by Adam Cohen
The summer of 1970 marked another milestone for the Loop: plans were unveiled to build the world’s tallest building, Sears Tower, on South Wacker Drive. Daley’s hard work encouraging companies to build in the Loop had been paying off handsomely. The previous year, 1969, had been the most successful yet — eight new buildings opened, adding 4.6 million square feet of office space. Daley had played a critical behind-the-scenes role in many of them. One of the recent gems was the First National Bank Building, a sixty-story granite skyscraper that opened in 1969 on Madison Street, between Dearborn and Clark streets. The bank held title to almost all the land it wanted to build on — everything except a small sliver of land owned by the city. The bank had tried for some time to purchase this remaining piece, but there seemed to be no way to accomplish this until Daley became mayor. When the bank approached him, Daley agreed to sell for just $77,500. “The deal was done quickly, over the phone, directly with the mayor,” writes historian Ross Miller. “No committees, no reports, no lengthy deliberations, no glossy plans.” The First National Bank Building quickly became a popular addition to Chicago’s downtown. The granite skyscraper’s design is distinctive — it tapers upward from a broad base — and its enormous sunken plaza along Monroe Street provides much-needed open space in the heart of the Loop. 35
Daley’s work on the Sears Tower called on more of his powers of persuasion. Daley knew that Sears, Roebuck and Company, the world’s largest retailer and a Chicago institution, was considering building a massive new world headquarters in the suburbs. He made a personal appeal to the company to instead locate the $100 million building in the city. Sears was willing to consider a location just west of the Loop, but it ran into a problem: the two-block parcel it wanted to build on was divided by Quincy Street, which was owned by the city. Sears’s chairman, Gordon Metcalf, met personally with Daley to discuss the situation. Daley believed that giving up a city street that dead-ended in the Chicago River was a small price to pay for having the tallest building in the world. He told Metcalf that there would be no problem. Corporation counsel Raymond Simon drew up a bill to sell the street to Sears at a modest price. The city also ended up assuming the cost of relocating water and sewer lines that lay under the street. 36
On July 27, Daley and Metcalf held a joint press conference at the Sherman House to announce plans for the new Sears Tower. The massive tower, which would allow Sears to consolidate employees who were scattered in seven locations around the city, would soar 1,454 feet, making it 104 feet taller than the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Its 4.4 million square feet of interior space would make it second in capacity only to the Pentagon. “I want to thank Sears for the confidence they are showing in the future in planning and designing the building which will adorn the West Side,” Daley told the press conference. In a time when older cities were being abandoned by big business — Detroit, for example, was reeling from Chrysler’s decision to build a new 1,700-acre complex in a suburb seventeen miles north of the urban core — Daley was scoring one of Chicago’s greatest triumphs. 37
On the eve of the 1970 general election, Daley was particularly worried about the prospects of two candidates: county assessor candidate P. J. “Parky” Cullerton and state treasurer candidate Alan Dixon. Cullerton was being opposed by Benjamin Adamowski, who was, as usual, running an aggressive anti-machine campaign. Adamowski was charging that Cullerton routinely gave large tax breaks to developers and property owners who contributed to the Democratic machine. At a closed meeting of the Democratic Central Committee at the Sherman House, Daley told the ward committeemen that electing the entire machine slate was important but that they should work particularly hard for Cullerton and Dixon. Daley was also counting on the magical name of Adlai Stevenson at the top of the ticket to help Democratic candidates statewide. 38
On election day, November 4, Daley voted in his Bridgeport polling place, taking just under eight seconds to cast his ballot. Asked how he voted, Daley left no doubt that he had pulled the Democratic straight-ticket lever, which registers a vote for the whole Democratic slate at once. “I guess you could tell from the length of time I was in there,” he told reporters with a smile. “That’s the way I’ve been voting ever since I began.” Stevenson ended up winning his U.S. Senate race by a landslide, taking nearly 60 percent of the vote against the Republican incumbent. Cullerton and Dixon also won handily. Daley waited until after the election to announce that he was submitting yet another record city budget. The new city spending, including raises of up to 10 percent for police and firemen, would require a property tax increase of 18 percent. Republicans noted that in the past ten years, Daley had raised the city’s operating budget by 125 percent while the city’s population had declined by 8 percent. “It’s politics as usual,” Republican alderman John Hoellen said. “The budget still has the evil of too much patronage.” 39
