Politics Is a Craft

Peter Orner's Illustrated History of Chicago Politics, which appears in the current issue, tells the stories of that city's political characters, including Paddy Bauler, Jane Byrne, Richard Daley, and Harold Washington. Here is Peter Orner on Bernie Epton, who lost to Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor, in the 1983 mayoral election. You can read a brief history of that race here.

VISIONS OF BERNIE EPTON (1983)

He comes to me sometimes in my awake dreams, shouting, Shut up, shut up, shut up…

Election night, 1983. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or maybe the campaign had, finally, driven him as bonkers as some Washington partisans accused him of having been all along. On paper, the man was a living miracle. He won 48.6 percent of the vote as a Republican running in Chicago. Of course it wouldn’t have happened if the Democratic nominee hadn’t been you know who. A vote for Bernie Epton was a vote for survival, plain and simple.

Do you want Chicago to become the next Detroit? Cleveland needs a run for its money? St. Louis? I was a punk kid in November of ’83 watching it all on television, but even I knew that Epton was a wild-eyed Republican from another planet. And a Jew no less.

Not to put too fine a point on it but Mother said we were Democrats before we were Jews. And, really, was the world ready for another Jewish savior? Especially one so funny looking? Hard to see Bernie Epton in the role. Epton’s lopsized eggy head one more thing he didn’t want exposed to the world along with his sealed psychiatric records.

But that night in Chicago he was a hangnail from being Mayor. Channel Two kept going back and forth from Harold Washington’s raucous victory party to Epton’s bizarre concession. It was hard then not to see Epton as some kind of weird looking white sacrifice. Shut up, shut up, shut up, he shouted at his supporters. They were cheering him on and Bernie couldn’t take it anymore.

He wanted to talk. He wanted to say something profound. His great-great uncle was a rabbi from Shershov. He had wisdom to dispense. I’m an intellectual, a lakefront liberal Jew for God’s sake. I never meant for it to get so out of hand. I’m only a human being. Who wouldn’t have been seduced by the possibility? God grants you how many chances at immortality? And if there’s somebody somewhere who holds a title more noble than His Honor Mayor of the City of Chicago we never heard of him in Illinois. I didn’t play the race card, other people snatched it out of my hand and laid it down for me. Blame a man for going along for the ride for the good of the city? Win first, heal later. Wasn’t that the plan? If the people in the streets have to call Harold Washington a child molester to stop him from getting elected than they’ve got to call him a child molester. Cicero called Cataline a lot worse in the name of for the good of the Republic. Cicero said he murdered his own son to marry his wife, that he had sex with donkeys, all kinds of unspeakable things. That’s politics.

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