American Pharaoh (38 page)

The first public sign that Daley was out to undermine Dawson came when 24th Ward alderman Sidney Deutsch died. The once-Jewish
24th Ward had by 1958 become one of the city’s leading “plantation wards,” so called because they were majority black, but
ruled over by white leaders. In the past, Dawson would have been allowed to name the new alderman, extending the reach of
the black submachine into yet another ward. But breaking with tradition, Daley decided to install his own man. In the same
year, Daley intervened in a dispute in another of Dawson’s wards in a way that demonstrated that the old submachine boss had
lost his ability to keep the machine out of his turf. As it happened, the clash came over an issue Daley and Dawson agreed
on: civil rights. Alderman Claude Holman, of the black 4th Ward, had agreed to cosponsor an open-occupancy bill with independent
5th Ward alderman Leon Despres. Dawson, who naturally opposed the bill, told Holman to back down, and when he refused, Dawson
asked the machine to strip Holman of his patronage. It was the traditional machine response to this kind of act of insubordination,
but Daley refused to do it. Dawson’s inability to bring down retribution on Holman sent a clear message to other members of
the black submachine that they no longer needed to fear their onetime leader.
⁵³

It did not take long for Dawson’s ward committeemen to switch their allegiance to City Hall. “They began to splinter off,”
says Dawson’s nephew, Ira Dawson. “Everyone vied for power from [Daley] in order to keep themselves in power.” The aldermen
who once reported to Dawson now saw themselves as working directly for Daley. Holman, who had been edging toward the civil
rights cause, swung violently back and became Daley’s chief spokesman against open-housing and fair-employment bills in the
City Council. Holman’s blustery opposition to civil rights was far less subtle than Dawson’s behind-the-scenes scheming. “Anything
I suggested, Holman would find a way of twisting it and showing that it really wasn’t for freedom, or if it was a good measure,
he’d get up and say that my motives were bad,” says Despres. “Holman had no inhibitions. He would flatter Mayor Daley and
tell the mayor publicly in the city council that he was the greatest mayor, in the glare of the cameras and radio microphones.
I remember once he said, ‘You are the greatest mayor in history, greatest mayor in the world and in outer space, too.’”
⁵⁴

The once-mighty black submachine was no more. But Daley did not destroy Dawson entirely. He allowed his old ally to keep his
seat in Congress, and to stay on as boss of the 2nd Ward. Daley also let Dawson continue to hold himself out as the leading
black in the Chicago machine, an arrangement that suited Dawson’s ego and Daley’s political needs. “Whenever a Negro delegation
approaches Mayor Daley with a community problem,” the
Chicago Defender
complained, “they are usually told: ‘See Bill Dawson, he’ll take care of it.’” Dawson made some minor attempts to regain
his lost standing. In 1959, he tried to form a black-Polish alliance to challenge Daley. But the truth was, even if the Poles
wanted to ally themselves with Chicago’s blacks — and they did not — Dawson could no longer deliver the black community. His
days as a boss were over. “What Mayor Daley had created — the most powerful black politician in the country,” historian William
Grimshaw has observed,

“Mayor Daley destroyed, and for the same reason: to advance his own political interest.” With the civil rights movement gaining
force both at home and nationally, Daley’s newfound control over Chicago’s black political leadership — from the ward organizations
to the local NAACP — would have important implications in the racial struggles to come.
⁵⁵

