Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  In the end, however, Daley’s populist rhetorical talents were mere icing on the cake. It was the machine, in all its organizational splendor, that pushed him over the top in what was a relatively close election by Chicago standards. The machine, as always, supplied Daley with a large financial edge and a veritable army of campaign workers, who, under the leadership of precinct captains, local fixers whose position depended on their ability to produce votes, pursued their objective through a range of illicit activities: from fraud to blackmail, to physical intimidation and worse. This was, of course, an old Chicago tradition. But what was somewhat new—and, in a sense, modern—about the machine’s campaign tactics under Daley was the very deft exploitation of white racial fears. Commenting on this campaign years later, famed Chicago journalist Mike Royko claimed: “Even before the phrase ‘white backlash’ was coined, the machine knew how to use it.”14 And it knew how to use it in a manner that barely even jeopardized black votes—due to the long reach of the machine into neighborhoods, up doorsteps, and into the very living rooms and kitchens of potential voters. The machine’s precinct captains could lean on scores of residents in their neighborhoods who were indebted to them for a job or any of a long list of political favors and services. This extensive network of loyal supporters enabled Daley to play a double game with the race issue.

  Thus, while Daley avoided making any public statements that painted him as unsympathetic to the plight of black Chicagoans, his operatives were spreading the word behind the scenes that he was no friend to racial integration. This message was transmitted, in part, through a shameless smear campaign to stir up racial concerns about his opponent. Machine cadres, for example, circulated letters in white neighborhoods from a bogus organization called the American Negro Civic Association urging residents to vote for Merriam because he would make sure blacks found proper housing throughout the city. They also spread rumors that Merriam’s first wife, who was born in France, was part black. Even though many people realized this was all pretty much a sham, they understood that the machine’s involvement in such shenanigans meant that its candidate was no civil rights crusader. Not only were Daley and his people precocious in their understanding of backlash politics, but they were also ahead of their time in their use of “coded” language to appeal to angry white voters on racial issues without really saying anything specific that could raise the ire of black voters.

  FIGURE 8. Richard J. Daley celebrates his first mayoral election victory in 1955. Richard J. Daley Collection, RJD_04_01_0012_0002_025, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.

  Hence, despite the endorsement of Chicago’s largest newspapers, which gave Merriam’s charges of corruption and bossism front-page exposure, Merriam amassed only 589,555 votes to Daley’s 708,222. But the election was much closer than it looked. The candidates ran evenly in most of the city, with Daley’s margin of victory lying in his overwhelming dominance in the machine’s core wards—referred to by political commentators as the “automatic eleven.” In the five black wards that Dawson controlled, Daley had garnered a nearly 50,000-vote margin; with the votes for him in several other black wards, the total black contribution to Daley’s victory was a decisive 103,000 votes.15

  Later that same year, African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, most of whom had been disenfranchised by terror and administrative chicanery, would begin a powerful bus boycott that would help to launch a movement for civil rights aiming to renew American democracy. Southern blacks, with some help from the Supreme Court, were pushing themselves across a new threshold of modernity, pulling the nation along with them. And as Adam Green has argued, African Americans in Chicago were, in this very same moment, developing a new consciousness of their connection to a larger national black community that spanned both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—a bond soldered by the revelation of Chicago-native Emmett Till’s brutal murder in rural Mississippi, where he had allegedly dared to flirt with a white woman while visiting relatives in August 1955; the experience of beholding the images of fourteen-year-old Till’s mangled, bloated body, exposed sensationally in the pages of the Chicago-based black publication Jet, produced, according to Green, a “moment of simultaneity” between blacks all over the country that laid the foundations for the northern civil rights struggle in the 1960s.16 Viewed in the light of these circumstances, the key role played by Chicago blacks in the election of Richard J. Daley appears an act of epic historical irony—even more so because Daley himself stood not for a return to the old order or even a maintenance of the status quo. Rather, the new mayor was a zealous modernizer. He would move almost immediately to upgrade Chicago’s transportation infrastructure, make Chicago one of the first cities to fluoridate its water, and bring in a battalion of state-of-the-art street cleaners that enabled the city to remove ten thousand more tons of street dirt (the calculation of such a figure in itself suggests the logic of linear, scientific progress in operation). In Daley’s Chicago, Bauhaus planners sponsored by modernist architectural trendsetter Ludwig Mies van der Rohe would design high-rise housing projects in an effort to provide more efficient housing for ghetto-dwelling blacks. Of course it was impossible for Chicago blacks to have known that they were helping to elect a man who would preside over the invention of the modern black hyperghetto, but it would not take long before they understood their place in the new order.

