Jane Byrne, Only Woman to Lead Chicago, Dies at 81

Jane M. Byrne, who stunned Chicago's Democratic machine in 1979 when she was elected mayor after sharply criticizing the incumbent for his handling of a devastating winter - a victory that made her the city's first female mayor, though her tenure lasted just one term - died on Friday in Chicago. She was 81.

Her daughter, Kathy Byrne, announced the death.

Ms. Byrne rose in Chicago as a protégé of the formidable Mayor Richard J. Daley, who made her commissioner of sales, weights and measures in the late 1960s. Yet after Mr. Daley died in 1976, she displayed little loyalty to his successor, Michael A. Bilandic, a product of Mr. Daley's machine.

When she announced that she would challenge Mr. Bilandic in the 1979 Democratic primary, suggesting that she was Mr. Daley's true political heir, she was called quixotic. It was well known that Mr. Bilandic had removed her from her post at City Hall.

'You cannot expect the media to ignore your opponent even if it is only Jane Byrne,' read a memo, apparently written by a Bilandic aide, that was made public 25 years later as part of a collection of Mr. Bilandic's papers given to the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Then came the winter of 1978-79. Snow owned the city, and many streets went unplowed. Furnaces failed, murders rose and people committed violence in defense of parking places they had shoveled clear. Cabin fever was epidemic.

Chicagoans wanted to blame someone, and Ms. Byrne pointed to Mr. Bilandic. 'The abominable snowman,' she called him.

She went on to defeat in him, narrowly, in the primary held in February, in the teeth of that bleak winter. In heavily Democratic Chicago, the candidate who wins the primary is almost certain to win the mayoralty, and Ms. Byrne cruised to victory in the general election in April, with the reluctant support of the party apparatus.

She became one of the first women to lead a major United States city, and no woman has been mayor of Chicago since. But her single term proved complicated.

Ms. Byrne was praised for helping to revitalize the business district known as the Loop, and for helping to turn Navy Pier into a waterfront mall. She encouraged arts and cultural festivals and farmer's markets, all of which are now common.

She drew attention to troubles at one of the city's most notorious housing projects, Cabrini-Green, by moving in, with heavy security, for about three weeks in 1981. Her unit was scrubbed and painted before she arrived.

But the maverick, combative style that had helped get Ms. Byrne elected did not always work at City Hall. She faced strikes by public workers early on, and the city's finances were troubled. She was criticized as having come under the influence of the same political machine that she had boasted of defying. Questions were raised about her quick firings and hires, one of whom was her daughter, who was given city job in public relations.

She was also accused of focusing too much on downtown and not enough on struggling minority neighborhoods. And late in her term, federal authorities demanded that the city return $28 million in community development funds that they said she had used improperly.

One of her most vocal critics was Representative Harold Washington, who challenged her in the 1983 Democratic primary. Ms. Byrne far outspent him and another challenger, Richard M. Daley, a son of her mentor. But Mr. Washington, who was black, benefited from division among white voters. He narrowly won a plurality in the three-way race, with Ms. Byrne finishing second. That April he was elected the city's first black mayor.

Mr. Washington proved more popular in office than Ms. Byrne had been, and he defeated her a second time when she challenged him in the primary in 1987. But his career was cut short when he died in office that November at 65. Mr. Daley became mayor in a special election in 1989 and served until 2011, the longest tenure in Chicago history.

'From signing the first ordinance to get handguns off of our streets, to bringing more transparency to the city's budget, to creating the Taste of Chicago, Mayor Byrne leaves a large and lasting legacy,' the city's current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said in a statement on Friday.

Margaret Jane Burke was born on May 24, 1933, in Chicago to William Patrick Burke and Katherine Marie Nolan. She attended the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In addition to her daughter, her survivors include a grandson. Her second husband, Jay McMullen, a journalist and political adviser whom she married in 1978, died in 1992. Her first husband, William P. Byrne, a pilot in the Marines who was Kathy Byrne's father, died in a plane crash in 1959.

Gender was a constant issue in Ms. Byrne's political career. A Bilandic campaign memo now in the collection at the Daley Library urged the incumbent to present himself as 'a mayor of responsibility and stature,' leaving Ms. Byrne to appear as 'a shrill, charging, vindictive person - and nothing makes a woman look worse.'

When she ran for re-election in 1983, her opponents boasted of their record on women's issues. Ms. Byrne did so less often.

'We are not in a campaign to elect a woman,' Karen Petit, who held Ms. Byrne's former job as weights and measures commissioner, said at the time. 'The mayor is a noun that knows no gender.'

from Google News http://#

via IFTTT

Tweet