This month, In The Fray wants your stories of rivalries. Tell us about the spirit of competition and how these experiences led to an unexpected revelation. Show us the ways that rivalries make people better — and the ways they make people worse.
In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | December 2012: Rivalries
Every one of us has had a rival at one point in our lives: siblings, classmates, coworkers, even strangers. At a national level, we’ve just witnessed a bitterly fought U.S. presidential election, but some of the most iconic rivalries have little to do with politics. Yankees and Red Sox. Microsoft and Apple. Vampires and werewolves. Leno and Letterman.
This month, In The Fray wants your stories of rivalries. Tell us about the spirit of competition and how these experiences led to an unexpected revelation. Show us the ways that rivalries make people better — and the ways they make people worse. As usual, we are open to stories that deal with the topic broadly construed, and in a variety of approaches: profiles, interviews, reportage, personal essays, op-eds, travel writing, photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and review essays of books, film, music, and art.
If interested, please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece as soon as possible — along with three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN DECEMBER 15, 2012. All contributors are urged to review our submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submit.
We are also looking for artists, photographers, and writers who can take care of specific assignments, including book and film reviews, interviews, and accompanying photos and artwork. If interested, please follow the instructions at the bottom of http://inthefray.org/submit to join our contributors’ mailing list.
Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich makes remarks in front of his Chicago residence the day before beginning a fourteen-year federal prison sentence. (Flickr)
The “Blago” scandal may have set new lows for reality TV-abetted shamelessness, but the ex-Illinois governor was just one in a long, storied line of corrupt Chicago politicos. We run through the decades of graft and cronyism that have weighed down the City of the Big Shoulders.
Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich makes remarks in front of his Chicago residence the day before beginning a fourteen-year federal prison sentence. Justin Newman, via Flickr
Like many other things that the city has branded and made its own (pizza, the blues, improv, hot dogs), Chicago has its own kind of politics. The structure of the city’s government is decentralized and hyperlocal, a swamp of favors, family ties, and a certain flair for the theatrical. Its leaders’ crooked dealings land on the front pages of Chicago’s papers on a regular basis. Corruption in Chicago is as constant as the Cubs’ losing streak: an inside joke that’s been done to death.
Chicago has always belonged to hustlers. In the 1830s, after a stretch of land was ceded by Native Americans, speculators saw the potential for a transportation hub. The city was built in a swamp known for its pungent onions (according to local lore, an Indian word for wild onion, shikaakwa, provided Chicago with its name).
Before Prohibition, the members of Chicago’s city council were mostly self-made men who exchanged favors for votes, giving rise to a system of patronage and cronyism. They were men with backgrounds as colorful as their nicknames: Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, Johnny “De Pow” Powers.
They weren’t the first to make a living brokering deals between the criminal element and politicians, but they did it in true Chicago style: loudly and unapologetically. They hobnobbed with the madames, gangsters, and pimps of their districts, took bribes as their due, and ran protection rackets. When the Municipal Voters League, a reform organization, printed that Coughlin was a tool of gamblers and thieves, Coughlin demanded a retraction — not of their claims that he was corrupt, but because they had written he’d been born in Waukegan. As a native Chicagoan, Coughlin took offense.
Chicago Mayor William “Big Bill” Hale Thompson, circa 1915. Wikimedia
The last Republican to hold the mayor’s office was William “Big Bill” Hale Thompson. During his time in office, the Chicago Outfit, the organized crime syndicate that Al Capone would make famous, dominated the bootlegging trade. Violent turf wars broke out — between local politicians. These culminated in more than sixty bombings in the run-up to the 1928 primary elections. The editor of the Chicago Tribune once wrote that Thompson had “made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization.”
The Depression turned Chicago into a Democrat’s town. A succession of slick mayors molded the city government into little more than an autocracy, complete with its own dynasties. Richard J. Daley served for five terms before dying in office in 1976. Despite an administration marked by scandals and well-publicized corruption cases, Daley is still regarded by political scientists as one of the best mayors in American history. After all, he gave us Sears Tower (now known as Willis Tower) and O’Hare Airport; what’s rampant and systemic corruption compared to that? The city loved him so much it elected his son, Richard M. Daley, after a very brief flirtation with a couple of reformist mayors. The younger Daley surpassed his father by serving for six terms before retiring.
It takes a certain kind of mindset to go into Chicago politics: a combination of brute determination, narcissism, flexible ethics, and manic tendencies — not to mention a rich vocabulary of curses. Maybe this can explain the slow-motion implosion of Rod Blagojevich’s short stint as governor of Illinois.
