Acceptable losses

If this story has any heroes, Edmund Donoghue, the city's chief medical examiner, is one. Mayor Daley (whose initial public comment on the heat wave was "It's hot ... It's very hot, but let's not blow it out of proportion ... we go to extremes in Chicago. And that's why people like Chicago"), concerned with maintaining the perception that he was a good "manager" who had made Chicago economically efficient while still providing services (and not wanting anything to ruin his coup of luring the Democratic National Convention back to the city in 1996), publicly cast doubt on Donoghue's numbers. "Every day," he said, "people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat."

Resisting immense political pressure from Daley, Donoghue stuck to his guns and insisted that no one who died during the heat wave had died from anything but the heat, an opinion that was later affirmed by medical examiners around the country and by epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Daley's response was to order the Health Department commissioner not to release the numbers of the dead.

Throughout the crisis and when faced with the study the city released afterward, Daley's response was a remarkable blend of political expediency and callousness. He and his officials insisted that the government could not be blamed for the heat. Many in the press, including editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune, took the same tone.

But of course, no one was blaming Daley for the heat. Rather, they were questioning the city's response to a crisis. Eager to paint it as anything but the failure of his administration, Daley attempted to shift the blame to Commonwealth Edison for losing power during the heat wave, and he promised to investigate the utility company.

But Daley's buck-passing seems like small potatoes next to that of his cronies. Klinenberg gives an account of a press conference where one public official after another took to the microphones to lie -- as Fire Commissioner Raymond Orozco did when he said his department "was not overwhelmed by the heat wave" -- or to blame the victims -- as Human Services Commissioner Daniel Alvarez did when he said of the dead, "We're talking about people who die because they neglect themselves. We did everything possible. But some people didn't want to even open their doors to us."

For Klinenberg, Alvarez's quote is key. On the surface, "Heat Wave" appears to be a piece of sociological reporting on a total civic breakdown. The horror of the story Klinenberg tells here, though, is that the Chicago city government operated exactly as a government is intended to operate when it's following the entrepreneurial model.

When saving money takes precedence over providing adequate services, even in an emergency, then we can no longer expect government to do the basic job of saving the lives of citizens in danger. The city health commissioner, Sheila Lyne, perfectly expressed the city's attitude toward the inability of its overwhelmed emergency services to respond to calls when she said, "it wasn't going to matter ... I think the people were going to die anyway."

But as Chief Medical Examiner Donoghue had initially said, there has never been any scientific evidence to suggest that the victims would have died of anything other than the heat. However, Lyne and other proponents of "government as business" can give thanks that, to borrow a line from Ebenezer Scrooge, the dead at least had the grace to decrease the surplus population.

The entrepreneurial government, Klinenberg explains, replaces the idea of government's sacred obligation to care for its citizens (and the care he's talking about includes such basics as emergency medical services, that is, adequate police, fire and paramedic personnel) with a model in which people are expected to act as informed consumers. The trouble, as Klinenberg notes, is that the people most in need of those services -- the old, the sick, those who have outlived family and friends -- are often the least able to access the information they need.

The victims of the heat wave were overwhelmingly poor, old, sick and alone. Equal numbers of blacks and whites died, but blacks died at a higher rate. To illustrate his point, Klinenberg offers a picture of two adjoining neighborhoods: North Lawndale, which suffered some of the heaviest casualties, and Little Village, where the toll was not nearly so pronounced.

Alvarez's description of the people who "didn't want to even open their doors to us" might apply to the residents of North Lawndale. A once-busy section where the original Sears Tower and businesses like Western Electric had provided jobs, North Lawndale saw a precipitous decline when those businesses moved out and many residents followed suit. Today the area is a mass of overgrown vacant lots whose tall grass provides cover to the drug dealers doing business there.

Next Page: Why people were afraid to open their doors

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