by Adam Cohen
Daley did not share this enthusiasm for the War on Poverty or CAP. He was not, by temperament, a believer in welfare programs. His upbringing in Bridgeport had taught him that life was a struggle, and that people caught up in hard times should look to themselves first. “Look, Sister,” Daley once said to a nun who complained to him about the problems of Chicago’s ghetto residents. “You and I come from the same background. We know how tough it was. But we picked ourselves up by our bootstraps.” Nor did Daley believe in the increasingly fashionable talk about “welfare rights,” and what poor people were owed by the government. “In his heart of hearts,” one Daley associate said, “I think he would like to grab these people by their lapels, shake them, and say, ‘Get to Work!’” But there was one thing Daley liked very much about the War on Poverty — it promised to send millions of dollars of federal money to Chicago. Daley was one of a contingent of big-city mayors, including New York’s John Lindsay, Los Angeles’s Sam Yorty, and Detroit’s Jerome Cavanaugh, who went to Washington for a private briefing on the program. Daley, who could track a federal dollar better than anyone, overcame his philosophical objections and declared after a two-hour meeting with Housing and Urban Development secretary Robert Weaver that the new anti-poverty initiative was a “bold, imaginative enterprise.” 67
Daley was more than willing to take the federal money, but he was determined not to let Chicago’s CAP operate under maximum feasible participation. The whole idea of letting poor people manage poverty programs, which the Johnson administration was so excited about, struck Daley as absurd. “It would be like telling the fellow who cleans up to be the city editor of a newspaper,” Daley declared. Daley also immediately grasped the serious political implications of maximum feasible participation. Policymakers in Washington saw it mainly as a way to sidestep the “board ladies and bureaucrats” who controlled poverty programs. Daley, who looked at everything through the lens of machine politics, understood that it would take money, patronage jobs, and ultimately power away from City Hall and the machine and hand them over to neighborhood activists. Daley had seen it all before. The idea of maximum feasible participation had been borrowed from a Kennedy administration juvenile delinquency program. Daley had watched that program channel money to the machine’s opponents in the neighborhoods. Ultimately, he shut the program down, sending millions of dollars back to Washington, and then established a new city-funded program that operated under his close supervision. To avoid being put in this position again, Daley went to Washington to testify against including a maximum feasible participation requirement in the CAP statute. The nation’s mayors believed, he told the House Committee on Education and Labor, that “any project of this kind, in order to succeed, must be administered by the duly constituted elected officials of the areas.” 68
Daley lost this early skirmish in the war. Maximum feasible participation remained in the law. But the language of the act remained imprecise enough that a local government that wanted to evade it had considerable leeway. The act did not specify how many poor people had to participate, or what kind of decision making they had to be part of. Daley’s approach to implementing CAP, which was quickly dubbed the Chicago Concept, was to keep control over the money and the important decisions in City Hall. “It is a mistake for mayors to let go of control of their programs to private groups and individuals,” he insisted. “Local government has responsibilities it should not give up.” He established the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity to oversee CAP, naming himself as chairman and Clair Roddewig, the firmly pro-Willis president of the Board of Education, as vice chairman. The ninety-member CCUO board that Daley named had only seven residents of poor neighborhoods — a level of participation that seemed suspiciously less than the “maximum feasible.” The vast majority of the board were machine loyalists, city bureaucrats, friends from the business community, and other people Daley could rely on to see things his way — including five black aldermen who voted with the machine on civil rights issues. One poverty activist charged that the CCUO board selected by Daley “reads like a fund-raising list of the Democratic party.” 69
To serve as executive director of the CCUO, Daley selected Dr. Deton Brooks, a former research director with the Cook County Department of Public Aid. Brooks, who was black, had close ties to Daley and the machine. While heading up the CCUO, he served as cochairman of the reelection campaign of machine congressman Roman Pucinski — despite protests from Republicans that his dual roles violated the Hatch Act’s prohibition on federal employees working in political campaigns. Brooks was responsible for setting up the network of local CAP organizations. He named directors for the twelve neighborhood service centers, who in turn chose local residents to serve on neighborhood advisory councils. This was the grassroots network that the War on Poverty theoreticians hoped would become the engine for reinventing anti-poverty programs nationwide. Under Brooks and Daley, of course, the network turned into an adjunct of the Democratic machine. As a gesture to maximum feasible participation, the CCUO designated one thousand poor people as salaried “community representatives,” but the vast majority of them were selected by the Democratic ward organizations. To be part of the network, one critic charged, “your precinct captain and ward committeeman must recommend you.” Daley was unapologetic about the machine’s involvement in CAP. “What’s wrong with a Democratic committeeman sending a capable man or woman when the test is on the person’s qualifications and not who sends him?” he asked. “It’s only a question of putting a force of the best men and women possible together.” In some cities, poor people were allowed to vote for members of local anti-poverty boards, but Daley insisted that Chicago’s representatives be appointed. It was, of course, another way in which Daley ensured that the machine dominated CAP at the local level. But Daley insisted he could not envision anyone wanting to participate in an election of this kind. “Would you want to come and vote and be forever known as poor?” he asked. 70
