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Chapter 1: The Sit-Down Striker

The Flint Sit-Down Strike, which lasted from Dec. 30, 1936 to Feb. 11, 1937, was to the American labor movement what Lexington and Concord was to the American Revolution. At Lexington, a gang of farmers stood up to the British Empire, the most powerful nation in the world. They lost the battle, but the war they started resulted in the founding of the United States, a new kind of nation, in which no man swore allegiance to a king. In Flint, for the first time, workingmen defeated a major industrial power — in this case, General Motors, the largest corporation in the world. Their victory resulted in the founding of the United Auto Workers, and in a new kind of America, one in which every man had a right to the wealth his labor produced.

Whether we still live in that America is one of the subjects of this book, but Everett Ketchum lived in it for most of his career. One of the last surviving Sit-Down Strikers, Everett not only participated in the battle that founded the blue-collar middle class, he enjoyed all the spoils of the peace that followed. As a tool-and-die maker at General Motors, Everett earned $27 an hour in the 1970s: more than any of the necktied budget analysts and wildlife biologists in Lansing’s mazes of state government cubicles. After he retired, he was guaranteed free health care for the rest of his life — 38 years so far, only a year less than he worked in the shop.

That’s why, into his 90s, Everett was still healthy enough to flirt with waitresses. Everett and I are no kin, but in the complicated way that extended families form, he’s the grandfather I haven’t had since I was a teenager. For years, he and his second wife lived across the street from the woman who became my father’s second wife. After Everett was widowed, he married my stepmother’s mother. Widowed again, he shared our Sunday dinners, our pew at the Presbyterian Church, and our Christmas Eve men’s luncheons. Sometimes, his randiness was embarrassing. At one of those luncheons, he used the cream pitcher to tell the waitress an off-color joke about breast milk. And I could never bring a date home without Everett winking at me and drawling, “Boy, you sure got an eye.”

Other times, though, his fondness for waitresses — and the savings from a lifetime of well-paid work — inspired him to benevolence beyond the call of Christianity. A hostess at his favorite pancake house always covered her mouth when she led him to a booth. Everett asked why. Reluctantly, she revealed a mouth with two missing teeth and a cracked incisor. Soon after, Everett handed her a dentist’s card.

“Go there today and make an appointment,” he ordered.

Dentures cost $7,000. Everett paid. A busgirl wouldn’t smile due to bad hygiene. Everett sent her to a dentist, too. Word got around about the Flap Jack Shack’s tooth fairy. The Lansing State Journal called. Everett would not allow his name to appear in the newspaper for an act of charity, so the reporter dubbed him “Dental Man.”

“I sat there day after day, watching those girls,” he told the columnist, “and thought, ‘It must be terrible to have to walk around with your hand in front of your mouth.’ And these girls were both hard workers. What’s money, compared to a chance to help somebody?”
After his legs became so frail he had to trade in his Buick for an aluminum walker, he moved to a retirement home, where actuarial reality made him extremely popular with the widows. One asked to hold his hand during the nightly movie.

“If I hold your hand,” he warned her, “I’m going to want to hold something else.”

Without the benefits the UAW won from General Motors, Everett would have lived his old age as an unwanted uncle — if he were living his old age at all. He’s decided 100 years will be enough life. After GM went bankrupt in 2008, I told him that his superannuation — both the result of, and the cause of, his consumption of health benefits — was personally responsible for GM’s financial crisis. Everett cackled.

“I don’t know where I’d be living without it,” he said. “I’d be living with one of my nephews or one of my nieces. My two sisters is gone. I really don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have what I have. If I had to buy my insurance that I got, I wouldn’t be living in this $2,000-a-month apartment. But how long are my benefits gonna last, ’cause I’m not working? All the money that I’ve got is interest money that I saved through the years.”

In his own lifetime, which began three months after World War I broke out, Everett went from northern Michigan farm boy to autoworker to prosperous pensioner. America went from agrarian society to foundry of the world to post-industrial nation. And Flint went from a small town where building cars was a cottage industry, to the city with the highest per-capita income in the United States, to a depopulated slum with the highest murder rate in the nation. How did all this happen, in the span of one man’s years?
Everett’s father, Earl Ketchum, wanted to be a farmer, but he couldn’t make corn and beans grow in the northern Lower Peninsula’s silt. So he worked in the family general store, driving a horse and buggy around the countryside, trading goods for milk, potatoes and eggs.

When America entered the Great War, it was join the Army or work in a factory, so Earl moved his family to Flint, where he built airplane engines at “the Buick,” as the locals called the auto manufacturer that would eventually employ two-thirds of the city.

By the early 20th Century, Flint was already on its third great industry, each a descendant of the last. In 1865, a sawmill began operating on the Flint River, slicing the pine woods into lumber. Once the forests were exhausted, Flint used the timber to become the nation’s carriage-making capital. When the automobile made carriages obsolete, a Scottish-born tinkerer named David Dunbar Buick added an engine and formed the company that grew into General Motors.

For a factory town, war meant work. In the teens and twenties, Flint’s population nearly tripled, from 38,500 to 156,600. GM head-hunters sought out dirt farmers all over the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley, handing them one-way tickets to Vehicle City, as Flint nicknamed itself. The newcomers to this boomtown slept in shacks, tents and railroad cars. Earl Ketchum’s family rented a tiny house, all he could afford on his factory pay. After the war, Earl tried farming again, failed again, and returned to Flint for good.

Everett grew up a city boy, with no agricultural ambitions. After graduating from high school in 1933, he enlisted in General Motors as an apprentice tool-and-die maker, at 50 cents an hour.

Not only were the wages low, the job could disappear in a day. If a supervisor wanted to hire his brother-in-law, he created an opening by handing a worker a yellow slip, the color of termination. Bachelors were laid off while married men with lower seniority kept their jobs. Wives were laid off because their husbands worked in the plant.

