American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  The Central Area Committee, still concerned about the state of the Loop, hired the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for $400,000 to draft yet another plan for the city. Their lavishly illustrated 125-page plan, which was released in May 1973, bore the boosterish name Chicago 21, because it was intended to carry the city into the twenty-first century. Chicago 21 laid out a $15 billion blueprint for overhauling downtown Chicago, including new construction and an aggressive campaign to double the central area’s population. Among its suggestions were building more family-sized apartments, constructing a playground on the banks of the Chicago River, and developing more mass-transit lines. In time, the plan envisioned an entirely new transit system containing moving sidewalks, gondola cars, and two levels of underground streets to separate cars and trucks from pedestrians. The main thrust of Chicago 21 was finding ways to make Chicago more attractive to middle-income and wealthy residents, who had been fleeing the city for the suburbs in large numbers. The suburban ring around Chicago added a million new residents during the 1960s, climbing from 2.6 million to 3.6 million. During the same period, Chicago’s population declined from 3.6 million to 3.3 million. The city was also rapidly becoming blacker and poorer. It had gained 300,000 black residents in the 1960s, for a total of 1.1 million, while it lost 570,000 whites. Chicago began the 1960s with about one in ten residents on government assistance, and ended with nearly one in five. 7

  Community groups, and the public generally, were more sophisticated about the racial implications of urban planning than they had been in the 1950s when the CAC drafted its first downtown development plan. Critics complained that Chicago 21 was a thinly veiled attempt to move racial minorities farther from the Loop. This criticism had by now taken on a multicultural tone: Mexican-Americans joined blacks in arguing that they were being targeted by urban-renewal bulldozers. Residents of the Near Southwest Side Pilsen neighborhood, which had changed from being Czech, German, and Polish to Mexican, contended that the new development plans called for pushing poor Latinos out and replacing them with middle-class whites. “They have good reason to fear,” said Douglas Shorieder, vice president of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Most of the residents of these communities are recent Mexican-American immigrants and low-income blacks who couldn’t afford to live in the communities if rents and taxes increase.” 8

  Like the 1958 and 1967 plans, Chicago 21 was particularly concerned about the region south of the Loop, between downtown and the Black Belt. The developers were looking to build a large middle-class residential development that would serve as a racial barrier. The hope was that the new development would firm up the southern flank of the Loop, putting an island of middle-class housing between downtown office buildings and businesses and the Black Belt ghetto and public housing projects to the south. It was also intended to change the demographic mix of the residents and clientele of the central business district. Downtown business leaders were looking for more middle-class customers and also, they admitted candidly, a greater percentage of whites. The Loop businessmen were troubled by the current racial mix of downtown after-hours retailing, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1972, because “many whites [particularly suburbanites] stay away — not essentially because of prejudice, but uneasiness.” 9

  There was a precedent for using a new middle-class housing development as a barrier between affluent areas and the ghetto. In the late 1950s, residents of two wealthy North Side neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, were worried the Near North Side ghetto would spread toward them. In Lincoln Park, the fear was that blacks and Hispanics would move north over the traditional racial boundary of North Avenue, known at the time as the area’s “Mason-Dixon line.” Residents of the Gold Coast along the lakeshore were worried the ghetto would move east toward the lake. Daley declared a swath of poor housing on the Near North Side to be an urban-renewal area, known as the Clark-LaSalle Redevelopment Project, and invited bids for middle-class housing. The Chicago Land Clearance Commission spent $10 million, most of it federal money, to acquire and raze blocks of old buildings on the site. Competition for the land was fierce, with two hundred developers sounding out the commission about development rights. In the end, the rights to a ribbon of land a block wide and almost a half-mile long were awarded to Arthur Rubloff to build a large middle-class housing development. Rubloff’s long, thin project, to be called Carl Sandburg Village, was unmistakably designed to insulate Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. It would also help protect North Michigan Avenue, the burgeoning luxury retailing boulevard to the southeast. “That was Rubloff ’s argument, that we needed a massive infusion of middle-class housing,” recalls Daley’s human rights commissioner, Edward Marciniak, “and that we needed to make it large enough so it wouldn’t be swamped.” David Kennedy, chairman of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago, provided $20 million in funding to start the project off. Carl Sandburg Village, which was developed between 1960 and 1975, worked exactly as planned. The sprawling development contained thousands of units of high-rise apartments and townhouses, occupied by middle-class and overwhelmingly white tenants. Sandburg’s strip of middle-class housing separated the Gold Coast from the thousands of public housing tenants in Cabrini-Green a few blocks west. It also formed an anchor for the area south of North Avenue, preventing the black ghetto from spreading north into Lincoln Park. 10