CHAPTER

6

Make No Little Plans

I
n August of 1958, Daley unveiled a sweeping plan for redeveloping downtown Chicago. Daley’s proposal was in the bold tradition of the Plan of Chicago, the blueprint for redesigning Chicago that Daniel Burnham prepared for the Merchants’ Club in 1909. “Make no little plans,” Burnham, a prominent architect and principal designer of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, advised. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Burnham’s plan had been anything but little. He called for more extensive use of Lake Michigan, including expanded lakefront recreational areas, and the construction of a series of offshore islands. Anticipating the great highways that would one day come, Burnham called for the city to build a major east-west artery stretching out from the lake, and he urged construction of a civic center. The plan advocated a system of broad boulevards, modeled on Paris, Budapest, and Geneva, to ease traffic through the city. But its true genius lay in its vision of the city as a single organism that combined industry and commerce with residential neighborhoods and recreational outlets. Burnham’s Plan of Chicago of 1909 was greeted with enormous enthusiasm. A popularized version of the plan became a bestseller, and in textbook form it became required reading for eighth-graders across the city. Like most Chicagoans of his era, Daley read the book as a student. This compendium of bold ideas for refashioning Chicago was, he once said, his favorite book.
¹

Daley invoked Burnham’s plan, and quoted his injunction to “make no little plans,” when he presented his own development plan for the central area of Chicago. At the unveiling, Daley stood before an enormous scale model showing how downtown would look after twenty-two years and $1.5 billion in renovations. The models spread out in his office were, Daley declared, “the future of Chicago.” In the limited part of the city that it addressed, Daley’s plan was every bit as sweeping as Burnham’s. It called for erecting several government building complexes downtown, including a new civil court building on Washington Street, a new government mall stretching from City Hall to State Street, and a new federal court building on the site of an existing federal building on the Dearborn-Clark-Adams-Jackson block. It also proposed consolidating railroad stations and using the land under railroad tracks south of the Loop as the site of a new Chicago campus for the University of Illinois. And it sketched out a variety of other ambitious undertakings, including a consolidated transportation center combining access to railroads, buses, and airport terminals and limousines, and construction of new housing for 50,000 families in the downtown area. Some of its suggestions, including expanded access to Lake Michigan beaches and construction of two new islands in the shallow water south of 23rd Street, were drawn straight from Burnham.
²

The new plan was, as a formal matter, the city’s. It had been drawn up under the direction of the commissioner of city planning, Ira Bach. The true guiding force, however, was the business community and the Central Area Committee. The CAC was listed prominently as a consultant on the plan, along with some of its individual leaders, like Clair Roddewig, and its influence was apparent on every page. The first topic addressed by the plan was “traffic flow,” a cause close to the hearts of downtown businessmen. Leading city planners of the day, such as Jane Jacobs, were writing eloquently about the importance of pedestrian traffic and street life to the vibrancy of large cities. Daley’s plan, however, was focused on automobiles. Downtown businesses were worried that their best customers were increasingly driving to new stores in the suburbs, leaving them with a poorer clientele who arrived downtown by mass transit or on foot. “The people [the downtown businesses] needed were not the low-income whites and Negroes who lived closest to the Loop,” one contemporary study noted, “but people with purchasing power to support the great stores, banks, and entertainment places that were the heart of Chicago.” The Daley plan contained elaborate super-highways designed to whisk shoppers in from the neighborhoods and the suburbs, and parking lots and new “pedestrian conveyance systems” that would ease their path to downtown stores. The plan called for some residential building, but it too was geared toward the needs of business. Downtown business leaders had long been clamoring for construction of luxury high-rise apartments in and around the Loop. Their hope was that upscale housing would raise the economic status of the area and improve downtown retailing, since the “[p]eople who could afford to live in them would be a good customer base for downtown stores.” The plan followed the business community’s lead, placing a “special emphasis” on “the needs of the middle income groups who wish to live in areas close to the heart of the City.”
³

Nowhere did the visions of the CAC and the drafters of the plan align more closely than on the matter of defending the borders of the business district. The Chicago central area, broadly defined, is surrounded by water on three sides. The curving Chicago River cuts it off from adjoining neighborhoods to the north and west, and Lake Michigan lies to the east. But there were no natural barriers between the Loop and the expanding ghettos and public housing projects of the South Side. Downtown businessmen at the time were “really concerned about what would happen south of the downtown area,” observes a modern-day Central Area Committee president. Of greatest interest to them was a large stretch of land just south of the Loop that contained a combination of railroad tracks and vacant and underutilized railroad property. In time, the tracks would be consolidated and a decision would have to be made about the disposition of the land. Downtown businessmen were concerned that it would be used for public housing, or that it would naturally be filled by the fast-expanding South Side Black Belt. They were relying on Daley to find a use for the land that prevented the ghetto from coming right up their front door.
⁴

