Little Caesars

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. Earlier this month, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Bernie Sanders responded by thanking Emanuel for endorsing his rival. As a CNN analyst put it–

CNN ANALYST: Bernie Sanders has decided to run against Emanuel as much as Hillary.

ED: –proving once again that all politics is local. One of Emanuel’s predecessors, Mayor Richard J. Daley not only promoted John F. Kennedy for president in 1960, he shaped the very social geography of the Windy City.

BRIAN: He wanted the neighborhoods to remain intact because the neighborhoods were turning out a big vote for the machine. If there were integration, who knows what would happen?

ED: Today on BackStory, how local power brokers have shaped American history, including coroners in the colonial era and women in 19th century Boston.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  They saw garbage in the street, really sick kids, and they wanted to make things better.

ED: A history of local power, today on BackStory.

MALE SPEAKER:  Major funding for BackStory is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, here with Brian Balogh–

BRIAN: Hey, Ed.

ED: –and Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Ed. We’re going to start today in the early 20th century with an election story. It takes place in Memphis, Tennessee’s segregated black neighborhoods. Now you can imagine what voting meant for African Americans back then.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: We’re talking about the South in 1920, brutal oppression, racism, lynching, all of these horrible things were happening.

PETER: This is writer Preston Lauterbach. He says Memphis had a unique black population at the time. It was a powerful voting block of 10,000 people led by a man named Bob Church. And let’s just say Church was also a rarity in the South.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: He was the son of the South’s first black millionaire was his claim to fame. And it was also the foundation of his legacy and his machine.

PETER: Bob Church used his personal wealth to build a black-run political machine in Memphis. He christened it the Lincoln League.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: Political power was his answer to racism. There was a lynching that took place in the Memphis area in 1917, right around the time that this league, the Lincoln League, was formed. He believed that the ballot was stronger than the bullet in trying to counter the violence that was taking place against his people.

PETER: Despite the imposition of poll taxes and a general threat of violence, Tennessee didn’t explicitly prohibit African Americans from voting. And so Church saw an opening. He made black Republicans the swing vote in the local Democratic primary, at a time when the South was solidly Democratic and the GOP was still the party of Lincoln.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: You’ve got two white Democrats. They’re generally splitting or close to splitting the regular white Democrat vote. You’ve got 10,000 African American votes on the side. Whichever of those two white Democrats can offer the most attractive package in return for those African American votes got them. Talk about strange bedfellows.

PETER: In smoke-filled rooms, Church would play white segregationist Democrats off against each other. Church wasn’t a cigar-chomping arm twister like other political bosses, dashing and always impeccably dressed. He was soft-spoken and dignified. He was careful never to overreach in his request for black policeman and paved roads in Memphis.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: Because he was a shrewd leader and because he gained the respect and trust of the white Democrat leaders locally, he was able to build new schools, new health care facilities, upgraded neighborhoods. There were a lot of jobs that he had control over. So he helped to stabilize what there was of an African American middle class at that time.

PETER: His Lincoln League was a detail-oriented operation. Church and his lieutenants spent years registering blacks in Memphis. They also raised money to pay poll taxes, taught Memphis residents how to read a ballot, and where to go on election day.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: They organized the city block by block, house by house. They divided it up and took their organization door to door.

PETER: Fast forward to the presidential election of 1920. Republicans were trying to win back the White House. So Church decided to take his efforts beyond the city of Memphis. He mobilized the African American vote across the entire state of Tennessee.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: He expanded his Lincoln League statewide. And the number that I found was that he eventually registered 170,000 African American voters in the state and won Tennessee for the Republican Party. I know that sounds funny today. But I mean, that would be like Alabama going for the Democrats in 2016. I mean, there was absolutely no precedent for a former Confederate state to go for the party of Lincoln.

PETER: It was a victory built on Church’s intimate knowledge of local politics throughout the state. Now Lauterbach says Church, who never took bribes or gifts, cared about more than being a machine boss. This self-funded Republican operative focused his efforts on the local level, using the ballot box to get better roads, parks, and schools for blacks in Memphis.

BRIAN: This election year, the 2016 presidential race has dominated the headlines. But on the fall ballot, you’ll probably vote for a slate of local officials too. Do you know who they are? Do you have any idea how they’re going to affect your life?

Today on the show, we’re applying those questions to the past by exploring local power in American history. We’ll look at how both elected and unelected officials have changed communities on the local and sometimes even national level. We’ll hear about Chicago’s machine politics under Richard J. Daley, and how Aspen, Colorado almost selected gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson as sheriff. And we’ll explore why many of America’s local coroners are elected officials.

Peter, you know I often tease you about there being so few people back in the 18th century and accuse you of knowing each one of them personally.

PETER: You mean Jefferson?

BRIAN: But finally, your moment has arrived. We’re talking about local power, little [INAUDIBLE], you know, communities. Who was the big man or the big woman in your community? Lay it on me, man.

PETER: I’ll give you a simple example, a couple of simple examples. One would be a town that is dominated by a shopkeeper. In lots of villages across the countryside, somebody’s got credit and can access the goods and capital. And that person becomes a node in an emerging market.

And you see it clearly. You see economic power. You see political power in the burgeoning popular political press in the beginning of the 19th century, late 18th century, when a single editor with a single press will be channeling national policy positions and news, and also playing a heavyweight role in local politics, getting the voters out.

I mean, all the forms of local power are easy to see. And I think we’re talking about networks in every case, and being connected, and having a key position in a network is the way you exercise power.

ED: You know, I hate to admit that you might be on to something, Peter. Because the 19th century really is the story of expanding and multiplying those networks. The leading people in town, Brian, are the brokers, the people who were able to translate between outside power and local power, right?

BRIAN: They can make the railroad come to our town.

ED: Exactly. And those are the ones who were the head of the chamber of commerce, something we invent in the 19th century, or the head of the Masonic Lodge. All those men, by and large, are participating in that.

But you start seeing women taking part in this as well. And so temperance organizations or any other kind of improvement organizations, movements for the suffrage, all those give women a chance to be brokers in themselves. So it’s amazing, really, to see how this all just burgeons across the 19th century because there’s more and more networks to plug into.

PETER: Yeah. And Ed, you spoke to somebody about this, didn’t you?

ED: Yeah, historian Sarah Deutsch. She says that those networks helped women get a foothold in local politics.

SARAH DEUTSCH: You didn’t have to have the vote to be powerful. And women discovered as long as they could organize other people, as long as they really knew what they were after, that they could achieve quite a bit, even in terms of changing the nature of municipal government itself.

ED: Deutsch says that, at the end of the 19th century, women became politically active by forming their own civic groups.

SARAH DEUTSCH: In Boston alone, there were 1,000 women’s reform organizations in the period around 1890, 1900. The women who could join these organizations by and large had to have some kind of resources. They had to not be spending every waking hour making enough money so that they didn’t starve. So the women in these organizations tended to be doctors, writers, college professors, or matrons of substance– women who had some money behind them.

ED: When I sat down with Deutsch, she told me that these activists used their networks to make city streets safer for women and to help them find work.

SARAH DEUTSCH: And then there were the women’s settlement house organizers. And these were women who, often with the benefit of college education, looked around and saw the city as a dirty and unhealthy place. And they decided one of the problems was that neighborhoods weren’t organized. They remembered growing up where their mothers visited their neighbors.

And so when they created settlement houses, they meant literally that they were going to settle among the working class and poor populations. They would buy a house. They would plop themselves down in it. They would invite other people to join them to study the neighborhood.

And they would begin to go visiting. They would visit their neighbors and see what the issues they faced were, what the problems they faced were. They saw garbage in the street. They saw really sick kids. They saw people out of work. They saw the streets as a threatening place. And they wanted to make things better. And they knew they had to do it together. They had to make coalitions and organizations.

ED: So what sorts of things were happening in turn-of-the-century Boston in which women were taking the lead?

SARAH DEUTSCH: In these many organizations, they were running employment services, they were running kindergartens, they were running lunch programs. And they were creating pilot programs with the hope that the city would ultimately take them over and run them on a citywide basis.

ED: So some of this, I imagine, is setting a good example. Is some of it kind of shaming the city into action?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Well, I think it was less shaming the city into action than showing the city that there was a dramatic need and that it could be met. I think the view had been that these problems were always going to be there and there wasn’t much you could do about it.

ED: So what were they up against?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Well, it’s not so dissimilar from the kinds of debates people get into today about what is the line between what’s a government service and what’s a handout. What should government be responsible for? What do we want to pay taxes for? How do we minimize how we pay taxes?

And politics was the last bastion, at least in Boston, an all-male sphere. They saw politics as what happened on election day, and who held office, and what happened in party back rooms.

For women, politics needed to do something else. They viewed themselves as more compassionate, making sure people didn’t starve, making sure people who wanted to work could work.

ED: Ah, now that’s really something men wouldn’t have understood, right? For them, politics and government are the same thing.

SARAH DEUTSCH: That’s right. And so women were opting for a different, more managerial strategy of government. And they lobbied city hall. And they trained people how to lobby. They would have interns from Wellesley and other local schools and teach them how to lobby. And they would send them down to city hall and they would lobby until the government agreed to take something over.

And it was a very different notion of what urban government should be. Nobody had thought that the city should be responsible for health, education, and welfare. Maybe education. But to these women, this was essential. If you were going to have a prosperous future where you didn’t have people going on strike all the time, you didn’t have labor unrest, you didn’t have crime, and where you had decent health.

ED: So that’s really impressive. Is Boston unusual?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Boston is not at all unusual in this regard. Almost every city of any size at all had women making these same kinds of efforts.

ED: So let me ask you kind of a loaded question. So did these women make local politics better than it would’ve been otherwise?

SARAH DEUTSCH: They made local politics different, and they made women’s politics different than they would have been otherwise. They created a new model of what a city should be. And they did it across the country. And they provide employment services for women. And they think there should be kindergartens that are free. And they think there should be school lunches.

And so this was a new thing. Who thought a government should do that? Well, these women thought government should do that. And they were able to make these changes. And  to me, yes, those are positive changes in the nature of what government should be, definitely. They were the authors of a particular kind of welfare state that hadn’t existed before.

ED: When I walked into the studio today, we had not yet had a female president of the United States. And I’m assuming it hasn’t happened while we’re in here today. So it seems striking that there is so much power of women on the local level. but that it’s taken a very long time for it to seem to move higher up the echelon. Is there a reason that it flourished at the local level?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Well, in some ways, the way these particular women were organized, it could flourish more easily, ironically, when they didn’t have the vote. They could assume that they had similar interests. Some women could assume that they could speak for other women.

