Ald. Eugene Sawyer (6th) was chosen acting mayor by the City Council early Wednesday morning after almost losing his resolve in the face of a sometimes angry crowd that packed City Hall and shouted, ”No deals! No deals!”
Sawyer finally was elected at 4:01 a.m. with 29 votes, 3 more than the 26 necessary, but his coalition came close to crumbling at several times during a frantic day of politicking that was marred by telephoned death threats and charges of intimidation and mob rule.
Sawyer, on the verge of collapse, departed the council floor for more than an hour Tuesday night, leaving his allies angry and confused.
He returned shortly after midnight, during a council session that had been delayed by a 90-minute recess, and his allies pressed on with the effort to elect him.
But his opponents delayed a final vote with a lengthy series of parliamentary maneuvers. Sawyer`s forces continually came up with the necessary vote totals to beat back repeated efforts by their opponents to adjourn and to amend the resolution to elect an acting mayor.
What did become clear as the night progressed was that the proceedings that resulted in Sawyer`s election would be challenged in court.
The crowd of demonstrators had been generated by allies of Sawyer`s chief opponent, Ald. Timothy Evans (4th), the favorite of many associates of the late Mayor Harold Washington. The Evans forces said they were not responsible for the threats.
Sawyer appeared on the verge of victory late Tuesday when a caucus of his supporters erupted in cheers and one of its members, Ald. Richard Mell (33d), burst from the meeting room proclaiming, ”We have a mayor! We have a mayor!” But the council unexpectedly decided to recess for at least an hour, when, according to two aldermen, Sawyer`s knees buckled after he spotted Mary Ella Smith, the late mayor`s fiancee in the council chambers.
During the council recess, Smith said that Sawyer had come up to her and embraced her and offered his condolences.
”It`s the first time he`s really had a chance to say that he was sorry about the mayor and then he left,” she said. ”What he said to me had nothing to do with him leaving.”
Sawyer was heard asking aides to ”respect my wishes,” an apparent reference to his desire to put off the vote for a few days.
Sawyer`s council allies were shocked that he left the council chamber when they were poised to elect him.
”I don`t know what`s going on any more around here,” said a puzzled Ald. Patrick O`Connor (40th).
After the council voted for the delay, Evans told reporters that Sawyer lacks sufficient public support to be acting mayor.
And, when Sawyer rejoined the council deliberations after the recess, he sat somewhat gloomily, occasionally conferring with allies but speaking publicly only to cast his votes.
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”It is my view the public will not simply tolerate a pretender to the throne,” Evans said during the recess. ”The public has not had adequate input. The coalition around this particular candidacy seems to be a coalition that has fought reform.”
Evans denied opponents` charges that the large crowd was a mob. ”There`s no mob activity here,” he said. ”People are simply asking, entreating that they (aldermen) listen to them.”
As the night wore on, many of the demonstrators huddled together, sleeping on the floor of the City Hall rotunda, where three days earlier Mayor Harold Wasghington`s body was lying in state. The lobby was littered with empty food containers, banners and shredded newspapers.
Many of Sawyer`s partisans blamed him for refusing to push for an immediate vote at 5:30 p.m. when the special council meeting was set to begin. ”I think Gene lost his nerve,” said State Rep. Al Ronan (D., Chicago), who had been lining up votes for Sawyer. ”At 5:30, he had 27 solid votes and 3 more in his pocket.”
But by 7:30, aldermen were holding closed-door caucuses along racial lines to try to agree on a candidate other than Sawyer for the job of acting mayor, who is to serve until a permanent replacement for Washington is chosen in a citywide election currently set for 1989.
Two potential replacements, Ald. Larry Bloom (5th) and Juan Soliz (25th), were discussed by separate caucuses of white, black and Hispanic aldermen, but were unable to put together enough votes.
Sawyer`s 27 ”solid” votes comprised 18 white aldermen and 9 blacks. Sawyer had 11 blacks on his side early in the day, but one said he switched sides after receiving death threats, and another defected in the face of pressure from the crowd.
”They called up my wife and said, `If your husband goes for Sawyer, he`s dead`,” said Ald. Jesse Evans (21st).
Ald. Allan Streeter (17th) said the noisy Evans forces had changed his mind, even though the crowd inside and outside City Hall numbered no more than 5,000, or less than one-tenth the population of a single city ward.
”I`d accept the people`s choice,” said Streeter. ”Right now the people`s choice is Tim Evans. There`s a mad crowd out there.”
