In the summer of 1952, the International Amphitheater in Chicago, with air conditioning and state-of-the-art accommodations for a new breed of broadcast journalists, hosted not one but two presidential nominating conventions. The city’s 3.6 million people made it nearly twice the size of Los Angeles which, while glamorous and growing, was still a 40-hour train ride away, too distant even for big-league baseball.

With Chicago leading the way, midcentury Illinois was king of the nation’s middle, second only to New York. But those days were a distant memory last month when the Census Bureau reported that in the last decade, Illinois lost population for the first time in its history.

“We like to compare ourselves to New York and to L.A.,” said Erin Aleman, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “To see the state experience a decline, it’s tough.”

Reversing the flow of young people out of Illinois poses tough questions for Democrats, who’ve proposed new legislative maps and whose control of the state has tightened as its national influence has shrunk. Experts say the state has to dump a Rust Belt mindset by widening employment opportunities, putting affordable housing in the right places and turning current tax policy on its head.

The total population is about 12.8 million, a decline of just 18,124 people, or less than 1%. But it cost the state one of its 18 U.S. House seat s — from a high of 27 in 1930 — a consequence more than psychological. And it was a rare drop. Only two other states, Mississippi and West Virginia, lost residents.

Historically, an Associated Press review found that, not counting the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, a decennial population loss has occurred to a state only 31 times since 1900. Downturns often occurred during cataclysms: half a dozen states lost people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, New York diminished in the 1970s amid a financial crisis that nearly pushed New York City into bankruptcy, Iowa fell during the farm crisis of the 1980s.

William Frey, senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution, said Illinois is losing young people of child-bearing age, a loss that’s compounded when those people go on to have their children in other states. And Illinois isn’t attracting enough young people from elsewhere, he said.

The decline was apparent early in the decade, even before Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who served from 2015-2019, advocated his conservative “turn around” agenda — lower taxes and fewer business regulations — to stem what he claimed was an exodus-from-Illinois stampede.

It’s the echo of Rauner’s drumbeat that piqued Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s response. Pritzker, who defeated the one-term Rauner in 2018, decried “the carnival barkers and the right-wing zealots” who he said were exaggerating the decline. He also hit Trump-era policies — late in the 2010s — that hampered immigrant inflow, long a source of growth for the state.

“I’m not going to downplay it in any way. We have to do better. We have to do more,” Pritzker said. “We need to keep our students here. We need to make it affordable for people to come to the state of Illinois and go to school here.”

Aleman believes there are answers in the Chicago Metropolitan Agency on Planning’s outlook, “On to 2050,” with appropriate housing planned for areas targeted for employment growth and with updated, community-friendly tax policies. Grousing about property taxes, at or near the nation’s highest, is an Illinois pastime.

“Those policies that are in place today were developed decades ago and really need to be brought up to date to deal with how we’re buying goods, how we’re living our lives, how we’re traveling on the roads,” Aleman said.

Two of those proposals, when floated during the past 20 years, have hit fierce opposition: Broadening the sales tax base to include services as well as products and substituting a usage fee for the motor fuel tax, whose impact has plummeted with fuel efficiency. Another key change would restructure the way state tax revenue is shared with municipalities to give them more flexibility in determining land use.

Stu Piper grew up in the Chicago suburb of LaGrange in a family that first farmed land in 1836, before Chicago was even incorporated as a city. Now a Realtor in Washington, D.C., but still a Prairie State booster, Piper said there’s strength outside Chicago in the stable housing prices offered by an abundance of smaller metropolitan areas such as Rockford, Peoria, the Quad Cities, Bloomington-Normal and Springfield.

“With the gig economy, there’s opportunities for people to work from home and live 100 miles from Chicago, maybe go in Chicago once or twice a month, or go to Rockford or Moline,” said Piper, past president of the Illinois Society of Washington, a group of Illinois ex-pats who promote the state in the nation’s capital.

“There’s a lot of people in Illinois, politicians and community leaders, that are thinking outside the box,” he said. “Not the same old, same way, go-along-get-along kind of politics, which Illinois has had for way too long.”

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Decennial population losses in U.S. states since 1900: https://bit.ly/3hHDNGn

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AP Researcher Monika Mathur in New York and AP Writer Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed.

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Follow Political Writer John O’Connor at https://twitter.com/apoconnor

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The Illinois legislature is currently working on redistricting the state, a process that’s completed just once every 10 years and has the power to shape the state’s politics for the next decade and beyond.

What exactly is redistricting, how does the process work in Illinois and why does it matter? Here’s a breakdown:

What is redistricting?

Redistricting is the process of redrawing the boundaries of district maps for both chambers of the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House districts in Illinois. The process is completed every 10 years in each state across the country following the U.S. Census.

The redistricting process in every state is governed by the individual laws of that state. In Illinois, the state Constitution gives the General Assembly the power to redraw the maps.

There are 118 districts in the Illinois House, 59 in the state Senate and soon to be 17 U.S. House districts. The boundaries of all districts are required by the Constitution to be “compact, contiguous and substantially equal in population” though that mandate leaves plenty of room for interpretation.

Democrats control both the Illinois House and the Senate, by and large giving them the power to control the redistricting process and draw each district’s boundaries that will remain in place for the next 10 years.

What is the timeline for redistricting in Illinois?

Per the Illinois Constitution, the General Assembly is required to create and approve of the new maps by June 30.

If no redistricting plan is approved by June 30, a Legislative Redistricting Commission must be created by July 10. That commission will consist of eight members, four from each political party. The speaker of the House, the House minority leader, the Senate president and the Senate minority leader can each appoint one lawmaker and one other person who is not a member of the General Assembly.

By August 10, that commission would be required to file a redistricting plan with the Illinois Secretary of State that is approved by at least five members. If the commission can’t come to an agreement or fails to file new maps by that deadline, the Illinois Supreme Court then submits two people of different political parties to the Secretary of State by September 1.

By September 5, the Secretary of State is then required to publicly draw the name of one of those two people at random to serve as the ninth tie-breaking member of the commission. The commission would then be required to submit a redistricting plan with approval of five of the now-nine members by October 5.

The new maps take effect in the upcoming 2022 election cycle, when every candidate in the statehouse and U.S. House is on the ballot. Members of both the Illinois House and the U.S. House run every two years, while Illinois Senate seats operate on a staggered, alternating schedule of two four-year terms and one two-year term.

What’s different about this year?

This year, the release of U.S. Census data was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, with what’s known as “block-level” population and demographic data from the 2020 Census not scheduled to be released until mid-August at the earliest, then in the properly-formatted file for states’ redistricting process by Sept. 30 at the latest.

That data is usually given to states in March each year following the Census, in time for states to use it in the redistricting process. But this cycle’s delay puts the data release well after the June 30 deadline for new maps that’s mandated in the Illinois Constitution – so lawmakers say they’re turning to other sources.

What those sources are remains unclear – an issue over which Republicans and reform advocates alike have criticized Democrats in control of the process, which has long been shrouded in secrecy.

Candidates can begin circulating petitions to get on the ballot in the March 2022 primary elections as early as Aug. 31, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections. If the legislature doesn’t have the new maps ironed out by then (or if lawmakers don’t move that date back), it’s possible some candidates could begin circulating petitions for districts that haven’t even been officially drawn yet.

Why does redistricting matter?

Redistricting gives enormous power to those responsible for drawing the maps, with critics saying in some cases that it enables politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around.

The political party in power during a partisan redistricting process oftentimes may seek to draw maps that are more advantageous to their incumbent members, like cutting out an area of a district that is the other party’s stronghold, or dividing up a community into multiple districts to distill its political power, or redrawing an opponent’s district to make it more difficult for them to hold their seat.

Those efforts can have the effect of stacking the deck in the party’s favor in upcoming elections, in order to keep control of the legislature and maintain power.

This year, control of the U.S. House could also be at stake. Illinois will lose one seat in the U.S. House to drop to 17, the Census Bureau announced in April. That figure is based on population counts of each state nationwide to determine congressional representation, divvying up the 435 House seats among all 50 states. Currently, Democrats hold 13 of Illinois’ 18 seats in the House, with Republicans representing five. With Democrats in control of the remap, they could potentially try to draw the new districts so that the seat that must be eliminated is a Republican-held one.

Because the maps are drawn every 10 years, they remain in place for the next five election cycles – with the potential to give the party that drew the map an advantage for a full decade.

The question of why redistricting matters really comes down to why state politics matters, in that the party that controls the legislature has the power to pass laws that impact residents every single day. Redistricting is a process that has the potential to give those in power a major advantage in keeping that power.

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Illinois Democratic leaders announced Thursday that they have agreed to repay federal pandemic-relief loans more than a year earlier than scheduled, saving taxpayers $100 million in interest.

The plan was announced as Democrats who control the House and Senate head into the final 10 days of the legislative session, still struggling to find ways to close a $1.4 billion deficit for the budget that begins July 1.

Washington lent money to in early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic and containment measures left economies battered and hundreds of thousands on the unemployment line. Illinois borrowed $3.2 billion and has repaid $2 billion. The rest was due by December 2023, but the state has money to pay it earlier.

“The federal loan was a lifeline to keep our state and our economy afloat,” said Senate President Don Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat. “That our economy has rebounded so strongly that we can now pay it off early is a testament to the resilience of the people and businesses of the great state of Illinois.”

The lethal respiratory ailment continued its carnage Thursday, when the Illinois Department of Public Health reported an additional 1,542 confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus disease, which claimed 42 more lives. There have now been 22,536 deaths among 1.37 million cases.

Officials also reported that 47% of Illinois adults have now been vaccinated against the virus. But there were 1,488 people hospitalized with COVID-19, 404 of whom were in intensive care units and 226 receiving assistance breathing from ventilators.

The coronavirus marched into Illinois in late January 2020 and by March, most businesses and schools were closed, large gatherings banned, and for several weeks, residents strongly urged to stay home.

State revenue plummeted and it borrowed $3.2 billion. By last fall, key revenue indicators such as sales tax collections started rebounding beyond expectations and have continued into this spring. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker proposed a budget which would have required covering a $2.6 billion deficit, but his administration has been able to adjust it downward since.