And these middle class and elite women who were so used to speaking on behalf of everyone else found that other women, they had their own ideas of what they wanted. And they were impatient with people trying to speak for them. They were blindsided by the ways in which they were not needed to be the spokeswomen for these other women any longer.

And at the same time, on a national level, I think they were blindsided by the hostility of men in power. So there was just this tremendous level of defense on the national level and even the state level that didn’t exist on the municipal level. Women hadn’t built the same level of organizations, the same level of trust and respect on that level. And there was much more at stake in terms of the men’s political power.

BRIAN: Sarah Deutsch is a historian at Duke University. She’s the author of Women in the City– Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. We also heard from Preston Lauterbach. He’s the author of Beale Street Dynasty–  Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis.

PETER: Hey, guys. We got a call from the Big Apple, New York City. It’s Tony. Tony, welcome to the show.

TONY: Well, thank you. I’m honored to be here.

PETER: OK, well, we’re honored to take your questions. Lay it on us.

TONY: Well, the thing that has been on my mind lately, being a history teacher of high school students, is graft in local government. In New York City here, we mention Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. And many of our students sometimes might think, ah, that’s something from the past.

But in New York City, we’ve had quite a few well-known politicians who have been indicted on crimes of graft. And it leads me to ask the question that I know some students have on their mind. Is graft necessary? Is it something that is important in order for the wheels of government to move?

PETER: Great question. Does it lubricate the wheels of government? hosts?

BRIAN: Well, Tony. I first of all confess that I used to work in New York City for City Council President Carrol Bellamy, a position so crucial that it’s been eliminated, that position.

ED: But that helps to explain why you have those nice shoes, Brian.

BRIAN: Exactly. And when I worked in New York City, I worked in the Tweed Courthouse. And it was a very elegant building. It cost a lot of money. And I don’t remember exactly how many millions of dollars the cost overruns were, but a lot of those costs overruns were a graft.

So clearly your students need to know that very often, graft and corruption does nothing for the public. However, there is a school of thought among historians that graft gets things done. When I think about the late 19th century and cities like New York City putting in sewers, putting in subways, building roads, trying to get things done really, really quickly.

The ability to grease the wheels by paying somebody to get things done, to make things happen quickly, even if someone comes home with a little extra money than they should in their pocket helps explain perhaps how our cities were able to build these incredible projects, subways, sewers, something like Central Park in New York City.

So I want to be very clear, I’m not advocating for corruption. But if you’d like to talk to me after the show and send me a couple hundred bucks, you can be on every week, Tony.

ED: I have a question for you. Is there any difference between graft and corruption?

TONY: You know, that’s something that my students have posed to me.

ED: All right, so what do you tell them? I’m curious.

TONY: I always try to cover my response by restricting it to the period we’re talking about. And it’s funny that you mentioned, you know, the late 19th century, very early 20th century. And the immigrant population that’s growing and the rise of tenements, and how the very, very poor conditions often relegated these immigrants, many of whom could not perhaps speak English, to try whatever they can to convince someone who does have some kind of authority to bring some attention to their needs. So I try to skirt around the issue without being a preacher to them.

ED: I don’t think you skirted that there, Tony. I think you actually answered my question, which is, why would it be necessary to have graft or corruption to build subways and parks? We assume other cities did it without it. But I think Tony pointed to the right answer which is that, at this time, constituents outside of power had to find ways to get in power. What do you guys think? Is that historically specific because of configuration of immigration?

PETER: Yeah. I think that’s one dimension of it, Ed. Another is the tendency of the machinery of government to lock down. The default situation for government is to do nothing because countervailing forces are always getting in the way.

ED: So I noticed that this seems to be at the municipal level, Brian. And our show’s about local power. Was corruption and graft mainly a local issue or did we see it on a larger scale?

BRIAN: Well, it wasn’t exclusively local, but it was mainly local. Number one, that’s where most services were and still are provided. But number two, that’s where you have a thick web and overlapping of family ties and ethnic ties, even racial ties.

These networks extended out literally from families, and at some point connected with the political parties. They were thickest and most prominent at the local level. The parties were, in many ways– sorry, Tony– they were the conduit for this graft and corruption. In many ways, it’s what made them run or at least helped them run.

TONY: Right.

BRIAN: So what grade did we get on our answer, Tony? You’re a high school teacher.

TONY: I would definitely give it an A.

PETER: Now that’s before grade inflation, right, Tony?

TONY: Well, absolutely. Right, we don’t inflate grades at all.

ED: I’d like to just point out, I agreed with your answer most enthusiastically, so I do think that’s worth extra credit.

PETER: Hey, Tony. Thanks very much for joining us today with that great question.

BRIAN: Hey, thank you, Tony.

TONY: But thank you once again to all of you.

BRIAN: There’s one 20th century machine politician who towers above all the others, Richard J. Daley. Daley was mayor of Chicago from 1955 until 1976. He was also boss of the city’s Democratic political machine during those years.

ADAM COHEN: He wasn’t necessarily the smartest guy in the city in terms of book knowledge. He wasn’t the most articulate. But he understood the way the levers of power worked.

BRIAN: That’s journalist Adam Cohen, co-author of a biography of Daley. He says, when it comes to local power, Daley was in a class by himself.

ADAM COHEN: There’s been no political machine of the size and influence of the Chicago machine anywhere else in the country. And Daley was head of it when it was at its greatest power in terms of patronage employment, ability to turn out the vote for candidates for local and national office.

BRIAN: Now we just spoke with a listener about how machine politics shaped 19th century New York. The same was certainly true for 20th century Chicago.

The Daley machine brought physical changes to Chicago, including an expanded O’Hare International Airport and elevated expressways that crisscrossed the city. But Cohen says Daley had an essentially conservative vision for how his city should run. He had no interest in modernizing Chicago’s politics.

ADAM COHEN: He started at the very bottom of the machine as a foot soldier in Bridgeport.

BRIAN: I see. So he really knew it inside out.

ADAM COHEN: That’s right. The machine was hierarchical. There was the boss at the very top. There were precinct captains and aldermen and other people below, down to the real foot soldier who knocked on his neighbor’s doors. The aldermen who really delivered for the machine got more patronage jobs. The aldermen who didn’t deliver for the machine got fewer or none.

If you were just a resident of a local neighborhood, you wanted to know your local guy in the machine. And somewhere up, up, up the chain, going all the way up to the boss, would be the benefits that would eventually be decided on then come back down to you.

BRIAN:Cohen says Daley’s impact on the city is especially visible in housing. The city was split between white neighborhoods on the north and west sides and black neighborhoods on the south side. Daley was determined to keep it that way, especially since his own Chicago neighborhood, Bridgeport, sat right on the dividing line.

ADAM COHEN: Daley was a big proponent of segregation, a big supporter of segregation. And the pragmatic reason was that he wanted to keep the city operating the way it was because it was what put him in power. So he wanted the neighborhoods to remain intact, because the neighborhoods the way they were were turning out a big vote for the machine.

If there were integration, who knows what would happen? Maybe a lot of whites would flee the city, maybe you’d end up with a black mayor. So he wanted the status quo.

And Daley very shrewdly used urban renewal– sometimes in Chicago, they called it Negro removal– to take black areas that were near white areas or near the downtown and pave them, and then put some kind of highway or some big new building there. So he was actually building segregation into the very concrete of the city.

An example of that is the Dan Ryan Expressway, which was a dividing line between the State Street Corridor, the largest concentration of public housing in the country, on one side, and then the Bungalow Belt on the other side, which was the white ethnic neighborhoods that Daley himself came from. The Dan Ryan really followed that line.

BRIAN: Well, why did blacks go along with that? Why did they participate in the larger machine if one of its purposes was to maintain that segregation?

ADAM COHEN: It was important for the machine to continually co-opt everyone who had votes in order to stay in power. So they needed to have a strategy for the black population. And that strategy was the black sub-machine, which was part of the machine, but a lesser part.

Blacks also wanted patronage jobs. They wanted to be able to feed their families. They wanted help if they couldn’t pay their electric bill. There were a lot of things that they wanted that the machine, that the ward healer in their neighborhood provided. And in exchange, they provided their votes.

And they didn’t quite get as much patronage. They didn’t have as much influence in city hall. But they got some patronage and they had some influence.

There was a congressman on the south side named Bill Dawson who was put there by the machine and kept in office by the machine. And he presided over a black sub-machine that reliably turned out huge votes for the machine and for Mayor Daley when he personally ran, and got back things in return.

So it’s ironic because people do think of Daley as being someone who was not well-inclined towards blacks, and certainly not in favor of civil rights. But he was very strategic with the black sub-machine in giving the community enough to turn out a strong vote.

BRIAN: How did Daley’s actions differ from those of any other big city mayor when it came to racial segregation? And what are the longer-term consequences of the power of the Daley machine?

ADAM COHEN: Yeah, I mean, you could contrast it with New York City where, for part of the time that Daley was in office, there was Mayor Lindsay, who was elected on a much more liberal platform and much more supportive of integration.

Daley really represented the old order till the very end. He believed that the neighborhoods should remain ethnic enclaves. And he was not interested in fair housing. And as I say, he was building these barriers everywhere to keep the black neighborhoods where they were.

And there were two ramifications of this. One is that it did keep the population more stable. We didn’t see the white flight in Chicago that we saw in places like Detroit, where Chicago really retained its white middle class.

But the cost of that was that Chicago also became the most segregated major city in America. So these walls were very real, and it’s something that one can see sometimes just walking around Chicago. It has just less of a mix in a lot of places than there are in other big cities.

BRIAN: Daley is seen as a master of wielding political power. What’s the biggest mistake he made?

ADAM COHEN: I mean, I think the biggest mistake he had, I would say, was really a moral one. That at his core, Daley really was a tribal guy. He was a man from Bridgeport who believed in Bridgeport and believed in his neighborhood. And he was really never able to empathize with the other. And the other in this case were, in many cases, African Americans who lived just a few blocks away from where he was born.

BRIAN: That’s fascinating, Adam. So you’re saying that, in a way, he was too local. He surely was a local power, but he was a man almost of his particular neighborhood rather than the entire city, not to mention metropolitan area.

ADAM COHEN: I think that’s exactly right. He really was always a man of Bridgeport. You know, to be a truly great man, the sort of person we would like to be mayor, he would really have an understanding of all the people of Chicago and try to help all of them.

So if we see him as a political creature, he did pretty well. But as a leader of a city to be so indifferent to the needs and legitimate wishes of about half of the city, that’s a huge moral failing. And that is part of his legacy.

BRIAN: Adam, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory.

ADAM COHEN: Oh, sure. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

BRIAN: Adam Cohen is a journalist and co-author of American Pharoah– Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.

