Big Daddy

Newspapers and magazines once described Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley as the last 19th century city boss to live in the 20th century. They were wrong. Daley was different: The caricature of a cigar-grubbing back-room dealer, surrounded by his cronies, hardly captures the uniqueness of Daley’s time, place and circumstance. Like Big Bill Thompson and Ed Kelly, Chicago mayors of previous epochs, Daley and his city were synonymous during his years in power, 1955-76. Having achieved absolute control over this city, he was admired as a modern mayor who was taking on “the urban crisis.” Chicago under Mayor Daley was “the city that works.” Reporters, urbanologists, magazine writers and thumb-sucking noodleheads from the foundations trooped to Chicago to learn from him how the American city was to be saved and properly governed.

Then, seemingly overnight, he became a national villain when, in 1968, his cops coursed through the city’s downtown, clubbing protesters over the head with merry if highly injudicious abandon at the Democratic National Convention. Overnight, Daley was converted from model modern mayor to intolerant, dictatorial, recidivistic throwback; illiterate, heartlessly corrupt machine boss; and ethnic brute.

But if what Daley did to the protesters in 1968 seems outrageous, consider what he did to the city’s black population. Under Daley, Chicago was a nightmare city for African Americans, who had to endure police assassinations, redlining, scandalously bad public education, gangsterism, injustice in the courts and discrimination both by city government and by the real estate and business interests whose backing played no small part in keeping the little round man in power until he finally dropped dead from a heart attack in his doctor’s office in 1976.

Mayor Daley has been dead for 24 years, and what makes him a person of enduring interest is his treatment of hundreds of thousands of African Americans who lived in Chicago with him. Pastors in the churches sometimes likened the African American experience in the city to that of the Jews in Egypt. Daley was their “American Pharaoh.”

Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor quite properly zero in on Daley and race relations. The central topic of their book is how Daley used his considerable power to box off, emasculate, baffle, contain, keep off, keep down and keep separate the city’s black and white people. It was as wrong as it was foolish, but he kept at it for the 20-plus years he ruled what was then the nation’s second-largest city.

No doubt about it, Cohen and Taylor know the truth about Daley. But what they seem unable to do is bring him to life on the page; no easy job, of course, because Daley let few people into his home, near his family or close to him. I remember spending a grim hour or two with Daley, trying to convince him to change course on his racial policies when I was what you’d call today a young activist. He struck me not as inscrutable but as impenetrable. I got nowhere. He sat behind his very clean desk, looking back at me, showing nothing, rubbing his hands together, not rapidly, but relentlessly. The place on his right hand where his left thumb rubbed against was raw. I left having had no effect on him whatsoever.

Similarly unable to see into his soul, Cohen and Taylor have had to content themselves with the outer aspects of his life: his Irish Catholicism, his lifelong love of the old neighborhood, his passion for Chicago and the political life. These elements are competently set out, but the authors are not able to evoke this once colorful and dynamic city and, though they try, they don’t have the heart for Chicago’s Irish Catholicism. They write as though it were all grim, gray, guilty Jansenism and, though they are fair-minded and balanced, they neither love their subject nor have the sort of sympathy for his world from which insight springs.

Cohen and Taylor concentrate, as many another before them has, on Daley’s sisyphean struggle to keep Chicago the nation’s most segregated large city. Ironically, even if he had done nothing, Chicago would have remained thoroughly segregated. Whites were leaving this city and others in huge numbers because of racial fears and because they looked on their houses and their neighborhoods as old-fashioned and obsolete. The living was better--a lot better--elsewhere. It would be a generation before a significant number of African Americans, despite the hell Daley put them through, would have the jobs and the money to follow them to the suburbs.

*

Nevertheless, the issue of the city’s declining population was joined over the question of segregated housing, a dilemma that could not be satisfactorily resolved under the social and economic realities of the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr., who brought his movement to Chicago, made his campaign there pivot on integration--of which there was none--instead of on schools, housing and jobs. It was obvious to many black Chicagoans then that integration was actually a secondary issue. Though African Americans didn’t want to be walled up and kept out of places where others could go, in the practical realm, they mostly wanted good neighborhoods, good homes, good jobs, good city services and good schools. Yet, outmaneuvered by Daley and befuddled by the dynamics of a northern metropolis, King failed in Chicago and slunk out of town.

The authors know this, and they say it, but they can’t make it come to life. They can’t describe what those double-shift black schools were like, where the children were taking classes in basements, sitting next to ancient boilers under pipes with ripped asbestos insulation and dangling lightbulbs. The reader is told about Daley’s nefarious public housing, miles of high-rise buildings, all done in Stalin Alley style; the reader is told about Flop Charlie, the crooked slum operator Daley put in charge of public housing, but none of it gets off the page to attack the imagination as it should so that one can picture what it was like to live in a place like the Robert Taylor Homes and hear the ping of the occasional gunshot over the moldering basketball courts, where the elevators never worked and the non-psychotic, noncriminal tenants had to carry their groceries up 10 flights of stairs around each landing of which there might be a stabbing, somebody shooting up or a man and woman copulating.