The son of Serbian immigrant parents, Blagojevich was born in 1956 on Chicago’s North Side. Growing up, he had a variety of odd jobs: shoeshiner, pizza delivery boy, meat packer. After a short, failed career in amateur boxing, he went to law school at Pepperdine University in California. He married the daughter of a powerful Chicago alderman, Richard Mell, who got him a clerk position with another member of the city council, Edward Vrdolyak. (Vrdolyak had been charged with attempted murder in 1960, at age twenty-two. Nearly a half century later, he would serve time for corruption.)
Blagojevich later became a state representative and then in 1996 won a congressional seat. He was young and charismatic, and he belonged to the city. He won the next two elections easily and eventually set his sights on a higher seat: governor of Illinois. He promised an end to the endemic corruption plaguing then-governor George Ryan, whose single term was marked by the indictments of seventy-nine state workers and business leaders — some of them with close ties to Ryan — on various graft charges. (Ryan himself was convicted in 2006 of mail fraud, tax fraud, racketeering, and lying to the FBI.)
Voters believed Blagojevich when he claimed to be an agent of change. But after becoming governor in 2003, he quickly alienated nearly everyone in his party, including Mell and the other men who had helped put him in power. His approval ratings were an abysmal 13 percent by the time the FBI caught him attempting to sell the newly vacant U.S. Senate seat of Barack Obama in 2008. “I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden,” he said, in the now-infamous recording. “I’m not giving it up for fucking nothing.”
The ensuing frenzy was as sensational as the headlines themselves. Outrage, disbelief, and censure flooded in from all corners. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office in January 2009.
Blagojevich went on a media blitz, appearing on talk shows to proclaim his innocence and even joining the cast of Donald Trump’s reality TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice. After a mistrial in 2010, a year later the former governor was convicted on most counts and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was the fourth Illinois governor convicted of corruption charges since 1973.
This year scholars at the University of Illinois at Chicago released a report, “Chicago and Illinois, Leading the Pack in Corruption,” citing new public corruption conviction data from the Department of Justice. The report concluded that the Chicago metropolitan region has been the most corrupt area in the country for the past thirty-five years, and that Illinois is the nation’s third most corrupt state. From 1976-2010, Illinois saw 1,828 convictions of government workers, including elected officials, appointees, and employees — an average of fifty per year. In Chicago alone, thirty-one aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1973 — one-third of the aldermen who have served since then. Even nominally reformist aldermen have been embroiled in scandals, prompting the Chicago Tribune to lament that the city is a “place so crooked, even the reformers are on the take.”
It’s interesting to note that no Chicago mayor has ever been arrested, never mind convicted, on corruption charges, even as their associates, friends, and cronies have been carted off to prison. It begs a few uncomfortable questions: Are they more powerful than the governor? Are they above the law?
Today the fast-talking Rahm Emanuel occupies City Hall. The former U.S. House Democrat from Illinois resigned as Obama’s chief of staff to run for Chicago mayor after the younger Daley announced his retirement. (Replacing Emanuel for a time was William M. Daley, the former U.S. commerce secretary — and brother of the man Emanuel would succeed in Chicago.) Emanuel has shown himself to be every bit the autocrat as the Daley father-son dynasty was. The city council acts more like a Greek chorus than a governing body, unanimously agreeing to his budget despite cuts to social services, granting him blanket spending authority for last May’s NATO summit, and backing his speed-camera ticketing plan.
Chicago’s politics are America’s politics — a crossroads of race, money, power, and greed, magnified and put on display. In some respects, the city has come a long way. Its leaders are no longer throwing bombs, gunning down rival politicians, or openly cavorting with mobsters. Yet its politics remain one of the most reliable spectator sports in town. Its cast of characters is huge and colorful, its daily drama edgily entertaining.
Carl Sandburg’s elegant summaryof Chicago gave it one of its proudest nicknames, “City of the Big Shoulders”:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities …
There is pride here, to be sure, an ironic swagger that comes as a consequence of such a checkered history. “Chicago ain’t ready for reform,” Alderman Mathias “Paddy” Bauler famously said in 1939. It still ain’t, in plenty of ways.
The stories recently featured on the site — The Grapes of Graft by Karen Schaefer, Guitar Hero by Cherise Fong, and The Cajun Cellist by Eli Epstein — have something to say about virtues often forgotten in today’s competitive, frenzied society: humility, patience, hard work with no immediate gratification.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has made the case that today’s society has lost the sense of humility that once tempered the greatness of the Greatest Generation. Even on the day that the Allies defeated Japan, what was striking was the absence of gloating, Brooks says. Public pronouncements conveyed humility, a simple gladness that the suffering had ended, and a rejection of the tempting belief that the victors were God’s chosen. The Christian faith of the time saw such pride as the worst of all sins, Brooks says:
… what pride does is it estranges you from God. It makes you desire to be your own God. It weakens the resistance to your own weakness inside and it makes it hard to tap the larger blessings of life, which probably come from outside yourself, from your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your creator.
