Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “Bess told me that Eleanor never really noticed her surroundings,” Margaret said to me after they returned from Washington. “But I think Bess feels, now that she has a home of her own, she’s going to put her own stamp on it. Spiff the place up a bit. Let it reflect her taste. The Midwestern aristocracy. Wall to wall carpeting and sofas stuffed with down feathers.”

  In October I went to Washington with Ed. He was meeting with the head of the new housing authority that was meant to deal with the terrible shortage of homes for returning veterans. And in Chicago’s case, for the tens of thousands of Negroes who were moving up to the city from the South. Ed had already gotten a chunk of federal money in 1937 and appointed the Chicago Housing Authority to spend it. William Dawson had recommended a Negro businessman named Robert Taylor to be head of the board. And somewhere Ed had met a social worker called Elizabeth Wood, whom he’d appointed to run the CHA along with a clutch of patronage workers who mostly just stayed out of her way.

  The first housing project, Altgeld Gardens, was on the South Side. Now I’d met and admired Elizabeth Wood, but her parents had been missionaries in Japan. In fact she had been born there. She’d reminded me a lot of Jane Addams and the women who’d worked at Hull House. Full of good intentions but sure they knew what was best for “the people.” Elizabeth insisted on interviewing every family before they were allowed to move into their apartment. She wanted to make sure that the mother had the requisite housekeeping skills, and she was emphatic about the ethnic mix. So many Irish, so many Italians, so many Germans, so many Jews, so many Negroes. And she’d done a good job, I’d have to admit. Altgeld Gardens was a lovely place with big sunny apartments and gardens that the tenants cultivated themselves. The second development, Bridgeport Homes, a group of row houses in our old neighborhood, was even nicer. It really looked as if the government was going to do something right. That the citizens of Chicago would have decent places to live.

  But I knew when Ed invited my camera and me along on the trip to Washington it was because he needed to flatter somebody. “Here,” he’d say, “do you mind if we took a photograph together that I could hang on the wall in my office in city hall?” And of course the fellow would smile and whatever Ed was asking for he’d usually get.

  On this trip Ed’s target was the fellow in charge of the entire federal housing project with a budget in the billions. A good man according to Elizabeth Wood, but Ed was finding him too rigid in the requirements he imposed on the contractors Ed was hiring. Herman Strauss had made headlines by promising that public housing would be built at half the cost expended in the private sector. No frills in these government dwellings, he’d vowed. Not a penny of taxpayers’ money would be wasted.

  “Why not?” Ed had said to me on the train down to Washington. “Why is he being such a tightwad? It’s not his money and the Congress will just take back what isn’t spent. Why not make these apartments nice? Believe me there’s not much real difference in the cost. Better to do a good job even if it takes a little longer.”

  “And hire bigger crews of construction workers,” I said.

  “Well, there is that,” he said.

  “That” was always in the front of Ed’s mind. Jobs. During the war the Defense plants had employed hundreds of thousands. But now those positions were gone. The city was lurching back into a peacetime economy, but government contracts were still the surest way toward employment. The number of houses being built in Chicago had dipped down into almost nothing during the Depression, and though developers like Merrion were ratcheting up construction, nothing beat a check from Uncle Sam.

  And it wasn’t just wages these projects represented, but tons of cement, miles of pipes, truckloads of bricks. A bonanza.

  “This guy Strauss is such a typical bureaucrat,” Ed had said. “Only cares about making himself look good. Big on cutting the budget. Doesn’t really give a damn about what that means to people. It’s all numbers with these fellows.”

  Which was proving to be the case as we sat in his office. “Now let’s talk about location,” Strauss said. A bureaucrat no question. This small man wore a suit I’d already passed four or five times in the halls of this federal office building. Ed had introduced me as his aide but Strauss had taken no notice of me. He had a map of Chicago pinned up on the wall.

