American Pharaoh (52 page)

Daley began 1963 with the kind of show of strength that only the Democratic machine could exhibit. On January 2, he filed
a sixteen-foot-high stack of nominating petitions containing 750,000 names. Daley kicked off his campaign by emphasizing his
work redeveloping the city and improving municipal services. His reform of the police department was already translating into
reduced crime rates, he said, and he boasted that Chicago had won awards in 1959 and 1961 as the cleanest big city in America.
During the campaign, Daley also announced that he had received a telegram from the National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix-Up Bureau
in Washington stating that Chicago was also designated the cleanest large city for 1962. The Chicago newspapers helped Daley
out by picking up on his themes, and they generally gave him high marks. And
Time
magazine put Daley on its cover shortly before the election, with his preternaturally jowly face set off against a bright
Chicago skyline, and the headline “Clouter with Conscience.” Inside,
Time
included photos of the city’s new skyscrapers, O’Hare International Airport, and an autographed photograph of President Kennedy
welcoming the Daley clan to the White House. Chicago was in the midst of reinventing itself — a “new facade is rising in steel
and zeal”— the magazine cheered, and it gave credit for the transformation to the city’s singular mayor. “Daley’s stubborn
resolve to rebuild his city has given Chicago a new stature,” the article said. “Making things happen is Daley’s passion.”
The magazine’s brief mention of Adamowski dismissed him as a former state’s attorney who “distinguished himself by never successfully
prosecuting a major case.”
³¹

Adamowski ran a spirited campaign that challenged Daley’s upbeat picture of Chicago government. He refused to concede that
city services had improved since Daley took office. The Chicago Fire Department, when it was not looting homes, was letting
fire deaths soar 150 percent in the last year, Adamowski charged. He also blamed Daley’s fire department for one of the worst
tragedies in Chicago history, the infamous 1958 fire at Our Lady of Angels School, in which ninety students and three nuns
perished. Adamowski also questioned how much progress had been made at the police department since the Summerdale scandal.
The Chicago police had recently allowed the “babbling burglar” himself, Richard Morrison, to be ambushed and shot while leaving
the Criminal Court Building after testifying in a Summerdale-related matter. Adamowski also hammered away at Daley, as promised,
on waste and high taxes. His charge that Daley routinely overpaid municipal workers was buttressed by a new study that found
that the city was paying $3.34 a square foot for cleaning and maintenance, compared to an average of 55.2 cents in thirty-nine
Loop offices studied.
³²
Republican state legislators also helped Adamowski by introducing a bill to put a tax ceiling on Chicago’s general expenditure
fund. Daley was adamantly opposed to it, and he was forced once again to publicly oppose a measure he had helped defeat in
1957, 1959, and 1961 — and thereby associate himself in the voters’ mind with high taxes. With Daley positioning himself as
the candidate of business and big labor, Adamowski tried to present himself as the people’s candidate. “I hear State Street
is against me, the bankers are against me, and the labor leaders are against me,” he declared, in remarks that sounded uncannily
like Daley’s in 1955. “State Street doesn’t make Chicago big, it’s the other way around. I’ll take Western Avenue, Nagle Avenue,
Ashland Avenue, and Milwaukee Avenue, where the little people reside. I’ll take the bank depositors over the bankers any day.
That goes for the little people in labor, too.”
³³

Even while Daley was in the midst of his usual election-time denials that he was a machine boss, he was quietly pulling strings
in the upcoming aldermanic races. In the racially changing 21st Ward on the Southwest Side, the white ward committeeman had
the necessary support from the ward’s precinct captains in his race for alderman, but Daley decided he would have to step
aside in favor of a black candidate. At the same time, in the 17th Ward on the Far South Side, which had become 80 percent
black, Daley refused to let the white incumbent be removed. And at a closed-door slating meeting at the Morrison Hotel with
top ward committeemen — including Dawson, Keane, Parky Cullerton, and Joseph Gill — Daley beat down a challenge to another
white alderman. Keane urged Daley to dump independent alderman Leon Despres, his biggest irritant in the City Council. Dawson,
who was eager to put his own man in as 5th Ward alderman, joined Keane’s appeal. But Daley instructed the 5th Ward Organization
to back Despres, because he did not want to alienate the liberal independent voters of Illinois, who backed Despres and whose
support he wanted in the mayoral election. As word of Daley’s dictates leaked out, Adamowski said they were further proof
that “we do not have one-party rule, we have one-man rule.”
³⁴

In the aldermanic election, the machine-and Independent-backed Despres overwhelmingly defeated Dawson’s candidate. But the
big news came two days later, when newly reelected alderman Benjamin Lewis was found in his West Side 24th Ward office handcuffed
to a chair and shot three times in the head. Lewis was in the process of easing white precinct captains out of the ward, and
he had been talking about keeping a larger share of the ward’s gambling money for himself. The killing had the look of a syndicate
hit, but no one was ever arrested. The Lewis killing was embarrassing for Daley and the machine, and it caused a rapid volley
of charges and countercharges over which of the two mayoral candidates was more corrupt. Lewis’s death was only the latest
“chapter in the sordid history of the Chicago Democratic machine,” Adamowski declared. “Now we are apparently at the beginning
of an era of violence and bloodshed.” Daley mobilized his supporters to attack Adamowski’s integrity. Daniel Ward charged
that when he took office as state’s attorney he discovered that Adamowski had failed to account for $833,984 in discretionary
funds. Adamowski responded that he had destroyed the relevant records to protect informants who had helped him to investigate
corruption in city government and other scandals. And he threw the charges back at Daley, asking for documentation on the
forty-three city contingency funds under the mayor’s control. Daley promised to divulge his contingency fund spending, but
he never did. Through it all, Daley continued to insist that he was not a machine politician. A reporter visiting from Brazil
told him, “You have quite a reputation in Brazil as the last of the city bosses.” Daley responded, “No, I’m the first new
leader.”
³⁵

