American Pharaoh (89 page)

The year ended with another racially charged fight over the school system. School board president Frank Whiston had died,
and the board was evenly divided between supporters of Warren Bacon, a black executive with Inland Steel Company, and United
Steelworkers of America executive John Carey. The board members closest to Daley were backing Carey. Blacks and liberals lobbied
Daley to use his influence with the board to select the first black president for a school system that was by now 60 percent
nonwhite. Bacon’s supporters presented Daley with 50,000 petition signatures asking him to back Bacon, and a special appeal
signed by such prominent Chicagoans as Professor Philip Hauser of the Hauser Report, developer Philip Klutznick, and Nancy
Stevenson, the new senator’s wife. But Daley made no commitments to Bacon, and when the vote came, Carey was elected. Bacon
and his supporters were especially bitter that the board had decided to take the unprecedented step of voting by secret ballot
— an indication, they believed, that the fix was in. “I am an object lesson of the powerlessness of the more than one million
black people that reside in this city,” Bacon said afterward. “We are the people who have given the majority votes in this
city to the Daley administration, and I have never seen the black community more of one mind than it was on this issue, but
we lost.” A group of thirteen black aldermanic candidates held a press conference to denounce Daley for “his underhanded tactics
in causing the defeat” of Bacon.
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Almost two years had passed since Judge Austin ordered the CHA to come up with public housing sites in white neighborhoods.
The city appeared to be stalling until after the April 1971 mayoral election in order to avoid facing white backlash at the
polls. But the plaintiffs continued to press the CHA to come into compliance, and Judge Austin took their side. After losing
appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, the CHA capitulated in early March and released a proposal for 1,746 units of
low-rise public housing on 275 scattered sites. The city was formally complying with the law, but Daley declared that the
court’s order was “detrimental to all of the people of Chicago, and in my opinion these units should not be built.” Daley
was careful to couch his objections in a way that made it seem that he was not opposed to integration per se. He noted that
the Nixon administration was resisting efforts to compel usually Republican suburbs to accept low and moderate-income housing
but at the same time it was “pursuing the exact opposite policy in the cities.” It was wrong, Daley contended, for Chicago
to have to bear the whole burden of integrated public housing. He also pointed out that Judge Austin’s ruling would prevent
the building of public housing in black neighborhoods “where this kind of housing is most needed and accepted.” It was not
just whites who wanted public housing in black areas, Daley said. “Some communities have requested this kind of low rise public
housing, but under the court order their requests have been denied.”
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The reaction to the CHA plan to build in white neighborhoods was immediate. Thomas Sutton, a suburban attorney leading the
opposition inside the city, told a meeting of twenty-five homeowner associations that Judge Austin’s orders would never be
allowed to take effect. “If the construction really starts, we’ll take action of some sort, and not letters or petitions,”
he said. “In the meantime, we’ll put pressure on the aldermen to stop it. If they don’t, we’ll run them out of town on a rail.”
At the same time, individual neighborhoods were maneuvering to get themselves off the list. Alderman Hoellen, one of only
two remaining council Republicans, contended that a site chosen by the CHA in his Northwest Side ward had already been selected
by the YMCA for a building expansion, which he viewed as more important to the community. “I think [the CHA] got the ouija
board out and tried to strew some of the devil’s brew, and where it fell, that’s where they put a public housing project,”
he said. But civil rights advocates supported the CHA proposal and urged that it be implemented quickly. “This is what Chicago
has needed for a long time,” Hyde Park alderman Despres said. “The city has to bring an end to the pattern of segregation
and the ever-growing ghetto so every neighborhood has a chance to survive.” A black newspaper columnist asked what happened
to Daley’s belief in law and order, noting that “Mayor Daley forgot to stress compliance with the law when he so forcefully
denounced our federal court’s ruling on public housing integration.”
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Daley was eager to prevent the CHA proposal from injecting racial issues into the upcoming mayoral election. Friedman was
already campaigning hard in black and independent wards, and public housing was an important part of his platform. As he had
seen in the 1963 mayoral race, open housing questions had the potential to set the machine’s black and white constituencies
against each other. In his statement about the proposal, Daley strained to argue that the public housing dispute was not racial
in nature. “Those who claim that public housing is solely an issue of race ignore the experience of communities, black and
white, which have rejected public housing because of economic reasons,” he said. “Many communities have and will accept low
income families, black and white, where they will not accept public housing.” But Friedman argued it was about race, and charged
Daley with “race-baiting Chicagoans with the low-income housing question.” Friedman tried to make an issue of Daley’s attempt
to put off the release of the sites until after the election — without himself coming out in favor of integrated public housing.
Daley was “the one who picked the 275 low-income housing sites, along with Charlie Swibel, Chicago Housing Authority director,
that he is now repudiating,” Friedman charged. “He is lying to whites and blacks alike. He’s fighting for time until the election
is over with and if he wins then he is going to go ahead and okay those sites. He had the list of sites locked up in his desk
drawer for over a year, but he didn’t have the guts to tell the people in the neighborhoods targeted for the project.” Friedman
also contended that the federal Model Cities Program was withholding the release of $55 million in federal Model Cities grants
for Chicago because the city did not have an acceptable housing plan. Still, Friedman was as eager as Daley to dodge the difficult
questions. He said he would have to poll Chicago’s citizens, both black and white, before deciding where he stood on the CHA
proposal.