  WRECKING MACHINE

  To the untrained eye, it might seem contradictory that Richard J. Daley—a Democrat who had come of age politically in a moment when the Democratic Party defined itself as the defender of society’s disadvantaged—would manage a city that so clearly relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. “My dad came out of the Roosevelt era and the Depression,” Daley’s son Richard M. Daley would later claim. “One person and one party made a difference in his life—that’s what everybody forgot when they called my father and other people political bosses.”17 Although Richard J. Daley’s legacy would be marked by his truculence in the face of civil rights protests, his “shoot-to-kill” order after rioters took to the streets in anger over Martin Luther King’s assassination, his unabashed will to turn the full wrath of police repression against student demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and his general unwillingness to alter the processes making Chicago the most segregated city in the United States, more recent accounts, many from people close to him and his son, have complicated Daley’s place in the pantheon of backlash cranks. Daley, some have pointed out, initially preferred the construction of much more humane, four-story housing projects to the alienating high-rise complexes that would come to dominate large swaths of the city, and he even travelled to Washington on two occasions to plead, ultimately unsuccessfully, for the additional funding that would make this possible.18 Some of Daley’s apologists, moreover, have claimed that he genuinely believed he was acting as a New Deal liberal should when he authorized the expenditure of government funds to move blacks out of deteriorating slums and into new apartment buildings. Put such facts together with his close ties to liberal Democratic icons like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and Daley seems not so implausible as a New Deal–style Democrat after all.

  Yet to understand Daley in these ideological terms is to completely misunderstand the Chicago machine system that gave meaning to his every move. In one of the most definitive studies of the Daley machine to date, sociologist and political insider Milton Rakove described the machine’s raison d’être as “essentially nonideological.” “Its primary demands on its members are,” he claimed, “loyalty and political efficiency. In return, it carries out its obligations by providing its members with jobs, contacts, contracts, and its own ‘social security’ system.”19 While Daley would become renowned for his humorously botched phrases—one of the more colorful was “the police are not here to create disorder, they are here to preserve disorder”—much more emblematic of his political acumen was his oft-quoted maxim: “good government is good politics.”r />
  This idea more than any vague notion of liberalism, democracy, civic duty, or even human compassion guided Daley’s decision to approve the construction of two adjoining strips of high-rises—Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes—that would together constitute the world’s longest and largest housing project of its time. By the late 1950s, after the blueprints for these projects had been hashed out, one would have been hard-pressed to find anyone able to make a convincing argument that this seemingly endless, four-mile corridor of almost indistinguishable concrete slab structures, all occupied exclusively by blacks, would not create a ghetto far more sinister than the one it was replacing. But to build such structures was good government in Daley’s eyes, because of the immense political benefits that would accrue from doing so. Not only would this housing “solution” be useful for steering clear of the thorny issue of racial integration, but also, thanks to Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, the federal government would be heavily subsidizing the work. In effect, a flow of capital would move through the mayor’s office, where it would be magically transformed into patronage—the jobs and contracts that lubricated the machine and made it run. When Daley took office, the city of Chicago employed nearly 40,000 people. If, according to Rakove’s estimate, each patronage job handed out translated into some ten votes from family members and friends, this meant that the Daley machine would enter each election with a lead of roughly 400,000 votes. But federally subsidized public works projects of the magnitude of those that built Chicago’s numerous high-rise housing projects offered the possibility of expanding the machine’s patronage resources even more while drawing very little from the city budget. For every hard hat on the job, for every light bulb and bolt, for every inspector and supervisor, the machine was expanding its base exponentially.

