by Adam Cohen
Daley’s race for his own term as county clerk was hard fought. His Republican opponent, 7th Ward alderman Nicholas Bohling, ran a spirited anti-machine campaign. Daley had served as the “errand boy, the mouthpiece of the Kelly-Nash-Arvey machine in the legislature at Springfield,” Bohling charged, and the machine now “owned” him. The centerpieces of Daley’s defense were endorsements from Stevenson and Douglas, two machine-made politicians who were nevertheless able to confer a mantle of reform. Despite the Democratic rout, Daley ended up defeating Bohling by 147,000 votes. There was no obvious explanation for why Daley had run so strongly, and rumors circulated after the election that he had won as a result of a carefully crafted sellout. Republicans allegedly agreed to “trim” — or hold back support for — Bohling in exchange for the machine’s trimming John Duffy, the Democratic candidate for Cook County Board president. The scenario had a certain plausibility. Machine boss Arvey wanted to see Daley elected, and he and Daley both had good reason to want to see Duffy defeated. A bitter battle was looming for control of the machine. Arvey’s tenuous hold on power was being challenged by a group that included Duffy; 14th Ward alderman Clarence Wagner; Judge James McDermott, a former 14th Ward alderman and county treasurer; and 19th Ward committeeman Tom Nash, a cousin of former boss Pat Nash who had gone over to the other side. If Duffy were elected to the patronage-rich position of president of the county board, it would have given a considerable boost to the Wagner-McDermott-Duffy faction in the battle for control of the machine. From Daley’s perspective, a victory for himself and a defeat for his rival Duffy was the best possible outcome. 75
After the machine’s poor showing in the 1950 elections, the antiArvey forces were ready to make their move. Arvey had survived as boss for three years through a series of shrewd slating decisions — primarily, running Kennelly for mayor in 1947 and Stevenson and Douglas statewide in 1948 — but when he slated “Tubbo” Gilbert, his luck finally ran out. The powerful ward committeemen who controlled the machine decided that Arvey’s interim chairmanship should come to a close. It was easy enough for the machine’s warring factions to decide that Arvey was out. The more difficult question was who would take his place. The Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash faction would clearly be fielding a candidate, and Daley wanted to run against them as the choice of the Arvey wing. Daley approached Arvey to ask for his support. “But Dick, I thought you wanted to run for mayor,” Arvey responded. Daley said that he did. “Well, then, you shouldn’t be county chairman,” Arvey said. “People will say you’re a boss.” Daley promised Arvey that he would step down as party leader if he ever became mayor, and Arvey agreed to support him. 76
The battle to succeed Arvey would be waged in the Democratic Cook County Central Committee — the Chicago machine’s version of the Politburo. The Central Committee was made up of committeemen from all fifty of Chicago’s wards, along with another thirty township committeemen representing suburban parts of Cook County. It was not a committee of equals: each committeeman’s vote was weighted according to how large a Democratic vote he had produced in the previous election. The ward committeeman from a strong machine ward like the 24th might cast fifteen thousand votes in the Central Committee, while a township committeeman might cast only a few thousand. As a practical matter, power was concentrated in a few ward committeemen from wards where the machine ran strongly, and elected officials whose offices gave them large numbers of patronage positions. 77
The two factions battling for control of the machine looked a lot alike: both were comprised primarily of South Side, Irish-Catholic machine loyalists. Beneath the similarities, however, lay a deep antipathy. The Arvey-Daley camp, heir to the old Kelly-Nash organization, was more politically liberal. Arvey, a child of impoverished Jewish immigrants, was a New Dealer at heart. He had used his office to move the machine in a more progressive direction: his greatest legacy would be the political careers of Stevenson and Douglas. The Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash group, for its part, would have been happy to dump Senator Douglas before the next election, and might well have tried to force Governor Stevenson out when he ran for reelection. But the real fault lines between the two groups were cultural and personal. The Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash faction was an alliance of two powerful groups of South Side Irish — the 19th Ward and the 14th. The 19th Ward was an enclave of upwardly mobile Irish-Americans who had left working-class areas like Bridgeport for middle-class enclaves like Morgan Park and Beverly. To Daley and his neighbors, they were the “lace-curtain Irish,” bitterly resented for looking down on their less successful brethren. These were the sort of Irish people, it was said in Bridgeport, who had fruit in the house when no one was sick. The 14th Ward, centered on the Back of the Yards area adjoining the 11th Ward, was culturally closer to working-class areas like Bridgeport. But 14th Ward politicians had a long-standing rivalry with the nearby 11th Ward, which made them natural allies of the 19th Ward faction. 78
When the time came to settle the issue, neither side had the votes to win the chairmanship. The committeemen decided to elect another caretaker boss, but this time one who would serve only through the 1952 presidential election. The two factions settled amicably on Joseph Gill, who was both Municipal Court clerk and ward committeeman from the 44th Ward on the North Side. The sixty-five-year-old Gill was the oldest member of the Cook County Democratic Committee, and was considered unlikely to try to stay on past his agreed-upon retirement date. Gill had been a noncombatant in the battles between the machine’s rival camps, and both regarded him as neutral. For Daley, the selection of Gill was a disappointment, eased somewhat by the fact that he was elevated to first vice chairman, inching him ever closer to the top job. When the maneuvering was complete, Senator Douglas invoked a well-known hymn on Daley’s behalf. “I do not ask to see the distant scene,” Douglas said, quoting John Henry Cardinal Newman. “One step is enough for me.” 79
CHAPTER
3
Chicago Ain’t Ready for Reform
After three years in office, Kennelly was turning out to be an ineffectual and not particularly popular mayor. Content to preside over ceremonial functions, he let the rapacious and independent-minded leaders of the City Council — the so-called Gray Wolves — plunder the city coffers. Kennelly’s ineptitude had become a citywide joke: one police captain testified at a City Council hearing that “the only thing [the moving company owner turned mayor] learned in the moving business is never to lift the heavy end.” Unfortunately for the machine, the one cause Kennelly pursued with determination and effectiveness was political reform. He had steadily whittled away at the patronage system, the machine’s lifeblood, taking 12,000 jobs away from the ward bosses and turning them into civil-service positions. Kennelly had also put teeth in the civil-service system by appointing reformer Stephen Hurley to head the Civil Service Commission. Hurley was wise to all of the machine’s tricks — hiring “temporary” employees to get around civil-service hiring lists, “forgetting” to schedule civil service exams, and changing job titles to wiggle out of civil service rules. Kennelly’s anti-patronage campaign had an impact. In the days of Kelly and Cermak, ward committeemen and aldermen each had about 285 jobs to dispense at their discretion. By the end of Kennelly’s first term, they had only a handful of jobs. The machine leaders were by now openly referring to Kennelly as “Snow White” and plotting his downfall. 1
As damaging as Mayor Kennelly’s war on patronage was to his political future, it was another moralistic campaign that more directly led to his undoing. Kennelly had worked throughout his first term to rein in two revered institutions in black Chicago: policy wheels and jitney cabs. “Policy” was an immensely popular, if illegal, lottery-like gambling game. It was divided into a variety of “pools,” which had evocative names like “Harlem,” “Monte Carlo,” and “Royal Palm.” Each pool issued its own “slips,” inscribed with different combinations of numbers. Players selected a combination of numbers and placed their bets at any of the “policy stations” scatte
red in barbershops, shoe-shine parlors, or basements throughout the South Side ghetto. Policy operators selected winning combinations, or “gigs,” by drawing numbered balls out of drum-shaped containers. 2 Jitney cabs were another great, illegal South Side institution. In Chicago, as in much of the country, big taxi companies operated cabs with white drivers who drove almost exclusively in white neighborhoods. That left black neighborhoods with jitney cabs, unofficial taxis that were generally owned and driven by blacks. In many parts of the Black Belt, they were the closest thing there was to public transportation.
