American Pharaoh Read online

  Daley’s deepest loyalties were to this small Irish-Catholic village-within-a-village. Hamburg was no more than a few square blocks, stretching from 35th Street down to the stockyards at 39th Street, and bounded by Halsted Avenue on the west and the railroad tracks along Wentworth Avenue on the east. Its major institution was Nativity, which like all Catholic churches of the time was as much a center of communal life as a place of worship. Archbishop James Quigley, who led the Chicago Archdiocese from 1903 to 1915, had decreed that “a parish should be of such a size that the pastor can know personally every man, woman, and child in it,” 7 and this was certainly the case in tiny Nativity Parish. The annual parish fair — which featured gambling games, booths selling oyster stew, and a Hibernian band playing in the corner — was almost a family gathering. 8 Hamburg also had an array of secular institutions tying its residents together. The 11th Ward offices, headquarters of one of the most important units of the city’s powerful Democratic machine, were located on Halsted Avenue at 37th Street. Directly across Halsted was the neighborhood saloon, Schaller’s Pump, which many said was the real headquarters of the 11th Ward Democrats. Young residents had an institution of their own, the Hamburg Athletic Club, a combination of sports club, adjunct to the political machine, and youth gang. Hamburg was a tight little world inhabited by people who shared a religion, an ethnicity, and a common set of values, and who were mistrustful of those who lacked these bonds. Though it was in the middle of a large city, Hamburg was “not only a separate neighborhood, but ... a separate world — a small town on a compact . . . scale.” 9

  By one well-established formulation, a neighborhood is a “place to be defended.” For all its seeming solidity, Irish-Catholic Hamburg was already in decline even at the time of Daley’s birth. Nativity Parish was losing congregants, declining from 2,800 to 1,200 in the early years of the century, and beginning to encounter financial troubles. Throughout Daley’s childhood, other ethnic groups were growing in size and drawing closer to Hamburg: formerly Irish Lawler Avenue, a mere four blocks west of Daley’s childhood home, was renamed “Lithuanica” as the Lithuanian population around it grew. Mr. Dooley, the fictional creation of the great Irish-American journalist Finley Peter Dunne, expressed Bridgeport’s fears of being engulfed by fast-encroaching ethnic rivals. In Dunne’s columns in the Chicago Daily News, Mr. Dooley was the Irish-born keeper of a Bridgeport saloon. In 1897, five years before Daley’s birth, Mr. Dooley was already bemoaning the fact that “th’ Hannigans an’ Leonidases an’ Caseys” were moving out to greener pastures, “havin’ made their pile,” and “Polish Jews an’ Swedes an’ Germans an’ Hollanders” had “swarmed in, settlin’ on th’ sacred sites.” The most telling sign of Bridgeport’s “change an’ decay,” Mr. Dooley said, was the selection of “a Polacker” to tend the famous “red bridge,” which joined Bridgeport to the rest of the city, thereby placing control of the neighborhood in the hands of a non-Hibernian. It was the rising tide of black immigration, though, that Bridgeporters found most worrisome. Daley’s youth coincided with the start of an unprecedented migration, as southern blacks moved north to take industrial jobs in the Northeast and Midwest. Most of the blacks flooding into Chicago were settling in the South Side Black Belt, just a few blocks east of Bridgeport, and the ghetto was always threatening to move closer. By the time Daley was born, many Bridgeporters had decided that their tough little neighborhood, with its workaday bungalows and slaughterhouse ambience, was best left to the new ethnic groups that were engulfing it on all sides. Irish residents of Hamburg who had the money — like Mr. Dooley’s Hannigans, Leonidases, and Caseys — were already moving out to more attractive and prestigious neighborhoods where the lawns were larger and the air did not smell of blood. But despite all sense and logic, Daley’s family, and later Daley himself, remained intensely loyal to their small Irish-Catholic village. Daley never moved out and, it might be said, he spent a lifetime defending it. 10

