The Boss of Chicago

It is the merit of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley — His Battle for Chicago and the Nation that Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor provide the facts on which one can develop a take on the man. It is the defect that the authors, particularly on the issues of race and housing, have their own take — which seems quite wrong.

American Pharaoh is the first scholarly biography of Daley, researched while it was still possible to interview many who dealt with Daley personally. It is written in lively, clear prose and with a narrative drive. The authors, though not natives, have a good feel for Chicago — that most parochial of large cities, where what happens even immediately beyond its fifty wards is dismissed as “out of town.” In the early chapters, one misses Daley’s distinctive voice, his gift for malapropisms (“the policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder”), and his gift for pious pronouncements that concealed what he knew was really going on. His words from those first days were not taken down and now are lost. Fortunately, the later chapters have the public record and the authors’ interviews to rely on.

Boss was the title Mike Royko gave his far from admiring 1971 biography, and that remains Daley’s image today: the greatest of the old Irish-American political bosses, an omnipotent politician (“pharaoh,” in Cohen and Taylor’s title) who ruled with more regard for his own political interest than the public good.

The truth is more complicated and interesting. Daley was a product of an Irish-American neighborhood, Bridgeport, just a few miles south of the Loop, where the Irish settled in the 1830s when Chicago was a village. He was born at 3502 South Lowe (Chicagoans don’t normally add “street” after a street name) and, after he was married, lived his whole life at 3536 South Lowe — not a long journey. He embodied many Irish-American virtues and defects, but was not exactly typical: Though he often invoked family, he talked so little of his early life that even close associates didn’t know he was an only child (somewhat unusual for the Irish) or that his mother was a suffragette (very unusual for the Irish).

“Politics is a risky business. Hence it has ever been the affair of speculators with the nerve to gamble and an impulse to boldness. These are anything but peasant qualities. Certainly these are not qualities of Irish peasants who, collectively, yielded to none in the rigidity of their social structure and their disinclination to adventure,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a brilliant and heartbreaking essay in Beyond the Melting Pot. “The Irish village was a place of stable, predictable social relations in which almost everyone had a role to play, under the surveillance of a stern oligarchy of elders, and in which, on the whole, a person’s position was likely to improve with time. Transferred to Manhattan, these were the essentials of Tammany Hall.”

Transferred to Chicago, they were also the essentials of the Democratic party of Richard J. Daley. Daley worked hard, waited long, watched for opportunities (which often came from the deaths of those above him), and absorbed his share of setbacks. Until finally, in 1953, at age fifty-one, he became chairman of the Cook County Democratic party and, two years later, mayor of Chicago.

But he was more than an unspectacular plodder. The other great mayors of Chicago fell by the wayside: Big Bill Thompson was defeated in 1931 by Anton Cermak’s machine, Cermak was shot by an assassin aiming at Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and Ed Kelly was forced out of office for corruption and liberalism in 1947. Behind Daley’s verbal slips, there was an accountant’s knowledge of detail: He knew the election returns for every precinct in Chicago, and which precinct committeeman had delivered his quota of votes. Nicholas Lemann estimates that he knew personally half of Chicago’s forty-thousand patronage employees. He had in his head the genealogy of a very large number of Chicago’s three million citizens: who they were related to, what parish they grew up in, who were their friends and neighbors.

Chicago for Daley was a network of families. In 1936, after six years’ courtship, he married Eleanor Guilfoyle, and together they would have seven children. “Sis” Daley is still living and reportedly dispenses intelligent advice to her sons, Mayor Richard M. Daley and former Commerce secretary (now Gore’s campaign chairman) William Daley.

“Of course I knew Dick was bound to succeed,” she once said. “Anyone who would work in the stockyards all day long, then go to school at night was determined to get ahead.”

Cohen and Taylor perceptively note that “family was everything for him.” Even his closest political allies were dropped if they betrayed their families. When his lifetime friend and aide Matt Danaher walked out on his wife, the Daley family invited her to lunch after Mass on Sunday, and Danaher was not slated again.

When Bill Plante, then a reporter for the Chicago CBS affiliate, whose father and brother were precinct committeemen in the forty-ninth ward, asked Daley a blunt question after the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Daley puzzled the national reporters but made perfect sense to Plante by replying, “Sometimes even in the finest of families there is a bad apple.”

Daley climbed in the hierarchy of Democratic politics as a priest climbs to cardinal in the Irish-dominated Roman Catholic Church. The Church upholds a moral order, but it understands that people will sin, and makes adjustments accordingly. So did Daley. He believed in endorsing high standards — otherwise why would people try to be better? — but as a practical man he knew that he must often look the other way. He pressured precinct committeemen to produce large majorities, knowing that some would cheat; he tolerated organized crime control of the first ward and seventh congressional district until he felt powerful enough to end it in 1964; he understood that patronage employees would often be incompetent, but he pushed them to perform on things he thought important.