PETER: Richard J. Daley died in 1976 during his sixth term in office. By then, black Chicagoans had begun moving from the segregated south side to white neighborhoods on the city’s west side. The Supreme Court had also struck down restrictive covenants that barred blacks from living in certain neighborhoods.

As they settled in new neighborhoods, blacks encountered plenty of racial hostility followed by a slow, rolling wave of white flight and resegregation. Reporter Steven Jackson has the story of one suburban community just west of Chicago that welcomed African Americans.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: Moving to Oak Park for me was like Dorothy waking up in the land of Oz. Suddenly she wakes up and everything’s in color.

STEVEN JACKSON: This is Crystal Shannon-Morla. She was just seven years old when her family came to Oak Park. It was 1968, and they had just moved out of a low-income, hyper-segregated African American neighborhood on Chicago’s west side.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: Everything looked different. The houses were bigger, the people looked different. This was the first time we ever saw white people in real life.

STEVEN JACKSON: On the first day, she and her sisters were playing in the backyard when they saw the neighbor kids out in their yard.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: There was a moment where all the kids, me and my sibs and the kids next door just sort of came up to the fence and stared at each other. And it was like we were just quiet, staring at each other. It seemed like forever.

And then my sister says, that boy, he has blue eyes. She said, can you see out of those eyes? And they were just quiet. Their mouths dropped. I imagine what they were thinking also as they were looking at our skin. Look at that skin, they’re like chocolate or whatever. And then we just went back to playing.

STEVEN JACKSON: Shannon-Morla and her family were one of the first African American families to move to Oak Park around this time. She didn’t know it, but they were pioneers– or maybe guinea pigs– in an ambitious social experiment.

It was spearheaded by a housing activist named Roberta Raymond. She didn’t like what she saw happening in Chicago. Neighborhoods resegregating from white to black with disinvestment and blight close behind.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: In many people’s minds, integration was that brief period of time between when the first black family moved in and the last white family moved out. And Oak Park had to really look and say, what can we do to make this different?

STEVEN JACKSON: Raymond founded a nonprofit called the Oak Park Housing Center and started working with local government and community groups and law enforcement to develop an integration strategy.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: It was based on the idea that you couldn’t just let the housing market do whatever was going to happen, that you had to intervene.

STEVEN JACKSON: So the village passed a fair housing ordinance. And unlike other towns, they trained realtors and landlords to follow it. If someone felt that they had been discriminated against, there was a village staffer to field that complaint.

Raymond’s Housing Center also did what you might call reverse steering, encouraging newcomers to spread throughout the village instead of clustering by race. And they bought ad space in national magazines, promoting Oak Park as a safe, racially integrated community. This was a new idea, using diversity as a marketing tool.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: You have to send this message that racial change in a community can be a very enriching experience. It can make a better community. That is a hard lesson for a lot of people to learn.

STEVEN JACKSON: For some people, racial change felt like an invasion. They didn’t want African Americans in their town. And Raymond was telling them they were wrong. She got a lot of threatening midnight phone calls.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, these would be people who call and say– I can remember one call. It was like, you know, nigger-lover, you better get out of town before we take care of you. You know, very threatening phone calls. And I had a file at the Housing Center of hate mail. And it was vicious.

STEVEN JACKSON: But most people weren’t vicious. Most were just uncomfortable with change. There were probably lots of dinner table conversations like this one from a 1974 documentary about Oak Park.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I think another interesting question is, when would we or any of us– at what percentage would we move? When a percentage of blacks moved in, when would we consider leaving? Not out of fear, just because it’s uncomfortable to be in the minority. And I think myself, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood between 60% and 80%.

MALE SPEAKER: I wouldn’t disagree with that, but the weekly rate of change is a big factor too. If it had become only a 40% but was changing 15% or 20% per year, I might be inclined to leave sooner if I were inclined to leave at all.

STEVEN JACKSON: As it turned out, a lot of white people were inclined to leave. In the 1970s, about 10,000 whites left, in a village of 60,000. But over time, Oak Park’s integration strategy worked. Amanda Seligman is a historian who has studied racial change on Chicago’s west side. And she says Oak Park enjoyed certain advantages that made integration easier.

AMANDA SELIGMAN: One is that they were their own municipality. So they could do things that the city of Chicago as a whole couldn’t do.

STEVEN JACKSON: Like enforcing the fair housing rules and shaping the local housing market. The village was also pretty liberal, so Raymond’s strategy had a lot of local support.

AMANDA SELIGMAN: And ultimately, also, it was wealthier. And so those African Americans who were going to be able to buy into Oak Park were just a much smaller proportion of the population. So the tolerance for a few African Americans of wealth was greater than it might have been for a larger population of poorer black people.

STEVEN JACKSON: Today, the population is about 64% white, 22% black, and 7% Latino. Demographically, that’s similar to the metropolitan area, although Latinos are underrepresented. And while other towns have racial and ethnic enclaves, Oak Park is integrated, almost block by block.

In the nearby suburbs, it’s a different story. Maywood is mostly African American, Cicero is mostly Latino. Elmwood Park, mostly white. Some of these towns have gotten more segregated in the last 20 years. And Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in the country. Here’s Roberta Raymond again.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: Segregation is so inbred in American life that the opportunity that Oak Park affords a family, a child growing up, is invaluable. My grandson is 10 years old, and he doesn’t think about the fact that he has kids of all races in his school. That is not something he thinks about. And I think, if children throughout the country grew up that way, we wouldn’t have to have some of the things that go on in this society.

STEVEN JACKSON: Raymond thinks big social problems like mass incarceration and generational poverty wouldn’t be so big if more communities were integrated. Again, Crystal Shannon-Morla.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: It made every difference in my life. Literally, my life will be different now.

STEVEN JACKSON: Growing up in Oak Park, she had white and black friends. She went to a good school where she had access to extracurriculars that just didn’t exist in her old Chicago neighborhood. And she grew up being comfortable around people of different races. She’s grateful for that.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: I’m always aware of that. I’m always aware of that. So it makes me want to contribute and get back.

STEVEN JACKSON: Today, she’s a psychologist and a mentor at an after-school program in Oak Park, trying to help academically struggling students catch up. Because even though Oak Park is diverse, it’s grappling with a racial achievement gap.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: These are big problems, and so we have to continue to come together as a community and work on these things and not give up. There’s more work to be done.

STEVEN JACKSON: Now she just has to do what Raymond and others did 50 years ago, organize from the ground up, look for new strategies, and hopefully lead the way for the rest of the country.

PETER: Steven Jackson is a freelance reporter and producer. If you want to hear more about Oak Park, head to our website. We’ll link to a story Steven reported with the radio show and podcast Curious City at WBEZ in Chicago. We partnered with them on this story. If you like BackStory, you should check them out. They often cover the history of Chicago while answering curious questions about the Windy City. Head to backstoryradio.org to find out more.

ED: We’re going to turn now to a local job that you might not think matters much, the coroner.

PETER: Coroners investigate violent, suspicious, or sudden deaths. And their basic job description hasn’t changed. But their power and how they get the job varies widely. Some coroners are appointed, some are elected, and some have been replaced by forensic experts.

BRIAN: Kelly Jones, one of our producers, decided to look into the history of coroners. And she’s here to tell us what she found. Hey, Kelly, welcome to the studio.

KELLY JONES: Thanks, Brian. So Peter’s right. The basic job of the coroner is to investigate suspicious deaths and sign death certificates that officially record how a person died. And the profession has been around for a long time.

BRIAN: I’ll bet.

KELLY JONES: Way before the New World was even a twinkle in the English crown’s eyes. However, I’ve done some really deep research. And I have found some archive tape of one of the first coroners that ever walked the earth. And I’d love to play it for you guys.

ED: Yeah.

BRIAN: Sure.

PETER: Oh, please. Yeah.

BRIAN: Bring it on.

CORONER: Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

MALE SPEAKER 2: Here’s one.

DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!

CORONER: Well, he says he’s not dead.

MALE SPEAKER 2: Yes, he is.

DEAD PERSON: I’m not!

CORONER: He isn’t?

MALE SPEAKER 2: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.

DEAD PERSON: I’m getting better!

MALE SPEAKER 2: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead–

KELLY JONES: As you know, that’s a famous Monty Python sketch.

BRIAN: And a good history lesson too.

KELLY JONES: Well, so not a lot of that rings true, except that the coroner was established in England. And usually he was a knight. So he was not a doctor from the very beginning. And that’s important because when the coroner position comes over to the New World, the coroner is also not a doctor.

And the main job of the coroner in the early period was to hold inquests. Which means that the coroner, when he’s investigating deaths, he becomes the judge, he calls witnesses, and he selects a jury to help him figure out what happened.

ED: Wow, there’s a lot of power.

PETER: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But you know what I’m impressed with, Kelly, is it sounds like this coroner has despotic power, the power of a king almost.

KELLY JONES: He does. And actually, coroner comes from crowner.

PETER: Oh, yeah.

KELLY JONES: The coroner in England was responsible for telling the king how someone had died and for giving the king his due if that person owed taxes or died by a crime where something could be given to the king to make up for losing that subject.

PETER: Well, I think that’s really important, Kelly, because after all, American colonists are subjects of the king. And this is the way the king is part of a local community, in the person of a coroner.

BRIAN: Peter, what better reminder than every time somebody dies, you’re reminded that they’re still a subject of the king.

ED: Yeah, and I’m so glad that we live in a democracy where we don’t need coroners anymore then.

PETER: It didn’t happen that way.

ED: I’m just guessing in the 19th century, that went away as the march of democracy proceeded, right?

KELLY JONES: Well, I’ll tell you when things really start to pick up and change. And it’s when we lose the intimacy of a small community or a small town and cities start booming. So before, coroners could call on local community knowledge. They would bring witnesses. Witnesses would generally know everybody. So would the people on the jury, and so would the coroner.

But as people began to move around more, and as the population began to grow, you had strangers. You had more unknowns. You had immigrants coming in. You had relationships that you couldn’t account for. But the job of the coroner also began to shift because it became less of a job you would have for a lifetime and more like a stepping stone on the way to more and more political power.

PETER: Yeah, people don’t want to end their career as a coroner.

KELLY JONES: Mm-mm. It’s the death of your career.

PETER: Right.

KELLY JONES: My favorite example is from the 1870s. There’s a coroner who gets elected in New York City. His name is Richard Croker.

PETER: No.

KELLY JONES: I kid you not. He got elected twice. And then he became the boss of Tammany Hall.

BRIAN: No, I recognize the name now.

KELLY JONES: Yeah, he’s an example of someone that used that coroner position to move around and become elected.

