American Pharaoh
Page 7
Cermak had discovered the power of ethnic coalition-building at a particularly opportune moment. By 1930, the city’s population had soared to 3.3 million and its ethnic composition was changing rapidly. Immigrants were flooding into the city, and white Protestant families had begun fleeing to the surrounding suburbs. Nearly two-thirds of Chicago’s population was now either foreign-born or born to immigrant parents. Chicago’s political power was starting to shift from a Protestant monolith to a more eclectic assortment of ethnic groups, many divided from each other by language and religion. More than ever, there was a need for a leader who could unite these groups into a coherent political force. Cermak, fresh from his success with United Societies, decided to build a political organization to serve as a “house for all peoples.” He began with a solid base in his own Czech community, and had strong ties to the city’s Germans. He also was on good terms with the city’s Jews — as president of the Cook County Board, he had created a kosher section of the county poorhouse — and enlisted Moe Rosenberg and Jake Arvey of the 24th Ward organization to the cause. Ethnic coalition building serves many larger purposes including, as political scientists have noted, the important work of managing conflict among competing groups. But in Cermak’s case, panethnic politics also served his own personal ambitions. As a member of one of the city’s smaller ethnic groups, he would not have gone far simply as a Bohemian politician. Cermak’s “house for all peoples” gave him the opportunity to appeal for the votes of all of Chicagoans. The genius of Cermak’s approach became clear in 1928, when Democratic Party chairman George Brennan died. Brennan had been heir to the city’s old Irish Democratic organization, and all other things being equal, another Irishman would likely have been chosen to succeed him. But Cermak drew on his multi-ethnic support to wrest away the party machinery from the Irish. The first real test of Cermak’s new style of politics came in 1931, when he accepted the Democratic nomination to run for mayor. 3
Chicago’s Republican mayor, William Hale Thompson, was a colorful combination of populist, political boss, and friend to the city’s criminal element. “Big Bill” Thompson was born in 1867 into Boston’s Brahmin aristocracy. His family moved to Chicago a year after his birth, and his father quickly built a real estate fortune. Thompson had an itinerant youth, running away from home to avoid attending Yale University. When Thompson returned to Chicago, he discovered politics, running for alderman in 1900 and winning. Two years later, he was elected to a seat on the influential Cook County Board. In time, he attracted the attention of leaders of Chicago’s fledgling Republican machine, who were looking for a mayoral candidate. He “may not be too much on brains,” an influential Republican declared, “but he gets to the people.” Thompson beat a reform candidate in the 1915 Republican mayoral primary, and with strong support from Germans, Swedes, and blacks went on to win the general election. He brought a quirky charisma with him to City Hall. Chicago’s new mayor thought nothing of putting aside municipal business to organize an expedition to photograph a reputed tree-climbing fish. Thompson’s most enduring contribution to Chicago politics, however, was the introduction of large-scale patronage and graft to city government. The newspapers wasted little time in coining a new word — “Thompsonism” — for the corruption and scandal that had settled on City Hall. Thompson’s patronage-backed Republican machine fast became a formidable force in both city and state politics. But its influence was short-lived: the defections started among middle-class Chicagoans, who were becoming disaffected over reports of corruption in government. Thompson also lost working-class voters by his support of Prohibition, which more than 80 percent of Chicagoans opposed in a 1919 referendum. In 1923, after two terms, Thompson decided not to run again, and he was succeeded by a Democrat. After four years out of office, Thompson was elected to a third term in 1927, but just barely, winning 50.4 percent of the vote. 4