In April 1964, the Daleys left for a three-week European tour, with Police Superintendent Wilson, Alderman Marzullo, and city director of special events Colonel Jack Reilly among those in tow. If Daley’s trip was designed to give him an air of worldliness — even, perhaps, to put him in the running to be named as Johnson’s running mate in 1964 — his mundane observations about the world capitals undercut the intended effect. On his first visit to Paris, in the shadow of Notre Dame and the Louvre, Daley exclaimed, “It’s marvelous the way they’re trying to have a clean city.” After an audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, he observed: “We all have the same problems, especially traffic.” The Daleys visited Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Lourdes, and Dublin, and had a private audience with Pope Paul VI. The highlight of the trip was a visit to Daley’s ancestral home of Dungarvan, in County Waterford, Ireland, where he was greeted by five thousand townspeople who wished him cead mile failte, Gaelic for 100,000 welcomes. Daley learned from the locals that his maternal grandfather, a well-known wrestler known as Big Diamuid O’Duinn, had been the town tug-of-war champion. In County Clare, Mrs. Frances Condell, the mayor of Limerick, told Daley that the O’Daleys were well-known poets in the area. She told Daley that one of his ancestors, Donough More O’Dalaigh, was the official poet of Bunratty Castle, where the Daleys ate a medieval dinner. 71 Daley’s welcome when he returned to Chicago was less gracious: the newspapers were once again full of corruption scandals. This time, the newspapers had discovered that city employees were making large amounts of money renting trucks to the city at inflated prices. It also turned out that the Forestry Division was buying all of its flowers, at inflated prices, from a single company owned by a Forestry Division employee. 72
In August, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, the Democrats were torn by one of the most searing disputes in the party’s history. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a biracial civil rights coalition, petitioned to be seated in place of the all-white “regular” Mississippi delegation, argui
ng that a segregated state delegation should have no place in the National Democratic Party. Fannie Lou Hamer, the last of twenty children born to sharecroppers, gave powerful testimony about the beatings and abuse she had suffered in her struggles to organize blacks to vote. Hamer’s televised testimony before the credentials committee riveted the nation until President Johnson — who was worried that Hamer’s appeal would divide the party — hastily scheduled a press conference to preempt her. Daley had the Illinois delegation adopt a resolution favoring the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation, which was headed by Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson — who had once joked that NAACP stood for “niggers, alligators, apes, coons, and possums.” As usual, Daley had his black machine followers take the lead in this anti–civil rights cause. The resolution backing the white Mississippians was sponsored by Alderman Kenneth Campbell, one of the “silent six,” and aldermen Claude Holman, Ralph Metcalfe, and William Harvey all spoke out in favor of rejecting Fannie Lou Hamer’s heartfelt plea. 73 The convention eventually adopted compromise, brokered by Hubert Humphrey, which permitted two members of the MFDP to be seated as part of the Mississippi delegation. 74
On September 12, in the midst of the national election campaign, the Chicago Commission on Human Relations received a report that a white group had purchased a two-flat at 3309 S. Lowe in Bridgeport, just three blocks from Daley’s home, with the intention of renting it to a black family. The purchasers included John Walsh, a high school teacher and former president of Teachers for Integrated Schools. Rumors quickly spread through Bridgeport that the house had been sold to a black family. Within a day, there was a small fire in the house. Within a week, excrement had been thrown into a vestibule. On September 19, Walsh wrote to Daley to say that he planned to rent the home to a black student from the nearby Illinois Institute of Technology and his dental-technician wife. “Since these young people are moving into a basically fine community, I’m sure that you will encourage all of your neighbors to make their new neighbors feel welcome in Bridgeport,” Walsh wrote. Faced by the community’s hostile reception, Walsh’s black couple backed out, but he found two young men — a twenty-one-year-old student and a nineteen-year-old mail clerk — to take their place. On October 3, a Saturday evening, white youths gathered at the house and shouted, “Two, four, six, eight. We don’t want to integrate.” Over the next few days, larger crowds arrived and threw rocks and bricks through the windows. 75
With the election only weeks away, Daley was in his usual bind over race. He could not afford to alienate Democratic voters in the black wards by endorsing housing segregation. At the same time, he did not want to lose white ethnics by supporting integration of the Bungalow Belt. The battle for 3309 South Lowe, of course, had an added layer of complexity because it literally hit close to home — compromising the racial boundary that the Hamburg Athletic Club of his youth had defended by force. Asked at a press conference about the clashes occurring down the street from his house, Daley declared, “Every person has the constitutional right to live wherever he wishes.” Human relations commissioner Edward Marciniak also insisted that the city was concerned about “protecting the rights of all people to live as good neighbors wherever they choose.” But while Daley championed open housing publicly, it was segregation that prevailed. The black men’s belongings were removed from the house without their consent, and a real estate agent rented it without Walsh’s knowledge to two whites, who proceeded to hold an open house for their neighbors. Walsh sued to evict the white tenants from his property, but the judge ruled in favor of the white tenants. Walsh took satisfaction in having shown that Daley did not really support open housing. “I proved that Daley was guilty of passive hypocrisy,” Walsh said later. “He could have prevented all the trouble ...[but] Daley didn’t lift a finger.” 76
