American Pharaoh (28 page)

Becoming mayor did change Daley in one respect: he quickly came to demand a new level of obeisance from subordinates and friends. Shortly after the 1955 election William Lee, a union official who had provided critical support during the campaign, saw his old friend arriving late for a civic function. “You’re late, Richard,” Lee said to Daley. “Don’t you ever call me ‘Richard’ in public,” Daley replied. “I am the mayor, and don’t you ever forget it.” Like a rich man who does not like to be reminded of the days before he had money, Daley did not like to be reminded of his more humble origins. South Side alderman Edward Burke recalls a meeting at the LaSalle Hotel where Attorney General William Clark made the mistake of mentioning in his speech that his father was on the City Council when Daley used to get coffee for the aldermen. “He was trying to allude to his long family relationship to the party, but Daley didn’t like being reminded he was a gofer,” says Burke. “That cast the die for Bill Clark. Daley wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
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In this case, Daley’s anger did not last. Clark remained a loyal member of the machine, and years later Daley slated him in a losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.

One of Daley’s first priorities in office was to rescue political patronage. Despite his campaign rhetoric, he never had any intention of continuing Mayor Kennelly’s civil-service reform efforts. The patronage system was simply too critical to the machine’s grip on power for Daley to allow it to be undone. Political patronage is often thought of by the uninitiated as a casual practice in which friends hire friends and relatives hire relatives for government jobs. In fact, in a well-run political machine like Chicago’s, patronage was anything but casual. Machines held on to power through their ability to trade jobs and other material inducements for political support. Paddy Bauler used to say that reformers could never hope to compete with the machine because their workers simply did not have the incentive to campaign that came with knowing that their livelihoods were at stake. “The type of people you got over there don’t need a job as bailiff, so you got to rely on amateurs for your organization,” Bauler scoffed at one reform leader. But the supply of patronage positions was limited, and the machine could afford to hand them out only to workers who could be counted on to work hard for it on election day. In his own 43rd Ward, Bauler once boasted, every one of his seventy-six precinct captains had city, state, or county employment. But in exchange, they all turned out their vote on election day.
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Patronage workers were chosen carefully, and their value to the machine was constantly reassessed. Daley had individual meetings with each of the fifty ward committeemen to discuss how much patronage his ward would receive for the year. To ready for these meetings, Daley patronage aide Matt Danaher prepared precise tabulations of how each precinct in each of the fifty wards had performed in the last election — more than 3,000 separate vote tallies that Daley personally pored over in making his patronage decisions. Everyone understood there was a “pecking order,” recalls Tom Donovan, who followed Danaher as Daley’s patronage chief. “Someone who’s with the best ward in the city naturally is going to have a better chance of getting key positions than someone who isn’t.” But there was also room for the machine boss to exercise his discretion, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. “We didn’t have a set form,” Donovan recalls. “It was something you had a feel for.” Ward committeemen with strong connections to Daley, including most of the Irish titans of the machine, tended to do especially well. Daley’s political base, the 11th Ward, may have had as many as 2,000 patronage positions, considerably more than it was entitled to based on electoral performance alone. At the other extreme, Frank Keenan, who had defied Daley and the machine by backing Kennelly for mayor, had his patronage cut off entirely.
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Despite the inroads made by Kennelly’s civil-service crusade, the machine’s patronage operation was still vast when Daley took power. Thousands of workers were on the city payroll directly, and many more were on the payroll of specialized government bodies like the Sanitary District, which had their own budgets and taxing authority. Thousands more were placed with machine politicians who controlled large staffs of their own. The president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners at one time employed 3,100, more than half of whom were patronage hires. The clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County had 1,700 employees, three-fourths patronage workers. In addition to these government jobs, thousands of private-sector positions in Chicago required sponsorship from the Democratic machine. Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s mail-order operations, located in the 24th Ward, used to turn away walk-in applicants who did not come with a letter from alderman Jacob Arvey. All told, the Chicago machine at its height controlled as many as 40,000 patronage jobs. “We had everything that wasn’t police or fire or career civil service,” recalls Daley patronage chief Tom Donovan. “That gave us a lot of positions to put our people in.” Even the worst patronage jobs offered a decent salary, and the best came with some appealing fringe benefits. Some jobs at the Forest Preserve District, a bastion of patronage, included a free house in the forest. Relatively minor supervisory positions often came with city cars. When 29th Ward precinct captain Thomas Fitzsimmons was supervisor of buildings and grounds at the Chicago Tuberculosis and Sanitarium District, he was entitled to a car and driver, although he did not take it. “He didn’t believe in calling attention,” says his granddaughter, Martha Fitzsimmons.
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To get a patronage job, the key was showing up with the right “sponsorship.” If the 10th Ward was entitled to six positions with the Sanitation Department, for example, the ward committeeman would send over six men with official “sponsorship letters.” Employers kept detailed patronage files, including when an employee was hired, who his sponsor was, and whether a sponsorship letter was on file. William Dawson’s correspondence files contain a letter that illustrates how the process worked. “I understand that my friend and office associate, Joseph J. Attwell, Jr., has received the endorsement of the 20th Ward Regular Democratic Organization for the position of trial attorney in your office,” Dawson wrote to Cook County state’s attorney John Boyle. “I also understand that there are already several appointees in your office from the 20th Ward. Since Mr. Attwell also meets with my approval, I would be happy to have you let your records show that you are charging his position to the Second Ward if that would facilitate his appointment.”
