investigate suspicious deaths and sign death certificates that officially record how a person died And the profession has been around for a long time. I'll bet way before the new world was even a twinkle in the English crown's eyes However, I've done some really deep research and I have found some archive tape of one of the first Coroners that ever walked the earth and I'd love to play it for you guys. Yeah. Oh, please I'm not dead. Yeah, he says he's not dead. Yes, he is

He is not wild. He will be soon. He's very ill. I'm getting better. No, you're not. You'll be stoned at night. As you know That's a famous Monty Python sketch and a good history lesson too Well, so not a lot of that rings true except that the coroner was established in England and Usually he was a knight So he was not a doctor from the very beginning and that's important because when the corner position comes over to the new world The coroner is also not a doctor and the main job of the coroner in the early period was to hold in quests Which means that the coroner when he's investigating deaths He becomes the judge he calls witnesses and he selects a jury to help him figure out what happened Oh, yeah, absolutely, but you know what I'm impressed with Kelly is it sounds like this coroner has Dispotic power the power of a king almost. He does an actually coroner comes from crowner The coroner in England was responsible for telling the king

How someone had died and forgiving the king his due If that person right old taxes or yeah, he died by a crime where something could be given to the king to make up for losing that subject Well, I think that's really important Kelly because after all American colonists are subjects of the king and this is the way the king is part of a local community in the person of a coroner Peter what better reminder Than every time somebody dies you are reminded that there's still a subject of the king Yeah, and I'm so glad that we live in a democracy where we don't need corners anymore then So I'm just guessing the 19th century that went away is the march of democracy proceeded right Well, I'll tell you when things really start to pick up and change and it's when We lose the intimacy of a small community or small town and cities start booming So before our coroners could call on local community knowledge They would bring witnesses witnesses would generally know everybody so with the people on the jury and so with the coroner

But as people began to move around more and as the population began to grow You had strangers you had more unknowns you had Immigrants coming in you had relationships that you couldn't account for right But the job of the coroner also began to shift because it became less of a job you would have for a lifetime And more like a stepping stone on the way to more and more political power People don't want to end their careers a coroner. Mm-hmm. It's the death of your career My favorite example is from the 1870s There's a coroner who gets elected in New York City his name is Richard Croaker No, did you not He got elected twice and then he became the boss of Tamini Hall So he no, I recognize the name now. Yeah, he's an example of someone that used that coroner position To move around and become elected. Okay. I'm still looking for progress here So yeah, the 19th century didn't get rid of it. Maybe the 20th century did for sure

I've these pay these folks were replaced by Teams of scientists right exactly they're all over you are they're all over TV Kelly So yes in the early 20th century we get the rise of forensic science and yet the coroner In many many places is still a very political position Mm-hmm if we have about three thousand counties in the US right now somewhere around half have an elected coroner Well, we still elect them and in about 1500 of those Counties the only requirement For running for coroner is that you're over 18 and have never been convicted of a felony So there was someone in 2012 a Republican candidate for coroner in a small county in Georgia who fit that bill Um, and I'd love to read you his platform from his Facebook page Here is what I want Obama

Gone borders closed language English culture US Constitution and the Bill of Rights Yeah, and how does that describe his job? I don't know but he won He was elected I would guess that the coroners are often a part of the dominant party in the County right because who has invested the energy to really discover the qualifications of a coroner You just come in and vote for all the people who are the party you believe in right consider it It's a survival of that old idea of patronage of a of a plumb job that a party faithful Can claim but Kelly Are these folks really as powerful as they were back in Peter's day or Really is politically mobile as this guy Croaker was in New York City It is this is that guy in Georgia really heading anywhere Yeah, I think the coroner position is still thought of as a stepping stone for other Political careers. So you become coroner to maybe become sheriff to maybe become mayor someday

It's a testing ground for how good you are getting elected right and I don't know I think the coroner has a great deal of power. It might not be machine style power, but The stakes of getting something wrong or getting a death wrong are pretty high if somebody gets murdered And you miss that as coroner There's a murderer out there somewhere if you fail to index that somebody died of a specific disease Maybe you can't tell that person's family that the disease runs in their family What about the money side of it in the taxes side of it that you started out with you know If you're an insurance company the corner has a lot of power when they determine how somebody dies sure They're still moving money around. They still determine who gets benefits and who doesn't So if money equals power We've still got a little bit of control kind of like death in taxes. Something's never changed. That's right We're gonna turn to the town of Aspen, Colorado in the late 1960s. It was a chic ski town on the rise

Local business owners sought to attract wealthy tourists to their iconic slopes At the same time young hippies inspired by tales of Shangri-La in the Rockies poured into town Many locals viewed these long haired newcomers as riffraff the county sheriff began arresting the hippies for minor crimes like loitering and hitchhiking Tensions between Aspen's entrenched establishment and its freaks culminated in a memorable election starring a well-known Gonzo journalist Backstoy producer Nina Ernest takes it from here Hunter S. Thompson had been living in Aspen for a few years when he decided to run for sheriff to Protect the hippies. This is DJ Watkins who wrote a book about Thompson's 1970 campaign

He says that the writer ran for sheriff of Pick and County under the banner of freak power We long hares were labeled freaks by the establishment And Hunter decided that freak was very descriptive. Let's use it. And this is Bob Brottis He moved to Aspen to be a ski bum and soon found himself drawn to Thompson's campaign And I pretty much agreed with Hunter's platform which was largely anti-greet and anti-chicken misdemeanor and felony laws What Brottis means is that Thompson wanted to decriminalize drugs Limit development and protect the environment And Watkins says that Thompson also wanted to make the sheriff more than just a sheriff He wanted to embrace the idea of the ombudsman There could be a member of government that his whole job was taking complaints from members of the community sort of a watchdog of the government itself

