American Pharaoh (12 page)

The Springfield that awaited Daley in 1936 was a town of surprising decadence. Nestled among the wheat fields and grain silos
of central Illinois was a state capital culture that revolved around good-time women, free-flowing liquor, and lobbyists who
carried wads of cash into dinner meetings with legislators. Many young legislators quickly found themselves caught up in the
city’s corrupting ways. “In Springfield you could tell real fast which men were there for girls, games and graft,” Adamowski
would say later. Daley was not one of them. He was, as even his worst enemies would readily concede, straitlaced when it came
to sex and alcohol. During Daley’s years in Springfield, he spent much of his time back in Chicago, where he and Sis were
building a family. Their first child, Patricia, was born on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1937. In 1939, after the birth of a second
daughter, Mary Carol, the Daleys built a seven-room bungalow at 3536 South Lowe — the same block Daley had been born on. Other
children came in quick succession: Eleanor, Richard, Michael, John, and William, who was born in 1949. Daley was devoted to
Sis, and had low regard for the many politicians he saw all around him breaking their marital vows or drinking heavily. Later,
when Daley was mayor, the story was told of a Daley administrator who was getting drunk one night when he received a phone
call at the bar. “This is Mayor Daley. Your wife is rather upset. I think you better get home,” said the voice at the other
end. “I don’t know how he knew where I was,” the hapless appointee said later. “But, of course, I went home right away.”
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Nor was Daley tempted by the special-interest money that flowed so freely. In those days, the legislative calendar was larded
with “fetcher” bills. These were bills drafted for the express purpose of posing financial damage to any of the well-funded
special interests that sent lobbyists to Springfield. When a fetcher bill was introduced, a little ritual was enacted: lobbyists
duly showed up with cash-filled envelopes which they handed out to legislators, and the bill mysteriously disappeared. But
cash-filled envelopes did little for Daley. It was clear even at this early stage of his career that Daley was driven to pursue
power, not money. Still, if Daley did not personally get caught up in the corruption of the capital, he felt no obligation
to speak out against it. “Daley’s moral code was emerging” in Spring-field, the newspaper columnist and Daley critic Mike
Royko would later say. “Thou shalt not steal, but thou shalt not blow the whistle on anybody who does.”
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Daley conceived of his role in Springfield as a simple one: following the orders of the Democratic machine back in Chicago.
As he had in every previous job, Daley relied on “hard work, a disposition to do what he was told, and a willingness to dive
into the most mundane details of governance to set himself apart.” While less serious lawmakers crammed into the saloons and
cadged drinks off lobbyists, Daley holed up with draft bills and budget documents. “Most of the time he kept to himself, stayed
in his hotel room, and worked hard,” Adamowski recalled. Along with Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, another state senator from Chicago,
Daley and Adamowski used to walk up and down Springfield talking endlessly about legislative business. The topic was frequently
Daley’s greatest preoccupation, finance. “Dick Daley knew more about budgets than anyone else,” recalled one representative.
“Even as a first-termer, people went to him to ask questions about the budget.”
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As a legislator, Daley had no trouble finding ways to make himself useful to Mayor Kelly and the Democratic machine. Chicago
always had a great deal at stake in Springfield. With the depression raging, Kelly’s agenda consisted chiefly of New Deal–style
legislation to advance the economic interests of his poor and working-class constituents. By doing the machine’s bidding,
Daley ended up being something of a progressive force in the capital. He introduced bills to replace the state’s sales tax,
which fell disproportionately on the poor, with individual and corporate income taxes. Despite Daley’s best efforts, the bill
failed. Daley was also an early supporter of the school lunch program, and backed legislation to make it more difficult for
people to be evicted from their homes. And he pushed for a law to make it easier for Chicago city government to take over
and improve substandard properties. “One building without tenants, with the windows out, generally run down, can blight an
entire block or neighborhood,” Daley said in support of the bill. “This bill is a forerunner to rebuilding the blighted areas
of Chicago and to stop the formation of new blighted areas.” Daley could claim one major achievement during his time in the
legislature: he shepherded through the law that created the Chicago Transit Authority out of Chicago’s bankrupt Chicago Surface
Lines and the Chicago Rapid Transit System. Daley was a machine operative during his years in Springfield, but an unusually
effective one. It was perhaps the highest praise he could aspire to when a political columnist called Daley “probably the
best exhibit of the hard-working, decent, honest organization politician that the Kelly machine can produce.”
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The machine began bestowing its own generosity on Daley almost as soon as he arrived in Springfield. On December 10, 1936,
the deputy Cook County controller died, and Daley was appointed to fill the vacancy while continuing to serve in the legislature.
The new job kept Daley in close touch with Chicago politics during his sojourn in the wilderness of Springfield. It also had
a more practical benefit: joining a long line of machine double-dippers, Daley earned another $6,000 a year in salary to spend
on his growing family. Within two years, the death of another machine politician helped to advance Daley’s career. When the
state senator for the district that included Bridgeport died, the machine tapped Daley to move up to the higher chamber. On
February 1, 1938, Daley led a field of nine candidates in the Democratic primary, and in the November general election, he
beat his Republican opponent by almost 3 to 1. After three years in the state senate, Daley was elected minority leader, with
the support of the body’s large contingent of machine Democrats. Only thirty-eight, he was the youngest party leader in the
history of the Illinois Senate.
