Nominating conventions came into being in the 1830s, after Andrew Jackson and his ilk turned party politics into a more egalitarian affair. The elite caucuses that had once chosen presidential candidates gave way to more inclusive mass gatherings where delegates styled themselves as representatives of the people. By the time the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, nominating conventions had become significant political events in the life of the country. Journalists, artists, and photographers documented the appearance and actions of the delegates and the spirit and style of the gatherings.
This particular artist’s drawing shows the meeting of the Republican Party in Chicago in 1860, when the young anti-slavery party nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. The Republicans went to the trouble to build a special hall for the convention, a vast domed wooden structure that they called the Wigwam. (It stood at the corner of Lake and Wacker and was reportedly destroyed by fire in the late 1860s.) Notably, the illustration shows a mainly female audience crowding the galleries to follow the proceedings. (Women would not gain the right to vote until 1920.)
Faced with the likelihood that the federal government would sanction the spread of slavery into the West and strengthen its legal underpinnings everywhere in the US, those participating in the Republican convention believed it to be an event ‘on which the most momentous results are depending.’ ‘No body of men of equal number,’ the convention chair proclaimed, ‘was ever clothed with greater responsibility than those now within the hearing of my voice.’
The Republicans, though only a northern regional party, were intent on dislodging the dominant Democratic Party, which they did that November, against all odds.
I’ve been away. To Puerto Rico, ironically, which like Illinois is bankrupt, but which is free of the pretensions of grandeur that make living in Chicago, Illinois such a political and spiritual nightmare.
The City of Chicago paid $2 million to settle a lawsuit that whistle-blowing cops had brought, heading off a trial that would have centered on the police department’s code of silence. Mayor Emanuel, who was to have been called to testify, figured this was a good use of citizens’ money. What use is justice here anymore, anyway?
In the state capital, the legislature once again ended its spring session without passing a budget. The legislature has now failed of its duty for two years. According to the website Truth in Accounting, Illinois’s debt burden is $187 billion. Others place it at $148 billion. Illinois lawmakers are too cowardly to face the pain entailed in getting the state’s finances back in balance again. It’s difficult to divine why they are in office.
Chicago is a microcosm of all that troubles the nation now. The racial divisions, out-of-control violence, and public corruption are corrosive. Public order is fragile and in jeopardy. Over all this is a posturing ‘leadership’ that cares mainly for reputation and the superiority of being part of a political elite.
Should we sympathize with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU)? On Friday, the teachers walked off the job and took to the streets, ostensibly on a crusade, not principally for their own benefit, but for the sake of increasing education funding more generally. Union boss Karen Lewis, looking jaunty, proclaimed, ‘We’re dying a death of a 1,000 cuts,’ implying that teachers were among Governor Bruce Rauner’s victims, and that all would be well if only the union could squeeze more money out of the state and its taxpayers.
Yet, if a report of the Illinois Policy Institute is correct, the financial woes of the Chicago school system and its teachers are largely internal and have been brought on by themselves. The Chicago Teachers Union has been complicit in the ruin of the pension system established to provide retirement security, allowing money to be diverted from the fund while accepting overly generous increases in working teachers’ salaries. Meanwhile, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) leadership has so mismanaged its finances that a pension system that was fully funded in 1999 now represents a $9.5 billion liability, despite the fact that, over the same period, public funding for CPS has increased at 150% of the rate of inflation, when calculated on a per-student basis.
The IPI’s report, published in late 2015, analyzes the funding of teachers’ pay and pensions over several decades. It explains the arrangements that have created the pension crisis while debunking some leading claims about where the solution lies.
1. Pension pick-ups: In 1981, when Ruth Love was CPS superintendent, the district and teachers agreed that the district would pay the part of the teachers’ pension contributions. Instead of pension contributions coming out of teachers’ pay, a part of their share would come out of the schools’ general operating funds. These pension “pick-ups,” which continue today, amount to a loss of operating revenue of $1.266 billion over the last decade. Meanwhile, the pick-up has not been counted as part of the CPS’s mandated contribution to the pension fund.
2. Pension holidays: On two occasions, in 1995 and again in 2010, the General Assembly allowed the CPS to forego paying in to the teachers’ pension fund as mandated. The first of these ‘pension holidays’ lasted from 1995 to 2006. During this period, the school system diverted all the money that should have gone for pensions (amounting to $1.5 billion) into its general operating funds. During the second pension holiday, from 2011 to 2013, the CPS diverted another $1.3 billion from the pension fund.
3. Colossally bad management: While the public is constantly being told that the schools’ problems stem from under-funding, the IPI claims that ‘Tax-payer provided revenues for the Chicago Public Schools have more than doubled‘ between 1997 and 2014, rising from $2.6 to $5.3 billion annually. Meanwhile, the size of the student population has dropped by about 7 percent, from a high of roughly 383,000 students in 2003 to 355,634 students in 2014. In 2014, the CPS received revenue of $15,011 for each child enrolled.
4. Unwise salary increases: The lifetime compensation of CPS teachers is the highest in the nation, relative to other major urban school systems. A beginning teacher with a BA earns $51,092 a year. Salaries increase rapidly during the first decade of service, so that teachers with 10-14 years of service earn an average pay of over $84,000 per year. The salary structure increases the pension benefits of teachers earlier in their careers, enhancing the payout to younger ‘retirees.’ In 2014, over 72% of teachers in the Chicago schools had less than 14 years’ seniority. The pension fund’s pool of beneficiaries is increasing, while the number of teachers paying into it is declining, another factor pushing it toward insolvency.
