American Pharaoh (30 page)

Not everyone applauded Daley’s shrewd political work in Spring-field. Critics of the new sales tax — notably the Illinois Federation of Retail Associations, whose members stood to lose business as a result — complained that Daley and Stratton had improperly taken the question of taxation out of the hands of the voters. Before long, a more sinister charge began to circulate: that Stratton had given Daley the taxing authority he wanted in exchange for a promise that the machine would put up only a token opponent in the next election. Daley angrily denied that he had struck any such deal. The charges came from “a polluted, twisted mind,” he said, pausing for breath and then adding that it came from a “vicious, proselyted, deluded mind who sees evil in everything men in public life try to do for people.”
⁴⁴

Early in his mayoralty, Daley took up a cause he would forever be associated with: improving city services. A few of his policy initiatives were large and cutting edge. In 1956, he directed that Chicago’s water be fluoridated, making the city a leader in what was still a controversial area of public health. He also upgraded the health care provided in city clinics, and allocated city funding for alcoholism treatment, again putting Chicago in the vanguard. But what captured Daley’s imagination were the small things — improved streetlighting and, most of all, street cleaning. Daley took a personal interest in the details of municipal housekeeping, and often became directly involved. As he was driven around town in the mayoral limousine, he often took notes on problems he observed along the way — broken traffic lights, dirty streets, and potholes. When he arrived at City Hall, he would direct his staff to fix the problems he had come across. Daley had a keen eye for potholes: by one estimate, fully half the city’s complaints for pothole repair began in the mayor’s office. Sometimes he took matters into his own hands. Daley once stopped his car when he saw a man drop a newspaper onto Michigan Avenue. As the sheets began to scatter to the wind, Daley and his police bodyguard leaped out and picked up the paper, putting it in the garbage.
⁴⁵

Cleaning up the city became a crusade for Daley. In May 1955, he returned from his first U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in New York and announced a citywide cleanup campaign. By the end of June, he had purchased forty new street sweepers, raising the total fleet size to more than one hundred, and Daley vowed that every street in Chicago would be cleaned at least once a month. His cleanup drive gained force over the summer, with an initiative to have businessmen sign pledge cards committing to keep the sidewalks in front of their establishments clean, and to place all their garbage in covered containers. Daley’s Streets and Sanitation commissioner issued a steady flow of statistics charting the drive’s progress. As of August 1, 3,640 shifts had been worked, up from 1,823 in the same period in 1954, and roughly 10,000 tons more street dirt had been removed than in the same period a year earlier. Later the same month, Daley spoke to eighty-three community cochairmen of the city’s cleanup campaign, gathered in the City Council chambers, and outlined plans for improving street cleaning and garbage removal, including a contest with prizes for blocks with the best cleanup records.
⁴⁶

Daley personally reaped the good publicity that came from the cleanup campaign. He rode through the Loop in a 1916 Isotta-Fraschini, heading up an antique car parade. Pulling up the rear were five city sanitation trucks handing out the first installment of 7,000 new wire garbage baskets Daley had ordered up for immediate distribution around the city. He urged all Chicagoans to “make a special effort over the Labor Day holiday to put waste paper and trash in waste baskets in parks, beaches, and city streets.” Daley also inspected a “Cleanerama” display that was touring the city, consisting of eight floats, including a fire truck with signs warning that 25 percent of Chicago’s fires began with litter or debris, and a cage showing rats feeding on garbage. Hardly a week went by without a prominent newspaper story featuring the mayor and his war on grime. One day Daley was directing that 2,000 metal signs and 10,000 decals be posted across the city with the message “Keep Chicago Clean.” Another day he was addressing 200 members of the Women’s Division of the Mayor’s Commission for a Cleaner City at the Bismarck Hotel, telling them that housewives were “naturals” to play a major role in cleaning up the city and handing out paper cleanup-drive boutonnieres that they could wear when they went out into the neighborhoods with pledge cards for the merchants to sign.
⁴⁷