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Daley’s legislative agenda consisted of more than just New Deal programs and slum improvement: he spent much of his time promoting
the parochial interests of the Kelly-Nash machine. Even in a body that seemed to function only to meet the needs of lobbyists
and political operators, Daley stood out for his forthright commitment to the interests of the Chicago machine. One Daley
tax reform, which he tried to pass four times, would have allowed Cook County residents to appeal their tax bills directly
to the county assessor, rather than proceed through the court system. It might have made appeals simpler for taxpayers, but
its greatest beneficiary would have been the ward committeemen and aldermen who could then use their ties to the highly political
county assessor’s office to reduce the taxes of their friends and supporters. Daley was also doing the machine’s bidding when
he crusaded to revise the state’s divorce laws to make the state’s attorney part of every divorce. The change would have given
the state’s attorney’s office a five-dollar fee for every divorce action filed in Cook County, generating revenue and work
for an office that was usually filled by the machine and that employed an army of Democratic patronage workers. The machine
also looked to Daley for help with electoral issues that came up in Springfield. Daley tried and failed in 1943 to enact a
redistricting plan that would have given Cook County representatives majority control in the state legislature. And in 1944,
when the Republican-controlled state senate seemed close to passing a resolution condemning a fourth term for Roosevelt, it
was Daley who organized the Democrats to block a roll call vote. Daley also served as the designated defender of the machine’s
extensive system of political patronage, fighting off Republican attempts to scrutinize the peculiar hiring practices that
were rampant in Chicago and Cook County government offices. When the Republicans called for an inquiry into the Civil Service
Protective Association of Chicago, Daley fought them to a draw by calling instead for an investigation of the Republican-run
state civil service agency.
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Daley’s years in Springfield continued the two constants in his political rise: learning about the minute workings of government,
and ingratiating himself to the machine. It also gave him an opportunity to hone his political skills, teaching him how to
build coalitions, field requests from lobbyists and constituents, and — not least — handle reporters. Not long after Daley
arrived in Springfield, the
Chicago Tribune
ran a small story about the Cook County Board agreeing to pay a ten-dollar bounty to two hunters who had killed wolves inside
the county limits. The chairman of the wolf bounty committee said the pelts should be examined, since the county had once
been accused of paying a wolf bounty on five police dogs. “Having served with the state legislature last year,” Daley was
quoted in the paper as responding, “I consider myself an authority on wolves. I will certify that the pelts on which we are
paying belonged to two timber wolves.” It was a good line, but not one calculated to ingratiate himself with his Springfield
colleagues. Daley wrote to the newspaper the following day “emphatically” denying that he had made the statement attributed
to him, and demanding a retraction. The paper does not appear to have retracted the story, but Daley learned a lasting lesson
about the perils of talking too freely to the press.
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Federally funded public housing is a product of the early days of the New Deal. During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s breakneck
First Hundred Days in 1933, Congress enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act, which laid the groundwork for a public
housing program. The act authorized the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration to buy and condemn property, and
to build housing on it. Public housing was sold to a skeptical Congress by emphasizing its most conservative aspects: that
it would clear slums and create work for unemployed members of the building trades. But to its creators, the public housing
program was about something more idealistic. It was intended to be “more than a means of providing shelter for those unable
to pay a fair, or economic, rent,” one New Dealer wrote. “It is a visible proof that this is a country which believes in the
dignity of all human beings, a living testimonial to the America for which Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Roosevelt dreamed
and fought.” The PWA started off with a program of fifty-one “demonstration projects” to be built around the country at a
cost of $134 million.
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No part of the country was more desperately in need of this new federal housing than Chicago. The housing available to poor
Chicagoans during the Great Depression rivaled any city’s in scarcity, dilapidation, and dangerousness. Chicago’s housing
inadequacies traced back to the Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed 17,000 buildings — one-third of the city’s total — and
made 100,000 people homeless. The City Council responded to the devastation by passing a law permitting the construction of
temporary wooden structures as emergency housing. But the emergency was never declared to have ended, and this kind of shoddy
housing continued to be common well into the 1900s. Chicago’s grim housing situation was made considerably worse by the depression.
The city’s population was growing rapidly, with much of the growth coming in the form of an influx of displaced farmworkers
and rural families. But just when the need was greatest, new housing construction had all but ground to a halt. In 1933, the
worst year of all, only twenty-one new apartment units were built in the entire city. At the same time, with more than 700,000
Chicagoans out of work and one-third of workers earning $1,000 or less, much of the city’s population was facing eviction
from their private-market apartments. Depression-era Chicago was littered with “Hoovervilles” and “Hobovilles,” squalid outposts
that the homeless fashioned out of scrap lumber and tar paper. Hard times had also introduced a new form of civil disturbance,
the eviction riot, in which friends and neighbors attempted forcibly to prevent bailiffs from serving eviction papers. In
one heated eviction riot on the South Side, three demonstrators were killed when police squared off against a crowd of 2,000
trying to stop an African-American family from being removed from its home. Recognizing its desperate straits, the Roosevelt
administration was generous to Chicago when the time came to apportion the first round of public housing. Of the first fifty-one
demonstration projects built by the PWA, it was decided that Chicago would get three: Julia C. Lathrop Homes on the North
Side, Trumbull Park Homes on the Far South Side, and Jane Addams Homes on the West Side.
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