American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  The pre–Vatican II Catholicism in which Daley was raised impressed on him a keen sense of man’s fallen state, and of the inevitability of sin. Man had to struggle hard against the influence of evil, which could be warded off only “if one chose the path of dutifulness and care, if one made sure by doing this twice over and respecting authority, if one closed off the energies of rebellion inside oneself.” It was an education that bred a wary, even skeptical view of one’s fellowman — a character trait Daley would carry with him through life. “He’s like a fellow who peeks in the bag to make sure the lady gave him a dozen buns,” a profile of Daley in the Chicago Daily News once observed. And it was an environment that left Daley with a lifelong skepticism of idealists of all kinds — whether they were reformers working to clean up machine politics or civil rights activists hoping to change hearts and minds on the question of race. These utopians all proceeded from an unduly optimistic vision of man’s perfectibility. “Look at the Lord’s Disciples,” Daley would later say in response to a charge of corruption in City Hall. “One denied Him, one doubted Him, one betrayed Him. If our Lord couldn’t have perfection, how are you going to have it in city government?” 23

  Daley was an obedient student, but not a particularly gifted one. He was “a very serious boy,” his teacher Sister Gabriel recalled. “A very studious boy. He played when he played. He worked when he worked. And he prayed when he prayed.” In 1916, after graduating from Nativity, Daley enrolled at De La Salle Institute, a three-year Catholic commercial high school known as “the Poor Boy’s College.” De La Salle was located at 3455 South Wabash, in a poor black neighborhood on the “wrong” side of the racial dividing line separating Bridgeport from the black neighborhoods to the east. Daley’s commute brought him into closer physical proximity with the blacks who lived across the railroad tracks, but it did nothing to break down the psychological barriers that still separated him and his classmates from their black neighbors. De La Salle regarded its location in a black neighborhood as an unfortunate trick of fate, and it made no effort to introduce its young charges to their neighbors. “The school was surrounded by tenements and by low life,” a history of De La Salle, prepared by the school itself, states bluntly. “It was a white school as an island surrounded by a black sea.” Daley traveled to De La Salle in a pack of his fellow Bridgeporters, and quickly made his way out of the neighborhood when school let out. 24

  De La Salle, founded by an Irish immigrant from the Christian Brothers Order named Brother Adjutor of Mary, had a highly practical approach to educating the children of the Catholic working class. Brother Adjutor believed the best training for a young man with few advantages was intensive instruction in business. De La Salle’s curriculum combined Catholic religious studies with commercial courses, including typing, bookkeeping, and business law. The school had actual “counting rooms,” and other lifelike replicas of business settings, for students to begin acting out the financial jobs they would one day hold. Daley continued to be a diligent but unremarkable student. One classmate remembered him as “a hard worker ... maybe a little above average.” Brother Adjutor’s educational philosophy worked well for Daley: the business skills he acquired at De La Salle were of considerable help later in life, when his financial skills proved to be a critical factor in his rise up the ranks of the machine. Like Nativity, De La Salle instilled the importance of unquestioning obedience. The Christian Brothers, imposing figures in long black robes and stiff white collars, instructed with a strictness that at times crossed the line to brutal. “They were good teachers,” one of Daley’s classmates recalled, “but if you got out of line, they wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in the head.” 25

