American Pharaoh (36 page)

In June, a whistleblower came forward to tell a different story. Dr. Seymour Scher, the Civil Service Commission’s personnel
examiner, wrote an open letter to Daley declaring that the commission under its new leadership had become a “farce.” Scher,
who had accepted an out-of-state teaching position and had nothing to lose, disclosed that there had been a sharp decline
in the number of civil-service exams given since Daley became mayor. Civil-service procedures called for the commission to
post lists of employees who had passed their exams, and these lists had also fallen dramatically — from 216 in 1954, Kennelly’s
last year in office, to 90 in 1956. When the lists were posted now, they often went up late, after many eligible employees
had already given up and taken other jobs. Scher also revealed that the city had been rapidly creating new job titles — 300
in 1957 alone, for a total of 1,700, when he estimated that 400 titles would have been sufficient. New job titles were an
effective way around civil service: when a new title was created, there were by definition no applicants available who had
passed a civil-service exam for it. The machine was therefore free to fill these slots with anyone it wanted. “It seems the
organization asked, ‘How many jobs are we going to give our boys this year?’” Scher said. Patronage positions had increased
almost 75 percent, he estimated, during Daley’s first two years in office. Scher’s charges received wide press attention.
Republicans in the City Council tried to launch committee investigations, but both times the Democrats defeated their motions.
Civic groups called on Daley to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to consider the charges. But Daley curtly dismissed Scher’s diagnosis.
“Dr. Scher’s statement indicates lack of ability to know what is going on,” Daley said. “I should appreciate his recommendations
and his assistance in making Chicago’s civil service the best in the country.” Fred Hoehler, Daley’s civil service adviser,
was more blunt. Scher, he said, was a “cynic” who “does not believe there is any honesty in government.” Neither Daley nor
Hoehler provided any evidence to refute Scher’s charges.
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Other controversies followed in quick succession. Daley’s 1957 budget included $14 million in pay raises, and members of the
City Council’s “economy bloc”— the twelve Republicans and one independent critical of Daley’s spending practices — detected
a pattern to who got them. Among the largest percentage raises were a 15 percent salary hike for Joseph McDonough, an administrative
assistant in the city purchasing department who was the son of Daley’s old 11th Ward patron. Another generous increase went
to an electric light and power inspector who was the brother of 27th Ward alderman Sain, and a 5th Ward precinct captain.
Alderman Freeman of the 48th Ward complained that Daley had pushed the pay increases through after the finance committee had
completed its hearings, and that they were “90 percent political.” After the salary scandal came a dust-up with the new state’s
attorney. Benjamin Adamowski found his position a perfect perch from which to attack Daley — and he lost no time in lobbing
potshots in the direction of his old foe. Adamowski thrust himself into a minor dispute over taxicab licenses — Daley and
two aldermen disagreed on the number of war veteran licenses that should be issued — and threatened to convene a grand jury
to investigate. The state’s attorney’s office did launch an investigation of whether the $279,244 the city paid to clean the
exterior of the City Hall–County Building was excessive. Daley denied it was, pointing out that it was cleaned at night, and
made from a kind of stone that was difficult to clean.
Life
magazine then weighed in with an article saying that Chicago “probably has the worst police department of any sizable city.”
Daley sent off an angry letter to the editor, calling the article an “unwarranted slur,” and saying that although the reporter
had “easy access to all of the facts” he had chosen to resort to “wild generalizations.”
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Throughout the fall, Daley continued to promote his wide-ranging agenda for the city. He invited Queen Elizabeth II to visit
Chicago in July 1959 for the formal opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which would make Chicago one of the world’s leading
seaports. Daley also returned to Washington to tell a Senate committee that Chicago would need an additional $100 million
for slum clearance over the next ten years. And he urged the Eisenhower administration to release another $200 million in
slum-clearance money appropriated by Congress but not yet allocated. When he returned to Chicago, Daley announced that he
would meet with his corporation counsel, John Melaniphy, to discuss a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Chicago’s
ban on the showing of the French movie
The Game of Love
. Daley had no patience with the Court’s emerging free-expression jurisprudence, which seemed to him to be about protecting
trash. “I thought the trend throughout the country was to suppress obscene literature and indecent pictures,” Daley declared.
“Everyone agrees something must be done to protect our children from obscenity and filth.”
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In the summer of 1957, Chicago was swept by a new round of racial violence. The Black Belt was spreading west and south, and
as blacks moved into white neighborhoods, interracial conflict followed. Many of the clashes started when newly arrived blacks
insisted on using local parks and beaches. In one South Side neighborhood in late July, more than six thousand whites attacked
one hundred blacks picnicking in a park that had been exclusively used by whites. The battle raged on for two days, and five
hundred police were needed to restore order. The same month, hostilities reignited in Trumbull Park, which had been relatively
peaceful for two years. The black residents who remained in the projects were becoming more assertive about their right to
use streets and stores in the neighborhood, and the
South Deering Bulletin
was continuing to fan the flames of white resistance. A mob of almost one hundred descended on the apartment of one of the
most outspoken black families living in Trumbull Park, breaking furniture, turning on the gas jets in the kitchen, and setting
fires. Within four months, nine of the thirty black families living in Trumbull Park moved out.
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As the racial violence heated up, Daley looked the other way. In August, an interracial group of sixty-seven prominent South
Side residents charged him with failing to act during “this hour of crisis in our city.” Daley’s “official laxity,” the group
argued, “had permitted hoodlum elements to outstrip our city’s law enforcement procedures.” At a national meeting of the Urban
League in September, Edwin Berry, executive director of the Chicago Urban League, declared that Chicago was the most segregated
major city in America and that in the city “a Negro dare not step outside the environs of his race.” Daley responded to the
charges only obliquely, saying that Chicago was not “as bad as some people say it is.”
