History
The fight for I&R in Illinois began in 1897, when 250 delegates met in
Chicago to form the Direct Legislation Union. Encouraged by this
organization, the state Democratic Party endorsed I&R, and governor
John Peter Altgeld endorsed it in a Labor Day speech in 1899.
The state legislature, seeking to defuse the I&R agitation without giving
voters any real lawmaking power, passed a “Public Opinion Law” in 1901
which allowed citizens to petition to put non-binding advisory questions on
state or city ballots. It restricted this initiative power further by setting the
signature requirement at 10 percent of registered voters for statewide
measures, and a nearly impossible 25 percent for local measures.
The initiative advocates reorganized as the Referendum League of
Illinois and elected Dr. Maurice F. Doty of Chicago as their leader. The
League employed the advisory petition as a means for citizens to
demand real I&R lawmaking rights. The first two advisory initiatives on the
state ballot called for state and local I&R. Both propositions received 83
percent of the vote – a landslide - on November 4, 1902.
In 1904 the League sponsored a statewide advisory initiative calling for
primary elections to replace nominating conventions, which passed by a
large majority. The League put more advisory initiatives on the state ballot
in the following years: a measure calling for the enactment of a law to
restrict corrupt political practices was passed in 1910 by a margin of
422,000 to 122,000, and a measure to shorten the long, complicated
election ballots was also approved. However, the legislature did not
respond to the people’s wishes except to their demand for primary
elections.
The League put a measure calling for I&R on the ballot a second time
in 1910. Leaders in this campaign included Harold L. Ickes, who later
became secretary of the interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and suffragist
Dr. Anna E. Blount. Illinois voters again demanded I&R, this time by a
resounding 78 percent, but the legislature again ignored the people’s
wishes.
In the four decades following World War II, only one advisory initiative
qualified for the state ballot: a measure calling for tax reduction,
sponsored by Governor James R. Thompson in 1978. Thompson, running
for re-election, was attempting to capitalize on the nationwide popularity
of California’s tax-cutting Proposition 13, which passed in June of that
year. Illinois voters approved the measure and re-elected Thompson, but
no tax cuts resulted.
At the local level, the earliest major I&R battle in Illinois began in 1901
between Progressives and the “traction trust,” as the price-gouging,
politician-bribing streetcar companies were known. In his book Altgeld’s
America, Ray Ginger gives a detailed account of this convoluted
campaign. Between 1902 and 1907, Chicagoans voted on five separate
ballot measures calling for city takeover of the streetcar lines. The voters
consistently endorsed municipal ownership, but were ultimately forced to
settle for a compromise that delayed this goal for 20 years and set up a
system of city regulation in the interim.
At the state constitutional convention in 1920, Progressives waged an
unsuccessful battle for the passage of a statewide I&R amendment. Since
then, little was done to promote the initiative process until the campaigns
by the Coalition for Political Honesty in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1980, the first and only “binding” initiative appeared on Illinois’s
ballot. The initiative reduced the size of the state legislature from 177
members to 118 members. It passed overwhelmingly.
Due to the fact that the Illinois initiative process is so limited and so
difficult, many initiative scholars don’t even count it as an initiative state.
Excerpted from the Initiative & Referendum Almanac by M. Dane Waters.