young Mayor Harrison the use of it. At any rate, Harrison and Chicago have been safe on the city’s side of it ever since.
The League also won on it. They gave bad records to twenty-seven of the thirty-four outgoing aldermen. Fifteen were not renominated. Of the twelve who ran again, nine were beaten. This victory gave them a solid third of the Council. The reform crowd combined with Mayor Harrison, the President of the Council, and his followers, and defeated ordinances introduced to give effect to Yerkes’s odious Allen law.
Here again the League might have retired in glory, but these “commonplace, ordinary men” proposed instead that they go ahead and get a majority, organize the Council on a non-partisan basis, and pass from a negative, anti-boodling policy to one of positive, constructive legislation. This meant also to advance from “beating bad men” to the “election of good men,” and as for the good men, the standard was to be raised from mere honesty to honesty and efficiency too. With such high purposes in view, the Nine went into their third campaign. They had to condemn men they had recommended in their first year, but “we are always ready to eat dirt,” they say. They pointed to the franchise issue, called for men capable of coping with the railways, and with 254bands
