American Pharaoh (13 page)

With Roosevelt’s support, Congress enacted the United States Housing Act of 1937, which authorized the United States Housing
Authority to underwrite construction and maintenance of public housing. The new law also called for local governments to establish
their own housing authorities to manage public housing projects and plan new ones. Cities around the country reacted to the
program — and to the promise of large federal subsidies — with enthusiasm.
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The Chicago Housing Authority was established in 1937, and to run it Mayor Kelly appointed a housing activist named Elizabeth
Wood. Wood was an unusual government bureaucrat. She had been born in Nara, Japan, the daughter of a Christian lay missionary.
When she was five, her family came back to America because of her father’s failing eyesight. On their return, he became a
professor of natural history at Illinois Wesleyan University. Wood’s parents could not afford to send her away for college.
“We were just plain poor,” she once recalled. So she enrolled at Illinois Wesleyan as a biology major, taking some of her
father’s classes. She worked a series of odd jobs — teaching violin for fifty cents a lesson, doing bacteriological testing
for a milk company — to pay for a senior year at the University of Michigan. Wood went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in rhetoric at the University of Michigan, and took a position teaching English at Vassar College, in upstate New
York. She headed back to the Midwest to pursue a doctorate in English at the University of Chicago, but she remained restless
in academia.
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Wood embarked on a series of short-lived undertakings, including writing a novel, before stumbling into a job doing promotional
writing for a Chicago housing project. Her lifelong interest in public housing was born. She worked briefly as a caseworker
for United Charities, but found that her ability to bring about meaningful reform was limited. “It was a spit-in-the-ocean
job,” Wood would later recall. “You could work your heart out and kids still got TB or starved, rats still bit babies and
youngsters still ended up in Juvenile Court. I got out of it as soon as I could.” The more poverty and deprivation she encountered,
the more convinced she became that the root cause of these ills was the deficient conditions under which people lived. “I
really got a terrible feeling,” she once said, “for the folly of pouring funds for medical and psychiatric treatment into
families that live in the slums, without taking the people out of these surroundings.” When Chicago’s Council of Social Agencies
began to shift its focus toward housing issues, Wood became head of its housing committee. She went on to serve, from 1933
to 1937, as the first executive secretary of the Metropolitan Housing Council, and as executive secretary of the Illinois
Housing Board. She left when Mayor Kelly named her to head the Chicago Housing Authority.
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Wood did not fit easily into the earthy male world of Chicago politics. As a woman heading a big-city housing authority from
the 1930s to the 1950s, she was an anomaly. An early profile of her in the
Chicago Tribune
marveled that “45 male engineers, designers, and department heads call her ‘boss’ and like it!” As much as her gender, Wood’s
bearing set her apart from the rough-hewn men who ran Chicago. An ocean of cultural distance separated the barely literate
aldermen from the refined author of
Afterglow,
Wood’s psychological novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship. “When people get to calling me names now — and
a lot of people do — they bring up that book and also teaching poetry at Vassar,” Wood once complained. “Those are pretty
black marks for a public servant to have on his record.” But for all of her refined ways, Wood brought a scientist’s discipline
to her job and had an impressive knowledge of the technical details of housing. “She may have taught poetry at Vassar, but
she could read a blueprint faster than most people could read a comic strip,” recalls the director of research for the CHA
under Wood.
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From the very beginning, Wood was on a collision course with the city’s political establishment. She never succeeded in forging
good relationships with the city’s most powerful aldermen, and even Mayor Kelly, who liked Wood and strongly backed her up,
was not close to her. “Kelly admired and respected what I stood for, but he hated to talk to me,” Wood once said. “We didn’t
talk the same language.” She often sent her leading staff adviser to meet with the mayor, since he was able to “talk the language
of the street.” But what really distinguished Wood from the politicians around her was her unadulterated idealism, a quality
that quickly earned her the nickname “the Jane Addams of public housing.” Wood was guided in her work by the conviction that
“houses work magic,” and that good housing provides poor people “ladders to climb.” Her constituency was not the machine politicians
but the poor mothers and children crammed into the city’s crumbling tenement houses and slum shacks. “These people have social
pressures to face when they read newspaper advertising, or pass a downtown store window and see how a living room or kitchen
can be furnished — while their own living space does not provide enough room so all the family can eat together at one time,”
Wood said. “Give these people decent housing and the better forces inside them have a chance to work. Ninety-nine percent
will respond.”
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Wood’s idealism led her to refuse steadfastly to let her agency hire, contract, or select workers or tenants on the basis
of patronage. To aldermen whose grip on power depended on finding jobs and providing favors to their supporters, her stand
was unacceptable. “They really hate us,” she told a reporter toward the end of her tenure. “They’d love to have that gravy.”
Most unforgivable of all, Wood strongly believed in using public housing to promote racial integration. “I think it came out
of the Christian ideology in which she was raised,” says a CHA division chief under Wood. “She did it not out of a sense of
noblesse oblige, but because it was the right thing to do.” Wood herself lived on Drexel Avenue in a neighborhood with many
blacks. And she regularly invited black friends to her home for dinner parties, which was not common at the time. To the great
frustration of her critics, Wood received unwavering support from City Hall for her racially progressive policies. City Council
leader John Duffy complained that “[u]nder Kelly, the Housing Authority submitted a proposal and that was it.”
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For all of the liberal impulses behind it, federal public housing was never meant to disrupt the nation’s racial status quo.
