The Nation: Court Decree

It was business as usual in Illinois. All week long, the Democratic office seekers trooped to the specially reserved rooms in Chicago’s Sherman House hotel or in the St. Nicholas in downstate Springfield to pledge fealty and plead for places on the party slate. Finally, the state’s dozen or so top Democrats gathered, as they always do, in the smallish Sherman House office of the Cook County chairman, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Last week, almost four months before the state primary, King Richard’s court announced the Democratic nominees.

If any proof was needed that the Daley machine is still running as smoothly and insensitively as ever, there was the renomination of State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, an old Daley crony who is under state indictment for his role in the police raid that left Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark dead in a blood-spattered Chicago apartment two years ago. Senator Adlai Stevenson 111 was so outraged at Han-rahan’s political reprieve that he took an unusual step for graduates of the Sherman House ritual: he publicly condemned the nomination.