American Pharaoh (35 page)

The 1956 general election was a disaster for Illinois Democrats. Eisenhower defeated native son Adlai Stevenson handily, in
Illinois and nationwide. Stratton was reelected as governor, and Republican junior senator Everett Dirksen was returned to
office. If Daley had in fact struck a deal to go easy on Stratton, it was not obvious from the results on election night.
Stratton won by only about 50,000 votes, running well behind both Eisenhower and Dirksen. Worst of all, Adamowski won his
race for state’s attorney. Daley was publicly upbeat, but some Democrats blamed him for the losses. They contended that his
new policy of shifting patronage to City Hall had sapped the strength of the ward organizations, and they argued that Daley’s
heavy-handed leadership of the party had hurt with voters. Steven Mitchell, a lawyer who had been passed over by the machine
for the gubernatorial nomination, charged after the election that Daley’s “one-man rule” was to blame for the rout. “A small
circle or group dominates the party, including the selection of candidates and the development of issues,” Mitchell charged.
“This is not healthy in a democratic system.” Mitchell called on Daley to resign as chairman of the Cook County Democratic
Organization, saying it was a “full time job” when done right.
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Daley had no intention of heeding calls that he step down as boss. “I offered my resignation when I was elected mayor last
year and it was not accepted,” he said. “Since then I have led my party to what I think is a good program.” But Daley also
knew that party leaders who lost elections did not stay in power long. He had seen Mayor Kelly relieved of his leadership
of the machine after the disastrous 1946 election, and he had seen Arvey pushed out of power after the Democratic defeats
of 1950. To avoid sharing their fate, Daley set to work building up the machine’s strength. One of his first priorities was
increasing Democratic influence in the Chicago suburbs. In the November election, Chicago’s share of the Cook County vote
had fallen significantly, and Eisenhower had run especially strongly in the suburbs. In January 1957, Daley appointed eight
suburban Democrats to a new committee to consider ways for the party to compete for suburban voters. Daley also went to work
purging his most entrenched machine foe. In a post-election gesture of reconciliation, city assessor Frank Keenan invited
pro-Daley Democrats in the 49th Ward to his annual Christmas dinner. But Daley forbade his precinct captains from attending.
Then, in one of his last official acts, outgoing state’s attorney John Gutknecht indicted Keenan for improperly exempting
several properties from taxation. Since it was the kind of charge that could have been brought against almost any Chicago
politician at the time, it seemed clear that the indictment was political, and it was widely rumored that Daley was behind
it. Daley indignantly denounced these reports as “a falsehood, a fabrication, and a lie,” but he did admit that he would be
happy if Keenan left the Democratic Party. In the end, the tax-evasion charges stuck, Keenan was forced to step down as county
assessor, and he went to prison. Daley got the Cook County Board to name John F. McGuane, an old friend and fellow 11th Ward
Irishman, to fill the position. Robert Merriam said later that even if the charges against Keenan had some merit, his downfall
was largely due to his falling out with Daley. “There was no longer any desire to protect him on the part of the organization,”
Merriam said. “They play a very hard game.”
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By the start of 1957, Daley was well at work on his plans for promoting urban renewal and downtown development. Effective
January 1, Ira Bach became the city’s new commissioner of housing. The next day, Daley announced that he had retained a prominent
New York marine engineering firm to study Chicago’s port facilities and recommend improvements. At a 120th birthday luncheon
for the city in early March, Daley said he expected Chicago would see more than $1 billion in public and private investment
over the next five years, and that the influx of funds would make Chicago a “new city.” Later the same month, fate intervened
to create one more redevelopment project for the city. On March 21, a fire in City Hall in the early evening destroyed the
City Council’s ornate chambers. Daley borrowed a pair of boots from a telephone company employee at the scene and waded through
the water-filled hallways himself to survey the damage. He announced that no important documents had been destroyed, and that
the building would reopen for business the following morning. Daley was hailed as a hero for leading four scrub-women to safety,
but he modestly insisted that the real heroes were four women telephone operators who continued to work on the tenth floor
throughout the blaze.
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Daley was always on the lookout for more money to develop the city. He quickly emerged as a leading advocate for the nation’s
cities, primarily because he was constantly asking Congress and the president to increase appropriations for programs that
benefited Chicago. In April 1957, Daley traveled to Washington to testify before a Senate committee in favor of one such program,
a federal slum clearance and community redevelopment initiative that faced funding cut-million bond initiative on the June
ballot. The bond measure was the occasion for Daley’s first public screaming tirade of his mayoralty. When Republican City
Council members criticized the proposal as wasteful, a red-faced Daley banged the rostrum repeatedly and exploded at his critics.
In the weeks leading up to the election, critics continued to charge that the bonds were not needed and would lead to large
tax increases, but they passed.
