American Pharaoh (18 page)

Had the machine been more united, it might have ousted Kennelly before he could win a second term. But with the bitter power
struggle between the Arvey-Daley and Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash factions still unresolved, the machine could not agree on
an alternative candidate. Dawson and the other ward committeemen allowed Kennelly one more term, but they were not enthusiastic
about it. “We as troops knew there was something wrong at the top,” said a Dawson precinct captain during Kennelly’s reelection
campaign. “In any good organization its members can just about get the temperament or the feel of there being something rotten
in Denmark. ...We were just dragging our feet.” Kennelly was reelected in 1951, but he failed to realize what even Dawson’s
foot soldiers had figured out: that his second term as mayor would be his last.
¹¹

The 1952 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, in the International Amphitheatre, just a few blocks from Daley’s
home. Joseph Gill, whose reign as party boss was scheduled to end after the 1952 presidential election, went out in a burst
of glory, by presiding over the convention. The delegates nominated Adlai Stevenson for president — the favorite son of Illinois,
and of the Chicago machine, which had plucked him from obscurity four years earlier. Stevenson’s nomination was marred only
by the fact that most people at the convention knew in their hearts that he had little prospect of defeating Dwight D. Eisenhower,
the World War II general who would be carrying the Republican banner. In fact, Eisenhower’s appeal was so broad that Jake
Arvey had initially tried and failed to recruit the unaligned hero to run for the Democratic nomination.
¹²

The Democratic convention was also notable as the site of an odd outburst of Daley ambition. When Stevenson got the nomination,
it created a vacancy at the top of the statewide ticket. Edward J. Barrett, Illinois secretary of state and a Chicagoan, was
eager to get the Chicago machine’s nomination for governor. He approached Daley on the convention floor, in the presence of
several witnesses, and asked for his support. “Without any hesitancy, Daley answered, ‘Absolutely,’ and we shook hands on
it,” Barrett said afterward. “He said I should be the man and that he would be with me.” But the Monday morning after the
convention ended, Daley told reporters that he was throwing his own hat in the ring. “I’m available,” he said from his county
clerk’s office. “Many people have suggested that my background of legislative leadership and as state revenue director under
Governor Stevenson would fill the bill.” Daley was undeniably going back on his word, and in reporting it the
Tribune
noted that Daley “had been considered a backer of Barrett.” When Stevenson threw his support behind his lieutenant governor,
Sherwood Dixon, it was clear that Daley had no chance of winning the nomination. Three days after announcing his interest
in running, Daley was insisting the whole matter had never occurred. “I am not, and was not, a candidate for the nomination
for governor,” Daley said. It was just as well that Daley did not get the nomination. Eisenhower was elected in a landslide,
rolling up a 400,000-vote victory even in Stevenson’s home state. Dixon lost to Republican William Stratton in the statewide
Republican rout.
¹³

With the elections over, the maneuvering to replace Gill as machine boss heated up. Daley, now the vice chairman, remained
eager for the position. The Wagner-McDermott-Duffy faction put Judge McDermott forward as its candidate. McDermott’s supporters
had considerable pull but the Arvey-Daley faction looked to be slightly stronger — particularly by the critical measure of
patronage positions. As county clerk, Daley himself controlled hundreds of patronage jobs. The retiring boss, Gill, who was
backing Daley, had another large army of patronage workers working for him in the Municipal Court clerk’s office. And another
Daley supporter, Municipal Court bailiff Al Horan, doled out both patronage jobs and lucrative insurance and bonding work.
The cold war between the two factions finally broke out into open warfare on July 8, 1953, when Gill formally submitted his
resignation to the Cook County Democratic Central Committee.
¹⁴

The meeting at the Morrison Hotel began with vice chairman Daley reading Gill’s resignation letter. The script then called
for Daley to be nominated and elected. But the Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash faction, knowing it did not have enough votes to
prevail, pursued a different strategy. After almost two hours of debate, Wagner moved to adjourn the proceedings for two weeks.
His un-spoken plan was to use the extra time to round up additional support for McDermott. When Daley emerged from the meeting,
reporters waiting outside were incredulous at the turn of events. “They didn’t give it to you?” asked one reporter, who, on
the basis of that morning’s
Tribune,
had expected to be interviewing the new machine boss. Daley, his eyes moist, shook his head and explained. “Clarence [Wagner]
stopped it,” Daley said. “Gill calls for a motion to nominate me and Clarence gets up and says ‘Now, wait a minute. Let’s
not be hasty.’ And there was a big argument and we didn’t get to vote.”
¹⁵

Wagner decided to go off on a fishing trip to Canada while Mc-Dermott and Duffy tried to win over wavering committeemen.Wagner
and friends, including state senator Donald O’Brien, packed into a city-owned Cadillac and headed north until Wagner crashed
the car over an embankment. Wagner died, though all his passengers survived. “It’s hard to know, even now, what actually happened,”
O’Brien said later, “but those highways up there are full of curves, and I think that Clarence mistook a small dirt road that
went off into the woods for a turn in the highway.” Daley had already built his career on a series of well-timed deaths, but
none was more convenient for him than this one.
¹⁶

McDermott did not give up his quest immediately. “I know that [the Daley forces] have the shiv out for me,” he declared, “but
I think it looks pretty good for us.” But with the powerful Wagner dead, he soon realized that there was no chance of defeating
Daley. “In the interest of my party and to bring about unity and harmony, I have requested those committeemen who advanced
my name to withdraw it,” McDermott said the day before the county committee was to meet for its vote. On July 21, the fifty-one-year-old
Daley was voted in as the new chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. Daley rose to thank McDermott for
“putting the unity and harmony of the party first.” Then he made the kind of implausible assertion he liked to offer whenever
he won a new office: “I have made no deals or commitments to anyone, nor will I.”
¹⁷