Daley’s plan addressed these concerns about the Loop’s southern flank directly. In its projections for the future, the plan anticipated that the Loop would expand in three directions — east, west, and north, all of which led toward white neighborhoods. The one direction it did not see the Loop expanding was south, toward the Black Belt, even though that was precisely the area where the underused railroad properties lay. Instead, the plan proposed using the land to the south of the Loop to build a new Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. The plan stated candidly that this campus would “act as an anchor to contain further southward expansion.” The remaining open land between the Black Belt and the Loop was designated in the plan as a “residential re-use area,” meaning that new — primarily middle-class — housing would be built, and it too would act as a buffer. To those of a conspiratorial mind-set, the plan seemed expressly designed to keep the central area white, and to physically cut it off from black Chicago. Certainly those rumors spread through the black community, which like black communities across the country harbored suspicions of various white “master plans” for using urban renewal and other development policies to shift greater control to whites. But in the case of Daley’s 1958 plan, at least some of those suspicions had a basis in fact. The plan, of course, never addressed these racial issues head-on. In fact, one of Daley’s housing consultants recalls that when development documents were drafted in City Hall, “the mayor didn’t want any mention of race.” Nevertheless, the 1958 plan must be seen now as an important step in a long-evolving process of making Chicago America’s most racially segregated large city.
⁵

The business community, not surprisingly, was delighted with Daley’s 1958 development plan. The
Chicago Sun-Times,
owned by the downtown department store company Marshall Field, greeted it with breathless headlines, including “Let’s Dream a Dream of Chicago: What City Would Be Like If All Plans Work Out.” What the
Sun-Times
did not dwell on was that, unlike the plan of 1909, Daley’s was almost single-mindedly focused on the downtown business district. Where Burnham had looked at Chicago as an organic whole, Daley’s planners proceeded as if downtown were the only part of the city whose future mattered. Despite the plan’s claim of giving “to all the people the best there is of urban living,” the recreation, beautification, new housing, and other improvements it called for were exclusively located in and around the central business district. The only improvement it offered to most of the city’s residential neighborhoods was a highway that would move cars more rapidly through them on the way to shopping in the Loop.
⁶

It was a particularly unfortunate time for Daley to forget his oft-repeated campaign promise to put Chicago’s neighborhoods first. By the late 1950s, many neighborhoods on the South and West sides were in the midst of a severe downward spiral. Continued black migration from the South was rapidly expanding the borders of the Black Belt — during the 1950s, three and a half blocks turned from white to black every week. The Black Belt, once confined to a north-south strip on the South Side, was moving out along two axes — further south into neighborhoods like Kenwood and Woodlawn that lay just below the existing ghetto, and west into neighborhoods like Lawndale and Garfield Park.
⁷
Racial change in these areas came in the worst possible way. The city’s entrenched opposition to fair housing, which prevailed everywhere from the Real Estate Board to City Hall, made it all but impossible for integrated neighborhoods to emerge. The real estate industry was actively working against integration, subsidizing neighborhood groups that were organizing against it, and lobbying against fair housing laws. At the same time, individual real estate agents used a variety of tactics to keep blacks from moving into white neighborhoods. One study from the time found that 56 percent of Realtors flatly refused to rent or sell blacks homes in white neighborhoods, and another 24 percent employed such dodges as saying a house was not available when it was. As a result, white homeowners who lived near the ghetto were convinced that if a single black family moved onto their block, the whole neighborhood would soon be black.
⁸