ED: OK. I’m still looking for progress here. So if the 19th century didn’t get rid it, maybe the 20th century did.

BRIAN: For sure. These folks were replaced by teams of scientists, right?

ED: I’ve seen the TV shows!

KELLY JONES: Well–

BRIAN: Exactly. They were all over TV, Kelly.

KELLY JONES: So yes. In the early 20th century, we get the rise of forensic science. And yet the coroner in many, many places is still a very political position. If we have about 3,000 counties in the US right now, somewhere around half have an elected coroner.

PETER: Whoa, still? Wow.

BRIAN: Come on, we still elect them?

KELLY JONES: In about 1,500 of those counties, the only requirement for running for coroner is that you’re over 18 and have never been convicted of a felony.

PETER: Nice.

KELLY JONES: So there was someone in 2012, a Republican candidate for coroner in a small county in Georgia who fit that bill. And I’d love to read you his platform from his Facebook page. “Here is what I want. Obama: gone. Borders: closed. Language: English. Culture: US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

PETER: Yeah, and how does that describe his job as a coroner?

KELLY JONES: I don’t know, but he won. He was elected.

ED: I would guess that the coroners were often a part of the dominant party in the county, right? Because who has invested the energy to really discover the qualifications of a coroner. You just come in and vote for all of the people who are the party you believe in, right?

PETER: Consider it a survival of that old idea of patronage of a plum job that a party-faithful can claim.

BRIAN: But Kelly.

KELLY JONES: Mhm?

BRIAN: Are these folks really as powerful as they were back in Peter’s day or really as politically mobile as this guy Croker was in New York City? Is that guy in Georgia really heading anywhere?

KELLY JONES: I think the coroner position is still thought of as a stepping stone for other political careers. So you become coroner to maybe become sheriff, to maybe become mayor someday. It’s a testing ground for how good you are at getting elected.

BRIAN: Right.

KELLY JONES: And I don’t know. I think the coroner has a great deal of power. It might not be machine-style power, but the stakes of getting something wrong or getting a death wrong are pretty high. If somebody gets murdered and you miss that as coroner, there’s a murderer out there somewhere. If you fail to index that somebody died of a specific disease, maybe you can’t tell that person’s family that the disease runs in their family.

BRIAN: What about the money side of it and the taxes side of it that you started out with?

KELLY JONES: You know, if you’re an insurance company, the coroner has a lot of power.

BRIAN: Good point.

When they determine how somebody dies, they’re still moving money around. They still determine who gets benefits and who doesn’t. So if money equals power, they’ve still got a little bit of control.

ED: Kind of like death and taxes, some things never change.

PETER: That’s right.

BRIAN: We’re going to turn to the town of Aspen, Colorado in the late 1960s. It was a chic ski town on the rise. Local business owners sought to attract wealthy tourists to their iconic slopes. At the same time, young hippies inspired by tales of Shangri-La in the Rockies poured into town.

Many locals few these long-haired newcomers as riffraff. The county sheriff began arresting the hippies for minor crimes like loitering and hitchhiking. Tensions between Aspen’s entrenched establishment and its freaks culminated in a memorable election starring a well-known gonzo journalist. BackStory producer Nina Earnest takes it from here.

NINA EARNEST: Hunter S. Thompson had been living in Aspen for a few years when he–

DJ WATKINS: –decided to run for Sheriff to protect the hippies.

NINA EARNEST: This is DJ Watkins, who wrote a book about Thompson’s 1970 campaign. He says that the writer ran for sheriff of Pitkin County under the banner of Freak Power.

BOB BRAUDIS: We long-hairs were labeled freaks by the establishment. And Hunter decided that “freak” was very descriptive, let’s use it.

NINA EARNEST: And this is Bob Braudis. He moved to Aspen to be a ski-bum and soon found himself drawn to Thompson’s campaign.

BOB BRAUDIS: I pretty much agreed with Hunter’s platform, which was largely anti-greed and anti-chicken [BLEEP] misdemeanor and felony laws.

NINA EARNEST: What Braudis means is that Thompson wanted to decriminalize drugs, limit development, and protect the environment. And Watkins says that Thompson also wanted to make the sheriff more than just a sheriff.

DJ WATKINS: He wanted to embrace the idea of the ombudsman. There could be a member of government that his whole job was taking complaints from members of the community, sort of a watchdog of the government itself.

NINA EARNEST: It sounds straightforward on paper, but some of his suggestions were a little surreal. Take this campaign advertisement.

MALE SPEAKER 3: Hunter I represents something wholly alien to the other candidates for sheriff. Ideas, and the sympathy towards the young, generous, grass-oriented society which is making the only serious effort to face the technological nightmare we have created.

NINA EARNEST: He wanted to tear up all the roads to make the city more walkable. He wanted to shame bad drug dealers, as in people who took advantage of their customers, in public stocks, medieval-style. And he wanted to change the name Aspen to Fat City to make the town less attractive to tourists.

Thompson set out to enlist all the newly arrived hippies to vote for the Freak Power cause. Volunteers like Bob Braudis registered over 700 new voters, a huge number for a county of just 6,000. Their success alarmed the town’s more conservative residents, and Thompson’s characteristically outlandish behavior didn’t help. Here’s Thompson himself.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON: We do have a Freak Power base, and that’s undeniable. If I went out there and walked through the streets naked with a bomb in each hand and covered with various sticky substances that were known to be drugs, they would still vote for me.

NINA EARNEST: Thompson’s main opponent, who he called a dim-witted cowboy with a gun, was the incumbent Carrol Whitmire. If Thompson was some bizarro version of a Western sheriff, Whitmire was straight out of Central Casting.

BOB BRAUDIS: He had his honorary posse with white Stetsons, white kerchiefs, white shirts, white guns. And he was basically parading what I saw in Western movies in the 1950s, the good guys all wear white.

MALE SPEAKER 4: The American Sheriff’s job was carved out of the rugged West. Vote for and elect Carrol Whitmire for our Sheriff–

BOB BRAUDIS: I think he woke up one day with Hunter running against him going, what the hell just happened?

NINA EARNEST: Before long, this tiny local election became a national story. In October, Thompson wrote an article about his campaign for Rolling Stone magazine. After the Battle of Aspen hit newsstands, profiles on Thompson for Sheriff appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even the BBC made a documentary about this election.

MALE SPEAKER 5: What kind of sheriff do they want in the West these days? Could the conventional, establishment citizens of Aspen elect as their Sheriff a hippie, a freak, an acid-head, a man who openly smokes grass– marijuana?

NINA EARNEST: The battle lines were drawn. Here was a microcosm of the country’s culture wars set amidst the ski slopes of Aspen. As the election approached, some of Aspen’s residents began to worry that Thompson could actually win.

So local elites ramped up their anti-Thompson rhetoric. They tapped into an issue that dogged his entire campaign. No one could figure out if he really wanted the job, while Braudis thinks his friend was serious.

BOB BRAUDIS: There was perhaps a component of self-aggrandizement, self-promotion in Hunter’s run for sheriff, because it definitely attracted way more attention than we thought it would. One time where Hunter had embarrassed himself by one of his crazy actions, I said Hunter, why are you doing this? And he said, Bob, you know I don’t do crazy stuff unless I can write about it and get paid for it.

NINA EARNEST: And running for sheriff, he told Braudis, was the craziest thing he had ever done.

Election day arrived November 3, 1970. Reporters from across the country descended upon Aspen.

BOB BRAUDIS: We were all watching the county clerk put the numbers up with chalk on a blackboard. And I was never as optimistic as some of the other people. But some people actually thought we were gonna win.

FEMALE SPEAKER 2: We won, we won, we won!

NINA EARNEST: Actually, Carrol Whitmire won, but not by much.

MALE SPEAKER 5: The Freak campaign had failed. The sheriff won by only 400 votes, though, out of 2,500.

NINA EARNEST: That night, Thompson heard the news at a local hotel that doubled as campaign headquarters. Wearing a blonde wig and draped in an American flag, the losing candidate faced a gaggle of reporters.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON: I think I unfortunately proved what I set out to prove. And that was more of a political point in the local election. And I think the original reason was to prove it to myself, that the American Dream really is [BLEEP]

NINA EARNEST: Thompson never ran for office again, though he remained a lifelong resident of Aspen. And despite his loss, Watkin says that Freak Power lived on in this corner of the Rockies.

DJ WATKINS: That voting block that he helped get involved and get engaged had a real lasting impact on every subsequent election.

NINA EARNEST: Look no further than the sheriff’s office. Here’s how it happened. Carrol Whitmire left office amidst allegations of mismanagement. And the guy that was elected after him had been Thompson’s choice for his undersheriff. And the next sheriff of Pitkin County, Thompson’s friend Bob Braudis.

BOB BRAUDIS: I’ve been retired for five years after 24 years as sheriff.

NINA EARNEST: Braudis says that he and his fellow sheriffs worked hard to make Hunter’s platform a reality, especially his idea that the sheriff should be more of a problem solver than a strict law enforcer. On the other hand, Aspen never became Fat City, and is in fact glitzier than ever. But still, Watkins claims that Aspen’s progressivism is worth emulating.

DJ WATKINS: You know, these things that Hunter was writing about and that Aspen went through are actually a model for what other places around the country are going through.

NINA EARNEST: But some people are going to hear this and say, OK, this works for Aspen. But Aspen is a small town, it’s a very wealthy town. It’s not very diverse. So what could this really tell us about how law enforcement can change?

DJ WATKINS: Well, in Aspen, 1970 is not so different than some other places now. But yeah, I mean, you’re definitely right. I mean, we live in sort of a bubble here.

BOB BRAUDIS: But as Tip O’Neill said, all politics are local. And Hunter Thompson said politics is the art of controlling your own environment. So you start small. If it spreads beyond your city limits, so be it. But if you’ve controlled your own environment, you’ve won.

BRIAN: That story was told by BackStory producer Nina Earnest. We also heard from DJ Watkins and Bob Braudis. Watkins is the author of Freak Power– Hunter S. Thompson’s Campaign for Sheriff. Braudis served as Pitkin County Sheriff for 24 years.

PETER: That’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Tell us what you thought of the show. While you’re there, pull the levers of power and help shape our upcoming episodes. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our engineer and Diana Williams is our digital editor. We have help from Briana Azar. And Melissa Gismondi assists with research. Special thanks this week to John Brooke, Marcella Fierro, Julie Johnson McGrath, and Brad [INAUDIBLE].

ED: Major support is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by The Tomato Fund– cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, humanities, and the environment– and by History Channel– history, made every day.

Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond.