  FIGURE 9. Stateway Gardens at 35th and S. Federal, ca. 1958. Chicago Architectural Photographing Company. Chicago Photographic Collection, CPC_01_C_0282_006, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.

  This patronage system had of course been fundamental to machine politics long before Daley had entered public life, but Daley’s great coup lay in understanding the need to take the system to another level and to reconfigure it so that he held all the cards. Patronage, it must be remembered, was under threat in 1955. Reformers had gained the upper hand in many major U.S. cities, and, as was demonstrated by the favorable press coverage of both Kennelly and Merriam’s anticorruption campaigns, even Chicago seemed ready for reform. More importantly, however, the city had entered a period of economic decline, which threatened to reduce the budget and with it the reservoir of patronage resources at the machine’s disposal. Generous federal government programs providing subsidized long-term loans to veterans and other potential middle-class homeowners had sparked a massive migration to the suburbs, and Chicago, like many other cities, was witnessing the flight of people and jobs into the rapidly growing outlying areas, where the American dream of a home of one’s own on a plot of green could be realized. What was happening to Chicago was part of a much larger story of deindustrialization and metropolitan sprawl that began sucking the life out of the urban core beginning in the late 1940s. The future was not broad shoulders and smokestacks but white collars and air-conditioned offices, a situation emblematized as early as 1955, when Chicago lost its claim as “hog butcher of the world” to the city of Omaha, Nebraska.20 Yet the real estate and service activities that would eventually make the city prosperous again were, by the mid-1950s, far from being able to compensate for the declining manufacturing sector. When Daley took office, housing construction had come to a virtual standstill; only one major structure, the Prudential Building, had recently been added to the downtown skyline; retail sales at the swanky Loop department stores were falling fast; and real estate values in the downtown area had still not recovered from the 13 percent hit they had taken between 1939 and 1947.21 Moreover, with the black ghetto converging on the Loop from the south, business leaders were bracing for the worst. The Chicago of Daley’s first term was not at all the bustling, vibrant city it would become by the end of his second. It was more akin to the Chicago of Nelson Algren’s gritty 1951 novel City on the Make, a landscape of sordid gin joints and dingy alleys peopled by stew bums, swindlers, crooked politicians, and gangsters. Being a part of this city was, Algren famously quipped, “like loving a woman with a broken nose.”22

  Chicago’s new mayor took such insults personally. A poignant Daley anecdote, whether the stuff of legend or truth, captures the bare-knuckled intensity of his investment in the city’s livelihood: the mayor once stopped his car so he could get out and, with his bodyguard looking on beside him, dispose of a piece of litter he had seen a pedestrian drop on the sidewalk. Yet for Daley, the goal of renewing Chicago was inextricably bound up with his own objective of holding on to power, and his political education told him that his hold on power was contingent on preserving and controlling the supply of patronage he could spread around. His first order of business was to bring patronage under his complete control in two ways that broke sharply with machine tradition. Despite promises to the contrary during his campaign, Daley refused to relinquish his position as Democratic Party chairman after being elected mayor. This not only handed him control of the party’s campaign funds, which he could distribute to the different city wards through his ward committeemen, based on who was most loyal and deserving, but it also gave him decisive influence over the selection of the full slate of the party’s candidates, including those for governor and both houses of the state and federal legislatures. These powers made every Democratic politician in the state beholden to Daley and thus ready to bend to his wishes. They also allowed Daley to become a player on the state and national stages, which could pay patronage dividends in some strange ways. For example, when Daley needed an increase in the city’s sales tax to pay for his ambitious plan to hire thousands of new police officers, firefighters, and sanitation workers, he went downstate to negotiate with Republican governor William Stratton, the one man who could ensure the approval of the state legislature for such a measure. Rumor had it that Stratton’s help came at a price: Daley’s agreement to slate a lackluster candidate against him in the coming gubernatorial election. “Daley turned purple and pounded his fist when he later denied the rumor,” wrote Mike Royko, “but he did indeed run a patsy against Stratton in 1956.”23