The Thompson-Cermak race got nasty quickly. Thompson had long been haunted by rumors linking him to Al Capone and other prominent Chicago gangsters. During the election, the rumors gained strength, after one of Thompson’s top city officials, a friend of Capone’s, was indicted for conspiring with merchants to cheat the people out of $54 million by the use of short weights. Despite his own scandals, Thompson accused Cermak of being in league with bootleggers and gamblers, and charged that he had “saved six million out of a $10,000 salary.” But Thompson saved his most pointed attacks for Cermak’s humble origins. It would be an embarrassment, Chicago’s WASP mayor declared, for the city to be led by “Pushcart Tony,” an immigrant who had gotten his start selling firewood. “He don’t like my name,” Cermak replied. “It’s true I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I came over as soon as I could.” With the ethnic changes that had overtaken Chicago, Cermak’s side was where the votes were. He ended up winning, but Thompson’s critics felt vindicated when, after Cermak’s death, one of his many safe-deposit boxes was discovered to hold $1,466,250 in cash. 5
The victorious Cermak continued shoring up his “house for all peoples.” As mayor, he reached out to the city’s Irish, an important political constituency that was still smoldering over being ousted from political power by a Bohemian. Cermak tapped Irish-Catholic politician Pat Nash to succeed him as chairman of the Democratic Party. The move was well received among Irish Democrats, but it was largely for show: Cermak continued to exercise the powers of Democratic boss. The one group that continued to resist joining the Democratic machine was Chicago’s black population, who traditionally voted Republican, the party of Lincoln, the emancipator. In the 1931 mayoral race, the five wards, out of fifty, that went for Thompson all had substantial black populations. 6
Cermak moved into City Hall early — on April 9, 1931, two days after the election and thirteen days before his inauguration — and undertook a systematic decimation of the Republican patronage army. He fired up to three thousand temporary workers, many of them blacks who had done precinct work for Thompson, and declared war on the South Side gambling and prostitution rackets that had generously supported black Republican elected officials. The Black Belt was turned upside down in the early months of Cermak’s mayoralty, as the police swooped in. Cermak admitted freely that he was turning on the heat because the black community had made the mistake of throwing its lot in with the Republicans. “On Friday and Saturday nights, the police stations were crowded with Negroes that had been arrested in gambling raids,” recalled a longtime Republican ward committeeman. “And when the aldermen would try to intercede for them, they would be told, ‘The minute you people find out there’s something besides the Republican Party, come back and talk to us.’ That was one way to make them Democrats, and he did.” At the very least, it was a start. The real black political realignment was still a few years away, and it would be triggered by national, not local, politics. 7
Cermak maintained that the new organization he was building could be a seemingly paradoxical entity: a reform-minded political machine. “The period of the backroom . . . is gone,” he told reporters. “From now on everybody in the organization will have a voice in its management.” Cermak believed hard work and strict discipline could replace the corruption that usually propped up political machines. One of his favorite aphorisms was that “only lazy precinct captains steal votes.” Cermak founded a party newspaper, the Public Service Leader, that printed each ward organization’s performance in the most recent election. The Leader claimed it had developed a “scientific mathematically exact grading of the vote-getting machinery in each of Chicago’s fifty wards.” The paper’s analysis considered vote margins, turnout percentages, and percentage of straight Democratic voters. Cermak’s rigorous attention to detail injected into the machine, from its earliest days, an obsession with the smallest elections and with turning out every possible vote. 8
Cermak’s work in building the Chicago machine was cut short by an incident that instantly made him a footnote to American presidential history. Not long after his election as mayor, Cermak contracted d