  Chicago 21 proposed to do for the south end of the Loop what Carl Sandburg had done for the north end. By the early 1970s, as a result of declining railroad passenger traffic and the rise of interstate trucking, the railroad land Daley had tried to obtain for the University of Illinois campus was available. A group of downtown businessmen, led by Commonwealth Edison president Thomas Ayers and Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. president John Perkins, united to form a corporation to build a “new town” on the railroad land south of the Loop. Daley and his commissioner of development and planning, Lew Hill, worked closely with the business community on the project. Private funds were used to purchase the land and construct the buildings, but the city agreed to pay to build new streets, schools, and sewers. 11

  Dearborn Park, the “suburb in the city” that resulted, was a great success. Its apartment towers and town houses were soon home to a community of thousands of middle-class professionals, both white and black. It was also successful in its role as a racial barrier: it separated the poor, black population at the north end of the State Street Corridor from downtown Chicago. Dearborn Park’s design created what critics called a fortress effect. All of the buildings faced inward, and the project’s parks were to be fenced off and limited to residents. The project was also planned with no north-south through streets — only streets running east and west. It appeared that the intention was to keep ghetto residents from driving up from the Black Belt. “We think the general thrust of Chicago 21 is to prevent the poor, the blacks, and brown people living in the inner ring around the Loop from ‘taking over’ the Loop,” the Coalition of Central Area Communities, an organization of low-income residents, charged. But defenders of Dearborn Park say the purpose was more benign. “It was not racism . . . that drove the plan,” says Lois Wille, a Chicago journalist who wrote a book about the development, “but an overriding conviction that the project would fail unless prospective residents felt safe living there.” 12

  President Nixon flew into Chicago on a cold day in January 1974. Daley met him at O’Hare and escorted him downtown to his appearance before the Executives Club. The Shannon Rovers, the mayor’s favorite musical group, greeted Nixon as he walked into the Conrad Hilton. Daley had never failed to meet a president passing through Chicago, and he was not going to let the fact that Nixon’s Justice Department was indicting his colleagues stop him from observing this protocol. But in other ways, Daley was changing his ways. He was becoming less agile and less willing to appear in public in unstructured settings. He was also getting increasingly nervous about security. He had guards
posted at the front and rear of his home on South Lowe Avenue, installed new bulletproof windows in his mayoral limousine, and began to have a tail car follow him. Daley also put his office suite, where reporters once roamed and the public was once welcomed, off limits, with three uniformed policemen standing guard. And when he approached City Hall now, his guards used two-way radios to alert police in the lobby, who in turn prepared the elevator, making sure no stranger rode up with him. 13

  Daley’s close associates were continuing to get caught up in Thompson’s snare. In February 1974, an unlikely member of Daley’s inner circle was indicted: Earl Bush, the mayor’s bespectacled word-smith. Bush, a former newspaper reporter, had not worked his way up the ranks of the machine, and did not appear to operate by its loose moral code. But the U.S. attorney’s office discovered that he had quietly acquired an ownership interest in Dell Airport Advertising, the company that had held the city contract for advertising since 1962. Bush had recommended to a special city advisory committee that Dell receive the contract, without disclosing his financial stake in the company. Bush, who made $202,000 from Dell between 1963 and 1973, was fired by Daley after the news broke. 14

