American Pharaoh Read online

  Daley came to see the great liberal crusades of the 1950s and 1960s — civil rights, the War on Poverty, the anti-war movement — as a threat to his power, and he battled against all of them. His focus was Chicago, but his power and influence were such that he ended up quietly shaping the national agenda. Nowhere was this more true than on civil rights. Daley was elected at the dawn of the civil rights era: it was during his first year as mayor that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. The civil rights movement first took hold in the South, where Jim Crow enshrined racial segregation in the law books, but its implications for Chicago were substantial. The city was in the midst of a demographic revolution when Daley took office. The city’s black population was reaching record levels, as trainloads of blacks fled their hard lives in the rural South for the promise of a better life in northern cities.

  Chicago under Daley became America’s major northern civil rights battleground. After his success in the South, and after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to take his movement to the North — and he chose Chicago as the place to start it off. King moved into a tenement on Chicago’s South Side for eight months in 1966 and spearheaded the Chicago Campaign, personally leading open-housing marches into the city’s white neighborhoods. Daley responded to King’s drive with a brilliant campaign of his own. Daley did not make the same mistake so many southern governors and mayors had: he refused to let the movement cast him as the villain in its drama. In the end, Daley’s handling of the Chicago Campaign would have far-reaching effects on the civil rights movement across the country. Daley also played a key role in preserving racial segregation in education, both in Chicago and nationally. Chicago’s public schools were nearly as segregated as the southern schools that were being ordered by federal courts to integrate. Daley fought back attempts to integrate Chicago’s public schools, and took on the federal government when it tried to force school desegregation on the city.

  Daley was also a leading opponent of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, and again his victory was felt far beyond Chicago. Daley did not share Johnson’s moral commitment to using government programs to lift the disadvantaged up from poverty, but his greatest objections were political. Johnson’s poverty programs incorporated the liberal notion of “maximum feasible participation,” which meant that poor people should have as much control as possible over how poverty programs were run. Daley saw these programs as a threat to the machine, because they put money and power in the hands of independent community activists. Daley’s response to the War on Poverty would be felt not only in Chicago, but in Washington and across the country.

  Daley emerged on the national scene in 1968 as an icon of working-class resentment toward the anti-war movement and the youth-oriented counterculture. Daley’s opposition was in large part political. The anti-authoritarian spirit behind the movement was a threat to machine politics, which was built on a foundation of blind obedience. Daley understood that when power shifted to the grass-roots level and to the streets, political bosses like him would suffer. In fact, his fears about the direction the anti-war activists were leading the Democratic Party would be borne out in the aftermath of the 1968 convention. Daley and his delegates were not seated in the 1972 convention: the party voted instead to recognize a ragtag group of liberals and blacks as the official Illinois delegation. The schism that emerged in Chicago in 1968 would haunt the Democratic Party, and national politics, for decades to come.

  In the end, however, Daley’s most lasting legacy was the cause he devoted most of his life to: building the modern city of Chicago. When he took office in 1955, Chicago was spiraling downward. The city’s middle-class was beginning to flee for the suburbs, their path paved by low-cost government mortgages and newly laid highways. Businesses were also headed for outlying areas, drawn by cheaper land and lower taxes. At the same time, poor blacks were flooding into the city from the rural South. Middle-class white areas were “flipping” rapidly and becoming black slums. Daley used his power to reverse Chicago’s decline. His City Hall worked hard to develop the city’s infrastructure and buttress its downtown business district. Daley built or helped build Chicago’s superlative institutions — O’Hare International Airport, the world’s busiest; Sears Tower, the world’s tallest; and the Dan Ryan Expressway, the world’s widest. Under Daley, an impressive new crop of skyscrapers went up downtown and filled out the city’s skyline. Daley convinced a reluctant University of Illinois to build a campus in Chicago, giving the sons and daughters of the city’s working class access to affordable college education close to home. And he built the Civic Center, a massive complex of government buildings, and McCormick Place, the world’s largest exhibition space. Daley also presided over the rise of North Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, one of the nation’s grandest upscale retailing districts. 7

