Jane Byrne, with an assist from mighty snowstorms and a tone-deaf Chicago mayor who preceded her, will forever be known as the feisty woman who in 1979 toppled Chicago’s formidable Democratic machine and “the cabal of evil men” she said ran City Hall.
Over her single term in office, Byrne launched Taste of Chicago and crowd-pleasing celebrations like Blues Fest, inspired the redevelopment of Navy Pier and the Museum Campus and encouraged moviemaking here in a big way by luring production of box office hits like “The Blues Brothers.”
She will also be remembered, however, as a perpetually unsmiling and mercurial leader prone to publicity stunts like the month she spent living in the old Cabrini-Green public housing complex. In office, Byrne also cozied up to the insiders she once reviled, alienating the coalition of blacks, liberals and women who were instrumental in making her the city’s first and only female mayor.
Byrne, 81, who faded from public view after losing a re-election bid in 1983 to Harold Washington, died Friday morning. She had a stroke last year and was receiving hospice care in a high-rise near the Water Tower downtown, according to her daughter, Kathy Byrne.
“At the start of the week I sort of knew,” her daughter said. “Her doctor said she was getting weaker and weaker.”
“She looked down on the city she loved,” she said. “The family was here. She was surrounded by people that loved her and whom she loved.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel paid tribute to Byrne as he dedicated a plaque memorializing Washington at downtown central library named for him.
“We once again find ourselves mourning the passing of another trailblazing mayor, mayor of the city of Chicago, Jane Byrne,” Emanuel said. “She didn’t just blaze a new trail for women in politics. She blazed a new trail forward for a better future for the entire city of Chicago.”
Byrne’s election as mayor was a glass-ceiling-shattering event at City Hall, an insular bastion of white male-dominated power. But her four years in office proved more transitional than transformational, setting the stage for an arguably even bigger change with the election of Washington, the city’s first African-American mayor, to succeed her.
Swept into office as a reformer, Byrne quickly disappointed many of those who were close to her and thought she represented a break from the many years of patronage and iron-fisted rule under Mayor Richard J. Daley, whom she had served under as the city’s consumer sales commissioner.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle worked to defeat Byrne and elect Washington. But Preckwinkle nonetheless lauded Byrne for her political trailblazing.
“I think it’s important that young people have role models, and it’s surely important that girls have role models in public life if we’re going to have greater participation of women in public office,” said Preckwinkle, a former City Council member.
Metra Chairman Martin Oberman, another former alderman and a key member of the council’s independent bloc during Byrne’s days as mayor, recalled Byrne as an “epic figure” in the city’s political history for having the “guts” to challenge the political establishment.
“She showed the electorate of Chicago that the old political forces don’t always guarantee a win, a victory,” Oberman said. “And she really laid the groundwork for more citizen participation.”
In a 2004 interview with the Tribune, Byrne conceded that her mayoralty often seemed chaotic but argued that it couldn’t have been any other way. “We broke up something that had been in existence for 75 years,” she said. “Like the spaghetti in a pressure cooker, it was all over the ceiling.”
“Nobody saw me coming. I was like a joke,” Byrne said of her come-from-behind victory over Michael Bilandic, the bland Bridgeport neighborhood alderman who became mayor after fellow Bridgeporter Daley died unexpectedly of a heart attack in late 1976.
Byrne said she was able to beat Bilandic because he and other “old boys” of the Daley machine dismissed her with a misogynistic flair, calling her “crazy,” “menopausal,” “drunk” or “on drugs.”
Indeed, an unsigned 1979 memo unearthed in Bilandic’s papers described Byrne as “a shrill, charging, vindictive person — and nothing makes a woman look worse … she already is sounding like a ‘scold,’ and somewhat of a ‘shrew.'”
Byrne was born Margaret Jane Burke on May 24, 1933, the second of six children. Her father, William Burke, was a vice president of Inland Steel. She attended Queen of All Saints Catholic School near her Sauganash neighborhood, then St. Scholastica high school before graduating Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest.
