Given the demographic changes the 14th Ward has experienced over the past few decades, the Burke family’s 70-year domination of its Southwest Side fiefdom borders on the miraculous.
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Ald. Edward Burke will retire next year as the alderman of a largely Spanish-speaking community. His decision to throw in the towel has a possible connection to the middle term of the formula he once gave for ways to leave the City Council:
“The ballot box. The jury box. Or the pine box.”
Burke is scheduled to be tried on political corruption charges in 2023.
When his father, Joseph Burke, was elected 14th Ward alderman in 1953, the ward was largely Eastern European. His son Ed’s career witnessed an ingenious way to remain in the City Council: Have census data, a straight edge, and pen ready when ward maps are redrawn every 10 years. A constitutional provision requires a new ward map after each census.
Confronting the demographic hurdles the Burkes faced, other Chicago aldermen have followed their core constituency to another ward and run for election there. But that can provoke a nasty head butting with the new ward’s incumbent. The Burkes avoided that by staying in the 14th Ward and moving it progressively westward — away from Spanish speakers, toward white voters.
Explaining that strategy to a reporter with the now defunct Chicago News Cooperative, writing for The New York Times, in 2010, Burke cited Horace Greeley’s celebrated advice: “Go West, young man.”
In 1946, the 14th Ward’s western border was Wood Street. By 2010, it reached nearly four miles farther west, to Cicero Avenue. The ward’s eastern border moved in the same direction.
The ward’s ethnic kaleidoscope reflects it history as a place where successive waves of immigrants began redeeming the American Dream. At one time, the Union Stockyards provided employment for many of them, with the Back of the Yards neighborhood at the center of the ward. Other newcomers and their offspring got a start by being put on a city payroll, the trade-off often being work for the local political organization.
Joseph Burke started out as a cop, became a judge’s bailiff, and doubled as precinct captain. When the 14th Ward alderman died in the early 1950s, the Democratic Organization gave his seat on the City Council to Joe Burke. A born schmoozer, he faced little opposition in his reelection campaigns.
“For everybody in the 14th Ward who died, my father went to the wake,” Ed Burke told Chicago Life magazine in 2010. “I still run into people today who say my father went to their grandfather’s wake, and that meant a lot to people.”
His father having hoisted the family up the socioeconomic ladder, Ed Burke went to college, then became a cop while simultaneously attending law school. He was studying for the bar exam when Joseph Burke was diagnosed with cancer in 1968, dying shortly thereafter. That put his son’s half-formulated plans on hold.
“He remembers his father’s former allies scheming about the future of the 14th Ward during the wake,” Chicago Life reported.
“That’s how I wind up a 24-year-old Democratic committeeman, and next year the alderman,” Burke said.
Burke and former Mayor Richard M. Daley were born one year apart, and the alderman had youthful memories of parties in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Bridgeport home.
But in his political life, Burke’s relationship with the Daleys was more complicated.
Burke disrespected the hallowed custom of freshmen aldermen being seen but not heard. He joined the Coffee Rebellion, so called because its participants met in a Loop hotel over coffee to make plans to break Mayor Richard J. Daley’s iron-fisted control of the City Council. Ald. Dick Simpson, a professor who studies political corruption, once pronounced Chicago’s council “a rubber stamp under strong mayors, and a pack of gray wolves ready to attack a weak one. “
Daley being nothing short of a strong mayor, the rebels lost.
Nonetheless, Daley sometimes used Burke as the floor manager for bills he wanted the City Council’s approval. Why not? He’d seen him playing with his own son in the basement of his Bridgeport bungalow. He knew that Burke was smart and shrewd.
The 2000 census showed Latinos outnumbered white residents in Burke’s ward 58,000 to 14,000, the Tribune reported. Burke faced a rebellion of his own over his organization’s manipulation of the remapping process to keep him in power, one that brought together Latinos demanding an equitable share of the action and reformers like Simpson.
As Burke saw it, he could profit from his opponents’ alliance with those associated with reform.
“Chicago voters tend to be suspicious of the term ‘reformer,’ ” Burke explained to a Tribune reporter. “There is an ethnic bias against people who would dictate how other people should lead their lives.”
He was speaking as a published historian of Chicago, having co-written a history of presidential conventions in Chicago. His thesis, echoing the old saw that Chicago isn’t ready for reform, was seemingly confirmed by the outcome of a lawsuit challenging the 1992 ward remap.
Maria Valdez represented the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund in that suit. In 1996, she told the judge hearing the case that Burke had only one staffer trained to operate the City Hall computer used to redraw ward boundaries.
“Valdez said that more than 100 maps and partial maps were recovered from the computer’s archives and they showed how the 14th Ward, then predominantly minority, was consistently drawn to maximize a white population,” the Tribune reported. “The trail leads back to one person, Alderman Burke of the Finance Committee.”
Yet the judge overseeing ruled that the 1992 map, which voters had approved in March of that year, was legal, calling it “the most open process of reapportionment I have ever heard of.”
The 14th Ward as configured in the remap following the 2010 census was once more the result of horse-trading between aldermen, along with political score settling. Burke “took a slice of the Garfield Ridge neighborhood into his 14th Ward,” the Tribune reported, once more shaping the ward to his liking by adding more white voters to the ward’s rolls.
Until stepping down following his federal indictment, Burke had chaired the Finance Committee, keeper of the City Council’s purse strings, since 1983, with time out for bad behavior under Mayor Harold Washington. He opposed Chicago’s first Black mayor, intemperately as he later acknowledged.
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His committee chairmanship put Burke in a problematic position. As a lawyer, he served clients doing business with the city. And the Finance Committee determines which entrepreneurs get city contracts. To give that scenario a fig leaf, Burke abstained from voting on contracts with clients whose proposals he championed. Was that a slight-of-hand trick or legit?
When laws are bent, it’s possible they’ll be broken. According to the federal indictment, a Burger King franchise owner in Burke’s ward needed help in getting remodeling permits, and Burke allegedly set a price: using his law firm for the restaurateur’s property tax issues.
As part of the federal investigation, a confederate of Burke’s had flipped, and wore a wire. Phone conversations and emails were intercepted. Some quotes attributed to Burke in court papers are sociological: “Yeah, for a big city, it’s a small town,” — presumably meaning things get done in Chicago by mutual back scratching.
Other excerpts from the feds’ tapes are potentially incriminating. Explaining why he hasn’t delivered on an under-the-table promise, Burke says: “The cash register has not rung yet.” In another instance, he responds with a question of his own: “Did we land the, uh, the tuna?”
Talking with the flipped confederate, Burke waxes sentimental, saying: “We are old school.”
It was a label Burke wore proudly over the years as he was repeatedly reelected to the post once held by his father, even as the ward’s demographic shifts made the Irish alderman more and more of an outlier. In his 2010 interview with the Chicago News Cooperative, Burke argued that he and his father were always outsiders. The way they held on to power, he said, was by getting things done.
“When I first became alderman, the majority of people living in the ward were of Polish and Eastern European extraction, not Irish, and I’m proud to say I was elected by overwhelming majorities in those years, as I was four years ago,” Burke said. “If you get the job done, people reward you on Election Day.”
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