An unhappy marriage

The 1971 re-election campaign for 50th Ward Ald. Jack Sperling was comprised of an uneasy alliance of Independent volunteers and Republican precinct captains.

 “We don’t want to talk to them,” a group of captains complained to Sperling one evening, referring to the Independents who were managing the field operation for their candidate and organizing all of the precincts the GOP couldn’t cover on its own, which was a majority of them.

 “You have to talk to them,” Sperling insisted. “We need them.”

 “No, we don’t,” they claimed. “They’re just a bunch of amateurs.”

 While that conversation loudly reverberated through the office, the Independent campaign organizers held a meeting at the other side of the room to discuss the level of precinct work that was being done.

 “He hung up on me,” one Independent volunteer reported when asked what a Republican captain had told her about the progress he was making in his precinct.

 “Do the best you can with the other precincts,” she was told. It was accepted that some of the GOP soldiers were just not going to cooperate with their Independent allies.