Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  FOUR

  The Boss and the Black Belt

  If, as historian Arnold Hirsch has claimed, the 1940s was an “era of hidden violence” along Chicago’s color line, the race issue was clearly out of the closet by the early 1950s.1 In fact, postwar Chicago-style racism made its dramatic worldwide debut in July 1951, when thousands of angry whites took to the streets in the suburb of Cicero to protest the settlement of a single black family there, overwhelming the town’s police force and causing Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson to send in National Guard troops. Lying at the city’s eastern limits, about seven miles away from the Loop, this tough, working-class town, which had once served as the Capone syndicate’s base of operations, was not exactly Chicago. But it was close enough, and news of Chicago racism hit international newswires. More locally, the Cicero riot was something of a cause célèbre that witnessed several hundred and perhaps thousands of young men from Chicago pouring into the neighboring town in cars and on city buses to lend a hand to what one racist organization referred to as “the brave youth of Cicero.”2 Arnold Hirsch was the first historian to examine the arrest lists from the several nights of rioting in order to explain the motives of those who took to the streets in a frenzy of racial hatred. The Cicero rioters, he concluded, were largely residents of the neighborhood trying to protect their community from a racial invasion that they believed would destroy the very fabric of their lives. Yet Hirsch’s analysis overlooks something very important that was transpiring in Cicero: the arrest records for the final few nights suggest that once news of the demonstration spread, it changed from a territorially based action to a much broader rally against integration that pulled in participants from West Side Chicago neighborhoods—some a considerable distance away from the scene at 6139 West 19th Street in Cicero.3 The Cicero riot revealed that the more “hidden violence” of the previous decade—the hit-and-run vandalism and nighttime raids, which, due to pressure from the mayor’s office, had been kept off the front pages of the city’s dailies—was by the end of the 1940s spreading throughout the city. Even though the events of Cicero were eye-opening for those outside Chicago, working-class ethnics and their black neighbors residing anywhere near the color line understood very well that this kind of thing was business as usual. Nonetheless, while African Americans in Chicago certainly did not lack events to reveal to them the racism they faced in their daily lives, the widespread media coverage given to the Cicero riot could only have emboldened the city’s black leadership.

  FIGURE 7. Young rioters brazenly confronting police in Cicero in July 1951. Photo from Ullstein Bild via Getty Images.

  Moreover, there were other sources of black discontentment simmering in Chicago around this time. Mayor Kennelly’s zeal for reform had begun to arouse cries of racial injustice in William Dawson’s five black-majority wards. Although Dawson’s political submachine had been critical to Kennelly’s election in 1947, just as it had for Kelly in the two previous mayoral elections, the mayor began to break the unwritten rule that Dawson and his underling ward bosses should be given free rein over the illicit operations that had created a parallel underground economy in black Chicago. Two rackets in particular, policy wheels and jitney cabs, headlined Kennelly’s crusade. Under the system Kennelly had inherited from his predecessor, the police were supposed to give a wink and then close their eyes to such activities, both of which provided thousands of jobs to ordinary black residents and substantial revenues to the black politicians that protected them. But within months after the election, different police details began making raids on South Side policy operations.

  By the late 1940s, black Chicagoans began to view such actions as constituting racial injustices, especially as police officers proved to be showing much greater dedication in upholding the laws against policy and gypsy cabs than they did in defending the rights of innocent black citizens being attacked by racist mobs. In July 1946, for example, the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations reported several such cases of police negligence, including an officer who refused to arrest two vandals because he was off duty, a policeman asleep at his post, and another who “expressed opposition to guarding residences of Negroes.”4 Especially galling, in this sense, was the crackdown on the jitney cabs, a trade that had developed in the first place because white taxi companies generally refused to serve black neighborhoods. Moreover, the Capone gang had tried repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s to take control of the South Side policy business, leaving Kennelly open to charges that he was backing a takeover of this lucrative source of black wealth by the white syndicates. To make matters worse, the mayor had continuously refused to give any credence to Dawson’s arguments about why a harmless vice like policy should be left alone. “Our people can’t afford to go to race tracks and private clubs,” Dawson reportedly told the mayor, “so they get a little pleasure out of policy.” In an episode that has become legendary in accounts of Dawson’s storied career, the boss of black Chicago refused to talk to Kennelly until just before his reelection bid in 1951, when in a heated backroom meeting, Dawson blasted the mayor: “Who do you think you are? I bring in the votes. I elect you. You are not needed, but the votes are needed. I deliver the votes to you, but you won’t talk to me?”5