ysentery from sewage that had seeped into the luxury hotel he was living in on South Michigan Avenue, and he traveled to Miami Beach to recuperate. On February 15, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt stopped in town on his way back from a fishing trip in the Bahamas. Cermak showed up at a Roosevelt appearance to pay his respects. When he was done delivering remarks from an open car, Roosevelt motioned Cermak over to talk. Their conversation had barely begun when an Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara fired a revolver in Roosevelt’s direction, missing him but hitting Cermak and four other bystanders. Cermak, who fell into Roosevelt’s arms, had stopped a bullet that could have struck the president-elect. According to Cermak lore, as he sped to the hospital, he said to Roosevelt: “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” Most people who knew Cermak, however, deemed the sentiment out of character. A sometime journalist named John Dienhart, who traveled with Cermak and advised him on public relations, later said that he made up the quote. “Jesus,” Dienhart said. “I couldn’t very well have put out a story that Tony would have wanted it the other way around.” 9
Before Cermak had succumbed to his bullet wounds in a Miami Beach hospital, the jockeying was already under way back in Chicago to succeed him as mayor. The obvious choice was Nash, the powerful alderman Cermak had named to take over the Democratic machine. But the seventy-year-old Nash pronounced himself too old and took himself out of the running. Jake Arvey, alderman from the mighty 24th Ward, was another possibility. But with Henry Horner, another Jew, having just been elected governor, the ethnic politics were wrong. “Nash thought and I agreed with him,” Arvey said later, that “to have a governor of Illinois Jewish, and a mayor of Chicago Jewish, at that time would have been rubbing it in to the Irish.” In fact, with Cermak out of the way, the Irish political bosses were more than ready to put an Irishman back in City Hall. Nash had a candidate in mind, a good friend and Bridgeport native named Edward Kelly, who held the improbable position of chief engineer for the Metropolitan Sanitary District. But there was a problem: Illinois law provided that when the mayor left office the City Council had to appoint someone from its own ranks to fill the vacancy. Nash got around the restriction by pushing new legislation through in Spring-field that made nonaldermen eligible to be selected. 10
With the backing of Nash and the Democratic machine, Kelly was named mayor of Chicago by the City Council. Kelly, the eldest of nine children of a policeman who had emigrated from Ireland during the Civil War, had dropped out of school after the fifth grade to help support his family. He had worked at an array of menial jobs, including a $4-a-week stint carrying beer buckets on long poles to men on lunch break at the Armour cannery. But Kelly found his calling when, at age eighteen, he took a job with the Chicago Sanitary District. He first assignment was chopping down trees along the canal with an ax. Forty years later, he had risen to chief engineer, and presided over a vast municipal agency. The tall, athletically handsome Kelly had managed to do some good in his obscure but influential position. Most notably, he had presided over the transformation of Grant Park into a lush expanse of green in the middle of downtown, earning himself the nickname “Father of the Lakefront.” But what brought Kelly to Nash’s attention was not his impressive rise from poverty, or his accomplishments in government. Nash’s family owned a sewer contracting firm, and it had done well under Kelly’s regime at the Sanitary District. Arrangements of this kind had made Nash wealthy — he had one of the ten highest incomes in Chicago in 1925. Kelly had also prospered, despite the handicap of earning only a civil-service salary. From 1926 to 1928, Kelly somehow brought in an income of $450,000, a windfall that did not escape the notice of his political foes. During a tough primary campaign in 1936, an opponent responded to Kelly’s sneer that he was not a politician that “if to amass a huge fortune on a modest salary is to be a politician, I am not a politician.”11
The rise of Edward Kelly at first looked like a significant setback to Daley’s own political hopes. Daley’s political standing depended on his ward committeeman and boss, McDonough, but McDonough’s best connections had died along with Cermak. It was unclear where Mc-Donough, and therefore Daley, would fit into the new Kelly-Nash regime that now controlled the city. McDonough was despondent about the recent turn of events, and began to wonder if he had a future in politics. But thirty-one-year-old Daley kept up his hard work for McDonough and continued to plug away at his law school studies.