President Johnson and Republican Barry Goldwater were now engaged in a heated — but, according to the polls, not especially close — presidential election. The Chicago machine, which had done disappointingly in the 1963 mayoral election, was gearing up for a massive effort on behalf of Johnson and the entire Democratic ticket. On September 14, five thousand precinct workers poured into the Medinah Temple for a pre-election rally. Dawson set off a five-minute frenzy of applause and cheering by shouting, “Dick Daley is the greatest political brain in the United States of America!” and “We have the most powerful political organization in the nation!” The Republicans were also preparing for the election, in their case by having volunteer canvassers examine the Chicago voting rolls as part of Operation Double Check. The party filed complaints against four thousand questionable voters, including the usual assortment of Democrats registered from vacant lots and psychiatric hospitals. The canvassers turned up one voter named Benjamin Franklin registered from a store at 4640 South Cottage Grove Avenue, though the store owner said no one lived there. Daley dismissed the canvass as “an effort to make political capital of a worn-out issue.” The machine held a traditional torchlight parade for Johnson on the eve of the election, with three thousand torches spread out at ten-foot intervals. Daley had ordered each of the city’s fifty ward organizations to turn out five thousand people, though one reporter on the scene said “it did not appear they had succeeded” and that some of those who showed up “looked like troops waiting to be dismissed.” Johnson, however, did not seem disappointed when he entered Chicago Stadium to the strains of the Democratic theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and was greeted by a capacity crowd. “Mayor Daley,” Johnson declared, “is the greatest politician in the country.” On election night, Johnson won Illinois by almost 900,000 votes, carrying Governor Kerner and the whole Democratic ticket in with him. The voting returns underscored the importance to the machine of handling the race issue correctly. One reason for the size of the Democrats’ margin of victory was the extraordinary growth in the state’s black vote. As a result of continued migration from the South, more than one million blacks now lived in Chicago. There were now some 500,000 blacks registered in Illinois, an increase of 300,000 in eight years. 77
After the election, Daley delivered his 1965 municipal budget. This budget was more modest than the ones that had sparked battles with the economy bloc in recent years. It did not seek pay increases for most city workers and, in response to newspaper stories critical of the cost of operating City Hall, it called for cutting the number of maintenance and operation workers there by more than 25 percent. Daley said he expected the new budget would lead to a reduction in property taxes. Also in response to recent criticism, Daley announced that the city had given 35,000 civil service tests in 1964, triple the rate in 1963. In another sign that Daley was shaking off some of the bad headlines of the last few years, the National Board of Fire Underwriters finally upgraded Chicago from 3 to 2, making it one of only eight cities to get that rating. On November 21, Daley’s second daughter, Mary Carol, married Robert Vanecko at Nativity of Our Lord Church. Joseph McKeon, a neighbor and longtime friend of the family, drove the bride in a limousine for the one-and-a-half-block trip to church. “She wanted me to do it because I drove her father and mother on their wedding day,” he said. 78 Governor Kerner, Lieutenant Governor Samuel Shapiro, and other elected officials attended. The Daley family received a two-foot-high stack of telegrams, including one from President Johnson. 79
In late November, the machine moved its headquarters from the Morrison Hotel to the Sherman Hotel across the street from City Hall. The Morrison, the machine’s home for the last thirty-five years, was being torn down to make room for the First National Bank of Chicago building. A few weeks later, Daley scheduled a meeting in his office with the city’s Committee on Organized Crime Legislation. The committee, which was headed by an associate dean at Northwestern University Law School, recommended making certain kinds of gambling a felony. A bill drafted by the committee that provided for prison sentences for bookmaking and policy games was signed into law a few months later by Governor Kerner. Coming after Daley’s decision to locate the
University of Illinois campus in the 1st Ward — which had led to a large piece of the syndicate’s home neighborhood being torn down — the latest round of legislation seemed to signal that Daley was finally making his break with organized crime. Daley’s turning against the syndicate appeared to be largely political. He had gladly used it to help him get to City Hall, but now that he no longer needed it he had to worry — as he had with Dawson — that it might at some point use its power against him. The syndicate was also proving increasingly embarrassing to the machine, with round after round of newspaper stories revealing that it had placed gambling operators and juice men in patronage jobs. The syndicate was well aware that its relations with the mayor’s office had grown chillier. The FBI was picking up that “the criminal element” in Chicago had begun to express dissatisfaction with Daley and “felt it should have more control over him since it helped him attain the position.” Daley’s FBI file reports on a conversation between an unnamed political figure and syndicate leader Sam Giancana. The political figure complained that Daley would not listen when he tried to prevent a particular nominee from being slated for Cook County sheriff. He “claimed that Daley was the most powerful political figure in Chicago history and he bemoaned the fact that prominent Chicago Ward politicians were no longer able to influence the Mayor,” the FBI report says. 80