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Applicants without political sponsorship were usually ineligible for patronage jobs, no matter how qualified they were. There is a classic study of the Chicago machine entitled
We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent,
and that was precisely the ethic that prevailed. When Jesse Jackson came to Chicago in 1964 to attend Chicago Theological Seminary, he needed a job. He had a letter of introduction to Daley from North Carolina governor Terry Sanford. Daley met with Jackson, and advised him to work for one of the ward organizations on the South Side. He also offered Jackson a job as toll collector on the Calumet Bridge. Jackson, insulted, turned the job down. “He thought he was going to get something that was more commensurate with his self-concept, if you will,” says Jackson’s friend Henry Hardy. “You know, he had come out of school as a star athlete, president of the student body, with a letter from the governor — there were other toll collectors, I’m sure, who never had a letter from a governor.” Still, there were not many toll collectors who had gotten their job without doing precinct work first.
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Workers were generally assigned patronage jobs that corresponded to their place in the machine hierarchy. Precinct captains and assistant captains often became supervisors in the government bureaucracy or minor department heads. Lower-level precinct workers might get jobs as clerical workers, janitors, or street cleaners. Being qualified to do the work was not an important consideration. A high-level Chicago bureaucrat once explained the difference between hiring workers sent by the 29th Ward’s Bernie Neistein and those sent by the 26th Ward’s Matthew Bieszczat. “Bernie Neistein is reasonable,” the bureaucrat said. “If he sends you five guys to put to work, only two are illiterate. But Matt Bieszczat sends you five illiterates and wants you to take them all!” In many cases, little actual work was expected of patronage workers, at least in their nonpolitical jobs. Ed Quigley, who was both Daley’s sewer commissioner and ward committeeman for the 27th Ward, was known to be particularly undemanding. “It was the only sewer department in the country where people came to work in white pants, and when they went home they were just as clean,” recalls one veteran political reporter. “You didn’t have to work hard, and you could often hold down another job.”
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The patronage system built a political army willing to do battle for the machine in every election. “It gave the mayor a cadre of people who wanted to see him succeed,” says Tom Donovan. Patronage workers circulated nominating petitions, put up posters, worked at polling places, or rang doorbells to get their neighbors out to vote. In many departments, any employee who brought a letter from his ward organization could get a paid day off on election day to do political work. Patronage workers were expected to kick back up to 5 percent of their salary to their ward organizations. In some wards, the machine calculated the annual amount and sent workers a schedule of monthly payments. Patronage workers were also expected to attend ward dinner-dances and golf outings and sell tickets to their friends and family, and to buy books of ward-organization raffle tickets to resell. In the 5th Ward, they sold ads in the official program for the annual “Marshall Korshak Night,” honoring the ward committeeman; in the 11th Ward, they canvassed to support the annual indoor picnic at the Amphitheatre, in which 12,000 ward residents, most of them children, gathered for a free day of ice cream, soda, Ferris wheels, and merry-go-rounds. Patronage workers were also often pressured to contribute directly to their employers. The summer was a particularly costly time of year for patronage hires. In August 1958, the
Chicago Tribune
noted that four elected officials had already held golf outings, and four more were coming up shortly. “These are the months dreaded by the thousands of temporary workers on the government payrolls,” the paper noted. “They are the people expected to make a ‘drop’ of money for tickets to their ward organizations — either from their paychecks or thru the sale of tickets to others. Workers who fail to meet quotas for ticket sales may find themselves slipping off the payroll.”
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Patronage employees who did not produce risked losing their jobs. A large number of patronage employees were officially classified as “temporary” workers, who were hired for periods of 60 to 180 days, after which their employment had to be renewed. The temporary worker category was a gaping loophole in Chicago’s civil-service system. The law permitted these workers to be hired outside the civil-service guidelines when no competitive examinations had been held — which gave the machine an incentive to see that exams were held as infrequently as possible. In some agencies, like the Park District, more than half of the new employees in a given year would be classified as temporary. Temporary workers who remained in the good graces of the machine could remain on the payroll for twenty-five years or more in their “temporary” capacity. The temporary worker system kept the pressure on patronage workers to fulfill their political responsibilities if they wanted to remain employed. Years later, when the patronage machine was challenged in federal court, workers would come forward with stories of being fired for failing to produce the votes that were expected of them or for not kicking back money to their ward organizations. Ida Barnes, who worked in the traffic ticket collection office of the clerk of the Circuit Court, testified that she lost her job after protesting she could not afford to buy a $50 ticket to a dinner sponsored by the 16th Ward Democratic Organization.
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From a purely political standpoint, the patronage system worked. By one estimate, each patronage job produced about ten votes for the machine: the worker’s own, the votes of his family and friends, and the votes that his campaign work and financial contributions produced. If the machine in fact controlled 40,000 patronage jobs, it went into every election with a 400,000-vote edge over its opponents. In local races, the impact could be even more dramatic. By one estimate patronage workers could account for as much as 25 percent to 50 percent of the vote in some aldermanic races. James Murray, onetime 18th Ward alderman, recalls that at one point his ward had about three hundred patronage jobs and produced a fairly good vote for the machine. “I remember Matt Danaher said to me, ‘Why aren’t you as good as the 11th Ward,’” Murray recalls. “I told him, ‘We would be if we had the jobs you have in the 11th Ward.’” Daley was a firm believer in the power of patronage. Once, at a meeting of the Cook County Central Committee, a committeeman from suburban Wheeling Township complained that he had more than one hundred precincts but only twelve precinct workers available to cover them on election day. Daley responded that the committeeman should focus on running slates of candidates for office in the villages across his township, with the goal of taking control of the village governments. Once he controlled these local governments, Daley advised, he could hire patronage employees and turn them into political armies.
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