American Pharaoh (5 page)

Daley’s parochial school education emphasized the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism. But as much as
anything he learned in the formal curriculum, his eight years there helped instill in him many of the Irish-Catholic values
he would carry with him throughout his life. Parochial school education was a prolonged education in submission to authority.
Daley’s patronage coordinator, Matt Danaher, who grew up in Bridgeport, once told of serving as an altar boy for a monsignor
at Nativity of Our Lord Church. “I said to him one morning, ‘We’re all set, Father,’” Danaher recalled. “He walked over, looked
at the clock and said, ‘It’s one minute to 6.’ And then he said, ‘How would you like to hang for one minute.’ He was always
a perfectionist.” And the nuns were, as countless Catholic memoirs have attested, often tyrants in habits. One chronicler
of a parochial school in a parish not far from Bridgeport wrote that “children were sometimes asked to kneel on marbles, or
eat soap, or scrape gum from the hallway stairs.” The curriculum at Nativity emphasized memorization, penmanship, and rote
learning. The Catholic catechism drilled into Daley in religion class was, of course, the ultimate form of rote learning,
reducing almost every question students could have about God or man to a memorized short answer. It was the ideal education
for a young man who might find his way to a career in machine politics, where success lay in unquestioningly performing the
tasks set out by powers above. But it was less helpful as training for a leader who would need to think independently and
adapt himself to changing times.
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In school and out, Daley absorbed his neighborhood’s conservative values and flinty self-reliance. Bridgeport, with its legions
of slaughterhouse workers marching off to their bloody and dangerous jobs each day, was a community dedicated to the virtues
of industry. No Bridgeporter with any pride would rely on others for his daily bread: success came through constant toil and
pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. The Catholic Church had its charities, but the overwhelming ethic in neighborhoods
like Bridgeport was that except in the most dire cases of family death or illness it was an embarrassment to accept alms.
“Poor people didn’t look to anybody for help or assistance,” observed the superintendent of Bridgeport’s parochial schools
in the 1930s. Mr. Dooley tells of the down-on-his-luck laborer Callaghan who nevertheless musters the strength of character
to tell the Saint Vincent de Paul almsgivers to “Take ye’er charity, an’ shove it down ye’er throats.” If the Callaghans had
things tough, it was because this earthly life was a hard one.
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The pre–Vatican II Catholicism in which Daley was raised impressed on him a keen sense of man’s fallen state, and of the inevitability
of sin. Man had to struggle hard against the influence of evil, which could be warded off only “if one chose the path of dutifulness
and care, if one made sure by doing this twice over and respecting authority, if one closed off the energies of rebellion
inside oneself.” It was an education that bred a wary, even skeptical view of one’s fellowman — a character trait Daley would
carry with him through life. “He’s like a fellow who peeks in the bag to make sure the lady gave him a dozen buns,” a profile
of Daley in the
Chicago Daily News
once observed. And it was an environment that left Daley with a lifelong skepticism of idealists of all kinds — whether they
were reformers working to clean up machine politics or civil rights activists hoping to change hearts and minds on the question
of race. These utopians all proceeded from an unduly optimistic vision of man’s perfectibility. “Look at the Lord’s Disciples,”
Daley would later say in response to a charge of corruption in City Hall. “One denied Him, one doubted Him, one betrayed Him.
If our Lord couldn’t have perfection, how are you going to have it in city government?”
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Daley was an obedient student, but not a particularly gifted one. He was “a very serious boy,” his teacher Sister Gabriel
recalled. “A very studious boy. He played when he played. He worked when he worked. And he prayed when he prayed.” In 1916,
after graduating from Nativity, Daley enrolled at De La Salle Institute, a three-year Catholic commercial high school known
as “the Poor Boy’s College.” De La Salle was located at 3455 South Wabash, in a poor black neighborhood on the “wrong” side
of the racial dividing line separating Bridgeport from the black neighborhoods to the east. Daley’s commute brought him into
closer physical proximity with the blacks who lived across the railroad tracks, but it did nothing to break down the psychological
barriers that still separated him and his classmates from their black neighbors. De La Salle regarded its location in a black
neighborhood as an unfortunate trick of fate, and it made no effort to introduce its young charges to their neighbors. “The
school was surrounded by tenements and by low life,” a history of De La Salle, prepared by the school itself, states bluntly.
