by Adam Cohen
Daley’s handpicked committee always followed his lead, slating whomever he wanted on the ticket. The slate chosen by the committee was later presented to the full Central Committee for ratification, but that was a mere formality. “Ordinarily there was no discussion at all,” one participant observed. “I don’t think I can remember a time when there was anyone but myself who spoke against anybody. When I did, the hostility was unbelievable.’” 27
The greatest dilemma confronting Daley in 1954 was whether to reslate Senator Paul Douglas. Douglas had distinguished himself as an outspoken liberal in his six years in the Senate, where he had championed labor unions in their battle against the Taft-Hartley Act, fought for civil rights, and advocated higher capital gains and corporate taxes. Douglas’s forthright stands had won him enemies among Chicago conservatives, including the Chicago Tribune editorial board. Daley defied the critics and reslated Douglas, though probably not for ideological reasons. In slating the top of a ticket, Daley’s primary consideration was always how strongly the candidate would run and what kind of coattails he would provide for machine candidates lower down the ballot. Daley expected that Douglas, a fairly popular incumbent, would run strongly in Chicago, and would help the rest of the ticket. He also understood, as Arvey had, the practical value of running “good government” candidates for the top offices. There was no harm in selecting a reformer for an office like U.S. senator, since it was not a position that carried a significant number of patronage jobs with it. And Daley knew that a reform candidate for senator or governor could help the machine elect its candidates for positions like county clerk — offices that came with considerable patronage, and were therefore of real importance. Daley also understood the value of keeping on good terms with independent voters. He knew that as powerful as the machine was, it had to reach out to unaffiliated voters to win citywide and countywide offices. Men like Douglas and Stevenson could lend the machine their credibility and help to reach these voters. A year later, when Daley was running for mayor and trying to convince voters he was not a machine hack, his close ties to Douglas would prove invaluable.
Daley also wanted a “blue-ribbon” candidate to run for Cook County sheriff. The voters were well aware how corrupt this office had been over the years, and they had registered their unhappiness four years earlier by roundly rejecting the hapless “Tubbo” Gilbert. Daley decided to try to win the office back from the Republicans by slating a candidate who would be so clearly qualified and nonpolitical as to be above reproach. Just as Arvey had found Douglas on the University of Chicago faculty, Daley found Joseph Lohman, a well-regarded criminologist who looked nothing like a typical machine candidate for sheriff. Lohman did not want to enter politics, and only after Daley met with Lohman personally did he agree to run.
When the time came to launch the 1954 campaign, Daley quickly demonstrated his skill at political organization. He instituted weekly meetings of all the machine candidates, something that had never been tried before, to coordinate campaign strategy. And he broadcast a fifteen-minute nightly “Democratic News Report to the People,” which precinct captains were encouraged to tune in to so they would know the official party line on important issues. Daley also inaugurated a speakers’ bureau, which arranged appearances by candidates and surrogates at citizens’ groups and neighborhood organizations across the city and into the suburbs. Since Daley held a countywide position, he understood better than most machine politicians the importance of cultivating suburban voters. He also saw sooner than most the increasing influence the fast-growing suburbs would have on Cook County politics. Daley began to meet regularly with the thirty Democratic township committeemen, the suburban equivalent of ward committeemen, and drew them more closely into the dayto-day operations of the machine.