  De La Salle’s real strength was its extensive efforts to get jobs for its graduates. Most young Irish-Catholic boys coming of age in places like Bridgeport in the early 1900s never made it out of the working class. But De La Salle opened up another world, a white-collar alternative, for its students. As graduation neared, its faculty operated as a kind of Irish-Catholic educational machine — mirroring the Irish-Catholic political machine — in which Brother Adjutor and other instructors drew on their contacts in the business world to find jobs for the “Brother’s Boys.” Brother Adjutor’s reference letters were similar to the ones precinct captains were writing in clubhouses across the city. Because of “the necessity of giving our students a good start in life,” went one, “I have for many years past strenuously exerted myself to secure for them good positions in the leading mercantile houses of this and other cities.” The school’s combination of commercial training and methodical Irish-Catholic networking was a powerful engine for thrusting working-class boys into the upper echelons of the city’s power structure. When Daley was elected mayor, he would be the third consecutive mayor educated at De La Salle. The school also produced numerous aldermen, including two from Daley’s own graduating class, and many prominent businessmen. A commemorative book boasted, with only some hyperbole, that “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” but “the business leaders of Chicago were trained in the Counting Rooms of De La Salle.” As an adult, Daley would remember De La Salle warmly as a place that “taught us to wear a clean shirt and tie and put a shine on your shoes and be confident to face the world.” Daley worked after school and on weekends. When classes let out at 3:30 every day, he traveled to the Loop to wrap packages and act as a department store messenger until the early evening. He also worked on bakery wagons and joined the drivers’ union. 26

  When Daley was not at school or working, he spent much of his free time at the Hamburg Athletic Club, which met in a nondescript clubhouse at 37th and Emerald, just a few blocks from his home. Hamburg was one of many such clubs in Chicago at the time — others had names like “Ragen’s Colts,” “the Aylwards,” and “Our Flag” — that were part social circle, part political organization, and part street gang. The athletic clubs placed a premium on toughness and loyalty. The Ragen’s Colts’ motto could have belonged to any of them: “Hit me and you hit two thousand.” Young men like Daley often ended up on the wrong end of the local policeman’s billy club. “All they wanted to do was just beat you over the head,” Daley would later say, revealingly, about the policemen of his youth. When they were not testing the limits of the law, Hamburg Athletic Club members actually engaged in a few athletic activities. The clubs organized their own competitive sports leagues, sponsored outings to professional sporting events, and even held picnics and dances. Daley excelled in the Hamburg Athletic Club’s sports program — not as a participant but as a manager of others. “Dick often came to practice carrying his books,” recalled a union official who was once the mascot of the Hamburg Athletic Club baseball team. “He was a very busy guy, but he took his job as a manager seriously. He made lineups, booked the games, and ran the team on the field during games.” 27

  Clubs like Hamburg also served as the first rung of the Democratic machine. Most were sponsored by machine politicians, who contributed to their treasuries and took a personal interest in their members. The clubs, for their part, did political work in the neighborhood during election season. The “Ragen” of Ragen’s Colts was Cook County commissioner Frank Ragen, who paid the rent on the clubhouse and underwrote many of the club’s other expenses. Hamburg’s patron was Alderman Joseph McDonough, a rising star in the Democratic machine. Hamburg had a long history as a training ground for machine politicians. Among its alumni was Tommy Doyle, president of the club in 1914, who challenged Bridgeport’s twenty-year-incumbent alderman and won. The club had served as a powerful political base for Doyle, providing him with an army of 350 campaign workers. Four years later, when Doyle moved on to higher office, McDonough inherited his aldermanic seat. Clubs like Hamburg were also valuable because their members were willing and able to apply force on behalf of their sponsors. It was a useful service, since Chicago political campaigns had a way of getting rough. A fierce battle for ward committeeman in the “Bloody 20th” Ward in 1928 ended with
one candidate killed gangland-style and his opponent put on trial for the killing. It was common for election judges to be beaten up on election day, or kidnapped and not released until the voting — and the vote stealing — was completed. “Politics ain’t bean-bag,” Mr. Dooley said in one of his most famous pronouncements. “ ’Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists ’d do well to keep out iv it.” For a young man in Bridgeport with political ambitions, the Hamburg Athletic Club was a good place to start out. Daley was elected president of the club in 1924, at age twenty-two, a post he held for the next fifteen years. 28

