Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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and concrete than the theoretical benefit gays and lesbians might derive from the new criminal code. Because the statute dealt with liquor regulations, Daley could not enact this more significant measure municipally. Rather, it required an act of the state legislature, where downstate Republicans initially opposed it. Politicians from more rural parts of Illinois “contended enactment of the bill could lead to harassment of legitimate business men.”21 The Democratic Senate majority leader and a key Chicago machine politician, George W. Dunne, assured his colleagues otherwise: “This bill is not directed at the ma and pa taverns,” he said, “but at the dens of iniquity that are operating in Chicago.”22 Yet it was squeezed through the legislature by limiting its application to Chicago—a provision that would, nearly a decade later, lead the state’s high court to strike it down. (The final law was written so that it applied to cities with more than half a million residents, of which Illinois had only one.) This debate departed from the usual pattern of partisan conflict in Springfield, in which Chicago Democrats typically argued for, and downstate Republicans against, higher spending and taxes. In the padlock law, the machine fought for the power to crack down more harshly on nightlife, while Republicans prevented such power from being exercised outside Chicago’s city limits.23
The new measure effectively strangled those best positioned to fight back against the war on gay sociability. By depriving bar owners of revenue while they appealed a liquor-license revocation, a process that could drag on for months or even years, the new measure added significantly to the financial risk involved in running a gay bar in Chicago. Daley portrayed the measure as a step against organized crime. One reporter said, referring to the mayor’s power before the new law’s passage, “When he closes a tavern for serious offenses, the operator can reopen for as long as two years while appealing the revocation.”24 The presence of “deviates” was clearly among the “serious offenses” that politicians and journalists alike understood to be a legitimate ground for closing a tavern. For the mayor of Chicago, homosexuality became a political question almost exclusively in the context of the regulation of vice. So far were gays and lesbians from being deemed a political constituency that they lacked, in some sense, even the right to assemble.
War on Vice
Even more consequential for gay citizens than the sodomy-law repeal and the law allowing the padlocking of taverns appealing license revocation was still another transformation that occurred in 1960, unfolding in Chicago rather than Springfield: a churning of the cycle of scandal and reform in the police department. A major scandal broke in January 1960, in which a police station on the Northwest Side (on Foster Avenue just east of Damen Avenue) was revealed as the epicenter of a large-scale burglary ring. Though Daley had consolidated his authority yet further after his reelection to a second term in 1959, the so-called Summerdale scandal that erupted early in 1960—named for the police station at its center—seemed to confirm the harshest charges of the machine’s critics. Daley had in fact loosened the regulation of organized crime after taking office, adding to his vulnerability: As a favor to his backers in the organized-crime syndicate, he had abolished the police intelligence unit, known as “Scotland Yard,” in 1956.25
FIGURE 3. New Chicago police superintendent O. W. Wilson being filmed by WGN-TV, 1960. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
The mayor managed not only to avoid being tarnished but even to benefit from the Summerdale affair through a politically brilliant step: He hired a new police superintendent, a reformer from outside, and authorized him to revamp the department from top to bottom. The choice of O. W. Wilson, a nationally prominent police reformer and the dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, restored confidence in Daley and showed his commitment to professionalism (see Figure 3).26 Arriving in the spring of 1960, Wilson was given wide authority to revamp the department. The Chicago job enabled him to implement his ideas about reorganizing big-city police departments, which involved a costly modernization of facilities and centralization of operations. The most up-to-date equipment was purchased, psychological profiling was adopted as a means of identifying officers for promotion, and a new intelligence division—the existence of which was widely publicized even as its actual operations were kept secret—was established.27
Wilson was a strong believer in policing vice aggressively. At the same time as the State Department’s dismissals of “security risks” at the national level decreased overall by focusing more exclusively on homosexuals than it did in the 1950s, it was local political authorities who most directly organized antigay policing in the Windy City.28 Newspapers spread the word that the new chief was cracking down on all manner of illicit activity, from horse betting to women’s being hired by bars to solicit drinks from male patrons.29 This upstanding Protestant clashed with local traditions in a city in which the police force and public life were heavily Catholic. In his first weeks on the job, Wilson stopped the practice of routinely allowing Catholic churches and other charities to raise money by holding bingo games, because this was technically illegal gambling. It did not endear this former university administrator to many of his officers, or to the city council, who for more than a year afterward pursued the idea of legalizing bingo by state law or referendum.30 Police confiscated bingo equipment in a raid at the Belgium-American Club.31 Slot machines were seized in Veterans of Foreign Wars halls.32 “There can be no compromise with vice any more than there can be compromise with other crime,” Wilson wrote in the second edition of his best-selling textbook Police Administration, which was released during his time at the helm in Chicago, following revisions made by his wife.33
Highly attentive to public relations, Wilson was a masterful superintendent in an era of intense competition between local newspapers to cover crime and policing. In planning a department’s public-relations efforts, he wrote in his textbook, “One story each day is better than three stories every third day.”34 The mainstream press, and many middle-class whites, credited Wilson with professionalizing the department, investing in technological improvements, and centralizing operations to reduce corruption. But the new chief’s need to justify budget increases, and his commitment to accurate and detailed crime statistics, generated pressure to increase arrests. He launched a phase of aggressive policing of black life that was invisible to most whites and with civil liberties implications that were ignored by the predominantly white media. Wilson believed that police officers should not simply respond to crime but should engage in aggressive, “preventive” action on the streets, and the brunt of this new style of policing fell on Chicago’s segregated black neighborhoods. The intelligence division that Wilson created in 1961 even included a special Gang Intelligence Unit, an early signal of the militarization of the department in the coming decade—as was the imposition of the 24-hour-clock military time system on police recordkeeping.35
In the streets of Chicago, and in his textbook on police administration, Wilson was a proponent of using undercover officers extensively, and under his leadership the department expanded the contexts in which these were used. To control vice, he wrote, “undercover operators and funds are needed for the intensive investigation, which is essential for successful enforcement.”36 Most controversially, he assigned—or at least told reporters that he was assigning—undercover police officers to the task of identifying officers willing to accept graft or bribes so that such officers could be prosecuted.37 This policy was extremely unpopular with the rank and file and opposed by the Patrolmen’s Association and the department’s Catholic chaplain. Together with his new limits on officers’ outside employment and his firm opposition to graft and what he called “political interference” with crime-fighting, these policies led to what Wilson’s biographer called “a serious morale problem” at the grass roots.38
Plainclothes cops and their swashbuckling antics, which appealed to a society obsessed with espionage and spying, became a staple of Wilson’s aggressive approach to public relations. Newspapers reported on cops “posing as conventioneers from New York” and hiring women from an escort service for sexual encounters