Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,905

This is the grave of Jane Byrne.

Born in 1933 in Chicago, Jane Burke grew up rich. Her father was the VP of a steel company. They were a Catholic family and they wanted their daughter to go to college. She originally went to St. Mary of the Woods, a Catholic college in Indiana, but she wanted a real education, so she transferred to Bard. She was a science-minded kid, getting degrees in chemistry and biology in 1955. But she was Irish Catholic, so you know these people are addicted to politics. She had moved back to Chicago and had a good opportunity to use her interests in this when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960. She volunteered for him, was good at this, and got the attention of Richard Daley, legendary mayor of Chicago. That put her on the fast track. She became part of his patronage network and since she was good at everything she did, she kept getting promoted.

By 1968, Byrne ran Chicago’s consumer affairs department. She started getting national attention and was a delegate to the disastrous 1972 Democratic National Convention, when liberals took over the party and nominated the completely incompetent George McGovern, who proceeded to be obliterated by Richard Nixon. Once again, the evidence that the people taking over the Democratic Party after 1968 has led to better outcomes is not strong. In 72, Byrne was Daley’s woman in the room and neither of them were happy about what happened. And let’s be clear, she was very much a Daley hack. As the Democratic Party in Chicago began to stand up to Daley, she took a lot of criticism too. He had her appointed co-chair Cook County Democratic Central Committee in 1975, despite anger from the grassroots. When Daley died the next year, the party immediately ousted her.

This infuriated Byrne. Michael Bilandic had taken over as mayor after Daley’s death and he was vulnerable. Him being the new mayor was a completely inside job that had cut out Wilson Frost, who was both Black and the president pro tempore of the City Council. But the machine guys didn’t want that. So Bilandic really didn’t have any constituency and while the Chicago machine was far from dead, it can’t easily run without a clear leader. So Byrne soon announced her candidacy to run in 1979. Bilandic was completely incompetent and alienated key constituencies and then a blizzard didn’t get cleaned up and nothing kills a political career in the cities like unremoved snow. Jesse Jackson then endorsed Byrne and that was huge. Republicans decided to come out for Byrne too. And then the machine only ran south side people up and down the ticket, so the north side was furious. Basically, it was incompetence all the way down and Byrne took advantage and won the nomination and then of course the general.

Unfortunately, Byrne was also very bad at being mayor. Although she was furious at the machine, what she really wanted was for the machine to back her instead. So she made her peace with the men who hated her. The late 70s and early 80s were a hard time to be mayor of a big city, let’s be fair here, no one had it easy. However, Byrne was really quite bad at the job. At first, Byrne went all in for inclusion, working closely with Jackson and other Black leaders, as well as hiring a lot of women and recognizing the gay community. But then she basically turned her back on all of that and started working more closely with the racist and homophobic machine men. She then endorsed Ted Kennedy and Cook County voted for Carter, so she was seen as weak and out of touch on national issues. She and Kennedy walked together in the 1980 St. Patrick’s Day parade, where they were booed and heckled.

It did not get better. Turnover in the city government became a huge problem. She fired Black members of the School Board and replaced them with openly racist whites. She went through several police commissioners over her four year term. She tried to bring attention to the disastrous Cabrini-Green housing project by moving in there for a few days, but it did nothing to help and was seen as a publicity stunt. She had actually said she’d stay until it was fixed and then left three weeks later, talking of the massively reduced crime in the projects. Of course, what she either didn’t realize or was just utterly clueless about is that the reason the crime was down is that the cops were all over the place because she was there and there was no structural fix to the issue. She faced a series of municipal worker strikes, which were still common in cities at this time, but she didn’t handle these real great either. Unfortunately for her, people started calling her “Calamity Jane.”

Byrne was good on gun control and issues like that, to her credit. She also was an early mayor who sought to raise the city’s profile by attracting big events and movie productions, including The Blues Brothers. She opened farmers’ markets, redeveloped the Navy Pier, pushed for the city’s museum district, was prominent in promoting the city’s Gay Pride Parade and a lot of other things that are hallmarks of modern liberalism.

Did Byrne face sexism? You bet she did. She was routinely mocked for being a woman. That hurt her, but it probably didn’t have that much impact on the overall evaluation of her tenure as mayor because she was simply so weak in every other way.

Byrne decided she would run for reelection in 1983, even though no one really wanted her. Daley’s son Richard M. Daley decided to take over the political machine. But what ended up happening is that the two of them split the machine vote, while Byrne’s support in the Black community absolutely cratered and Harold Washington managed to defeat both of them. Daley was far from done in his career but Byrne was done in hers. She ran against Washington again in 1987, but lost again. By this time, she was a washed up politician addicted to running for office, a real problem for a lot of Democrats who lose. She ran in 1988 for Cook County Circuit Court Clerk and lost again. She ran for mayor again in 1991 and received all of 5.9% in the Democratic primary, with Daley dominating.

After all of this, Byrne finally stopped running for things. She wrote her memoir in 1992 and just became a senior Democrat invited to stuff, doing some lobbying, old Democrats kind of things. She died in 2014, at the age of 81.

Jane Byrne is buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Evanston, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other women who were mayors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Given the number of large cities who have never elected a woman mayor…..but hey there’s the nation as a whole electing women as president….oh yeah. Anyway, the first woman to ever be elected mayor in American history was Susanna Salter, elected in Argonia, Kansas in 1887. She is buried in Argonia. The first large city to elect a woman mayor was Seattle, who elected Bertha Knight Landes in 1926. She is buried in Seattle. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.