American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley’s totals — in the Automatic Eleven, certainly, but in other wards as well — were likely inflated by vote theft and other improprieties. Days before the election, Kennelly campaign manager Frank Keenan implored thousands of machine precinct captains to play fair. “We know most precinct captains are honest men and women,” Keenan wrote in a letter to them. “Don’t let anyone order you to do anything in the polling place which could bring punishment and also disgrace to your family.” But it was a plea that, in many precincts, was flatly ignored. In the days leading up to the election, envelopes showed up in poorer neighborhoods with a dollar bill and a mimeographed message: “This is your lucky day. Stay lucky with Daley.” In some wards, the vote theft was overt. After the primary, the anti-machine Chicago Tribune published photographs from election day showing Sidney Lewis, a former bail bondsman with the evocative nickname of “Short Pencil,” erasing crosses on ballots marked for Kennelly and replacing them with votes for Daley. Years later, in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series, the Tribune would document in vivid detail the many methods by which the machine routinely stole votes — “four-legged voting,” in which precinct captains accompanied voters into the voting booths; registering flophouse residents without their knowledge and then voting for them on election day; and, crudest of all, just sending someone into a voting booth and having him pull the Democratic straight-ticket lever again and again. How many of the 100,064 votes that made up Daley’s margin of victory were stolen is impossible to say, but some of them certainly were. Kennelly may have been thinking in part of the machine’s prodigious ballot-box-stuffing ability when he said on election night, “Unbreakable, just unbreakable, aren’t they?” 69

  The Republicans turned to a charismatic Democratic alderman named Robert Merriam to run against Daley in the general election. The thirty-six-year-old Merriam represented the liberal 5th Ward, home to the University of Chicago and the surrounding Hyde Park neighborhood, in the City Council. Merriam, who was known as “the WASP Prince of Chicago,” was heir to a Chicago reform dynasty. His father, a well-regarded University of Chicago political science professor named Charles Merriam, had also been a 5th Ward alderman, and had himself run for mayor in 1911. Before embarking on a political career, the younger Merriam had been a World War II army captain and war hero, who had survived the Battle of the Bulge and then went on to write a book about it. In the City Council, he was a leader of a group of reformers known as the “economy bloc” because of their skepticism about the machine’s wasteful spending of city dollars. And as chairman of the council’s crime committee, he had made a name for himself as a crime-fighter by broadcasting actual corruption and crime cases on his television show Spotlight on Chicago. The handsome and youthful Merriam spoke articulately about the problems facing Chicago. He was, one Washington columnist declared excitedly, “the type who has been upsetting tawdry, tired machines all over the country.” 70

  Merriam was not the unanimous choice of Chicago Republicans. Many of the city’s ward committeemen were not enthusiastic about giving their nomination to an unreconstructed Democrat. But Governor William Stratton, who was eager to breathe some life into the moribund Chicago Republican organization, prevailed upon them to give Merriam the nomination and use him to expand the party’s base. “The whole idea was to have a fusion ticket of independent Democrats, independents, and what there was of the Republican Party, which wasn’t very much,” Merriam said later. The crusty Chicago Tribune was not pleased with the Merriam candidacy. The leading conservative paper in America at the time, the Tribune regularly railed against watered-down Eisenhower Republicanism and the “socialistic” United Nations. It endorsed Merriam over Daley because it despised the Democratic machine even more than it hated Republican impostors. But Merriam had endorsed both Stevenson and Douglas in their last races, and he was “the darling of the Independent Voters of Illinois, the organized left wing of the Democratic Party,” the paper editorialized. “Merriam’s marriage to the Republican Party is obviously and shamelessly a marriage of convenience.” 71