With so many people fleeing such dismal situations in cities around the Midwest, the market for slum housing slumped so badly that landlords in Chicago, New York and elsewhere were abandoning their properties or torching them. Hence the need for a huge public housing program was debatable at best, but Daley, a true monumentalist, liked to pour concrete. Beside the teat from which money, the mother’s milk of politics, flows is the rear end of a contractor’s cement mixer. The last element in Daley’s public housing program was his idee fixe that, if he could build enough housing in the Black Belt, he could keep the African American populations incarcerated in their own neighborhoods and the white people would stay. It was nuts, but he believed it heart and soul.

Now, of course--and who is to say if it’s irony or some kind of justice?--Daley’s son, the present mayor of Chicago, is toppling, brick by brick, every building his father built. He has taken it upon himself to rectify the father’s crime and turn the Chicago public schools into institutions of learning. For those not familiar with the baleful history of Chicago public education, in the old man’s era, schools for African American children were so overcrowded that they were on double shift and still had to hold classes in boiler rooms and supply closets while, a mile away, schools in white areas might have as few as two children to a classroom.

Cohen and Taylor have compiled Daley’s record as it was known in his lifetime. You’re not going to learn anything new about him in “American Pharaoh,” nothing that was not common knowledge among people who followed Chicago politics and has not already been described by Mike Royko, Eugene Kennedy, Milton Racove and John Allswang in their books on Daley. Nor are readers given any understanding of how Chicago became an extreme example of the racial policies and practices found in all cities, except to be told that Daley was the boss of an invincible political machine.

The authors devote a little space to speculating on the Irish talent for political organization. They recognize that Daley inherited his political organization, which was founded in the 1920s by a Bohemian (Czech) Protestant. Yet the system of tight internal controls that made the Cook County (which encompasses Chicago) Regular Democratic Organization quite different from organizations elsewhere owes its existence to the genius of Anton Cermak, whom Daley probably modeled himself after. Cermak invented procedures of centralized control which were handed down to Daley who, having cut his teeth as a youngster in the closed sphere of organizational politics, knew well enough how to use them.

The ethnic makeup of Chicago was such that the Irish politicians had to learn that if they favored their own to the exclusion of all others they would keep the Democratic Party in the state of boiling chaos it was in when Cermak took it over and composed the differences between warring ethnic political factions. Cermak practiced coalition politics. But it was a thoroughly corrupt practice. Cermak taught them that you get no boodle unless you go shares with the boodle.

By the mid-1950s, however, when Daley made his way into the dual offices of mayor and party chairman, old-time political organizations such as Cermak’s were falling to pieces. New York’s Tammany Hall was going out of business, as were the Republican organization in Philadelphia and the operations of Ed Crump in Memphis and Frank (“I am the law”) Hague in Jersey City. The social foundations upon which these organizations were built had shifted.

So the question needs to be asked: If Daley and his operation were not sustained by methods and procedures of old-time political organizations, how did he and his administration hang on so long and so smoothly? It was simple: He had no opposition. The Republican Party had vanished from Chicago. It ceased to exist. In fact, there was a positive prohibition against making a serious run for the mayor’s office. (I know of at least one Republican candidate who ran for mayor in that period who had the law laid down for him by the Republican bigwigs: He was not to raise more than $150,000 for his campaign or he had no future in the party.) Republicans ran against Daley only to mislead people into thinking that there were two parties and real elections in Chicago. In Daley’s time, Illinois Republicanism had become all-white and all-suburban. It was probably cheaper, and it certainly was easier, to buy influence and favors from the one party left in the city than to try to start again in Chicago, a task for which the GOP of that era had little taste or inclination.

Once upon a time, there had been an effective two-party system in Chicago. “The Blond Boss,” William Lorimer, had run a Republican machine on the city’s southwest side, and there had been other effective Republican organizations on the northside, but after Daley’s first election, they gave up trying. Or rather, Daley bought the Republican money interests off with everything from low tax assessments to land giveaways. While the rest of the city went to hell in a handbasket, the downtown Republican money people got whatever they wanted.

Cohen and Taylor never quite grasp these details, which were the underpinnings of Daley’s power. They narrate Daley’s quid for the rich Republicans’ quo, but they don’t explain the part this played in turning Chicago into a one-party, no-election city. So, of course, the bandwagon--anachronism that it was--rolled on. And Daley’s crime became the businessmen’s crime and the Republicans’ crime. As they sat on Daley’s blue-ribbon committees, they allowed hundreds of thousands of African American children to grow up unschooled. One of them even sat as chairman on Daley’s school board.

You could go miles in Chicago and not find an election precinct with a Republican campaign worker. Although the black vote had once elected Republican mayors in Chicago, the party abandoned African Americans in municipal elections, and when they did sporadically appear in the city’s black belt for national elections, it was with flying squads of lawyers and investigators to catch ballot box stuffers.

The cost to those who grew up ignorant and unskilled needs no spelling out. This year once again, in Illinois and elsewhere, the Republicans will pay for their abandonment of African American voters. As for Chicago, it has a shiny downtown that may or may not compensate for its continuous population loss and its subsidence into a city whose past is more interesting than its future. That is the final significance of Richard J. Daley’s life. I wish Cohen and Taylor had made that clear.