It sounds straightforward on paper, but some of his suggestions were a little surreal Take this campaign advertisement Hunter represents something wholly alien to the other candidates for ideas And a sympathy towards the young generous grass-oriented society Which is making the only serious effort to face the technological nightmare we have created He wanted to tear up all the roads to make the city more walkable He wanted to shame bad drug dealers as in people who took advantage of their customers in public stocks Medieval style And he wanted to change the name Aspen to fat city to make the town less attractive to tourists Thompson set out to enlist all the newly arrived hippies to vote for the freak power cause Volunteers like Bob Brottis registered over 700 new voters a huge number for a county of just 6,000 They're success alarmed the town's more conservative residents

And Thompson's characteristically outlandish behavior didn't help Here's Thompson himself We do have a freak power base and that's undeniable If I went there and walked through the streets naked with a bomb in each end And drugs dripping, you know Cover with the various picky substances that were known to be fat hole drugs And they were still vote for me Thompson's main opponent who he called a dim-witted cowboy with a gun Was the incumbent Carol Whitmeyer If Thompson was some bizarre version of a western sheriff Whitmeyer was straight out of central casting He had his honorary policy with white stetsons, white cur chiefs, white shirts, white guns And he was basically parading what I saw in western movies in the 1950s The good guys all wear white The American sheriff's job was carved out of the rugged west Vote for an elect

Carol Whitmeyer for our sheriff I think he woke up one day with Hunter running against him going What the hell just happened Before long, this tiny local election became a national story In October, Thompson wrote an article about his campaign for Rolling Stone magazine After the Battle of Aspen hit news stands Profiles on Thompson for Sheriff appeared in the New York Times in the Washington Post Even the BBC made a documentary about this election What kind of sheriff do they want in the West these days Could the conventional establishment citizens of Aspen elect as their sheriff A hippie, a freak and acid head A man who opened these smokes, gross marijuana The battle lines were drawn Here was a microcosm of the country's culture wars Set amidst the ski slopes of Aspen As the election approached, some of Aspen's residents began to worry that Thompson could actually win So local elites ramped up their anti-Thompson rhetoric

They tapped into an issue that dogged his entire campaign No one could figure out if he really wanted the job While broadest thinks his friend was serious There was perhaps a component of self-aggrandism and self-promotion in Hunter's run for Sheriff Because it definitely attracted way more attention that we thought it would One time where Hunter had embarrassed himself by one of his crazy actions I said, Hunter, why are you doing this? They said, Bob, you know I don't do crazy stuff Unless I can write about it and get paid for it And running for Sheriff, he told broadest, was the craziest thing he had ever done Election Day arrived, November 3rd, 1970 Reporters from across the country descended upon Aspen We were all watching the county clerk put the numbers up with chalk on a blackboard And I was never as optimistic as some of the other people

But some people actually thought we were going to win We won, we won, we won Actually, Carol Whitmer won, but not by much The freak campaign had failed The sheriff won by only 400 votes though, out of 2,500 That night Thompson heard the news at a local hotel that doubled as campaign headquarters Wearing a blonde wig and draped in an American flag The losing candidate faced a gaggle of the reporters I can't, unfortunately prove what I said out to prove And it was more of a political point of the local election And I think the original reason was to prove it to myself But the American dream really is Thompson never ran for office again Though he remained a lifelong resident of Aspen And despite his loss, Watkins says that freak power lived on in this corner of the Rockies

That voting block that he helped get involved and get engaged Had a real lasting impact on every subsequent election Look no further than the sheriff's office Here's how it happened Carol Whitmer left office amidst allegations of mismanagement And the guy that was elected after him had been Thompson's choice for his under sheriff And the next sheriff of Picking County Thompson's friend Bob Brottis I've been retired for five years after 24 years as sheriff Brottis says that he and his fellow sheriffs worked hard to make Hunter's platform a reality Especially his idea that the sheriff should be more of a problem solver than a strict law enforcer On the other hand, Aspen never became fat city and is in fact glitzier than ever Still, Watkins claims that Aspen's progressivism is worth emulating You know, these things that Hunter was writing about and that Aspen went through Are actually a model for what other places around the country are going through

But some people are going to hear this and say okay, this works for Aspen But Aspen is a small town. It's a very wealthy town. It's not very diverse So what could this really tell us about how law enforcement can change? Well, an Aspen 1970 is Not so different than some other places now, but you I mean you're definitely right I mean we live in a and sort of a bubble here But as tip O'Neill Said all politics are local and Hunter Thompson said politics is the art of controlling your own environment So you start small if it spreads beyond your city limits so be it But if you've controlled your own environment you want That story was told by backstory producer Nina Ernest We also heard from DJ Watkins and Bob Broadess

Watkins is the author of Freakpower Hunter as Thompson's campaign for Sheriff Broadess served as Pitkin County Sheriff for 24 years Well, that's gonna do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online Tell us what you thought of the show while you're there pull the levers of power and help shape our upcoming episodes You'll find us at backstory radio.org or send us an email backstory at virginia.edu We're also on Facebook Tumblr and Twitter at backstory radio Whatever you do don't be a stranger Backstories produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Ernest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gattick Jamal Milner is our engineer and Diana Williams is our digital editor We have helped from Brianna Azar and Melissage's Monday assist with research Special thanks this week to John Brook, Marcella Fiero, Julie Johnson McGrath, and Brad Shriver

Major support is provided by the SheaCon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities that Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations Additional funding is provided by their tomato fund, cultivating fresh ideas and the arts, the humanities, and the environment and by history channel history made every day Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia Peter Oneth is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Backstory is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange