American Pharaoh (14 page)

If Daley seemed like a good choice for the machine, it was less clear how good the job of county sheriff would be for Daley.
Even by the low standards of Cook County politics of that time, the sheriff ’s office was notorious for its levels of patronage
and graft. County sheriffs had been known for acquiring a quick personal fortune in the one term that the law allowed them,
and then retiring wealthy. “Knowledgeable people had a rule of thumb at that time that if a sheriff couldn’t step out of office
four years later with a clear $1,000,000 in his pocket, he just wasn’t trying,” a Chicago journalist has observed. Because
of this history of corrupting its occupants, the office of county sheriff was generally considered a career-ender. Daley might
become the rare sheriff who was able to raise the ethical standards of the office, but his friends and political allies were
troubled by his decision to accept the nomination. “When I got back from the service and found out he was going to run for
sheriff, I couldn’t believe it,” recalled Benjamin Adamowski, who had been off fighting in World War II. “I told him: ‘What
in the hell do you want to do that for? You can’t help but get dirty in that office. Everybody does.’” Daley told Adamowski
that Mayor Kelly wanted him to run, and that Daley’s law partner, William Lynch, thought it would be a good idea. “But he
wanted it,” Adamowski said. “He would have run for anything, he was that eager for it, that hungry for power.’” Lillian Daley
also advised Daley against running for sheriff, pronouncing the post unworthy of her son. But Daley’s beloved mother died
during the campaign, before she could see how wise her counsel turned out to be.
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The 1946 campaign for county sheriff was a fierce one. Daley’s Republican opponent, Elmer Michael Walsh, attacked him for
his ties to Kelly and the Democratic machine. “‘D’ is for Daley and also for doubles on the payroll,” Walsh told a Republican
women’s organization on the Far South Side. “He draws one salary as state senator and another as deputy county controller.
Here is another example of how the present city and county administrations fail to give the public dollar value. Nephews,
aunts and even cousins have been uncovered feeding upon the spoils of the Kelly machine.” Daley responded with platitudes.
At the birthplace of the National Temperance Union, he warned an audience of women about the dangers of underage drinking.
“Boys and girls often go wrong when allowed to frequent disreputable resorts where liquor is sold to minors.” More potently,
Daley showed his talent for building coalitions and collecting endorsements. Adamowski, who had a strong following in the
city’s Polish wards, chaired a lawyers’ committee for Daley. And William A. Lee, head of Local 734 of the Bakery Drivers Union,
and president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, headed a labor committee for Daley. As the Democratic candidate, Daley started
out with strong support in the black wards, and he courted black voters during the campaign by speaking out against racially
restrictive covenants.
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Daley could not control the national political trends, however, and 1946 was shaping up as a disastrous year for the Democratic
Party. President Truman had come into office on a wave of goodwill when he took over after Roosevelt’s death, but eighteen
months later, America found itself wracked by inflation, meat shortages, and red scares. A consensus was emerging that Truman
was a bumbling incompetent, and his approval ratings had skidded to 32 percent, a 50 percent drop in the space of a year.
New York impresario Billy Rose was promoting W. C. Fields for president in 1948 on the logic that “If we are going to have
a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” The best thing Truman could do to help Democratic candidates in the
1946 elections, national party leaders told him, was to hide in the White House. Daley did what many Democrats across the
country were doing — distanced himself from Truman and told audiences that he still believed in “those policies for which
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the great spokesman.” But when election day arrived, Democratic candidates were trounced from coast
to coast. The Republicans took control of the House 246–188 and the Senate 51– 45, the first time they had held both houses
of Congress since the 1920s. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire exulted that “[t]he United States is now a Republican
country.” The aggressively Republican
Chicago Tribune
declared the Democratic defeat to be the nation’s greatest victory since Appomattox.
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The Chicago Democratic machine was dragged down in this national Democratic rout, and Daley was no exception. Losing to the
Republican Walsh seemed like a significant setback at the time, but it probably worked out for the best. Daley was never tempted
to test the million-dollar rule of thumb, and he could not be faulted, as county sheriffs always were, for looking the other
way as organized crime ran its gambling operations and loan-sharking rackets with impunity. Nor would the loss be held against
him personally, since the entire Democratic ticket had been defeated. Daley still had his position as deputy comptroller for
Cook County, which made him the machine’s point man on large county contracts — and gave him a platform from which to plan
his next move.
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With the end of World War II, the Chicago Housing Authority’s job was becoming even more complicated. Thousands of discharged
soldiers were streaming into Chicago, and the city was scrambling to find room for them in converted barracks, trailers, and
Quonset huts. There was strong popular sentiment to do better for these returning national heroes, and the City Council quickly
allocated millions of dollars to build new veterans’ housing. To get the housing built quickly, Mayor Kelly directed that
it be constructed on sites already owned by the Park District, the Sanitary District, and the Board of Education. As it happened,
most of this land was in outlying white sections of the city. The CHA found itself in a bind. About 20 percent of the veterans
needing public housing were black, and federal law required that they receive a proportionate share of new apartments. But
the Neighborhood Composition Rule, which required public housing to reflect the racial mix of the surrounding community, dictated
that the new housing be almost entirely white. Something had to give, and in 1946 the CHA abandoned the Neighborhood Composition
Rule. Liberated from the constraints of the rule, Elizabeth Wood and her staff were free to pursue racially integrated housing
with the new veterans’ projects. The CHA developed a list of twenty-two sites for the new housing, and most were in white
areas.