FEMALE SPEAKER 3: BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

BRIAN: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. Earlier this month, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Bernie Sanders responded by thanking Emanuel for endorsing his rival. As a CNN analyst put it–

CNN ANALYST: Bernie Sanders has decided to run against Emanuel as much as Hillary.

ED: –proving once again that all politics is local. One of Emanuel’s predecessors, Mayor Richard J. Daley not only promoted John F. Kennedy for president in 1960, he shaped the very social geography of the Windy City.

BRIAN: He wanted the neighborhoods to remain intact because the neighborhoods were turning out a big vote for the machine. If there were integration, who knows what would happen?

ED: Today on BackStory, how local power brokers have shaped American history, including coroners in the colonial era and women in 19th century Boston.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  They saw garbage in the street, really sick kids, and they wanted to make things better.

ED: A history of local power, today on BackStory.

MALE SPEAKER:  Major funding for BackStory is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, here with Brian Balogh–

BRIAN: Hey, Ed.

ED: –and Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Ed. We’re going to start today in the early 20th century with an election story. It takes place in Memphis, Tennessee’s segregated black neighborhoods. Now you can imagine what voting meant for African Americans back then.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: We’re talking about the South in 1920, brutal oppression, racism, lynching, all of these horrible things were happening.

PETER: This is writer Preston Lauterbach. He says Memphis had a unique black population at the time. It was a powerful voting block of 10,000 people led by a man named Bob Church. And let’s just say Church was also a rarity in the South.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: He was the son of the South’s first black millionaire was his claim to fame. And it was also the foundation of his legacy and his machine.

PETER: Bob Church used his personal wealth to build a black-run political machine in Memphis. He christened it the Lincoln League.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: Political power was his answer to racism. There was a lynching that took place in the Memphis area in 1917, right around the time that this league, the Lincoln League, was formed. He believed that the ballot was stronger than the bullet in trying to counter the violence that was taking place against his people.

PETER: Despite the imposition of poll taxes and a general threat of violence, Tennessee didn’t explicitly prohibit African Americans from voting. And so Church saw an opening. He made black Republicans the swing vote in the local Democratic primary, at a time when the South was solidly Democratic and the GOP was still the party of Lincoln.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: You’ve got two white Democrats. They’re generally splitting or close to splitting the regular white Democrat vote. You’ve got 10,000 African American votes on the side. Whichever of those two white Democrats can offer the most attractive package in return for those African American votes got them. Talk about strange bedfellows.

PETER: In smoke-filled rooms, Church would play white segregationist Democrats off against each other. Church wasn’t a cigar-chomping arm twister like other political bosses, dashing and always impeccably dressed. He was soft-spoken and dignified. He was careful never to overreach in his request for black policeman and paved roads in Memphis.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: Because he was a shrewd leader and because he gained the respect and trust of the white Democrat leaders locally, he was able to build new schools, new health care facilities, upgraded neighborhoods. There were a lot of jobs that he had control over. So he helped to stabilize what there was of an African American middle class at that time.

PETER: His Lincoln League was a detail-oriented operation. Church and his lieutenants spent years registering blacks in Memphis. They also raised money to pay poll taxes, taught Memphis residents how to read a ballot, and where to go on election day.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: They organized the city block by block, house by house. They divided it up and took their organization door to door.

PETER: Fast forward to the presidential election of 1920. Republicans were trying to win back the White House. So Church decided to take his efforts beyond the city of Memphis. He mobilized the African American vote across the entire state of Tennessee.

PRESTON LAUTERBACH: He expanded his Lincoln League statewide. And the number that I found was that he eventually registered 170,000 African American voters in the state and won Tennessee for the Republican Party. I know that sounds funny today. But I mean, that would be like Alabama going for the Democrats in 2016. I mean, there was absolutely no precedent for a former Confederate state to go for the party of Lincoln.

PETER: It was a victory built on Church’s intimate knowledge of local politics throughout the state. Now Lauterbach says Church, who never took bribes or gifts, cared about more than being a machine boss. This self-funded Republican operative focused his efforts on the local level, using the ballot box to get better roads, parks, and schools for blacks in Memphis.

BRIAN: This election year, the 2016 presidential race has dominated the headlines. But on the fall ballot, you’ll probably vote for a slate of local officials too. Do you know who they are? Do you have any idea how they’re going to affect your life?

Today on the show, we’re applying those questions to the past by exploring local power in American history. We’ll look at how both elected and unelected officials have changed communities on the local and sometimes even national level. We’ll hear about Chicago’s machine politics under Richard J. Daley, and how Aspen, Colorado almost selected gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson as sheriff. And we’ll explore why many of America’s local coroners are elected officials.

Peter, you know I often tease you about there being so few people back in the 18th century and accuse you of knowing each one of them personally.

PETER: You mean Jefferson?

BRIAN: But finally, your moment has arrived. We’re talking about local power, little [INAUDIBLE], you know, communities. Who was the big man or the big woman in your community? Lay it on me, man.

PETER: I’ll give you a simple example, a couple of simple examples. One would be a town that is dominated by a shopkeeper. In lots of villages across the countryside, somebody’s got credit and can access the goods and capital. And that person becomes a node in an emerging market.

And you see it clearly. You see economic power. You see political power in the burgeoning popular political press in the beginning of the 19th century, late 18th century, when a single editor with a single press will be channeling national policy positions and news, and also playing a heavyweight role in local politics, getting the voters out.

I mean, all the forms of local power are easy to see. And I think we’re talking about networks in every case, and being connected, and having a key position in a network is the way you exercise power.

ED: You know, I hate to admit that you might be on to something, Peter. Because the 19th century really is the story of expanding and multiplying those networks. The leading people in town, Brian, are the brokers, the people who were able to translate between outside power and local power, right?

BRIAN: They can make the railroad come to our town.

ED: Exactly. And those are the ones who were the head of the chamber of commerce, something we invent in the 19th century, or the head of the Masonic Lodge. All those men, by and large, are participating in that.

But you start seeing women taking part in this as well. And so temperance organizations or any other kind of improvement organizations, movements for the suffrage, all those give women a chance to be brokers in themselves. So it’s amazing, really, to see how this all just burgeons across the 19th century because there’s more and more networks to plug into.

PETER: Yeah. And Ed, you spoke to somebody about this, didn’t you?

ED: Yeah, historian Sarah Deutsch. She says that those networks helped women get a foothold in local politics.

SARAH DEUTSCH: You didn’t have to have the vote to be powerful. And women discovered as long as they could organize other people, as long as they really knew what they were after, that they could achieve quite a bit, even in terms of changing the nature of municipal government itself.

ED: Deutsch says that, at the end of the 19th century, women became politically active by forming their own civic groups.

SARAH DEUTSCH: In Boston alone, there were 1,000 women’s reform organizations in the period around 1890, 1900. The women who could join these organizations by and large had to have some kind of resources. They had to not be spending every waking hour making enough money so that they didn’t starve. So the women in these organizations tended to be doctors, writers, college professors, or matrons of substance– women who had some money behind them.

ED: When I sat down with Deutsch, she told me that these activists used their networks to make city streets safer for women and to help them find work.

SARAH DEUTSCH: And then there were the women’s settlement house organizers. And these were women who, often with the benefit of college education, looked around and saw the city as a dirty and unhealthy place. And they decided one of the problems was that neighborhoods weren’t organized. They remembered growing up where their mothers visited their neighbors.

And so when they created settlement houses, they meant literally that they were going to settle among the working class and poor populations. They would buy a house. They would plop themselves down in it. They would invite other people to join them to study the neighborhood.

And they would begin to go visiting. They would visit their neighbors and see what the issues they faced were, what the problems they faced were. They saw garbage in the street. They saw really sick kids. They saw people out of work. They saw the streets as a threatening place. And they wanted to make things better. And they knew they had to do it together. They had to make coalitions and organizations.

ED: So what sorts of things were happening in turn-of-the-century Boston in which women were taking the lead?

SARAH DEUTSCH: In these many organizations, they were running employment services, they were running kindergartens, they were running lunch programs. And they were creating pilot programs with the hope that the city would ultimately take them over and run them on a citywide basis.

ED: So some of this, I imagine, is setting a good example. Is some of it kind of shaming the city into action?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Well, I think it was less shaming the city into action than showing the city that there was a dramatic need and that it could be met. I think the view had been that these problems were always going to be there and there wasn’t much you could do about it.

ED: So what were they up against?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Well, it’s not so dissimilar from the kinds of debates people get into today about what is the line between what’s a government service and what’s a handout. What should government be responsible for? What do we want to pay taxes for? How do we minimize how we pay taxes?

And politics was the last bastion, at least in Boston, an all-male sphere. They saw politics as what happened on election day, and who held office, and what happened in party back rooms.

For women, politics needed to do something else. They viewed themselves as more compassionate, making sure people didn’t starve, making sure people who wanted to work could work.

ED: Ah, now that’s really something men wouldn’t have understood, right? For them, politics and government are the same thing.

SARAH DEUTSCH: That’s right. And so women were opting for a different, more managerial strategy of government. And they lobbied city hall. And they trained people how to lobby. They would have interns from Wellesley and other local schools and teach them how to lobby. And they would send them down to city hall and they would lobby until the government agreed to take something over.

And it was a very different notion of what urban government should be. Nobody had thought that the city should be responsible for health, education, and welfare. Maybe education. But to these women, this was essential. If you were going to have a prosperous future where you didn’t have people going on strike all the time, you didn’t have labor unrest, you didn’t have crime, and where you had decent health.

ED: So that’s really impressive. Is Boston unusual?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Boston is not at all unusual in this regard. Almost every city of any size at all had women making these same kinds of efforts.

ED: So let me ask you kind of a loaded question. So did these women make local politics better than it would’ve been otherwise?

SARAH DEUTSCH: They made local politics different, and they made women’s politics different than they would have been otherwise. They created a new model of what a city should be. And they did it across the country. And they provide employment services for women. And they think there should be kindergartens that are free. And they think there should be school lunches.

And so this was a new thing. Who thought a government should do that? Well, these women thought government should do that. And they were able to make these changes. And  to me, yes, those are positive changes in the nature of what government should be, definitely. They were the authors of a particular kind of welfare state that hadn’t existed before.

ED: When I walked into the studio today, we had not yet had a female president of the United States. And I’m assuming it hasn’t happened while we’re in here today. So it seems striking that there is so much power of women on the local level. but that it’s taken a very long time for it to seem to move higher up the echelon. Is there a reason that it flourished at the local level?

SARAH DEUTSCH: Well, in some ways, the way these particular women were organized, it could flourish more easily, ironically, when they didn’t have the vote. They could assume that they had similar interests. Some women could assume that they could speak for other women.

