American Pharaoh (7 page)

The seventeen-year-old Daley was, at the very least, extremely close to the violence. Bridgeport was a major center of riot
activity: by one estimate, 41 percent of all the encounters occurred in and around Daley’s neighborhood. South Side youth
gangs, including the Hamburg Athletic Club, were later found to have been among the primary instigators of the racial violence.
“For weeks, in the spring and summer of 1919, they had been anticipating, even eagerly awaiting, a race riot,” one study found.
“On several occasions, they themselves had endeavored to precipitate one, and now that racial violence threatened to become
generalized and unrestrained throughout Chicago, they were set to exploit the chaos.” The Chicago Commission on Human Relations
eventually concluded that without these gangs “it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash.” It is also
clear that Joseph McDonough, patron of the Hamburg Athletic Club and later Daley’s political mentor, actively incited the
white community at the time of the riots. McDonough was quoted in the press saying that blacks had “enough ammunition . .
. to last for years of guerrilla warfare,” and that he had seen police captains warning white South Side residents: “For God’s
sake, arm. They are coming; we cannot hold them.” At the City Council, McDonough told police chief John J. Garrity that “unless
something is done at once I am going to advise my people to arm themselves for protection.”
⁴⁰

Was Daley himself involved in the bloody work of the 1919 race riots? His defenders have always insisted he was not, arguing
that it would have been more in character for him to be attending to “his studies” or “family affairs” while much of the Irish-Catholic
youth of Bridgeport were out bashing heads. But Daley’s critics have long “pictur[ed] him in the pose of a brick-throwing
thug.” It strains credulity, they say, for Daley to have played no part in the riots when the Hamburg Athletic Club was so
heavily involved — particularly when he was only a few years away from being chosen as the group’s president. Daley’s close
ties to McDonough, who played an inflammatory role, also argue for involvement. Adding to the suspicions, Daley always remained
secretive about the riots, and declined to respond to direct questions on the subject. It was a convenient political response
that allowed Daley to play both sides of the city’s racial divide: whites from the ethnic neighborhoods could believe that
Daley was a youthful defender of the South Side color line, while blacks could choose to believe the opposite. Daley’s role,
or lack of role, is likely lost to history, in part because the police and prosecutors never pursued the white gang members
who instigated the violence. At the least, it can be said that Daley was an integral member of a youth gang that played an
active role in one of the bloodiest antiblack riots in the nation’s history — and that within a few years’ time, this same
gang would think enough of Daley to select him as its leader.
⁴¹

After graduating from De La Salle in 1919, Daley took a job with Dolan, Ludeman, and Company, a stockyards commission house.
Daley once said that as children he and his friends were always drawn to the slaughterhouses, “being city kids fascinated
with farm animals.” Daley woke at 4:00
A.M.
each day to walk from his parents’ house to the yards. In the mornings, he moved cattle off trucks and weighed them. In the
afternoons, he put his De La Salle skills to work in the firm’s offices, writing letters, taking dictation, and handling the
books. Later in his career, Daley would regale political audiences with tales of his days as a stockyards “cowboy.” He presented
himself as something of a South Side John Wayne, probably overstating the amount of derring-do his job required, and certainly
omitting the grim brutality of the work.
⁴²

Bridgeport’s traditional employment trinity consisted of the stock-yards, government work, and politics — with a select few
going off to the priesthood. Daley once said that his ambition early in life had been to become “another P. D. Armour,” but
it must soon have become clear to him that a career in the stockyards would likely have been low-paying and unsatisfying.
Daley could have joined the many Bridgeporters who took patronage jobs with government bodies like the Park District or signed
on as police officers. But that route also held little promise and fell far short of the accomplishments his mother had been
grooming him for. Politics was another matter entirely. A young man with political ambitions could hardly have started out
better than being born in Bridgeport. Bridgeport lay in the heart of the Irish South Side, in the powerful 11th Ward. The
11th was one of Chicago’s famous “river wards,” the bloc of working-class and slum wards along the Chicago River that were
the mainstay of Chicago’s Democratic machine. These wards — which were at odds with Chicago’s Protestant Republican establishment
— regularly produced the machine’s margins of victory, and their leaders controlled the Cook County Democratic Organization’s
Central Committee. Of all the river ward neighborhoods, Bridgeport was in a class of its own: it would soon come to be known
as the “mother of mayors.” Starting in 1933, this small South Side neighborhood would send three successive residents to City
Hall — Edward Kelly, Martin Kennelly, and Daley — who would rule the city for forty-three years. Daley was coming of age just
as Bridgeport’s machine politicians were rising to new heights of power.

