American Pharaoh Read online

  Extraordinary acclaim for

  American Pharaoh

  Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago

  and the Nation

  by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor

  “Cohen and Taylor put Daley in historical perspective.... If you want to understand the most beautiful and most corrupt city of mid-twentieth-century America, and the power that urban machines once had, you could not do better than to read this gripping book.”

  — David L. Chappell, Newsday

  “Briskly written, authoritative, and thoroughly honest.”

  — Steve Neal, Chicago Sun-Times Book Week

  “Readers likely will find that they have revisited a place from their and this nation’s past. American Pharaoh isn’t just about Daley and the city he grew up in and ran for more than twenty years. It is the gritty reality of how it feels to be inside a melting pot. It is a modern history lesson that takes us from the Irish immigration in the mid-1800s through the Civil Rights Era of the ’60s.”

  — Robert T. Nelson, Seattle Times

  “This is a myth-shattering portrait of Mayor Daley the elder.... American Pharaoh is an eye-opening work that enthralls the reader from page 1.”

  — Studs Terkel, author of Working and My American Century

  “This fine biography speaks to our time as well as to memory.... Cohen and Taylor know Chicago, byways and all, and they tell a good story. Their detailed account of personalities and events never lets us forget the grander drama of Daley’s public life, its bright successes shadowed by elements of tragedy.”

  — Wilson Carey McWilliams, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Cohen and Taylor’s book stands as the one indispensable source on Daley, the argument-starter and the argument-settler.... American Pharaoh accomplishes the odd feat of leaving its readers with a more positive impression of Daley than they probably used to have while also being, page by page, quite anti-Daley.... A fascinating and admirably complete biography.”

  — Nicholas Lehmann, New Republic

  “Until now, the definitive chronicle of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s two-decade reign over Chicago has been Mike Royko’s Boss, published in 1970, when Daley was still very much in power. The intervening years have permitted the authors of this hefty new biography a cooler perspective. Cohen and Taylor hit all the high points while also sketching a compelling social history of mid-century Chicago.”

  — The New Yorker

  “A fascinatingly detailed civic biography.... Through the prism of the public housing issue and throughout American Pharaoh , the authors do an excellent job of exposing the tragic racial history of postwar America. . . . Cohen and Taylor have written history as it did unfold, clear-eyed and astringently.”

  — David C. Ward, Boston Book Review

  “Superb.... Daley’s story is vividly told by Cohen and Taylor in what is not only the best full-scale investigation of the Daley reign but one of the finest political biographies of recent years. . . . Highly recommended.”

  — Karl Helicher, Library Journal

  “A masterly biography.... Indeed, the patronage and favoritism afforded by big-spending government at all levels (and the waste and corruption it entails) drive the rhythm of this book: an insistent ostinato of greed and power.”

  — John Lilly, American Spectator

  “Worth the attention of anyone interested in big-city politics.”

  — Larry King, USA Today

  “Cohen and Taylor are fastidiously fair to the famous mayor and do not take sides. No edge and no attitude adorn this encyclopedic saga of the fifty wards. Like their subject, the authors take Chicago very seriously. To anyone interested in America or its cities, Chicago is fascinating. Art, commerce, political power, and race are part of the city’s story, especially race.... American Pharaoh is fast-paced, comprehensive, and written well enough to evoke the sights and sounds of a great city in turbulent times.”

  — Martin F. Nolan, Washington Monthly

  “Engrossing and massively detailed. . . . American Pharaoh is a vital and necessary work that students of American political history are likely to consult for decades to come.”

  — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

  COPYRIGHT

  AMERICAN PHARAOH. Copyright © 2000 by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2427-9

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Little, Brown and Company.

  First eBook Edition: May 2001

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Beverly Cohen and Stuart Cohen

  and

  Barbara Taylor and James, William, and Caroline Kaplan

  Daley’s Chicago

  “This is Chicago, this is America.”

  —Richard J. Daley, press conference, August 29, 1968

  Contents

  Extraordinary acclaim for American Pharaoh

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: A Separate World

  Chapter 2: A House for All Peoples

  Chapter 3: Chicago Ain’t Ready for Reform

  Chapter 4: I Am the Mayor and Don’t You Forget It

  Chapter 5: Public Aid Penitentiary

  Chapter 6: Make No Little Plans

  Chapter 7: Two for You, Three for Me

  Chapter 8: Beware of the Press, Mayor

  Chapter 9: We’re Going to Have a Movement in Chicago

  Chapter 10: All of Us Are Trying to Eliminate Slums

  Chapter 11: The Outcome Was Bitterly Disappointing

  Chapter 12: Shoot to Kill

  Chapter 13: Preserving Disorder

  Chapter 14: We Wore Suits and Ties

  Chapter 15: If a Man Can’t Put His Arms Around His Sons

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selective Bibliography

  Prologue

  As Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley prepared to talk to Walter Cronkite on August 29, 1968, a CBS News camera panned across the empty floor of the Democratic National Convention. The news reports from the convention so far had been grim and bloody, filled with footage of the Chicago police charging into crowds of unarmed anti-war demonstrators, swinging clubs and breaking heads. The elderly, the young, and innocent bystanders of all kinds had been attacked by Daley’s army in blue — some were teargassed, others had their skulls cracked, and still others were shoved through plate-glass windows. Daley, the wily machine boss who ruled Chicago like a feudal preserve, was being portrayed in the national media as a homegrown American tyrant: just the night before, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut had stood at the podium and decried, to a nationwide television audience, the “Gestapo tactics” being used on the streets of Chicago.