“The supervision, they had no control, either,” Everett recalled. “You could come in to work today as a supervisor and have a desk and have a yellow slip on there that said, ‘You’re all done.’”

Labor’s last great campaign to unionize American workers, a 1919 steel strike, had been crushed in the post-World War I Red Scare. But Franklin D. Roosevelt was now president, and his National Industrial Recovery Act gave workers the right to bargain collectively. In 1936, the United Auto Workers sent a missionary to Flint. If the UAW failed to organize Vehicle City, it had no future. General Motors tried to pacify its employees with a pay raise and time-and-a-half for overtime. But it also sacked many of the 150 men who’d been brave enough to join the UAW. What worker would risk his job to join a union too weak to win a contract? GM controlled Flint so thoroughly that Genesee County Relief Board case workers asked clients whether they belonged to unions or read labor publications. The workers didn’t just want more money. They wanted an end to the arbitrary firings. They also wanted an end to assembly line speed-ups. The “speed up” was profitable for GM — 1936 was Chevrolet’s first million-selling year — but workers were breaking down under the hectic pace.

“Working conditions [are] so bad a man [can] hardly keep up the pace for nine hours,” a Flint autoworker wrote to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. “I [haven’t] worked an eight hour day for two years. It’s not the amount of pay so much. A man hasn’t time to get a drink of water and take care of his personal affairs during working hours. At lunch time a man has to shut one of his two machines, take off his apron, and walk a block or two and wash his hands, walk back, find his lunch pail and eat lunch on a piece of sheet metal that has been out in a car/truck for several hours and just unloaded. Abraham Lincoln freed the colored people from slavery and now we are slaves…Today in the factories one man does the work of five men.”

Only a union could change that.

On November 12, at the Fisher 1 Plant, three welders conducted a short, pro-union sit-down demonstration. The foreman pulled their time cards from the rack. In protest, an entire department in the plant stopped working. Faced with a shutdown, the plant manager agreed to meet with a UAW representative, who told him production would not resume until the militant welders returned to work. The next day, 500 autoworkers signed up with the union that had prevented the firings.

The UAW high command had planned the strike for January, when GM’s new model-year production would be at its peak, and when Michigan’s newly-elected New Deal governor, Frank Murphy, would be sworn in. But the week after Christmas, the company forced the union’s hand.

On December 30, a rumor circulated through Fisher No. 1 that GM was about to ship dies to Grand Rapids and Pontiac so it could stamp out 400 Buick bodies a day if suddenly radicalized Flint went on strike. The move ended up causing the shut down it was intended to prevent. At 10 p.m. The night shift stopped working, and refused to go home. The Sit-Down Strike had begun.

“This strike has been coming for years,” autoworker Francis O’Rourke wrote in his diary. “Speed-up system, seniority, overbearing foremen. You can go just so far, you know, even with working men.”

Everett was working at the Chevrolet plant known as “Chevy in the Hole,” because it was located in a low-lying area beside the Flint River. When the strike spread to Chevy in the Hole, Everett asked his supervisor whether he should keep working or join the union.

“Join it,” his foreman told him. “You need it.”

For the first week-and-a-half, the strike was peaceful. Inside the plants, the men slept on car seats and filled the long idle days playing pedro and euchre, the Michigan farmers’ version of bridge. They watched movies and made up songs mocking GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan and Vice President William S. Knudsen. To banjos, mandolins and guitars, they sang this parody of “Goody Goody,” a big hit in 1936:

We Union men are out to win today, Goody, Goody
General Motors hasn’t even got a chance, Goody, Goody
Old Sloan is feeling blue
And so is Knudsen too
They didn’t like the bitter sit-down
What could they do?

Strike pay was $25 a week, enough for Everett, who still lived with his parents, but not enough for the family men. Grocers and truck farmers sold food to strikers at half price. To oust the strikers, GM sought a court injunction and sent Genesee County Sheriff Thomas Walcott after the “trespassers.” Fearing the company would use force, the strikers fashioned blackjacks out of hoses, leather and lead.

On January 11, GM’s plant police shut down the furnaces of Fisher Body No. 2. Winter seeped through the building’s brick walls. Wives delivering baskets of food to their striking husbands were turned away by company guards. A 30-member strikers’ police force, wearing armbands to identify themselves as soldiers in a workingman’s army, broke open the gate, then barred it with a hose to prevent the cops from following them into the factory. A Flint police captain demanded admission. When the strikers told him to shove off, he fired a gas bomb through a window. Officers gassed 150 pickets on the sidewalk, but as they advanced toward the plant, the strikers inside hurled door hinges, bolts and milk bottles from an upper window. They hosed down the cops with cold water. Outside, picketers still smarting from the gas attack overturned Sheriff Wolcott’s car, while Wolcott was inside.

Outside the plant, UAW organizer Victor Reuther (whose brother, Walter, would later lead the union for 24 years) shouted commands from a sound truck. Threatening to destroy the plant if the attack continued, Reuther ordered workers to barricade Chevrolet Avenue with automobiles, so the police couldn’t pull their squad cars up to gates and snipe through the windows.

The police retreated to a bridge spanning the Flint River, north of the plant, but returned an hour later. This time, they launched gas grenades over the gate, covering their attack with pistol fire, to prevent strikers from picking up the projectiles and tossing them back. Several autoworkers standing on the roof of the plant were struck by bullets. But even the wind was on the strikers’ side. A cold blast from the south blew gas back into the attackers’ faces, forcing them to retreat again. Sensing a rout, the pickets chased after the cops, pelting them with snowballs, chunks of concrete, milk bottles and whatever other garbage they could convert into projectiles. This time, the police turned and fired at their pursuers. Thirteen autoworkers were wounded in what came to be known as the Battle of the Running Bulls.