  However, if Dawson was voicing complaints that might have helped to fuel the growing sense of racial injustice in black Chicago, one would be mistaken to think of him as a civil rights activist. In his 1960 study Negro Politics, political scientist James Q. Wilson categorized black leaders of the pre–civil rights era as either those who promoted the “status” of the black community or those who fought for its “welfare.” According to this scheme, the status-oriented leaders were the ones supporting objectives that uplifted the race by defending black rights, such as integration and equal educational and employment opportunities, while the welfare-oriented leaders focused on bread-and-butter issues that met the social needs of the black poor.6 To say that Dawson, who was heard on a number of occasions comparing himself to Booker T. Washington, belonged to the latter camp does not adequately describe the situation. Not only did Dawson not fight for status issues, but his very position depended on the failure of those who did. Segregation had made Dawson, and he knew all too well that integration threatened to unmake him. Until 1948, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelley v. Kraemer struck down the use of contracts between homeowners to prohibit sales or rentals to blacks and other perceived racial undesirables in the eyes of white residents, African Americans were largely relegated to the three main community areas that made up the Black Belt. If those championing racial integration were to carry the day, many of the votes underpinning the black submachine would be dispersed throughout the city, thereby deteriorating Dawson’s base and the harvest of votes he could deliver to the Democratic machine. Dawson’s fear of civil rights activism was so pronounced, in fact, that, when serving on the Civil Rights Section of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960, he had tried to persuade the other members of the committee to drop the term civil rights from its name, arguing that the words might “offend our good southern friends.”7

  Yet Dawson could take some consolation in the fact that he did not face his dilemma alone. In fact, the whole Cook County Democratic Party machine depended on Dawson’s ability to deliver votes. Even though by the early 1950s Chicago blacks had not abandoned the party of Lincoln to nearly the same extent that African Americans in the rest of the nation had since the 1936 presidential election, when some 76 percent had cast their vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dawson’s black submachine had nonetheless provided Democratic candidates with Black Belt majorities—albeit somewhat slim ones—that had ensured their victories in the elections of 1939, 1943, 1947, and 1951.8 However, for the Democratic machine, civil rights agitation for integration represented a double-edged sword. Not only did it threaten to undermine the pivotal electoral advantage the Black Belt had been providing, but even more importantly, it held the potential to wreak political havoc in the machine’s whi
te working-class strongholds, causing many families to move to outlying Republican wards and to the suburbs and spreading feelings of animosity among those left behind. For the next few decades, two opposing forces—the black struggle for integration, equality, rights, and power on the one hand and a white reaction that historians have described as “defensive localism” and “reactionary populism” on the other—would shape a treacherous landscape for mayoral politics in the Windy City.9 With the increasingly rights-conscious Black Belt holding the margin of victory, one could not afford to be viewed as soft on questions of racial justice; take too aggressive a stand though, and the fury of the white backlash threatened to make even the strongest of black votes irrelevant.

  As early as 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, these two counterforces of black struggle and white reaction were fighting it out in a small community of steelworkers in the southeast corner of Chicago. In the far-flung neighborhood of South Deering a set of two-story brick buildings constructed around grassy courtyards—the prototypes of the “garden apartment” public housing complexes built in the New Deal era—became, quite by chance, the city’s test-case for racial integration. The affair began around the summer of 1953 when a Chicago Housing Authority official mistakenly granted an apartment in the Trumbull Park Homes project to a light-skinned black woman named Betty Howard. When, just days after moving in, Mrs. Howard was sighted with her darker-skinned husband, residents in the area launched a campaign of terrorism that forced the Howards to board up their windows and wait for police escorts every time they wanted to step outside their home. What amounted to an ongoing race riot continued for over a year, during which time embattled CHA director Elizabeth Wood took on the mob by moving ten other black families into Trumbull.

  In an effort to understand what lay behind the intensity of South Deering racism, the American Civil Liberties Union enlisted a “spy” to hang out at local bars and parks and record the conversations he overheard, a move that unwittingly yielded some compelling documentation of the shadowy, everyday milieu of 1950s white reactionary populism. In the conspiratorial nightmares and daydreams of South Deering residents, we learn from these conversations, powerful Jews pulled the strings of the city’s housing policies in order to promote intermarriage and exploit the real estate market, and it was the handful of Trumbull’s harried black families, not the established white residents, who had the upper hand. “I heard there is an organization of smart niggers that use certain other niggers like this fellow Howard to move into a neighborhood, and this ruins the neighborhood,” one patron at a local bar told the crowd one afternoon, “and then these smart ones with money come in and buy up the property at a low price and then sell to other niggers at a high price.”10 For many of the folks sharing such anxieties over beer and cigarettes, the Brown ruling was not so much about desegregating southern schools as it was about integrating their own neighborhoods. Here was an early glimpse of the now very familiar populist rhetorical style of turning the world upside down—to put “liberals” and minorities on top and average, white, middle-class taxpaying people on the bottom—that infused the conservative ascendancy in the postwar United States from Nixon’s “silent majority” backlash to George W. Bush’s triumphant alliance of neoconservatives and evangelical Christians. The heated barroom conversations of South Deering suggest that this sense of victimization at the hands of liberals was not merely spoon-fed by Republican politicians to their antiliberal constituents; rather, it was elemental to the everyday experience for many working-class whites in the metropolitan United States, and it was an emotion that crystallized most visibly in places where African Americans were mounting spirited challenges to their own victimization.