“It was a white school as an island surrounded by a black sea.” Daley traveled to De La Salle in a pack of his fellow Bridgeporters,
and quickly made his way out of the neighborhood when school let out.
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De La Salle, founded by an Irish immigrant from the Christian Brothers Order named Brother Adjutor of Mary, had a highly practical
approach to educating the children of the Catholic working class. Brother Adjutor believed the best training for a young man
with few advantages was intensive instruction in business. De La Salle’s curriculum combined Catholic religious studies with
commercial courses, including typing, bookkeeping, and business law. The school had actual “counting rooms,” and other lifelike
replicas of business settings, for students to begin acting out the financial jobs they would one day hold. Daley continued
to be a diligent but unremarkable student. One classmate remembered him as “a hard worker ... maybe a little above average.”
Brother Adjutor’s educational philosophy worked well for Daley: the business skills he acquired at De La Salle were of considerable
help later in life, when his financial skills proved to be a critical factor in his rise up the ranks of the machine. Like
Nativity, De La Salle instilled the importance of unquestioning obedience. The Christian Brothers, imposing figures in long
black robes and stiff white collars, instructed with a strictness that at times crossed the line to brutal. “They were good
teachers,” one of Daley’s classmates recalled, “but if you got out of line, they wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in the head.”
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De La Salle’s real strength was its extensive efforts to get jobs for its graduates. Most young Irish-Catholic boys coming
of age in places like Bridgeport in the early 1900s never made it out of the working class. But De La Salle opened up another
world, a white-collar alternative, for its students. As graduation neared, its faculty operated as a kind of Irish-Catholic
educational machine — mirroring the Irish-Catholic political machine — in which Brother Adjutor and other instructors drew
on their contacts in the business world to find jobs for the “Brother’s Boys.” Brother Adjutor’s reference letters were similar
to the ones precinct captains were writing in clubhouses across the city. Because of “the necessity of giving our students
a good start in life,” went one, “I have for many years past strenuously exerted myself to secure for them good positions
in the leading mercantile houses of this and other cities.” The school’s combination of commercial training and methodical
Irish-Catholic networking was a powerful engine for thrusting working-class boys into the upper echelons of the city’s power
structure. When Daley was elected mayor, he would be the third consecutive mayor educated at De La Salle. The school also
produced numerous aldermen, including two from Daley’s own graduating class, and many prominent businessmen. A commemorative
book boasted, with only some hyperbole, that “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” but “the business
leaders of Chicago were trained in the Counting Rooms of De La Salle.” As an adult, Daley would remember De La Salle warmly
as a place that “taught us to wear a clean shirt and tie and put a shine on your shoes and be confident to face the world.”
Daley worked after school and on weekends. When classes let out at 3:30 every day, he traveled to the Loop to wrap packages
and act as a department store messenger until the early evening. He also worked on bakery wagons and joined the drivers’ union.
