American Pharaoh (21 page)

On December 1, 1954, Kennelly announced that he would be running for reelection the following spring. Asked by a reporter
if he had notified the machine of his plans, Kennelly said cheerfully that he intended to call Daley as soon as the press
conference was over. If Kennelly still did not grasp the depth of his troubles with the machine, he was one of the few people
active in Chicago politics who missed it. “It is symbolic of the difficulties that have arisen between the mayor and the party
machine that only after handing his announcement to the press did he telephone the news to Richard J. Daley,” the
Chicago Daily News
explained for him on its editorial page the next day. “It is this aloofness which angers and alienates the ward committeemen.”
The aloofness ran in both directions. Asked if he would attend the opening of Kennelly’s reelection headquarters in his capacity
as party leader, Daley offered a curt response: “No, I have to take my kids to Santa Claus.”
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Daley was evasive about whom he intended to support. “I expect the Democratic mayoral primary to attract the most able men
in our great city,” he said. “I have been asked as chairman of the Democratic Party just whom the Democratic Party will endorse.
Obviously, I cannot answer that question because I do not know. The Democratic Party will meet and discuss all candidates,
and it will select the best candidate.” Daley was being unduly modest about the role he would play in the process. As he had
done a year earlier, Daley would appoint the slate-making committee that would choose the machine’s candidates, and he would
be sure to stack it with men who could be counted on to follow his lead. Daley named Joe Gill, his predecessor as boss and
a reliable ally, as chairman. He appointed Barnet Hodes, Jake Arvey’s law partner, and Michael McDermott, committeeman from
the 13th Ward on the Southwest Side, whose day job was chief clerk in Daley’s county clerk’s office. And Daley named submachine
leader Bill Dawson. Dawson was not as much of a Daley crony as other members of the committee — that would come later — but
Daley had been assiduously cultivating him, stopping by his district office at 35th and Calumet on a regular basis for visits
on his way home from the Loop. At the least, Daley knew that Dawson was a reliable anti-Kennelly vote, since he had vowed
four years earlier that the mayor’s current term would be his last.
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Reports were by now rampant that Daley himself was on the verge of entering the mayoral race. Daley fueled the speculation.
Asked if he would be making a presentation to the slate-making committee, Daley said he would “if asked to make one.” Asked
if he would run for mayor, Daley responded: “That’s up to the slate committee.” On December 15, 1954, Kennelly walked from
City Hall to the smoke-filled rooms of the Morrison Hotel and read a prepared statement to the slate-making committee in which
he assured them that “[w]henever there has been conflict between the interests of the public and personal or political considerations,
my decisions have been made upon the basis of what is good for the city and its citizens — and what benefits the city benefits
the Democratic Party.” His stony-faced audience was buying none of it. When Kennelly was through reading, he said to Gill,
who at Daley’s behest chaired the committee, “You invited me, I’ll be glad to answer any questions.” But no one spoke up.
“Is there anything you want me to explain?” the mayor asked. “No,” Gill responded. Kennelly looked from one ward committeeman
to the next, and saw that he was not going to win them over. “I presume it’s unanimous?” he asked. “They gave me a fast deal,”
he would complain later.
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Most ominous of all for Kennelly’s prospects was the fact that Daley had sat in on the proceedings, even though he was not
on the committee. “My office as chairman is next door to the room where the committee is meeting,” Daley explained. “I pop
in now and then.” In contrast to Kennelly’s brief appearance, Daley met with the committee for two hours. The slating committee
later insisted it had “seriously” considered Kennelly, Adamowski, and others, but it unanimously voted to draft Daley. It
had been a foregone conclusion that the committee would choose Daley, but it was not certain it would be unanimous. The unanimity
indicated that the anti-Daley factions were beginning to reconcile themselves to Daley’s leadership, and that Daley would
have the support of a united machine in the primary.