A tangible symbol of Daley’s new attention to city services showed up in the lobby of City Hall on July 18. Chicago’s official information booth, technically the Office of Inquiry and Information, was unveiled with great fanfare. Reporters looked on as one Marquard Howe became the first Chicagoan to take advantage of the new service. Howe complained that his neighbor had placed cinder blocks on the parkway near his home, preventing him from parking his car and causing a backup of rainwater onto Howe’s lawn. Daley also announced plans for a “City Hall on Wheels,” a station wagon that would cruise the streets five days a week, staffed with mayoral aides who would be available to listen to constituents’ problems. The City Hall information booth was a Daley favorite, and he marked its one-year anniversary by manning the booth himself and personally answering a citizen’s question.
⁴⁸

Daley may have had a sincere interest in improved city services. His admirers have always attributed his attention to street cleaning and potholes to his love for Chicago and its inhabitants. Chicago was Daley’s “Our Lady of the Lake,” a Chicago journalist once wrote, “and he would never stop building shrines and lighting candles for her.” Daley’s attention to Chicago’s streets and sidewalks can be seen as a form of loving ministration. If there was a psychological explanation, though, it is just as likely that his furious efforts to clean and repair were a manifestation of his extraordinarily controlling personality. Chicago was his city, and a litter-strewn sidewalk was as much a challenge to his authority as an insurgent candidate for ward committeeman. Most likely of all, however, is that Daley swept and paved for political reasons. Daley had come into office with a cloud over him: his critics openly predicted that he and his allies would plunder city government for their own gain. “The attitude was that the Daley people were going to get screwdrivers and take the doors off the hinges,” recalls Daniel Rostenkowski. To fight this perception, Rostenkowski’s father, 32nd Ward alderman Joseph Rostenkowski, offered Daley a word of advice: “Put the money where they can see it.” Daley was increasing taxes, but the stream of headlines about city services gave at least the appearance that the money was being used to buy better government.
⁴⁹

Improved city services was also good politics in another way: it helped expand the patronage system that had atrophied under Kennelly. Cleaning streets, filling potholes, paving roads, and other aspects of municipal upkeep were all labor-intensive. That meant more municipal jobs to fill with loyal Democrats. The hoopla about streets and garbage pickup also provided cover for Daley as he hired patronage workers in other parts of city government. In 1957, when Daley proposed a city budget that raised spending 15 percent in one year — well above the rate of inflation and the city’s population growth — he had a ready answer for those who accused him of padding it with political hires. The new spending was “justified by the record of this administration,” he said, “in which we carried on the program of expanding and improving the city’s vital services.” In fact, much of the new money went to allies of the machine. As much as 90 percent of the city’s fast-growing streetlight construction business, for example, was being directed to a single group of politically connected contractors.
⁵⁰

Daley also used his control over city services to forge strong bonds with organized labor. He had many personal ties to labor unions: his father had been a labor official, he had briefly been a member of the drivers union, and many of his friends and neighbors in Bridgeport were union men and women. Organized labor was also an integral part of the Democratic machine, and it had played a large role in getting him elected. As mayor, Daley came through generously for the city’s labor unions. Shortly after his election, he instituted a new policy that required workers to be paid prevailing wages for all city work. The concept of prevailing wages did not sound extravagant, but as a practical matter, paying prevailing wages to city construction workers, electricians, and other laborers gave them a significant windfall. Nongovernment workers’ wages had to be large enough to compensate them for the loss of income between projects, bad-weather days for which they were not paid, and other vagaries that did not affect city workers. “One of the greatest benefits is to be assured full employment,” the building industry argued to the City Council. “City workers are practically guaranteed this. Those in private industry are sometimes on the street seeking work.” In fact, the salaries produced by Daley’s policy were so generous that they could only be viewed as a political payoff from the city’s coffers. Daley soon introduced a city budget that, because of the prevailing wage rule, raised the salaries of the city’s unionized window washers above the level of starting policemen.
⁵¹