  But as the CBS camera scanned the International Amphitheatre, it found no sign of this tyrannical Daley. The protest signs that filled the streets were absent from the hall: all the camera picked up were banners, lovingly hung from the rafters by machine foot soldiers, praising Chicago’s embattled leader. “World’s Greatest Mayor! Richard J. Daley,” exclaimed one, signed “14th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, Edward M. Burke, Committeeman.” Nor could the camera find any of the thousands of demonstrators who were loudly denouncing Daley and the Chicago police for engaging in unprovoked violence. The only nondelegates admitted to the gal
leries were precinct captains and patronage workers, who waved American flags and held placards reading “We love Mayor Daley” and “Police Keep Up the Good Work.” 1

  Against this carefully crafted backdrop, Daley arrived in the CBS anchor booth and took a seat beside Cronkite. Like most of the media covering the convention, Cronkite had been outraged by the violence of the past week, and had been vocal in his criticism of the Chicago police. In the next few minutes, before a television audience of millions, it seemed that Daley would be gently torn apart by America’s most beloved newsman. As the TV camera rolled, the two men warily exchanged pleasantries. Cronkite declared that CBS had received hundreds of telegrams and “a lot of phone calls” taking Daley’s side over the recent violence. “I can tell you this, Mr. Daley, that you have a lot of supporters around the country as well as in Chicago,” Cronkite said. Daley assured Cronkite that, through his nightly news broadcasts, he was a “constant visitor” in the Daley home. Then Daley brought the casual conversation to an abrupt halt. Accustomed to being in control, the mayor produced a typewritten statement and — defying the traditions of the on-air interview — began reading an uncompromising defense of the Chicago police and of himself. 2

  The anti-war demonstrators who had converged on Chicago were nothing less than terrorists, Daley said sternly. “They came here equipped with caustics, with helmets, and with their own brigade of medics,” he read, his voice a mixture of midwestern flatness and working-class rough edges. “They had maps locating the hotels and routes of buses for the guidance of terrorists from out of town.” The truth was, it had been the demonstrators who had been violent and the police who had been the victims, Daley insisted — the media were just too biased to report the clashes fairly. “How is it that you never showed on television, Walter, the crowd marching down the street to confront the police?” Daley asked. “You show it after ... it happens. Is the television industry interested in this violence? I’d like to have them show the fifty-one policemen who were injured, some of them severely.” Cronkite offered up a hesitant defense of his news-gathering colleagues. “Maybe the police take care of their own and get them out of the way when they’re wounded,” the newsman suggested. “They don’t take care of them,” Daley snapped. “They’re lying on the street like everyone else.” 3

  Daley was not finished putting his gloss on the week’s events. The leaders of the anti-war movement were Communists, Daley insisted — David Dellinger, leader of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, had even visited Hanoi. Why, Daley wanted to know, had none of this been reported in the media? “Can’t you get their record?” Daley asked, again impatient. “Anyone can get their record.” Cronkite gently raised a point much on the minds of his colleagues: that among those injured by the Chicago police had been thirty-two members of the press. But Daley had a quick retort. “Many of them are hippies themselves,” he explained. “They’re a part of this movement. Some of them are revolutionaries and they want these things to happen. There isn’t any secret about that.” Finally, Daley announced that he was going to share with Cronkite something “that I never said to anyone.” He had received intelligence reports in recent weeks that “certain people” planned to assassinate the presidential candidates and Daley himself. “I didn’t want what happened in Dallas or what happened in California to happen in Chicago,” Daley said, invoking the shootings of John Kennedy in 1963, and Robert Kennedy only a few months before the convention. “So I took the necessary precautions.” 4

  Most of what Daley told Cronkite was simply untrue. The young men and women who had descended on Chicago were upset about the Vietnam War and critical of the way the country was being run, but few of them were actually Communists. The vast majority of reporters injured by the Chicago police were professional newsmen with no ties to the anti-war movement. And if there were actual plots to assassinate the presidential candidates during convention week, they were never mentioned again, and no one was ever arrested or prosecuted. As for a threat to assassinate Daley, he admitted himself in the course of the interview that it was a common enough occurrence — “I’ve had that constantly,” he noted — and it certainly provided no justification for raging attacks against unarmed civilians. Most egregious of all was Daley’s attempt to blame the hundreds of anti-war demonstrators for being beaten up by the Chicago police. By week’s end, more than one hundred civilians would be hospitalized and hundreds more treated by mobile medical units. A few months after the convention, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by President Johnson would carefully sift through the evidence, examining video evidence and evaluating three thousand eyewitness accounts. The panel would conclude that Daley’s officers had engaged in an unjustified “police riot.” 5