  The mayoral election was shaping up as a contest between two men who, by all external appearances, could hardly have been more different. Merriam had style and sophistication, while Daley exuded working-class Bridgeport. Daley was a fifty-three-year-old father of seven who had spent decades of his life plodding his way up the ranks of the machine. A short and pudgy man, he had a face that drooped into a vast expanse of hanging flesh. “He would be doomed in the cosmetology of today’s politics: those jowls, that heavy-set look,” David Halberstam would write in a profile years later. “He doesn’t look like a modern municipal leader, a cost-accounting specialist; he looks, yes, exactly like a big city boss.” And Daley spoke in the heavy accent of ethnic Chicago, sprinkling his sentences with “dis’s” and “dat’s.” He spoke awkwardly and at times incomprehensibly. According to one observer, he alternated between “a controlled mumble for TV and an excited gabble for political rallies.” And throughout his career, his words had a way of coming out in a tangle. When he opened a bicycle path in Odgen Park, a year into his mayoralty, he referred to a bicycle-built-for-two as a “tantrum bike,” and expressed concern for the park’s “walking pedestrians.” The same year, at an atomic energy exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, he would declare it “amazing what they will be able to do once they get the atom harassed.” He would declare to reporters, “I resent the insinuendos,” offer information “for the enlightenment and edification and hallucination of the alderman,” and implore his audience to “reach higher and higher platitudes.” And in a moment of despair toward the end of his career, he would exclaim, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” 72

  Daley was especially unprepossessing when contrasted with the captivating young Robert Merriam. Merriam may have been polished, but he also looked, as one political observer put it, “like a South Side Chicago image of an Ivy Leaguer.” His distinguished manner seemed to put him above the workaday Chicagoans whose votes he was seeking. “You know what the party workers say?” Merriam complained after the election. “They say to each other, ‘Have you ever seen this Merriam take a drink? Does he ever drink? I mean, have you ever actually seen him take a drink?’” And Merriam’s high-minded reform politics might appeal to the blue bloods who lived near the Lake, but they left many working-class voters cold. Supporters of Boston’s legendary Mayor James Michael Curley used to tell the story of the Beacon Hill lady who went door-to-door in working-class South Boston campaigning for a reformer for school committee. One Irish housewife listened to her pitch politely, and then asked, “But doesn’t he have a sister who works for the schools or who has something to do with the school system?” The Boston Brahmin lady immediately protested: “I assure you, madam,” she said, “he is not the kind of man who would ever use his position to advance the interests of his sister.” The Irish housewife replied, “Well, if the son-of-a-bitch won’t help his own sister, why should I vote for him?” Merriam’s upper-crust idealism was not for everyone. 73

  Merriam’s charisma and articulateness did little for him in the campaign. In 1955, television was just beginning to come into its own as a political force. The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, which revealed Senator Joseph McCarthy as a bully and tyrant before an entire nation, had powerfully demonstrated the potential the new medium held to influence public affairs. But Adlai Stevenson, an engaging orator, still lost the next year’s presidential race to the less articulate Dwight Eisenhower. Election campaigns were still largely won or lost through retail politics. This was particularly true of machine candidates, who generally prevailed not because of their personal qualifications or charisma but because of the strength of the organization backing them. George Washington Plunkitt, a leader in New York’s legendary Tammany Hall organization and the foremost philosopher of machine politics, noted in his primer How to Become a Statesman that organization candidates who “cram their heads with all sorts of college
rot” are wasting their time if the machine is doing its job properly. In choosing the machine candidate, a voter was supporting a whole political system — the ward office that got his street repaved, the ward committeeman who got his child out of a scrape with the law, the patronage system that provided him or a relative with a job. For all of this to continue, the machine candidate had to win. Daniel Rostenkowski, who would rise to be an influential congressman as a result of Daley’s patronage, recalls that when his wife saw Adamowski on television, he impressed her so much more than Daley that she asked her husband if he was sure he was backing the right man. “I said, ‘LaVerne, it’s just bread and butter.’” 74

  Daley made the most of his party affiliation. He never tired of reminding voters that he was the Democrat and Merriam the Republican — not bothering to explain that Merriam had jumped parties because of his frustration with the machine’s lock on his party. He taunted his opponent for not being a loyal member of either political party. Merriam was trying to convince Democrats he was not a Republican, and Republicans he was not really a Democrat, Daley said in one debate. “I can’t think of anything more difficult than trying to mate an elephant with a donkey.” 75

  But Merriam’s best chance of winning was, in fact, trying to accomplish a mating of that kind. He appealed to supporters of Kennelly and Adamowski to cross party lines, arguing that he was the rightful heir to their anti-machine campaigns. If he were elected, Merriam promised, he would reappoint Kennelly’s Civil Service Commission chairman, who had been targeted by the machine. Merriam had some successes in winning over his fellow Democrats. The Independent Voters of Illinois, the city’s most powerful reform organization, abandoned its usual Democratic loyalties to endorse Merriam. But what really would have given Merriam’s campaign the aura of Democratic-Republican fusion was an endorsement from either of Daley’s Democratic primary opponents, and in this endeavor he failed. Kennelly remained neutral. Adamowski, for all his warnings of the dire consequences that would befall Chicago if Daley won, told Merriam that as a lifelong Democrat he could not endorse a Republican. “The next year,” Merriam noted later, “he ran as a Republican for state’s attorney.” 76