  Daley’s modern Chicago was built, however, on an unstated foundation: commitment to racial segregation. He preserved the city’s white neighborhoods and business district by building racial separation into the very concrete of the city. New developments — housing, highways, and schools — were built where they would serve as a barrier between white neighborhoods and the black ghetto. Daley worked with powerful business leaders to revitalize downtown by pushing poor blacks out, replacing them with middle-class whites. But Daley’s most striking accomplishment was Chicago’s deeply troubled public housing projects. Daley used public housing as a repository for thousands of blacks who might otherwise have ended up moving into white neighborhoods. 8 He built new public housing in the form of densely packed high-rise towers, and he placed them in Chicago’s black ghettos. Many of these projects ended up along a single street in the South Side ghetto. The State Street Corridor, as it came to be known, remains today the densest concentration of public housing in the nation. Daley was also responsible for the final touch: routing the Dan Ryan Expressway to follow the neighborhood’s traditional racial boundary. The fourteen-lane Dan Ryan separated the State Street Corridor from the white, working-class neighborhoods of the South Side — including Daley’s own neighborhood of Bridgeport.

  Daley may well have saved Chicago. He reigned during an era in which suburbanization, crime, and white flight were wreaking havoc on other midwestern cities. Detroit, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Saint Louis were all prosperous, middle-class cities when Daley took office, and all declined precipitously after World War II. In a twenty-five-year period after the war, Detroit lost one-third of its Fortune 500 companies; by the mid-1970s, it had become the nation’s murder capital, with twice as many killings per capita as any other large American city. That never became Chicago’s fate. In large part due to Daley, the city’s downtown business district expanded at the same time Detroit’s was collapsing, and much of its sprawling white, working-class “Bungalow Belt” remained intact. 9

  Daley created a city that, in the famous phrase, worked. The question was, for whom did it work? Daley championed working-class, ethnic neighborhoods like his own beloved Bridgeport, and fought to preserve and expand Chicago’s now-thriving downtown. But for every middle-class neighborhood he saved, there was a poor neighborhood in which living conditions worsened. For every downtown skyscraper that kept jobs and tax dollars in the city, there was a housing project tower that confined poor people in an overcrowded ghetto. Over time, the Daley-era housing projects turned into “vertical ghettos,” rife with crime and social dysfunction. Today, Chicago is the nation’s most racially segregated large city: about 90 percent of black Chicagoans would have to move for the city to be integrated. Chicago is one of America’s wealthiest cities but, remarkably, nine of the nation’s ten poorest census tracts are in Chicago’s housing projects. Most of these are in the State Street Corridor. 10

  During the civil rights era, Chicago blacks often referred to Mayor Daley as “Pharaoh.” Civil rights activists saw Daley as an oppressor and a taskmaster — as an unrelenting Ramses to Martin Luther King’s Moses. Daley wa
s a pharaoh in this sense, but also in others. He ruled over his empire with pharaonic power, the kind of absolute power that few American politicians have ever wielded. His twenty-one-year reign over Chicago was of dynastic proportions. And like the pharaohs of old, Daley built a city and filled it with awesome monuments — an imposing legacy that, for good and for bad, has survived long after his death, and that will likely continue to carry out his will for generations to come.