  Millions of Americans watching the interview at home were waiting for Cronkite to challenge Daley’s self-serving account. But that confrontation never came. In the face of the mayor’s bluster and strength of purpose, Cronkite folded. The veteran newsman, who had been deeply troubled by the events of the past week, let Daley’s wildest assertations stand. And to the amazement of many viewers, Cronkite concluded the interview with an ingratiating anecdote. He told Daley he had recently driven back to his hotel with several other people, and they had all commented on “the genuine friendliness of the Chicago Police Department.” Daley had gone into the interview a subject of national scorn, but he had emerged with a public relations triumph. As one CBS executive said dejectedly when it was over: “Daley took Cronkite like Grant took Richmond.” 6

  The defeated CBS news staff were hardly the first people to underestimate Daley. It had happened to him all his life. Daley was born in 1902 in the gritty, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport on Chicago’s South Side. He was bereft of the usual attributes of promising youth. He was not academically gifted, charismatic, or articulate. (Indeed, later in life he would be known for his colorful malapropisms. “The policeman is not there to create disorder,” he said after the convention violence. “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”) What Daley did begin with was an Irish-Catholic background, making him part of the city’s politically ascendant ethnic group; extraordinary personal drive; and a keen understanding of how to amass and wield power.

  Daley was a masterful politician — perhaps the shrewdest retail politician in U.S. history. Like Stalin, he understood the enormous personal power that could come from presiding over a strong party apparatus. Daley skillfully worked his way up the ranks of Chicago’s mighty Democratic machine, quietly forging the citywide coalition that elected him party boss in 1954. Daley presided over a Central Committee made up of ward committeemen from each of the city’s fifty wards. Through them, he commanded an army of 3,400 precinct captains spread out over every block of the city, and dispensed 40,000 patronage jobs. Patronage workers who came through on election day kept their jobs. Those who failed to turn out the vote were “vised,” or fired, and replaced with someone who would try harder. The machine’s leadership was made up of Daley’s fellow Irish-Catholics, but its genius was that it included most of the city — blacks, Jews, Poles, even organized crime. Within a year of becoming Democratic boss, Daley ousted Chicago’s well-meaning but politically naive mayor and installed himself in City Hall.

  Daley, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976, was the most powerful local politician America has ever produced. He possessed a raw political might that today, in an age when politics is dominated by big money and television, is hard to imagine. He personally slated, or selected, candidates for every office, from governor to ward committeeman. A generation of governors, U.S. senators, congressmen, state legislators, and aldermen owed Daley their political careers. When he wanted something from them — whether it was a congressman’s vote on the national budget or a patronage position in the county sheriff ’s office — he almost always got it. (And when he did not, he could be ruthless: one of the brightest stars on the Chicago political scene in the 1960s lost his seat on the Cook County Board for
refusing to side with the machine on a vote over a garbage dump.) But Daley’s influence reached far beyond the borders of his city and state. His control over the large and well-disciplined Illinois delegation made him a kingmaker in selecting Democratic candidates for president — he was, Robert Kennedy once declared, “the whole ball game.”

  To what end did Daley use all of this power? He reigned in an era rich with ideological leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. was battling for civil rights, and George Wallace was fighting for segregation; Eugene McCarthy was campaigning to end the Vietnam War, and President Johnson was struggling to win it. Daley had an ideology of his own: the flinty conservatism that prevailed in Bridgeport and in much of white ethnic, working-class America in the 1950s and 1960s. A devout Catholic and loyal machine member, he believed deeply in authority. He favored the strong over the weak, the establishment over dissidents. Daley liked presidents, business leaders, and powerful institutions; he was offended by anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters, and hippies, who sought to influence policy without doing the hard work of prevailing at the ballot box. Daley believed that poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as his Bridgeport neighbors struggled to do. And he believed in racial separation, of the kind that prevailed in his own neighborhood. Blacks stayed in the Black Belt to the east of Wentworth Avenue, and whites stayed to the west.

  Those were Daley’s views, but his agenda in office was less complicated: he was motivated first and foremost by a drive to accumulate and retain power. That was the way of the Chicago machine, and it was Daley’s — make deals and share the wealth with the Church or the syndicate, with black political leaders or anti-black neighborhood organizations, and with anyone else whose votes would help elect the machine’s candidates. Daley’s primary test of a political cause was whether it would increase or decrease his power. He chose candidates who would win, and who would pull the rest of the machine slate into office with them. He formed alliances with politicians who could deliver votes, and ruthlessly cut them off when they were no longer useful — or when they became so strong that they posed a threat.