Comptroller Susana Mendoza said she now can structure payments to relieve the debt during the next budget year, which begins July 1.

Mendoza joined Pritzker, Harmon, and House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch of Hillside in making the announcement.

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CHICAGO (CBS/AP) — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is acknowledging she hasn’t accomplished much of what she hoped when she replaced former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as mayor of the nation’s third-largest city, promising to do the job better.

Lightfoot says the pandemic and protests over police violence upended many of those plans though she is “unbelievably proud” of what her administration has done.

READ MORE: Over 17,000 Unemployment Claims Filed In Illinois Last Week Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

But as she reaches the halfway point of her four-year term on Thursday, Lightfoot faces an abundance of critics over her performance, and hundreds of people plan to protest near her home. Lightfoot says: “The reality is, I’m the mayor. I’m the target.”

The mayor received heavy criticism over her decision to only offered the customary one-on-one interviews to one select group of journalists — political reporters of color.

Her decision has ignited all kinds of opinions.

She took the action to make a statement about the lack of Black and Brown political reporters in television, radio and print newsrooms in Chicago, and she laid out her reasons in a letter sent to reporters like CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov who were not on that interview list.

In her two-page letter, Lightfoot brings up the country’s “historic reckoning” around systemic racism while pointing out the “absence of diversity across the city hall press corps.” She expresses concern about the “mostly whiteness and maleness” of the city’s news outlets, a glaring observation considering she is not only the city’s first Black woman mayor but also the first openly gay mayor.

“Diversity matters,” she writes, “and without it, how can you, as the media, truly speak to the needs and interests of the diverse and nuanced constituency you claim to serve until you do the work necessary to reflect that constituency.”

She also points to “implicit bias” in city hall news coverage but does not give examples.

READ MORE: Child Tax Credit: How Much Will Your Monthly Check Be?

Her challenge is to “hire reporters of color — and especially women of color — to cover Chicago politics and city hall in particular” or make sure a person of color is working with them.

But then there is the question of access and cherry picking who gets to ask an elected official direct questions.

The dean of the Medill School of Journalism is conflicted.

“We’re talking about someone trying to shed light on historic inequities, and that’s a commendable goal. Still, it’s a slippery slope to kind of allow politicians to dictate coverage in that way,” said Dean Charles Whitaker with Northwestern University.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

I ran to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall.

It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.

— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021

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Former Oregon Secretaries of State Phil Keisling and Norma Paulus are shown as they drop their ballots at a ballot drop site in Portland, Ore., Monday, May 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

I first become friends with Phil Keisling in the early 1980s when he and I were extremely low-paid editors ($8,400 a year!) of the Washington Monthly. Like many other journalists I revere (including Pulitzer Prize winners Katherine Boo, Taylor Branch, and Jon Meacham), Phil and I are proteges of the legendary founder, Charlie Peters, one of the most influential magazine editors of the late 20th Century.

In the 1990s, Phil served as secretary of state of Oregon, where in 1998 the entire state began voting by mail. The “vote-at-home” system that Phil developed soon helped boost turnout dramatically and, according to the 2005 Carter-Baker Commission, served as a national model for safeguarding mailed-out, or so-called “absentee ballots.”

Phil went on to be the Johnny Appleseed of the vote-at-home movement. In recent years, Oregon has been joined by Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii in holding entire elections by mail—that is, by automatically mailing all active registered voters their ballots. Voters then have the choice of returning them in the mail, or dropping them off in person.

Nationally, the portion of the electorate that voted with a mailed-out ballot went from 7.8 percent in 1996 to 46 percent in 2020. And in 2020, nine states and the District of Columbia—all blue except Utah—automatically sent ballots to their voters. This huge surge in mail ballot use was a big reason the 2020 election brought record turnout despite taking place during a pandemic.

It wasn’t long ago that it was Republican voters—think seniors, those traveling on business—who most took advantage of voting by absentee ballot. But Donald Trump turned vote-by-mail into a partisan issue—remember the attacks on the post office? Last November, two thirds of Trump supporters voted in person—and four-fifths of Biden supporters voted early or by mail.

The overall threat to democracy that these bills (and in some states, now laws) present is catalogued and analyzed at the Brennan Center for Justice, Protect Democracy and The National Vote at Home Institute, the organization Phil co-founded, which has zeroed in on the threat to vote-by-mail.

Jonathan Alter: I’m so sick of this Republican line about “ballot integrity.” Ever since 2001, when Karl Rove started pressuring U.S. Attorneys (and in some cases firing them) in a bogus effort to find vote fraud, these jokers have come up empty. That’s 20 years of lies about a problem that basically doesn’t exist.

Phil Keisling: Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies. Why risk jail to fake one vote? It makes no sense and almost no one ever does it.

JA: I grew up in Chicago politics, where the joke in the 1950s and 1960s was that the ward heelers in Mayor Daley’s machine urged their people to “vote early and often.” The dead told no tales but they did sometimes show up on Election Day. In Georgia in 1962, a county boss literally stuffed the ballot box in a failed effort to prevent Jimmy Carter from being elected to the state senate. But those days are long over. The irony is, the 2020 election may have been the cleanest in American history.