  “Now”—he pointed to a swath of land along Madison on the West Side—“all this is substandard housing. Landlords have been dividing what were three-bedroom apartments into four so-called studios, with a hot plate for a kitchen and a bathroom in the hallway. Unfortunately, Negroes coming from the South are so desperate they take anything on offer. We’ve put out feelers to these landlords and they are more than willing to sell. And we can move ahead with demolition fairly soon but…” He pointed a bit east of the area. “We’re meeting resistance here. People are refusing to sell.”

  “That’s an Italian neighborhood,” Ed said. “Those people own their own homes.”

  “Which are substandard,” he said.

  “Couldn’t they be fixed up? Repaired?” Ed asked.

  “That’s not the model we’re working from. This office has been tasked with slum clearance. That’s our mandate.”

  “But there’s plenty of vacant land throughout the city and some really depressed areas. Why not let me make a survey and tell you where to put the housing?” he asked Strauss.

  “May I remind you, sir, that I have studied housing projects in Europe and New York? I have a team of experts that are working with me and input from amateurs such as you would not be helpful.”

  Geeze Louise, I thought. I’d noticed a model of six high-rise buildings on a cabinet behind his desk and now had to ask, “Are these what you’re proposing to build in the city?”

  “Yes,” Strauss said.

  “It looks like a prison complex. Why not build low-rise town houses the way the Chicago Housing Authority did in Bridgeport and Altgeld? Or at least keep the buildings under six stories,” I said.

  “I’ll have you know, madam, that Mies van der Rohe himself approved these plans.”

  Ed shook his head. “Don’t you think it would be better to have buildings that would fit in with the old neighborhood?”

  “You’re missing the point. There will be no old neighborhood. We’re creating new neighborhoods. New communities. Cities within cities where the poor will finally be housed.”

  “But without frills?” I said. “In these grain storage elevators?” The way he said “the poor” made me squirm. No one poorer than the Kellys when Granny and Aunt Máire stepped off the canal boat into Hardscrabble, Bridgeport’s original name, with eight children and no money. Run out of their own country by bureaucrats like this man who wanted to manage the poor. I know, I thought. He is a New Dealer and building affordable housing is an important and worthy project. But why not make the homes appealing, as Ed said, and put them throughout the city? Strauss was not listening to us.

  “If you don’t want these multi-million-dollar projects all funded by the federal government built in your city, I’m sure Detroit, or Cleveland, or Indianapolis would be happy to accept our plans,” he said.

  “Please, Mr. Strauss, I’m just asking that you be open to some local input,” Ed said.

  Now Ed didn’t realize it but his career in politics was ending right there in this fellow’s office. In a few months, the clearances began. Families were turned out. Houses demolished. There were no places to put these people while waiting for the “urban renewal” to begin. Veterans were especially vulnerable. Ed twisted a few arms until emergency housing was put up near Midway Airport. A Negro veteran and his family moved into one of the units. He had been in the Battle of the Bulge. The white people in the neighborhood went nuts. Shocking. I mean this fellow had defended our country. Didn’t matter to the crowds that gathered to throw stones at the house. Let “the niggers” in and the value of all their brick bungalows would go down. Ed sent the cops in to stop the riot and protect the family. He went down t
here himself. Made a statement that was carried on the radio. “All law-abiding citizens may be assured of their right to live peacefully anywhere in Chicago,” he said. The right thing to say no question, but the alderman from that district got on the radio himself. The mayor was naive. The mayor was out of touch. Let the Negroes live in Bronzeville or on the West Side. Put up housing for them there.

  The city council voted to take over the Chicago Housing Authority. Ed tried to fight back. He’d battled them before and won but this was different. He was stepping outside of the tribe. William Dawson backed him, and maybe if Pat Nash had been alive to defend Ed … But “open housing” became a slur aimed at the mayor. The party would drop him in two years. His time as mayor would end in 1947.

  Of course Ed didn’t know any of this when we left Washington. He’d gotten so many projects up and running. Look at the subway. A miracle! He could outmaneuver this fellow Strauss too. “The important thing is that we don’t create ghettos,” he said. Other big plans in the works, too.

