American Pharaoh (39 page)

It was a climate that caused many stable working-class neighborhoods to transform into slums. An unscrupulous variety of real estate agent known as the “panic peddler” arose to speed the process along. They practiced “block busting,” going door-to-door in white neighborhoods on the fringes of the ghetto, warning that an “invasion” of blacks was imminent, and offering the opportunity to get out on “generous” terms while their homes still had some value. Panic peddlers posted prominent “sold” signs to scare neighbors into thinking that the block was changing, and spread false rumors about blacks buying nearby homes or crime rates rising. Many employed spies in vulnerable neighborhoods, who helped them locate whites who were getting nervous and might be persuaded to sell. The panic peddlers then turned around and sold the houses at inflated prices to middle-class blacks who had few alternatives, or divided them into overcrowded apartments and rented them out at exorbitant rates. The institutions that could have anchored integrated neighborhoods, including churches, were often the first to stir up racial fears. “The Niggers have taken over Corpus Christi Church, Holy Angels and St. Ann’s and they are now trying to take over this church; but if it’s left to me, they will not,” Pastor F. J. Quinn reportedly preached at Saint Ambrose Church in racially changing Hyde Park.
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Instead of healthy integrated neighborhoods, the South and West sides ended up with a single black ghetto that engulfed communities in its path. “Much like a monstrous giant, this expansion continually reaches out for the blocks that are located on the periphery of the already existing Negro ghettos,” the Chicago Urban League observed. This had not been how neighborhood transformations had occurred in the past, when it was whites who were moving in. Neighborhoods like Bridgeport managed to be a patchwork quilt of different white ethnic groups. But when blacks arrived, old white ethnic neighborhoods were swept away almost overnight. On the West Side, North Lawndale and East Garfield Park changed quickly from tidy, white working-class enclaves to black ghettos. Predominantly Jewish North Lawndale, for example, went from 13 percent black in 1950 to 90 percent black in 1960. The loss of old neighborhoods was often painful for the white groups who were displaced. Residents lost friends and neighbors they had known for decades, and left behind beloved churches, synagogues, and schools.
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The harm done to newly arrived blacks was equally severe. Blacks who made their way out of the ghetto had no chance to live in a stable, middle-class neighborhood. The white areas they moved into almost immediately became slums themselves. Homes that a single white family had lived in were often sliced up into two or three cramped apartments or “kitchenettes” for black tenants. The overcrowding was frequently extreme. A building at 3323 Calumet Avenue, which started out housing eight families, was reconfigured to house fifty-four. Landlords often reduced or eliminated maintenance services to the property after blacks moved in, not because the rent collected was less, but because it was now slum property. One study of the Chicago housing market found that although the median rent paid by blacks and whites was identical, blacks lived in units that were on average smaller and more dilapidated. North Lawndale is a classic case of neighborhood decline. As whites moved out, businesses left with them. In the late 1960s, when the neighborhood was overwhelmingly black, International Harvester closed a plant that employed 14,000 people. Later, the world headquarters of Sears, Roebuck left for the Loop, pulling out 10,000 jobs. From 1960 to 1970, North Lawndale lost about 75 percent of its businesses. By the mid-1980s, the neighborhood had become a slum. It had just one supermarket and one bank for its 66,000 residents, but it had forty-eight lottery agents and ninety-nine liquor stores and bars.
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Preventing neighborhoods like this from being destroyed would not have been easy, but there were a few neighborhood activists at the time who were meeting with some success. On the South Side, the Organization for the Southwest Community worked to stabilize endangered neighborhoods that stood about a mile “behind the line” of the advancing black population. OSC staff tore down illegal “sold” signs put up by panic peddlers, and held public burnings to protest real-estate scare tactics. The group confronted city inspectors, challenging their failure to enforce building codes and their inaction in the face of illegal conversions of single-family homes. The OSC’s community organizers also worked directly with white residents on the Southwest Side, persuading them that they did not need to flee their neighborhood just because blacks were beginning to move in. One of the OSC’s most innovative programs was a cooperative arrangement with local banks to provide mortgages with 10 percent down payments, rather than the customary 20 percent to 30 percent. The idea was to stabilize neighborhoods by keeping white families, particularly families affiliated with local Catholic churches, from moving to the suburbs. In the first nine months, the program arranged for eighty-three mortgages. The OSC’s approach was far from perfect. To some, the emphasis on stabilizing neighborhoods by obtaining loans for white homeowners seemed anti-integrationist. And by the late 1960s, much of the area that the OSC worked was black, rather than racially integrated. The attempts to stabilize middle-class neighborhoods on the Southwest Side were, in the end, simply “too little and too late.”
