WARD HEELERS

On this lazy Sunday morning, I thought I would say just a word about the term “ward heeler” and its connection to a very large change in American politics that took place after World War II. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, an enormous number of people from Europe emigrated to the United States and many of them settled in large eastern and midwestern cities – Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and so forth. They tended to settle in linguistic, national, and ethnic neighborhoods – Italian, Irish, German, Polish, and Russian. The new immigrants by and large did not speak English and in the Catholic churches that sprang up, although of course the mass was still celebrated in Latin, the sermons were in the language of the neighborhood. In those days, a mixed marriage, a source of much agita to the parents, might be the union of a young Italian Catholic boy with a young Irish Catholic girl.

The city governments were organized into wards and quite often run by political machines whose low-level neighborhood operatives walked the wards saying hello to the folks they met and doing necessary favors for them – arranging for an ordinance to be waived, facilitating permission to hang a sign outside of a saloon, and so on. When election day rolled around, those for whom favors had been done were expected to respond by giving their votes to the machine candidate. Since these political operatives walked “on their heels” they were called ward heelers. Typically, the big city machines were allied with the Democratic Party and it was the proud boast of the machine boss that he could “deliver” his territory to a state or national candidate when called upon to do so. One of the last of the big city bosses was Richard Daley of Chicago. I can still recall, late on election night in 1960, when the vote total from Illinois had been frozen for hours and the outcome of the election hung in the balance, until finally Richard Daley “voted the graveyards” as the saying had it and threw Illinois to Kennedy, giving him the presidency.

After World War II, there was a massive movement of the more affluent city residents to the suburbs and even the exurbs, facilitated by the automobile and eventually by the creation of the interstate highway system. The explicit written federal guidelines for government guaranteed mortgages discriminated against nonwhite applicants with the consequence that the suburbs became all white. The white middle-class and upper-middle-class suburbanites no longer needed the small favors from the local city government that had been the meat and potatoes of the old political machines. Instead, sitting in their segregated enclaves beyond the city limits, they issued a call for “good government” which in practice meant government that attended to the economic needs of the upper-middle-class. The inner cities became ghettos, heavily black, and with the departure of the affluent city residents, the sources of funds for city government began to dry up. The machines remained in some form or other but were taken over by black politicians who eventually succeeded in electing some of their own to city government.

All of that and a great deal more is contained in the old term “ward heeler.”