5. Reckless borrowing: It’s hard to escape concluding that the Chicago schools have been terribly mismanaged. Between 1998 and 2014, despite enjoying many years of pension ‘holidays,’ the CPS sank ever more deeply into the red, borrowing instead of confronting its true fiscal constraints. CPS indebtedness totaled $6.2 billion in 2014. Its bond offerings have been floated at ever higher rates of interest, even as its bond rating tanks. Today, nearly eight percent of the CPS budget goes right to debt payments. Another 68 percent goes to compensation costs, leaving just 24 percent for all the other expenses of running the schools.
Image: “Playing Teacher” (1890 Prang Company lithograph)
from this source.
Optimism is to be cherished, but, given the state of the world, it may be a foolish indulgence. The times call for levelheaded engagement, not the dreamy complacency that optimism breeds. Faith in our political system, in the American people, or in the capacities of elected leaders: faith like that has yielded small rewards lately. The glue of trust that valorizes American government is disintegrating.
That the US has fallen into troughs of mediocrity before (think of the Gilded Age culture Mark Twain pilloried) is one of the few thoughts that consoles me.
Our national capacities matter more then ever, given the dire condition of the world, our institutions, and many of our communities. What can we bring to 2016’s daunting prospect, a prospect defined by several cosmic and worrisome possibilities?
1. World War Three?
If it breaks out, it will be a war like no other, as was also true of World Wars One and Two. In fact, it may already be underway. We may not know it, simply because we are in the same situation as those who lived through other world wars. We watch as an unconventional conflict erupts and spreads in a fashion that the world order is unprepared to protect itself against. In Syria and with the Islamic State, aggressors are working with playbooks that defy borders and prevailing conceptions of war and nationality. As in previous wars, the Middle East’s war-within-a war has geographic and strategic traits that have already begun enmeshing a widening set of parties, both psychologically and militarily.
2. The decline of national sovereignty
World order as we know it is based on the concept of the nation-state: that states and powers have boundaries, and that, within those boundaries, all are subject to a nation’s laws. The international order and our concepts of war are built on the notion that nations are sovereign. In the many parts of the world, the concept of the nation-state has allowed humans to live peacefully under the rule of law.
These days, the integrity of the nation-state and the inviolable nature of national sovereignty are losing salience. A host of contributing forces, both economic and geopolitical, was strikingly evident in 2015. While Greece’s economic crisis exposed the mutual discontents inherent in the great experiment known as the European Union, its member-states are increasingly fractious, as the incidence of terrorism and a massive influx of refugees from war-torn and dysfunctional parts of the world have highlighted their loss of internal control.
Global mobility has increasingly challenged the static bulwark of the nation state, but the world’s leading powers have also rained insults on its integrity. Whether it’s Russia in the Ukraine, or the US in Syria, the superpowers frequently allow their desires to override their respect for the sovereignty of nations that they dislike. Their increasing resort to overt and covert interventionism mocks the concept of national sovereignty. Even changes in technology–such as the increasing sophistication of air-to-ground warfare–have made it easier to ignore and violate the clear boundaries that formerly protected nations from one another and impeded a general descent into war.
3. Witchy weather
Climate change, global warming—call it what you will, it’s a major worry. Unbreathable air; murderous landslides; droughts and forest fires; glaciers melting, oceans rising. Whether you’re a scientist or a believer in the Biblical end-time, you may agree (while wearing shorts in winter) that ‘Old Mother Nature’ is trying to tell us something. Resource exhaustion is how a planet’s inhabitants typically do themselves in. With omens like this, why worry about bombs?
4. The twin bankruptcies of Chicago and Illinois
Chicago and the State of Illinois are bankrupt already. They just haven’t admitted it yet because of the shame. The most powerful people in our state, especially the state legislators and Speaker of the Illinois House, Mike Madigan, will be remembered as the people at the helm when the ship went down.
Poor governance alone is to blame for Chicago and Illinois’s difficulties, for, ironically, both are richly endowed entities, with great human capital and masses of valuable resources and assets, including some of the world’s most productive farmland. Illinois has one of the largest GDPs in the country, but it is saddled with a growing and inescapable debt load consisting chiefly of unmet pension obligations, the legacy of decades of corrupt and self-interested leadership.
The collapse of a major American city and its state AT THE SAME TIME has no precedent in US history. History will remember and damn the leading politicians who for decades have written bad laws and abused the people’s trust. Hold on to your hats, all Illinois! 2016’s going to be a bumpy ride.
5. A Donald Trump presidency
Beyond the well-aired controversies that Donald Trump inflames, his ascendancy portends chaos in the political realm. Not only does Trump’s unwelcome prominence prove that the Republican National Committee has lost control of the party; it also shows the degree to which both parties and their personnel have lost touch with the sentiments of the electorate. Whether Trump can convert viewers into votes remains to be seen, but if he polls well, we’re going to find out what happens when a candidate upends an entrenched national party.
Image: Carol M. Highsmith, Marble House, Newport, Rhode Island, from this source.
