American Pharaoh (2 page)

Millions of Americans watching the interview at home were waiting for Cronkite to challenge Daley’s self-serving account.
But that confrontation never came. In the face of the mayor’s bluster and strength of purpose, Cronkite folded. The veteran
newsman, who had been deeply troubled by the events of the past week, let Daley’s wildest assertations stand. And to the amazement
of many viewers, Cronkite concluded the interview with an ingratiating anecdote. He told Daley he had recently driven back
to his hotel with several other people, and they had all commented on “the genuine friendliness of the Chicago Police Department.”
Daley had gone into the interview a subject of national scorn, but he had emerged with a public relations triumph. As one
CBS executive said dejectedly when it was over: “Daley took Cronkite like Grant took Richmond.”
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The defeated CBS news staff were hardly the first people to underestimate Daley. It had happened to him all his life. Daley
was born in 1902 in the gritty, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport on Chicago’s South Side. He was bereft of the usual
attributes of promising youth. He was not academically gifted, charismatic, or articulate. (Indeed, later in life he would
be known for his colorful malapropisms. “The policeman is not there to create disorder,” he said after the convention violence.
“The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”) What Daley did begin with was an Irish-Catholic background, making him part
of the city’s politically ascendant ethnic group; extraordinary personal drive; and a keen understanding of how to amass and
wield power.

Daley was a masterful politician — perhaps the shrewdest retail politician in U.S. history. Like Stalin, he understood the
enormous personal power that could come from presiding over a strong party apparatus. Daley skillfully worked his way up the
ranks of Chicago’s mighty Democratic machine, quietly forging the citywide coalition that elected him party boss in 1954.
Daley presided over a Central Committee made up of ward committeemen from each of the city’s fifty wards. Through them, he
commanded an army of 3,400 precinct captains spread out over every block of the city, and dispensed 40,000 patronage jobs.
Patronage workers who came through on election day kept their jobs. Those who failed to turn out the vote were “vised,” or
fired, and replaced with someone who would try harder. The machine’s leadership was made up of Daley’s fellow Irish-Catholics,
but its genius was that it included most of the city — blacks, Jews, Poles, even organized crime. Within a year of becoming
Democratic boss, Daley ousted Chicago’s well-meaning but politically naive mayor and installed himself in City Hall.

Daley, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976, was the most powerful local politician America has
ever produced. He possessed a raw political might that today, in an age when politics is dominated by big money and television,
is hard to imagine. He personally slated, or selected, candidates for every office, from governor to ward committeeman. A
generation of governors, U.S. senators, congressmen, state legislators, and aldermen owed Daley their political careers. When
he wanted something from them — whether it was a congressman’s vote on the national budget or a patronage position in the
county sheriff ’s office — he almost always got it. (And when he did not, he could be ruthless: one of the brightest stars
on the Chicago political scene in the 1960s lost his seat on the Cook County Board for refusing to side with the machine on
a vote over a garbage dump.) But Daley’s influence reached far beyond the borders of his city and state. His control over
the large and well-disciplined Illinois delegation made him a kingmaker in selecting Democratic candidates for president —
he was, Robert Kennedy once declared, “the whole ball game.”

To what end did Daley use all of this power? He reigned in an era rich with ideological leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. was
battling for civil rights, and George Wallace was fighting for segregation; Eugene McCarthy was campaigning to end the Vietnam
War, and President Johnson was struggling to win it. Daley had an ideology of his own: the flinty conservatism that prevailed
in Bridgeport and in much of white ethnic, working-class America in the 1950s and 1960s. A devout Catholic and loyal machine
member, he believed deeply in authority. He favored the strong over the weak, the establishment over dissidents. Daley liked
presidents, business leaders, and powerful institutions; he was offended by anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters,
and hippies, who sought to influence policy without doing the hard work of prevailing at the ballot box. Daley believed that
poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as his Bridgeport neighbors struggled to do. And he believed in
racial separation, of the kind that prevailed in his own neighborhood. Blacks stayed in the Black Belt to the east of Wentworth
Avenue, and whites stayed to the west.

Those were Daley’s views, but his agenda in office was less complicated: he was motivated first and foremost by a drive to
accumulate and retain power. That was the way of the Chicago machine, and it was Daley’s — make deals and share the wealth
with the Church or the syndicate, with black political leaders or anti-black neighborhood organizations, and with anyone else
whose votes would help elect the machine’s candidates. Daley’s primary test of a political cause was whether it would increase
or decrease his power. He chose candidates who would win, and who would pull the rest of the machine slate into office with
them. He formed alliances with politicians who could deliver votes, and ruthlessly cut them off when they were no longer useful
— or when they became so strong that they posed a threat.

Daley came to see the great liberal crusades of the 1950s and 1960s — civil rights, the War on Poverty, the anti-war movement
— as a threat to his power, and he battled against all of them. His focus was Chicago, but his power and influence were such
that he ended up quietly shaping the national agenda. Nowhere was this more true than on civil rights. Daley was elected at
the dawn of the civil rights era: it was during his first year as mayor that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery,
Alabama, city bus. The civil rights movement first took hold in the South, where Jim Crow enshrined racial segregation in
the law books, but its implications for Chicago were substantial. The city was in the midst of a demographic revolution when
Daley took office. The city’s black population was reaching record levels, as trainloads of blacks fled their hard lives in
the rural South for the promise of a better life in northern cities.

