American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley was also less able to shape the city than he had been earlier in his mayoralty. Since the mid-1960s, he had been promoting the Crosstown Expressway, a $1 billion road that would go north-south and then east-west to connect to the Dan Ryan Expressway. Daley declared that the Crosstown would be a “New Main Street for Chicago,” the first highway that would improve rather than destroy the communities it ran through. The expressway’s planners issued press releases contending that it would “add elegance” to the neighborhoods it crossed. But even by Daley’s own figures, the 6.5-mile east-west stretch alone would displace 1,390 homes, 371 businesses, two schools, and 37 factories that employed 1,134 people. According to some estimates, the entire Crosstown would destroy almost 3,500 homes and displace more than 10,000 people. Residents of the middle and working-class neighborhoods along the Crosstown’s proposed routes came out strongly against the expressway, objecting that it would end up destroying their homes and neighborhoods. Blacks objected that planners had chosen to place the east-west segment at 75th Street rather than 59th Street, as was originally being considered, because the new route would destroy black neighborhoods rather than white, Catholic ones. This grassroots opposition was helped considerably when Governor Daniel Walker added his voice in opposition to the Crosstown. The Crosstown would have meant considerable disruption, but not much more than the siting of the University of Illinois campus or Hyde Park urban renewal — both of which Daley had been able to force through despite considerable opposition. It was an indication of Daley’s declining power that he could not make his dream of a Crosstown Expressway a reality. “It was the older Daley versus the younger Daley,” says William Singer. “The younger Daley would have developed a coalition of good government and young Democrats in favor of the Crosstown. But old Daley was in charge.” 35

  By the spring of 1975, word had begun to leak out about the activities of the Red Squad, the Chicago Police Department unit that had been keeping dossiers on an array of civic leaders, politicians, and journalists, particularly liberals and blacks. It turned out that the group had been spying on an incongruous group of people, from Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, television commentator Len O’Connor, and Alexander Polikoff, the lawyer who brought the Gautreaux case. Civil rights groups were another significant target. One memo from the Chicago Police Intelligence Division — labeled “Security Analysis Unit (Subversive)”— reported that the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League was holding a benefit dinner honoring Hesburgh, Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, and special prosecutor Barnabas Sears. These documents confirmed some liberal and black groups’ suspicions that Chicago was just a bit more like a totalitarian police state than most other American cities. Daley responded that the spying was regrettable, but he assured the targets that “if you don’t do anything wrong, there’s no need to worry.” 36

  New information also came out about the shady dealings of CHA chairman Charles Swibel. When Swibel’s private Marina City project was in trouble, it turned out, Continental Bank had taken title to the property, took over the development, and hired Swibel’s management company for $79,000 a year to run it. Around the same time, Swibel was involved in switching a significant part of the $100 million the CHA handled annually to Continental Bank. Some of these funds were placed in non-interest-bearing accounts that cost taxpayers $44,000 a year. It also turned out that Swibel had switched the CHA’s guards contract to Wells Fargo after the company installed and maintained a burglar alarm in his suburban Winnetka home without charging him. And Swibel was charged with directing his staff to admit his friends and relatives into elderly housing ahead of applicants on the waiting list. The Better Government Association, equating Swibel’s actions with those of an “out-and-out crook,” demanded that Daley remove him. “There is little hope of improving the housing authority if its chairman is more interested in using his office for financial benefit than in providing services for CHA tenants,” the group declared. 37

  Daley moved at a slower pace, and lost some public battles, but he continued to use his power to hurt those who crossed him. In an old game of political chess, Daley tried to use reapportionment to increase the congressional seats for the machine and decrease the influence of the Republican suburbs. As part of this scheme, Daley eliminated the seat held by Congressman Abner Mikva, a liberal, Hyde Park independent who had endorsed Bill Singer in the 1975 election. Mikva’s South Side district was redrawn to be over 90 percent black, forcing him north to Evanston. Mikva protested that the redistricting was being done as punishment for his differences with Daley. Daley did not disagree, calling Mikva “a partisan narrow-minded bigot who thinks he has a divine right to his congressional seat.” Daley also had special plans for Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, who had so dramatically split with the machine. So far, Daley had merely inconvenienced Metcalfe by pulling back some of his patronage jobs. But with the new reapportionment plan, Daley could shave off some precincts and possibly put his seat at risk. Even worse, just as Daley had anointed Metcalfe over Dawson’s objections, in December he slated Erwin France, also black and head of Chicago’s Model Cities and anti-poverty agencies, to challenge Metcalfe in the March 1976 primary. 38

  As 1976 began, there at last appeared to be a final resolution to the years of litigation over integration of the police department, initiated in 1970 when the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League charged the department with discriminating against blacks. In January 1976, Federal District Court Judge Prentice Marshall not only ordered the department to set up remedial racial quotas in its hiring but also reaffirmed the court’s impoundment of $95 million in federal revenue-sharing funds until the police department ended its discriminatory practices. The money had been withheld since December 1974 when the city first lost the suit in federal court. Even after the court’s 1974 ruling, Daley had continued to insist that the Chicago Police Department was among the most integrated in the country. Marshall disagreed, however, criticizing the city’s resistance to the suit and emphasizing that the department was only 17 percent black and Hispanic when those minority groups represented 40 percent of the city. 39

  This order was unacceptable to Daley. Even though resisting the order hurt the city financially, acceding to it would alienate his political base of white city workers and their families. Indeed, one of the linchpins of white ethnic support for the machine was the virtual exclusion of blacks from certain city and county jobs, along with its defense of white ethnic neighborhoods. With the federal funding still impounded, in December Chicago was forced to borrow $55 million from local banks to pay its policemen. To Daley, it was worth it to take a stand against hiring quotas. In defending his actions, Daley spoke out against racial quotas in employment. “The quota system is totally un-American,” Daley insisted. “We’ll continue to fight this as long as we’re around.”

  Daley sent off a letter to Washington in an attempt to get the impounded bonds released. He suggested that the federal money be made available for the city to spend on a “variety of other purposes, including social services.” In the days of Lyndon Johnson, the White House would have jumped when Daley made his appeal. But the Republicans were less solicitous. Once again, failure to elect a Democratic president in 1968 was continuing to haunt him. 40

  The upcoming Illinois Democratic primary election in March was very important to Daley. It was widely viewed as a test of his hold on power — particularly races involving machine enemies like Metcalfe. Daley miscalculated the election disastrously. Drawing on his own popularity, as well as growing voter discontent with Daley’s interference, Metcalfe handily beat Daley’s congressional candidate, Earl France. Even in his race for committeeman, Metcalfe beat Daley’s handpicked candidate, machine alderman Tyrone Kenner. He won by only eleven votes, but this victory was significant because the machine virtually never lost a committeeman election. Conventional wisdom held that it was mainly machine voters who bothered with these party races — but not this time. Metcalfe had even overcome the machine’s ult
imate punishment: that it had taken the patronage it stripped him of and given it to Kenner. The outcome was a humiliation for Daley, who had staked considerable political capital on ousting Metcalfe from office. “The people have spoken. They want to be free,” said Metcalfe. “People did not like the idea of Daley sending a puppet to destroy another man.” 41

  Metcalfe was not the only candidate Daley tried to force out of office. He also had his sights on defeating the incumbent Democratic governor, Dan Walker. Walker had ridden the 1972 wave of voter anti-machine sentiment into office, but he had proven to be an inept politician. He squabbled with Daley on minor issues and was unable to deal with state legislators, even Democrats, most of whom were more loyal to Daley than to him. But the last straw for Daley was a bill to assist the perpetually financially troubled Chicago public schools. Walker vetoed the bill, and in the fall of 1975, Daley made a rare journey to Springfield to generate support for an override. He stood in the well of the state senate chamber and made an emotional appeal that so drained him that he immediately had to take a rest afterward. Daley lost on the long-shot override, but after that, relations between the two men were irreparably damaged. 42

  Daley selected secretary of state Michael Howlett to challenge Walker in the Democratic primary. Howlett, an affable Irishman, born and raised on the West Side, had come up through the machine but was never in Daley’s inner circle. Nonetheless, he projected the right image to Democratic primary voters for Daley’s purposes — getting Walker out of office. And Howlett knew what was required. At a fund-raising dinner shortly before he announced his candidacy for governor, Howlett stressed the theme of “loyalty” to the crowd of 3,500 people, repeating the word several times. Howlett was being touted as “Mr. Clean,” so when Republicans charged him with a conflict of interest over his role as a consultant to a steel firm, Daley was furious. In characteristic style, he attacked the reporters, not the Republican leader who made the charge. “They get a few drinks, and they get a little high and they write a lot of things that are not true,” Daley said of the press. On election night, though, the machine prevailed, as it generally did in primary elections. Daley got his revenge on Walker, as he watched him go down in defeat. The fact that Daley had badly damaged the Democrats’ prospects through this intramural bloodletting — and made the hated James Thompson’s election as governor all but certain — was apparently of little consequence to him. 43