  Another prime function of the athletic clubs was defending their narrow stretch of turf from outsiders. Before World War II, Chicago was divided into ethnic enclaves that were bitterly mistrustful of their neighbors on all sides. When an Irish neighborhood adjoined a Slavic one, or a Polish neighborhood adjoined a Scandinavian one, the fault lines were clear and the animosities barely restrained. For Bridgeport, the great dividing line was Wentworth Avenue, which separated it from the black neighborhoods to the east. Bridgeport’s fears were exacerbated by the fact that the population in the black ghetto was expanding rapidly as a result of migration from the South. At any moment, it seemed, the black neighborhoods to the east might expand and grow large enough to overrun Bridgeport. The intensity of Bridgeport’s racial feelings would be laid bare decades later by a small but brutally revealing incident. It was June 1961, just weeks after busloads of Freedom Riders had been beaten up in the segregated bus stations of the South. The old Douglas Hotel on the black South Side had caught fire, and eighty residents had suddenly been made homeless. Red Cross volunteers had arrived on the scene and — unaware of Bridgeport’s racial sensitivities — evacuated the refugees to temporary quarters in Bridgeport’s Holy Cross Lutheran Church, a few blocks from Daley’s home. Word spread quickly, and almost immediately a crowd of jeering whites was standing outside the church demanding the removal of the black fire victims. “They threatened to break windows in the church and screamed obscenities I can’t repeat,” Helen Constien, the pastor’s wife, said afterward. “They threatened to destroy the church if we didn’t get the Negroes out of the building.” The Red Cross quickly took the black fire victims out of Bridgeport. 29

  The work of patrolling the South Side’s racial borders was often taken care of by gangs like Daley’s Hamburg Athletic Club. Because of these gangs’ propensity for violence, blacks who walked through neighborhoods like Bridgeport did so at their peril. It was a lesson that black children growing up on the South Side absorbed with their ABC’s, but newly arrived blacks who wandered into the area from outside could be caught unaware, often with dire results. In 1918, the poet Langston Hughes made the mistake of walking west across Wentworth Avenue into the heart of the white South Side. It was Hughes’s first Sunday in Chicago — he was a high school student at the time — and he “went out walking alone to see what the city looked like.” Hughes returned to the black side of Wentworth with black eyes and a swollen jaw, having been beaten up by an unidentified Irish street gang — it is lost to history whether it was the Hamburg Athletic Club — “who said they didn’t allow niggers in that neighborhood.” 30

  Blacks have lived in the Chicago area longer than any group but Native Americans. “Chicago’s first white man,” the old Chicago saying has it, “was a Negro.” The man in question was Jean Baptiste du Sable, a Haitian black who built a trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1779 to trade with the Potawatomi Indians. The city’s black population grew slowly at first: black migration into Illinois was limited until the Civil War by laws that barred blacks, both slave and free, from settling in the state. Despite the legal prohibitions, enough fugitive slaves followed the Underground Railroad to Chicago in the 1840s and 1850s that it came to be known among pro-slavery polemicists as a “sink hole of abolition.” By the 1870s, Illinois blacks had the franchise, and in 1876 Chicago sent a black representative to the Illinois legislature. Chicago had 3,700 black residents — 1.2 percent of the total population — when, as legend had it, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern that started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. By the turn of the century, blacks still numbered only 30,000. Although they were starting to concentrate in a small “Black Belt” on the South Side, even as late as 1915 blacks were still living in virtually every part of Chicago. 31

  Daley’s childhood coincided with one of the nation’s most far-reaching social transformations: the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North. With the start of World War I, the booming wartime economy in the North faced a severe labor shortage, as the war cut off the flow of European immigrants. Realizing that there was a ready supply of workers in the rural South, where agricultural automation was fast reducing the need for black farm laborers, northern recruiters spread out across the Deep South. Many northern cities were competing for these black workers, but Chicago had a unique advantage. The Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading black newspaper, was widely read throughout the South, and it painted an especially rosy picture of the high-paying jobs and good life that awaited black migrants in Chicago’s factories and slaughterhouses. “MILLIONS TO LEAVE SOUTH,” a banner headline in the January 6, 1917, Chicago Defender declared. “Northern Invasion Will Start in Spring — Bound for the Promised Land.” To many southern blacks living in conditions of extreme poverty and chafing under the oppression of Jim Crow, Chicago and the other large northern cities became a “glorious symbol of hope.” Even blues singers from the era got caught up in the spirit:

