American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley wanted to expand O’Hare, but he was looking for a way to do it without saddling the city with costs. Daley’s agreement with the airlines left them with the obligation to pay for the airport, and he called for a new round of negotiations. The talks began in the office of the commissioner of public works, but when the airlines and the city could not agree, they shifted to the mayor’s office. The two sides met every ten to fourteen days for a period of about three months, but each side had nonnegotiable demands the other side would not agree to. Just when the deadlock seemed unresolvable, Daley got up from his chair, looked around the room, and announced that the city would waive all of its remaining conditions if the airlines did the same. The airlines met for ten minutes outside, and when they returned a United Airlines lawyer announced that the airlines accepted. The airlines agreed to a revenue bond issue for construction of new jet facilities, to be paid off by airport revenue, but guaranteed by the airlines in case the revenues fell short. This pact achieved Daley’s goal of getting the airport completed without taxpayer dollars. With the funding settled, Daley announced new plans for expansion and renovation of O’Hare. They were more ambitious than the airlines wanted — the costs were being estimated at $120 million — but in the end they agreed to put up a forty-year bond. O’Hare’s status as the world’s first self-sustaining airport was preserved. 38

  O’Hare’s passenger service buildings were completed in the summer of 1961, and Daley took a tour of them on August 29. The new buildings were “magnificent . . . showplaces of which Chicago justly will be proud,” he declared. “No one could fail to be impressed when he stands at the passenger service level and looks for 750 feet past scores of ticket counters and entrances, framed in the wonderful glass walls,” Daley said. “And this, remember, is repeated in two buildings.” On January 15, 1962, the new O’Hare terminal complex was dedicated. Daley was part of a contingent of two hundred VIP visitors who were given a tour of the new facility, examining ticket counters, passenger waiting areas, and luggage weighing stations. To some critics it was all too much. One newspaper calculated that the longest distance between transfers, if the passenger made no mis-steps, was 4,200 feet — or four-fifths of a mile. In 1962, O’Hare became the world’s busiest airport.

  O’Hare stands as one of Daley’s most impressive legacies, but it was not immune from the machine’s usual rules for doing business. The critical $120 million bond issue that allowed final construction to go forward was awarded to a syndicate of five banking houses through a process of “negotiation” rather than competitive bidding. While the City Council was rubber-stamping the deal Daley had worked out with these politically connected banks, the city comptroller claimed that competitive bidding would have been impossible in this situation. Also without competitive bidding, Norman Drug Stores was awarded a ten-year contract to operate the airport’s two drugstores. Critics said that the contracts shortchanged the city, but Daley defended the decision. “Our interest was to protect the public,” he said. “While we could have obtained a higher percentage, perhaps, we might not have got the quality operation we do have out there.” 39

  Worse revelations were yet to come. When the airport opened for business, it turned out that the right to sell flight insurance at the airport had been awarded exclusively to a single company, Airport Sales Corp., whose corporate parent had retained Tom Keane for the previous eight years. Another company, Tele-Trip, came forward to reveal that it had substantially underbid Airport Sales — proposing to charge $3.75 rather than $5 per $150,000 in passenger insurance. When the company submitted its bid to Daley’s aviation commissioner, it said, the bid was ignored. It also came out that another company that had hired Keane, New York–based Malan Construction, had been awarded $35 million in work at O’Hare. Among the projects given to Malan was a $5.4 million airplane hangar, a decision reportedly made over the protests of the city’s public works commissioner and the airport architects. In the 1963 mayoral election, Republican Benjamin Adamowski would charge that Daley personally waived almost $1 million in penalties against Malan for failing to complete parts of the airport on time. The airport was being run, Adamowski charged, as “a private concession for Tom Keane.” 40