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Daley used the release of the CHA plan to continue to talk about a position on open housing he had promoted since the 1966
housing summit: that the suburbs should have to accept some of the burden. “Those who occupy public housing, through no fault
of their own, require many local governmental services and the cost of providing them should not be borne disproportionately
by the taxpayers of Chicago,” he said. “The entire metropolitan area must share in the responsibility for providing housing
for all income groups.” Daley was clearly advocating public housing in the suburbs in an attempt to minimize the amount that
ended up being built in Chicago’s white neighborhoods. In making his case, however, he used an argument liberals would make
years later: that poor blacks would be better off in the suburbs, where economic opportunities were greater. He cited a Harvard
University study of Cook County estimating that between 1962 and 1968, 30,000 jobs would have been open to low income workers
in the suburbs if housing had been available for them nearby. In fact, Daley was right. The suburbs were a better place for
new public housing than white neighborhoods in the city, which were older, poorer, and closer to the ghetto, and therefore
more likely to “tip.” But the politically powerful Republican suburbs did not want any public housing, and as Daley pointed
out, they had an ally in the Nixon administration.

Though he could not stop the federal courts from ordering the list of sites released before the election, Daley could bottle
it up in the City Council. As protesters packed the galleries with signs like “Austin belongs in a home,” the council voted
33–6 to send the siting proposal to the Rules Committee, which, one editorial page noted at the time, “doubles as a cemetery
for legislation Daley doesn’t want.” The council had no further meetings scheduled before the mayoral election. The liberal
Catholic Interracial Council called the City Council’s decision to send the proposal to committee a racist act, but Daley
was rid of the issue until after the election.
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Despite Friedman’s energetic attempts to forge an anti-machine coalition, Daley seemed to be gliding to victory. It was an
indication of the machine’s continued strength that Daley and his running mates submitted 975,000 nominating signatures to
get on the ballot — a remarkable two-thirds of all registered voters in the city.
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Daley continued to emphasize the progress the city had made in new building and infrastructure during his time in office.
In early January, he presided over the opening of the new McCormick Place, almost exactly four years after the first one burned
down. “This is the ‘I Will’ spirit of Chicago,” Daley said, invoking the city motto. As he did in every election, Daley reached
out to the machine’s core interest groups — the ward organizations, the ethnic groups, and organized labor. A labor dinner
at the new McCormick Place attracted 10,158 union members, each of whom paid $15 to eat filet mignon with Daley. The dinner’s
sponsors boasted that it was the largest dinner ever held in a single room. Daley made his entrance, walking down a red carpet,
preceded by the Shannon Rovers and accompanied by William Lee, president of the Chicago AFL-CIO. As Daley walked through the
hall, each row of tables burst into a wave of applause. Lee introduced Daley as “the greatest mayor in the greatest city of
America.” After a full minute of applause, Daley pledged his support to labor, calling for less welfare and more employment.
“It appears to me,” he said as he looked out over 125 yards of tables, “that there is no better way to rescue able-bodied,
employable but unemployed men from their present eroding idleness, which slowly kills morale and initiative, destroys the
spirit and affects the offspring, than to give meaningful work at decent wages.”
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In this election, like every past one, Daley used Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade as his own personal campaign rally.
He marched up front with men sporting huge white buttons with a green shamrock and “Daley ’71” written on them. The day after
the parade, Daley addressed 1,100 precinct captains at the Sherman House, telling them that on April 6 he expected them to
help him obtain “the greatest majority ever cast.” A sign on the wall read: “Work, Work, Work.” It was apparent this time,
however, that the usually indefatigable campaigner was starting to slow down. Daley turned most of the actual campaigning
over to machine surrogates, not making the rounds of the ward rallies the way he had in his past races. In the final days
of the campaign, while Friedman set out on a forty-hour last-minute sprint for votes, Daley confined his activities to one
rally held by the Women’s Auxiliary of the South Side 6th Ward Regular Democratic Organization.
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Within an hour of the polls closing on election night, Daley had enough reports from his ward committeemen to know that he
had won the race handily. The sixty-eight-year-old Daley ambled out to the Old Chicago Room of the Sherman House a few hours
later to tell the crowd of his victory. Daley’s margin was impressive: he had 735,787 votes to Friedman’s 318,059, or 70 percent
of the vote. He carried forty-eight of the city’s fifty wards, losing only two liberal white wards — the 5th Ward, containing
University of Chicago– Hyde Park, and the 43rd Ward along the lakefront on the North Side. Once again, he had managed to hold
on to the support of both blacks and anti-integrationist whites. Judge Austin’s ruling, in the end, probably helped Daley
with white voters by reminding them that they needed him in office, because he could be trusted to continue to hold the line
on public housing. At the same time, Daley ran relatively well among black voters. Friedman was hurt among blacks by his affiliation
with the Republican Party, and by his unwillingness to come out strongly for integration. But he insisted that the machine’s
grip on the black wards was to blame for his poor showing. “He had the black vote in his hip pocket,” Friedman said of Daley.
“He gave out morsels — jobs and the like — and precinct captains put out the word that welfare checks would be stopped if
voters voted for me. I had a lot of black friends who were beholden to Daley and I did not expect them to support me.”
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