  I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill

  I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill

  She was crazy ’bout me, ooh well, well, cause

  I worked at the Chicago Mill.32

  The trip itself was not difficult. The Illinois Central Railroad, dubbed the “Fried Chicken Special” for the homemade lunches carried by the migrants, provided easy passage from New Orleans through the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and on up to Chicago. A half-million southern blacks made the journey north between 1916 and 1919 alone, and another million followed in the 1920s. Large numbers of blacks headed to New York, Detroit, and Cleveland, but as one Mississippi migrant recalled, “the mecca was Chicago.” 33

  As the city’s black population soared, blacks were increasingly concentrated in a distinct ghetto — the South Side’s Black Belt. Many of the southern migrants pouring into the Illinois Central Railroad Station clutched the addresses of friends and family who lived in the Black Belt, and those who arrived with no plans were generally steered in that direction. By 1920, the Black Belt — an area roughly bounded by 26th Street to the north, 55th Street to the south, State Street to the west, and Lake Michigan to the east — was home to about 85 percent of the city’s blacks. “[S]egregation has been increasing,” Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote of Chicago in An American Dilemma, his classic survey of American race relations. “[E]ven the upper class Negroes whose ancestors lived in Chicago on terms of almost complete social equality with their white neighbors are now forced into Negro ghettos and are hardly differentiated from the impoverished Negro just arrived from the South.” The upside of this racial segregation was that a remarkable African-American world began to take shape on the South Side. The stone-front houses and apartment buildings along once-white avenues like South Parkway and Michigan Boulevard now housed black teachers, lawyers, and other pillars of the black middle class. And the Black Belt’s business districts were filled with black-owned stores and black doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. “Why should Negro doctors and dentists give a damn that most white folks would rather die than let skilled black fingers repair their vital organs?” St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in Black Metropolis, their 1945 study of Chicago’s “Bronzeville.” “The Negro masses were gradually learning to trust their own professional men and would some day scorn to enrich white physicians at the expense of their own. Why beg white stores and offices
to rescue educated colored girls from service in the white folks’ kitchens and factories? Negroes were learning to support their own businesses, and some day colored entrepreneurs would own all the stores and offices in the Black Belt; cash registers and comptometers and typewriters would click merrily under lithe brown fingers.” The Black Belt provided Chicago’s blacks with a measure of control over their own lives, and some refuge against the unfriendly white city outside its borders. But the sad reality was that it remained badly overcrowded and desperately poor, with high illness and mortality rates; a high percentage of residents on relief; a high crime rate; inadequate recreational facilities; lack of building repairs; accumulated garbage and dirty streets; overcrowded schools; and high rates of police brutality. 34

  In white Chicago, the Great Migration produced a response that ranged from wariness to undisguised panic. The Chicago newspapers ran inflammatory headlines such as “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm to the North to Better Themselves” and “Negroes Arrive by Thousands — Peril to Health.” Articles in the city’s three leading papers — the Tribune, the Daily News, and the Herald Examiner — generally overstated the size of the migration, and focused on the new arrivals’ purported sickness, criminality, and vice. White Chicagoans worked to prevent the migrants from moving into white neighborhoods. One South Side neighborhood association captured the exclusionary spirit sweeping white Chicago when it declared that “there is nothing in the make-up of a Negro, physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor.” In April 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board met and — concerned about what officials described as the “invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes” — appointed a Special Committee on Negro Housing to make recommendations. On this committee’s recommendation, the board adopted a policy of block-by-block racial segregation, carefully controlled so that “each block shall be filled solidly and . . . further expansion shall be confined to contiguous blocks.” Three years later, the board took the further step of voting unanimously to punish by “immediate expulsion” any member who sold property to a black on a block where there were only white owners. 35