ABSTRACT
The City Council consists of the mayor and fifty aldermen, each of whom represents a ward. Normally, the Cook County Board is controlled by a Democratic president much as the City Council is controlled by the mayor. Cook County is not a government but a congeries of unrelated governing bodies. Chicago is heavily Democratic. The Democratic heartland is the slums and semi-slums of the inner city; in wards which are predominantly Negro, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, or Irish, and almost entirely Catholic, the machine gets the hard core of its support. The inner city wards are so populous and so heavily Democratic that they can usually offset the Republican vote of the outlying wards. The newspapers are all Republican, and of course it is "good politics" to make the Democrats look bad. Newspapers, no less than department stores and real estate operators, want favors from local government.
