American Pharaoh (55 page)

With planning for the second school boycott now under way, Daley took back the freedom he had previously given black machine
members. He now expected them to support Willis strongly, and to work actively against the civil rights sentiment sweeping
through the black wards. In the City Council, the only black member of the City Council school committee fell into line and
voted in favor of the nomination of Cyrus Adams and Wild, even as liberal white alderman Leon Despres voted against them.
And black machine politicians formed a new group called the Assembly to End Prejudice, Injustice, and Poverty that, despite
its name, opposed the CCCO and the school movement. “We hope the school boycott fails, and we’re working hard toward that
end,” the group’s president, South Side 20th Ward alderman Kenneth Campbell, said at a February 4 press conference. The black
machine sent precinct workers door-to-door in the same wards the CCCO was trying to organize, warning parents that the boycott
was an “ineffective weapon” that “harms children.” Machine canvassers carried leaflets to be signed and returned by parents,
saying: “Your children need all the education they can get. Let nobody fool you into believing that another school boycott
can do any good.” Daley denied, not very convincingly, that he had any involvement in the formation of the Assembly to End
Prejudice, Injustice, and Poverty. “They sent me a copy of the programs and objectives,” he insisted. “That’s all I know about
it.” But civil rights activists were not convinced. “Captain Richard J. Daley has cracked the whip,” said Rose Simpson, whose
recent meeting with the mayor had gone so badly, “and his plantation overseers jumped in line.”
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When February 25 came, about 125,000 students stayed away from school, an impressive showing in absolute terms, but a sharp
fall-off from the first boycott. The black machine’s new campaign had made itself felt. In a march on City Hall coinciding
with the boycott, demonstrators carried placards reading “The polls are next — watch out Daley,” and “If we don’t get rid
of Daley, we’ll have boycotts daily.” The protesters also carried a mock coffin bearing the names of Dawson, Willis, and the
six black aldermen from the submachine who opposed the boycott. The message the civil rights protesters and the parents of
the 125,000 school children were trying to send was lost on Daley. “I don’t think civil rights is a political issue,” he said.
“It is not a political issue, just as education and unemployment are not.”
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Civil rights activists had long maintained that the Chicago schools were highly segregated, and on March 31, 1964, they received
official confirmation. University of Chicago professor Philip Hauser had been commissioned, as part of the settlement of a
federal discrimination lawsuit, to study the racial situation in the Chicago school system. Hauser’s report struck a conciliatory
tone, noting that the problem of school segregation was not “unique to Chicago.” Still, it found that 84 percent of the black
pupils in Chicago attended schools that were at least 90 percent black, and that 86 percent of white students were in schools
that were at least 90 percent white. The Hauser Report faulted the Board of Education for not moving “earlier and more rapidly
. . . to resolve the problem of school integration.” As debate raged over the report, Daley had the chance to fill three more
vacancies on the Board of Education.
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The most controversial issue Daley faced was whether to reappoint Mrs. Wendell Green to another five-year term. The elderly
Green, who had risen out of the black submachine, remained the greatest apologist for Willis and the school system on the
question of race. “I don’t know what integration means,” she told the City Council when she testified seeking reappointment.
“There is no segregation in Chicago schools.” Edwin Berry of the Chicago Urban League spoke for most of the school movement
when he warned Daley that “[r]eappointment of Mrs. Green would be a monumental tragedy.” Dr. Oldberg tried to talk Daley into
appointing her to a vacant two-year term, rather than the full five years. “Dick, she’s going to be over eighty,” Oldberg
argued. “Since there’s been such a ruckus, give her the short term.” “Fine, Doc,” Daley replied. But in the end, he reappointed
Green to a five-year term. In a surprising act of political independence, 6th Ward alderman Robert Miller broke with his fellow
members of the “silent six” and voted against Green in committee. He changed his position by the time her nomination reached
the floor, but by then it was too late to restore his standing with the machine. In his usual punitive fashion, Daley withdrew
the machine’s support in the next election, and Miller lost to an independent candidate. “Daley wouldn’t forgive him for going
against his wishes,” challenger A. A. “Sammy” Rayner said afterward. “I really won by default.”
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President Johnson traveled to Chicago in April 1964 to address a machine fund-raiser, where he declared his commitment to
build “a Great Society of the highest order.” The crowd of six thousand loyal Democrats greeted Johnson’s declaration with
raucous applause. “If you could make a graph of this administration, perhaps this would be a sort of peak,” Lady Bird Johnson
wrote in her diary. The Great Society was Johnson’s plan for extending the progressive ideals of the New Deal through programs
like the War on Poverty and Medicare. The War on Poverty was actually a holdover from the Kennedy administration. The late
president had asked his aides in the fall of 1963 to develop a program that would extend the nation’s growing prosperity to
those who were being left behind. After Kennedy’s death, Johnson picked up the torch and instructed his staff to “[g]ive it
the highest priority.” Johnson, who started out in humble circumstances in rural East Texas, had strong personal feelings
about fighting poverty. One of his proudest accomplishments was his early work bringing electricity to rural Texas. “Electricity
changed those people’s lives, made things easier, brought light into the darkness,” he recalled to an aide who was helping
to develop the Great Society. Johnson also saw his anti-poverty campaign as an integral part of the drive for racial justice.
As the battle against Jim Crow was being won in the South, blacks would still need economic assistance to bring them up to
the status of whites. Johnson was committed, he said in his first State of the Union address, to using his office on behalf
of those who “live on the outskirts of hope — some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too
many because of both.”