In 1956 she married William Byrne, a Marine pilot. Their daughter, Kathy, was born a year later. But tragedy struck in 1959 when William Byrne died in a plane crash.
The young widow soon got involved in politics, joining the presidential campaign of Democrat John F. Kennedy. That drew the notice of Daley, himself a key player in Kennedy’s campaign, and Byrne gravitated into the mayor’s powerful political orbit.
After paying her dues in the precincts, ringing doorbells, handing out pamphlets and tacking up signs, Byrne joined the Daley team officially in 1965, accepting her first government job as a recruiter for an anti-poverty program.
A mutual admiration flowered between Byrne and the mayor, who in characteristic Daley fashion frequently mispronounced her name as “Janey Byrnes.”
Daley eventually named her commissioner of the city Department of Consumer Sales, Weights and Measures, an obscure office that Daley felt needed reorganization in the wake of growing consumerism. He also gave Byrne political visibility by making her co-chair of the Cook County Democratic Party and putting her on the Democratic National Committee.
Daley’s admiration of Byrne was only part of the story behind his sponsorship of her political rise. He was stung in 1972 when the delegation he led to the Democratic National Convention was not allowed to be seated because it lacked diversity.
Byrne, in the 2004 Tribune interview, said she was aware that Daley had an ulterior motive in promoting her. “I was that token woman,” she acknowledged. “I was wise to what he was doing. … But to me it was, ‘I’ll do the job.’ … After a while, I was no longer a token with him.”
In Daley’s City Hall, where shutting up and doing what you were told was the key to longevity, Byrne stood out. She readily cultivated media attention for her consumer crusades, making an outsized name for herself in Daley’s cabinet while at the same time alienating more buttoned-down colleagues.
That media savvy side of Byrne served a key role in building her political success and then destroying it.
When Daley died, Byrne lost not just a friend but a mentor and patron. She remained briefly in her consumer services post under Bilandic but was fired in the summer of 1977 when she went to the news media complaining that City Hall had “greased” a cab fare increase.
The next spring, Byrne married Jay McMullen, a former City Hall reporter for the Chicago Daily News. Byrne then quickly declared her intention to take on Bilandic in the 1979 city election, with McMullen bragging to his old pals in the clubby, male-dominated City Hall press corps that he was behind some of the strongest rhetoric in her announcement.
The big campaign break for Byrne came on New Year’s Eve of 1978, when the first of two back-to-back blizzards brought the city to a halt under mountains of snow. Bilandic’s inept handling of snow removal efforts handed Byrne a ready-made issue.
As runways at O’Hare International Airport backed up and piles of luggage grew in terminals, Bilandic boasted to television audiences that the airport had the best snow-fighting program in the world. The CTA closed down elevated train stops in black neighborhoods to beef up service to white areas.
Even worse, as city plows largely bypassed residential streets in minority neighborhoods, Bilandic publicly declared that snow removal operations were proceeding smoothly.
Byrne had a meager campaign war chest, but she channeled the little she had into television ads blasting Bilandic for his handling of the crisis — a tactic that clearly resonated with snowbound voters.
When the results were in, Byrne edged Bilandic by a slim margin in a Democratic primary that was tantamount to election itself. In a general election vote a few weeks later, Byrne had no trouble dispatching her Republican rival.
Speaking to supporters on the night of her victory over Bilandic, Byrne triumphantly declared that “I will do the one thing that everybody has asked me to all along — smile.”
Any smiles didn’t last long. Byrne walked into the mayor’s office in mid-April 1979, surrounded by some of the people who had joined in her campaign. The first months of her administration were spent tearing down the Bilandic administration and engaging in political feuds.
Most notably she went after Daley’s son, then-state Sen. and future Mayor Richard M. Daley, and trimmed the well-known patronage clout of Daley’s South Side Bridgeport community.