PK: That’s right, and vote-by-mail is generally cleaner because there’s less opportunity for mischief at the board of elections than in precincts. In recent years, states and counties have built in safeguards for these ballots.

JA: As we saw in 2020, there’s a major correlation between automatically getting an absentee ballot and turnout. So then it’s likely that turnout will be down in 2022, right? And not just because there’s lower turnout in midterms.

PK: Before answering that, let’s rise above the treetops for a second. There are three main ways that people vote. You go some place in person, [either early to polling places or drop boxes or to vote on Election Day]. You apply for an absentee ballot, often months in advance, and you get it—in most cases—with no excuses necessary. But there’s a third way, pioneered in Oregon, where they just send the ballot to you automatically in the mail if you’re an active registered voter.

In 2020, states where absentee ballots were already “no excuse required,” or which made them more accessible because of Covid-19, saw increased turnout compared to 2016. But it wasn’t dramatic – and some “excuse required states” had similar increases in the 5-6 percent range.

“The irony is, the 2020 election may have been the cleanest in American history.”

The much bigger differences came in states in this third category — where voters just receive the ballot automatically, no application required, period. I like to paraphrase Shakespeare: “To be required to apply, or not to be required to apply—that is the question.”

For example, New Jersey, Nevada, Vermont, and Hawaii for the first time mailed ballots to all their voters – and saw gains in the double-digits.

And look at what happened in non-battleground New Jersey, among young registered voters, age 18-29. According to a study out of Tufts University, those voters cast ballots at a 67 percent rate—up 22 percent from their turnout rate in 2016.

JA: Those are astonishing numbers for young voters, Phil, but now things in Republican-controlled states are moving in the wrong direction. And I’m scared by this ridiculous Arizona audit because it shows that Republicans will literally do anything—even throw in their lot with “Cyber Ninjas” conspiracy nuts who think bamboo splinters they’ve “found” prove that the Arizona ballots were corrupted in China. 

I think there’s a decent chance that if these Banana Republicans win control of the House in 2022 and hold it in 2024—quite possible, by the way—they will refuse to certify the 2024 election if a Democrat wins. That would bring down the curtain on American democracy. How scared are you?

PK: This is a long battle that has gone on for centuries. The reason I’m not as scared as other people is that we have elevated the conversation in ways that didn’t exist before. The involvement of organizations like ours and Major League Baseball and corporations is making a difference, too. Politicians working to suppress the vote aren’t doing this in the dark of night in back rooms; they’re being forced to do it in broad daylight, where they’re more likely to suffer real consequences.

“The key is to frame the issue very simply: Do you want to make it easier to vote—or harder?”

So while in the short term some important territory has been lost, most states now have highly motivated people fighting back. And even with the new law in Georgia, all voters still have options for “no excuse” voting with mailed out ballots that don’t exist at the moment in places like New Hampshire, or Delaware, where you still have to have an excuse to vote absentee.

JA: This is not Jim Crow on steroids. Yes, it’s motivated by the same racism that powered poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, “The Thirty Questions” (quizzes even a political science professor couldn’t answer)  and the other unconstitutional crimes of Jim Crow that I learned more about researching Jimmy Carter’s life. But those Jim Crow voter suppression tactics reduced the number of Black voters in some Southern counties literally to zero. That’s not what’s happening here. These new laws are the same in spirit, different in result, at least when it comes to suppression. When it comes to using politicized election boards and state legislatures to rig elections to favor Republicans, today’s danger is very real. 

This 19th century political cartoon portrayed the widespread discrimination and intimidation Black voters faced throughout the South (Library of Congress).

PK: These laws — so-called solutions desperately in search of a true problem — are built on the Big Lie and myths about the 2020 election having been stolen. But if people mobilize around small “d” democracy—if the people who see it’s a rigged game educate themselves—there’s a good chance the lost territory can’t just be regained, but we can keep pushing forward to win new territory.

“To be required to apply, or not to be required to apply—that is the question.”

JA: To make progress both at the state level and to build support nationally for HR1 and S1—the For the People Act—it seems to me the key is to frame the issue very simply: Do you want to make it easier to vote—or harder? Every time they appear on TV, Republicans should be asked: “Why do you want to make it harder to vote?” 

This obviously won’t solve the problem, but it will at least frame the question properly. The good news is that while polls show that most Americans think some kind of ID makes sense—a possible area for concession and compromise—the vast majority want easy, no-excuses vote-by-mail, early voting and professionals—not ideologues—running elections.

PK: And the backlash against voter suppression may prove more powerful than the temporary gains the voter suppression people think they’ve got.

JA: Yep. I remember in 2012 when there was a lot of voter suppression in Pennsylvania and the Romney people were talking about a “white wave” there that would win it for him. I called Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and asked him about it. He said something like, “There’s a wave coming, all right. It’s a Black wave and it will sweep in Obama again.” 

Nutter was right. If you try to take away something their parents and grandparents fought and died for, you’re going to pay the price. If voters are really angry about this in the midterms, they might stand in line for three hours and defy the historical norm, which would be Republican gains.