And these middle class and elite women who were so used to speaking on behalf of everyone else found that other women, they had their own ideas of what they wanted. And they were impatient with people trying to speak for them. They were blindsided by the ways in which they were not needed to be the spokeswomen for these other women any longer.

And at the same time, on a national level, I think they were blindsided by the hostility of men in power. So there was just this tremendous level of defense on the national level and even the state level that didn’t exist on the municipal level. Women hadn’t built the same level of organizations, the same level of trust and respect on that level. And there was much more at stake in terms of the men’s political power.

BRIAN: Sarah Deutsch is a historian at Duke University. She’s the author of Women in the City– Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. We also heard from Preston Lauterbach. He’s the author of Beale Street Dynasty–  Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis.

PETER: Hey, guys. We got a call from the Big Apple, New York City. It’s Tony. Tony, welcome to the show.

TONY: Well, thank you. I’m honored to be here.

PETER: OK, well, we’re honored to take your questions. Lay it on us.

TONY: Well, the thing that has been on my mind lately, being a history teacher of high school students, is graft in local government. In New York City here, we mention Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. And many of our students sometimes might think, ah, that’s something from the past.

But in New York City, we’ve had quite a few well-known politicians who have been indicted on crimes of graft. And it leads me to ask the question that I know some students have on their mind. Is graft necessary? Is it something that is important in order for the wheels of government to move?

PETER: Great question. Does it lubricate the wheels of government? hosts?

BRIAN: Well, Tony. I first of all confess that I used to work in New York City for City Council President Carrol Bellamy, a position so crucial that it’s been eliminated, that position.

ED: But that helps to explain why you have those nice shoes, Brian.

BRIAN: Exactly. And when I worked in New York City, I worked in the Tweed Courthouse. And it was a very elegant building. It cost a lot of money. And I don’t remember exactly how many millions of dollars the cost overruns were, but a lot of those costs overruns were a graft.

So clearly your students need to know that very often, graft and corruption does nothing for the public. However, there is a school of thought among historians that graft gets things done. When I think about the late 19th century and cities like New York City putting in sewers, putting in subways, building roads, trying to get things done really, really quickly.

The ability to grease the wheels by paying somebody to get things done, to make things happen quickly, even if someone comes home with a little extra money than they should in their pocket helps explain perhaps how our cities were able to build these incredible projects, subways, sewers, something like Central Park in New York City.

So I want to be very clear, I’m not advocating for corruption. But if you’d like to talk to me after the show and send me a couple hundred bucks, you can be on every week, Tony.

ED: I have a question for you. Is there any difference between graft and corruption?

TONY: You know, that’s something that my students have posed to me.

ED: All right, so what do you tell them? I’m curious.

TONY: I always try to cover my response by restricting it to the period we’re talking about. And it’s funny that you mentioned, you know, the late 19th century, very early 20th century. And the immigrant population that’s growing and the rise of tenements, and how the very, very poor conditions often relegated these immigrants, many of whom could not perhaps speak English, to try whatever they can to convince someone who does have some kind of authority to bring some attention to their needs. So I try to skirt around the issue without being a preacher to them.

ED: I don’t think you skirted that there, Tony. I think you actually answered my question, which is, why would it be necessary to have graft or corruption to build subways and parks? We assume other cities did it without it. But I think Tony pointed to the right answer which is that, at this time, constituents outside of power had to find ways to get in power. What do you guys think? Is that historically specific because of configuration of immigration?

PETER: Yeah. I think that’s one dimension of it, Ed. Another is the tendency of the machinery of government to lock down. The default situation for government is to do nothing because countervailing forces are always getting in the way.

ED: So I noticed that this seems to be at the municipal level, Brian. And our show’s about local power. Was corruption and graft mainly a local issue or did we see it on a larger scale?

BRIAN: Well, it wasn’t exclusively local, but it was mainly local. Number one, that’s where most services were and still are provided. But number two, that’s where you have a thick web and overlapping of family ties and ethnic ties, even racial ties.

These networks extended out literally from families, and at some point connected with the political parties. They were thickest and most prominent at the local level. The parties were, in many ways– sorry, Tony– they were the conduit for this graft and corruption. In many ways, it’s what made them run or at least helped them run.

TONY: Right.

BRIAN: So what grade did we get on our answer, Tony? You’re a high school teacher.

TONY: I would definitely give it an A.

PETER: Now that’s before grade inflation, right, Tony?

TONY: Well, absolutely. Right, we don’t inflate grades at all.

ED: I’d like to just point out, I agreed with your answer most enthusiastically, so I do think that’s worth extra credit.

PETER: Hey, Tony. Thanks very much for joining us today with that great question.

BRIAN: Hey, thank you, Tony.

TONY: But thank you once again to all of you.

BRIAN: There’s one 20th century machine politician who towers above all the others, Richard J. Daley. Daley was mayor of Chicago from 1955 until 1976. He was also boss of the city’s Democratic political machine during those years.

ADAM COHEN: He wasn’t necessarily the smartest guy in the city in terms of book knowledge. He wasn’t the most articulate. But he understood the way the levers of power worked.

BRIAN: That’s journalist Adam Cohen, co-author of a biography of Daley. He says, when it comes to local power, Daley was in a class by himself.

ADAM COHEN: There’s been no political machine of the size and influence of the Chicago machine anywhere else in the country. And Daley was head of it when it was at its greatest power in terms of patronage employment, ability to turn out the vote for candidates for local and national office.

BRIAN: Now we just spoke with a listener about how machine politics shaped 19th century New York. The same was certainly true for 20th century Chicago.

The Daley machine brought physical changes to Chicago, including an expanded O’Hare International Airport and elevated expressways that crisscrossed the city. But Cohen says Daley had an essentially conservative vision for how his city should run. He had no interest in modernizing Chicago’s politics.

ADAM COHEN: He started at the very bottom of the machine as a foot soldier in Bridgeport.

BRIAN: I see. So he really knew it inside out.

ADAM COHEN: That’s right. The machine was hierarchical. There was the boss at the very top. There were precinct captains and aldermen and other people below, down to the real foot soldier who knocked on his neighbor’s doors. The aldermen who really delivered for the machine got more patronage jobs. The aldermen who didn’t deliver for the machine got fewer or none.

If you were just a resident of a local neighborhood, you wanted to know your local guy in the machine. And somewhere up, up, up the chain, going all the way up to the boss, would be the benefits that would eventually be decided on then come back down to you.

BRIAN:Cohen says Daley’s impact on the city is especially visible in housing. The city was split between white neighborhoods on the north and west sides and black neighborhoods on the south side. Daley was determined to keep it that way, especially since his own Chicago neighborhood, Bridgeport, sat right on the dividing line.

ADAM COHEN: Daley was a big proponent of segregation, a big supporter of segregation. And the pragmatic reason was that he wanted to keep the city operating the way it was because it was what put him in power. So he wanted the neighborhoods to remain intact, because the neighborhoods the way they were were turning out a big vote for the machine.

If there were integration, who knows what would happen? Maybe a lot of whites would flee the city, maybe you’d end up with a black mayor. So he wanted the status quo.

And Daley very shrewdly used urban renewal– sometimes in Chicago, they called it Negro removal– to take black areas that were near white areas or near the downtown and pave them, and then put some kind of highway or some big new building there. So he was actually building segregation into the very concrete of the city.

An example of that is the Dan Ryan Expressway, which was a dividing line between the State Street Corridor, the largest concentration of public housing in the country, on one side, and then the Bungalow Belt on the other side, which was the white ethnic neighborhoods that Daley himself came from. The Dan Ryan really followed that line.

BRIAN: Well, why did blacks go along with that? Why did they participate in the larger machine if one of its purposes was to maintain that segregation?

ADAM COHEN: It was important for the machine to continually co-opt everyone who had votes in order to stay in power. So they needed to have a strategy for the black population. And that strategy was the black sub-machine, which was part of the machine, but a lesser part.

Blacks also wanted patronage jobs. They wanted to be able to feed their families. They wanted help if they couldn’t pay their electric bill. There were a lot of things that they wanted that the machine, that the ward healer in their neighborhood provided. And in exchange, they provided their votes.

And they didn’t quite get as much patronage. They didn’t have as much influence in city hall. But they got some patronage and they had some influence.

There was a congressman on the south side named Bill Dawson who was put there by the machine and kept in office by the machine. And he presided over a black sub-machine that reliably turned out huge votes for the machine and for Mayor Daley when he personally ran, and got back things in return.

So it’s ironic because people do think of Daley as being someone who was not well-inclined towards blacks, and certainly not in favor of civil rights. But he was very strategic with the black sub-machine in giving the community enough to turn out a strong vote.

BRIAN: How did Daley’s actions differ from those of any other big city mayor when it came to racial segregation? And what are the longer-term consequences of the power of the Daley machine?

ADAM COHEN: Yeah, I mean, you could contrast it with New York City where, for part of the time that Daley was in office, there was Mayor Lindsay, who was elected on a much more liberal platform and much more supportive of integration.

Daley really represented the old order till the very end. He believed that the neighborhoods should remain ethnic enclaves. And he was not interested in fair housing. And as I say, he was building these barriers everywhere to keep the black neighborhoods where they were.

And there were two ramifications of this. One is that it did keep the population more stable. We didn’t see the white flight in Chicago that we saw in places like Detroit, where Chicago really retained its white middle class.

But the cost of that was that Chicago also became the most segregated major city in America. So these walls were very real, and it’s something that one can see sometimes just walking around Chicago. It has just less of a mix in a lot of places than there are in other big cities.

BRIAN: Daley is seen as a master of wielding political power. What’s the biggest mistake he made?

ADAM COHEN: I mean, I think the biggest mistake he had, I would say, was really a moral one. That at his core, Daley really was a tribal guy. He was a man from Bridgeport who believed in Bridgeport and believed in his neighborhood. And he was really never able to empathize with the other. And the other in this case were, in many cases, African Americans who lived just a few blocks away from where he was born.

BRIAN: That’s fascinating, Adam. So you’re saying that, in a way, he was too local. He surely was a local power, but he was a man almost of his particular neighborhood rather than the entire city, not to mention metropolitan area.

ADAM COHEN: I think that’s exactly right. He really was always a man of Bridgeport. You know, to be a truly great man, the sort of person we would like to be mayor, he would really have an understanding of all the people of Chicago and try to help all of them.

So if we see him as a political creature, he did pretty well. But as a leader of a city to be so indifferent to the needs and legitimate wishes of about half of the city, that’s a huge moral failing. And that is part of his legacy.

BRIAN: Adam, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory.

ADAM COHEN: Oh, sure. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

BRIAN: Adam Cohen is a journalist and co-author of American Pharoah– Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.