The day after the skirmish, Governor Murphy dispatched the National Guard to Flint, to prevent more violence between police and strikers. Guardsmen in doughboy uniforms set up machine guns in the streets, but instead of throwing the sit-downers out of the plants, the Guard made sure they stayed inside. This was why the UAW had tried to wait until January. They knew Murphy would take the workingmen’s side. (As a consequence of his union sympathies, Murphy was defeated for re-election the next year; President Roosevelt rewarded the beaten liberal by naming him attorney general, then associate justice of the Supreme Court.)

“They came down there and tried to stop it, but they was overwhelmed,” Everett would recall, 73 years after the battle. “Even the city police. We had everybody behind us. If you’re in a police car, just move on. I don’t care how many police cars you had. Just move on. It was do or die. We had to make it go, to let the union be in control. In a way, it was kind of comical. General Motors, as big as they was, as strong as they was, didn’t have a choice. A lot of the guys wanted to go back to work, but the union said no work, no machines. You go to start your machine up, they shut it off and kick your butt out.”

A month after the Flint Police and the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department lost the Battle of the Running Bulls, General Motors surrendered, too. The company recognized the UAW and raised wages a nickel an hour. It had no choice. From Flint, the center of the GM universe, the strike had spread nationwide. In the first 10 days of February, GM produced only 151 automobiles.

“The sit-down strike had idled 136,000 GM workers across the land at a cost in wages of just under $30 million,” wrote University of Michigan history professor Sidney Fine in Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-37. “GM, as the result of the strike, was estimated to have lost the production of more than 280,000 cars valued at $175 million.”

When the armistice was announced, thousands of autoworkers paraded through Flint behind a drummer and a flag bearer. The workers waved the Stars and Stripes and sang “Solidarity Forever.”

“It was a whoopee-doo, holler holler, we’re all done, we’re going back to work starting Monday,” Everett said.

Everett Ketchum worked another 39 years in General Motors, but the Sit-Down Strike was the most important event of his career. It made his workingman’s fortune possible, and was the source of his superannuation. There was never a better time to work for General Motors than the 1940s through the 1970s. There was never a better time to be a laborer, period. After GM recognized the UAW, Everett received a pension plan and health insurance. During World War II, he stayed out of combat by building armored trucks for Chevrolet. Once the war was won, “Flint was booming. They even bused people up from the South, bring ’em up here to work. Everybody was working, everybody had a job, everybody had one or two cars, and you kept getting bigger homes. Oh, boy.”

Widowed when his first wife died in an automobile accident, Everett married a woman who ran the 4-H program at Michigan State College, and transferred to the Oldsmobile plant in Lansing. As a tool-and-die maker, producing dies that stamped out fenders, he belonged to the shoprat elite. Skilled tradesman at GM was the best job in town, blue- or white- collar. The tradesmen earned more money than the assembly line workers, and when GM went bankrupt, in 2008, the retirees held on to their company health insurance, unlike the non-union salesmen and engineers. With his night-shift bonus—another union perk—Everett bought houses near campus, and rented them to MSU students. In the early 1960s, around the time he began wearing the UAW 25-year service ring that still protrudes from his fist like a pewter nut, he joined the company glee club, the Rocketaires, named after the Oldsmobile Rocket engine. Oldsmobile provided the Rocketaires’ satin uniforms, gave them time off to rehearse, and paid them to sing at Christmas concerts in the plant’s 2,000-seat auditorium. Every two years, Everett bought a new Oldsmobile in cash, at an employee discount. When he retired in 1976, two years before the American auto industry hit its all-time high of 977,000 workers, the former four-bit apprentice was earning over 50 times his starting wage.

“The whole picture, to me, I was in the right place at the right time,” he reflected. “I always had a job right from the time I was a 5-year-old kid, I always had a job. My father was a small-town mechanic and he and another fella had a garage and my job was, after school, I come back and cleaned the tools up for the next day. I was 12, 14 years old. I got $5 a day every day that I worked. For me, that was big money. At GM, I come in there at a good time. It was just the right era for a lot of things, and I appreciate that.”

America’s greatest 20th Century invention was not the airplane, or the atomic bomb, or the lunar lander. It was the middle class. We won the Cold War not because of our military strength, but because we shared our wealth more broadly than the Communists and, as a result, had more wealth to share. Everett has a Depression boy’s gratitude for his good fortune. Born half a century later, I assumed that universal prosperity was the natural condition of American life. Now that another half century has passed, I’m beginning to assume otherwise.

As the unions saw it, the labor movement overthrew an economic order in which the mass of humankind had been born with saddles on their backs, to be ridden by a booted and spurred aristocracy — an order in which the many toiled to provide pleasures for the few. Collective bargaining made obsolete the iron law of wages, which stated that labor could command no more than a subsistence living from capital. It made obsolete the notorious marketplace known as “bidding at the factory gate,” in which workers offered their services for ten cents an hour, only to lose the job to a more desperate man who offered nine. If preserving the victory of the Sit-Down Strikers is foolish nostalgia, then perhaps we have to ask whether the Golden Age of the American worker was a historical aberration, made possible by the fact that we were the only country to emerge from World War II with any industrial capacity. Was that golden age destined to end as soon as the rest of the rest of the world rebuilt itself, making blue-collar burghers such as Everett an obsolete class, a relic of the American Century? In this Global Century, will laborers again have to reconcile themselves to their roles as members of an international peasantry, bargaining for work against the exotic Hindoo and the heathen Chinee?

We have to ask, was the American middle class just a moment?

Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“Nothin’ but Blue Skies” is structured as a series of reports from the field, detailing how Detroit fell into urban decay, drugs and bankruptcy; how Cleveland became “the Mistake on the Lake”; how Buffalo has struggled since the St. Lawrence Seaway took away much of its water traffic; and how Chicago’s old-boy network both corrupted and partly saved the Second City. Along the way, McClelland tracks the early careers of documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and Cleveland politician Dennis Kucinich; hangs out with bar owners, union leaders, drug dealers and black rappers (“White folks focus on dogs and yoga”); and reminds us that Willis Carrier’s invention of air-conditioning was the prerequisite for the boom in Southern industry at the expense of the North. Even the iconic Carrier plant in Syracuse, N.Y., eventually shifted most of its operations to North Carolina and Georgia.

McClelland is a terrific reporter, smoothly blending facts from the historical record with the bitter, often profane, conversation of the displaced and desperate men and women he meets and his own reflections. These last are often as witty as they are shrewd: “Drive-ins and classic-car shows are to the Midwest what Civil War reenactments are to the South: remembrances of the region’s last glorious era.” “Steel executives always announced mill closings the week after Christmas, when the holiday moratorium on acting like an SOB was over.” “Only a genius could write an entertaining book about assembly-line labor. But not even a genius could make an entertaining movie about it.”

Again and again, McClelland demonstrates how outsourcing and the closing of mills and plants have ruined thousands of lives; how predatory lenders wrecked old established neighborhoods, as well as our economy, even as our government looked the other way; and how American-as-apple-pie companies were sold off to overseas investors who sucked them dry and left the husk to become an abandoned junkyard.

Scott Martelle, Los Angeles Times

To drive these days through Great Lakes cities — Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, among others — is to drive through the nation’s industrial past. The iconic images have become Rust Belt cliché: weed-choked parking lots, windowless houses, cold factories stripped of their metals and open to the elements.

But there are human stories behind those static images, and author and journalist Edward McClelland digs deeply into them for his empathetic new book, “Nothin’ but Blues Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland.”

Engagingly written, the book covers some of the emblematic stories of the past few decades, from the 1994 A.E. Staley labor lockout in Decatur, Ill., an underappreciated example of the uneven playing field on which organized labor fights these days, to the creation of a shoppers’ paradise out of old steel property in Homestead, Pa., near Pittsburgh, a “microcosm of what America had become: a nation of shopkeepers who sold each other things, instead of making things.”

Robert L. Smith, Cleveland Plain Dealer

Through interviews, the historical record and personal memories, McClelland re-creates the glory years of American manufacturing. More poignantly, he details how it collapsed into a humbling heap.

We meet steelworkers washed up at 50, never to work again; former autoworkers making half their past wages at fast-food jobs; mayors of cities forced to lay off police as desperation and crime soars.

McClelland, a former newspaper reporter, is an engaging writer with an ear for local voices. He has a knack for the memorable phrase and often lends a poetic touch to urban affairs.

Rick Brown, Rustwire

It is difficult to describe how truly outstanding the book entitled Nothing But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland is to read. As a nearly lifelong Rust Belt resident, I can attest to the fact that Edward McClelland’s newly released book simply nails our industrial heritage, decline, and hopeful potential squarely on the head. From nationally known politicians like Dennis Kucinich or Coleman Young to the everyday blue-collar laborer toiling in our mills and factories, Mr. McClelland personifies the Rust Belt like no other book I have ever read on the subject. As a Lansing native, he has personally witnessed the dramatic (and sometimes catastrophic) changes just in his lifetime. In Nothing But Blue Skies, Mr. McClelland takes the reader on a quasi-chronological step-by-step sequence of events that shook the Rust Belt down it its very core.

Chapter 7: The First Campaign

A sex scandal created the opening Barack Obama needed to get into politics.

Chicagoans are used to seeing their politicians misbehave, but usually the transgressions involve a lust for money. A secretary of state is found dead in his Springfield hotel room, alone except for $900,000 in kickbacks, stuffed into shoeboxes. A congressman uses official funds to buy gift ashtrays and trades in postage for cash, as though he’s redeeming green stamps at the supermarket. An alderman shakes down a liquor license applicant for a bribe. The list of hinky officeholders is endless, repetitive and forgettable.

Rep. Mel Reynolds caused such a sensation because his sins were carnal, not financial. Reynolds, a second-term congressman from the South Side, was accused of having sex with a 16-year-old he’d met during his 1992 run for office. Reynolds had spotted the girl while driving around the district and pulled over to chat, even though he was supposed to be politicking and she was too young to vote. Soon after, she joined his campaign as volunteer and mistress. Two years later, the girl confessed to the affair to her next-door neighbor, who happened to be a Chicago police officer. The state’s attorney set up a phone-sex sting. While sitting in a prosecutor’s office, the girl called Reynolds and told him she couldn’t make their tryst because she had to babysit.

“What you gonna wear?” Reynolds prompted.

“Well, my peach underwear, like you told me to. I was hoping we could do something really special but I see that’s not going to happen, I guess.”

“I was definitely gonna fuck,” Reynolds said.

“Really?”

“Right in my office. I was gonna masturbate too.”

At the panting congressman’s urging, the girl spun a story of sex with a lesbian lover. When Reynolds asked if the other woman would be willing to do a threesome, the girl said no – but she knew a 15-year-old girl who might. A 15-year-old Catholic schoolgirl.

“Did I win the Lotto?” Reynolds exclaimed.

There was no 15-year-old schoolgirl. But Reynolds’ declaration of his lust for teenagers turned into a catchphrase. Jay Leno joked about it on The Tonight Show. The case was so salacious it made headlines in Chicago for more than a year. Reynolds won re-election in his heavily Democratic district, but, by 1995, he was facing a trial that threatened to cost him his seat in Congress.

Reynolds’s downfall was so distressing because he wasn’t supposed to be another Chicago pol. His election had represented the same sort of post-racial promise and generational change that Obama’s would a dozen years later. Born in Mississippi, raised in a housing project, Reynolds had attended Harvard and won a Rhodes Scholarship. After two failed primary runs, he finally unseated Rep. Gus Savage, a crude black nationalist who campaigned by reading aloud lists of Reynolds’s contributors, lingering over the names of Jews.