  Daley’s second power play was to emasculate the city council, effectively reducing it to a rubber-stamp advisory board. This he did by forcing a number of procedural changes, the most important of which was transferring responsibility for formulating the city’s annual budget from the city council into his own hands. This represented an enormous shift in the balance of power between the mayor and the city council, a change that was reinforced by Daley’s elimination of the practice of requiring city council approval for any city contract over $2,500. Complementing such official changes were a number of tactics the new mayor pursued to limit the city council’s informal powers. All of the aldermen sitting on the city council, for example, possessed the authority to bestow a range of favors on constituents, most of which came at a price. One of the most profitable of these favors was the issuance of permits to construct driveways; under Daley, requests for such permits would now need to pass through the mayor’s office. The members of the city council were, of course, not happy about such restrictions on their power, but resistance was futile.

  Daley may not have gotten away with such actions were he not also moving swiftly to make everyone with any financial clout in the city happy. The candidate who had run a populist campaign against the “big interests” quickly became the toast of State Street with a flurry of decisions that exhibited the progrowth ideology that would come to define the Daley era. What perhaps few expected of the kid who knew the summer stench of the stockyards was an unparalleled ability to draw massive amounts of both public and private funding to modernize and improve the city’s infrastructure. Once again Daley was the m
an for his time and place. The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 had extended generous federal funds for local governments to buy land in blighted areas and then sell it off to private developers for public housing and nonresidential projects, such as universities and hospitals. While policy makers and lobbyists in Washington debated what forms of redevelopment should be prioritized and which populations should be targeted by “urban renewal”—with the business community cheering for the rehabilitation of downtown business districts and liberals arguing for better housing for the poor—the matter would largely be settled on the local level, where municipal governments put the federal money to work. In Daley’s Chicago, the progrowth ideology was never in doubt, and all of the “trickle-down” arguments from the coalition of developers, bankers, and commercial interests that rallied merrily around their new mayor seemed like pipe dreams by the late 1960s, when black Chicago was engulfed by the flames of rebellion.

  In this moment of black disillusionment about the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights movement, novelist James Baldwin provocatively referred to “urban renewal” as “Negro removal,” a description that fits the case of Chicago particularly well. Indeed, when Daley pushed his plan for the Robert Taylor Homes through the city council in May 1956, it was not yet clear just how this and the numerous other ghetto high-rises being planned and constructed would fit into the overall scheme. In fact, these housing complexes were among a number of public works projects being pushed forward by the mayor during his first term in office. The city was going to get new skyscrapers in the Loop, new expressways that connected the suburbs to the downtown business district, new parking garages to accommodate the additional rush of commuters, the new $35 million McCormick Place convention center on Lake Michigan that would make the city “the convention capital” of the nation, a new and improved O’Hare Airport, new bridges and train crossings, new government buildings, new police stations, and a new University of Illinois campus. Daley was unleashing the growth machine and it promised to make everyone involved fat—bankers and lawyers, realtors and developers, contractors and suppliers, politicians and friends. And the State Street crowd was jubilant. The old retailers like Marshall Field’s applauded the expressways and parking garages that would bring suburban shoppers safely and quickly downtown, and the top brass of the many Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in the Loop—in 1957 Chicago was second only to New York in housing corporate headquarters—saw a solution to the ghetto blight creeping northward from the South Side. The only inconveniences in this scheme were the human beings who remained after their neighborhoods were cleared away. What was to be done with them? Moreover, one could talk about holding off the ghetto, but what did this mean in a city that had seen its black population increase from 277,731 (8 percent of the total) in 1940 to 812,637 (23 percent of the total) in 1960? Here, alas, is where federally subsidized public housing fit into the big picture, and in a picture as black and white as Chicago’s was, urban renewal did indeed mean just what Baldwin said it did: “Negro removal.”