American Pharaoh (23 page)

Daley’s supporters took every opportunity to contrast Kennelly’s patrician ways with the modest background of their own candidate.
“Kennelly ain’t lived with people,” one Daley campaign lieutenant argued in typically homespun fashion. “He picks a fancy
apartment, an elevator to take him up away from the people, and when the elevator brings him down his car is waiting. But
Richard Daley lives in a bungalow, walks to church, sees his neighbors, and understands people.” The Daley campaign also realized
the uses to which the candidate’s large Irish family could be put. “Those seven kids of his don’t hurt,” one Daley strategist
noted. “I was the one that told him to get their pictures in his ads.” Daley increased his working-class appeal by picking
up the endorsement of the city’s major unions, which all had long-standing ties to the machine. The Chicago Federation of
Labor, led by an old friend, endorsed Daley on January 4. A few days later, the state Congress of Industrial Organizations
fell into line as well.
⁶¹

On the tricky issue of race, Daley carefully appealed to both sides. The vote in the black submachine wards was simply too
large for a machine candidate to ignore. Fortunately for Daley, Dawson had already come out against Kennelly because of his
stand on the jitneys and policy wheels, and Daley made private assurances to Dawson that he would not interfere in these spheres.
Daley also spoke warmly of Dawson personally. In his attacks on the machine, Kennelly often singled out Dawson as a symbol
of everything that was wrong with the Morrison Hotel crowd. “The congressman is a political boss,” Kennelly said in a January
30 speech. “I can understand why Dawson passed the word that he couldn’t stand for Kennelly. I haven’t been interested in
building up his power. Without power to dispense privilege, protection and patronage to preferred people, bossism has no stock
in trade.” Daley came to Dawson’s defense — particularly before all-black audiences. On the eve of the election, Daley traveled
to the Grand Ballroom in the 6th Ward — the latest territorial addition to Dawson’s growing submachine empire — and stood
behind the South Side congressman at a rally of 1,200 submachine workers. “Why should they castigate leaders in the lifestream
of politics as bosses?” Daley said, one machine head defending another. “I don’t say Bill Dawson is a boss. I say Bill Dawson
is a leader of men and women.” At the same time that Daley was appealing to blacks on welfare issues and personality politics,
he sent signals to white voters that on the overriding racial issue of the day — integration of white neighborhoods — he stood
with them. In an address to 7,500 members of the United Packinghouse Workers on February 17, Daley told his overwhelmingly
white audience that the police department should “not be used to advance the interests of any one group over another,” a coded
reference to the role of the police in integrating Trumbull Park.
⁶²

Heading into the final weeks of the election, Daley trailed Kennelly by a substantial margin, according to the rudimentary
opinion polls used at the time. A
Tribune
poll found that nearly 57 percent of the 104 voters who expressed a preference backed Kennelly, against only 33 percent who
intended to vote for Daley. Kennelly’s camp had also been encouraged by the results of its own straw polls. A car carrying
four women poll takers and a male supervisor would pull up to street intersections in bellwether wards, get out, and survey
passersby. Kennelly’s teams kept their stops brief, because within thirty minutes of arriving at a corner, word would reach
the machine, and it would dispatch ringers to artificially boost Daley’s numbers. But in their shorter and more random stops,
Kennelly was outpolling Daley by better than 2–1. “Every sign from these and other sources shows sentiment for Mayor Kennelly
is growing every moment,” his campaign manager declared. “No matter where you go, there is no grass roots sentiment at all
for the Morrison Hotel candidate.” But again, the Kennelly campaign was showing a dangerous naïveté about the way the machine
operated. One voter polled by the
Tribune,
a retired accountant walking down Clifton Avenue in the North Side 46th Ward, tried to explain how Chicago politics worked.
“This is Joe Gill’s ward,” the accountant said. “Gill is one of the bosses who decided to dump Kennelly. The people in this
ward will be herded to the polls like cattle and they will vote as they are told. It’s the same in nearly every other ward.”
⁶³