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The machine’s official line was that Daley had been “drafted” to run for mayor. Daley played his part in the little drama,
exclaiming that the draft was “a great honor, and I never dreamed it could happen to me.” He said he would need time to decide
whether he would be willing to run. Two days later, to the surprise of absolutely no one, in a prepared statement, Daley said
he would accept the draft, “[a]lthough I have not sought this honor.” The slate-making committee’s nomination was technically
only a recommendation that was forwarded to the full Cook County Democratic Central Committee. Frank Keenan, the powerful
Cook County assessor and Kennelly’s newly appointed campaign manager, delivered a passionate speech to this larger group in
favor of renominating the mayor. In the end, Daley won 47–1, with Kennelly winning only Keenan’s vote.
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Kennelly was not about to give up City Hall without a fight. “It is already evident that the ‘draft’ is building to a hurricane
of resentment against boss rule,” Kennelly declared. “The question is whether the people of Chicago will rule or be ruled
by the willful, wanton inner circle of political bosses at the Morrison Hotel.” As an embattled candidate taking on the machine,
Kennelly started to show a spirit he never exhibited as mayor. Five of the ward committeemen who voted for Daley in the Democratic
Central Committee held city jobs. Kennelly demanded their resignations; two were forced out just two days before Christmas.
Kennelly also stopped putting patronage workers recommended by the party bosses on the city payroll, and vowed to fire all
non-civil-service city employees who campaigned against him in the upcoming election. Though Kennelly had lost the machine,
he was not without supporters. The business community — a traditional antagonist of the machine — threw its weight behind
his candidacy. And in an editorial headlined “The Man They Dumped,” the
Chicago Tribune
— another longtime machine opponent — lauded Kennelly as a public servant who “hasn’t regarded service to the party organization
as his first duty in office.”
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The Democratic primary was complicated further when Benjamin Adamowski, Daley’s old friend from Springfield, entered the race
on an anti-machine platform. Adamowski is one of the great might-have-beens of Chicago politics, and someone whose career
stands in dramatic counterpoint to Daley’s plodding but utterly effective ascent up the machine ranks. Adamowski was born
into machine politics to a far greater degree than Daley. He was the oldest of nine children of Max Adamowski, a three-hundred-pound
Polish immigrant saloonkeeper and organization alderman from Little Poland, on the near North Side. Adamowski earned a law
degree from DePaul University in 1928, and took a job as examiner of titles for the Cook County recorder of deeds. But he
was too ambitious to remain in the county bureaucracy for long. In 1931, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected to the
state House of Representatives. After the election, Adamowski submitted his resignation as examiner of titles. The Cook County
recorder of deeds, a good machine politician, tried to talk Adamowski into staying on. The machine liked having legislators
on its payroll, and the legislators — who earned as little as $1,750 a year — were usually grateful for a second salary. But
Adamowski decided to take a more independent path, spurning the machine’s offer and opening a law office on LaSalle Street
instead.

In the legislature, Adamowski put even more distance between himself and his father’s political machine. While Daley was doing
the bidding of Mayor Kelly and the Democratic Organization, Adamowski aligned himself with the liberal, reformist governor
Henry Horner, Kelly’s rival in the statewide Democratic Party. It was not a good career move — as Daley understood, the machine
could do more for an ambitious Chicago politician than an unaffiliated governor could — but Adamowski was acting on principle.
As a legislator, Adamowski was a force to be reckoned with. He was a man of unusual intelligence and a skilled orator, whom
one University of Chicago philosopher called the “Daniel Webster of the West.” After rising to majority leader, Adamowski
left the legislature and returned to Chicago to become Mayor Kennelly’s corporation counsel. Adamowski took the job because
he believed Kennelly was prepared, despite his machine backing, to usher in a new age of reform for Chicago. After three years,
Adamowski resigned, disillusioned by the degree to which the machine bosses continued to have their way at City Hall. “Kennelly
was just a nice guy,” Adamowski said later. “He should never have been mayor of Chicago. He should have been a cardinal or
a monsignor. He was that kind of person.”