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In fact, Daley had a plan for addressing Chicago’s growing racial violence: clamping down on civil rights activism in the
black community. The leading instigator of civil rights protests in the city was the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. The chapter
had not always been so outspoken — for years, it was led by a succession of “legal moderates,” who believed all racial progress
would come in the courts. But beginning in late 1953, the chapter came under the leadership of Willoughby Abner, who started
out as chairman of the executive committee and was then elected chapter president. Abner developed an aggressive agenda for
civil rights in Chicago, calling for increased employment opportunities for blacks, an end to overcrowding and double shifts
in black schools, and improved police protection in racially tense neighborhoods on the South Side. Abner, an official with
the United Auto Workers, believed in demonstrations rather than litigation. He had been the driving force behind the 1955
march outside City Hall to protest Daley’s failure to act decisively on Trumbull Park. Abner also rallied Chicago blacks behind
the civil rights struggle then unfolding in the South. He championed, in particular, the case of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old
Chicagoan lynched in Mississippi in 1955. In June 1957, more than seven thousand NAACP members and sympathizers turned out
at the Coliseum to hear the Reverend Ralph Abernathy describe his work with Martin Luther King Jr., organizing the Montgomery
bus boycott in Alabama. Abner’s newly energized NAACP was attracting unprecedented levels of support in the black community.
A single Freedom Day dinner, featuring Jackie Robinson as a guest speaker, brought in $25,000, allowing the organization to
increase its staff. After his first year as chapter president, Abner was reelected with near-unanimous support.
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Abner was outspoken in his opposition to Daley’s surrogates in the black community — Dawson and the black submachine. Abner
argued that the submachine represented nothing more than black subservience to an oppressive white power structure. In a scathing
“Open Letter to Congressman William Dawson,” sent out on NAACP letterhead on August 29, 1956, Abner painted a devastating
portrait of Dawson as a traitor to his race. Chicago’s only black congressman had remained “thunderously silent,” the letter
charged, when Emmett Till — his own constituent — was lynched. Nor did Dawson take action when civil rights worker Gus Courts
was shot, and Lamar Smith and the Reverend George W. Lee were killed, fighting in Mississippi for black voting rights. The
letter recounted that when the NAACP asked if he had introduced any civil rights legislation in the latest congressional session,
Dawson replied that he had not and would not. And Dawson was the only Chicago-area congressman, Abner wrote, who voted against
the Powell Amendment, which would have withheld federal funds from states and school districts that openly defied
Brown v. Board of Education.
When Dawson got a position on the platform committee of the 1956 Democratic National Convention, he had had yet another chance
to come through for his fellow blacks. “Perhaps now at last we would see the fruits of ‘working behind the scenes’— a strong,
forthright honest plank on civil rights,” Abner wrote. “Perhaps now, the inexpli[c]able would become clear. But, alas, our
hopes were drowned in a sea of meaningless platitudes, outright evasions and surrender to the Confederacy.” Dawson played
a critical behind-the-scenes role at the convention, working against a minority report backed by the NAACP, the Americans
for Democratic Action, and UAW President Walter Reuther calling for a tougher civil rights plank. The letter concluded by
urging Dawson to reconsider his loyalty to “a political philosophy that puts party above all else.”
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Dawson was publicly dismissive of Abner and his newly radicalized NAACP chapter. “What are they going to do, come into my
district and beat me?” Dawson asked. But privately, he was plotting political retribution. The Chicago chapter was scheduled
to hold its election of officers on December 17, 1957. Precisely thirty days before the election, the submachine took out
memberships for between four hundred and six hundred of its precinct captains and patronage workers. It was the last day that
an applicant could join and be eligible to vote, which meant that when Abner and his supporters learned that the chapter’s
membership rolls had been flooded, it was too late to respond in kind. On the appointed night, the sub-machine’s troops turned
out in force. A parade of Dawson and Daley loyalists rose to denounce Abner. One of the denouncers was Building Services Union
president James H. Kemp, who served with Daley ally William Lee on the executive committee of the Chicago Federation of Labor.
In the end, the chapter’s members voted to replace Abner with Theodore Jones, an executive with the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance
Company who could be counted on to take a more moderate course. Dawson never denied that he played a role in ousting Abner
and his fellow civil rights activists. “I’m not interested in controlling the NAACP or its policy making body,” Dawson later
told historian Dempsey Travis. “However, I do want to see the ‘right man’ as president.”
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The 1957 NAACP elections would forever be remembered as the machine’s “political takeover” of the branch. “The invaders of
the NAACP were elected to make certain that no one in the newly elected NAACP hierarchy or their successors would ever rock
Daley’s political boat,” Congressman Charles Hayes said later. The change in philosophy could be felt immediately. In a victory
statement in the
Chicago Defender,
Jones vowed to “take an inventory of the programs and projects in which the branch was committed.” Among the first to go
were the chapter’s challenges to Daley over Trumbull Park and public housing integration. Daley quickly threw his support
behind the politically neutered NAACP chapter. He declared a citywide “NAACP Tag Day” in May 1958, and urged Chicagoans to
buy NAACP tags that volunteers were selling on street corners. Jones tried to develop a nonmachine base within the NAACP chapter,
but his efforts met with only modest success. When the time came for him to run for reelection, he had to bring out the machine
foot soldiers once again. “He called us about a week before the election,” one black politician recalled later. “He must have
woke up and saw that the people he had counted on weren’t going to deliver as they had promised. His supporters were supposed
to deliver 150 or 200 votes each. But it was closer to 50 or 75 each. ...So we sent in some people from our wards. If it hadn’t
been for the organization, I think he would have lost the ball in the weeds.”
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