  “We’ve taken over the site of the Orchard Place Ford plant. We’ll be able to have direct service to Europe as well,” Ed said to me as we rode home on the train. “You’ll see ORD listed as the destination for flights from all over the country, all over the world.”

  “You should name it Edward J. Kelly International Airport,” I said.

  Ed laughed.

  “That would be a sure way to get the project killed all together,” he said. “No, I was thinking of calling it O’Hare Airport after the young Navy pilot killed in the Battle of Midway. His father was Al Capone’s lawyer. Word is that the father traded his testimony against Capone for his son’s appointment to Annapolis. For all kinds of reasons no one in the council will oppose that name,” Ed said.

  Chicago, I thought. His second big idea was to propose Chicago as the headquarters of the international association of all the countries in the world that was being called the United Nations. It made sense. No victory over the Nazis and Japanese without the manufacturing might of the Midwest. Plus we were America while New York, the other contender, was New York, a separate entity. Ed thought the site of the Century of Progress would be perfect for the new institution. Ed said, “Imagine the jobs the place would generate, first in construction but the whole world would come to us. Diplomats, translators, bureaucrats buying homes, shopping, eating in our restaurants, hiring maintenance people, secretaries. A chance to know Chicago the beautiful.”

  Ed was planning to lead a delegation of politicians and business people to London to present our case to an executive committee that was to decide where the headquarters would be located. American Airlines offered to inaugurate a nonstop flight from Chicago to London for the group over Thanksgiving. And I’m going to be on that flight, I thought as we got off the train. I had my own plans.

  NOVEMBER 18, 1945

  “I want to go to London with you, Ed,” I said. “And then take you to Ireland. You can’t imagine what it feels like to stand on the piece of Irish soil that belonged to the Kellys. Step into the waters of Galway Bay at the very spot where Granny Honora was born.”

  We were celebrating Mary Pat’s first birthday at Mike and Mariann’s small house in Merrionette Manor. I hadn’t realized how loud I was talking until all activity in the dining room stopped. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.” I looked over at the one-year-old sitting up in a highchair. If the development of little humans wasn’t so common, the front pages of newspapers would be full of headlines. She walks! She talks! I’d watched Mike’s child take her first steps holding on to the old coffee table, one of the few pieces Rose had saved from the house in Argo. Both Rose and I had used Ed’s car and driver to visit the two families who shared this attached house. Neither of them had a car.

  Every day Mike took a long bus ride to the advertising agency in the Loop, where he worked. Not the career he’d planned. Mike had told me that he had intended to go back to DePaul University for a law degree and then follow Ed into politics. I was there in the office two months before in mid-September when he’d come in to discuss his plans. Just out of the Navy. Back in Chicago. Ed had arranged for Mike to come in to him at the same time Joseph Kennedy and his son Jack were visiting. He and Ed were friendly enough now that Ed had helped Kennedy buy the Merchandise Mart and had arranged that the huge complex, the biggest office building in the world, would remain nonunion. How Ed, who was the champion of unions, managed that I never knew. Lots of secret meetings and no photographer required.

  Both Jack Kennedy and Mike had still been in uniform. The war was over but no one had been demobilized. Such a funny word, especially in the way it was shortened to “demobbed.” Removed from the group? Leaving the crowd? All these fellows who’d been part of this tremendous movement, marching in step with millions of others, had been cut loose now. I’d heard from Colonel Duggan, who’d commanded the Marines in Derry. He’d gone to the South Pacific, as had many of his men. Iwo Jima, Saipan, Okinawa—names none of us had heard before that now were part of the national vocabulary. Still we civilians had no real sense of what they had faced. The living and the dead. All the boys coming home from somewhere we could never travel. Here were two of these returning heroes in the flesh, though of course they would never let me call them heroes to their faces. When I’d told Mike he was a hero he’d bitten my head off. The real heroes were the ones who didn’t make it home, he’d said.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’d thought, what a good-looking pair. Hard to believe only one generation before their grandparents had been starved out of Ireland. Running for their lives. Jack hadn’t changed much from the skinny sixteen-year-old I’d met on the train in Florida. Didn’t look like he weighed much more, but then Ed had told me Jack was still recovering from the—now I have to say “heroic”—rescue of the crewmen he commanded on the PT boat the Japanese had sunk. He’d led the survivors on a brutal four hour swim through the shark-infested waters to a tiny island. Jack had towed one badly burned sailor, clenching the strap of the man’s life jacket in his teeth. For six days Joe and Rose thought they’d lost another son to the war.

