It is interesting that wikipedia has this topic in its collection. Another meme that comes from Chicago is their claim to be the most patriotic city in the world. Why? Where else do the dead vote? I am 76 now and I grew up with this stuff. Voter fraud and other forms of crime and corruption are certainly not unique to Chicago but it is a "funny" part of my heritage. My first presidential election was in 1960. This was a classic in the hanky panky that goes on in elections. Read on below and let us see if we can deal with both myth and reality here.
First of all who believes that our society is not corrupt? You can leave now. Second of all who believes that corruption is only found in one political party? You too can leave now. No amount of reality will help those folk. Let us look at 1960. It was not a shock to me that charges of corruption in Chicago were part of the scenario. I did grow up there. I have many many tales about first hand experiences but this is not the time or place for them. let us try to look at the record (a real impossibility) of what went on in 1960.Here's but one set of opinions:
Q: I once read in a quite serious history book that Kennedy
would have lost the 1960 election but for massive vote
fraud by the Daley machine in Chicago. Do a majority of
historians believe this?
A:There is no unanimity of opinion on this matter. Although some
reputable historians and political scientists do not subscribe to the
"Nixon was robbed" theory, the legend lives on. There are claims that
"most historians" or "most experts" support both sides of the issue.
I've gathered some material from online sources; predictably, the
viewpoints disagree.
"The GOP's failure to prove fraud doesn't mean, of course, that the
election was clean. That question remains unsolved and unsolvable. But
what's typically left out of the legend is that multiple election
boards saw no reason to overturn the results. Neither did state or
federal judges. Neither did an Illinois special prosecutor in 1961.
And neither have academic inquiries into the Illinois case (both a
1961 study by three University of Chicago professors and more recent
research by political scientist Edmund Kallina concluded that whatever
fraud existed wasn't substantial enough to alter the election).
On the other hand, some fraud clearly occurred in Cook County. At
least three people were sent to jail for election-related crimes, and
677 others were indicted before being acquitted by Judge John M.
Karns, a Daley crony. Many of the allegations involved practices that
wouldn't be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago
Tribune, among others, to conclude that 'once an election has been
stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.' What's more, according to
journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who
heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was
rightfully Nixon's. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover
believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow
normal procedures and refer the FBI's findings to the attorney general
- as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy - he effectively buried the
case."
But then there is this which I remember very clearly:
most historians agree that whatever irregularity might have gone on in
Chicago for Kennedy during the 1960 election, the distortion in
downstate Illinois, which was solidly for Nixon, would have offset
it."
We will never know the truth as in the case of so very many other important events in our history and that is not really my point.
Those of you who have read my diaries on electoral politics know that I am totally cynical about them. I see them as a part of a very corrupt system that the plutocrats have perfected to enslave us. That the system is now gotten out of hand does not change this. The system, both parties, is part of the problem not the solution. I am collecting HRs for expressing my opinions here so you can not intimidate me.
I am working hard to elect democrats here in Virginia as I did in 2008 and am proud of the fact that I risked congestive heart failure in 2008.
There will be cheating galore in this election. I want to believe that our side is clean and until I see evidence to the contrary that is what I do believe.
Why am I so willing to see the other side as corrupt then? I am simply watching them and listening to them. I am a scholar whose main interests include the workings of the human mind. I see a very disturbing progressive disease at work in this country. Its roots go deep. Its roots involve superstition and denial of reality, especially as revealed by science but in other ways too. How could people who have gone that far away from reality fail to get caught in a self-constructed web of lies and deceit that can only lead to an eventual mental breakdown?
If that last sentence sounds like I expect this to get much worse you got the message. You see the corruption I grew up with in Chicago was different. They knew they were dishonest and were proud of their ability to pull it off. It was not covered by self righteous religiosity and moral charades of the kind we are seeing now. They still were in touch with reality in some important ways. No more. The people we are seeing oppose us now are very different and far far more dangerous. I suspect that we are afraid to really come to grips with the danger we are in.