Reynolds protested that he was only guilty of phone sex and erotic fantasies, but as his trial approached, a challenger stepped forward. State Sen. Alice Palmer announced she would run against Reynolds in the Democratic primary the following March. Palmer’s seat was up for re-election in 1996, so, win or lose, she would be leaving the legislature. As a middle-aged woman, Palmer figured to be an appealing candidate against a congressman caught in a sex scandal. She immediately won the support of EMILY’S List, which donates to female politicians around the country.

Palmer’s state senate district included Hyde Park, so this was Obama’s chance.

“If Alice decides she wants to run, I want to run for her state senate seat,” he told his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle.

Obama also discussed his ambitions with John Ruiz, his old law school student. The two had become friends, sharing an annual summer luncheon. In 1995, Ruiz brought a copy of Dreams From my Father for Obama to sign.

“You’re the only guy I know who wrote a book,” Ruiz said. “Who knows? You

might make something of yourself someday.”

That day was now, Obama told Ruiz. He laid out a plan for a political career that would begin in the state senate and culminate with his election to Harold Washington’s old job.

“I’m going to need help from you,” Obama said earnestly.

“Barack, Mayor Daley is going to be there forever,” Ruiz scoffed. But he agreed to work on Obama’s senate campaign. That seemed possible. He held a small fundraiser in his apartment, raising $1,000.

Around this time, Obama had dinner with Douglas Baird. Now dean of the law school, Baird took Obama to the Park Avenue Café, a fancy downtown restaurant. He had woo on his mind. He wanted Obama to become a full-time assistant professor and dedicate himself to law teaching and academic writing.

During the meal, Baird asked Obama about his law school grades. Obama, who took his intellectual image seriously, shot Baird an irritated look. Wasn’t a Harvard degree proof enough that he knew the law?

“Douglas,” he said, “I graduated magna.”

So Baird offered him a job.

“Barack, I’d like you to become a full-time academic,” Baird said, “but you have to understand, if you become a full-time academic, you have to seriously commit yourself to academic scholarship. There’s no sense getting into something if you don’t have relatively clear expectations.”

“Douglas, that’s not me,” Obama said.

Obama enjoyed teaching, but he didn’t see himself as someone who wrote academic papers or attended conferences where scholars critiqued the works of Richard Posner. It was too far removed from real life. He was going into politics, he told Baird. He was running for the state senate. Obama even asked Baird for a donation. Baird wrote him a check, but thought it amusing that, at one point during the dinner, Obama leaned over and revealed he was wearing an Armani tie. A guy in an Armani tie, asking me for money, Baird thought.

Obama wanted to run for the legislature with Alice Palmer’s blessing. But despite his political involvement, Obama had never met his state senator. He had an in, though: Brian Banks, his old colleague from Project Vote!, was managing Palmer’s campaign. Obama called him.

“I want to run,” he told Banks. “I want to talk to Alice.”

Banks arranged a meeting at the North Side home of Hal Baron. Baron, who had been Harold Washington’s policy director, was chairing Palmer’s campaign. At the meeting, Obama told Palmer of his plans.

“Do you have any problem with that?” he asked, wanting assurance, “and will you come back if you lose?”

The second question was especially important to Obama. By the time he met Palmer, Mel Reynolds had been convicted, imprisoned, and resigned his seat in Congress. That meant Palmer was no longer running in the March 1996 primary. She was running in a special election, scheduled for November 28, 1995, which would give her enough time to re-file for the state senate if she lost. And defeat was a real possibility because two better-known challengers had entered the race: Emil Jones, Jr., minority leader of the state senate, and Jesse Jackson, Jr., the 30-year-old son and namesake of the civil rights leader. Palmer assured Obama she was all in. It was going to be Congress or bust.

Alice Palmer wasn’t a Hyde Parker – she lived in nearby South Shore – but she was perfectly attuned to the neighborhood’s character. She had begun her career as an academic, earning a Ph.D. from Northwestern and serving as that university’s director of African-American student affairs. Although she was politically active – she founded the Chicago Free South Africa Committee – Palmer didn’t get into electoral politics until she was 49, joining in a rebellion against the remnants of the Machine. Her committeeman had supported Jane Byrne for mayor against Harold Washington. After Washington’s death, progressives all over the city set out to defeat black and Latino politicians who hadn’t had Harold’s back. In 1984, Palmer was swept into office as part of the New Ward Committeeman Coalition, a gang of liberals who held regular meetings at a Mexican restaurant and supported pro-Washington candidates for city council.

Seven years later, Palmer was running a non-profit called Cities in Schools, which brought mentors and money to inner-city students. Richard Newhouse, the long-serving state senator from the 13th District, fell ill and resigned from his seat. It was up to the committeemen to appoint a replacement. They wanted Palmer.

“I’m writing a grant,” she protested. “I’m busy.”

But she was drafted anyway, and went to Springfield, where she served as an independent Democrat, helping to ensure that lottery money funded education and holding hearings on universal health care.

Palmer did more than give Obama her blessing and promise to get out of the way. She introduced him as her successor. On September 19, 1995, Obama announced his candidacy before 200 supporters at the Ramada Inn Lakeshore. Palmer preceded him to the microphone, where she anointed him as a scion of the lakefront liberal movement.

“In this room,” she declared, “Harold Washington announced for mayor. It looks different, but the spirit is still in this room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a passing of the torch because he’s the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district.”

It wasn’t just Palmer who signaled that Obama was the independent movement’s choice. In attendance were both Hyde Park aldermen, Barbara Holt and Toni Preckwinkle. Also in the crowd was Cook County Clerk David Orr, who had been one of Harold Washington’s few white allies on the city council.