Southerners were a powerful force in Congress, and supporters of public housing understood that requiring it to be racially
integrated would have doomed it to defeat. Time and again, congressional liberals compromised on integration in order to get
more units of housing. “[I]t is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing program as planned,”
Illinois senator Paul Douglas told his fellow liberals in one debate over a proposed nondiscrimination clause, “rather than
put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it, and defeat all hopes for rehousing four million persons.” When
the public housing program began, the federal government’s solution to the thorny issue of race was the Neighborhood Composition
Rule, developed by interior secretary Harold Ickes himself. The regulatory rule stated that the racial mix of tenants in a
new public housing project had to match the racial composition of the residents who had previously lived on the site. The
Neighborhood Composition Rule had the virtue of seeming to sidestep the whole question of race by simply maintaining the status
quo. But it put local public housing authorities in the business of monitoring the race of all of their applicants and tenants.
And like many such pronouncements from Washington, it proved extremely difficult to implement out in the field.
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It was clear from the beginning of Chicago’s public housing program that virtually every decision relating to race would be
fraught with controversy. Chicago’s three “demonstration projects” were ready for occupancy in early 1938, and the CHA had
to make its first decisions about racial composition. There was no debate about Lathrop Homes and Trumbull Park Homes: both
were located in all-white sections of the city, and under the Neighborhood Composition Rule their first tenants would be exclusively
white. But Jane Addams Homes was located on a site that had previously had a small black population. The CHA initially admitted
twenty-six black families to the 1,027-unit project, but after a dispute over the calculations and the threat of a lawsuit,
the agency raised the number of black units to sixty. In 1941, the CHA opened a fourth housing project, Ida B. Wells Homes,
in an all-black neighborhood on the South Side. The housing situation for blacks was so dire that the CHA received ten applications
for each of the project’s 1,662 apartments. It was an indication of just how strong feelings ran about race and public housing
that even this all-black project in an all-black neighborhood stirred up a racial firestorm. Residents of nearby white neighborhoods
sued to shift Ida B. Wells a half-mile deeper into the black ghetto. When the suit failed, white homeowners in the area added
restrictive covenants to their deeds in an attempt at racial containment.
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As the CHA built more housing projects, the racial balancing act became more complicated. Four more projects went up during
World War II. Two of these presented no difficult racial issues. One was located between 31st and 32nd streets off Lithuanica
Avenue, a short walk from Daley’s home. In addition to having an entirely white tenant population, this project was designed
as two-story row houses, virtually indistinguishable from the private housing around it. Another all-white project, built
in a lightly populated industrial area, was also easily dealt with. But when the CHA set out to find tenants for the other
wartime projects — Francis Cabrini Homes and Robert Brooks Homes — it was confronted with the practical limits of the Neighborhood
Composition Rule. Cabrini was built on the Near North Side, on the site of an old slum called “Little Sicily” that had some
black residents mixed in among the Sicilians. Applying the Neighborhood Composition Rule, the CHA determined that occupancy
of the project would be 80 percent white and 20 percent black. But it proved difficult to attract the full complement of whites
to public housing in a racially changing neighborhood, and there were far too many black applicants. The CHA tried to surpass
the 20 percent quota for blacks, but backed down when white residents resisted. As a temporary measure, it decided to leave
140 units unoccupied, but when it became clear that the missing whites would never be found, the CHA departed from the 80–20
ratio. By 1949, the project was 40 percent black.
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At Brooks Homes, the CHA had even less luck attracting white tenants. Brooks had been built on a site that was 80 percent
black, and the CHA wanted to fill 20 percent of the units with whites. But it soon became clear that few whites were eager
to move into public housing in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood. The CHA soon gave up its effort to attract white tenants
and allowed Brooks to become entirely black. The CHA’s fifth wartime project, Altgeld Gardens on the Far Southwest Side, suggested
what may have been the only easy solutions to the racial issues associated with public housing. Altgeld was designed as an
all-black project, so the CHA did not need to worry about attracting white tenants. And to speed construction, the CHA had
built it on a 137-acre tract of vacant land in a remote part of the Far South Side–Lake Calumet industrial area. It was so
far from any existing neighborhood, white or black, that there was no one around to complain about it.
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After nearly a decade in the state legislature, Daley was ready to return to Chicago. He wanted to spend more time with his
family back in Bridgeport and, equally important, he was ready to redirect his ambitions toward Chicago politics. Daley’s
current patron, Mayor Kelly, was in political trouble. Kelly had stepped in as head of the Democratic machine on the death
of Pat Nash. The move had allowed him to consolidate political power — and to fend off other factions that were looking to
take over the machine — but it had also cost him in popular support. Kelly’s administration already had a reputation for corruption
and for being too close to the machine. His decision to tear down entirely the wall between City Hall and the clubhouse hurt
him with many voters. Kelly was also being blamed for a series of school, police, and organized crime scandals that had struck
the city. Not least, he was rapidly losing popularity among white ethnic voters because of his support for Elizabeth Wood
and the issue of open housing.
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Mayor Kelly had a great deal riding on the 1946 elections. He needed a slate of Democratic candidates that could come through
for the machine, including a strong candidate for county sheriff to replace the incumbent, who was barred by law from succeeding
himself. Kelly needed that rare ideal of a machine candidate: someone with enough of an appearance of integrity to appeal
to nonmachine voters, but who could nevertheless be counted on to use his office to advance the machine’s interests, and to
continue to employ the hundreds of Democratic Party workers who were currently on the sheriff ’s office payroll. Daley seemed
like the perfect choice. He had won a reputation for honesty and hard work in Springfield — the
Chicago Daily News
had pronounced Daley one of the Democrats’ “brightest stars.” Yet Kelly knew better than anyone how completely Daley had
subordinated himself to the interests of the machine. With Kelly’s backing, the machine slated Daley for county sheriff.
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