Daley was himself a candidate for reelection as county clerk, opposed by North Side Republican alderman John J. Hoellen. Daley began campaigning immediately after the April primary, not waiting for the traditional Labor Day kickoff. His primary focus was ward organizations, and he instructed each ward office to schedule at least three meetings at which candidates could speak to precinct captains and other machine workers, who would turn out voters on election day. Daley also experimented with some of the populist rhetoric he would employ a year later in his campaign for mayor. “Special interests dominate the Republican party nationally and locally,” Daley told a kickoff rally of the machine faithful at the Morrison Hotel. “For too long a time — much too long — Illinois has been represented by a majority of reactionary special interests Congressmen.” To help with fund-raising, he brought in a charismatic Democratic senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy to speak at a $100-a-plate dinner at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. 28
Daley made a concerted effort during the campaign to raise his public profile through the increasingly important medium of television. He eagerly appeared on the local NBC show City Desk. To smooth his rough Bridgeport edges, he took diction lessons through the Northwestern University speech department. Even with this expert advice, however, Daley still badly mangled syntax and vocabulary, at times fading into incomprehensibility. At a televised roundtable, he was asked whether he would serve out his term if reelected or whether he might run for mayor in a year. “Well . . . that question is highly problematically and loaded, as you know,” Daley responded.He added that the question, which seemed straightforward enough, “had too many contingencies and too many possibilities for any intelligent man to answer it at the present time.” Despite Daley’s weak performance on television, he won reelection as county clerk handily. 29
Daley’s reelection campaign had all the markings of a dry-run for a mayoral race the following year. Most tellingly, he seemed to be quietly working to undermine Mayor Kennelly. Party regulars had never liked Kennelly, but some viewed him as a necessary evil — a reformer they needed to keep their hold on City Hall. Kennelly was, for better or worse, an integral part of the machine’s operations. This changed, however, once Daley became machine boss. Kennelly’s views were no longer considered in slating decisions, and the mayor was suddenly frozen out of the traditional preelection precinct captains’ luncheons and from the traditional round of “speak for the ticket” rallies at the ward offices. When a Daley loyalist was asked about Kennelly not being invited to the precinct captains’ luncheons, he responded that “Kennelly’s not a committeeman” — something that had been equally true in years when he had been invited. These attempts to push Kennelly out bore all the hallmarks of a classic Daley betrayal. Kennelly had consistently supported Daley. Desperate to be slated for county clerk in 1950, Daley had Kennelly call Arvey to lobby for him. The same year, when Daley was maneuvering to be slated for Cook County Board president, Kennelly was one of the allies Daley tried to sneak onto the slating committee. On October 31, 1954, Daley declared, “I am not and never was a candidate for mayor.” He was, he insisted, only “a candidate for the important office of County Clerk” — words of reassurance to help lull his old ally Kennelly into a false sense of security. 30
With the drive to push Elizabeth Wood out gaining force, Kennelly’s housing coordinator recommended that the CHA board commission a study of the agency’s operations. On his recommendation, the board retained a consulting firm. Wood was frozen out of the consultants’ information-gathering process, and when the firm completed its report it recommended abolishing her position of executive secretary and replacing it with a new position of executive director. Wood’s supporters at the CHA were convinced that the consultants’ report was designed to provide the board with nominally objective reasons for doing what it had already decided to do. “All that stuff about Elizabeth not being a good administrator was phony,” says the former CHA director of research. “It was what the board wanted them to say.” 31
At an August 23 meeting, the CHA commissioners gave Wood a copy of the report. They informed her that they had taken the consultants’ advice to create a new position, executive director, and had filled it with retire
d army lieutenant-general William Kean. Kean would run the CHA. Board chairman John Fugard said he hoped that Wood would stay on to handle “the social aspect of housing in which she excels.” Wood requested and was granted a meeting with Mayor Kennelly. In a sharply worded statement days after that meeting, she attacked the CHA board for the new restructuring “without prior notice to or consultation or discussion with me.” She was being stripped of her authority, she charged, because of differences between herself and the board over race:
[T]he most significant and dramatic area of conflict has been on the subject of race relations and segregation. The truth is that the differences that have arisen between the Commissioners and the Executive Secretary have been related primarily to the issue of the elimination of segregation in public housing and the opening of all public housing projects in the City of Chicago to Negro and white persons without discrimination or segregation.
