American Pharaoh (10 page)

Cermak maintained that the new organization he was building could be a seemingly paradoxical entity: a reform-minded political
machine. “The period of the backroom . . . is gone,” he told reporters. “From now on everybody in the organization will have
a voice in its management.” Cermak believed hard work and strict discipline could replace the corruption that usually propped
up political machines. One of his favorite aphorisms was that “only lazy precinct captains steal votes.” Cermak founded a
party newspaper, the
Public Service Leader,
that printed each ward organization’s performance in the most recent election. The
Leader
claimed it had developed a “scientific mathematically exact grading of the vote-getting machinery in each of Chicago’s fifty
wards.” The paper’s analysis considered vote margins, turnout percentages, and percentage of straight Democratic voters. Cermak’s
rigorous attention to detail injected into the machine, from its earliest days, an obsession with the smallest elections and
with turning out every possible vote.
⁸

Cermak’s work in building the Chicago machine was cut short by an incident that instantly made him a footnote to American
presidential history. Not long after his election as mayor, Cermak contracted dysentery from sewage that had seeped into the
luxury hotel he was living in on South Michigan Avenue, and he traveled to Miami Beach to recuperate. On February 15, 1933,
Franklin D. Roosevelt stopped in town on his way back from a fishing trip in the Bahamas. Cermak showed up at a Roosevelt
appearance to pay his respects. When he was done delivering remarks from an open car, Roosevelt motioned Cermak over to talk.
Their conversation had barely begun when an Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara fired a revolver in Roosevelt’s direction,
missing him but hitting Cermak and four other bystanders. Cermak, who fell into Roosevelt’s arms, had stopped a bullet that
could have struck the president-elect. According to Cermak lore, as he sped to the hospital, he said to Roosevelt: “I’m glad
it was me instead of you.” Most people who knew Cermak, however, deemed the sentiment out of character. A sometime journalist
named John Dienhart, who traveled with Cermak and advised him on public relations, later said that he made up the quote. “Jesus,”
Dienhart said. “I couldn’t very well have put out a story that Tony would have wanted it the other way around.”
⁹

Before Cermak had succumbed to his bullet wounds in a Miami Beach hospital, the jockeying was already under way back in Chicago
to succeed him as mayor. The obvious choice was Nash, the powerful alderman Cermak had named to take over the Democratic machine.
But the seventy-year-old Nash pronounced himself too old and took himself out of the running. Jake Arvey, alderman from the
mighty 24th Ward, was another possibility. But with Henry Horner, another Jew, having just been elected governor, the ethnic
politics were wrong. “Nash thought and I agreed with him,” Arvey said later, that “to have a governor of Illinois Jewish,
and a mayor of Chicago Jewish, at that time would have been rubbing it in to the Irish.” In fact, with Cermak out of the way,
the Irish political bosses were more than ready to put an Irishman back in City Hall. Nash had a candidate in mind, a good
friend and Bridgeport native named Edward Kelly, who held the improbable position of chief engineer for the Metropolitan Sanitary
District. But there was a problem: Illinois law provided that when the mayor left office the City Council had to appoint someone
from its own ranks to fill the vacancy. Nash got around the restriction by pushing new legislation through in Spring-field
that made nonaldermen eligible to be selected.
¹⁰

With the backing of Nash and the Democratic machine, Kelly was named mayor of Chicago by the City Council. Kelly, the eldest
of nine children of a policeman who had emigrated from Ireland during the Civil War, had dropped out of school after the fifth
grade to help support his family. He had worked at an array of menial jobs, including a $4-a-week stint carrying beer buckets
on long poles to men on lunch break at the Armour cannery. But Kelly found his calling when, at age eighteen, he took a job
with the Chicago Sanitary District. He first assignment was chopping down trees along the canal with an ax. Forty years later,
he had risen to chief engineer, and presided over a vast municipal agency. The tall, athletically handsome Kelly had managed
to do some good in his obscure but influential position. Most notably, he had presided over the transformation of Grant Park
into a lush expanse of green in the middle of downtown, earning himself the nickname “Father of the Lakefront.” But what brought
Kelly to Nash’s attention was not his impressive rise from poverty, or his accomplishments in government. Nash’s family owned
a sewer contracting firm, and it had done well under Kelly’s regime at the Sanitary District. Arrangements of this kind had
made Nash wealthy — he had one of the ten highest incomes in Chicago in 1925. Kelly had also prospered, despite the handicap
of earning only a civil-service salary. From 1926 to 1928, Kelly somehow brought in an income of $450,000, a windfall that
did not escape the notice of his political foes. During a tough primary campaign in 1936, an opponent responded to Kelly’s
sneer that he was not a politician that “if to amass a huge fortune on a modest salary is to be a politician, I am not a politician.”
¹¹

The rise of Edward Kelly at first looked like a significant setback to Daley’s own political hopes. Daley’s political standing
depended on his ward committeeman and boss, McDonough, but McDonough’s best connections had died along with Cermak. It was
unclear where Mc-Donough, and therefore Daley, would fit into the new Kelly-Nash regime that now controlled the city. McDonough
was despondent about the recent turn of events, and began to wonder if he had a future in politics. But thirty-one-year-old
Daley kept up his hard work for McDonough and continued to plug away at his law school studies.