Chicago under Daley became America’s major northern civil rights battleground. After his success in the South, and after winning
the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to take his movement to the North — and he chose Chicago as the place
to start it off. King moved into a tenement on Chicago’s South Side for eight months in 1966 and spearheaded the Chicago Campaign,
personally leading open-housing marches into the city’s white neighborhoods. Daley responded to King’s drive with a brilliant
campaign of his own. Daley did not make the same mistake so many southern governors and mayors had: he refused to let the
movement cast him as the villain in its drama. In the end, Daley’s handling of the Chicago Campaign would have far-reaching
effects on the civil rights movement across the country. Daley also played a key role in preserving racial segregation in
education, both in Chicago and nationally. Chicago’s public schools were nearly as segregated as the southern schools that
were being ordered by federal courts to integrate. Daley fought back attempts to integrate Chicago’s public schools, and took
on the federal government when it tried to force school desegregation on the city.

Daley was also a leading opponent of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, and again his victory was felt far beyond Chicago.
Daley did not share Johnson’s moral commitment to using government programs to lift the disadvantaged up from poverty, but
his greatest objections were political. Johnson’s poverty programs incorporated the liberal notion of “maximum feasible participation,”
which meant that poor people should have as much control as possible over how poverty programs were run. Daley saw these programs
as a threat to the machine, because they put money and power in the hands of independent community activists. Daley’s response
to the War on Poverty would be felt not only in Chicago, but in Washington and across the country.

Daley emerged on the national scene in 1968 as an icon of working-class resentment toward the anti-war movement and the youth-oriented
counterculture. Daley’s opposition was in large part political. The anti-authoritarian spirit behind the movement was a threat
to machine politics, which was built on a foundation of blind obedience. Daley understood that when power shifted to the grass-roots
level and to the streets, political bosses like him would suffer. In fact, his fears about the direction the anti-war activists
were leading the Democratic Party would be borne out in the aftermath of the 1968 convention. Daley and his delegates were
not seated in the 1972 convention: the party voted instead to recognize a ragtag group of liberals and blacks as the official
Illinois delegation. The schism that emerged in Chicago in 1968 would haunt the Democratic Party, and national politics, for
decades to come.

In the end, however, Daley’s most lasting legacy was the cause he devoted most of his life to: building the modern city of
Chicago. When he took office in 1955, Chicago was spiraling downward. The city’s middle-class was beginning to flee for the
suburbs, their path paved by low-cost government mortgages and newly laid highways. Businesses were also headed for outlying
areas, drawn by cheaper land and lower taxes. At the same time, poor blacks were flooding into the city from the rural South.
Middle-class white areas were “flipping” rapidly and becoming black slums. Daley used his power to reverse Chicago’s decline.
His City Hall worked hard to develop the city’s infrastructure and buttress its downtown business district. Daley built or
helped build Chicago’s superlative institutions — O’Hare International Airport, the world’s busiest; Sears Tower, the world’s
tallest; and the Dan Ryan Expressway, the world’s widest. Under Daley, an impressive new crop of skyscrapers went up downtown
and filled out the city’s skyline. Daley convinced a reluctant University of Illinois to build a campus in Chicago, giving
the sons and daughters of the city’s working class access to affordable college education close to home. And he built the
Civic Center, a massive complex of government buildings, and McCormick Place, the world’s largest exhibition space. Daley
also presided over the rise of North Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, one of the nation’s grandest upscale retailing districts.
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Daley’s modern Chicago was built, however, on an unstated foundation: commitment to racial segregation. He preserved the city’s
white neighborhoods and business district by building racial separation into the very concrete of the city. New developments
— housing, highways, and schools — were built where they would serve as a barrier between white neighborhoods and the black
ghetto. Daley worked with powerful business leaders to revitalize downtown by pushing poor blacks out, replacing them with
middle-class whites. But Daley’s most striking accomplishment was Chicago’s deeply troubled public housing projects. Daley
used public housing as a repository for thousands of blacks who might otherwise have ended up moving into white neighborhoods.
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He built new public housing in the form of densely packed high-rise towers, and he placed them in Chicago’s black ghettos.
Many of these projects ended up along a single street in the South Side ghetto. The State Street Corridor, as it came to be
known, remains today the densest concentration of public housing in the nation. Daley was also responsible for the final touch:
routing the Dan Ryan Expressway to follow the neighborhood’s traditional racial boundary. The fourteen-lane Dan Ryan separated
the State Street Corridor from the white, working-class neighborhoods of the South Side — including Daley’s own neighborhood
of Bridgeport.

Daley may well have saved Chicago. He reigned during an era in which suburbanization, crime, and white flight were wreaking
havoc on other midwestern cities. Detroit, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Saint Louis were all prosperous, middle-class cities
when Daley took office, and all declined precipitously after World War II. In a twenty-five-year period after the war, Detroit
lost one-third of its
Fortune
500 companies; by the mid-1970s, it had become the nation’s murder capital, with twice as many killings per capita as any
other large American city. That never became Chicago’s fate. In large part due to Daley, the city’s downtown business district
expanded at the same time Detroit’s was collapsing, and much of its sprawling white, working-class “Bungalow Belt” remained
intact.
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