Obama began his first run for office with a lawyer joke. “Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days – they fall somewhere lower than lawyers,” he said, before delivering the message Hyde Parkers wanted to hear: “I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf.”

Obama opened a campaign office on 71st Street, far from Hyde Park, but close to the center of the district, which reached south into South Shore and west into Englewood, one of the city’s poorest, most barren neighborhoods. As his campaign manager, he hired another Project Vote! veteran, Carol Anne Harwell, who had run races for Alderman Sam Burrell, County Clerk David Orr, and Danny Davis, a county commissioner who would later go to Congress. Harwell had been baffled by Obama’s interest in the seat.

“Why do you want to do that?” she’d said, when Obama told her he planned to run.

“We can make some changes,” he responded. Then he added, “Alice asked me.”

Harwell’s job was to transform Obama from a law lecturer to a Chicago politician. Despite Palmer’s endorsement, his election was not a sure thing. There were two other candidates: Marc Ewell, the son of a former state representative, and Gha-is Askia, who had the support of Sen. Emil Jones, and a name as exotic as Obama’s. Outside of Hyde Park, Obama was unknown in the district. Not only did he have to get known, he had to overcome the rest of the South Side’s suspicion toward uppity U of C types. He decided to spend most of his time campaigning in Englewood. Starting every evening around suppertime, he’d doff his suit coat so he could roll up his sleeves and don the leather jacket he’d worn as a law student.“Where are you going?” Harwell would ask.

“We’re going to circulate some petitions.”

“It’s cold, Barack.”

Undaunted, Obama would drive his Saab into the hood. He didn’t bother to wear a hat or gloves, even as Chicago sank into winter. That was something else he needed to learn about local politics. After he caught a cold, Harwell scolded him.

“Barack, this is Chicago,” she said. “You have to learn how to dress.”

Obama was a big hit with the little old ladies who answered the doors of Englewood’s worn two-flats and decaying houses. They were just as eager as the women of DCP to mother this skinny young man. Obama was offered fried chicken sizzling in stovetop pans and invited to sit down and explain where he’d gotten that funny name.

“My father was from Africa,” he explained, and that led to even more conversation, until Obama had spent 15 minutes to get a single name on his petition. Door knocking hours were 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., and, sometimes, Obama would leave an apartment house with only three signatures.

“Barack, you can’t sit and talk to them,” Harwell lectured. “I’m gonna give you a goal. We’re gonna do two sheets.”

As with everything else he’d ever attempted, Obama proved a quick learner. His forays into ghetto Englewood also reawakened street smarts he hadn’t needed in Hyde Park or at Harvard. One Saturday he was walking a precinct with John Ruiz.  Another group of campaign volunteers ran up to Obama with serious news.

“There’s a bunch of thugs coming over and asking us who gave us permission to walk in their neighborhood, and one of them flashed a gun,” a volunteer reported.

Ordinarily, Obama didn’t hesitate to approach gang-bangers on street corners. But these were his volunteers. And there was a gun involved.

“It’s time to go,” he snapped.

Obama got a boost from another old colleague when Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a small Sunday brunch for him at their house. Again, Palmer was there and introduced Obama as her chosen successor, touting his bona fides as a community organizer, a Harvard graduate, and a law school teacher.

During the campaign, Obama found time to attend the Million Man March, in Washington, D.C. And he was the subject of his first feature-length profile, a flattering, 4,300-word cover story in the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly that carried the banner of the city’s independent movement. Obama told writer Hank DeZutter that he was running for office to empower ordinary citizens, just as he’d done as a community organizer.

“What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer,” he wondered, “as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.”

It hearkened back to that long-ago conversation with John McKnight, in the Wisconsin cabin. Obama had quit community organizing not because he disagreed with its goals, but because he wanted to be on the inside, making decisions. As a community organizer, he had protested decision makers. As a lawyer, he had sued them. As a state senator, he would finally be one of them.

As payback for Palmer’s support, Obama acted as an advisor to her congressional campaign. He attended strategy meetings and helped develop a position paper on building a freight-handling airport in the south suburbs. Still, Obama felt conflicted about supporting Palmer, for both personal and political reasons. He wanted to help a mentor, but Michelle was an old schoolmate of Jesse Jackson Jr.’s wife, Sandi. Harwell had advised him not to take sides in the congressional race, to avoid making enemies of the Jacksons, or of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was supporting Emil Jones.

Against those powerful Chicago dynasties, Palmer’s campaign was floundering. By her nature, she was an academic, not a politician, driven more by the need to change public policy than by the ego gratification of winning elections. This shared wonkiness was one reason she and Obama had hit it off, but it made her ill-suited for a Congressional race. As a committeeman, she had done little to build her ward organization, so she was unknown even to some of her own constituents.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., had no problems with name recognition. His father was one of the most famous black men in Chicago, and he used that connection astutely, collecting money from Rainbow PUSH donors and spending it on expensive mailers and phone banks. Most of his money came from out of state. Bill Cosby and Johnnie Cochran wrote checks. Jones was depending on ward organizations. True to her background in community groups, Palmer ran a grass-roots campaign. She tried to dismiss Jackson as a young upstart trading on his family name.

“Politics, like good cooking, needs some seasoning,” she said, following up with a jibe against Jackson’s father. “I came out of a tradition of taking people seriously, that not everything can be reduced to a sound bite that rhymes.”

“Junior,” as he was called then, and still is, had inherited his father’s gift for oratory, although he came off as more disciplined, less passionate, enunciating each word as though he’d been trained in elocution. Yes, he conceded, he was half the age of his rivals, but that was an asset. A congressman needed years to build seniority, and he had those years. His goal was to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, like Chicago’s own Dan Rostenkowski, who was also elected to Congress at age 30. Why elect an old man like Emil Jones who was more valuable in his current job as leader of the state senate Democrats? In a flourish that no doubt made his father proud, Junior took a swipe at Jones while working in Chicago’s biggest sports stories of 1995: Bulls’ forward B.J. Armstrong’s expansion draft loss to the Toronto Raptors and Michael Jordan’s retirement from basketball.

