When
Hull-House, however, made an effort in the following spring
against the re-election of the alderman himself, we encountered
the most determined and skillful opposition. In these campaigns
we doubtless depended too much upon the idealistic appeal for we
did not yet comprehend the element of reality always brought into
the political struggle in such a neighborhood where politics deal
so directly with getting a job and earning a living.
We soon discovered that approximately one out of every five
voters in the nineteenth ward at that time held a job dependent
upon the good will of the alderman. There were no civil service
rules to interfere, and the unskilled voter swept the street and
dug the sewer, as secure in his position as the more
sophisticated voter who tended a bridge or occupied an office
chair in the city hall. The alderman was even more fortunate in
finding places with the franchise-seeking corporations; it took
us some time to understand why so large a proportion of our
neighbors were street-car employees and why we had such a large
club composed solely of telephone girls. Our powerful alderman
had various methods of entrenching himself. Many people were
indebted to him for his kindly services in the police station and
the justice courts, for in those days Irish constituents easily
broke the peace, and before the establishment of the Juvenile
Court, boys were arrested for very trivial offenses; added to
these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal
kindness, from the peddler who received a free license to the
businessman who had a railroad pass to New York.
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