American Pharaoh (15 page)

Defeat was the one unforgivable sin in machine politics. When the organization slate lost, the machine leadership saw its
power ebb, and lower-ranking members lost their jobs and the ability to put food on the table. Although the 1946 losses were
part of a national rout for the Democrats, machine leaders insisted that Mayor Kelly step down as party boss. When the Cook
County Central Committee met in June to select a new chairman, the Irish politicians who controlled the selection process
divided into warring factions. The committee compromised on Jacob Arvey, ward committeeman from the West Side’s heavily Jewish
24th Ward. Arvey made an ideal caretaker because of his relative powerlessness. An Irishman would necessarily have belonged
to one of the rival Irish factions, and once installed in office would give his camp effective control over the machine. Poles
were a large enough ethnic bloc that if one became boss, it might be impossible to wrest control of the machine back for the
Irish. But Jews were a less powerful voting bloc, and their influence was waning, as they fled old machine neighborhoods for
the suburbs or for wealthier reform wards along the lakefront. Arvey could be counted on to run the machine competently and
could be pushed aside when one Irish faction or the other gained the upper hand.

A child of Russian immigrants, Arvey was born on La Salle Street in 1895. He attended the Chicago Hebrew Institute, and worked
his way through night law school by covering settlement-house basketball games for the weekly
Jewish Sentinel.
Arvey began his political career in 1914, when one of his law professors ran for judge in the 24th Ward. When he graduated,
he took a five-dollar-a-week clerk job at a law firm, and began working in politics on the side. Arvey rose through the ranks
of the 24th Ward political organization, becoming a precinct captain, and then campaign manager for a ward committeeman who
in 1923 exercised his slate-making prerogatives to install the twenty-seven-year-old Arvey as alderman from the 24th Ward.
A decade later, Arvey became ward committeeman himself. Arvey took control of the 24th Ward at an opportune moment. Jewish
Chicagoans had only a loose identification with the Democratic Party until the early 1930s, when Roosevelt and the New Deal
turned Jews across the country into committed Democrats. Just as Arvey became ward committeeman, the 24th Ward was becoming
one of the Democrats’ strongest wards in Chicago — and in the nation. In 1936, it went for Roosevelt over Alf Landon by the
remarkable margin of 26,112 to 974. Even President Roosevelt was impressed, telling Arvey that Chicago’s 24th was “the No.
1 ward in the entire Democratic Party.”
⁶⁰

The first item on Arvey’s agenda as party boss was deciding how to handle the mayoral election of 1947. Mayor Kelly wanted
to run for reelection, but the voters had turned against him. Kelly was widely regarded as too corrupt, even by the prodigious
standards of Chicago mayors. Record levels of patronage hiring appeared to be interfering with the functioning of the public
schools. And Kelly had happily looked the other way as the Chicago police took payoffs to let the syndicate operate its various
gambling and prostitution rings unimpeded. “The truth is,” one political observer wrote at the time, “Chicago’s municipal
affairs are shot through with political knavery, overt and concealed corruption . . . inefficiency and fakery.” The machine
leaders had nothing against corruption, but under Mayor Kelly it had been so blatant and artless that it seemed clear it would
produce another anti-machine backlash at the polls. Equally problematic, Kelly was hurting the machine with white voters because
of his support for racial integration. Arvey and a few other machine leaders had decided to assess Kelly’s strength by conducting
informal public opinion polls, approaching voters at neighborhood movie theaters, and calling them at home to ask them about
the mayor. Arvey’s poll takers heard, particularly from Irish voters, a consistent theme: that Kelly was “too good to the
niggers.” Armed with this evidence of the mayor’s low standing with the Chicago electorate, Arvey persuaded Kelly not to seek
reelection.
⁶¹

The machine leaders were in a “demoralized state,” Arvey recalled, as they looked around for a candidate to hold on to City
Hall. They wanted someone with strong reform credentials, who could help throw off the cloud of scandal that had settled on
city government. And their casual polling indicated that they would be best off with someone who did not share Mayor Kelly’s
politically unpopular views on race. The man they turned to was businessman and civic leader Martin Kennelly. Kennelly was
a Bridgeport-born, Irish-Catholic bachelor who lived with his widowed sister in a luxury apartment on the North Side. He had
made a considerable fortune founding a moving company, and was an active supporter of the Red Cross and DePaul University.
The tall, silver-haired Kennelly at least looked like the part the machine was casting him for: A. J. Liebling would later
observe that he resembled “a bit player impersonating a benevolent mayor.” The machine’s calculated attempt to embrace reform
— or, at least, the appearance of reform — was a success. In the 1947 mayoral election, Kennelly beat a lackluster Republican
opponent, Russell Root, taking 59 percent of the vote.
⁶²