What mattered, in other words, was not abstract public opinion but actual votes, and the machine had a knack for getting its
voters to the polls. Kennelly was pinning his hopes on a large turnout to overcome the machine voters, who would turn out
without fail for Daley. As it happened, the election fell on Washington’s birthday, when banks and schools were closed, and
the Kennelly camp was hoping the holiday would stimulate voting. If turnout was above 900,000, they believed, the mayor would
be reelected. In the waning days, the Kennelly campaign concentrated on stimulating turnout, but lacking the machine’s precinct
captains and foot soldiers, it had to get the message out through television. In a commercial repeated at fifteen-minute intervals
the day before the election, Kennelly called on voters to show up at the polls in massive numbers to send a message to the
party bosses. And in a final half-hour television appearance broadcast from the Erlanger Theater, Kennelly declared that “every
vote counts today to maintain the integrity of local government.”
⁶⁴

The primary was February 22, and Daley’s election-night party was held at the Morrison Hotel. Outside the machine headquarters,
a crowd of machine true-believers sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” In the inner sanctum, the machine’s leaders, the men
responsible for turning out the loyal voters, were all in attendance. Dawson had arrived, bringing word that blacks had turned
out in force in the submachine wards. The city’s labor titans, who had supplied many of the enlisted men in the machine’s
election-day army, had also shown up — William A. Lee, the Bakery Drivers Union leader who was president of the Chicago Federation
of Labor; William McFetridge of the Flat Janitors Union; and Stephen Bailey of the Plumbers Union. Sargent Shriver, at that
time a member of the Chicago Board of Education and head of the Kennedy family’s Merchandise Mart, was on hand with his wife,
Eunice Kennedy Shriver. When the polls closed for the night, nervous ward committeemen filed into headquarters and reported
directly to Daley on the precinct-by-precinct tallies in their wards. It was a ritual Daley would act out time and again,
accepting the ward committeemen’s proffered numbers and reviewing them silently. If the results pleased him, he would jump
up excitedly and pump the ward committeeman’s hand. If he was unhappy, there was a good chance Daley would scream at the bearer
of bad tidings. Daley was once so upset with a ward’s results, according to a machine insider, that he reached over his desk
and began shaking the terrified ward committeeman by his necktie.
⁶⁵

But this night, Daley was happy. The weather had been good all day, but even the clear skies had not prompted a turnout as
high as the Kennelly camp hoped — or the machine feared. In the end, fewer than 750,000 Democrats had cast ballots. As the
numbers poured into the Morrison Hotel, it was clear to Daley that he had triumphed. At 9:00
P.M.
., Kennelly went on television to concede. Fifteen minutes later, a telegram of congratulation arrived from Adamowski. At
9:32, Daley came out from his office to make a victory statement. He thanked everyone in the crowd for their hard work on
his behalf, ending his remarks by saying, “I shall conduct myself in the spirit of the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: ‘Lord,
make me an instrument of thy peace.’”
⁶⁶
Daley arrived home at midnight, and his family was still awake. Reporters could hear Sis Daley shout, “Here he is, kids!”
Daley hugged six of his seven children — Patricia, the firstborn, was at a Sisters of Mercy novitiate in Des Plaines — and
promised he would take them fishing. “Tell your mother not to fix anything for dinner,” Daley exclaimed. “We’re going to bring
home some trout.”
⁶⁷

In the round of postmortems that followed, the ward-by-ward vote totals showed that Daley’s edge had come from just a few
wards, and they revealed which constituencies put him in office. Daley and Kennelly ran remarkably evenly in thirty-nine of
the city’s fifty wards. It was the remaining eleven wards, known as the machine’s “Automatic Eleven,” that were responsible
for Daley’s victory. He carried these wards by 98,859 votes, almost his entire 100,064-vote victory margin. The Automatic
Eleven voters belonged overwhelmingly to the machine’s three key voting blocs: working-class white ethnics, blacks, and the
syndicate. Several were old-style machine wards, in which powerful white ward committeemen used the traditional methods to
turn out a strong vote for the machine slate. Daley also fared well in the so-called plantation wards, which had turned majority
black but remained under white control, and in the city’s “skid row.” Dawson’s submachine of five wards also racked up big
margins for Daley. Finally, Daley ran unusually well in the syndicate-dominated 1st Ward.
⁶⁸