Policy and jitneys were not merely popular on the South Side — they were big business. There were, by one estimate, 4,200 policy stations spread across the South Side, handling bets from 100,000 people a day. The policy wheels were “as efficient and as well run as any marble-lined bank or brokerage house on LaSalle Street and many times more profitable,” one historian observed. 3 They also provided thousands of well-paying runner, clerk, and cashier jobs for black Chicagoans, who faced an otherwise grim employment market. “Sometimes the girls could make $20 a week,” one study reported. “There isn’t a laundry in the city or a kitchen in Hyde Park where a girl without learning could earn $20 for a week’s work.” The jitneys were also an important source of jobs for black workers, and they were a critical part of the ghetto infrastructure: for many blacks, they were the only means of getting to grocery stores and doctor appointments. 4
The policy wheels also contributed a great deal of money to the black submachine, particularly William Dawson’s 2nd Ward Democratic Organization. Both the policy wheels and jitney cabs had operated for years with the protection of black politicians. Dawson and the machine defended the black policy wheels against both police extortion and the white syndicate, which tried repeatedly to extend its gambling empire into the black wards. Each time the Al Capone mob bribed a police captain to let white mobsters move in, Dawson had gone to Mayor Kelly and got the captain transferred out of the ward. But Mayor Kennelly, as part of his reform program, directed his police to undertake a massive crackdown on illegal activity in the black neighborhoods. The black community was outraged. Kennelly’s edict was doing real harm to black Chicagoans — jitney cabdrivers were being thrown out of work, and employees of the policy wheels were being arrested. Kennelly was also violating the long-standing tradition of allowing black leaders to determine what illegal activity would be allowed in the black wards. Not least, many blacks suspected that for all of his good-government talk, Kennelly was simply clearing the way for white organized crime to replace black organized crime. “If anybody is to profit out of gambling in the Negro community, it should be the Negro,” William Dawson fumed. “I want the money my people earn to stay in the Negro community.” Dawson resolved to put a stop to Mayor Kennelly’s incursions. 5
Dawson’s response to Kennelly was the indignation of a classic black “welfare” politician. In his book Negro Politics, James Q. Wilson divided black leaders of the pre–civil rights era into two types: those who pursued “status” for the black community and those who pursued “welfare.” Status leaders, many affiliated with groups like the NAACP and the Urban League, devoted themselves to uplifting the social standing of the race — integrating neighborhoods and public facilities, or pushing for equal employment opportunity. That was not Dawson. Well into the 1940s, much of Chicago was racially segregated, and blacks were as a rule barred from white hotels, bars, soda fountains, taxis, and bowling alleys. But Dawson was best known in civil rights circles for the battles he failed to join — like the 1946 protests at Chicago’s aptly named White City Roller Skating Rink, challenging its policy of denying admission to blacks. When Dawson did take a stand on integration, he was liable to oppose it. Chicago’s leading black politician outraged the NAACP and his black congressional colleagues in 1956 by coming out against a federal bill to end segregation in public schools. He argued that requiring integration could endanger federal funding to public schools, which he viewed as more important. And during the 1960 presidential campaign, Dawson served on the civil rights issues committee of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign — known as the Civil Rights Section. The first thing Dawson tried to do was get the name changed. “Let’s not use words that offend our good Southern friends, like ‘civil rights,’” he told the group’s first meeting. His office in the campaign headquarters was quickly dubbed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Dawson’s primary loyalty was to his political organization, not his race — and when the two were in conflict, the Democratic machine always won. “You would not expect Willie Mays to drop the ball just because Jackie Robinson hit it,” Dawson liked to say. 6
Dawson was doing the machine’s bidding when he opposed civil rights, but he also had his own self-interested reasons for opposing the status goals of civil rights activists. The black submachine that he led owed its existence to racial segregation, and Dawson’s personal political power derived from his ability to mine the rich lode of Democratic votes in the black wards. The Black Belt was growing as a result of racial segregation, and as it grew Dawson incorporated more wards into the black submachine. If the status leaders got their way and achieved racial integration, black voters would disperse across the city — and would end up on the tally sheet of white ward committeemen. Civil rights activism had another practical drawback: it threatened to destroy the black submachine’s monopoly on black politics. Now, the only candidates in the black wards were put up by the machine, and they had no significant opposition. If the black community divided over integration, civil rights supporters might run their own slate of candidates and turn every election into a referendum on racial progress. Whatever civil rights activism meant for the race — and Dawson remained skeptical on this point — it spelled disaster for the black submachine. 7
