"Thank the Party"

Beaming with pride, Chicago's silver-haired Democratic Mayor Martin Kennelly (rhymes with uh-nelly) had something to tell the reporters. He had just been elected to a second term as mayor and wanted it known that he wore no man's collar--not even the Democratic Party's. Said he: "I don't take it as an endorsement of any administration except my own."

The politicos thought differently, and bluntly told him so on election night. "The Democratic organization did it for you, Mr. Mayor," cried out beefy Al Horan, Cook County committeeman and bailiff of the municipal court, as Kennelly was busy taking bows. "You can thank the party. I gave you 20,000 votes this afternoon in the 29th Ward. The West Side did it, Mr. Mayor. . . Where's Arvey?" Bald little Jake Arvey, until recently boss of the Cook County machine, pushed forward. Cried Horan: "Here's the greatest little Democrat in Chicago."

What the politicians said was true: it had taken the machine to get out the vote, and even then it had been light. As mayor of Chicago since 1947, benign Martin Kennelly, 63, who runs a storage and trucking business, had worked hard and made few enemies. Even the Republicans weren't mad enough at him to put up a fight. The G.O.P. tried to make Truman the issue and "Defeat the War Party" the slogan; their candidate, a worthy but unexciting lawyer named Robert L. Hunter, preferred to campaign against Kennelly himself as a "ribbon-snipping, do-nothing mayor." Actually, Kennelly had tidied up the civil service and improved the police department a bit, but Chicago's crawling slums were as bad as ever, and crime was still a big problem. His own reputation for honesty was widely respected, but graft still bit deep into the city's pockets, and Kennelly did little to control the politics-ridden city council. "The 'take' in the city is just as great as it ever was," said one alderman, "but it has been decentralized."

In fact, as the election demonstrated, Mayor Kennelly would in future need the Democratic machine as much as it needed him. Kennelly refused to admit it, but Ed Kelly's old saw was still true: "If you don't boss the machine, it will boss you."

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