In December 1970, Daley ended the speculation that had overtaken the city and announced at a hastily arranged news conference that he would be running for a fifth term. He then went to the Sherman House where the ward committeemen — some sporting buttons reading “Daley is the one in ’71”— officially slated him. It was yet another occasion for Daley to bask in the effusive praise of his machine followers. Claude Holman, City Council president pro tem, declared that lauding Daley was “a joy and a pleasure for a black man.” Daley responded with his usual assertions that he was “fighting for the cause of the people” and that “no one walks through life alone.” In what had become a campaign-time ritual, Daley earnestly declared that he dreamed of “a city in where there are no slums.” In a concession to the growing strength of the black vote, the slate-makers named Joseph Bertrand, a black bank president, for city treasurer. He would, if elected, become the first black to hold a major office in city government. 40 To run against Daley, the Republicans nominated lawyer Richard Friedman, a former executive director of the Better Government Association. They were hoping that the reformist Friedman could assemble a coalition of Republicans and independents that would give Daley and the machine a strong challenge. 41
The year ended with another racially charged fight over the school system. School board president Frank Whiston had died, and the board was evenly divided between supporters of Warren Bacon, a black executive with Inland Steel Company, and United Steelworkers of America executive John Carey. The board members closest to Daley were backing Carey. Blacks and liberals lobbied Daley to use his influence with the board to select the first black president for a school system that was by now 60 percent nonwhite. Bacon’s supporters presented Daley with 50,000 petition signatures asking him to back Bacon, and a special appeal signed by such prominent Chicagoans as Professor Philip Hauser of the Hauser Report, developer Philip Klutznick, and Nancy Stevenson, the new senator’s wife. But Daley made no commitments to Bacon, and when the vote came, Carey was elected. Bacon and his supporters were especially bitter that the board had decided to take the unprecedented step of voting by secret ballot — an indication, they believed, that the fix was in. “I am an object lesson of the powerlessness of the more than one million black people that reside in this city,” Bacon said afterward. “We are the people who have given the majority votes in this city to the Daley administration, and I have never seen the black community more of one mind than it was on this issue, but we lost.” A group of thirteen black aldermanic candidates held a press conference to denounce Daley for “his underhanded tactics in causing the defeat” of Bacon. 42
Almost two years had passed since Judge Austin ordered the CHA to come up with public housing sites in white neighborhoods. The city appeared to be stalling until after the April 1971 mayoral election in order to avoid facing white backlash at the polls. But the plaintiffs continued to press the CHA to come into compliance, and Judge Austin took their side. After losing appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, the CHA capitulated in early March and released a proposal for 1,746 units of low-rise public housing on 275 scattered sites. The city
was formally complying with the law, but Daley declared that the court’s order was “detrimental to all of the people of Chicago, and in my opinion these units should not be built.” Daley was careful to couch his objections in a way that made it seem that he was not opposed to integration per se. He noted that the Nixon administration was resisting efforts to compel usually Republican suburbs to accept low and moderate-income housing but at the same time it was “pursuing the exact opposite policy in the cities.” It was wrong, Daley contended, for Chicago to have to bear the whole burden of integrated public housing. He also pointed out that Judge Austin’s ruling would prevent the building of public housing in black neighborhoods “where this kind of housing is most needed and accepted.” It was not just whites who wanted public housing in black areas, Daley said. “Some communities have requested this kind of low rise public housing, but under the court order their requests have been denied.” 43