  Daley was born in a simple two-flat at 3502 South Lowe on May 15, 1902. Daley’s father, Michael, was the second of nine children born to James E. Daley, a New York–born butcher, and Delia Gallagher, an immigrant from Ireland. Like most Irish-American immigrants, Daley’s forebears came to the country as part of the Great Potato Famine migration, which caused more than two million Irish to expatriate between 1845 and 1850. Though not brought over in chains, these Irishmen and Irishwomen were torn from their land and forced to emigrate by extraordinarily cruel circumstances. Before the famine ended, perhaps one-quarter of Ireland’s population of eight million had died of starvation and disease. Many survivors headed for America. Their journey across the ocean, made in aptly named “coffin ships,” was perilous. Passengers often succumbed to “ship fever,” a kind of typhus, along the way. It was a migration of refugees fleeing a country they held dear, often forced to leave loved ones behind. Family legend has it that Daley’s grandfather began his own journey when he went to market in Cork with his brother to sell pigs and, with the few shillings he made on the sale, boarded the next ship for America. 11

  Growing up in Bridgeport, Daley could not have avoided hearing about the horrors of the “Great Starvation.” Adults in the neighborhood, some of whom had seen the suffering firsthand, passed on to the children lurid tales of skeletons walking the countryside, and peasant women dying in the fields. These famine stories were invariably laced with bitter accounts of how the hated British had exported wheat and oats out of the country while the Irish starved. In the course of his childhood, Daley learned the whole tragic history of his people — the centuries of rule as a conquered territory, the rebellions brutally put down, the absentee landlordism that drove farmers into poverty, and the language all but obliterated. 12

  The America Daley’s grandparents immigrated to rescued them from famine, but it was far from welcoming. The flood of Irish arriving in the nation’s large cities produced a feverish outpouring of anti-Catholic sentiment. Protestant ministers preached about the threat posed by a Catholic Church they referred to by epithets like “The Scarlet Lady of Babylon” and “The Whore of Rome.” And the American reading public devoured incendiary anti-Catholic books like the infamous novel Artful Disclosures, an “exposé” of convent life in which a nun describes forced sexual relations with priests, frequent orgies, and the murder of nuns who refused to submit. 13

  This anti-Catholic fervor found political expression in the Know-Nothing Party, which in the elections of 1854/55 won seventy-five seats in Congress. In newspapers and popular magazines, a stereotype soon emerged of Irish immigrants as shiftless and prone to drink, with a dangerous propensity for brawling, gambling, and other lowlife pastimes. “Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?” the Chicago Tribune asked in 1855. The Irish were regarded as particularly disposed to crime. “Scratch a convict or a pauper,” the Chicago Post declared in 1898, and “the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic at the same time — an Irish Catholic made a criminal or a pauper by the priest and politicians who have deceived him and kept him in ignorance, in a word, a savage, as he was born.” 14

  America reserved some of the lowest rungs on the economic and social ladder for the new Irish immigrants. Signs proclaiming “No Irish Need Apply” were common. Advertisements for housekeepers often specified “Protestant girls” only, because young Irish-Catholic women, as one account had it, were “the daughters of laborers, or needy tradesmen, or persecuted, rack-rented cotters, they are ignorant of the common duties of servants in respectable positions.” Irish men, for their part, were largely relegated to the jobs native-born whites would not take. They were the laborers who carved out the canals, laid the railroad tracks, and dug the ditches — often at great personal cost. As one Irish-American lamented at the time: “How often do we see such paragraphs in the paper as an Irishman drowned — an Irishman crushed by a beam — an Irishman suffocated in a pit — an Irishman blo
wn to atoms by a steam engine — ten, twenty Irishmen buried alive by the sinking of a bank — and other like casualties and perils to which honest Pat is constantly exposed in the hard toils for his daily bread.” 15