Personally, he always behaved according to the rules. As a legislator in Springfield, he spurned lobbyists’ offers of cash-filled envelopes, free drinks, and women’s favors. Instead he stayed up late at night in his hotel room, reading bills and studying budgets. His gift for detail served him well in the administrative offices he held: deputy county treasurer, deputy county comptroller, state director of revenue under Governor Adlai Stevenson, Cook County clerk.

He built the Chicago Transit Authority, created a tabulation system that made it easier to spot tax delinquents, and streamlined the process for getting birth certificates and marriage licenses: small, perhaps, but solid good-government achievements nonetheless. He championed income tax as a substitute for the more regressive sales tax, and pushed to make it easier for the city to condemn substandard properties — fine liberal causes in those days.

Cohen and Taylor argue convincingly that Daley had no lifetime ambition to be mayor. He simply took every chance he could to move up, and good luck — and his creditable record as a public official — enabled him to get the job he will always be identified with. Despite the reputation machine politicians have for loyalty, he was ready to shove aside mentors who had become weak: the eleventh ward Democratic committeeman in 1947, for instance, and Adlai Stevenson in 1960. He promised to resign as county chairman if he was elected mayor, but never did; he explained breezily that the committee had rejected his resignation.

Still, his elevation to mayor was not automatic. In the primary he had to beat incumbent Martin Kennelly, a native businessman who had antagonized Democratic pols, and Benjamin Adamowski, a friend when they were both legislators, who soon became a Republican and Daley’s most effective opponent as Cook County state’s attorney from 1956 to 1960 and candidate for mayor in 1963. He also had to beat an attractive and articulate Republican opponent, reformer Robert Merriam. He won both races by solid but not overwhelming margins. For the rest of his life his license plate number was 708,222 — the number of votes he received in the 1955 general election.

Once in office, Daley quickly showed a sense of command and instinct for power that he had never betrayed before. In his inaugural speech he promised to strip the city council of its executive and budgetary functions and its power to approve all city contracts over $ 2,500. The council, stage-managed by his ally Thomas Keane, would be tightly controlled by Daley for the rest of his life. He refused to let Congressman William Dawson, the head of what Cohen and Taylor call the black “submachine,” appoint ward committeemen; Dawson, always a machine loyalist, accepted that Daley, not he, would be making decisions.

On election night in 1955, forty-third ward alderman Paddy Bauler famously exulted, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!” He added, in words less often quoted but which Cohen and Taylor are careful to note, “Keane and them fellas — Jake Arvey, Joe Gill — they think they’re gonna run things. Well, you listen now to what I am sayin’: They’re gonna run nothin’. They ain’t found it out yet, but Daley’s the dog with the big nuts, now that we got him elected.”

The metaphor has been used before: A ruler of Verona in the fourteenth century was called Cangrande della Scala (“Big Dog of the Ladder”), and, like Daley, he was succeeded by his son. But Daley kept his steady habits. A man who moves only once in his life — half a block — is one who keeps in touch with his roots. His daily regimen doesn’t sound much fun: Mass every morning, diligent study of budgets and personnel lists and precinct returns at his desk, journeys around the city to preside at ceremonial functions, council sessions, visits to weddings and wakes and testimonial dinners. His Sundays were reserved for church and family. He had little taste for luxuries, and even his harshest critics had to admit he never stole a dime. His one indulgence was the custom-tailored suits he wore every day, seldom removing the coat. Others might steal or wear slovenly clothes; Mayor Daley insisted on upholding the dignity of his office.

But he was not, as Cohen and Taylor insist, a “pharaoh.” Daley had to deal with Republican governors for ten of his twenty years as mayor and a hostile Democrat for four more; Republicans were Cook County state’s attorneys for eight of those years and U.S. attorneys for the northern district of Illinois for thirteen. He controlled the Chicago regional offices of federal bureaucracies for only the eight Kennedy-Johnson years. Many of his big projects depended on cooperation from the heads of Chicago’s big corporations, who were not originally a Daley constituency.

Most important, he had to deal with a changing electorate. The 1924 law that stopped immigration from Europe had the effect of stabilizing Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods, just as Anton Cermak was about to consolidate them into a citywide Democratic machine. But between 1940 and 1965, some half a million southern blacks moved to Chicago, which meant enormous changes in neighborhoods and threatened to split Daley’s coalition of white ethnics and blacks. In 1963 Daley lost votes in white ethnic wards to Adamowski; by 1970, he was losing control of black wards, as dissidents won aldermen’s elections and Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, angered by police treatment of prominent constituents, dramatically split with the mayor. Cohen and Taylor’s vivid account of this political turbulence runs contrary to their pharaonic image: Daley navigated currents that would have sunk many other mayors.