  Other Thompson indictments came in quick succession. In April, he indicted Tom Keane’s law partner, 49th Ward alderman Paul Wigoda, for tax evasion. The charge against Wigoda arose out of a $50,000 payoff he allegedly accepted in return for zoning the ninety-two-acre Edgewater Golf Course in a way that increased its development value. Days later, Matt Danaher, one of Daley’s closest allies and a longtime protégé, was indicted. Danaher was a Bridgeporter who had followed closely in Daley’s footsteps. His mother had asked Daley to get her son a job in 1948, and the young man started out as Daley’s driver. He went on to serve as Daley’s administrative assistant, and then as his patronage aide, before being elected alderman in Daley’s own 11th Ward. With Daley’s backing, Danaher had moved up to clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court. Danaher’s indictment stemmed from charges, first reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, that he had received more than $300,000 in payoffs from two Chicago builders in exchange for voting for zoning changes to clear the way to build a South Side subdivision. Word also leaked out that Danaher was being investigated by a federal grand jury because he had allegedly failed to pay for a $20,000 remodeling job on his house at 3504 South Lowe, a few doors down from the mayor. 15

  On May 2, Thompson indicted Tom Keane, the second most powerful man in Chicago government. Keane had once famously observed of his days in public life that “Daley wanted power, and I wanted to make money, and we both succeeded.” Thompson investigated how Keane made his money, and ended up indicting him on seventeen counts of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy. Keane was charged with using his position in the City Council to purchase 218 parcels of tax-delinquent land going back to 1966 and then reselling it to city agencies like the Department of Urban Renewal and the CHA for a profit of 125 percent. Daley stood by his City Council floor leader. “I’ve known him for many years,” Daley said. “He represents one of the finest families. I know his wife and his children. I’m shocked that anything like this could happen.” 16

  Thompson would no doubt have been delighted to move on to Daley himself, but no indictment was forthcoming. His supporters said the reason was simple: no matter what went on around him, Daley was not personally corrupt. Stahl, who ran Daley’s $60,000 contingency fund for four years, emphasizes that Daley was above reproach in his own financial dealings. “This was a totally honest man,” Stahl insists. “He used it to send Sister so-and-so to Rome on the occasion of her 25th anniversary. He used it to fix the holes in the roof of St. Stanislaw’s Catholic Church. It was like a little welfare fund. Not a penny went into his pocket.” Daley also wanted City Hall to operate cleanly. Financial impropriety “was not part of the public trust we had,” says Stahl. Daley may have presided over a system that was inherently corrupt. Jobs were given out on the basis of political work, not ability to perform, and workers were fired if they did not fulfill their political obligations. Work for the Democratic machine was routinely done on city time, and patronage employees were expected to kick back part of their salaries to their ward organizations. Votes were stolen, and decisions of government bodies on matters like zoning were for sale. But there is no evidence Daley ever gained financially from any of it. 17

  Thompson’s indictments were not the only legal troubles facing Daley in early 1974. Reports were circulating that John Daley, twenty-seven, and William Daley, twenty-five had actually failed their 1971 insurance license tests, but that the exams had been altered to provide them with passing scores. Several state officials charged that the exams bore signs of multiple erasures, indicating that they had been tampered with. The Daleys had insisted that John and William knew nothing about the alleged wrongdoing, and that the charges were politically motivated. But the scandal would not go away. In a county grand jury investigation, Gordon Casper, a former state insurance examiner, testified that William Daley did not answer six essay questions on the exam and would have failed it if Robert Wills, another former examiner, had not completed it for him. William Daley’s examination allegedly had answers written in two different colors of ink from two pens. Another witness testified that on one of the Daley tests the first 20 of the 120 multiple-choice questions were erased, and that in 19 of those 20 the answer was changed from incorrect to correct. Casper told the grand jury that Wills wrote the answers to the essay questions on William Daley’s test paper at the kitchen counter of Casper’s Springfield apartment. “Wills told me he was doing it because he wanted to do a favor for [Senate minority leader Cecil] Partee,” Casper said. Then Wills spent about twenty minutes working on Daley’s paper, Casper testified. Daley would later testify that he could not be certain whether the handwriting on the questionable answers was his or not. “I’m not an expert,” he said. “I can’t be sure.” Casper, who was fired from his job as an insurance examiner, was hired by the Employee Service Division of the State Labor Department. Wills, who also lost his job, got a new job — and a pay raise — as a custodian in the State Archives, which was under the jurisdiction of secretary of state Michael Howlett. Rumor had it that Partee had arranged for Wills’s new job, a possibility Partee himself did not entirely dismiss. “Whether I helped Wills get a job as a custodian is a gray area,” Partee said. Daley continued to insist that the insurance-test flap was politically motivated.“The idea apparently is if you can’t get at the father, attack the sons,” he said. 18