  On December 11, 1958, more than one thousand of the Cook County Democratic loyalists gathered in the Morrison Hotel for a luncheon to launch Daley’s reelection campaign. It was a classic machine affair. A live orchestra played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and other standards. The speaker’s table was festooned with a large banner proclaiming the Daley motto, “Good Government Is Good Politics,” and blown-up photographs showed the major civic projects begun during Daley’s first term. Speakers waited patiently for their turn to step up to the podium and shower praise on the mayor. The city clerk and the city treasurer were particularly enthusiastic: just moments before the luncheon started Daley, in his capacity as machine boss, had notified them that they had been reslated for office. When it was Daley’s turn to address the crowd, he ticked off a long list of achievements from his first term: increasing the number of police and firemen; doubling the number of three-wheel police motorcycles; quadrupling the number of street cleaners; and installing new lights on 75 percent of the city’s streets, part of his campaign to make Chicago “the best lighted major city in the nation.” It was dry stuff, but Daley was preaching to the converted — and, in many cases, to the city-employed. The machine faithful burst into sustained applause as Daley proclaimed, “I am grateful for your confidence.” 41

  The official Republican party line was that there was a chance Daley could be defeated for reelection. “I can think of four or five good candidates,” Governor Stratton said. “Whether they will run is another matter.” The truth was, Daley had strong support that crossed party lines. He began, of course, with a solid Democratic base in the machine, and organized labor was firmly in his camp. William Lee, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, announced an hour after Daley’s kickoff lunch that the mayor had the CFL’s endorsement — even though the Republicans had not yet settled on a candidate. The newspaper editorial pages that had been wary of Daley four years earlier were now much more warmly inclined. The Chicago Sun-Times — owned by Marshall Field and Company, which had a strong interest in Loop redevelopment — led the cheerleading. “In the three and a half years that he has been in the City Hall, Dick Daley has been one of the best mayors in Chicago’s history,” the paper declared on the day Daley announced for reelection. “Coming from us, that is quite a compliment, for we opposed him in the 1955 Democratic mayoral election.” 42

  Although Daley was riding high at home, he was about to suffer an embarrassing setback at the state level. His longtime downstate Democratic antagonist, Paul Powell, was running for Speaker, now that the Democrats had retaken control of the Illinois House. Word spread that Daley was traveling to Springfield to make a personal appeal for his own candidate for Speaker, a Chicagoan who had the backing of Cook County’s fifty-four House members. Normally, that would have been enough to give Daley’s candidate the speaker-ship, but Powell cut a deal with the House Republicans. The combined votes of Republicans and downstate Democrats were enough to elect Powell. Stung by the defeat, Daley tried to retaliate by taking away Powell’s power to appoint House committees. Daley’s scheme, which would have created a Cook County–dominated Committee on Committees, was soundly defeated. It was such a naked power grab, and so divorced of principle, that even thirteen Cook County Democrats mustered the courage to break with Daley on this vote. Daley’s loss was a reminder of just how quickly his powers dissipated outside the Chicago city limits. He was at times able to get his way at the state level, as his tax deal with Governor Stratton in 1955 demonstrated. But without the advantage of the machine’s near-monolithic control of the political process, as he enjoyed in Chicago, Daley had to use more subtle maneuvering than he did in his blunt assault on Powell. 43

  The Republicans eventually drafted Timothy Sheehan, the son of a Republican precinct captain
on the Near West Side, to run against Daley. Sheehan took the obvious route in his campaign, trying to paint Daley as the leader of a corrupt and power-hungry political machine. Making the most of Daley’s failed attempt to put his own candidate in as House Speaker, Sheehan charged that Daley was “angry because he was thwarted in his evident wish to run the Illinois Legislature as he runs the Chicago City Council.” Sheehan also asserted that vice and drugs were thriving on the South Side because they operated under the protection of Daley and the machine. “There seems to be a positive correlation and connection between those areas which have suffered a breakdown of law and order and Democratic Party success,” Sheehan said. Sheehan even attempted to make public housing an issue, charging that Daley’s construction plans would result in “skyscraper slums.” However valid the criticism, it was not an attack that would win Sheehan many votes. The constituencies he needed to reach — white ethnics, business leaders, and wealthy people — did not oppose building public housing as skyscraper slums. And most black voters, who might have been more inclined to agree with the objection, were too deeply tied to the Democratic Party and the machine to consider backing the Republican Sheehan. 44

  The main difference between Daley’s 1959 campaign and his first run, four years earlier, was his newfound support in the business community. Chicago’s business leaders had a long history of opposing the Democratic machine. It was, in part, simple political partisanship. Leading businessmen in Chicago, as in most of the country, were heavily Republican. Their interest in low taxes also put them at odds with the machine, which thrived on padding payrolls and handing out sweetheart contracts. And there were social and ethnic factors at work. Chicago’s business elite was overwhelmingly comprised of wealthy WASPS from the suburbs, who saw themselves as having little in common with the machine’s working-class Catholics, Jews, poor blacks, and recent immigrants. Given the choice, Daley and Tom Keane were not the sort of people most of them would want to run their city.