Daley was by now a powerful force — perhaps the most powerful — in 11th Ward Democratic politics. As long as he lacked the
title of ward committeeman, though, he had no standing in the machine hierarchy. Daley was eager to make the move up, but
there was a problem. The 11th Ward already had a ward committeeman, Daley’s old patron, Hugh “Babe” Connelly. Daley and Connelly
had been friends back when they both served as apprentices to Joe Mc-Donough. When Abraham Lincoln Marovitz was off fighting
in World War II, Daley sent his old friend a letter assuring him that “Babe Connelly and all the boys from the Hamburg A[thletic]
A[ssociation] wish you well and say hello.” Connelly had consistently supported Daley’s ambitions, slating him for the state
legislature and promoting him for higher office. But now Connelly stood in his way, and he was weak. He had recently been
defeated by a Republican when he ran for reelection to a fourth term as alderman, and he was in poor health. On October 24,
1947, Daley convened a meeting of the 11th Ward precinct captains at Saint John’s School Hall just up the street from his
home. Connelly was too ill to attend. When the meeting was over, Connelly was out as ward committeeman and Daley was in. Romantics
like to portray the Chicago Democratic machine as a political community in which people stood by their friends and loyalty
was rewarded. But the reality was much harsher. “Babe was always pushing Daley out front,” Benjamin Adamowski said later.
“He sent him to Springfield, pushed him for the better jobs. Then, when Daley got a chance, he squeezed Connelly out.” Daley
was a shrewd vote counter, and one of his tactics in cobbling together his 11th Ward majority was striking a deal with the
Polish precinct captains, who had been gaining influence in the 11th Ward. After he became ward committeeman, Daley repaid
his Polish supporters by slating Stanley Nowakowski to run for alderman in the next election. Nowakowski won the seat back
for the Democrats, and the hapless Babe Connelly — who had now been stripped of both his alderman and ward committeeman posts,
along with his health — retreated to Florida.
⁶³

The Democrats’ national prospects in the 1948 elections looked almost as bleak as they had in 1946. Trying to build on his
success with Kennelly, Arvey once again sought out candidates with an aura of reform. In a single election year, Arvey slated
two little-known men who would go on to become among the leading statesmen of their generation. For governor, Arvey selected
Adlai Stevenson, a civic-minded lawyer whose grandfather had served two terms as a U.S. representative before becoming Grover
Cleveland’s vice president. To run for the Senate, Arvey slated Paul Douglas, a liberal alderman and University of Chicago
economist. Knowing that the machine “had a tough fight,” Arvey said, he looked for candidates who would “enhance the image
of the organization.” He found, he said, that “there was nobody that could question Douglas’s open-mindedness, his lack of
subservience to the organization, his independence, his integrity. And the same with Stevenson.” Finding reform candidates
to carry the Democratic banner worked as well for the machine in 1948 as it had a year earlier. Both Stevenson and Douglas
won statewide and — more important for the machine — ran up impressive margins in Chicago. Arvey’s shrewd slating decisions
may have provided reverse coattails for President Truman, who carried Illinois by only 33,612 votes in his come-from-behind
victory over Thomas E. Dewey.
⁶⁴

The machine’s triumph in the 1948 elections turned out to be a victory for Daley. In the quid pro quo world of machine politics,
he was suddenly in a strong position: Stevenson owed his election to Arvey, and Arvey needed the support of the powerful 11th
Ward Democratic Organization to remain as boss. Daley prevailed on Arvey to sponsor him for state director of revenue, and
on December 21, 1948, Governor-elect Stevenson made the appointment, declaring, “I need him in my show.” As in his past promotions,
Daley’s rise was due not only to machine influence, but to his specialized knowledge of the workings of government. Daley
had a solid legal and financial background, and brought with him the detailed knowledge of state budgets he had acquired in
his years in the legislature. “Daley . . . is expected to be an ace on Stevenson’s staff in helping guide the legislative
programs over the hurdles ahead,” the
Chicago Tribune
declared.
⁶⁵