  Issues, in the conventional sense, played only a minor role in the campaign. Daley’s positions ran heavily to platitudes. He was against crime, favored hiring more policemen, and strongly supported “beat walking.” Daley also wanted government to operate more efficiently. And, in what would become one of his trademarks, he made insistent but vague promises about doing more for the city’s neighborhoods. “The neighborhoods are the backbone of the city,” Daley told one local crowd. “Revitalizing and protecting them is the first and main job of an administration centered on the people of Chicago.” Merriam, by contrast, actually offered creative solutions to many problems confronting the city. To improve transportation, for example, he called for tearing down the ugly and noisy elevated tracks in the Loop and replacing them with a subway system, and for offering transfers between the commuter rail lines and the city bus system. 77

  As he had in the primary, Daley pursued a two-track approach to the racial question. He continued to embrace Dawson and the sub-machine, and campaigned heavily in the Black Belt. Daley, who had grown up close to blacks and attended high school in a black neighborhood, threw himself into Bronzeville in a way that more patrician whites like Kennelly would not. “One of my first experiences in politics was on the South Side at an infamous nightclub at 55th and State,” recalls Ira Dawson, William Dawson’s nephew. “I watched Daley parade down through that packed, smoked-filled nightclub — it was like the Cotton Club in Harlem — and being very accessible.” Daley managed to present himself to the black community as someone who supported them in their struggle for equal rights. In a front-page editorial entitled “Elect Daley Mayor,” the Chicago Defender declared that “[o]n the vital issues facing Chicago,” including civil rights, Daley had “taken a firm and laudable stand.” But the truth was, Daley’s stand was not especially laudable, and it certainly was not firm. When whites were present, Daley made every effort to dodge direct questions about integration. At a March 28 meeting of the City Club of Chicago, he was asked where public housing should be located. Daley spoke in favor of public housing, but he would not address the most vexing question about it. “Let’s not be arguing about where it’s located,” Daley responded. Through the machine’s back channels to the ethnic neighborhoods, Daley got out word that white voters could count on him to hold the line on integration. The militantly anti-integration South Deering Improvement Association, which was leading the battle against blacks moving into Trumbull Park, endorsed Daley for mayor. The group sent out sound trucks on primary day announcing that it had struck a secret deal with Daley, and urged its followers to vote for him. In the days after the election, the South Deering Bulletin declared confidently that Daley would be good for the cause because he lived in a neighborhood “very much like South Deering” and he had stood up for “preservation of neighborhoods.” The machine also employed more blatant racial appeals, but it made them quietly. It circulated letters in the Bungalow Belt — the working-class white neighborhoods on the Southwest and Northwest sides — from a made-up group called the “American Negro Civic Association” praising Merriam for his steadfast support for open housing. The machine also spread rumors in these same neighborhoods that Merriam’s wife — whose French ancestry made her exotic by Bungalow Belt standards — was black. While they were at it, they also stirred up Catholic voters by circulating copies of Merriam’s divorce papers. In a television appearance for Daley, Near North Side alderman Thomas Keane spoke movingly of Daley’s family — “that enchantingly adorable mother . . . and those seven children kneeling at the side of their bed at night in family prayer” — and emphasized that “Daley has seven children and they are all his own.” It was a reminder that Merriam had divorced, remarried, and was raising two children born to his wife during her first marriage. 78

  Daley sought, as he had in the primary, to fashion his campaign into a populist struggle. He once again made the rounds of the ward luncheons and neighborhood meetings, and he drew on the machine’s grassroots contacts to stage a series of “family-to-family” meetings in private homes. Without the benefit of the machine’s connections, Merriam’s forays into working-class Chicago often left him in front of unreceptive, or at best indifferent, audiences. In one of the low points, Merriam arrived at a South Side revival meeting just as a woman writhing with religious ecstasy was being carted out. “Say what you got to say,” the preacher told Merriam. “Do it in five minutes and git out of here.” The candidate did as he was told. 79