  But in his first term in office, Daley had skillfully won the Republican business establishment over to his side. The most important factor was his vigorous promotion of downtown interests. Daley’s 1958 redevelopment plan, which had been all but drafted by the Central Area Committee, made clear to downtown businessmen that the Loop was his highest priority. The business community also appreciated his other improvements: his success in getting O’Hare built, his promotion of highways and parking lots, and his perpetual drive to clean up the commercial district. Daley had also endeared himself to businessmen with his willingness to extend favors and bend rules. “Daley has made it easier to do business in Chicago than almost anywhere else in the country,” one national commentator noted. “In the Windy City a favored entrepreneur who makes the right connection with a higher-up in the machine — say an Alderman Keane — finds little difficulty in getting permits, zoning changes, favorable tax decisions from the assessor’s office, and bank financing.” But Daley’s appeal to Chicago’s corporate titans was more than just the sum of these pragmatic considerations. He flattered the city’s business leaders by soliciting their advice on important issues facing the city, and by appointing them to countless Clean-Up Chicago commissions and committees to welcome visiting dignitaries. And although much of the city’s business elite was uncomfortable with Daley’s humble origins, many of these upper-class WASP businessmen got a perverse thrill from their relationships with the rough-hewn mayor. Continental Bank president John Perkins recalled once standing on a receiving line with Daley to meet the cardinal. “I said, ‘Nice to see you,’” Perkins recalls, “and he whispered, ‘Your Excellency.’” To some of these Evanston and Winnetka suburban family men, Daley was a romantic figure. “The man really knows how to use a good sock in the jaw,” white-shoe advertising executive Fairfax Cone once said admiringly of Daley. “As these men endorse the machine,” Commonweal magazine once observed, “they also indulge their own machismo.” 45

  The degree of Daley’s success with the business establishment became clear when he announced for reelection. On February 12, a bipartisan group of businessmen and labor bosses held a joint press conference at the Palmer House to endorse him and laud not only his “progressive program, but also his major accomplishment in making Chicago a better place in which to live and work.” The presence of Daley’s old labor cronies was to be expected, but the turnout from the ranks of the city’s old-line business leaders was impressive. Among the cochairmen of the committee were William Patterson, president of United Air Lines and a friend from the O’Hare negotiations; Clair Roddewig, president of the Association of Western Railways and a prime mover behind the Central Area Committee; and Fairfax Cone, chairman of the executive committee of the advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding. Sheehan, who should have been able to count on strong support from the business establishment, ended up with almost none. The defection of the business community was particularly obvious in the area of fund-raising. Sheehan was able to raise little more than the $130,000, making his the most under-funded mayoral campaign since the Great Depression. 46