  I’d put the two young naval officers next to each other with Ed on one side of them and Joseph Kennedy on the other.

  “Don’t know if I want to stand this close to a flyboy,” Jack had said.

  “Well at least my uniform doesn’t still smell of salt water,” Mike had replied, and the two boys laughed.

  Joseph Kennedy hadn’t even smiled but then his oldest son had been a pilot. Dead.

  Jack had looked at me. “Wait,” he’d said. “You were the photographer on the president’s train. Weren’t you somehow involved in saving Roosevelt—”

  His father had cut him off. “I sometimes wish that Zangara had been a better shot. John Nance Garner might have been a decent-enough president and then some Republican would have been elected in 1940 who would have figured out a way to outmaneuver Hitler,” he’d said.

  “My dad has a strange sense of humor,” Jack had said to us.

  Ed had a kind of bar in a closet in the corner of the office. Nothing fancy. A table with a collection of bottles and glasses. He’d walked over there, opened the door and looked at the other men. “Irish?” Ed had said.

  “I prefer scotch,” Joe had said. You would, I thought. But Jack had said he was glad to see Ed had Jameson and he’d like his neat, and Mike ordered the same. I’d been a little nervous when I saw Ed pour himself a shot. He handed each of us a glass.

  “Sláinte,” Ed said.

  Jack had smiled at me. “The Irish word for health, right?” He really had remembered me. Ed had directed the men to the corner of the office where Margaret had set up as a kind of sitting area. The two young men sat together on the leather couch while Joe and Ed took the high-backed wing chairs on each side of the coffee table.

  “What now, fellows?” Ed had asked.

  “I suppose I’ll finish law school first and then, well,” Mike had said.

  “Jack’s runnin
g for Congress,” Kennedy had said, interrupting Mike. “There’s a seat opening up in ’46. I’m putting together a team now.”

  “But,” I’d started. I hadn’t been invited to sit down with the men so I’d drunk my whiskey down and was near the door when I’d heard Kennedy’s statement. “But,” I’d said again, “what happened to giving each one of your kids a million dollars so they could become poets?”

  “Jack can do some writing. His senior paper about England’s lack of preparation for war is being published and now he’s going to write an account of PT 109,” Joe Kennedy had said.

  “I’m not, Dad, I told you,” Jack had said.

  “Well somebody is and you’ll collaborate,” his father said.

  “Dad has a team,” Jack had said and looked at Mike, who’d shrugged. Is that what happens now? I’d wondered. Bad enough that old men send young men to war, but would they then take credit for their victories? Find ways to capitalize on their service?

  “I think our generation does have a responsibility to make a difference,” Mike had said. Their generation. Both these young men were not yet thirty but had already survived the Great Depression and world war. Surely they deserved the miracle of normal life. Mike was over the moon about his baby daughter. Why not embrace peace and the time to enjoy it? But both Mike and Jack had been fidgeting on the couch. Jack had tapped his toe on the Oriental rug Margaret had used to create this island in Ed’s office, while Mike had shifted forward on the couch ready to make his argument. Joe and Ed had leaned back, resting their heads against the places where these leather chairs were already stained from hair tonic and sweat. Power. They both had it. Now they were inviting their own flesh and blood. To claim it so they could pass it on to their sons.