  The issue of public housing — which had all but faded from view — reappeared briefly in April 1976 when part of the Gautreaux case was decided by the United States Supreme Court. Daley had, of course, long insisted that public housing required a metropolitan solution that would take in the suburbs as well as the city. The Gautreaux plaintiffs agreed, and filed a separate lawsuit against the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that sought just such a metropolitan-area-wide remedy. Judge Austin at first rejected this claim, but ultimately, on April 20, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court held that including the suburbs was appropriate. Daley hailed the decision, repeating his view that “the only way to do something about housing is on a metropolitan basis.” Three months later, HUD and plaintiffs’ lawyer Alexander Polikoff announced a joint plan to move 400 existing CHA tenants and people on the waiting list into private apartments in integrated settings in Chicago and the suburbs, with rents subsidized by the federal government. This demonstration program, administered by the Metropolitan Leadership Council for Open Housing, yielded impressive results. In addition to increasing residential integration, studies of the families involved showed that they had greater educational and employment success than those who remained behind in the ghetto. The demonstration program proved to be the lawsuit’s greatest legacy. In addition to improving the lives of many of its participants, it has provided policymakers with strong empirical evidence that racial and economic integration can make a difference in the lives of inner-city blacks. Unfortunately, the program had space for only a small fraction of the tenants trapped in Chicago public housing and desperate to get out. The lives of those left behind in Daley’s State Street Corridor remained as impoverished as ever. One researcher who interviewed blacks on the South Side found that many were almost completely cut off from the rest of the city. Many had never been to the Loop, and a surprising number had never even left their own neighborhoods. 44

  On the larger issue of new housing construction, Congressman Pucinski’s prediction — that the Gautreaux decision would spell the end of new public housing in Chicago — turned out to be prophetic. Gautreaux was not entirely to blame: the federal commitment to funding public housing declined rapidly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But with Gautreaux’s requirement that new construction occur in white neighborhoods, the political will at the local level was all but eviscerated. In the decade after Judge Austin’s decision, the CHA built only 117 units of new public housing. This later construction came in the form of “scattered-site” housing — units spread across a wide geographical area — rather than the mammoth projects of earlier days. But even after the court order, most of the scattered-site housing ended up being built in poor, minority neighborhoods. Almost two-thirds of it was located in just ten wards, nine of which were overwhelmingly minority. Almost none was built in wealthy white neighborhoods like Lincoln Park or Beverly, or white ethnic neighborhoods like Bridgeport.

  A 1975 HUD investigation revealed one more part of Chicago public housing that was segregated: housing for the elderly. Racial segregation was achieved not by actively directing blacks and whites to different projects, but by a clever procedure for making assignments. The CHA put the names of applicants for elderly housing on a master list, and noted their preference for particular buildings. The CHA permitted applicants to turn down buildings that came open first, to wait for those they preferred. Because the wait list was substantially longer for the city’s predominantly white projects, blacks on the master list would generally accept one of the predominantly black buildings when it came open. By the time a vacancy occurred in a primarily white building, the applicants at the top of the wait list would be almost exclusively white. HUD found that as a result of these CHA rules, eleven buildings for the elderly in black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides had fewer than five white tenants. The situation in predominantly white elderly housing was the reverse: twelve CHA buildings on the North Side, with between 116 and 450 apartments, had fewer than ten black residents each.45

  Over the years, as the political landscape changed, Daley’s blessing became less important to presidential candidates. Nevertheless, in 1976, Daley sought to be the kingmaker as presidential contenders paraded through Illinois. Jimmy Carter, the obscure former Georgia governor, had wooed Daley for years, beginning with personal expressions of concern through the summer of Daley’s stroke. Carter even extended an invitation to visit Warm Springs, Georgia, to recuperate. Throughout the primary season, Carter called Daley to give him status reports on the campaign. And when he traveled to Chicago, Carter made a point of visiting Daley, not even minding that on one trip — after he had all but clinched the nomination — Daley was introducing him as “Jim Carter.” This massaging aside, Daley was predisposed to Carter, since he remembered that Carter, as governor, had led his Georgia delegation in voting to seat Daley at Miami Beach in 1972. 46

  But on the eve of the March Illinois primary, Daley was still uncommitted. The presidential portion of the Illinois primary was composed of two unrelated parts, the election of delegates pledged to candidates and a nonbinding “beauty contest.” Daley put together a slate of delegates pledged to Senator Adlai Stevenson, who had said that he would not run. By keeping these delegates uncommitted, Daley was trying to assure himself a broker’s role at the convention. Jimmy Carter played along with Daley, only running Carter-pledged slates in the congressional districts outside the city. 47

  Still, Daley refused to make it easy for Carter. When Kennedy in-law and presidential candidate Sargent Shriver came through Chicago, Daley broke
the rules and allowed only Shriver, and no other candidate, to address a meeting of the Cook County Democratic Committee. In the end, Carter shored up his status as front-runner by winning the nonbinding preference primary in Illinois with 48 percent of the vote. Alabama governor George Wallace was the next closest with 28 percent, followed by Shriver with 16 percent. Carter’s delegate slates led outside the city, but in Chicago, Daley’s Stevenson slates swept to victory. 48

  Daley played coy about his presidential preference for months, but he simply appeared old and out of touch. He did not take to the campaign trail over the summer. Instead, he remained more deeply rooted in Bridgeport, where his influence still seemed to matter. Daley was elected to his thirteenth full term as chairman of the Cook County and Chicago Democratic parties. He turned seventy-four on May 15, and as he had the year before, remained at home. A contingent of parochial school children, including some of his grandchildren, paraded along South Lowe Avenue in his honor.