The one drawback of Daley’s new job was that the governor’s staff worked out of the state capital of Springfield. Daley and
Sis now had seven children, and he was reluctant to spend so much time away from home. He also could not afford to absent
himself from the clubby political world of Chicago. Daley was by now forty-six, and if he was going to rise any further up
the ranks of the machine, he would have to do it soon. The convenient arrangement Daley worked out with Stevenson was that
he would work out of the State of Illinois building in downtown Chicago, diagonally across the street from City Hall. Daley
got considerable political mileage out of being director of revenue. He was able to make some changes in how government operated,
and then receive credit for them. One of his reforms was a new tax tabulation system that made it easier to catch delinquents,
which was immediately praised in the newspapers. Daley also used his state office as a bully pulpit from which to speak out
in favor of fiscal reform. Addressing the Business and Professional Women’s Club, Daley held forth on the need for tax reform
to distribute the tax load more fairly. Daley’s prestigious position — in the cabinet of a respected reform-minded governor
— also helped lift him above the mundane world of Chicago machine politics. The Daley that the public saw was Governor Stevenson’s
innovative revenue chief — not Daley the ward committeeman, a position he held on to, who spent evenings in the 11th Ward
offices doling out favors.
⁶⁶

In July of 1949, Congress enacted landmark public housing legislation. The new law provided funding for 810,000 new units
of government-subsidized housing to be built across the country. The need for the new building was real. After ten years of
depression and another four of world war, the nation’s housing stock was more depleted than ever. Chicago’s shortfall was
particularly dire: it had 1,178,000 families but only 906,000 standard units available to house them. In some cities, like
New York, local housing authorities began building public housing almost as quickly as funding could be secured. But in Chicago,
the politics was more complicated. A political cartoon in the
Chicago Sun-Times
showed an Uncle Sam figure towering over Chicago with his arms filled with public housing, with the caption: “Where Do You
Want It?” That was the critical question. To most white aldermen, the new housing looked like an invitation to Elizabeth Wood
and the CHA to build public housing for blacks in white neighborhoods. To prevent this from happening, the chairman of the
City Council housing committee convinced the state legislature to pass legislation in 1948 giving the Chicago City Council
the power to approve or disapprove all sites selected by the CHA.
⁶⁷

The same day Congress passed the new act, the CHA delivered to Mayor Kennelly an ambitious proposal for building 400,000 new
units of public housing over the next six years. The difficult part was deciding where to recommend that the new units be
located. Wood and her staff knew by now that every project they tried to locate in a white neighborhood would set off a political
firestorm. But they were too committed to integrated housing to propose that all of the new units be built in the black ghetto.
On November 23, 1949, the CHA formally submitted its proposal for the first seven sites, which contained 10,000 units of housing.
The City Council held hearings on the sites that raged on for four days, with 160 speakers squaring off for and against the
proposed sites. When the fighting was over — one observer said that the seven hills of Rome had generated less discussion
than these seven sites — the City Council handed the CHA a stern rebuff. The aldermen approved two sites located in black
neighborhoods near existing public housing, but rejected the remaining five sites. Unwilling to trust the CHA to identify
additional sites, the City Council established its own subcommittee to evaluate possible locations. These aldermen took a
raucous bus trip across the city in search of sites. The subcommittee joked in its wanderings around the city about how many
public housing units it would place in the wards of the few white aldermen who supported Wood and the CHA. Benjamin Becker,
a Jewish alderman from the North Side, was a particular target of the anti-integration aldermen. They also floated the idea
— which they eventually abandoned — of locating a housing project on the University of Chicago’s tennis courts, as a payback
to liberal Hyde Park alderman Robert Merriam. The proposal that emerged from the bus tour turned out to be no more viable
than the CHA’s plan. Where the CHA had taken too little account of politics, the subcommittee’s plan seemed to be concerned
with nothing else. Civic groups and newspaper editorial boards assailed the “bus tour sites” as irresponsible, and accused
the City Council of treating public housing as “a nuisance to be swept into odd corners here and there or hidden behind industrial
ruins.”
⁶⁸