The reaction to the CHA plan to build in white neighborhoods was immediate. Thomas Sutton, a suburban attorney leading the opposition inside the city, told a meeting of twenty-five homeowner associations that Judge Austin’s orders would never be allowed to take effect. “If the construction really starts, we’ll take action of some sort, and not letters or petitions,” he said. “In the meantime, we’ll put pressure on the aldermen to stop it. If they don’t, we’ll run them out of town on a rail.” At the same time, individual neighborhoods were maneuvering to get themselves off the list. Alderman Hoellen, one of only two remaining council Republicans, contended that a site chosen by the CHA in his Northwest Side ward had already been selected by the YMCA for a building expansion, which he viewed as more important to the community. “I think [the CHA] got the ouija board out and tried to strew some of the devil’s brew, and where it fell, that’s where they put a public housing project,” he said. But civil rights advocates supported the CHA proposal and urged that it be implemented quickly. “This is what Chicago has needed for a long time,” Hyde Park alderman Despres said. “The city has to bring an end to the pattern of segregation and the ever-growing ghetto so every neighborhood has a chance to survive.” A black newspaper columnist asked what happened to Daley’s belief in law and order, noting that “Mayor Daley forgot to stress compliance with the law when he so forcefully denounced our federal court’s ruling on public housing integration.” 44
Daley was eager to prevent the CHA proposal from injecting racial issues into the upcoming mayoral election. Friedman was already campaigning hard in black and independent wards, and public housing was an important part of his platform. As he had seen in the 1963 mayoral race, open housing questions had the potential to set the machine’s black and white constituencies against each other. In his statement about the proposal, Daley strained to argue that the public housing dispute was not racial in nature. “Those who claim that public housing is solely an issue of race ignore the experience of communities, black and white, which have rejected public housing because of economic reasons,” he said. “Many communities have and will accept low income families, black and white, where they will not accept public housing.” But Friedman argued it was about race, and charged Daley with “race-baiting Chicagoans with the low-income housing question.” Friedman tried to make an issue of Daley’s attempt to put off the release of the sites until after the election — without himself coming out in favor of integrated public housing. Daley was “the one who picked the 275 low-income housing sites, along with Charlie Swibel, Chicago Housing Authority director, that he is now repudiating,” Friedman charged. “He is lying to whites and blacks alike. He’s fighting for time until the election is over with and if he wins then he is going to go ahead and okay those sites. He had the list of sites locked up in his desk drawer for over a year, but he didn’t have the guts to tell the people in the neighborhoods targeted for the project.” Friedman also contended that the federal Model Cities Program was withholding the release of $55 million in federal Model Cities grants for Chicago because the city did not have an acceptable housing plan. Still, Friedman was as eager as Daley to dodge the difficult questions. He said he would have to poll Chicago’s citizens, both black and white, before deciding where he stood on the CHA proposal. 45
Daley used the release of the CHA plan to continue to talk about a position on open housing he had promoted since the 1966 housing summit: that the suburbs should have to accept some of the burden. “Those who occupy public housing, through no fault of their own, require many local governmental services and the cost of providing them should not be borne disproportionately by the taxpayers of Chicago,” he said. “The entire metropolitan area must share in the responsibility for providing housing for all income groups.” Daley was clearly advocating public housing in the suburbs in an attempt to minimize the amount that ended up being built in Chicago’s white neighborhoods. In making his case, however, he used an argument liberals would make years later: that poor blacks would be better off in the suburbs, where economic opportunities were greater. He cited a Harvard University study of Cook County estimating that between 1962 and 1968, 30,000 jobs would have been open to low income workers in the suburbs if housing had been available for them nearby. In fact, Daley was right. The suburbs were a better place for new public housing than white neighborhoods in the city, which were older, poorer, and closer to the ghetto, and therefore more likely to “tip.” But the politically powerful Republican suburbs did not want any public housing, and as Daley pointed out, they had an ally in the Nixon administration.