Kelly turned out to be a surprise as mayor. Nash had selected him because of his willingness to hand out sweetheart deals and patronage jobs, and he more than lived up to Nash’s expectations in this regard. But Kelly was also a progressive political force during troubled times. His fourteen years in office included some of the worst years of the Great Depression. The national economic crisis caused thousands of people to board the railroad cars that passed through devastated industrial towns and dust bowl farm regions, heading to Chicago in search of a livelihood. In the face of this influx, the city’s relief expenditures soared from $11 million in 1931 to $35 million in 1932, and Chicago began to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. A “Hooverville” sat on the edge of the Loop, with streets named “Prosperity Road” and “Hard Times Avenue.” Kelly responded by passionately embracing the New Deal. “Roosevelt,” he liked to say, “is my religion.” Kelly forged a strong relationship with the White House, and worked with Washington bureaucrats to bring desperately needed federal jobs to Chicago. Of course, Kelly and Nash gained as well: the federal jobs added considerably to the supply of patronage positions available for the machine faithful. The nation’s economic hard times ended up being good for the Chicago machine. “They had more to work with,” longtime Republican committeeman Bunnie East recalled. “They had more jobs, more money, and they had a Democratic president . . . [who] was very kind to them as far as government jobs and government contracts were concerned.” 12
Chicago’s Democratic machine was now at a crossroads. With Kelly and Nash in charge, it seemed that Cermak’s “house for all peoples” might revert to an old-style Irish political machine. But Kelly and Nash decided instead to continue in the Cermak tradition, making a point of filling important offices with Poles, Germans, and Jews. Kelly was also succeeding in one area where Cermak had done poorly: integrating black Chicagoans into the machine. While Cermak had relied primarily on sticks, Kelly held out an array of carrots. Kelly made a point of going to Soldier Field for the annual Wilberforce– Tuskegee football game — a red-letter day on black Chicago’s calendar — and he banned the movie Birth of a Nation, a glorification of the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. Kelly also spoke to blacks in terms they could identify with: the millionaire mayor received enthusiastic responses from South Side audiences when he recalled the days when his mother scrubbed floors in the mansions of Hyde Park. 13
Mayor Kelly’s appeal to Chicago blacks was based on substance as well as symbolism. In 1943, he established Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations, and three years later he set up a civil rights unit in the corporation counsel’s office. Kelly also took pioneering stands in favor of equal opportunity in housing and education. When Kelly learned that branch schools had been set up to separate white and black pupils in Morgan Park, a Far South Side neighborhood, he ordered the Board of Education to end the segregation. He stood his ground even after white students staged a walk-out. The Chicago Defender lauded Kelly for his stand in favor of school integration, declaring that the mayor had earned “the respect and confidence of every citizen of every color and creed whose mind is not blinded by hate, prejudice, and bigotry.” At the same time, Kelly offered an olive branch to the black gambling operations that had been Cermak’s special target. The same police that had conducted aggressive raids under the previous mayoral administration now had firm orders to hold back. The new, warmer relations between gambling operations and City Hall were reflected in a 1934 Chicago Daily News report that the machine was now taking in $1 million a month from illicit vice, and that precinct captains, particularly in the black wards, were
running gambling houses. 14
Kelly’s outreach to Chicago’s black community came against the backdrop of a major party realignment occurring in black America. The Great Depression pushed many Americans into the Democratic camp: Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 with roughly 60 percent of the vote, and he swept Democrats into office with him at every level. Although blacks were among the nation’s worst off citizens, many were reluctant to abandon the party of Lincoln for a Democratic Party in which the segregationist Dixiecrat wing was so strong. In Roosevelt’s landslide 1932 victory, blacks gave him only 32 percent of their votes. Once in office, though, Roosevelt quickly began to win black voters over with his evident compassion for the victims of hard times. His New Deal initiatives — the NRA, the CCC, the WPA, and other programs designed to get Americans working again — earned him considerable gratitude in the black community. Roosevelt was regarded as a kind of secular savior by many blacks — “Let Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you!” was one black preacher’s rallying cry. In 1936, Roosevelt took 49 percent of the black vote, and four years later he won 52 percent. This black movement toward the Democratic Party was helped along by the fact that the party was beginning to break with its southern wing and express greater support for civil rights. In 1944, after Roosevelt endorsed equal opportunity for all races and an end to the poll tax, his national share of the black vote jumped to 64 percent. In 1948, after Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights platform was adopted at the Democratic National Convention and President Truman issued his order integrating the armed forces, 75 percent of black America voted Democratic at the presidential level. 15