  CHAPTER

  1

  A Separate World

  Richard Joseph Daley was a product of the bloody world of the Chicago slaughterhouses. Chicagoans of his day, both Catholics and non-Catholics, located themselves by referring to their local parish — they came from Saint Mary’s or Saint Nicholas’s. Daley came from Nativity of Our Lord, the parish church of his childhood, where he would be eulogized seventy-four years later. Nativity was founded in the mid-1800s to serve the poor Irish-Catholic laborers who were flooding the area to work in the growing meat-packing industry. The church’s simple stone building stood at the corner of 37th and Union, on the fringes of the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport and hard up against a vast expanse of cattle-slaughtering facilities. Standing on the steps after Mass, young Daley could smell the fetid mixture of manure and blood that wafted over from the sprawling Union Stock Yards to the south. The gurgling in the background was the cackle of “Bubbly Creek,” a torpid offshoot of the Chicago River that got its name from the fermenting animal carcasses and offal in its slow-moving waters. If Nativity seemed like an unlikely place for spiritual repose, it had once been worse. The church’s first home had actually been in the former J. McPherson livery stables. The name “Nativity” was a reference to the fact that the church, like Christ, had been born in a stable — an attempt to put a holy gloss on grim surroundings. Nativity’s new building had a pleasant interior, including ornate stained-glass windows, but nothing could make up for the harsh reality of geography. Daley’s spiritual home was located just a few hundred feet from what one parish history called “the greatest and bloodiest butcher shamble in the world.” 1

  The whole city of Chicago had a reputation for coarseness and for lacking the style and sophistication of older cities like Philadelphia or Boston. “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again,” Rudyard Kipling wrote after visiting in 1889. “It is inhabited by savages.” Chicago was the industrial capital of the Midwest, a tough town dominated by factories that belched black smoke. Theodore Dreiser, who roamed the city as a reporter, marveled in his book Newspaper Days at the “hard, constructive animality” of the rougher parts of Chicago. It was not uncommon, he found on his rounds, to come across men standing outside ramshackle homes “tanning dog or cat hides.” The Chicago of this era was a town in which displaced farmhands and struggling immigrants competed for space in ram-shackle tenements and rooming houses, and hooligans roamed the streets. Block after block of “disorderly houses” did a brisk business corrupting hordes of guileless young girls, like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, who arrived daily from small towns in a desperate search for a better life. And it was Chicago saloonkeepers who invented the Mickey Finn, a chloral hydrate–laced drink slipped to solitary patrons so they could be easily robbed. “The New York Tenderloin,” journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote, “was a model of order and virtue compared with the badly regulated, police-paid criminal lawlessness of the Chicago Loop and its spokes.” Chicago’s moral climate was shaped by Al Capone and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and by the ignominy of the 1919 Chicago White Sox — the team that shocked the nation by fixing the World Series. “Chicago is unique,” journalist A. J. Liebling would conclude after visiting for a year to research a book. “It is the only completely corrupt city in America.” Loving Chicago, Nelson Algren once said, was like loving a woman with a broken nose. 2

  Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Daley’s neighborhood was a grim place. It was Chicago’s first slum, known in its early days by the evocative name Hardscrabble. It was settled in the 1830s and 1840s by the Irish “shovelmen” who built the nearby Illinois & Michigan Canal, many working for whiskey and a dollar a day. The area was renamed Bridgeport in the 1840s, when a low bridge was built across the Chicago River at Ashland Avenue, forcing barges to unload on one side and reload on the other. When the canals were completed, Bridgeport’s dirty work of canal-building gave way to the even less savory trade of animal slaughter. Chicago killed and prepared for market much of the livestock raised in the farm states surrounding it. Leading the nation in slaughterhouses, it was truly — as Carl Sandburg observed — “hog butcher for the world.” In the mid-1800s, Chicago slaughterhouses were being forced out of the congested downtown, and they found the vast expanses south of Bridgeport an ideal place to relocate. The area had sweeping tracts of open land, and a steady supply of water from the Chicago River available to use in the slaughtering and treatment processes. It was also near railroad tracks, which meant that once the cattle arrived from the countryside, they would not need to be led through the city streets on their way to the slaughter. In 1865, several slaughterhouses that once operated in downtown Chicago combined to form the Union Stock Yards, an enormous collection of meat-processing plants that dominated the area just south of Bridgeport. 3

  Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed the horrific world of the Chicago slaughterhouses, captured the unsavory surroundings in which Daley grew up. There were “so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world,” Sinclair wrote. “The sound of them here was as of all the barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them — it would have taken all day simply to count the pens.” Young Daley used to watch as the animals were driven down Archer Avenue to their demise, and he and his friends would gawk at the remnants that showed up in Bubbly Creek. Thousands of Daley’s neighbors labored in the slaughterhouses, their workdays an uninterrupted assembly line of killing. Pigs with chains around their hind legs were hooked to a spokeless wheel, which hoisted the squealing animals into the air and carried them by overhead rail across the length of the building, where a man covered in blood cut their throats by hand. The blood that drained out was collected for use as fertilizer. Then the hog, often still squirming with life, was dropped into a vat of boiling water. Cattle were treated no better. It was hard, dispiriting work. Daley’s neighbors were the workers Sinclair told of, those who fell prey to the chemicals used to pickle the meats, which caused “all the joints” of their fingers to “be eaten by the acid, one by one.” Coming of age in this violent world, Daley was robbed of any illusions early. 4

  As its original name suggested, Bridgeport was a hardscrabble place. The neighborhood’s earliest residents had lived in wooden shanties along the Chicago River that sank into the muddy soil of the riverbank. It was a wild region, where wolves ran free in the early years of Daley’s childhood. The predominant form of housing, after residents gained the wherewithal to move beyond wooden shanties, was the humble “bungalow,” a staple of working-class Chicago architecture. These long and narrow houses, or “shotgun-shacks,” were a big step up from the squalid accommodations along the river, but they were still cheap housing for people who could not afford better. These small bungalows, on not-much-larger lots, were usually home to large immigrant families that would have been crowded in twice the space. Years after Daley was elected mayor, his wife would recall the cramped conditions of her childhood bungalow, in a neighborhood adjoining Bridgeport. “There were 10 children in our family and we only had one bathroom but somehow we all managed,” Sis Daley told a newspaper reporter cheerfully.5

  Bridgeport was, as much as any neighborhood in Chicago, a world apart. It lay on the geographical fringes of the city, five miles from downtown, on land that had only recently been incorporated. And it was separated on all sides by imposing barriers: the Chicago River to the north, the stockyards to the south, Bubbly Creek to the west, and wide railroad tracks — and then a black ghetto — to the east. Ethnic groups had divided Chicago
according to an unwritten peace treaty. Germans settled on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and blacks in the South Side Black Belt. Bridgeport was more diverse than most Chicago neighborhoods: it was home to several different white Catholic immigrant groups. But this only meant that Bridgeport was itself divided into ethnic enclaves. Most of its Poles were concentrated in northwest Bridgeport, west of Halsted Street, the traditional boundary line between Irish and non-Irish Bridgeport. Lithuanians also lived predominantly in the northwest, with Morgan Street separating them from the Poles. Germans and Bohemians were more spread out, but they too stayed mainly on the non-Irish side of Halsted. It is a reflection of how ethnically divided Bridgeport was that in 1868 the “index of dissimilarity” — the most commonly used measure of residential segregation — between its Lithuanians and Irish was .96, indicating almost complete separation. In turn-of-the-century Bridgeport, a block or two meant a world of difference. Tom Donovan, who would later become Daley’s patronage chief, grew up at 39th and Lowe Avenue, only a few blocks from Daley’s home at 35th and Lowe. But it was one parish over — Saint Anthony’s, rather than Nativity of Our Lord — so, Donovan insisted, “I didn’t grow up in his neighborhood.” Even Bridgeport’s Irish were divided up into sub-neighborhoods: the northwest Bridgeport Irish; the Dashed Irish, who lived along upper Union Avenue, once named Dashed Avenue; the Canaryville Irish, who lived in the marshy far-south end of the neighborhood; and, just north of Canaryville, the little rectangle of land around Nativity of Our Lord Church known as Hamburg. 6