  By the fall of 1954, the South Deering situation had been the subject of a nationally televised news broadcast and numerous articles in the Chicago Defender, and Elizabeth Wood had been forced out of her post. But Wood’s ouster had done little to recoup the damage Kennelly had sustained over the situation. His failure to adequately protect blacks in Trumbull Park had made him the scourge of black Chicago, and yet his association with the whole affair was hardly reassuring to working-class whites living around the color line. More importantly, both his reform crusade and his falling out with Dawson had made him a persona non grata with the leadership of the Cook County Democratic machine, whose new chairman, Richard J. Daley, began maneuvering behind the scenes to replace him as the machine’s candidate in the upcoming mayoral elections. In fact, not much maneuvering was required to get the job done. As chairman and thus “boss” of the machine, Daley controlled the selection of the “slating committee” responsible for recommending to the Cook County Democratic Central Committee all the candidates to run on the machine’s ticket. Suffice to say that few were surprised when the Central Committee approved the slating committee’s recommendation of Daley for mayor by a vote of 47–1, with Kennelly’s campaign manager casting the lone dissenting vote.

  Few people, if anyone, in the room that day could have sensed the historic significance of their choice. Few could have imagined that Daley would become the quintessential boss, that he would create the nation’s most powerful political machine at a time when reformers were putting machines across the country to rest, that presidents would be indebted to him, and that it would take a heart attack to remove him from office twenty-one years later. Daley, to be sure, was ambitious, but by most accounts, he was hardly a visionary leader, and fortune more than anything else had placed him in a position to become the machine’s mayoral candidate in 1955. Three years earlier a powerful South Side bloc within the party had appeared to have effectively opposed Daley’s bid for party chairman, but in the midst of the selection process, Daley’s leading opponent, Fourteenth Ward alderman Clarence Wagner, had perished in a car accident while on a fishing trip in Minnesota, and Daley prevailed after all.

  Yet Daley’s rapid ascent was not merely a matter of chance, even if chance had played a part. He was the right man for his time and place. Having grown up the son of a sheet-metal worker in a large Irish Catholic family in the working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, where he continued to live after his election, Daley was intimately acquainted with the spirit of defensive localism that was developing across the city’s Bungalow Belt and white working-class neighborhoods. Moreover, Daley was a rhetorical genius, a virtual savant in the art of appealing to the common people with his heavy Chicago accent and straight-talking style, while avoiding any easily discernable position on the issues. This skill had the astonishing effect of enabling a Bridgeport kid who had run with the famously racist Hamburger gang to capture the endorsement of none other than the Chicago Defender, which, in a front-page editorial, opined that he had “taken a firm and laudable stand” on civil rights issues.11 In a hard-fought primary against Kennelly, who decided to try to go it alone after being dumped by the machine, Daley met his opponent’s charges of bossism with classic populist retorts about being a man of the people in a struggle against the “big interests.” But Daley best exhibited his talent for populist platitudes in his campaign against his Republican challenger, Robert Merriam.

  A former Democrat from Chicago’s liberal Fifth Ward, which included the campus of the prestigious University of Chicago and the surrounding Hyde Park neighborhood, home to a constituency that machine politicians referred to contemptuously as “lakefront liberals,” the stately and well-spoken Merriam staked his campaign on the reform spirit sweeping across U.S. cities. But Merriam’s WASP background and his social distance from most Chicagoans played right into Daley’s hands. Faced again with allegations of bossism, Daley swore to voters that he would “follow the training [his] good Irish mother” had given him. “If I am elected,” he added, “I will embrace mercy, love, charity, and walk humbly with God.” Moreover, when pushed on the thorny issue of public housing, Daley pronounced himself a proponent, but when asked where it should b
e built, he replied, “Let’s not be arguing about where it’s located.” Similarly, in contrast to Merriam’s very specific policy positions, Daley spoke repeatedly and vaguely about the need to protect the “neighborhoods”—“the backbone of the city,” as he called them.12 When I walk down the streets of my neighborhood,” he assured his supporters, “I see the streets of every neighborhood.” And sounding the old populist refrain, he promised that under his administration, “The sun will rise over all the Chicago neighborhoods instead of just State Street.”13