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When Daley was not at school or working, he spent much of his free time at the Hamburg Athletic Club, which met in a nondescript
clubhouse at 37th and Emerald, just a few blocks from his home. Hamburg was one of many such clubs in Chicago at the time
— others had names like “Ragen’s Colts,” “the Aylwards,” and “Our Flag” — that were part social circle, part political organization,
and part street gang. The athletic clubs placed a premium on toughness and loyalty. The Ragen’s Colts’ motto could have belonged
to any of them: “Hit me and you hit two thousand.” Young men like Daley often ended up on the wrong end of the local policeman’s
billy club. “All they wanted to do was just beat you over the head,” Daley would later say, revealingly, about the policemen
of his youth. When they were not testing the limits of the law, Hamburg Athletic Club members actually engaged in a few athletic
activities. The clubs organized their own competitive sports leagues, sponsored outings to professional sporting events, and
even held picnics and dances. Daley excelled in the Hamburg Athletic Club’s sports program — not as a participant but as a
manager of others. “Dick often came to practice carrying his books,” recalled a union official who was once the mascot of
the Hamburg Athletic Club baseball team. “He was a very busy guy, but he took his job as a manager seriously. He made lineups,
booked the games, and ran the team on the field during games.”
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Clubs like Hamburg also served as the first rung of the Democratic machine. Most were sponsored by machine politicians, who
contributed to their treasuries and took a personal interest in their members. The clubs, for their part, did political work
in the neighborhood during election season. The “Ragen” of Ragen’s Colts was Cook County commissioner Frank Ragen, who paid
the rent on the clubhouse and underwrote many of the club’s other expenses. Hamburg’s patron was Alderman Joseph McDonough,
a rising star in the Democratic machine. Hamburg had a long history as a training ground for machine politicians. Among its
alumni was Tommy Doyle, president of the club in 1914, who challenged Bridgeport’s twenty-year-incumbent alderman and won.
The club had served as a powerful political base for Doyle, providing him with an army of 350 campaign workers. Four years
later, when Doyle moved on to higher office, McDonough inherited his aldermanic seat. Clubs like Hamburg were also valuable
because their members were willing and able to apply force on behalf of their sponsors. It was a useful service, since Chicago
political campaigns had a way of getting rough. A fierce battle for ward committeeman in the “Bloody 20th” Ward in 1928 ended
with one candidate killed gangland-style and his opponent put on trial for the killing. It was common for election judges
to be beaten up on election day, or kidnapped and not released until the voting — and the vote stealing — was completed. “Politics
ain’t bean-bag,” Mr. Dooley said in one of his most famous pronouncements. “ ’Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples
an’ prohybitionists ’d do well to keep out iv it.” For a young man in Bridgeport with political ambitions, the Hamburg Athletic
Club was a good place to start out. Daley was elected president of the club in 1924, at age twenty-two, a post he held for
the next fifteen years.
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Another prime function of the athletic clubs was defending their narrow stretch of turf from outsiders. Before World War II,
Chicago was divided into ethnic enclaves that were bitterly mistrustful of their neighbors on all sides. When an Irish neighborhood
adjoined a Slavic one, or a Polish neighborhood adjoined a Scandinavian one, the fault lines were clear and the animosities
barely restrained. For Bridgeport, the great dividing line was Wentworth Avenue, which separated it from the black neighborhoods
to the east. Bridgeport’s fears were exacerbated by the fact that the population in the black ghetto was expanding rapidly
as a result of migration from the South. At any moment, it seemed, the black neighborhoods to the east might expand and grow
large enough to overrun Bridgeport. The intensity of Bridgeport’s racial feelings would be laid bare decades later by a small
but brutally revealing incident. It was June 1961, just weeks after busloads of Freedom Riders had been beaten up in the segregated
bus stations of the South. The old Douglas Hotel on the black South Side had caught fire, and eighty residents had suddenly
been made homeless. Red Cross volunteers had arrived on the scene and — unaware of Bridgeport’s racial sensitivities — evacuated
the refugees to temporary quarters in Bridgeport’s Holy Cross Lutheran Church, a few blocks from Daley’s home. Word spread
quickly, and almost immediately a crowd of jeering whites was standing outside the church demanding the removal of the black
fire victims. “They threatened to break windows in the church and screamed obscenities I can’t repeat,” Helen Constien, the
pastor’s wife, said afterward. “They threatened to destroy the church if we didn’t get the Negroes out of the building.” The
Red Cross quickly took the black fire victims out of Bridgeport.
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