Other pro-Sawyer aldermen who reported receiving death threats were Mark Fary (12th), Anna Langford (16th), Sheneather Butler (27th) and Sawyer`s campaign manager, Bill Henry (24th) who wore a bulletproof vest beneath his gray double-breasted suit.
The Evans forces began generating the crowd Monday night at a ”memorial service” for Washington in the University of Illinois-Chicago Pavilion. There, several speakers urged the audience to march on City Hall to try to keep Sawyer from winning the prize.
Richard Saks, a political organizer for Ald. Raymond Figueroa (31st), said Evans` partisans had asked him and other ward activists to bring as many people as they could to City Hall. Saks said he had turned out 200 from his Logan Square neighborhood.
”Sawyer knows there are thousands of people here who would do anything to keep him from becoming mayor,” Saks said. ”The numbers here can influence the decision.”
The council went ahead with its meeting despite a lawsuit filed late Tuesday by the Better Government Association. The BGA sought, but failed to receive, an injunction prohibiting the meeting on the grounds that aldermen had violated the state Open Meetings Act in closed-door discussions of the mayoral succession over the last several days. Circuit Judge Sophia Hall set a hearing for Wednesday after Sawyer`s lawyers sought a change of venue.
Throughout the hectic day, aldermen continued their weeklong practice of mixing hardball politics with effusive tributes to the late mayor.
At a council memorial service that began about 10 a.m. and lasted five hours, alderman after alderman rose on the council floor to praise Washington, whose empty podium chair was draped in black cloth. But fewer than half of them were in their seats at any one time to listen to the paeans.
Instead, they circulated in the backrooms and halls, arguing, dealing, lining up votes and, in the case of the pro-Sawyer aldermen, trying to avoid the hundreds of Evans supporters who jammed into the public area outside the council chambers.
”You walk out of that room and you gotta walk past people who are screaming, who are leaning over you,” complained a perspiring Ald. Fred Roti (1st), a Sawyer ally. ”You don`t know what they could do. This thing is intimidation.”
The aldermen were dogged not only by demonstrators but by knots of reporters, whose presence sometimes contributed to angry confrontations between Sawyer and Evans loyalists.
For example, as Henry was telling a television reporter that Sawyer was the first alderman or ward committeeman to support Washington in 1983, he was interrupted by Robert Lucas, director of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization.
”He only did that to save his political life!” Lucas shouted at the microphone.
The confrontation escalated until both were shouting. As police moved in, Lucas had the last shout. In a reference to the March, 1988, elections for ward committeeman, the first public test for those aldermen who also control Democratic ward organizations, he declared:
”When this is over, we will beat you! We will get your committemanships. We`ll picket your homes. We`ll picket your office. We`ll chase you out of the city, Bill Henry.”
Henry, who wore a ”No Deals” button on one lapel and a ”Washington, Always and Forever” button on the other, just laughed.
Another confrontation occurred when about 20 members of Network 44, a pro-Washington group from the 44th Ward, surrounded the ward`s alderman, Bernard Hansen, and angrily demanded that he explain his decision to back Sawyer. When Hansen discovered that a member of the group was taping the impromptu session, he angrily demanded the tape and threatened to have the group member arrested.
Sawyer and Evans remained in their offices for most of the day, receiving groups of aldermen but avoiding the milling crowds.
Sawyer`s brain trust of three aldermen-Henry, William Beavers (7th) and Robert Shaw (9th)-reportedly were concerned that Sawyer, who has studiously avoided confrontation during his 16 years on the council, might waver in his resolve.
So they kept offering him encouragement throughout the day and isolated him from the chanting crowd. They also circulated among aldermen, trying to make sure their coalition remained intact.
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Rumors floated throughout the day that more black aldermen were backing away from Sawyer under the pressure of hundreds of protesters who packed the second- and third-floor corridors and from hundreds of telephone callers who flooded ward offices with calls.
Ald. Keith Caldwell received so many angry calls Tuesday that his secretary took the telephone off the hook so she could eat a sandwich.
”They all do the same thing,” she said. ”They call and they give their name and their precinct and they say they supported Keith, and they want an open election. You got people stirring up trouble, blacks and against blacks, whites against whites. We shouldn`t have to do that. We have enough racial problems.”
But white aldermen confided that they had replacements lined up. Whites such as Ald. Michael Sheahan (23d), who had vowed that they wouldn`t vote for Sawyer, said privately that they would cast the deciding votes in his favor if they were needed.