To his critics, Dawson’s civil rights record made him “perhaps the classic Uncle Tom politician,” currying favor with the white power structure by selling out his own people. But Dawson vehemently rejected the label, insisting that he was more in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, who taught his politically dispossessed black followers the pragmatic gains that came from working within the system. “Yes, they called Booker T. an Uncle Tom,” Dawson once said. “But today the bust of Booker T. Washington is displayed in the Hall of Fame. Congress has just approved an appropriation to help preserve his birthplace for posterity while the names of his detractors have long since been forgotten.” In fact, Dawson’s career is too complex to dismiss with the epithet “Uncle Tom.” Having grown up in the Jim Crow South, and having been forced to flee his hometown in a Faulknerian scenario involving interracial rape and revenge, he knew at least as well as his critics how bad things were for blacks. In his speeches, he occasionally alluded to these racial wounds. “Were it my desire,” he once told an audience at Ohio’s historically black Wilber-force University, “I could cite to you from my own personal knowledge incidents which would chill the blood within you, whip your temper into a frenzy, and fan the fires of your wrath into a devastating flame on which reason and judgment would be quickly consumed and give place to bitter vengeance and unbridled retaliation.” Rather than unleashing this spirit of “unbridled retaliation,” Dawson believed in working through the political process for incremental gains. For years, he had a sign over his desk with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” For Dawson, these words were a racial credo. 8
What Dawson believed in was welfare politics: jobs, money, and favors. Dawson went downtown to the Democratic machine headquarters just as the white ward committeemen did, demanding patronage, and because he delivered on election day, the machine gave it to him. Dawson and the submachine did not get the same number of patronage jobs as his white counterparts did, and the black sub-machine’s positions were generally low-level ones. In 1955, when blacks were 19 percent of the Chicago population, and regularly gave machine can
didates more than 70 percent of their votes, they had only 5 percent of judgeships and no city commissioners. Still, in the impoverished black wards Dawson represented, even the lowliest patronage jobs were prized. “He’d take a hundred menial jobs over ten judgeships,” observed historian Dempsey Travis. “He counted numbers.” Dawson and his precinct captains were also able to dole out favors, just as white machine politicians did — calling the city to get garbage picked up or intervening with a judge to get a young person out of a scrape with the law. And until Kennelly’s crackdown on the policy wheels and jitney cabs, the machine had always given Dawson a measure of autonomy over the black wards — allowing him, as the saying went, to “stand between the people and the pressure.” Kennelly’s decision to go after the jitneys and policy wheels was an attack on this autonomy, and on Dawson’s ability to deliver for his followers on a classic welfare issue.9
Dawson was in a strong position to make his displeasure about Kennelly’s actions known. He was, by now, a substantial figure in the Democratic Party. He had risen in Congress to become chairman of the committee that would later be called Government Operations, the first black to serve as chairman of a regular House committee. In 1948, he had headed up the Negro division of the Democratic National Committee, raising money and hitting the hustings in black neighborhoods across the country. Far more important, though, was his power at the local level. Dawson’s submachine was in the process of extending its reach to include five majority-black wards that, along with the River Wards, were the machine’s most productive. Dawson knew that he and his voters had played a large part in putting Kennelly in City Hall — it was only Kennelly who seemed to have forgotten it. Before the 1951 election, Dawson exploded at Kennelly, in a meeting that immediately became part of Chicago’s political lore. “Who do you think you are? I bring in the votes. I elect you. You are not needed, but the votes are needed. I deliver the votes to you, but you won’t talk to me? ” Many white machine leaders felt as Dawson did, bitterly resentful that Kennelly wanted them to back him for reelection at the same time as he was turning their patronage jobs into civil-service positions. 10