Daley’s pre-mayoral career gave little hint that he had any clear goals for Chicago. But, as Cohen and Taylor show, he did. He wanted to strengthen the Loop, preserve the solid neighborhoods of “the bungalow wards,” and improve housing in the slums. In this he was driven by an aesthetic sense that has not been properly appreciated. Daley had a passion for cleanliness and neatness. When he was being driven through the city, he would make notes about broken traffic lights, dirty streets, and potholes, and demand they be fixed; he was known to get out of the limousine and pick up strewn newspapers, and half the requests for fixing potholes reportedly came from his office.

In one annoying passage, Cohen and Taylor speculate that “his furious efforts to clean and repair were a manifestation of his extraordinarily controlling personality.” This sounds like the resentment of an articulate teenager who has been told to clean up his room. My sense is that Daley instinctively knew what James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s 1982 article “Broken Windows” taught other big-city mayors: Allowing seemingly minor signs of disorder to persist tends to create crime and destruction of property.

“Make no little plans!” proclaimed Daniel Burnham, the designer of Chicago’s great lakefront parks. Daley was a maker of big plans as well. When he became mayor, he could see that Chicago’s Loop was getting old and that the suburbs were growing faster than the city. His plans to improve Chicago were in line with the assumptions of the liberalism of his times.

The great shopping areas and office buildings of the Loop were to be protected by urban renewal, by seizing property at the edge of downtown and building projects that would seal off the Loop from the slums. Thus Daley worked hard to place a Chicago campus of the University of Illinois (a campus that made college education much more available to modest-income Chicagoans) near the southern edge of the Loop. And he built Carl Sandburg Village (high-rise apartments for yuppies before they were called yuppies) to seal off North Michigan Avenue from the Cabrini-Green housing project.

Cohen and Taylor see this as an attempt to prevent the clientele of the State Street department stores from becoming mostly black, which quite possibly it was. But Daley was correct in understanding what would destroy the Loop’s retail area. In Detroit during those years, the department stores came to have a mostly black clientele and failed financially. The site of J. L. Hudson’s in Detroit, which had even more square feet than Marshall Field’s in Chicago, lies empty today — while Chicago’s State Street stores are profitable and jammed with a racially diverse clientele.

Daley also worked hard to build O’Hare Airport, understanding that Chicago’s great success in the nineteenth century owed much to the fact that it was the railroad hub of the nation. Without O’Hare, Chicago might have sunk as other Great Lakes cities have. Daley imposed higher and higher taxes, with little sense that they might weaken the private sector, but he understood that making the city hospitable was necessary to create jobs for its residents. Today there are five hundred thousand jobs in downtown Chicago, behind Manhattan’s million-plus but far ahead of the next highest city’s (San Francisco’s one hundred and fifty thousand).

Some of Chicago’s bungalow wards have become slums, but most have not. The black South Side now has many solid neighborhoods, and new immigrants have added vitality to the North and Southwest Side. Daley’s much-criticized urban renewal of Hyde Park, done in collaboration with University of Chicago president Edward Levi, is a thriving university-town-within-the-city rather than the crime-ridden slum it threatened to become. Cleveland, Detroit, and perhaps St. Louis are reviving themselves today, but none of them has anything like the strength and vitality of Chicago.

Which brings us to what seems to be Cohen and Taylor’s major argument, that Daley was a man of pharaonic powers who devoted them to keeping blacks down. They speculate whether he was involved, at age seventeen, in the vicious Chicago race riot of 1919. They argue persuasively that he believed in “the natural instinct of free people to stick with their own kind” and wanted to preserve Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods pretty much unchanged.

The tipoff to the centrality of the issue in American Pharaoh is the long passages early in the book on Elizabeth Wood, executive director of the Chicago Housing Authority from 1937 to 1954. Wood is an interesting figure, but one wonders why there is so much material on a person forced out of her job a year before Daley became mayor. Then it becomes clear: Elizabeth Wood is Cohen and Taylor’s model for what Daley should have done. Wood, like many of the liberals of her day, believed that the private market could never provide decent housing for the masses and that government must build new housing to compensate. This made superficial sense in 1945; there had been little construction during the fifteen years of the Depression and World War II, and existing housing was indisputably crowded, especially for the blacks who migrated to Chicago.

Wood bravely attempted to build housing projects in white neighborhoods (though most of her projects were in black neighborhoods), and the few blacks who moved in sparked violent responses from white residents. Aldermen from white districts blocked public housing projects from their wards — it would have been political suicide to do anything else — and major projects there were canceled, but Wood kept on trying to integrate where she could. She handpicked black tenants and sent social workers in to counsel residents. For this she was forced out of office by Mayor Kennelly. Daley seems to have played no role at all.