  Coming of age in Bridgeport, Daley absorbed a keen understanding of Ireland’s long years of “misery, suffering, oppression, violence, exploitation, atrocity, and genocide.” And he felt deeply the discrimination that, even in America, his countrymen experienced. Hard as it may be to imagine now, one of the major forces driving Daley — born in a working-class Irish-Catholic neighborhood in a city run by wealthy Protestants — was something as basic as “an aspiration for full-class citizenship.” Later in life, after he had taken control of the Chicago Democratic machine and been elected mayor, Daley spoke at an Irish-American dinner at Chicago’s venerable Conrad Hilton Hotel. “I can’t help thinking of your mothers and fathers and grandparents who would never have been allowed in this hotel,” Daley declared. The lace-curtain Irish crowd laughed, but Daley did not. “I want to offer a prayer for those departed souls who could never get into the Conrad Hilton.” Daley’s childhood catechism of Irish deprivations left him convinced that no group had suffered as his kinsmen had suffered. In the 1960s, when Daley was turning a deaf ear to the civil rights movement, one liberal critic opined: “I think one of the real problems [Daley] has with Negroes is understanding that the Irish are no longer the out-ethnic group.”16

  Daley spent his childhood in conditions a distinct notch above the world of his grandfathers. He was born just as Chicago’s Irish immigrants were making the hard transition from “shanty Irish” to the more respectable echelons of the lower middle class. Daley’s father, Michael, was a sheet-metal worker and a business agent for his union. The Daleys fit in well in a neighborhood whose beliefs were few but deeply cherished: the Catholic Church, family, labor unions, and the White Sox, who played at Comiskey Park, just a few blocks away from the Daley home.

  In the teeming Irish-Catholic world of Hamburg, Daley was a rarity: an only child. He and his parents were, perhaps because there were only three of them, an unusually closely knit family. Michael Daley, a wiry man who almost always sported a derby, was a man of few words. If Daley did not learn ambition or politics at his father’s knee, he did acquire one of the mannerisms that would serve him best in his career: speaking little and keeping his own counsel. “Part of the mystique of Richard Daley is that no one ever seems to know precisely what he thinks,” one observer has written. Daley’s taciturn ways may have been sheer political strategy, but they were also the prevailing character trait in the Daley household. “I think the reason he’s always had trouble talking,” an old Bridgeport neighbor recalled, “was that there weren’t any other children in his home, and his parents were quiet people.” Daley’s father also taught him respect for authority and reverence for the government. Years later, when his own mayoral authority was questioned by civil rights protesters, Daley would invoke a lesson he learned from his father at the funeral parade for Governor Edward Dunne. “There is the governor of Illinois, son,” Daley recalled his father saying to him. “Take off your hat.” 17

  Lillian Dunne Daley was eight years older than Daley’s father, and she had a far stronger personality. Students of Irish history contend that as families left the land and moved to cities, gender roles changed, and women began to play a more dominant role. Mrs. Daley was one of this new breed, the “powerful and autocratic Irish matron.” She was an active force in the church. Once, a young priest new to the parish wanted to start a bingo game, but was too shy to bring it up. Mrs. Daley advised him to raise it at an upcoming meeting of churchwomen. When the priest said in an uncertain voice that he wanted to start bingo, Mrs. Daley shouted out, “And we all do, too!” applauding, and carrying along the other women in the group. In addition to her work at Nativity of Our Lord, Mrs. Daley was a committed suffragist — not a usual cause for women in Bridgeport — and even took her son along to marches in support of the franchise for women. It is a measure of how formidable a force Lillian Daley was that a spectator would recall that as the Daley family walked by, a neighbor pronounced with dark Irish humor, “Here they come now, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!” Daley remained close to his mother her entire life, never moving more than a block away. Years later, as mayor, Daley would nod and wipe a tear from his eye when a women’s float at a Chicago Saint Patrick’s Day parade waved a banner saying, “The Mayor’s Mother Was a Suffragette!” 18