“I’m not running against Emil Jones,” he insisted. “I am trying to build a stronger team. B.J. should never have been traded; M.J. should have stayed in basketball; E.J. should stay in Springfield, and J.J. should be sent to Congress.”

Jones didn’t have much of an answer for that. He was an ineffective public speaker who had talked in a deep mumble best suited for giving orders in the back room of a ward office.

“If he was named Jesse Smith, he wouldn’t even be on the radar screen,” Jones groused, ignoring the fact that nepotism had never bothered Chicago voters. (When Jones himself retired from the Senate, he was succeeded by Emil Jones III).

A week before the election, a Chicago Tribune poll found that Jackson had 97 percent name recognition in the district, compared with 69 percent for Jones and 61 percent for Palmer. Palmer was leading among white voters, who had a strongly negative view of the Jackson family. She tried to take advantage of that by locating her campaign headquarters in the suburbs. Whites had helped Mel Reynolds overthrow Gus Savage, but they could only make a difference in a close race. And this race wasn’t close at all.

On November 28, the night of the special election, Palmer and her supporters gathered at a hotel in the suburb of Harvey. Her defeat was obvious as soon as the first returns came in, and it only looked worse as the numbers piled up. Jackson got 50,600 votes; Jones, 38,865; and Palmer, 9,260. She lost her own ward, even her own precinct.

Obama and Harwell followed the returns from Obama’s campaign office. To Harwell, Palmer’s loss meant nothing for the state senate race.

“We need to move forward,” she told Obama.

Obama, however, was genuinely conflicted. Palmer had endorsed him, and he wasn’t going to make a decision without talking to her first.

“We need to call Alice,” he said. “She’s still the senator, and if she wants the senate seat, she should have it back.”

Obama drove to the hotel where Palmer was making her concession speech.

“I wanted to build a coalition that bridges city and suburbs, young and old, men and women and ethnic groups in order to forge a new social contract,” Palmer told her small crowd. Not many people had voted, but “I’m not disappointed for myself, but for the missed opportunities people had to say ‘change was needed.’”

Once she left the podium, Palmer repeated to Obama and Hal Baron that she did not plan to re-enter the race for state senate. That satisfied Obama.

“If she’s not running, then I’m still running,” he told Baron.

It did not, however, satisfy Palmer’s husband, Edward “Buzz” Palmer, a politically active Chicago police officer who had helped found the African-American Patrolman’s Union.

“What the shit is she saying?” Buzz Palmer exploded to Baron. “Go up there and tell her to take it back!”

The filing deadline for the March primary was on December 18. That was three weeks away, plenty of time for a politician with her own ward organization to gather the 757 signatures necessary to appear on the ballot. The next morning, the Tribune reported that Palmer was “undecided” about reclaiming her seat.

Palmer’s husband was not alone in wanting to keep his wife in Springfield. State Rep. Lou Jones, an influential member of the Legislative Black Caucus, thought Palmer was too valuable to lose. The easiest way to avoid a fight, they figured, was to talk this young upstart Obama into stepping aside. Without Alice Palmer’s knowledge, Obama was summoned to a meeting at Jones’s house. Buzz Palmer was there, as were Timuel Black and Adolph Reed, who taught political science at Northwestern. These were elders of Chicago’s black community. They told Obama that he was a promising young man, but it was not yet his turn. The senate seat belonged to Alice. In Chicago, you get ahead by working your way up through an organization. If Obama stepped aside now, they would support him for another office down the road.

Obama shook his head.

“I’m not gonna do that,” he said.

He had made a deal with Palmer, and she had told him on Election Night that she wasn’t running. He’d opened a campaign office and collected thousands of dollars from supporters.

If anything, the sit-down made Obama more determined to stay in the race. He left Jones’s house livid at the condescending, bullying tone of the lectures he’d just heard. By the time he caught up with Harwell, he was still angry. It was one of the few times she’d ever seen him vent his emotions.

“They talked to me like I was a kid,” Obama sputtered. “They said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ It was ‘Alice said this, Alice said that.’”

Since Obama refused to yield, a Draft Alice Palmer committee was formed. Headed by Black, it also included state Sen. Donne Trotter and one of Obama’s old supporters, Ald. Barbara Holt. The unexpected primary fight put many Hyde Park independents in a quandary. Obama and Palmer were both progressives. Both had been endorsed by the IVI-IPO in their races. They had to ask themselves which was more important: Palmer’s pledge to Obama, or her experience in Springfield.

“Like many, I supported Obama as a successor to Alice,” former IVI-IPO chairman Sam Ackerman told the Hyde Park Herald. “But now we don’t need a successor.”

A week after losing the congressional election, Palmer decided she would attempt to reclaim her state senate seat, and her supporters began collecting signatures. Suddenly forced to play hardball politician, Obama found a way to call Palmer an Indian giver without actually using that politically incorrect term. The primary, he predicted to the Herald, would be determined by how voters felt about his message.

“I’m not going to win because people feel Palmer went back on her word,” he said, using his rival’s last name, in case anyone thought they were still friends.

Privately, though, Obama was uncomfortable with the aggressive political maneuvers his locally born and bred supporters told him were necessary to defeat Alice Palmer. On December 18, Palmer filed her petitions. The next day, an old Hyde Park politico named Alan Dobry went downtown to the Board of Elections and began paging through the sheets. Dobry was a longtime supporter of Palmer’s. As 5th Ward committeeman, he had encouraged her to take the state senate seat, assuring her she could do more for education as a politician than as a non-profit executive. Dobry had even knocked on doors for Palmer during her congressional run. But he had also pledged to support Obama’s state senate campaign and he wasn’t going back on his word just because Palmer had lost her race for Congress. Hyde Parkers respected Dobry’s political judgment, so he’d look like a fool if he went around the neighborhood telling people, “Oh, we made a bad mistake. We’re going to do it differently and we’re not going to run Barack. We’re going to run Alice again.”