Daley’s totals — in the Automatic Eleven, certainly, but in other wards as well — were likely inflated by vote theft and other
improprieties. Days before the election, Kennelly campaign manager Frank Keenan implored thousands of machine precinct captains
to play fair. “We know most precinct captains are honest men and women,” Keenan wrote in a letter to them. “Don’t let anyone
order you to do anything in the polling place which could bring punishment and also disgrace to your family.” But it was a
plea that, in many precincts, was flatly ignored. In the days leading up to the election, envelopes showed up in poorer neighborhoods
with a dollar bill and a mimeographed message: “This is your lucky day. Stay lucky with Daley.” In some wards, the vote theft
was overt. After the primary, the anti-machine
Chicago Tribune
published photographs from election day showing Sidney Lewis, a former bail bondsman with the evocative nickname of “Short
Pencil,” erasing crosses on ballots marked for Kennelly and replacing them with votes for Daley. Years later, in a Pulitzer
Prize–winning series, the
Tribune
would document in vivid detail the many methods by which the machine routinely stole votes — “four-legged voting,” in which
precinct captains accompanied voters into the voting booths; registering flophouse residents without their knowledge and then
voting for them on election day; and, crudest of all, just sending someone into a voting booth and having him pull the Democratic
straight-ticket lever again and again. How many of the 100,064 votes that made up Daley’s margin of victory were stolen is
impossible to say, but some of them certainly were. Kennelly may have been thinking in part of the machine’s prodigious ballot-box-stuffing
ability when he said on election night, “Unbreakable, just unbreakable, aren’t they?”
⁶⁹

The Republicans turned to a charismatic Democratic alderman named Robert Merriam to run against Daley in the general election.
The thirty-six-year-old Merriam represented the liberal 5th Ward, home to the University of Chicago and the surrounding Hyde
Park neighborhood, in the City Council. Merriam, who was known as “the WASP Prince of Chicago,” was heir to a Chicago reform
dynasty. His father, a well-regarded University of Chicago political science professor named Charles Merriam, had also been
a 5th Ward alderman, and had himself run for mayor in 1911. Before embarking on a political career, the younger Merriam had
been a World War II army captain and war hero, who had survived the Battle of the Bulge and then went on to write a book about
it. In the City Council, he was a leader of a group of reformers known as the “economy bloc” because of their skepticism about
the machine’s wasteful spending of city dollars. And as chairman of the council’s crime committee, he had made a name for
himself as a crime-fighter by broadcasting actual corruption and crime cases on his television show
Spotlight on Chicago.
The handsome and youthful Merriam spoke articulately about the problems facing Chicago. He was, one Washington columnist
declared excitedly, “the type who has been upsetting tawdry, tired machines all over the country.”
⁷⁰

Merriam was not the unanimous choice of Chicago Republicans. Many of the city’s ward committeemen were not enthusiastic about
giving their nomination to an unreconstructed Democrat. But Governor William Stratton, who was eager to breathe some life
into the moribund Chicago Republican organization, prevailed upon them to give Merriam the nomination and use him to expand
the party’s base. “The whole idea was to have a fusion ticket of independent Democrats, independents, and what there was of
the Republican Party, which wasn’t very much,” Merriam said later. The crusty
Chicago Tribune
was not pleased with the Merriam candidacy. The leading conservative paper in America at the time, the
Tribune
regularly railed against watered-down Eisenhower Republicanism and the “socialistic” United Nations. It endorsed Merriam
over Daley because it despised the Democratic machine even more than it hated Republican impostors. But Merriam had endorsed
both Stevenson and Douglas in their last races, and he was “the darling of the Independent Voters of Illinois, the organized
left wing of the Democratic Party,” the paper editorialized. “Merriam’s marriage to the Republican Party is obviously and
shamelessly a marriage of convenience.”
⁷¹