Kelly turned out to be a surprise as mayor. Nash had selected him because of his willingness to hand out sweetheart deals
and patronage jobs, and he more than lived up to Nash’s expectations in this regard. But Kelly was also a progressive political
force during troubled times. His fourteen years in office included some of the worst years of the Great Depression. The national
economic crisis caused thousands of people to board the railroad cars that passed through devastated industrial towns and
dust bowl farm regions, heading to Chicago in search of a livelihood. In the face of this influx, the city’s relief expenditures
soared from $11 million in 1931 to $35 million in 1932, and Chicago began to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. A “Hooverville”
sat on the edge of the Loop, with streets named “Prosperity Road” and “Hard Times Avenue.” Kelly responded by passionately
embracing the New Deal. “Roosevelt,” he liked to say, “is my religion.” Kelly forged a strong relationship with the White
House, and worked with Washington bureaucrats to bring desperately needed federal jobs to Chicago. Of course, Kelly and Nash
gained as well: the federal jobs added considerably to the supply of patronage positions available for the machine faithful.
The nation’s economic hard times ended up being good for the Chicago machine. “They had more to work with,” longtime Republican
committeeman Bunnie East recalled. “They had more jobs, more money, and they had a Democratic president . . . [who] was very
kind to them as far as government jobs and government contracts were concerned.”
¹²

Chicago’s Democratic machine was now at a crossroads. With Kelly and Nash in charge, it seemed that Cermak’s “house for all
peoples” might revert to an old-style Irish political machine. But Kelly and Nash decided instead to continue in the Cermak
tradition, making a point of filling important offices with Poles, Germans, and Jews. Kelly was also succeeding in one area
where Cermak had done poorly: integrating black Chicagoans into the machine. While Cermak had relied primarily on sticks,
Kelly held out an array of carrots. Kelly made a point of going to Soldier Field for the annual Wilberforce– Tuskegee football
game — a red-letter day on black Chicago’s calendar — and he banned the movie
Birth of a Nation,
a glorification of the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. Kelly also spoke to blacks in terms they could identify with: the
millionaire mayor received enthusiastic responses from South Side audiences when he recalled the days when his mother scrubbed
floors in the mansions of Hyde Park.
¹³

Mayor Kelly’s appeal to Chicago blacks was based on substance as well as symbolism. In 1943, he established Chicago’s Commission
on Human Relations, and three years later he set up a civil rights unit in the corporation counsel’s office. Kelly also took
pioneering stands in favor of equal opportunity in housing and education. When Kelly learned that branch schools had been
set up to separate white and black pupils in Morgan Park, a Far South Side neighborhood, he ordered the Board of Education
to end the segregation. He stood his ground even after white students staged a walk-out. The
Chicago Defender
lauded Kelly for his stand in favor of school integration, declaring that the mayor had earned “the respect and confidence
of every citizen of every color and creed whose mind is not blinded by hate, prejudice, and bigotry.” At the same time, Kelly
offered an olive branch to the black gambling operations that had been Cermak’s special target. The same police that had conducted
aggressive raids under the previous mayoral administration now had firm orders to hold back. The new, warmer relations between
gambling operations and City Hall were reflected in a 1934
Chicago Daily News
report that the machine was now taking in $1 million a month from illicit vice, and that precinct captains, particularly
in the black wards, were running gambling houses.
¹⁴

Kelly’s outreach to Chicago’s black community came against the backdrop of a major party realignment occurring in black America.
The Great Depression pushed many Americans into the Democratic camp: Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 with roughly
60 percent of the vote, and he swept Democrats into office with him at every level. Although blacks were among the nation’s
worst off citizens, many were reluctant to abandon the party of Lincoln for a Democratic Party in which the segregationist
Dixiecrat wing was so strong. In Roosevelt’s landslide 1932 victory, blacks gave him only 32 percent of their votes. Once
in office, though, Roosevelt quickly began to win black voters over with his evident compassion for the victims of hard times.
His New Deal initiatives — the NRA, the CCC, the WPA, and other programs designed to get Americans working again — earned
him considerable gratitude in the black community. Roosevelt was regarded as a kind of secular savior by many blacks — “Let
Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you!” was one black preacher’s rallying cry. In 1936, Roosevelt took 49 percent of the black
vote, and four years later he won 52 percent. This black movement toward the Democratic Party was helped along by the fact
that the party was beginning to break with its southern wing and express greater support for civil rights. In 1944, after
Roosevelt endorsed equal opportunity for all races and an end to the poll tax, his national share of the black vote jumped
to 64 percent. In 1948, after Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights platform was adopted at the Democratic National Convention and
President Truman issued his order integrating the armed forces, 75 percent of black America voted Democratic at the presidential
level.
¹⁵

In large part because of Mayor Kelly’s efforts, Chicago blacks began to defect to the Democratic Party slightly ahead of the
national trend. In 1934, the Democratic machine embarked on a mission of virtual lèse majesté, challenging the South Side’s
legendary three-term Republican congressman, Oscar DePriest. The first black elected to Congress since 1901, DePriest was
a heroic figure to blacks across the country. He battled tirelessly against segregation and in support of black institutions
such as Howard University. But for all of DePriest’s popularity and good works, it was becoming increasingly hard to be a
black Republican. It also hurt him that he was a loyal party man, who regularly voted against the New Deal programs that were
so popular with his constituents. In an outcome that marked a sea change in the city’s politics, a black Democrat, Arthur
Mitchell, took DePriest’s seat. Any doubts that the movement toward the Democrats was real were dispelled the following year
when Kelly ran for reelection. Days before the voting, black Republicans turned out for a massive pro-Kelly rally in Congressional
Hall. “Lincoln is dead,” a former Republican alderman told the crowd. “You don’t need no ghost from the grave to tell you
what to do when you go to the polls Tuesday.” The Democratic ticket, with Kelly at the top, swept the black South Side, taking
more than 80 percent of the vote.
¹⁶