CAMPAIGN OUTSIDER No place to Hyde Park
By Muhammad Cohen
CHICAGO - On the night that Barack Obama declared victory in the race for the
Democratic presidential nomination, the seeds of his defeat could be seen in
the heart of Obama country, Hyde Park.
Hyde Park is a neighborhood of broad lawns and attractive homes that is part of
but apart from Chicago's South Side, a predominantly black and poor area, a
rough and desperate place. Hyde Park is the home of the University of Chicago,
the oldest Jewish congregation in Chicago the birthplace of Playboy magazine
and the Monsters of the Midway (Chicago Bears). It's also the home of Barack
Obama. Unfortunately, Hyde Park fits
the narrative that we've heard and will keep hearing, that Obama is an elitist
who doesn't understand plain folks.
Founded in the 1850s, Hyde Park runs about two kilometers inland from the shore
of Lake Michigan. It was first popular as a summer retreat for Chicagoans
before bridges were built across the Chicago River to the north of the Loop,
Chicago's center. Attractions from the lakeside stretched along a path of land
between 59th and 60th Streets, known as the Midway. The term midway stuck as
the name for carnivals and circus sideshow areas.
The University of Chicago's American football team played at Stagg Field, just
north of the Midway. In sport's early days, the Maroons earned the nickname
Monsters of the Midway. The Chicago Bears, a pioneering franchise of the
National Football League playing up the lakefront, appropriated the nickname
after the university team faded from glory. Today, a library stands on the site
of the football stadium. "Leave it to the University of Chicago to replace a
perfectly good football stadium with a library," one graduate chided.
Chain reaction
Before it was demolished, Stagg Field helped change the course of history.
Under its seats, physicist Enrico Fermi initiated the first controlled nuclear
reaction. The dawn of the atomic age is marked with an eerie Henry Moore
sculpture entitled "Nuclear Energy" featuring a spherical form that can been
seen as a mushroom cloud, a skull, or a stylized version of the trophy given to
the winner of the Federation Internationale de Football Association's World
Cup.
Neighboring Kenwood, where Obama actually lives, features mansions, such as
Obama's US$1.6 million, three-story Georgian with a dozen windows in front and
porch woodwork in need of a paint job. Originally built for captains of Chicago
industry, Kenwood residents included Julius Rosenwald who took Sears big time
and the Swift family, whose meatpacking company helped transform Chicago into
poet Carl Sandburg's "Hog butcher of the world ... city of big shoulders".
Here and in more modest Hyde Park, there are magnificent homes built by Frank
Lloyd Wright and local architects who didn't quite match Wright's fame. Bill
Veeck, who planted the ivy at Wrigley Field, North Side home of baseball's
Chicago Cubs, then twice owned the South Side White Sox, lived here. So have
author Saul Bellow and Hugh Hefner, who laid out the first issue of Playboy on
his Hyde Park kitchen table.
But around Hyde Park, the South Side experienced an influx poor blacks from the
American South after World War II, party of a larger northward migration. Urban
ills surrounded Hyde Park and crept within. By the 1950s, the University of
Chicago considered leaving town, contemplating a move to California and a
merger with Stanford.
Bunker mentality
When it looked like Hyde Park would succumb to the urban blight surrounding it,
government stepped in. One of the earliest slum clearance projects took out
housing for poor people with the aim of creating an integrated, middle class
neighborhood. Juke joints and dilapidated housing were removed, replaced in one
case with gray brick row houses that form a solid windowless wall across their
frontage. The townhouses don't fit architecturally or aesthetically with their
surroundings, but it was a case of addition by subtraction.
City officials took other steps to help Hyde Park remain an oasis in the midst
of devastation. One of most blatant yet subtle steps was reconfiguring traffic.
Streets were redesignated as one-way, with traffic lights and stop signs were
added. The goal was to keep traffic from the surrounding ghetto areas out of
Hyde Park. It was a potent symbol that Hyde Park would stand apart from the
South Side.