Wood went on to accuse the board of paying “lip-service” to open housing “while privately issuing instructions thwarting those policies.” The CHA refused to admit blacks to all-white projects, she charged, “despite repeated protests on my part.” With black families in the white Trumbull Park project living “in a state of fear and isolation, subject to constant harassment,” Wood said, that housing project had “become the shame of Chicago and the shame of the Nation.” Most dramatically, Wood went on television and attacked Kennelly for his weak support for open housing. “I don’t think that the city administration has ever adopted a clear cut policy on the integration of races in housing,” she declared on a local news show, only an hour after attending a closed meeting with the CHA board. 32
The day after Wood made her public statements, the CHA board met in special session and voted unanimously to fire her effective the following day. The board contended that she was being fired for making irresponsible statements to the press, including charging board members with “illegal and immoral motives” in connection with the integration of public housing. But Wood stuck by her own interpretation: “My feeling is that the racial question lies under my problems,” she said. The Chicago Defender agreed, headlining a story: “Action Labeled Victory for Mob.” Wood was quickly hailed by supporters of open housing as a martyr to the cause. Four members of a CHA citizens’ advisory committee on racial matters, which included representatives from the Chicago Defender, the NAACP, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, resigned to protest her removal. The black Baptist Ministers Conference of Chicago denounced her ouster, and one local pastor gave a sermon entitled “Elizabeth Wood and Her Enemies.” Wood’s backers formed an Emergency Committee on the Chicago Housing Authority, which asked the State Housing Board to investigate, and held a testimonial for her on October 28, 1954, at the 8th Street Theatre, at which she was praised for her “fearless leadership and selfless service” in her seventeen years with the CHA. 33
After she left office, Wood continued to attack the CHA for supporting racial segregation. “In no field,” she said, “is the program of nondiscrimination so bloody, so ruthless, as in the field of housing.” Before long, Wood moved to New York, where she became a housing consultant. In 1961, she wrote a report for the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York urging that public housing be designed with built-in lounges, candy stores, and even pubs. She told the New York Times, which put her recommendations on its front page, that these social accommodations were necessary to avoid the “army barracks” feel of most projects, in which residents are deprived of the physical space to socialize with their neighbors. Wood also traveled to India for the Ford Foundation, as part of a team advising a Calcutta metropolitan governmental body on planning issues. Her most eloquent later writings, though, were on the importance of racial and economic integration in housing. In The Balanced Neighborhood, she proselytized for what she called “good heterogeneity” in urban planning, her vision of a residential environment that provides for “meaningful contacts between unlike members of a community as a result of shared community facilities.” Exiled from Chicago, she continued to issue the same warning she delivered shortly before being forced out at the CHA: “The next generation will have to cure the slums created by this generation’s official blindness.” 34
Wood always blamed the political forces in the Democratic machine and the City Council for her ouster, says a former staff member who spoke with her after she left. The CHA board was weak, she explained, and important decisions were essentially forced on it by the mayor and the City Council, which is to say the Democratic machine. Though Daley was still eight months away from becoming mayor when Wood was forced out, he may have played a significant role in her dismissal. Daley had as much motive as anyone to want Wood out. He was strongly opposed, on principle, to using public housing to integrate white neighborhoods, and Wood’s plans hit especially close to home, since she had announced plans to move blacks into Bridgeport Homes, only blocks from Daley’s house. Wood’s insistence on running a “clean” agency was particularly problematic for Daley, since he was the head of a political machine that relied for its survival on its ability to find jobs for patronage workers. Her refusal to hire Daley’s cousin was the most personal affront, and it is likely that Daley would have been especially unhappy with the way the incident played out in the press. 35
