In 1948 Abner Mikva had just started law school. He walked into the 8th Ward Regular Democratic headquarters in Chicago to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas. The ward committeeman asked him, “Who sent you, kid?” Mikva said, “Well, nobody sent me.” The answer came back: “Well, we don’t want nobody nobody sent.”
Mikva later served in Congress and became a federal appeals judge. The same words became the title of Milton Rakove’s 1979 oral history of the Daley-era Chicago machine. In it, Jacob Arvey gives his advice for getting out the vote: “put people under obligation to you.”