Overall, the neighborhood lost many of its black residents, and certainly most
of its poor ones, replaced with a rainbow of middle class. Hyde Park's
integrated, upmarket character attracted black celebrities including boxer
Muhammad Ali, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and Nation of Islam founder Elijah
Muhammad.
And later, Barack Obama, who lived in a Hyde Park condo apartment before buying
his mansion in 2005. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee finds
himself at the center of the Democratic Party, but, according to critics, apart
from some key constituents. Antagonists say Obama is aligned with the
Chardonnay-sipping, limousine liberal wing of the party. The argument goes that
Obama can't connect to the Democratic Party's blue-collar roots because he's an
elitist who doesn't understand regular folks. Hyde Park, where the local
newspaper is the New York Times, makes a convenient exhibit A.
At one level, elitism is a completely ridiculous charge against a mixed-race
guy who grew up in a one-parent household, sometimes relying on government food
stamps to get by. On the other hand, he's a graduate of Columbia and Harvard,
married to a Princeton grad, and their Hyde Park neighborhood fuels the elitist
narrative.
In his own backyard
From Obama's house at 5050 Greenwood Avenue, you can see the panorama of
pitfalls awaiting his campaign beyond the manicured lawns. Literally in his
backyard, there's 5046 Greenwood, the lot Obama purchased at below-market price
from Tony Rezko. A day after Obama's Tuesday victory speech, a jury convicted
Rezko on corruption charges. Opponents will do their best to tar Obama with
that conviction, a metaphor for the corruption of Illinois politics. It could
stick given that potent reminder on Obama's doorstep.
Obama's house overlooks the Kehilath Anshe Maarav Isaiah Israel Congregation,
now in its 161st year. The congregation traces its ancestry to the purported
first Jewish synagogue in the Midwest, above a dry goods store downtown at
Wells and Lake. Its current home at Greenwood Avenue and Hyde Park Boulevard,
just across the street from Obama, dates to 1924 and was declared an official
Chicago landmark in 1977.
You'd think this happy coincidence might help Obama with Jewish voters. But
architect Alfred Alschuler based his design on a second century Byzantine
synagogue at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. The building has a dome and a
minaret-like tower that looks far more like a mosque than a synagogue, churning
the rumor mill about Obama's closet Islamism. Louis Farrakhan's house a couple
of blocks away, with its two-story stained glass window and Nation of Islam
guards discretely in vehicles outside, go with the flow that Obama is not just
a closet Muslim, but the black candidate, a radical, and out of the mainstream.
The University of Chicago adds to the elitist, egghead flavor. It also serves
as a reminder of an Obama stretch that Republicans have picked up on. Obama's
commonly cited resume states that he was a constitutional law professor at the
university's law school, whereas he was only a lecturer. Republicans win
elections by creating mountains out of molehills, distracting voters from the
mountainous problems Republican rule has wrought.
No romance
The Seminary Bookstore, in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary
within the university campus, is another brick in the elitist facade. It's a
warren of wonder aimed at "the discriminating readers of the Hyde Park
community", according to its website, with an Islamic history section, a
biochemistry section, but no mystery or romance shelves. How highbrow can you
get?
The Hyde Park that Obama wants as part of his narrative can found at Medici, a
famed neighborhood pizza and burger joint on 57th Street. The help, decidedly
working class, wears "Obama Eats Here" tee-shirts. In the great Chicago
tradition, the wooden tables and booths are adorned with carvings from patrons
past. The food is definitely American mainstream, and it's strictly bring your
own for Chardonnay or any other kind of wine or beer. (The lemonade is great.)
I sat with friends at Obama's table, a booth in the back with a sign "five or
more only" written in crayon on a paper plate fragment, thumbtacked to the back
of the nearest booth. As a reminder of the real South Side, a guy standing
outside cadging for change holding a brown paper bag that just might be his own
bottle.
It's sad to think that Obama's electoral fate could come down to being
identified with a burger joint and a beggar, rather than celebration of how far
Barack Obama has come in his life. It's sad to think voters could hold Obama's
journey up from food stamps to make diverse and vibrant Hyde Park his home, the
essence of the American dream, against him. But when has an American
presidential election been anything but depressing?
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the
world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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