PK: There’s a much better solution than waiting in line—apply for your mail-in ballot as soon as you can. But you shouldn’t have to. If I had to put the slogan I’ve been thinking about on a t-shirt, it would be, “Send me my damn ballot, you government bastards. It’s mine.”

OK, so it needs a little refinement. Maybe you and your readers can do better.

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As Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot approaches the two-year anniversary of her inauguration, reaching the halfway point through her first term, she told the city’s media outlets that she would grant one-on-one interviews to mark the occasion, but with one condition: she will only speak with journalists of color.

“I ran to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall,” Lightfoot tweeted Wednesday morning. “It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.”

I ran to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall.

It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.

— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021

“Diversity and inclusion is imperative across all institutions including media. In order to progress we must change,” she continued. “This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city.”

Lightfoot called the racial make-up of the City Hall press corps “an imbalance that needs to change,” adding that Chicago’s local media “should reflect the multiple cultures that comprise it.”

While some on social media responded to Lightfoot’s tweets Wednesday praising the move as “equity” and a step forward in representation, many others criticized the decision.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt was among those disagreeing with the policy.

“I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today,” Pratt tweeted. “However, I asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them.”

I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today. However, I asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them. https://t.co/YMW8M8ZgJm

— Gregory Pratt (@royalpratt) May 19, 2021

In a letter emailed to Chicago media outlets, including NBC 5, Lightfoot – Chicago’s first Black female mayor and first openly gay mayor – said she wanted to “ensure” that members of the media understood her “thinking behind that decision.”

“In the time since I was elected, our country has faced an historic reckoning around systemic racism,” Lightfoot wrote, in a nod to the renewed racial justice movement sparked after a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis last May. “In looking at the absence of diversity across the City Hall press corps and other newsrooms, sadly it does not appear that many of the media institutions in Chicago have caught on and truly have not embraced this moment.”

Lightfoot wrote that since she began her campaign for mayor, she has been “struck” by the “overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically.”

Lightfoot went on to list in her letter the positions in both city government and on her own team that are filled by people of color, noting that the city has “more to do” but calling equity and inclusion the “north stars” of her administration.

“I am issuing a challenge to you,” Lightfoot wrote in her letter. “Hire reporters of color — and especially women of color — to cover Chicago politics, and City Hall in particular.”

She went on to ask outlets if they have people of color in leadership teams or on editorial boards, if there are qualified reporters of color who could cover City Hall but haven’t been given the chance, and if outlets have analyzed their own coverage to “identify and root out implicit bias.”

“If the answer to these questions is no, be advised that I will continue to press for that to change,” Lightfoot wrote.

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Chicago is well-known as the Windy City, but where does the nickname come from? The origin of the phrase is widely disputed, but ultimately goes back to Chicago’s politics and rivalries. 

SAMMI BOAS: Why is Chicago called the Windy City?

PERSON 1: Because it’s windy.

PERSON 2: It was originally founded by John J. Windolin.

PERSON 3: The gnats at NU fly around so much it gets windy.

PERSON 4: Because the wind absolutely gusts me over.

PERSON 5: I don’t remember but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to do with the fact that it’s actually windy, like, for real.

SAMMI BOAS: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Sammi Boas.

LILY COHEN: And I’m Lily Cohen. Welcome to The Ripple, a podcast exploring the effects of state and national politics on the Evanston and Northwestern community.

SAMMI BOAS: Chicago has many nicknames: the Second City, City of the Big Shoulders, Chi-town. But none of those are as famous as the Windy City. 

LILY COHEN: The moniker makes appearances all over the city. To name a few, Windy City Smokeout is a country music festival, The Windy City Times is a newspaper covering the Chicago LGBTQ+ community and Windy City LIVE is a Chicago morning talk show. 

SAMMI BOAS: But where does the name Windy City come from? 

LILY COHEN: The easiest answer would be that the wind coming off of Lake Michigan makes for a windy atmosphere. But in our search for the true reason, we discovered that the origins of the name actually have nothing to do with weather, and everything to do with politics.

SAMMI BOAS: Many historians think the name comes from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 — the first World’s Fair hosted in Chicago. This World’s Fair was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. 

PATRICK MCBRIARTY: There was a pretty fierce competition between a variety of cities in the United States to host that World’s Fair. There were meetings held, I believe, in New York. Where then it was reported that the, I guess, bombastic politicians or boosters of Chicago were so outspoken that Chicago was tagged with this moniker of the people from the Windy City, you know, that we were all blowhards about how great Chicago was and, you know, New Yorkers of course didn’t think much of Chicago and sometimes they still don’t, as part of the flyover states.

LILY COHEN: That was author and bridge historian Patrick McBriarty, He’s also a co-host of the Windy City Historians, a podcast about the history of Chicago.

SAMMI BOAS: That year, St. Louis, Washington, D.C. and New York City all competed to host the 1893 World’s Fair. The main competition was between NYC and Chicago, the largest and second-largest cities in the U.S. at the time.

LILY COHEN: Charles Dana, the publisher of the New York Sun at the time, was a strong advocate for New York hosting the Fair. In 1890, Dana allegedly said, “Don’t pay any attention to the nonsensical claims of that windy city. Its people could not build a World’s Fair even if they won it.” 