In addition to being lucky in his place of birth, Daley had the right ethnic background for a career in Chicago politics.
An old Chicago adage holds that “the Jews own it, the Irish run it, and the blacks live in it.” It was an exaggeration on
all three counts. But if the Irish did not run Chicago — most of the businesses, banks, and newspapers were in Protestant
hands — they did dominate the Democratic machine out of all proportion to their numbers. Chicago was far from the only city
to fall under the sway of Irish politicians. As early as 1894, Yankees were decrying the “Irish conquest of our cities,” and
listing the Irish Democratic party bosses who had seized the reins of municipal power from Boston to San Francisco. It is
one of the great puzzles of American political life that almost all of the great political bosses — including New York’s William
“Boss” Tweed, Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast, Boston’s James Michael Curley, and, of course, Daley — have been Irish. The Irish
had an advantage of timing: they arrived in the United States in one of the earliest migrations, making them one of the most
established ethnic groups. They also spoke English and were familiar with America’s British-style political system. And unlike
Central European and Eastern European immigrants who often carried ethnic rivalries with them from the old country, the Irish
had no enemies among their fellow immigrants. “A Lithuanian won’t vote for a Pole, and a Pole won’t vote for a Lithuanian,”
said one old-time Chicago politician. “A German won’t vote for either of them — but all three will vote for [an Irishman].”
⁴³

It has also been suggested that the Irish have a particular aptitude for machine politics. Edward Levine, in his classic study
The Irish and Irish Politicians,
argued that the Irish were naturally “given to politics.”
⁴⁴
Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in
Beyond the Melting Pot
that the structure of the political machine, with its rigid hierarchies and respect for seniority, in many ways paralleled
“[t]he Irish village ... a place of stable, predictable social relations in which almost everyone had a role to play, under
the surveillance of a stern oligarchy of elders, and in which, on the whole, a person’s position was likely to improve with
time. Transferred to Manhattan, these were the essentials of Tammany Hall.” The Irish disposition toward political machines
may also derive from a traditional need for unofficial forms of government. In eighteenth-century Ireland, the penal laws
made Catholicism illegal. In response, the Irish created their own informal mechanisms for taking care of their own. It was
an outlook that translated easily to America’s Protestant-dominated cities. This new land might be filled with employers whose
hiring policies bore the hated words “No Irish Need Apply,” charity workers who looked down their noses at the Irish poor,
and judges who regarded the Irish as an incorrigible race. But the political machine would provide. Moynihan has also argued
that disreputable machine practices like vote theft, patronage hiring, and kickbacks — he lumps them together under the rubric
of “indifference to Yankee proprieties” — were commonplace in eighteenth-century Ireland. Irish landed aristocrats sold the
votes of their tenants and bought seats in Parliament long before the Tweeds and Daleys of the New World. “The great and the
wealthy ran Ireland politically like Tammany Hall in its worst days,” noted one scholar. “Had they not sold their own country
for money and titles in the Act of Union with England and, as one rogue said, thanked God they had a country to sell?”
⁴⁵

By the time of Daley’s birth, the Irish political ascendancy was already well under way. As early as the 1830s, complaints
were being heard that the city’s Irish population wielded too much political power. Irish influence grew over the next few
decades, as immigration from Ireland surged. The Irish suffered a setback in the municipal elections of 1855, when Know-Nothing
Party candidate Levi D. Boone, grandson of frontiersman Daniel Boone, was elected mayor and his fellow Nativists took control
of the City Council. During its brief reign, Boone’s regime passed a law barring immigrants from city jobs. But Irish political
influence soon resumed its steady rise. After the City Council elections of 1869, the Irish held 15 of the 40 seats. And Irish
politicians had an influence beyond their numbers. In the 1890s, by one estimate, 24 of the 28 most influential aldermen of
the decade were Irish. In 1905, when Daley was three, Chicago elected Edward Dunne, its first Irish-Catholic mayor. The first
mayoral candidate to break through the WASP stranglehold on city government, Dunne was a populist hero in neighborhoods like
Daley’s. “It was taking your life in your hands to campaign against Dunne in Bridgeport or Back of the Yards,” a turn-of-the-century
mayor once said.
⁴⁶

Daley’s route into the Democratic machine was through a Hamburg Athletic Club connection: the club’s sponsor, Bridgeport alderman
Joseph (“Big Joe”) McDonough. McDonough was elected alderman in 1917 at the age of twenty-eight, and ward committeeman the
following year. With the two most important ward positions his, Mc-Donough was indisputably the most powerful Democrat in
the 11th Ward. McDonough, a three-hundred-pound former Villanova University football hero, was a colorful neighborhood institution,
known for eating an entire chicken for lunch. McDonough ran a saloon, owned a real estate firm, and served as vice president
of an automobile sales company. The clout he held as a result of his political offices contributed to the bottom lines of
each business. But he was beloved in the 11th Ward for taking care of his people: one depression-era Christmas, McDonough
single-handedly passed out 5,600 baskets of food for the needy. Bridgeport was filled with young men who would have jumped
at the chance to apprentice themselves to the powerful McDonough. No doubt some of these men were more intelligent, better
educated, and more charismatic than Daley. But these were not the important qualities for a budding machine politician. Daley
was a plain-speaking, Irish-Catholic son of Bridgeport, who had proven through his presidency of the Hamburg Athletic Club
that he could earn the respect of his peers. He also benefited from the premium the machine placed on the traditional virtues:
discretion, sobriety, plodding hard work, fitting in, and a willingness to follow orders. McDonough selected Daley to be his
personal assistant, appointed him to serve as a precinct captain, and invited him to work in the 11th Ward Organization. Daley
worked as a precinct captain in the mayoral election of 1919 and the presidential election of 1920.
⁴⁷