PETER: Richard J. Daley died in 1976 during his sixth term in office. By then, black Chicagoans had begun moving from the segregated south side to white neighborhoods on the city’s west side. The Supreme Court had also struck down restrictive covenants that barred blacks from living in certain neighborhoods.

As they settled in new neighborhoods, blacks encountered plenty of racial hostility followed by a slow, rolling wave of white flight and resegregation. Reporter Steven Jackson has the story of one suburban community just west of Chicago that welcomed African Americans.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: Moving to Oak Park for me was like Dorothy waking up in the land of Oz. Suddenly she wakes up and everything’s in color.

STEVEN JACKSON: This is Crystal Shannon-Morla. She was just seven years old when her family came to Oak Park. It was 1968, and they had just moved out of a low-income, hyper-segregated African American neighborhood on Chicago’s west side.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: Everything looked different. The houses were bigger, the people looked different. This was the first time we ever saw white people in real life.

STEVEN JACKSON: On the first day, she and her sisters were playing in the backyard when they saw the neighbor kids out in their yard.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: There was a moment where all the kids, me and my sibs and the kids next door just sort of came up to the fence and stared at each other. And it was like we were just quiet, staring at each other. It seemed like forever.

And then my sister says, that boy, he has blue eyes. She said, can you see out of those eyes? And they were just quiet. Their mouths dropped. I imagine what they were thinking also as they were looking at our skin. Look at that skin, they’re like chocolate or whatever. And then we just went back to playing.

STEVEN JACKSON: Shannon-Morla and her family were one of the first African American families to move to Oak Park around this time. She didn’t know it, but they were pioneers– or maybe guinea pigs– in an ambitious social experiment.

It was spearheaded by a housing activist named Roberta Raymond. She didn’t like what she saw happening in Chicago. Neighborhoods resegregating from white to black with disinvestment and blight close behind.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: In many people’s minds, integration was that brief period of time between when the first black family moved in and the last white family moved out. And Oak Park had to really look and say, what can we do to make this different?

STEVEN JACKSON: Raymond founded a nonprofit called the Oak Park Housing Center and started working with local government and community groups and law enforcement to develop an integration strategy.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: It was based on the idea that you couldn’t just let the housing market do whatever was going to happen, that you had to intervene.

STEVEN JACKSON: So the village passed a fair housing ordinance. And unlike other towns, they trained realtors and landlords to follow it. If someone felt that they had been discriminated against, there was a village staffer to field that complaint.

Raymond’s Housing Center also did what you might call reverse steering, encouraging newcomers to spread throughout the village instead of clustering by race. And they bought ad space in national magazines, promoting Oak Park as a safe, racially integrated community. This was a new idea, using diversity as a marketing tool.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: You have to send this message that racial change in a community can be a very enriching experience. It can make a better community. That is a hard lesson for a lot of people to learn.

STEVEN JACKSON: For some people, racial change felt like an invasion. They didn’t want African Americans in their town. And Raymond was telling them they were wrong. She got a lot of threatening midnight phone calls.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, these would be people who call and say– I can remember one call. It was like, you know, nigger-lover, you better get out of town before we take care of you. You know, very threatening phone calls. And I had a file at the Housing Center of hate mail. And it was vicious.

STEVEN JACKSON: But most people weren’t vicious. Most were just uncomfortable with change. There were probably lots of dinner table conversations like this one from a 1974 documentary about Oak Park.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I think another interesting question is, when would we or any of us– at what percentage would we move? When a percentage of blacks moved in, when would we consider leaving? Not out of fear, just because it’s uncomfortable to be in the minority. And I think myself, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood between 60% and 80%.

MALE SPEAKER: I wouldn’t disagree with that, but the weekly rate of change is a big factor too. If it had become only a 40% but was changing 15% or 20% per year, I might be inclined to leave sooner if I were inclined to leave at all.

STEVEN JACKSON: As it turned out, a lot of white people were inclined to leave. In the 1970s, about 10,000 whites left, in a village of 60,000. But over time, Oak Park’s integration strategy worked. Amanda Seligman is a historian who has studied racial change on Chicago’s west side. And she says Oak Park enjoyed certain advantages that made integration easier.

AMANDA SELIGMAN: One is that they were their own municipality. So they could do things that the city of Chicago as a whole couldn’t do.

STEVEN JACKSON: Like enforcing the fair housing rules and shaping the local housing market. The village was also pretty liberal, so Raymond’s strategy had a lot of local support.

AMANDA SELIGMAN: And ultimately, also, it was wealthier. And so those African Americans who were going to be able to buy into Oak Park were just a much smaller proportion of the population. So the tolerance for a few African Americans of wealth was greater than it might have been for a larger population of poorer black people.

STEVEN JACKSON: Today, the population is about 64% white, 22% black, and 7% Latino. Demographically, that’s similar to the metropolitan area, although Latinos are underrepresented. And while other towns have racial and ethnic enclaves, Oak Park is integrated, almost block by block.

In the nearby suburbs, it’s a different story. Maywood is mostly African American, Cicero is mostly Latino. Elmwood Park, mostly white. Some of these towns have gotten more segregated in the last 20 years. And Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in the country. Here’s Roberta Raymond again.

ROBERTA RAYMOND: Segregation is so inbred in American life that the opportunity that Oak Park affords a family, a child growing up, is invaluable. My grandson is 10 years old, and he doesn’t think about the fact that he has kids of all races in his school. That is not something he thinks about. And I think, if children throughout the country grew up that way, we wouldn’t have to have some of the things that go on in this society.

STEVEN JACKSON: Raymond thinks big social problems like mass incarceration and generational poverty wouldn’t be so big if more communities were integrated. Again, Crystal Shannon-Morla.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: It made every difference in my life. Literally, my life will be different now.

STEVEN JACKSON: Growing up in Oak Park, she had white and black friends. She went to a good school where she had access to extracurriculars that just didn’t exist in her old Chicago neighborhood. And she grew up being comfortable around people of different races. She’s grateful for that.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: I’m always aware of that. I’m always aware of that. So it makes me want to contribute and get back.

STEVEN JACKSON: Today, she’s a psychologist and a mentor at an after-school program in Oak Park, trying to help academically struggling students catch up. Because even though Oak Park is diverse, it’s grappling with a racial achievement gap.

CRYSTAL SHANNON-MORLA: These are big problems, and so we have to continue to come together as a community and work on these things and not give up. There’s more work to be done.

STEVEN JACKSON: Now she just has to do what Raymond and others did 50 years ago, organize from the ground up, look for new strategies, and hopefully lead the way for the rest of the country.

PETER: Steven Jackson is a freelance reporter and producer. If you want to hear more about Oak Park, head to our website. We’ll link to a story Steven reported with the radio show and podcast Curious City at WBEZ in Chicago. We partnered with them on this story. If you like BackStory, you should check them out. They often cover the history of Chicago while answering curious questions about the Windy City. Head to backstoryradio.org to find out more.

ED: We’re going to turn now to a local job that you might not think matters much, the coroner.

PETER: Coroners investigate violent, suspicious, or sudden deaths. And their basic job description hasn’t changed. But their power and how they get the job varies widely. Some coroners are appointed, some are elected, and some have been replaced by forensic experts.

BRIAN: Kelly Jones, one of our producers, decided to look into the history of coroners. And she’s here to tell us what she found. Hey, Kelly, welcome to the studio.

KELLY JONES: Thanks, Brian. So Peter’s right. The basic job of the coroner is to investigate suspicious deaths and sign death certificates that officially record how a person died. And the profession has been around for a long time.

BRIAN: I’ll bet.

KELLY JONES: Way before the New World was even a twinkle in the English crown’s eyes. However, I’ve done some really deep research. And I have found some archive tape of one of the first coroners that ever walked the earth. And I’d love to play it for you guys.

ED: Yeah.

BRIAN: Sure.

PETER: Oh, please. Yeah.

BRIAN: Bring it on.

CORONER: Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

MALE SPEAKER 2: Here’s one.

DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!

CORONER: Well, he says he’s not dead.

MALE SPEAKER 2: Yes, he is.

DEAD PERSON: I’m not!

CORONER: He isn’t?

MALE SPEAKER 2: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.

DEAD PERSON: I’m getting better!

MALE SPEAKER 2: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead–

KELLY JONES: As you know, that’s a famous Monty Python sketch.

BRIAN: And a good history lesson too.

KELLY JONES: Well, so not a lot of that rings true, except that the coroner was established in England. And usually he was a knight. So he was not a doctor from the very beginning. And that’s important because when the coroner position comes over to the New World, the coroner is also not a doctor.

And the main job of the coroner in the early period was to hold inquests. Which means that the coroner, when he’s investigating deaths, he becomes the judge, he calls witnesses, and he selects a jury to help him figure out what happened.

ED: Wow, there’s a lot of power.

PETER: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But you know what I’m impressed with, Kelly, is it sounds like this coroner has despotic power, the power of a king almost.

KELLY JONES: He does. And actually, coroner comes from crowner.

PETER: Oh, yeah.

KELLY JONES: The coroner in England was responsible for telling the king how someone had died and for giving the king his due if that person owed taxes or died by a crime where something could be given to the king to make up for losing that subject.

PETER: Well, I think that’s really important, Kelly, because after all, American colonists are subjects of the king. And this is the way the king is part of a local community, in the person of a coroner.

BRIAN: Peter, what better reminder than every time somebody dies, you’re reminded that they’re still a subject of the king.

ED: Yeah, and I’m so glad that we live in a democracy where we don’t need coroners anymore then.

PETER: It didn’t happen that way.

ED: I’m just guessing in the 19th century, that went away as the march of democracy proceeded, right?

KELLY JONES: Well, I’ll tell you when things really start to pick up and change. And it’s when we lose the intimacy of a small community or a small town and cities start booming. So before, coroners could call on local community knowledge. They would bring witnesses. Witnesses would generally know everybody. So would the people on the jury, and so would the coroner.

But as people began to move around more, and as the population began to grow, you had strangers. You had more unknowns. You had immigrants coming in. You had relationships that you couldn’t account for. But the job of the coroner also began to shift because it became less of a job you would have for a lifetime and more like a stepping stone on the way to more and more political power.

PETER: Yeah, people don’t want to end their career as a coroner.

KELLY JONES: Mm-mm. It’s the death of your career.

PETER: Right.

KELLY JONES: My favorite example is from the 1870s. There’s a coroner who gets elected in New York City. His name is Richard Croker.

PETER: No.

KELLY JONES: I kid you not. He got elected twice. And then he became the boss of Tammany Hall.

BRIAN: No, I recognize the name now.

KELLY JONES: Yeah, he’s an example of someone that used that coroner position to move around and become elected.