Daley’s victory over McDermott was widely hailed as a victory for progressivism and reform within the machine. The comparatively
liberal
Sun-Times
welcomed Daley as “an associate of the more enlightened progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” and said his challenge
would be to convert the machine’s “old-timers” to his way of thinking. The hard-core Republican
Tribune
declared that “[o]ne result of Daley’s election will be to continue the New Deal color of the Democratic organization, with
semireform overtones.” Daley was already being mentioned as a candidate for mayor in 1955, and some observers wondered if
he was hurting himself by becoming head of the machine. It would make him an easy target for opponents who wanted to charge
him with bossism. But the political reality was that if the Wagner-McDermott-Duffy group had seized control of the machine,
it is unlikely Daley would ever have received the Democrat nomination for mayor. Daley insisted that the point was moot. Two
days after winning the chairmanship, he appeared on television to declare that he would seek reelection as county clerk. Daley
promised that he would support Mayor Kennelly for reelection in 1955, “if the mayor is interested in being a candidate.”
¹⁸

After the Duffy-Lancaster Compromise, it was clear that the tide had turned forcefully against integrated public housing.
The CHA began to lose some of its key integrationists. Elizabeth Wood’s top staff member had been forced out when Mayor Kennelly
took office. Within months of the City Council’s vote on the Duffy-Lancaster plan, two of the strongest supporters of integration
resigned from the CHA board of directors.
¹⁹

With site selection resolved by the Duffy-Lancaster plan, the battle over race in public housing shifted to tenant selection.
Many of the CHA’s public housing projects remained racially segregated. There were a number of all-white projects — including
Trumbull Park Homes, Lawndale Gardens, Lathrop Homes, and Bridgeport Homes — reflecting the all-white neighborhoods in which
they had been built. And others were all black, including Ida B. Wells Homes and Altgeld Gardens. The CHA had announced a
policy of nondiscrimination in 1952, under which blacks would be admitted to the all-white projects. But top CHA officials
later admitted that the board had ordered the agency to continue to exclude blacks from these projects. It was a secret policy,
Wood would later charge, identical to “the discredited ‘separate but equal’ doctrine which the Dixiecrats have used to support
segregation.” Wood tried to resist the board policy by continuing to recommend blacks for the city’s all-white projects, but
her candidates were routinely rejected.
²⁰

The next white public housing project to be besieged by racial unrest was Trumbull Park Homes, in the Far South Side neighborhood
of South Deering. The all-white project was accidentally integrated in the summer of 1953, when the project’s administrative
staff mistakenly gave Betty Howard and her family an apartment. Howard was a black woman with an extremely light complexion,
whose application listed her as living in a neighborhood that was not identifiably black. Because Mr. Howard was a veteran,
the CHA waived its customary home visit, and therefore did not meet the rest of the family. With no clear indications that
the Howards were black, Trumbull Park’s housing clerk assumed they were white and approved their application. The Howard family
moved into the project on July 30. It was not until the following week that Trumbull Park’s manager called the city with some
troubling news — Mrs. Howard, the manager reported, “might be Negro.”
²¹

Word of the unwelcome new neighbors spread quickly through Trumbull Park. On August 5, a crowd of about fifty white teenagers
gathered at the Howards’ apartment, yelling threats and throwing rocks and bricks. Four days later, the angry mob had grown
to more than one thousand. They threw rocks, bricks, and sulfur candles through the Howards’ windows, forcing them to board
them up with plywood. The Howards lived as virtual prisoners in their home, as the white-looking Mrs. Howard escaped for occasional
trips for food and other supplies. By week’s end, forty-one protesters had been arrested, twenty injured, and a round-the-clock
vigil of 250 police officers was needed to keep the peace. The mob at Trumbull Park was a mixture of white ethnic groups —
Irish, Slavs, Poles, and Italians — with no one group predominating. The
Chicago Defender
would note of the white mobs that “although there was no unity in the language backgrounds, they had a common . . . hatred
for Negroes.” The Trumbull Park mob enforced a fierce racial solidarity: within a month of the Howards’ arrival, a white-owned
liquor store that served blacks was set on fire. Adding to the feeling of terror, bombs exploded regularly in the area around
the Howards’ apartment.
²²

South Deering’s whites were convinced that the black incursion into Trumbull Park Homes was only the first step in a campaign
of racial infiltration. Blacks would soon start using the neighborhood’s parks and playgrounds. Then they would begin buying
up private homes in the neighborhood. In no time at all, the whites believed, “the whole thing will be Black and they will
buy at their own price.” When the housing battle was won, blacks would begin taking away white jobs at the nearby Wisconsin
Steel Works, which had started hiring blacks only during the labor shortages of World War II. The great underlying fear for
many South Deering residents — as it was in the Deep South — was interracial dating and miscegenation. “White people built
this area [and] we want no part of this race mixing,” the
South Deering Bulletin
declared. According to one fair-housing investigator who had been sent into South Deering, neighborhood residents were saying
that “it won’t be long now and Negroes and whites intermarrying will be a common thing and the white race will go down hill.”
In fact, the investigator reported, no doubt with some exaggeration, that South Deeringites lately talked “about nothing else.”
²³