Though he could not stop the federal courts from ordering the list of sites released before the election, Daley could bottle it up in the City Council. As protesters packed the galleries with signs like “Austin belongs in a home,” the council voted 33–6 to send the siting proposal to the Rules Committee, which, one editorial page noted at the time, “doubles as a cemetery for legislation Daley doesn’t want.” The council had no further meetings scheduled before the mayoral election. The liberal Catholic Interracial Council called the City Council’s decision to send the proposal to committee a racist act, but Daley was rid of the issue until after the election. 46
Despite Friedman’s energetic attempts to forge an anti-machine coalition, Daley seemed to be gliding to victory. It was an indication of the machine’s continued strength that Daley and his running mates submitted 975,000 nominating signatures to get on the ballot — a remarkable two-thirds of all registered voters in the city. 47 Daley continued to emphasize the progress the city had made in new building and infrastructure during his time in office. In early January, he presided over the opening of the new McCormick Place, almost exactly four years after the first one burned down. “This is the ‘I Will’ spirit of Chicago,” Daley said, invoking the city motto. As he did in every election, Daley reached out to the machine’s core interest groups — the ward organizations, the ethnic groups, and organized labor. A labor dinner at the new McCormick Place attracted 10,158 union members, each of whom paid $15 to eat filet mignon with Daley. The dinner’s sponsors boasted that it was the largest dinner ever held in a single room. Daley made his entrance, walking down a red carpet, preceded by the Shannon Rovers and accompanied by William Lee, president of the Chicago AFL-CIO. As Daley walked through the hall, each row of tables burst into a wave of applause. Lee introduced Daley as “the greatest mayor in the greatest city of America.” After a full minute of applause, Daley pledged his support to labor, calling for less welfare and more employment. “It appears to me,” he said as he looked out over 125 yards of tables, “that there is no better way to rescue able-bodied, employable but unemployed men from their present eroding idleness, which slowly kills morale and initiative, destroys the spirit and affects the offspring, than to give meaningful work at decent wages.” 48
In this election, like every past one, Daley used Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade as his own personal campaign rally. He marched up front with men sporting huge white buttons with a green shamrock and “Daley ’71” written on them
. The day after the parade, Daley addressed 1,100 precinct captains at the Sherman House, telling them that on April 6 he expected them to help him obtain “the greatest majority ever cast.” A sign on the wall read: “Work, Work, Work.” It was apparent this time, however, that the usually indefatigable campaigner was starting to slow down. Daley turned most of the actual campaigning over to machine surrogates, not making the rounds of the ward rallies the way he had in his past races. In the final days of the campaign, while Friedman set out on a forty-hour last-minute sprint for votes, Daley confined his activities to one rally held by the Women’s Auxiliary of the South Side 6th Ward Regular Democratic Organization. 49
Within an hour of the polls closing on election night, Daley had enough reports from his ward committeemen to know that he had won the race handily. The sixty-eight-year-old Daley ambled out to the Old Chicago Room of the Sherman House a few hours later to tell the crowd of his victory. Daley’s margin was impressive: he had 735,787 votes to Friedman’s 318,059, or 70 percent of the vote. He carried forty-eight of the city’s fifty wards, losing only two liberal white wards — the 5th Ward, containing University of Chicago– Hyde Park, and the 43rd Ward along the lakefront on the North Side. Once again, he had managed to hold on to the support of both blacks and anti-integrationist whites. Judge Austin’s ruling, in the end, probably helped Daley with white voters by reminding them that they needed him in office, because he could be trusted to continue to hold the line on public housing. At the same time, Daley ran relatively well among black voters. Friedman was hurt among blacks by his affiliation with the Republican Party, and by his unwillingness to come out strongly for integration. But he insisted that the machine’s grip on the black wards was to blame for his poor showing. “He had the black vote in his hip pocket,” Friedman said of Daley. “He gave out morsels — jobs and the like — and precinct captains put out the word that welfare checks would be stopped if voters voted for me. I had a lot of black friends who were beholden to Daley and I did not expect them to support me.” 50