THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

1/23/10

The Chicago media are abuzz over Circuit Court Clerk, and County Board Presidential Candidate, Dorothy Brown’s “Jeans Day” fund. Apparently, employees of the Circuit Court Clerk’s office can fork over $3 per day or $10 per week, cash, for the privilege of wearing jeans to work. No one is quite sure where the money, which amounts to, depending on whom one believes, $40,000 to $60,000 per year, goes, but Ms. Brown and her Chief Financial officer, Wasiu Fashina, assure us that the money goes for “charitable, benevolent, and employee morale causes” while we await a genuine accounting. One can be reasonably sure that at least one employee of the Clerk’s office has had her morale tremendously enhanced by the “Jeans Day” fund, but that is another issue about which I am sure we will hear more in the near future.

Dorothy Brown’s “Jeans Day” fund is not without precedent, and I am not talking about Ms. Brown’s practice of “accepting” cash birthday and Christmas gifts from her employees in the spirit of former Governor, and current federal inmate, George Ryan. No, the precedent about which I speak goes back even further than Aurelia Pucinski, former Circuit Clerk who reportedly started the quaint “Jeans Day” custom and who is the daughter of Chicago political legend, Roman Pucinski, who was promoted from Congressman to Alderman in 1972 after a suicide mission against Charles Percy at the behest of the Daley Machine. No, the precedent about which I write goes back to the dawn of the Daley Machine.

The year was 1956. Richard J. Daley had only been mayor a little more than a year and Chairman of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization a little more than three years. The Organization had slated Cook County Treasurer Herb Paschen as its candidate to face Governor Bill Stratton in the upcoming gubernatorial election. Stratton, the prototype for many GOP governors who followed him, was said to be, until Bill Scott ran the State Treasurer’s Office in the 1970s, “Daley’s favorite Republican.” Mr. Paschen was a decent Treasurer, but showed little beyond a passable level of competence to distinguish him as a worthy candidate for governor. Still, when a scandal broke out in Stratton’s administration (State auditor, Republican Orville Hodge was indicted for defrauding the state of millions of dollars.), it looked like Paschen might win. Suddenly, a “flower fund” was discovered in Paschen’s office. Employees of the Treasurer’s office were forced t contribute to a fund that was used to buy flowers and gifts for employees in the office who were in the hospital. No mention was made in this case of “charitable, benevolent, and employee morale causes,” which probably says more about the relative chutzpah of the colorless Herb Paschen and the colorful Dorothy Brown than it does about the ultimate employment of the funds. Paschen was forced to drop out of the race and the party slated Richard Austin, a virtually invisible County Judge to take on Stratton. Stratton went on to squeak by the unknown Austin in the Eisenhower led Republican landslide of 1956.

A couple footnotes, neither of which has anything to do with County Board Presidential race:

First, the discovery of hapless Herb Paschen’s “flower fund” was almost certainly not an accident. If Pat Quinn gets renominated for Governor, an outcome that is no longer the sure bet it was even a month ago, and one of the establishmentarian Republican candidates, Jim Ryan, Bill Brady, Kirk Dillard, or Andy McKenna, gets the GOP nod, as seems likely, look for similar revelations coming from Quinn’s office. Anyone who thinks the powers that be in Cook County Democratic politics would be less comfortable with any of the aforementioned GOPers as governor than they would be with Governor Quinn does not understand Chicago or Illinois politics.

Second, Dick Daley may have been too clever by half, as the saying goes, in 1956. As a consolation prize for taking on Stratton, Richard Austin was given a federal judgeship, ostensibly at the recommendation of Senator Paul Douglas but really by Daley. The same Judge Richard Austin went on to give Daley fits in the 1970s by trying to force the integration of the Chicago Housing Authority’s public housing horrors. Resistance to such efforts became one of the major issues, some might say distractions, of Richard I’s reign in its twilight years.