Political history of Chicago

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Politics in Chicago through most of the 20th century was dominated by the Democratic Party. Organized crime and political corruption were persistent concerns in the city. Chicago was the political base for presidential nominees Stephen Douglas (1860), Adlai Stevenson II (1952 and 1956), and Barack Obama, who was nominated and elected in 2008.

In 1855, Chicago Mayor Levi Boone threw Chicago politics into the national spotlight with some dry proposals that led to the Lager Beer Riot by the wets. The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated home state candidate Abraham Lincoln. During the 1880s, 1890s, and early 20th century, Chicago also had an underground radical tradition with large and highly organized socialist, communist, anarchist and labor organizations. The Republicans had their own machine operations, typified by the "blonde boss" William Lorimer, who was unseated by the U. S. Senate in 1912 because of his corrupt election methods.

Chicago has a long history of political corruption, dating to the incorporation of the city in 1833. It has been a de facto monolithic entity of the Democratic Party from the mid 20th century onward. In the 1980s, the Operation Greylord investigation resulted in the indictments of 93 public officials, including 17 judges. Research released by the University of Illinois at Chicago reports that Chicago and Cook County's judicial district recorded 45 public corruption convictions for 2013, and 1,642 convictions since 1976, when the Department of Justice began compiling statistics. This prompted many media outlets to declare Chicago the "corruption capital of America". Gradel and Simpson's Corrupt Illinois (2015) provides the data behind Chicago's corrupt political culture. They found that a tabulation of federal public corruption convictions make Chicago "undoubtedly the most corrupt city in our nation", with the cost of corruption "at least" $500 million per year.