Even the politicians and celebrities of that era were largely obedient to this faith, Brooks says, believing it to be unseemly to promote themselves or think too much of themselves. For many — Brooks mentions presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — that belief had been inculcated from an early age. In tight-knit communities that taught kids to remember where they came from from and to never get “too big for their britches.” In bible passages that reminded them that “he that ruleth his spirit” is better than “he that taketh a city.”
Perhaps some of this was false modesty, but the contrast with modern attitudes is striking. In 1950, a Gallup poll asked, “Are you a very important person?” Twelve percent of high school seniors said yes — compared to 80 percent in 2006. Brooks offers some other statistics that describe modern society’s bitter cocktail of self-regard. Troubling levels of narcissism. An obsession with fame. An inflated sense of our own abilities.
In other words, American Idol. Not to pick on that hit show, but, diminished ratings aside, it remains an apt symbol of today’s values, for better and worse. On one hand, Idol reflects the principles that makes the global economy so dynamic and exciting: the relentless search for talent (of the mass-marketable kind) and the reassuring optimism that anyone with ability and drive can make it. On the other hand, it peddles the delusion that anyone, regardless of ability, can make it — and that they should even try. That’s the guilty pleasure of the show’s first part, when we laugh at talentless rubes who somehow believe in their genius. But the “somehow” should really come as no surprise: in 2006, 51 percent of twenty-five-year-olds said that being famous was the most important goal they could have.
As Cherise Fong’s review of the documentary Searching for Sugar Man makes plain, Sixto Rodriguez is the anti-Idol. A Detroit singer-songwriter hailed in the seventies as a genius by music critics and a prophet by apartheid dissidents, he never made it big in the U.S. market, but never seemed to care. He went back to Detroit and took up a career in demolition and construction work. “Nothing beats reality,” he said, when his fans finally tracked him down. “Keeps your blood flowing, keeps you fit.” One reason his story is so compelling is that his humility and yearning for privacy are so out of place in an entertainment industry that increasingly sells the extroverted personalities of its artists — via tell-all interviews and confessional tweets — while focusing its marketing juggernaut on a few big bets, crowding out everyone else. Humble people aren’t usually good at selling themselves, after all.
The breathtaking scale and connectedness of today’s world markets has made the likes of Lady Gaga and LeBron James into global superstars, growing the power and allure of celebrity. Technology helps, too, in that today’s aspiring celebrities just need one viral YouTube video to achieve notoriety. Oftentimes, truly talented people — neglected or fallen along the way — rise to the surface of this crowdsourced pond. But the ease of instantaneous fame makes us forget that much of it is just novelty — a quirky skill or salacious episode that draws clicks — while enduring fame requires exceptional ability but also an even more exceptional drive.
In today’s superstar culture, artists like Sean Grissom seem like anachronisms. In Eli Epstein’s profile of him, we learn that Grissom is a classically trained cellist who has played Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Yet he still spends his days in New York’s subway stations, busking for stray bills and change. His performances underground help develop his craft, he says. “It’s important to be able to play for everybody,” he says. Craftsmanship, patiently paying your dues, slogging through the day-to-day grind of practice to achieve perfection — all of this is at odds with a marketplace that instantly grants a staggering stardom to the hint of promise.
With the rewards so high, and everyone else around them (adults included) grasping for wealth and fame, no wonder today’s young people come across as materialistic and self-centered in the surveys. And yet they might be happier, and their chances to make a real impact might improve, if they waited and let their talents develop before jumping into the latest get-retweeted-quick scheme. Attention can come too early, and criticism can be too cruel. People need the time and space to make mistakes, think crazy thoughts, invent and reinvent themselves.
Karen Schaefer’s profile of Cleveland writer and businessman Mansfield Frazier tells such a story. When he was young, Frazier saw himself as an outlaw, and he counterfeited credit cards across the country. He was arrested and spent years in prison. Once released, he turned his life around by doggedly pursuing his passion for writing, working his way up to writing for the Daily Beast. Now, in his latest incarnation as an entrepreneur, Frazier is transforming his poor, crime-ridden Cleveland neighborhood by bringing urban farming to its vacant city lots. His first venture: a vineyard.
Properly understood, humility is not about retreating into some corner and hiding your face. It’s not about hating yourself or resenting other’s success. It’s about taking yourself less seriously — maybe even reaching that potent state of mind where you lose yourself to your work — so that you can achieve something of genuine and lasting importance. Working hard at your given skills. Giving something of yourself to your family and community. Recognizing your failings and striving to be a better person. Humility in this way leads us down the path to craftsmanship and compassion, and hopefully, too, to a broader perspective on this life and its blessings. Seen from that mountaintop, the goals of fame and wealth seem nothing more than idols.
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