SAMMI BOAS: But researchers have never managed to find Dana’s original article that included this quote. Chicago was ultimately chosen because of its railway system and central location.

LILY COHEN: Barry Popik, an etymologist, took a trip to Chicago when they were celebrating the World’s Fair around 1994. While there, Barry visited the Chicago History Museum. Interested in the origins of words and phrases, he asked the tour guide about the origin of the phrase. The tour guide didn’t know the answer. So, Barry began researching the Windy City question himself.

BARRY POPIK: So the first thing I did was I went to the obvious source, which was the Dictionary of Americanisms. What’s the first citation? 1887 from the Louisville Courier Journal. And I said, wait a minute, 1887? They were bidding for the World’s Fair in 1889. That was two years later. So it has nothing to do with the World’s Fair. It was not coined by this guy. So I knew within seconds that the whole Windy City story was completely wrong.

SAMMI BOAS: Barry went to the New York Public Library, where they have a lot of newspapers on microfilm, to investigate further. But they didn’t have the Louisville Courier Journal. So, he checked out the Chicago Tribune, which was then called the Chicago Daily Tribune, and found a citation from 1886.

BARRY POPIK: And it says, people are calling us the Windy City. We don’t know why, we don’t deserve it. And then I got a clue that it’s from Cincinnati. And I found a lot of citations from Cincinnati.

LILY COHEN: Barry found citations from The Cincinnati Enquirer from the 1870s that used the term “Windy City” against Chicago in a derogatory way.

BARRY POPIK: For Cincinnati, those people in Chicago are windy. Cincinnati was a rival city of Chicago. They were both called Porkopolis — Cincinnati had the name Porkopolis. Later, Chicago took the same nickname, Porkopolis. They were rival cities. You don’t think about it now that Chicago being a rival of Cincinnati, but at the time they were, and it was a very big thing.

SAMMI BOAS: In the 19th century, Chicago was a city on the rise, trying to prove itself. It was incorporated as a city by the state in 1837, making it newer than rival Cincinnati.

PATRICK MCBRIARTY: Through that late 1800s, early 1900s, Chicago is probably much more trying to compensate for its really dirty, you know, swampy, West town characterization that Easterners might give it, and also fight its way into becoming what eventually became the second-largest city in the United States, surpassing St. Louis and Philadelphia and some other cities like that. I got the sense that, you know, Chicagoans would probably be a little more aggressive or maybe defensive throughout those periods.

LILY COHEN: Despite its underdog status, Chicago was growing quickly. Over the course of the 1860s to the 1880s, Chicago grew from a city of around 110,000 people to one of more than 1 million residents, making it the largest city in the American Midwest and third-largest in the United States.

PATRICK MCBRIARTY: Early on in the 19th century, Chicago was fighting for its place in the United States and in the world to be recognized. So I think there was probably a much stronger push and more boosterism for Chicago at that stage, particularly after trying to recover from the Fire of 1871 and rebuild the city. And it is pretty remarkable that then only a couple of decades later Chicago ends up holding a World’s Fair, that becomes known as probably one of the greatest World’s Fairs ever. So that gives a fair amount of pride.

SAMMI BOAS: Chicago wanted to host political conventions as a way to bring people and money into the city. The first presidential nomination convention Chicago hosted was a Republican convention in 1860, where Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois native, became the Republican nominee. Between 1860 and 1996, Chicago hosted 14 Republican presidential nomination conventions, 11 Democratic presidential nomination conventions and one Progressive Party Assembly. Thus began Chicago’s relationship with politics and politicians. 

LILY COHEN: Dick Simpson is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a former alderman of the city from 1971 to 1979 and a two-time Congressional candidate in the 1990s. He has a unique personal relationship with Chicago politics and offered some historical context for the way some of those politics came to be.

DICK SIMPSON: Back in 1871, the first of the political machines was built under a crook politician named Michael Cassius McDonald and machine politics became the hallmark of Chicago ever since. 

LILY COHEN: For those of you who may not know, a political machine is a political organization led by one person or a small group that controls enough votes to maintain power over the government in a city, county or state. 

DICK SIMPSON: Early it was divided into different fiefdoms and both the Democratic and the Republican Party. After the Great Depression, or during the Great Depression, it became centralized in the Democratic Party under Anton Cermak, perfected under Richard J. Daley and transmogrified again under Richard M. Daley.

SAMMI BOAS: Richard J. Daley became mayor in 1955 and stayed in the position until his death in 1976. He contributed to the city’s urban renewal projects and highway construction, but also received backlash, especially from Black voters who grew frustrated with racial segregation in housing and schools.

LILY COHEN: Richard M. Daley — the son of Richard J. Daley — became mayor of Chicago in 1989. Richard M. Daley opened Millennium Park and planted trees around the city. But under his leadership, the city’s budget deficit grew. This led to the privatization of government operations, including parking meters, which drew criticism. 

SAMMI BOAS: Now, Richard J. Daley is cited as the leader of the last political machine in the United States.

