The Making of a Litmus Test

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The once fabled local Democratic machine is hardly putting forth the type of effort that has kept city hall in party hands for half a century. Byrne endorsed Washington after her primary defeat, then decided to oppose him through a write-in bid, then decided not to. Few of the machine's 50 ward bosses have offered their nominal nominee much help, and last week Alderman Roman Pucinski became the eighth of them openly to endorse the Republican. He said he could not ask his present workers to support Washington, who has pledged to abolish the patronage power of the party machine. Said Pucinski: "Why should I give him the guillotine with which to chop off my head?" At one rally in a Democratic neighborhood last week, formerly staunch Democrats serenaded Epton with a campaign song to the tune of Bye Bye Blackbird.

Some Chicagoans are wearing vividly telling campaign buttons. One shows a watermelon with a black slash across it. Another is simply all white, as if there were really nothing more to say. T shirts are similarly emblazoned. VOTE RIGHT, VOTE WHITE read some.

Epton, a Jewish millionaire and successful lawyer, is an unlikely hero for Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. He is certainly no racist, himself, and once marched in Memphis in memory of the late Martin Luther King Jr. But his newest ads have played on the underlying theme of the election with the tag line: EPTON—BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. The Chicago Tribune characterized Epton's constant disavowals of race as an issue as "the ring of a man who doth protest too much."

The numbers still seem to favor Washington: assuming he gets almost all of the black vote, he will need only 20% white support to win. But polls show that he may have trouble. In just two weeks, according to one local poll, Epton has cut by half Washington's once-commanding 28-point lead.

Many of Epton's new fans cite nonracial reasons for opposing Washington, who in 1972 served a month in jail for failing to file income tax returns for four years. Washington, whose birthday is April 15, claims he "forgot" about the requirement, an explanation that may not win a lot of hearts and minds from voters wrestling with their 1040 forms. He also had his license to practice law suspended in 1969 for failing to perform legal services for which he had been retained. In any normal campaign, these issues would, of course, be serious enough. Writes New York Times Columnist William Safire: "If Mr. Washington were white, would it be remotely conceivable that his jail term and suspension from practice would not be pointed out on television by his opponent?" Yet his record is doubtless being used by some as a disingenuous rationale for voting against a black. In a satirical fantasy, Tribune Columnist Bill Granger describes Washington and Epton waking up one day with their skin colors miraculously switched: those in front of St. Pascal Church who had attacked Washington as a "crook" quickly reverse field and boo the now black Republican as a "Nixon lover."