  Mrs. Daley had high hopes that her only son would end up somewhere better than the stockyards or a South Side sheet-metal union hall. She always dressed Daley more formally than his contemporaries, in suits with neckties, which made him look like a little adult — an extravagance made easier by the fact that the family had only one child to clothe. Young Daley often sported a handkerchief and he was, according to one family friend, the only child in Bridgeport at the time who owned pajamas. Whether it came from his parents or from somewhere within, Daley had a strong work ethic from a very young age. His first childhood job was selling newspapers at the corner of 35th and Wallace. Daley also made the rounds of the city’s streetcars, riding to the end of the line as he walked up and down the aisle selling papers. These early jobs provided Daley with spending money, but they also trained him for his future career. “I think selling newspapers is a good thing for kids,” Daley would say later. “They learn how to handle themselves with people.” Daley also worked Saturday mornings, starting at 7:00, running up and down stairs to make deliveries for a peddler who sold vegetables door-to-door from a horse-drawn wagon. Bridgeport was a neighborhood in which many parents expected nothing more of their children than for them to match their own modest achievements. Lillian Daley, however, always made it clear she wanted more. This pressure to succeed was a constant in Daley’s life as long as his mother lived. Shortly before her death, after Daley won the Democratic nomination for the powerful post of Cook County sheriff, Lillian Daley made it clear that she was unimpressed. “I didn’t raise my son to be a policeman,” she told a friend. She also had another reason for opposing his run for sheriff. Gilbert Graham, a priest and a friend of the family, recalls that she complained to her son: “You’re going to have to put people to death.” Earl Bush, Daley’s longtime press secretary, suspects Mrs. Daley had an entirely different career path in mind for her only child. “I don’t think [Mrs. Daley] naturally thought of her son as being a politician,” says Bush. “I think she would have preferred him to become a priest.” 19

  Daley attended parochial school at Nativity, where he became an altar boy and stayed through graduation. In that era, the Catholic Church expected its parishioners to send their children to parochial school, and most complied. By one estimate, as many as 90 percent of Bridgeport’s Catholic children attended church schools. The Daleys, like many Catholic parents, probably feared the non-Catholic world around them. The Catholic press of this era was filled with cautionary tales of Catholic parents who had entrusted their children to Protestant-dominated public schools. An article in the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, extreme but not entirely atypical, told the tale of a ten-year-old child whipped “black and blue” in a Boston public school “for refusing to read the King James Version” of the Bible. The story all but omitted the fact that the incident had occurred fifty years earlier, but it reflected the deep mistrust many Irish-Catholic parents held for the public school system. 20

  Daley’s parochial school education emphasized the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism. But as much as anything he learned in the formal curriculum, his eight years there helped instill in him many of the Irish-Catholic values he would carry with him throughout his life. Parochial school education was a prolonged education in submission to authority. Daley’s patronage coordinator, Matt Danaher, who grew up in Bridgeport, once told of serving as an altar boy for a monsignor at Nativity of Our Lord Church. “I said to him one morning, ‘We’re all set, Father,’” Danaher re
called. “He walked over, looked at the clock and said, ‘It’s one minute to 6.’ And then he said, ‘How would you like to hang for one minute.’ He was always a perfectionist.” And the nuns were, as countless Catholic memoirs have attested, often tyrants in habits. One chronicler of a parochial school in a parish not far from Bridgeport wrote that “children were sometimes asked to kneel on marbles, or eat soap, or scrape gum from the hallway stairs.” The curriculum at Nativity emphasized memorization, penmanship, and rote learning. The Catholic catechism drilled into Daley in religion class was, of course, the ultimate form of rote learning, reducing almost every question students could have about God or man to a memorized short answer. It was the ideal education for a young man who might find his way to a career in machine politics, where success lay in unquestioningly performing the tasks set out by powers above. But it was less helpful as training for a leader who would need to think independently and adapt himself to changing times. 21

  In school and out, Daley absorbed his neighborhood’s conservative values and flinty self-reliance. Bridgeport, with its legions of slaughterhouse workers marching off to their bloody and dangerous jobs each day, was a community dedicated to the virtues of industry. No Bridgeporter with any pride would rely on others for his daily bread: success came through constant toil and pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. The Catholic Church had its charities, but the overwhelming ethic in neighborhoods like Bridgeport was that except in the most dire cases of family death or illness it was an embarrassment to accept alms. “Poor people didn’t look to anybody for help or assistance,” observed the superintendent of Bridgeport’s parochial schools in the 1930s. Mr. Dooley tells of the down-on-his-luck laborer Callaghan who nevertheless musters the strength of character to tell the Saint Vincent de Paul almsgivers to “Take ye’er charity, an’ shove it down ye’er throats.” If the Callaghans had things tough, it was because this earthly life was a hard one. 22