DICK SIMPSON: Chicago is essentially the epitome of American politics. It shows its racial biases more clearly. It shows machine politics. It is built as an example of often what is good about American politics and frequently what is bad about American politics so it’s an exemplar, or an extreme case, as they say in the social sciences.

LILY COHEN: But not all hope is lost for the Windy City or the American political system. While Chicago’s messy, or as some might say, “windy,” political history encompasses so much of what is wrong with politics today, it also offers potential for change.

DICK SIMPSON: Chicago is a harbinger of what might be possible in American politics that is a rebirth of democracy. The election of Lori Lightfoot and a more progressive city council is one example of beginning to come to terms with both our racist and unsavory machine politics history, and hopefully it’s a new wind blowing across Chicago.

SAMMI BOAS: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Sammi Boas. 

LILY COHEN: And I’m Lily Cohen. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Ripple. This episode was reported and produced by me, Lily Cohen, and Sammi Boas. The audio editor of The Daily Northwestern is Madison Smith, the digital managing editor is Haley Fuller, and the editor in chief is Sneha Dey. 

Email: [email protected], [email protected] 

Twitter: @BoasSamantha @LilyyCohenn 

Related Stories: 
— Chicago Democracy Project maps political history of the Windy City
— Evanston, Chicago leaders talk fair housing and reparations in forum

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For nearly a year, I have been running into the reality of Chicago politics in our own neighborhood.

As a resident of Beverly/Morgan Park and the 19th Ward, I have made repeated requests to speak with a member of our ward’s zoning advisory committee (ZAC) and have yet to meet with success.

As someone who values civic engagement, I have been looking for ways to meld my interest in land-use policy with involvement in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, responses to my persistent emails and phone calls to the office of 19th Ward Ald. Matt O’Shea have been alternatively vague and dismissive or nonexistent. Frustratingly, research into ZAC across the city has affirmed that my experience is not an isolated incident. 

What are ZAC, and why do they matter? Understanding a ZAC begins with dissecting aldermanic prerogative. As many Chicagoans will be quick to point out, aldermanic prerogative is the unwritten rule in Windy City politics that gives aldermen “veto power” over what gets built (and what doesn’t) in their ward. 

ZAC have been employed to help further this centralization of aldermanic power while simultaneously giving aldermen cover. In my case, despite repeated inquiries, I have not been able to speak with anyone on the 19th Ward ZAC nor learn of a membership roster. It goes without saying that ZAC meetings are off limits to the public. 

In addition to the lack of transparency, ZAC are dangerous in their ability (disproportionately leveraged by aldermen over majority-white, low-poverty wards) to stymie development patterns that can lead to greater racial integration. Downzoning, landmarking and other land-use policies are often employed to create barriers to entering certain neighborhoods.

At times, the majority-white 19th Ward more closely resembles a fortress than a village in the city. Given the context of majority-black neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the 19th Ward, I believe the role our ZAC plays in walling off our corner of the city from the broader South Side cannot be ignored. 

I am calling upon our alderman to lead the charge in introducing greater transparency both locally and citywide (where there is a total lack of regulation surrounding ZAC). As we come off the heels of a renewed cry for racial justice in 2020, will you join me in advocating for a more transparent and just Chicago?

Editor’s note: Scott Kibler, a Chicago transplant from Oregon, currently resides in Beverly/Morgan Park. He holds a master’s degree in public health with a concentration in urban planning from the University of Minnesota and works in healthcare.

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For the past 40 years, Chicago has always had three Black representatives in Congress, symbolizing the power of the “Black Metropolis” that elected Harold Washington mayor. We have sent more African Americans to Washington than any other city.

In the past decade, though, Chicago’s Black population has fallen 14 percent, part of a long-term decline that could reduce it from 1.2 million at its peak in 1980 to 665,000 by 2030. Chicago may still have three Black representatives — Bobby Rush, Robin Kelly, and Danny Davis — but it no longer has three Black-majority congressional districts. Rush’s 1st District, which has been represented by an African American since 1929, longer than any other in Congress, has held steady at 51 percent Black since 2010. Kelly’s 2nd District is actually up 1.5 percentage points in Black population, to 57 percent, because she represents the south suburbs, which have absorbed many Blacks leaving Chicago. But Davis’s 7th District, which encompasses the shrinking West Side and the booming Loop, is now only 47 percent Black, down from 54.6 percent.

The Voting Rights Act guarantees minorities representation commensurate to their numbers, but has the moment come when Black politicians no longer have the numbers to hold on to their traditional seats of power? It’s not just Congress: In the Illinois General Assembly, 10 districts drawn with Black majorities after the 2010 census now have a minority of African Americans. The population loss has been magnified by a 2020 census that experts believe undercounted Blacks and Latinos even more than usual. “Danny Davis’s district is in trouble,” says Alden Loury, WBEZ’s senior editor covering race. “He’s been in that seat forever, but it’d be a lot harder for a lesser-known Black candidate to win.”

Blacks have already lost ground on the City Council. The 2nd Ward, which had been represented by an African American for nearly a century, was won by a white candidate in 2007 and has had a white alderman ever since. The 15th Ward, on the South Side, is now represented by a Latino. Loury can foresee further loss in the South Loop and the West Loop, where white gentrifiers have replaced African Americans. Non-Hispanic whites surpassed Blacks as the largest racial group in Chicago in 2010; they now make up a third of the population, compared with 28.5 percent for Blacks.