  In his public appearances, Daley enumerated the long list of civic improvements he had brought to Chicago during his first term. Outside of the spotlight, however, he spent most of his time in quiet meetings with Democratic Party operatives designed to ensure a strong turnout of machine voters. He made a personal appeal to all fifty Democratic ward committeemen at the Morrison Hotel, starting on January 28 with a meeting for wards 1 through 25. He also presided over the traditional preelection luncheons for precinct captains in the Morrison Hotel. Daley was “the best mayor Chicago ever had,” Senator Douglas told the party workers at one luncheon. 47 Tom Keane implored the crowd to work to elect good machine aldermen rather than “carping critics.” At another precinct captain luncheon, Keane told the crowd that it would be a “sad affair” if Daley got only a normal-sized victory on April 7. “It lies in the hands of the Democratic workers to bring about the victory we deserve — the greatest ever seen in this area.” On that occasion, Dan Ryan was on hand to play bad cop to Keane’s good cop. Precincts that had brought in only fifty or seventy-five votes in the virtually uncontested February 24 primary elections had not been punished, he said, but those that fell short this time might not be so lucky. The machine held its traditional torchlight parade through Bridgeport on March 9, about a month before the election, ending with a rally at the Lithuanian Auditorium. Of the thousand people in the audience, the master of ceremonies — Daley’s park commissioner — introduced more than one hundred by name, including Jake Arvey and Dan Ryan. Daley did much of his campaigning in the city’s fifty Democratic ward offices. On March 16, he paid visits to the 40th, 45th, and 49th wards on the North Side, talking to ward heelers and listening to neighborhood problems. Ward organization functionaries greeted Daley, who got his own start ringing doorbells in the 11th Ward, with the special warmth they reserved for one of their own. At a dinner of the North Side, lakefront 44th Ward, at the Belmont Hotel, 330 Democratic party operatives serenaded Daley with a little song of their own composition. To the tune of “The Sidewalks of New York,” played on a handy piano, they sang: “Here’s to Mayor Daley / He’s so tried and true / That’s what everyone will say / Next Tuesday, too / You’re the greatest leader in the things you do/ To a man, the 44th is all for you.” 48

  In the great tradition of Anton Cermak’s “house for all peoples,” Daley also made the rounds of the city’s many ethnic organizations. He was an honored guest at a dinner for 2,000 hosted by the Italian American Committee at the Sherman Hotel. In a gesture Cermak would have appreciated, the band played “McNamara’s Band” when Daley arrived, and “O Sole Mio” as he left. He was departing, as it happened, for a dinner being given by a Greek Democratic organization. Daley, of course, needed no help in winning over Chicago’s large Irish community. The Saint Patrick’s Day parade on March 17 functioned as another Daley campaign event. Holding a blackthorn cane and sporting a green fedora, Daley led fifty thousand
marchers down State Street. The parade included thirty bands, sixty-eight marching groups, floats with leprechauns and Saint Patrick’s Day queens, and a healthy outpouring of Daley campaign posters. When the parade ended, Daley attended an Irish Fellowship Club dinner for 1,200 at the Palmer House. 49

  Sheehan could make little headway against this Daley juggernaut. Out on the campaign trail, he tried gamely to convince the voters that Daley’s administration was corrupt. At an appearance before the 49th Ward Republican organization, Sheehan charged that Daley and the machine were protecting the South Side policy wheels. To back up his accusations, Sheehan produced tickets from eight different policy wheels that one of his campaign workers had purchased in a single day. “Mayor Daley and Police Commissioner Timothy O’Connor, with 10,600 policemen, are unable to uncover even one policy wheel,” he said. “The reason is that the gambling interests are helping to keep the Democratic city administration in power.” Sheehan also attacked Daley in an address to the Business and Professional Women’s Club for leading a “ruthless” assault on Kennelly’s civil service system. “We in the practical end of politics can cite many instances in the past two elections where civil service employees have been out working actively, violating the spirit and law of the civil service system,” he said. Sheehan’s charges of bossism and corruption were, of course, entirely on the mark. It is one of the great ironies of Daley’s career that in this election, and in several others, he managed to enlist strong support from reform Democrats. Stevenson and Douglas played an important role in Daley’s outreach to anti-machine Democrats: they had their own political reasons for keeping on good terms with the machine, and many of their supporters followed them into the Daley camp. Daley benefited from the fact that the reform wing of the Democratic Party was comprised of liberal Democrats, who would sooner vote for him than for a Republican like Sheehan. Daley also did a good job of mouthing reform campaign rhetoric to anti-machine audiences, just as he sounded like a friend of the black community when speaking to black audiences. As in his 1955 campaign, a “Volunteers for Daley” committee formed to raise money and generate support for Daley among reform Democrats. At a dinner for 1,000 at the Sherman Hotel on April 2, Daley told the audience that he had been wrongly accused of being a “machine politician” when he ran four years earlier. “I was tried, I was convicted, and I was sentenced, without a chance to say what I had done.” 50