Daley was in a good position to influence the situation if he desired. He had already been chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee for eight months when the consultants’ report on the CHA was commissioned, and for more than a year when Wood was removed. As party boss, he had considerable influence over the mayor, the City Council, and the CHA board. Daley also had close ties to James Downs, the Kennelly housing coordinator who commissioned the report and played a key role in ousting Wood. The NAACP Chicago chapter president said Wood’s removal was an “expertly engineered coup . . . masterminded” by Downs, and one of Wood’s former staffers called Downs “the evil genius behind it all” and suspected Daley may have been an important force acting on Downs. “Downs was a running dog for the political system, which at that time was Daley,” says Edward Holmgren, a former assistant to Elizabeth Wood. Daley proved happy enough with Downs that when he was elected mayor a year later, Downs became his first housing and redevelopment coordinator and one of his most trusted advisers. 36
With former military man William Kean now in charge, the CHA dramatically changed course. Wood’s aggressive attempts to use the agency to promote racial integration were replaced by obedience to the city’s political establishment. Kean set forth the CHA’s new direction in his first statements to the press. Asked if he would take a new approach to the Trumbull Park Homes situation, Kean said he did not know enough to comment, but that in any case he would not be the one to ask, “because the commissioners issue policy to me.” As it turned out, Kean lost little time in revising Wood’s racial policies and calling a halt to the CHA’s efforts to integrate all-white projects like Trumbull Park and Bridgeport Homes. 37
As for the integrated projects, Wood’s successor undid her efforts to promote “managed integration.” Wood had grasped that with racial animosities running as high as they were in 1950s Chicago, housing projects had to be integrated with great care. She worked hard to introduce blacks into majority white projects without exceeding the “tipping point” at which whites would move out and abandon the project so that it became entirely black. She also tried to keep the racial mix in projects in white neighborhoods sufficiently white to make them acceptable to the surrounding community. Leclaire Courts, for example, had been built in a predominantly white neighborhood, over loud protests from its neighbors. Wood had carefully managed its racial composition, holding black occupancy to between 10 percent and 15 percent and making a concerted effort to replace departing whites with new white families. It was an approach that by today’s standards seems troubling, and perhaps illegal, since it apportioned housing on the basis of race, and often meant that blacks would have to wait longer for housing than s
imilarly situated whites. But Wood’s tactics were intended to promote integrated housing in a highly segregated city. When her successor took office, he decreed that integration would no longer be managed. Kean did not hold open the apartments of departing whites until new white tenants could be found. As a result, projects that had been racially integrated soon became segregated. Leclaire Courts, for example, had 315 whites and 40 black tenants in 1953. After Wood’s departure, when whites moved out they were replaced by blacks. Before long, it was virtually all black. 38
By abandoning managed integration, the CHA effectively decided that Chicago’s public housing would become housing for blacks. Over the next twenty-five years, whites fled projects like Trumbull Park and Cabrini-Green. By 1969, fully 99 percent of the tenants in the CHA’s family housing would be black. In addition to ending Wood’s dream of integrated public housing, the new policies ensured that white politicians would fiercely resist allowing any new projects to be built in their districts “Now the aldermen could say self-righteously, ‘We can’t give you another site in our area; look at what you will do with it,’” recalls one of Wood’s aides. “And so no further sites were given.” 39
The CHA also abandoned Wood’s careful attention to tenant selection. Some of Wood’s criteria in evaluating tenants seem, by today’s standards, to be inappropriate. It is hard to imagine bureaucrats today evaluating the housekeeping skills of applicants for government benefits, and no doubt civil libertarians would file a lawsuit if they did. But the animating principle behind Wood’s tenant-selection process was that housing projects would only be healthy communities when careful thought was given to what kind of tenants would be allowed to move in. “It takes only a very few, very antisocial people to make a floor or a building or a project unsatisfactory to parents who are concerned about their children,” she once said. Wood’s tenant-selection process was abandoned not out of concern for civil liberties, but because the CHA was no longer concerned about the kind of communities that were being created. “The biggest problem after 1954, housing project tenants told me, was the breakdown in tenant selection . . . no real belief that you had to select self-respecting families,” recalls Wood’s aide. The chronically unemployed, convicted criminals, and gang members were all ushered into the projects, and hardworking tenants who wanted a healthier environment for their children moved out. 40