Public housing, Cohen and Taylor state, gave Daley “power to control the demographics of the city.” This is nonsense. Daley could not have integrated Chicago by strategic placement of public housing, because people would not stand for it. Whites, with attitudes very much more hostile than they would be in the 1970s, were prepared to use violence to keep blacks out — and there weren’t enough police to prevent it, as the large numbers stationed to protect Elizabeth Wood’s few black tenants proved. Moreover, even if Chicago’s allotment of forty thousand housing units had all been built, these would not have been a major factor in a city with more than a million housing units (and Daley built more than anybody else could have, considering the bureaucratic nightmares of urban renewal and federal housing programs).

From 1940 to 1965, about half a million southern blacks moved to Chicago. Penned up in the South Side during the war, they were inevitably going to buy or rent homes in large numbers in the postwar years. The vicious behavior of whites cannot be excused, but those whites’ widespread assumption that neighborhoods were going to change from all-white to all-black within a few years of the first blacks’ moving in was realistic. The 1980 and 1990 censuses showed at least some blacks living in every tract in metropolitan areas of Chicago (something that was certainly not true in 1950 or 1960), but they also showed many 90 percent-plus black and white neighborhoods as well.

Cohen and Taylor seem to have a better case when they criticize Daley for building the huge blocks of high-rise projects that line four miles of the State Street corridor on the South Side, cordoned off, they point out, from Bridgeport and similar white neighborhoods by the Dan Ryan Expressway, which Daley put there. But the mayor built the State Street corridor in line with the liberal thinking at the time — as ensconced in federal policies that he tried unsuccessfully to change.

Advanced thinkers in the 1950s rhapsodized about high-rise towers set widely apart, and federal cost limits made them the only feasible form of federal housing. Elizabeth Wood herself had backed high-rises (and Cohen and Taylor’s effort to exonerate her on the ground that she wanted only six- to nine-story buildings is unconvincing). As historian D. Bradford Hunt has shown, Daley went to Washington to try to get the government to fund low-rises, but failed; and so, in accordance with the assumption that public housing was necessary because of market failure, he built high-rises.

Moreover, in the 1950s public housing projects had not yet become hellholes. It was only in the 1960s, as Hunt shows, that competent families began moving out of the projects as housing became available in the private market — which public housing enthusiasts assumed would never happen. Then in 1967, court decisions limited housing authorities’ right to throw out disruptive and criminal tenants (something even Wood believed in). Federal law reduced the rent authorities could recover, starving them of revenue. As an idea, public housing was born from the market-failure liberals of the 1930s; as an institution, it was destroyed by the anti-authority liberals of the 1960s. Daley can be criticized for sharing the assumptions of the former, but he must be absolved of responsibility for the latter, who came to strength just after the last State Street corridor high-rise went up in 1965. The current Mayor Daley is now tearing the high-rises down.

The older Mayor Daley had doubts not only about high-rises but also about the antipoverty programs of the 1960s, and these doubts have proved well justified, too. Daley objected to the creation of new neighborhood organizations to spend antipoverty money, and mostly squelched them in Chicago. He argued that poor and black people were already represented in the political process, even if they did not vote as white liberal reformers would like them to. And if it is objected that they were controlled by the Daley machine, that control pretty quickly faded. The notion that poor people could show others how to get out of poverty seemed absurd to the orderly, authority-respecting Daley. His view, once regarded as retrograde in liberal quarters, now seems to be just common sense.

So is the idea of the mayor as a champion of law and order. Daley was much criticized for ordering police to “shoot to kill” arsonists in 1968; the liberal wisdom was that riots and crime were just the understandable response of people subjected to racial segregation. Now it is clear that Daley was right: Riots and crime, after all, hurt black people more than anyone else. Bungalow ward residents’ claims that blacks were much more likely to commit crimes than whites were, sadly, accurate.

Interestingly, the first mention of crime — which destroyed many neighborhoods in Chicago and whole cities like Detroit — by Cohen and Taylor is when Martin Luther King Jr. moved to a West Side slum apartment in 1966. Coretta Scott King was, quite reasonably, worried about crime in the neighborhood, and the Kings ended up spending little time there. The failure of King’s mission in Chicago is explained by Cohen and Taylor as the result of Daley’s shrewdness and trickery, and they are right as far as they go. But it also reflects the fact that by 1966 the main ills of blacks in cities like Chicago was not (as 1960s liberals insisted) racism, but crime.

Daley may have understood that, and he certainly never gave black crime the sanction that the white liberals of his time did. But crime tripled in America between 1965 and 1975, and it is only in the 1990s that it has been reduced by mayors like Rudolph Giuliani and Richard M. Daley who were willing to ignore cries of racism from black activists and politicians and the dizzy liberals of the New York Times. American cities might have been spared a lot of tragedy if their leaders had listened more respectfully to the malapropisms of a mayor who knew Chicago in more depth and detail than perhaps anyone else has known a great city.

Michael Barone is a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.