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Johnson guided a series of Great Society initiatives through Congress in 1964 and 1965. He established the Department of Housing
and Urban Development to take on the problems of the nation’s large cities, and allocated $900 million to fight rural poverty
in Appalachia. And he persuaded Congress to support his Medicare program, signing it into law in Independence, Missouri, with
eighty-one-year-old Harry Truman at his side. It was the Economic Opportunity Act, however, that laid the groundwork for the
War on Poverty. The new law created an Office of Economic Opportunity, which Johnson put under the leadership of Sargent Shriver,
director of the Peace Corps and brother-in-law of President Kennedy. The choice of Shriver was an indication that Johnson
intended the agency and its anti-poverty mission to play an important role in his administration. Shriver was a tireless worker
and a bureaucratic warrior who, as the Peace Corps’ first director, had turned a start-up program into one of the defining
undertakings of the Kennedy era. Daley and Shriver had strong ties, going back to Shriver’s time in Chicago as manager of
the Kennedy family’s Merchandise Mart, and as a member of the Chicago School Board.
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The architects of the War on Poverty intended for it to take a bold new approach to the nation’s ills. It was aimed, Johnson
declared, “at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.” The OEO included eight major programs designed to take on
distinct aspects of economic disadvantage. Head Start focused on improving early childhood education for 1.3 million low-income
pre-schoolers. The Job Corps was designed to provide job-training opportunities for underprivileged youth. And Volunteers
in Service to America, or VISTA, was established as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. Conservatives complained that the
War on Poverty was undermining the free market by creating unnecessary government programs and entitlements. Republicans began
sporting buttons proclaiming, “I’m fighting poverty, I work.” But for the most part, Johnson’s efforts to reach out to the
nation’s most disadvantaged citizens were well received in the early days. “This is the best thing this administration’s done,”
Johnson told Shriver. “I’ve got more comments and more popularity on the poverty thing than anything else.”
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The most innovative of all the new anti-poverty initiatives was the $1 billion Community Action Program (CAP). Traditional
welfare programs placed bureaucrats and social workers in downtown office buildings and put them in charge of dispensing checks
to needy people who lived far away. CAP called for moving welfare programs out of downtown and into the neighborhoods where
poor people lived. The most innovative piece of the CAP model was its “maximum feasible participation” rule. The Equal Opportunity
Act required that local programs be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of residents
of the areas and members of the groups served.” Buried in this dense statutory language was a truly radical notion. Poverty
programs were to be run by neighborhood-based organizations that were “broadly representative of the community.” If the mandate
was followed faithfully, it would empower poor people to run their own programs for the first time, and give them millions
of dollars in federal money to distribute in their communities. Robert Kennedy, testifying in favor of the act, hailed its
departure from the traditional model of anti-poverty efforts that “plan programs for the poor, not with them.” Richard Boone,
a key framer of the OEO legislation, said it was intended as an end-run around city halls and welfare bureaucracies that did
not have the interests of the poor at heart. Advocates for the poor believed CAP had the potential to completely change the
national landscape. Shriver called it “the boldest of OEO’s inventions,” and predicted that its grassroots network of neighborhood
offices would become “the business corporation of the new social revolution.” Michael Harrington, author of the influential
anti-poverty manifesto
The Other America,
declared that the Equal Opportunity Act could end up doing as much to organize the poor as the Wagner Act had done to organize
workers thirty years earlier.
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Daley did not share this enthusiasm for the War on Poverty or CAP. He was not, by temperament, a believer in welfare programs.
His upbringing in Bridgeport had taught him that life was a struggle, and that people caught up in hard times should look
to themselves first. “Look, Sister,” Daley once said to a nun who complained to him about the problems of Chicago’s ghetto
residents. “You and I come from the same background. We know how tough it was. But we picked ourselves up by our bootstraps.”
Nor did Daley believe in the increasingly fashionable talk about “welfare rights,” and what poor people were owed by the government.
“In his heart of hearts,” one Daley associate said, “I think he would like to grab these people by their lapels, shake them,
and say, ‘Get to Work!’” But there was one thing Daley liked very much about the War on Poverty — it promised to send millions
of dollars of federal money to Chicago. Daley was one of a contingent of big-city mayors, including New York’s John Lindsay,
Los Angeles’s Sam Yorty, and Detroit’s Jerome Cavanaugh, who went to Washington for a private briefing on the program. Daley,
who could track a federal dollar better than anyone, overcame his philosophical objections and declared after a two-hour meeting
with Housing and Urban Development secretary Robert Weaver that the new anti-poverty initiative was a “bold, imaginative enterprise.”
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Daley was more than willing to take the federal money, but he was determined not to let Chicago’s CAP operate under maximum
feasible participation. The whole idea of letting poor people manage poverty programs, which the Johnson administration was
so excited about, struck Daley as absurd. “It would be like telling the fellow who cleans up to be the city editor of a newspaper,”
Daley declared. Daley also immediately grasped the serious political implications of maximum feasible participation. Policymakers
in Washington saw it mainly as a way to sidestep the “board ladies and bureaucrats” who controlled poverty programs. Daley,
who looked at everything through the lens of machine politics, understood that it would take money, patronage jobs, and ultimately
power away from City Hall and the machine and hand them over to neighborhood activists. Daley had seen it all before. The
idea of maximum feasible participation had been borrowed from a Kennedy administration juvenile delinquency program. Daley
had watched that program channel money to the machine’s opponents in the neighborhoods. Ultimately, he shut the program down,
sending millions of dollars back to Washington, and then established a new city-funded program that operated under his close
supervision. To avoid being put in this position again, Daley went to Washington to testify against including a maximum feasible
participation requirement in the CAP statute. The nation’s mayors believed, he told the House Committee on Education and Labor,
that “any project of this kind, in order to succeed, must be administered by the duly constituted elected officials of the
areas.”
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