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When whites learned that public housing was coming to their neighborhoods — and that 20 percent or more of the residents might
be black — they reacted with barely disguised panic. Racially integrated living was something that few of them had any experience
with, and something that struck most of them as implausible. Most were convinced that integrated public housing would be the
end of their neighborhoods, causing whites to flee for the suburbs and allowing blacks to take their place. It was a frightening
prospect for working-class whites who had large stakes, both financial and emotional, in their neighborhoods. Elected officials
from the neighborhoods targeted by Wood rose up in opposition to the CHA’s plans for veterans’ housing. “Some of the housing
people are on the square but there are as many more who are interested in stirring up trouble,” said City Council finance
chairman John Duffy, who represented the heavily Irish 19th Ward on the Far Southwest Side. “By putting up a project in every
section of Chicago they could infiltrate Negroes,” Duffy charged, the CHA was trying to “stir up trouble and keep the pot
boiling — never let it stop.” To appease its critics in the white neighborhoods, the CHA decided to keep many of the smaller
projects entirely white. Black veterans would be limited to the largest of the new projects, and even these would start out
with an informal cap of 10 percent. Wood also insisted on careful screening of the applicants. In selecting black tenants
for public housing, the CHA looked particularly for former military officers with combat records, and wives known to be good
housekeepers.
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In late 1946, Airport Homes opened in an all-white Southwest Side neighborhood near Midway Airport. The CHA made clear from
the outset that the 185-unit project was going to house both black and white veterans, but the neighborhood had other ideas.
The CHA admitted 125 white veterans to the project, but before it could complete the more probing background checks it applied
to black veterans, the community acted. White residents from the area helped themselves to keys to the vacant apartments and
simply moved in. The surrounding neighborhood, caught up in anti-integration fervor, vocally supported the white squatters.
Presented with a racial crisis, the CHA decided to try to work out an accommodation with the neighborhood. It allowed white
squatters who were legally eligible for public housing to remain, but it required those who were not to vacate their apartments.
The ineligible tenants moved out only when it was clear that a court would order them to leave.
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Wood and the CHA were determined to fill the newly vacant apartments with black veterans. On December 5, 1946, the CHA tried
to move two black families into Airport Homes. It would prove to be the start of “an era of hidden violence and guerrilla
warfare” in Chicago. The two black men who were chosen to break the color line at Airport Homes both had distinguished war
records: one had seen combat in the Pacific and the other had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and been awarded four battle
stars. Despite their war service, both were greeted with violent protests at Airport Homes. The CHA’s strategy had been to
move the families in at noontime, when most of the neighborhood men would be at work. But the neighborhood women, most of
whom were at home, proved more than able to defend their turf. A crowd of two hundred dirt- and rock-throwing demonstrators,
primarily middle-aged women, surged on the truck delivering the families’ household furnishings, breaking its windows with
rocks, and forcing the new tenants and their moving men to run to safety in the housing project office. It took four hundred
policemen to restore the peace. The following day, the protests continued. Demonstrators turned over a police car, and police
responded by cracking heads with nightsticks. As the violence raged at Airport Homes, Wood announced that seven black families
had changed their minds and asked to be removed from the waiting list. While the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations warned
that the city was moving toward mob law, the CHA found that it could no longer locate any black veterans willing to move into
Airport Homes. The project remained all white.
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For the next veterans’ project the CHA sought to integrate, Fern-wood Park Homes on the Far South Side, Wood personally attended
a community meeting in May 1947 to emphasize that her agency did not intend to be defeated again. Wood’s assertion that “we
must invite them all in the exact order of their application and on the basis of their need” was not well received by the
audience of 350 white residents from the neighborhood. The local alderman, Reginald DuBois, spoke after Wood and blamed her
and the CHA for integration. “I believe that Negroes would not ask to be assigned to this project if they were not pushed
to do so,” DuBois said. “We all want to protect our homes, and the people of this community will put up a stout fight.”
⁵⁸

Wood did not back down. On August 13, 1947, the CHA began to move the first fifty-two families, eight of them black, into
Fern-wood Park. A mob of five thousand white demonstrators was on hand to greet the new black tenants. The crowd returned
night after night, engaging in intermittent acts of violence and trying to drive the black tenants out. The police sent seven
hundred officers to hold the mob in check. Eventually, the white resisters realized they would not succeed in driving the
black tenants out. Still, the protests took their toll and opposition grew to Wood and the CHA. Alderman DuBois, one of the
leaders of this backlash, introduced a resolution in the City Council declaring that the CHA “persists in theories of housing
which are shared by no other representative local government agencies in Chicago, and are not in accord with those of a great
majority of citizens.”
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