As an Obama supporter, Dobry felt obligated to do whatever he could to help his candidate win. In Chicago, challenging petitions is a tactic that goes back to the days when voters signed their names with fountain pens. Politicians pay good money to election lawyers who specialize in disqualifying signatures. As a member of an independent organization, Dobry had fought the Machine’s efforts to knock his candidates off the ballot. By answering their challenges, he had learned to raise his own. Now, he and his wife, Lois, were examining Palmer’s petitions, looking for mistakes. Right away, he found errors that suggested a hurried, slapdash effort. One sheet was filled with signatures from an adjacent district. On some petitions, entire households had signed, even though not everyone at the address was registered to vote. Dobry suspected Palmer’s campaign had enlisted students from South Shore High School, who had then gone out and signed up their friends. Palmer’s petitions contained 1,580 signatures, more than twice the number required to place her name on the ballot, but if these first sheets were any indication, there were enough duds to knock that figure below the minimum.

State Sen. Rickey Hendon was also at the Board of Elections that day, looking to knock off challengers for his own West Side seat. He wasn’t surprised to see the Dobrys – they were well-known political operatives – but he thought they were acting funny. When they left the room, he sidled over to peek at their papers and couldn’t believe what he saw.

Oh, Lord, Hendon thought. Alice Palmer.

Hendon and Palmer had become good friends in Springfield. They shared similar inner-city backgrounds and progressive politics. Hendon loved the fact that Palmer still behaved more like a schoolteacher than a politician – some days, she brought cookies onto the Senate floor. So he found a phone and called her at home.

“Alice,” he told her, “the Dobrys are down here going through your petitions.”

“But they circulated for me,” Palmer protested, recalling the couple’s support in her run for Congress.

“They are knocking you off the ballot.”

Palmer realized then that she had blundered. She had ignored that old Chicago maxim, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Nobody had sent her Barack Obama. He’d been introduced by Brian Banks – a fellow Harvard man. As for the Dobrys, they were part of the Hyde Park political cabal. Like Harvard grads, Hyde Parkers always stuck together.

The next meeting of the IVI-IPO was scheduled for January 6. The Draft Alice Palmer Committee decided to make an appearance to insist the organization switch its endorsement. The meeting, held in the basement of a Lutheran church, was so acrimonious that a fistfight nearly broke out between Palmer’s supporters and allies of Toni Preckwinkle, who was still backing Obama. But the organization stuck by its original endorsement. This was far more important for Obama than for Palmer. He needed all the support he could get. If both candidates appeared on the ballot, Obama would be the underdog: a political novice with an exotic handle, running against an incumbent. Barack Obama sounded like a name adopted by one of those self-converted Muslims who ran their own storefront mosques and appeared on the public access TV show Muhammad and Friends in robes, beards, and kufis. Would voters see any difference between Obama and Gha-is Askia, the actual Black Muslim running for state senate? Realistically, eliminating Palmer was the only way to win.

At first, Obama was reluctant to challenge Palmer’s petitions. Harwell had spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s down at the Board of Elections and had come to the same conclusion as Dobry: Palmer’s sheets were full of errors and non-voters. But to Obama, knocking his patroness off the ballot seemed so crude, so brass-knuckled, so . . . . Chicago. He had learned his politics from the great anti-Machine movements: Saul Alinsky’s community organizing, the Hyde Park independents, and the Harold Washington crusade, represented by his boss, Judd Miner. Now, he was being asked to bump aside a 57-year-old schoolmarm, and win his first political office in a way that any thick-fingered hack might chortle about at the ward’s annual smoker. A Chicagoan wouldn’t have thought twice, but Obama was from Hawaii, a state that didn’t even get politics until two years before he was born. He was finally persuaded by Harwell, and field coordinator Ron Davis, who cut through Obama’s agonizing by growling, “The hell with this. The petitions are garbage.”

Obama went after all three of his rivals: Palmer, Ewell, and Gia-Askia. The Board of Elections agreed that none had collected enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Palmer had one last chance: if her supporters could collect 200 affidavits from challenged voters, affirming they had signed her petitions, the Board might approve her candidacy. Her campaign made an effort, but there wasn’t enough time to track down all those people before a January 17 hearing. Palmer withdrew from the race. Six months earlier, she’d been first in line to challenge a kinky congressman. Now, she’d lost her job to a 34-year-old rookie.

Years later, asked about his challenge to Palmer, Obama would say glibly, “I think the district got a pretty good state senator.” Palmer disagreed. She never forgave Barack Obama for taking her seat. She cursed out Brian Banks for introducing him to her.

“This was all a plot,” she insisted.

“Look,” Banks said. “You sat down with him and you gave whatever support you gave to him.”

Still, Palmer felt Obama had stabbed her in the back. Her onetime protégé was “a betraying ingrate,” she told friends. After leaving the Senate, Palmer resumed her academic career, going to work for the University of Illinois-Chicago, where she taught public affairs and was a special assistant in the Office of the President.

Palmer stayed out of politics until 2008, when she let the world know what she thought of Obama by campaigning for Hillary Clinton. She even went to the Democratic National Convention in Denver as a Clinton delegate. When the delegates were asked to nominate Obama by acclamation, Palmer didn’t raise her voice.

In February 2000, during Barack Obama’s ill-fated run for Congress and while he was serving in the Illinois State Senate, I sat down for this interview with the candidate in his law office at Miner, Barnhill and Galland.