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But the OSC and other groups like it showed what Daley and city government could have tried if they had a more sophisticated approach to the racial change confronting Chicago. With his strong ties to the city banking establishment, Daley could have built a home-ownership program far larger than the one cobbled together by the OSC. The city had far greater resources at its disposal to mediate between white residents and new black arrivals. And Daley could have aggressively worked to enforce housing codes and anti-blockbusting laws. But the truth was, Daley had no interest in working for integrated neighborhoods. And from a political standpoint, segregated white ethnic and black wards were still the mainstay of the machine’s support. Daley refused to face the issue of racial transition head-on. A housing consultant to Daley prepared a report early on that predicted that Chicago would become majority black by 1975, and that many white neighborhoods near the existing Black Belt, including Bridgeport, would become black. Daley reacted by burying the report. Nicholas von Hoffman, then a young reporter for the
Chicago Daily News,
gained access to it and printed its conclusions. Daley “had a conniption,” the consultant recalled. “This was the first time a city report mentioned race in the history of the city since Daley.” Donald O’Toole, a South Side banker, once tried to talk to Daley about the OSC and the progress it was making on racial issues. “I suppose our faces were this far apart,” O’Toole says. “And I was explaining, ‘Dick, I don’t think that you really understand what this organization is doing. The way it is put together is a fascinating thing.’ I was very enthusiastic about it, very worked up over it. And we continued to be just that far apart. And when I reached the end of my pearl of an oration, he said, ‘Don, when did your dear old dad die? God rest his soul.’”
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In mid-October 1958, Daley announced a reduction in the number of mass precinct-captain luncheons that would be held at the Morrison Hotel before the November elections. There would be only two this year, with 1,200 of the machine faithful at each, rather than the usual four. The cutback was widely regarded as a sign of machine confidence that it would do well in the upcoming elections, in which only countywide and local offices were at stake. Daley spent a good deal of time trying to reach out to the fast-growing, and largely Republican, suburban Chicago. “[T]he suburbs supposedly are the place for the opposition party,” he told an audience of 1,200 at a five-dollars-a-plate dinner at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club in Niles. “But that’s no longer the case. The balance of power there is swinging to the Democrats.” The Republicans, for their part, circulated “S.O.S” lapel buttons, urging suburban voters to “save our suburbs from the Morrison Hotel gang.” Vice President Richard Nixon campaigned in Chicago a week before the election, declaring that the Democrats had “run out of gas,” and that “if we can keep going at our recent rate, a lot of people who have been predicting a Democratic landslide are going to have red faces next week.”
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Despite Nixon’s optimism, the 1958 elections were a sweep for the Democrats. The machine scored a key victory in the county assessor race, which a Democratic ward committeeman won by 372,000 votes. This post was a critical one for Daley and the machine, since it set the value on properties for tax purposes. Property owners could often be induced to make generous contributions to the machine in exchange for low tax assessments, an arrangement that explained the office’s nickname: “the party’s banker.” But the biggest winner was Otto Kerner, who was elected county judge by 545,000 votes, including a 6,500-vote victory in the Cook County suburbs. At slate-making time two years later, Daley would remember how strongly Kerner had run both in and outside the city.
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Daley had been working to build a Chicago campus of the University of Illinois long before it made an appearance in his 1958 plan. In 1945, as a state senator, he sponsored one of the first bills in the legislature promoting the cause. When Governor Stratton paid a courtesy call to Daley’s fifth-floor office to examine the 1958 redevelopment models, Daley told him that the Chicago campus was one of his highest priorities. There were political reasons for Daley to favor it. As a branch of the state university system, it would bring more state money to Chicago, making available more contracts and jobs for the machine to hand out to its friends. The 1958 plan had revealed how the campus could work as an economic and racial buffer for the downtown business district. And attracting a low-tuition state school for the sons and daughters of Chicagoans would certainly be an accomplishment that would resonate well with the voters when Daley ran for reelection. But Daley also seemed to be motivated by a genuine belief that Chicago needed and deserved the campus. As someone who had worked his way out of the working class through college and years of night law school, Daley understood the importance of education. The university’s main Champaign-Urbana campus was hundreds of miles south of the city, and many poor and working-class Chicagoans were being deprived of higher education because of the difficulty and expense of traveling downstate to receive it.
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But making the University of Illinois at Chicago a reality would not be easy. The first stumbling block was that Daley did not have a site to offer. The 1958 plan called for building it on land that was then occupied by railroad tracks south of the Loop, but those tracks were still in use and it was not clear that the railroads that owned them wanted to give them up. Daley proposed that five railroad passenger terminals spread out across the South Side be combined into a single Union Station, which would free up 160 acres of land south of the Congress Expressway, more than enough for the new campus. But the railroads were not enthusiastic about incurring the substantial costs of consolidation. Daley also faced skepticism from the University of Illinois trustees. Many worried that without the flow of Cook County students, the main campus at Champaign-Urbana would, as one local state senator put it, “return to the great prairie that it once was.”
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Then, as support grew for building a four-year campus in the Chicago area, many of the trustees inclined toward a suburban location. The suburbs offered cheaper land and more of it, nearby suburban living for the school’s faculty, and faster population growth in the surrounding area. The trustees had actually voted in favor of a site in the western suburbs called Miller Meadows. But it was owned by the Forest Preserve District, and the university needed the Cook County Board to approve the transfer. Daley attended meetings between the Cook County Board president and the university trustees, at which his demeanor was described as “Buddha-like.” Although Daley never stated his views publicly, the Cook County Board turned down the Miller Meadows proposal, quite possibly under threat that Daley would not reslate any board member who voted for it. Even with this setback, the trustees remained committed to a suburban location for the new campus. “No available site within the city limits of Chicago will meet criteria of [the] Board and long range objectives,” one trustee insisted. “A skyscraper university would be expensive to build and to operate, [it would take] many years to acquire a site through slum clearance — [and it would be] costly in funds and time.”
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