Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,725

This is the grave of Otto Kerner.

Born in 1908 in Chicago, Kerner grew up in the Czech immigrant community there. He was a real smart kid and managed to get into Brown, where he graduated in 1930. Wonder what that jump was like, out of the Czech neighborhoods in Chicago and into tony east side Providence. Could investigate this, but there’s plenty more important things to do here. He then went to Trinity College at Cambridge from a year, and then went back to Chicago for Northwestern Law. He graduated and passed the bar in 1934. He married that year into the city’s political elite. In fact, his wife Helena was the daughter of Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago killed the year before in the assassination attempt on FDR in Miami.

Always looking to raise his political career, Kerner joined the National Guard that same year and was still in it when World War II started. That meant combat and thus political opportunities, something many young politicians wanted to take advantage of, so many that Congress and Roosevelt acted to stop sitting congressman from leaving for military service. Kerner did real combat. He was a field artillery officer in the 9th Infantry in North Africa and Italy and then was moved to the Pacific as part of the 32nd Infantry. He got a Bronze Star. By the time the war was over and he was mustered out in 1946, he had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the regular army. He went back into the National Guard until the 1950s and was a major general in the Army National Guard upon his retirement.

Well, Kerner’s commanding officer in the National Guard was a guy named Jacob Arvey. That guy also happened to be the head of the Cook County Democratic Party and thus close to Richard Daley. So let’s just say that this was a good strategy for Kerner to raise his profile among the men in Chicago who mattered. So with the support of the Chicago machine, Kerner was named U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in 1947, staying there until 1954. Then he became a judge in an Illinois court. His major policy issue at this time was reforming adoption law. He also prosecuted the auto executive Preston Tucker for fraud, but he didn’t win that case. What he did manage was to get his name in the papers a lot while also pleasing Daley.

In 1960, Kerner decided to run for governor of Illinois and was Daley’s man. That meant a lot of votes and he blew out the incumbent William Stratton. He was a just fine governor, relatively policy oriented in generally positive ways. Job creation was a big thing for him, and not just in Chicago but on the farms. So he pushed very hard on expanding exports of Illinois grain around the world while also putting people to work in the facilities to move that grain. He traveled to both Europe and Japan to build ties between his state and those markets. He successfully won the contract to bring the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to Illinois. He also was big on building housing and expanding the welfare state. He had a big interest in improving mental health programs and got national attention for this too.

All of this led Lyndon Johnson, in 1967, to name Kerner the head of his National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of the urban riots of these years. It became known as the Kerner Commission. Under Kerner’s leadership, the investigators did a legitimately good job of exploring the obvious issue that white policymakers and journalists and the general public really didn’t want to hear about–systemic racism. Think about that terrible human who suffered from the white family pathology of racism, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It would have been politically expedient for Kerner to just go down that road. That’s certainly where the white public was going. Remember that when Martin Luther King was assassinated, he had a 25 percent approval rating among whites. And Kerner had seen what happened in 1966 when King tried to desegregate housing in Chicago. King said he felt more hate in Chicago than he ever had in Alabama. Maddie and Connor need protection!!! Or Linda and Johnnie in 1966. Anyway, Kerner took this head on. The Commission’s final report stated,

“White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II . . . What white Americans have never fully understood–but what the Black can never forget, is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

The Kerner Commission sold like hot cakes and accomplished very little from a public or politicians who were more interested in white backlash, as they are today. Johnson was annoyed that the report didn’t just say he was great. Then a month after the report was issued, Martin Luther King was assassinated and rioters again headed to the streets. Do you think this led Congress to respond with the kind of funding Kerner urged? Ha, it did not!

For all of this, Johnson appointed Kerner to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 1968. Can you imagine appointing a politician to the courts today? I’d love to see Democrats start doing this again. He stayed there for the next six years.

Unfortunately, Kerner was very much a man of the Chicago machine. So his hand was in the cookie jar. In 1969, federal prosecutors accused the owner of some Chicago race tracks of bribing Kerner. He had been given preferential stock options in 1961, which he then sold for a large profit in 1968. Now, Kerner claimed it was politically motivated. The prosecutors were Republicans. And he did report the profits on his taxes. But he was found guilty, resigned his court seat before he was impeached, and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Kerner was released early because he had cancer and it was a death sentence. He died in 1976, at the age of 67.

Otto Kerner is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other members of the Kerner Commission, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edward Brooke is also in Arlington and so is James Corman. It’s a club! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.