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The most important changes on the development front were occurring at the Chicago Housing Authority. Daley was in the process
of pushing out the current leadership and installing his own team. In July 1957, the CHA announced that William Kean was resigning
as executive director for “personal reasons.” But the truth was, Kean’s departure came after bitter feuding with the CHA board,
particularly with an outspoken young board member named Charles Swibel. Swibel got his start sweeping floors for Isaac Marks,
one of Chicago’s biggest slumlords, and in 1954, Daley appointed the twenty-nine-year-old Swibel to the CHA board. Swibel’s
background was an odd one for someone who would be responsible for guiding Chicago’s public housing policies. As president
of Marks & Co., he had operated two hotels on skid row, both of which refused to rent rooms to blacks, in violation of Illinois
state law, into the 1960s. Swibel owed his seat on the board to Flat Janitors Union president William McFetridge, who felt
he could count on Swibel to promote labor’s interests. Swibel was well known as an operator — one critic described him as
“a do-fer. As in ‘What can I do fer you?’” The newspapers just called him “Flophouse Charlie.” Kean’s run-ins with Swibel
and a few other members of the CHA board stemmed in large part from the fact that, like Elizabeth Wood before him, he backs.
Daley also tried to raise more money locally, putting a $113 wanted to run a “clean” agency — one that refused to take on
patronage workers, and that held its employees to high standards of performance. The final showdown between Kean and the board
came over whether Kean would be allowed to hire and fire CHA employees without the board’s approval. In public, Daley assumed
the role of peacemaker, even taking credit at one point for talking the embattled Kean out of resigning. But Daley never used
his influence with his appointees to the CHA board to stop them from pushing Kean out.
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The fact was, the CHA was a bastion of patronage and featherbedding — and neither Kean nor Elizabeth Wood had been able to
stop it. The following March, the Public Housing Administration issued a scathing report detailing waste and corruption in
the CHA. PHA investigators found that overstaffing, make-work assignments for unionized workers, and inefficient administration
at the CHA wasted $1 million a year. The agency’s overstaffed and “sluggish” force of glaziers, the report found, installed
only 6.5 panes of glass per day per glazier, compared to 18 panes a day by glaziers in Detroit.
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When new refrigerators were installed in public housing, CHA work rules required an electrician to be present “because of
the need for plugging in the cord and starting the motor.” Wood had wanted to reform the agency’s operations, but she quickly
realized the unions and their allies in the machine would not allow it. “That was something Elizabeth just couldn’t touch,”
says former Wood aide James Fuerst. “She just said, ‘Look, it’s bigger than us.’” When the PHA’s report came out, Daley expressed
concern. “These are serious charges and I want to know what the facts are,” Daley declared at his morning press conference.
“I plan to meet with everyone to see if we can’t work out solutions for correcting these alleged abuses.” Of course, if Daley
really wanted to learn more, he would have had little trouble: it was his own appointees to the CHA board that were responsible
for much of the corruption.
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Kean’s departure allowed Daley to select his own CHA executive director. He appointed city welfare commissioner Alvin Rose,
who promised from the start to be more accommodating to political pressure than Kean had been. To some observers, it appeared
that Swibel was now in charge of the CHA — and that the weak-willed Rose was only there to do the slumlord’s bidding. Rose
was a “tired, frightened bureaucrat who was terrorized by Swibel,” says a
Chicago Daily News
reporter. “He would take you aside and say, ‘That man [Swibel] is a devil.’” One of the first areas in which the CHA changed
direction was race. Kean had never been an integrationist. He had been brought in to end the Elizabeth Wood era at the CHA,
and he had done so. But he was also not an arch-segregationist and under him the CHA continued to investigate potential public
housing sites throughout the city, and to recommend some sites “even though they felt the City Council would not approve them.”
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With Daley’s team in charge, a new segregationist era dawned at the CHA. At a January 17, 1958, meeting at the City Club of
Chicago, a man from a white neighborhood on the North Side asked why his neighborhood was not getting any housing projects.
Rose explained that if a housing project were built in his area, there would be no way of guaranteeing that blacks would not
move into it. A former director of the CHA who was in the audience recalled Rose’s response as “startling.” It “was like saying
to the gentleman from Uptown, ‘Do you really want a project out here, because if we put a project out here some Negroes are
going to move into Up-town?’” The difference between the Kean era and the Rose era was subtle but unmistakable: under Kean,
political pressure was allowed to block the agency’s attempts at integration; under Rose, there would no longer be any attempts
to integrate. The new CHA regime made it even easier for white aldermen to block housing projects that were being considered
for their wards. Rose personally contacted every alderman in the city to ask about locating 3,000 units of housing that had
come available. If any alderman objected to a proposed project in his ward, Rose said, “it ha[d] no chance of getting through.”
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During the summer of 1957, Daley faced the most serious patronage scandal of his mayoralty. It was an open secret that since
he took over City Hall Daley had been aggressively increasing the number of patronage workers, and pushing out employees who
lacked the correct political sponsorship. Robert J. Nolan, who had served the city as an assistant corporation counsel for
sixteen years, was fired from his job handling condemnation work for the city. Nolan’s offense was to have come to the city’s
law department from the 19th Ward organization, which had backed Kennelly in the mayoral primary. Nolan went without a fight.
“I was going to leave, but this is hurrying it up a bit,” he said on his way out. The Civil Service Commission’s annual report
revealed that the city now employed 6,175 temporary workers, the category most often filled by patronage hires — an increase
of 47 percent in the past year. Daley attributed the increase to a “step-up” in city services.
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