ED: OK. I’m still looking for progress here. So if the 19th century didn’t get rid it, maybe the 20th century did.

BRIAN: For sure. These folks were replaced by teams of scientists, right?

ED: I’ve seen the TV shows!

KELLY JONES: Well–

BRIAN: Exactly. They were all over TV, Kelly.

KELLY JONES: So yes. In the early 20th century, we get the rise of forensic science. And yet the coroner in many, many places is still a very political position. If we have about 3,000 counties in the US right now, somewhere around half have an elected coroner.

PETER: Whoa, still? Wow.

BRIAN: Come on, we still elect them?

KELLY JONES: In about 1,500 of those counties, the only requirement for running for coroner is that you’re over 18 and have never been convicted of a felony.

PETER: Nice.

KELLY JONES: So there was someone in 2012, a Republican candidate for coroner in a small county in Georgia who fit that bill. And I’d love to read you his platform from his Facebook page. “Here is what I want. Obama: gone. Borders: closed. Language: English. Culture: US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

PETER: Yeah, and how does that describe his job as a coroner?

KELLY JONES: I don’t know, but he won. He was elected.

ED: I would guess that the coroners were often a part of the dominant party in the county, right? Because who has invested the energy to really discover the qualifications of a coroner. You just come in and vote for all of the people who are the party you believe in, right?

PETER: Consider it a survival of that old idea of patronage of a plum job that a party-faithful can claim.

BRIAN: But Kelly.

KELLY JONES: Mhm?

BRIAN: Are these folks really as powerful as they were back in Peter’s day or really as politically mobile as this guy Croker was in New York City? Is that guy in Georgia really heading anywhere?

KELLY JONES: I think the coroner position is still thought of as a stepping stone for other political careers. So you become coroner to maybe become sheriff, to maybe become mayor someday. It’s a testing ground for how good you are at getting elected.

BRIAN: Right.

KELLY JONES: And I don’t know. I think the coroner has a great deal of power. It might not be machine-style power, but the stakes of getting something wrong or getting a death wrong are pretty high. If somebody gets murdered and you miss that as coroner, there’s a murderer out there somewhere. If you fail to index that somebody died of a specific disease, maybe you can’t tell that person’s family that the disease runs in their family.

BRIAN: What about the money side of it and the taxes side of it that you started out with?

KELLY JONES: You know, if you’re an insurance company, the coroner has a lot of power.

BRIAN: Good point.

When they determine how somebody dies, they’re still moving money around. They still determine who gets benefits and who doesn’t. So if money equals power, they’ve still got a little bit of control.

ED: Kind of like death and taxes, some things never change.

PETER: That’s right.

BRIAN: We’re going to turn to the town of Aspen, Colorado in the late 1960s. It was a chic ski town on the rise. Local business owners sought to attract wealthy tourists to their iconic slopes. At the same time, young hippies inspired by tales of Shangri-La in the Rockies poured into town.

Many locals few these long-haired newcomers as riffraff. The county sheriff began arresting the hippies for minor crimes like loitering and hitchhiking. Tensions between Aspen’s entrenched establishment and its freaks culminated in a memorable election starring a well-known gonzo journalist. BackStory producer Nina Earnest takes it from here.

NINA EARNEST: Hunter S. Thompson had been living in Aspen for a few years when he–

DJ WATKINS: –decided to run for Sheriff to protect the hippies.

NINA EARNEST: This is DJ Watkins, who wrote a book about Thompson’s 1970 campaign. He says that the writer ran for sheriff of Pitkin County under the banner of Freak Power.

BOB BRAUDIS: We long-hairs were labeled freaks by the establishment. And Hunter decided that “freak” was very descriptive, let’s use it.

NINA EARNEST: And this is Bob Braudis. He moved to Aspen to be a ski-bum and soon found himself drawn to Thompson’s campaign.

BOB BRAUDIS: I pretty much agreed with Hunter’s platform, which was largely anti-greed and anti-chicken [BLEEP] misdemeanor and felony laws.

NINA EARNEST: What Braudis means is that Thompson wanted to decriminalize drugs, limit development, and protect the environment. And Watkins says that Thompson also wanted to make the sheriff more than just a sheriff.

DJ WATKINS: He wanted to embrace the idea of the ombudsman. There could be a member of government that his whole job was taking complaints from members of the community, sort of a watchdog of the government itself.

NINA EARNEST: It sounds straightforward on paper, but some of his suggestions were a little surreal. Take this campaign advertisement.

MALE SPEAKER 3: Hunter I represents something wholly alien to the other candidates for sheriff. Ideas, and the sympathy towards the young, generous, grass-oriented society which is making the only serious effort to face the technological nightmare we have created.

NINA EARNEST: He wanted to tear up all the roads to make the city more walkable. He wanted to shame bad drug dealers, as in people who took advantage of their customers, in public stocks, medieval-style. And he wanted to change the name Aspen to Fat City to make the town less attractive to tourists.

Thompson set out to enlist all the newly arrived hippies to vote for the Freak Power cause. Volunteers like Bob Braudis registered over 700 new voters, a huge number for a county of just 6,000. Their success alarmed the town’s more conservative residents, and Thompson’s characteristically outlandish behavior didn’t help. Here’s Thompson himself.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON: We do have a Freak Power base, and that’s undeniable. If I went out there and walked through the streets naked with a bomb in each hand and covered with various sticky substances that were known to be drugs, they would still vote for me.

NINA EARNEST: Thompson’s main opponent, who he called a dim-witted cowboy with a gun, was the incumbent Carrol Whitmire. If Thompson was some bizarro version of a Western sheriff, Whitmire was straight out of Central Casting.

BOB BRAUDIS: He had his honorary posse with white Stetsons, white kerchiefs, white shirts, white guns. And he was basically parading what I saw in Western movies in the 1950s, the good guys all wear white.

MALE SPEAKER 4: The American Sheriff’s job was carved out of the rugged West. Vote for and elect Carrol Whitmire for our Sheriff–

BOB BRAUDIS: I think he woke up one day with Hunter running against him going, what the hell just happened?

NINA EARNEST: Before long, this tiny local election became a national story. In October, Thompson wrote an article about his campaign for Rolling Stone magazine. After the Battle of Aspen hit newsstands, profiles on Thompson for Sheriff appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even the BBC made a documentary about this election.

MALE SPEAKER 5: What kind of sheriff do they want in the West these days? Could the conventional, establishment citizens of Aspen elect as their Sheriff a hippie, a freak, an acid-head, a man who openly smokes grass– marijuana?

NINA EARNEST: The battle lines were drawn. Here was a microcosm of the country’s culture wars set amidst the ski slopes of Aspen. As the election approached, some of Aspen’s residents began to worry that Thompson could actually win.

So local elites ramped up their anti-Thompson rhetoric. They tapped into an issue that dogged his entire campaign. No one could figure out if he really wanted the job, while Braudis thinks his friend was serious.

BOB BRAUDIS: There was perhaps a component of self-aggrandizement, self-promotion in Hunter’s run for sheriff, because it definitely attracted way more attention than we thought it would. One time where Hunter had embarrassed himself by one of his crazy actions, I said Hunter, why are you doing this? And he said, Bob, you know I don’t do crazy stuff unless I can write about it and get paid for it.

NINA EARNEST: And running for sheriff, he told Braudis, was the craziest thing he had ever done.

Election day arrived November 3, 1970. Reporters from across the country descended upon Aspen.

BOB BRAUDIS: We were all watching the county clerk put the numbers up with chalk on a blackboard. And I was never as optimistic as some of the other people. But some people actually thought we were gonna win.

FEMALE SPEAKER 2: We won, we won, we won!

NINA EARNEST: Actually, Carrol Whitmire won, but not by much.

MALE SPEAKER 5: The Freak campaign had failed. The sheriff won by only 400 votes, though, out of 2,500.

NINA EARNEST: That night, Thompson heard the news at a local hotel that doubled as campaign headquarters. Wearing a blonde wig and draped in an American flag, the losing candidate faced a gaggle of reporters.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON: I think I unfortunately proved what I set out to prove. And that was more of a political point in the local election. And I think the original reason was to prove it to myself, that the American Dream really is [BLEEP]

NINA EARNEST: Thompson never ran for office again, though he remained a lifelong resident of Aspen. And despite his loss, Watkin says that Freak Power lived on in this corner of the Rockies.

DJ WATKINS: That voting block that he helped get involved and get engaged had a real lasting impact on every subsequent election.

NINA EARNEST: Look no further than the sheriff’s office. Here’s how it happened. Carrol Whitmire left office amidst allegations of mismanagement. And the guy that was elected after him had been Thompson’s choice for his undersheriff. And the next sheriff of Pitkin County, Thompson’s friend Bob Braudis.

BOB BRAUDIS: I’ve been retired for five years after 24 years as sheriff.

NINA EARNEST: Braudis says that he and his fellow sheriffs worked hard to make Hunter’s platform a reality, especially his idea that the sheriff should be more of a problem solver than a strict law enforcer. On the other hand, Aspen never became Fat City, and is in fact glitzier than ever. But still, Watkins claims that Aspen’s progressivism is worth emulating.

DJ WATKINS: You know, these things that Hunter was writing about and that Aspen went through are actually a model for what other places around the country are going through.

NINA EARNEST: But some people are going to hear this and say, OK, this works for Aspen. But Aspen is a small town, it’s a very wealthy town. It’s not very diverse. So what could this really tell us about how law enforcement can change?

DJ WATKINS: Well, in Aspen, 1970 is not so different than some other places now. But yeah, I mean, you’re definitely right. I mean, we live in sort of a bubble here.

BOB BRAUDIS: But as Tip O’Neill said, all politics are local. And Hunter Thompson said politics is the art of controlling your own environment. So you start small. If it spreads beyond your city limits, so be it. But if you’ve controlled your own environment, you’ve won.

BRIAN: That story was told by BackStory producer Nina Earnest. We also heard from DJ Watkins and Bob Braudis. Watkins is the author of Freak Power– Hunter S. Thompson’s Campaign for Sheriff. Braudis served as Pitkin County Sheriff for 24 years.

PETER: That’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Tell us what you thought of the show. While you’re there, pull the levers of power and help shape our upcoming episodes. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our engineer and Diana Williams is our digital editor. We have help from Briana Azar. And Melissa Gismondi assists with research. Special thanks this week to John Brooke, Marcella Fierro, Julie Johnson McGrath, and Brad [INAUDIBLE].

ED: Major support is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by The Tomato Fund– cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, humanities, and the environment– and by History Channel– history, made every day.

Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond.

FEMALE SPEAKER 3: BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

BRIAN: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.