  There were still more charges swirling around the next Daley generation. Around the time the Daley sons were at the center of the insurance-test scandal, the newspapers were also reporting that a North Side home owned by Patricia Daley and her former husband, William Thompson, had not been properly appraised after improvements were made to it. And Daley son-in-law Dr. Robert Vanecko was called to testify before a grand jury investigating charges of vote fraud in the 11th Ward. The inquiry centered on absentee ballots cast on behalf of purportedly sick voters, accompanied by certificates signed by doctors. Some of the voters said they had not seen the doctors and did not vote in the elections in question. 19

  On top of everything else, Daley was now confronted with another police scandal. Police superintendent Conlisk had resigned the previous October after some of his men were convicted in an elaborate, and highly organized, scheme of shaking down tavern owners. The shakedowns reportedly netted more than $500,000 for the police participants. The latest scandal was part of a disturbing pattern of corruption in the department. Over the preceding three years, 86 policemen had been indicted for crimes and 407 fired, or forced to quit, for involvement with drugs and vice, and other improper activities. After Conlisk stepped down, Daley elevated deputy police superintendent James Rochford to take his place. In one of his first acts, Rochford ordered all top-ranking police officers to take lie-detector tests to determine if they had been involved in organized crime or corruption; of the 70 officers taking the test, seven failed ent
irely and nine failed one or more questions. And the police department had other troubles. In November 1973, the Chicago Tribune had reported on numerous cases of police brutality, including a teenager who lost an eye after being struck by a police officer. The series led to the indictment of four members of the force. In February 1974, it was revealed that the proportion of nonwhite police officers, which had never been high, had actually declined in recent years, even though the city’s black and Hispanic population had been increasing. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League urged Daley to do something about the racial disparity, and eventually sought help from the federal government. After Daley resisted the efforts of the Justice Department to address the problem through negotiation, the police department was drawn into multiple federal lawsuits. 20

  The signs that Daley’s health was in decline were becoming harder to ignore. He was elected to a twelfth term as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Organization in April. None of the fifty ward and thirty township committeemen present at the La Salle Hotel voted against him, but two liberal suburban committeemen abstained. It was another impressive political victory, but those in attendance reported that Daley appeared “upset and perturbed.” In a long, rambling acceptance speech, he went on about how the ousting of his delegates in 1972 had been “disgraceful” and charged that the Singer-Jackson slate of delegates had been selected in “telephone booths.” Within days of Keane’s indictment, Daley’s condition declined more abruptly. He appeared in the City Council chamber on May 6, but after feeling dizzy left hastily for an appointment with his physician, Dr. Thomas Coogan. After a brief examination, Daley entered Presbyterian–Saint Luke’s Hospital. City Hall’s public relations campaign went into high gear. Dr. Eric Oldberg, president of the Chicago Board of Health and a family friend, announced that Daley was suffering from hypoglycemia. Sis, the seven Daley children, and several of their spouses, converged at the hospital. Reporters suspected that the mayor was in a serious condition, but Daley’s new press secretary, Frank Sullivan, denied it. “This is a sign of the affection the kids feel for the mayor,” he said by way of explaining the visits. Sullivan stuck by the hypoglycemia story for nearly a week until reporters found out that Daley had, indeed, experienced a mild stroke. The family had held the news so tightly that even Sullivan apparently had not known the truth. The stroke, it was revealed later, involved the left side of his brain and impaired sensory perception and speech. Daley celebrated his seventy-second birthday in the hospital. When he went home, after a ten-day hospital stay, he was greeted by well-wishers holding signs welcoming him back to Bridgeport. Onlookers were kept at a distance so they were unable to discern any impairment. Daley returned to the hospital on June 1 for surgery to unclog a partially blocked carotid artery and then headed to the family home in Grand Beach, Michigan, to recuperate. 21