Adamowski tried to appeal to white ethnic voters by coming out against open housing. Politically, it was not a difficult choice
for him. Daley and the machine had a virtual lock on the black vote, and Adamowski would be unlikely to pick up many black
votes even if he took a pro–civil rights stand. But he had a chance of making significant inroads into the machine’s white
ethnic base by strongly opposing integration. Adamowski’s stand put Daley in a difficult position. Daley had no intention
of supporting open housing, both because he opposed it and because he did not want to lose support in the Bungalow Belt. But
he was constrained, as Adamowski was not, by the need to avoid offending black voters. He needed blacks both to support him
and to turn out enthusiastically. Daley’s solution was to duck the issue. Asked at a City Hall press conference if he supported
open housing, Daley said, “Everyone knows my record on adequate housing for all people.” When the reporter pressed him again,
Daley simply responded: “You know my record.”
³⁶

As always, Daley’s electoral strategy relied on energizing the machine faithful. He pulled out all of the usual tricks, including
a torch-light parade, and a luncheon for 1,400 precinct captains and other machine functionaries at the Morrison Hotel, where
he was lauded by Governor Kerner and Senator Paul Douglas. He also pulled out some new ones, like another rally downtown with
an elephant wearing a banner reading, “I am voting for Dick Daley too.” Just as he appealed to both sides on race, Daley played
both sides of the organized crime issue. He received enthusiastic applause at a meeting of the syndicate-dominated 1st Ward
organization when he boasted of his proven record of putting convicted criminals on the city payroll. “I’ve been criticized
for doing this,” he told the standing-room-only crowd, “but I’ll make no apologies. I’ll always stand alongside the man with
a criminal record if I think he deserves another chance.”
³⁷

This time around, Daley was able to call in a better class of political debt. On March 25, barely a week before voters went
to the polls, Daley decided that it was time for another O’Hare dedication now that the airport’s circular restaurant was
complete. President Kennedy agreed to attend, and Daley’s campaign made the most of it. Crowds up to five deep lined the seventeen-mile
route between O’Hare and the downtown Conrad Hilton Hotel, where Daley presided over a “civic luncheon.” Cynics in the press
grumbled that the ceremony “may make O’Hare the most dedicated airport in the nation.” But Daley was able to bask in Kennedy’s
well-timed declaration that O’Hare “could be classed as one of the wonders of the modern world,” and that it stood as “a tribute
to Mayor Daley who kept these interests and resources together, working together, until the job was done.”
³⁸

When the votes were counted on April 2, Daley won 679,497 to 540,705. Daley’s 56 percent of the vote was a sharp drop-off
from the 71 percent he had taken four years earlier, and less than he had predicted going into the election. It was also the
first time that his vote total had fallen under 700,000. The ward-by-ward mayoral election returns revealed the source of
the machine’s difficulties. Daley had run strongly among black voters, taking 81 percent of their votes. But his support among
white voters had actually slipped to 49 percent. In part, it was due to ethnic voting. Adamowski had run strongly among his
fellow Poles, most of whom usually voted a straight machine ticket. But Daley had also suffered significant falloffs in wards
like Tom Keane’s 31st, where his vote total was about half what it had been four years earlier. In the 1st Ward, where he
was hurt by his University of Illinois stand as well as tensions with the syndicate, his vote fell about 40 percent.
³⁹

Now that Daley was no longer the candidate of white Chicago, he faced a stark choice. He could have decided to govern in the
New Deal tradition of the Kelly-Arvey wing of the Democratic Party. Like Kelly, he could have tried to govern as a racial
progressive, and then worked to keep enough moderate white voters behind him to stay in office. It would have been a difficult
path — Kelly had failed to make it work. But Daley would have had four years to navigate the issues of open occupancy and
public housing and chart a compromise-filled political course that kept the Democrats in power and promoted the civil rights
of his most loyal voting block. Chicago might have become an entirely different city if he had proceeded along that path.
But instead, Daley decided to make a strong appeal to the white “backlash” voters in the Bungalow Belt who had begun to desert
him in the 1962 bond referendum and the 1963 mayoral election. He would come out more directly against open housing and equal
rights for blacks, so there would be no confusion among white voters about where he stood. He intended to hold on to as much
of his black support as he could, but he would do that not by his stand on the issues, but through patronage and the work
of the black ward organizations. Alderman Despres, Daley’s foremost foe in the City Council, drafted a memo setting out what
he took to be Daley’s cynical approach to racial politics. “While controlling the votes of Negro Chicagoans through partisan
patronage and the national attraction of the Democratic label, make all necessary concessions to white segregationists by
maintaining the pattern of racial housing segregation, school segregation, and social segregation,” Despres wrote. But he
added a warning: “Since a pattern of housing and school segregation guarantees a growing ghetto and a declining city, the
segregation policy which wins each election hastens a tragic explosion.”
⁴⁰