Not surprisingly, Black elected officials have announced they intend to hold their ground — and even increase their representation — when congressional, legislative, and aldermanic districts are redrawn. “We’re going to have to work very carefully from the Black Caucus’s perspective to protect our districts,” state representative Sonya Harper said at a virtual panel on the census and redistricting organized by political consultant Avis LaVelle. “We want to ensure that the districts are drawn in a manner that allows for all people to have representation.” In the City Council, 28th Ward Alderman Jason Ervin, chair of the Black Caucus, sees the 18 existing Black-majority wards — out of 50 total — as a “premise” that could be increased to 19 with creative mapmaking, since some of those wards are more than 90 percent Black. 

The state legislature and the City Council have a certain amount of wiggle room: State law allows mapmakers to draw low-population districts for the purpose of preserving minority representation. In the 2011 City Council remap, many South and West Side wards wound up less populous than North Side districts for that reason. There are no such allowances for congressional districts, which must be equal in population. And as a result of the 2020 census, Illinois will lose one seat in Congress, down to 17. 

Population Swap 

At the beginning of the 2010s, Blacks made up the largest racial group in Chicago. Over the past decade, they’ve fallen to third, behind whites and Latinos, imperiling their political representation.

Source: American Community Survey

Nonetheless, U.S. representative Kelly thinks it’s possible to maintain three Black congressional districts — and even add a Latino district. “There is concern about the seats of mine, Bobby, and Danny’s, and the importance of those seats, and who we represent,” she said at the census and redistricting panel. “I think that everything will be done to make sure those seats remain. The Latino population has grown, and they have one seat, which is Chuy García. From my understanding, they’re looking at their population, and possibly having two seats. It’s going to be a delicate balance.”

When the Better Government Association asked demographer Rob Paral to produce a nongerrymandered congressional map, he managed to create three Black-majority districts, but Paral says each was at “barely 50 percent.” However, he argues that Black-majority districts are no longer as essential to electing Blacks as they were in the 1980s, when Chicago’s politics were racially polarized. Two Black aldermen — Matt Martin and Maria Hadden — represent North Side wards. Mike Simmons, who is Black, was appointed to replace a white state senator on the Far North Side. “With the Black population loss, it makes it harder to draw a Black-majority district,” Paral says. “It doesn’t mean you can’t elect a Black official.”

Minority politicians don’t think a few North Side victories make the Voting Rights Act unnecessary. Two Latino aldermen were elected on the North Side in 2019, but that was the result of “anti-incumbent sentiment,” said Alderman Roberto Maldonado, chair of the City Council’s Latino Caucus. Over the past decade, Latino growth in the city has been fairly flat — an estimated 2 percent — but Maldonado thinks there are opportunities to add two Latino-majority wards on the South Side in the remap. “My interest is to make sure Latinos get the number of slots we deserve,” he says. “That is the spirit of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. To pretend that we are a colorblind city, I don’t live in la-la land. Nobody will convince me that given standard political times, without the intensity of emotions against incumbents, Maldonado will beat Smith.”

Which is why Black and Latino politicians are going to fight to maintain the power they’ve gained in Chicago over the past four decades — whether the numbers add up for them or not. 

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  Published On 11 May,2021 01:39 pm

Biden chooses Rahm Emanuel for US ambassador to Japan: media

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Joe Biden has chosen Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to Barack Obama, as US ambassador to Japan, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

There had been speculation that Emanuel would become envoy to China, but that job is expected to go to former top US diplomat Nick Burns, the report said, citing multiple sources familiar with the Biden team’s discussions.

Ambassador to Japan is one of Washington’s most important diplomatic postings, and Tokyo one of its most important allies, highlighted when prime minister Yoshihide Suga was the first foreign leader Biden received at the White House.

At that meeting, the United States and Japan vowed to stand together against an assertive China, with a joint statement calling for “candid conversations” and raising concerns over Beijing’s growing maritime moves, its clampdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and growing tension over Taiwan.

Emanuel’s appointment would continue a tradition of sending high-profile political operators to Tokyo.

The role was also held by Caroline Kennedy, John F Kennedy’s daughter, who served during Obama’s second term.

Emanuel, the son of an Israeli immigrant, is known as a high-energy, fierce Democratic partisan.

He came to national notice as an enforcer in the Clinton White House, where he held several roles, ramming home the administration’s agenda.

He was credited with masterminding the 2006 Democratic election triumph, which saw the party grab control of the House of Representatives from the Republicans, and returned to the White House as chief of staff to President Obama.

He then served two terms as mayor of Chicago, before surprising the political establishment by declining to run for a third, just as an incendiary police shooting trial was about to begin.

He has a reputation for abrasiveness and the occasional piece of profanity-laced rhetoric, attributed to his training in the bearpit of Chicago politics.

Mireya Solis, a Japan expert at the Brookings Institution, told the Financial Times that while Tokyo would value his relationship with Biden, there was some “trepidation” over his reputation for bluntness. 

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