Daley also gave organized labor a large role in running parts of the city government that affected it. He named labor representatives to most of the city and county boards: the Chicago Housing Authority and the Board of Education regularly had at least two advocates for organized labor. Daley generally included on the school board representatives of both the craft unions that formerly made up the American Federation of Labor and the industrial unions that once composed the more radical Congress of Industrial Organizations. Though the two factions had merged in 1953, Daley wanted to keep both happy. The greatest beneficiary of Daley’s appointment practices was his good friend William McFetridge, president of the Flat Janitors Union, who was one of the most important behind-the-scenes players in Chicago city government under Daley. “I’m on more committees than anyone else in Chicago,” McFetridge liked to boast. The appointments were “part of the quid pro quo” for labor’s political support, says Daley’s human rights commissioner Edward Marciniak. The labor appointees were fierce defenders of high pay scales, lenient work rules, and featherbedding. When fights developed over building scattered-site public housing, the federal government would be surprised to learn that construction costs in Chicago were, by a considerable margin, the highest in the country.
⁵²

Daley’s attention to city services helped Chicago to develop its reputation as “the city that works.” There was some basis for it. Under Daley, Chicago repeatedly won national awards for cleanliness, and there is no denying that thousands of new streetlights went up. But there was much about the city that did not work. The benefits of government were doled out unequally — to those who lived in some parts of the city, and to those with connections to the Democratic machine. Outside the Loop and a few favored wards, upkeep dropped off sharply. “Get off the subway anywhere in the central business area and you won’t find a broken city sidewalk,” says former Hyde Park alderman Leon Despres. “Get off the subway almost anywhere else, and you will. Between the central business area and the outskirts lie large, almost uninterrupted gray areas of urban dry rot.” And a great deal of money was wasted, it would later be revealed, to pay city workers who were hired for political purposes, and who often did no work. “The streets had potholes galore,” recalls former Cook County Board president Seymour Simon. “Lights went off. Crime was bad. City workers today are better trained and there is more devotion to jobs.”
⁵³

In June 1955, a delegation of black tenants from Trumbull Park showed up at City Hall to enlist Daley’s support. The tenants, who met with Daley and his housing adviser James Downs, brought along a full-page statement calling on Daley to end the violence in their neighborhood “once and for all.” Specifically, they wanted more police, more arrests, and an investigation of the South Deering Improvement Association for “conspiracy to incite riot.” The visit put Daley in the same bind he had been in during his mayoral campaign. Black voters were too important to the machine for Daley blatantly to support the white segregationists. In his public pronouncements, at least, he had to formally support the right of blacks to live anywhere they wanted in the city. At the same time, he did not actually want to see the white South Side integrated. That, too, would be bad politics. Integration threatened to push white voters out to the suburbs, diminishing an important part of the machine’s political base. Open housing would also allow blacks to move out of the traditional black wards, and away from the careful supervision of William Dawson’s precinct captains. It would cut the black submachine’s vote significantly. “Dawson didn’t want [black voters] dispersed,” CHA chairman Charlie Swibel said years later. “Many of the [black] aldermen didn’t want them dispersed.” Politics aside, Daley had his own reasons for opposing integration. The idea that blacks should be allowed to force their way into white neighborhoods that did not want them violated everything he believed in. “He grew up in Bridgeport,” says Edward Marciniak. Daley’s attitude was “if you grew up in a place, why do you want to come into mine?” Marciniak says. “It wasn’t that you can’t, or shouldn’t, but why? Why would you want to do that?” Then, of course, there was the fact that Daley himself still lived in Bridgeport. “The mayor certainly wanted to keep the black community contained, particularly because his own neighborhood was so close to the ones where blacks were expanding,” says Anthony Downs, James Downs’s son, and a Daley housing adviser in his own right.
⁵⁴