  Daley also used his organized labor support to reach out to everyday Chicagoans. He was warmly received in the city’s union halls. On March 4, an enthusiastic crowd of four thousand members of the AFL International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers heard Daley introduced as “the man who can do us the most good.” Several weeks later, he promised a meeting of twelve hundred transit workers that if elected he would appoint a “labor union man” as a member of the Chicago Transit Authority board. In fact, Daley promised, he would appoint labor representatives to city boards in every area — including schools, parks, and health. “I have found union leaders want to serve not only for their unions but for all the people,” he said. “That is the kind of leadership we need.” Daley brought his father, Michael, with him to a rally of the Sheet Metal Workers Union, of which the elder Daley had been a member for half a century. “Give Dick a vote,” Michael Daley implored his union brothers. “We’ve never had a member or a member’s son elected to such a high office.” Daley also paid a pre-election visit to the stockyards, mounting a horse and reminiscing for a crowd of 500 about his days as a stockyard cowboy. 80

  Merriam, like Kennelly and Adamowski before him, painted a dark picture of the kind of city Chicago would be under Daley. This was an election, Merriam argued, that would determine whether the city would fall hostage to the “arrogant
Morrison Hotel bosses” and their brand of machine politics. “Their transparent and nefarious manipulations,” he said, proved “that the Democratic party cannot be trusted to govern the city in the interests of all the people.” Merriam also tried to tie Daley to the syndicate. Kennelly had been dumped, Merriam charged, to clear the way for a “wide open city” for syndicate gambling and other illegal activities. He cited an article in Variety reporting that strip joints were starting to reopen in Chicago in anticipation of a Daley victory. “I’ve been hearing reports that Democratic precinct captains around town are spreading the word that after the election — if their man becomes mayor — everything is going to go,” Merriam declared. “Every syndicate operation is going to open up in Chicago: open for high stake, high pressure gambling, crooked dice games and all the rest.” 81

  As in the primary, Daley responded to Merriam’s charges of bossism with sentimental pleas that the voters see his innate goodness. “I would not unleash the forces of evil,” Daley protested. “It’s a lie. I will follow the training my good Irish mother gave me — and Dad. If I am elected, I will embrace mercy, love, charity, and walk humbly with my God.” A key to Daley’s strategy of deflecting the charges of machine politics was once again securing the endorsement of reform icon Adlai Stevenson. At a Palmer House dinner for the reform-minded “Volunteers for Daley” group, Daley endorsed Stevenson for president in 1956. Daley’s logrolling worked. At the dinner, Stevenson called Daley a “four square friend of judicial and tax reform,” and later went on to back him against Merriam. 82

  Merriam’s warning that Daley would usher in an age of corruption received a boost when the Chicago Bar Association brought charges against Alderman Becker in connection with the zoning-kickback allegations. Daley, who had stuck by Becker when the accusations were first made, decided to act. He forced Becker off the machine ticket and pushed John Marcin, the nominee for city treasurer, up to the city clerk slot. To replace Marcin, Daley chose Morris Sachs, who had run for city clerk on Kennelly’s ticket and lost by a mere 21,000 votes — running 79,000 votes ahead of the mayor. Sachs, who started out as a poor immigrant selling clothing from a pack on his back, had risen to success as a clothing retailer and as creator of the popular Sachs’ Amateur Hour television show. Sachs was a beloved figure in Chicago, known for his folksy ways. “I sold Dick Daley’s mother the first pair of long pants for Dick,” he used to boast on the campaign trail, to the delight of his audiences. “Without me, where would he be?” It also did not hurt that Sachs was Jewish, which kept the Democratic ticket ethnically balanced after the removal of Becker. The Tribune wasted little time in running a cartoon depicting Sachs as a bellboy at the Morrison Hotel, but Sachs remained popular with the voters, and his ebullient personal style quickly overshadowed the Becker scandal. Daley once again relied on the well-disciplined Chicago machine to turn out his voters. As party boss, he sent word out from the Morrison Hotel that every ward committeeman and precinct captain was expected to produce in this election as he never had before. Daley’s frenetic campaigning in the ranks of the machine reached its high point on March 28, at a final rally for nearly six thousand precinct workers at the Civic Opera House. 83