Byrne built her own inner circle, but even supporters started to question how sincerely she wanted reform.
During her campaign she had constantly railed against Bilandic’s hiring of friends and political allies. As mayor, her daughter, Kathy, and two of Kathy’s college classmates landed jobs working for the city.
Byrne also became known for a volatile style. She was notorious for making late-night telephone calls to reporters’ homes to scold them for what she thought was unfair reporting. Angered once by a Tribune story, she ordered a reporter for the paper to vacate his desk in the City Hall pressroom, though she eventually backed down.
Mike Royko, the late columnist for several Chicago papers including the Tribune, nicknamed her “Mayor Bossy.”
Byrne began complaining that coverage of her administration was sexist and built around a stale stereotype of a woman who couldn’t make up her mind.
That said, her actions often seemed to play into the stereotype. She would say one thing in the morning and something quite different in the afternoon, with both versions rolled out on evening TV news. In four years’ time she had four police superintendents, three commissioners of streets and sanitation and three press secretaries. The Tribune called it “government by revolving door.”
Byrne acknowledged in the 2004 Tribune interview that inexperience contributed to her difficulties. “Did I realize the importance of the job? That every word I spoke was that of the mayor and not Jane Byrne?” she said. “No, I didn’t realize that. I did not measure my words.”
The populist tide that Byrne rode into office quickly ebbed. Her highly publicized monthlong “move”‘ into the crime-embattled Chicago Housing Authority Cabrini-Green complex to dramatize conditions there was lauded by some but criticized by others as a transparent publicity stunt.
Once in office, she backed away from her campaign pledge to wage a good government crusade against the “cabal” aligned with Bilandic — foremost among them “the Eddies,” then-Ald. Edward Vrdolyak, 10th, and still-Ald. Edward Burke, 14th.
That was especially disappointing to David Orr, now the Cook County clerk but in those days a member of the City Council’s reform bloc.
“Some of us had these high hopes of reform, and very quickly she became close with Eddie and Eddie, even though when she ran for mayor, she said she was running against the evil cabal,” Orr recalled. “But she was a talented, spunky, tough woman, who did a number of things.”
Byrne’s support in the African-American community also waned dramatically when she replaced black members of the Chicago Board of Education and the Chicago Housing Authority with white political allies.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson and other black leaders, appalled at her appointments and other perceived slights to the black community, staged a high-profile boycott of one of her city festivals, an early sign of the racial tension that drove the 1983 mayoral election.
After leaving the mayor’s office, Byrne made a few unsuccessful stabs at returning to public office. She also briefly became a television ad spokeswoman for a chain of Mexican restaurants and cut another ad for the Weather Channel, making a pitch about how weather can change your life.
Perhaps Byrne’s last public appearance came in August at a ceremony renaming the Circle Interchange, the confluence of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Dan Ryan expressways, the Jane Byrne Interchange. And before that, the city renamed a plaza near her Streeterville high-rise in her honor.
“It’s amazing timing,” Kathy Byrne said, “that all this happened and now she passed away. But she passed away knowing that all these things occurred and knowing how beloved she was to Chicago.”
A funeral Mass for Byrne will be at 11 a.m. Monday at St. Vincent de Paul Parish, 1010 W. Webster Ave. Visitation will precede the Mass, beginning at 9 a.m., and burial will follow immediately after the funeral at Calvary Cemetery in Evanston.
Byrne is survived by her daughter and a grandson.
This story contains material from a 2004 Tribune Magazine interview of Byrne written by Ellen Warren, who covered City Hall when Byrne was mayor and retired from the Tribune this month, as well as material prepared by Robert Davis, who covered City Hall for the Tribune during Byrne’s term, retired from the paper in 1999 and died in 2003.
Tribune reporters Kim Geiger, John Byrne, Hal Dardick and Bill Ruthhart contributed.
bsecter@tribpub.com
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