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As the 1955 election approached, Adamowski felt he had seen enough of Daley and Kennelly to know that he could do a better
job as mayor than either of them. The question for Adamowski was how he could outpoll a well-known two-term mayor and the
head of the powerful Democratic machine. Adamowski was convinced that Kennelly would drop out of the race. “My experience
with him was that in a contest, he’d back off,” he said. Then, in a one-on-one race against Daley and the machine, Adamowski
believed he could win by combining the anti-machine vote with his following in the city’s large Polish community. The problem
with Adamowski’s plan was that Kennelly remained steadfast, and Chicago’s first contested mayoral race in modern times ended
up as a three-man race.
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The ugly tone the election would take became clear on December 29, 1954, the day nominating petitions were due. In Chicago,
candidates were listed on the ballot in the order in which the city clerk received their petitions. This top spot was coveted
because so many voters routinely pulled the lever beside the first recognizable name. The city clerk’s office opened at 8:30
A.M.
, and Kennelly’s Corporation counsel, John Mortimer, arrived in the outer office at 7:45
A.M.
to deliver the petitions. He patiently waited for the office to open, confident that Kennelly would be first on the ballot.
Somehow, though, Daley’s men managed to enter through a side door and get their petitions time-stamped at 8:13
A.M.
, while Kennelly’s followed by three minutes. Kennelly’s camp protested foul play but was unable to push Daley off the top
of the ballot.
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Daley was less successful in an attempt to strong-arm the Cook County Board. Word leaked out on December 30 that Daley had
applied “extreme pressure” to the Democratic board members to slash the budget of county assessor Frank Keenan, the most prominent
elected official backing Kennelly. Daley’s attempt to undermine Keenan was rebuffed at a closed-door meeting at which Daley
and board president Daniel Ryan reportedly almost came to blows. Daley later denied he had ever approached the board on the
subject, saying that “the woods are full of rumors these days” and “a lot of people are trying to spread rumors to hurt Dick
Daley.”
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Daley’s campaign was run out of the machine’s headquarters in the old Morrison Hotel. The offices of the Cook County Democratic
Organization were prosaic in appearance. “An out-of-town conventioneer ... would think he had stumbled into the local sales
office of a business firm that distributed literature and brochures advertising the company’s product,” one student of the
Chicago machine wrote some years later about its offices, which by then had moved to the LaSalle Hotel. “There are no smoke-filled
rooms reeking of cigars (Chairman Daley does not smoke), no jangling batteries of telephones, no authentic characters out
of
The Last Hurrah
lounging around. . . . Except for a large Buddha-like photograph of a Chairman Daley, smiling enigmatically down on all who
enter, and pictures of the local candidates at election time on the walls, the decor is typical of any business office in
the Loop.” In Daley’s campaign for mayor, the main emphasis was on coordinating the efforts of, and providing backup to, the
fifty ward organizations that would do the real work of turning out voters on election day. “What do they do over at the Morrison?”
Jake Arvey once asked rhetorically. “Actually, the Morrison is just like any sales organization trying to sell its product
and straighten out its problems. Setting up an organization in a ward where we’re weak. Then there’s the matter of literature
— deciding on it, distributing it, getting it into the hands of four or five thousand precinct captains. Then there’s organized
labor. Labor and fraternal groups are for you but you’ve got to see to it that they do the work, get special literature, and
so on.” Daley’s strategists at the Morrison were responsible for those functions that had to be performed on a citywide basis
— sending out speakers to community groups across the city, organizing the big downtown rallies, and hosting the massive pre-election
precinct captain luncheons. Machine headquarters also told the ward committeemen how many votes they were expected to deliver,
and mediated conflicts between rival factions in a ward. “It’s a full-time job, eight-thirty to six at night,” said Arvey.
“That’s what makes an organization.”
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