(3 of 10)
Louise's Blunder. The mayoral rivals, Louise Hicks, 48, and Massachusetts Secretary of State Kevin White, 37, are both Irish Democrats, and for most of the campaign the issue though muted, was racial. Mrs. Hicks had established herself as the protector of Boston's lower-middle-class whites against forced school integration and black assertiveness in general. While Williams-educated White is no racial radical, he was clearly sympathetic to the ghetto's troubles.
Louise Hicks posed a formidable challenge. Although an amateurish and unattractive campaigner, she had rolled up 69% and 64% of the vote in her last two elections to the school committee; in 1965 she got the biggest citywide vote of any candidate for any office. This year she led a field of ten in the mayoral primary.
White, hardly a dynamic campaigner himself, seemed to be running behind until Louise blundered four weeks ago by promising to increase the salaries of policemen and firemen without raising taxes. The money, she said, would come from Washington. White pointed out that the pay raise would add $26 per $1,000 of assessed value to the tax rate, and thereby captured votes in tax-conscious Irish neighborhoods that had previously gone overwhelmingly for Mrs. Hicks.
In her own South Boston, she had to settle for about 60%, down nearly ten points from her previous showings. In Irish precincts with higher income and education levels, her share of the vote dropped to near 50%. Yankee, Negro and Jewish neighborhoods went decisively for White. Negroes ignored the promptings of black militants to boycott the mayoral election and vote only for Atkins. Though the percentage of eligibles voting was the largest ever for a Boston municipal election, White's plurality of 12,552 out of 192,860 votes cast was one of the smallest in the city's history.
Harvard Social Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew summed it up by saying: "A lot of people voted their prejudices, but more people voted something else." White, more assertive as a victor than as a campaigner, declared: "No man or woman is going to tear this city apart with hate or bigotry or false promises." Mrs. Hicks, more gracious in defeat than in combat, appeared with White on election night to congratulate him and wish him well.
Franks & a Pint. Gary enjoyed no such amity. The city of 178,000 on Lake Michigan has two major industries, steel and Democratic politics, whose byproducts are wide-open vice and only slightly less tangible corruption. The population is mostly blue-collar. The majority of whites remain close in custom and outlook to their foreign origins and suspicious of the Negroes, who make up 55% of the population; many of them have arrived from the South since World War II. The city boasts 54 foreign-language groups, and in the 1964 presidential primary, the white vote went overwhelmingly to George Wallace.
Thus the Democratic bosses were understandably less than elated by the advent of a mayoral candidate who was both Negro and reform-minded, who deplored gambling, prostitution and crooked politics. Hatcher's presence jarred the Democrats so badly that in their primary last May, Mayor Martin Katz was challenged not only by the Negro but by a white segregationist as well. With the white vote split, City Council President Hatcher was able to win the nomination.