American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  If white Chicago as a whole turned a cold shoulder to the new black arrivals, Daley’s Irish kinsmen were particularly unwelcoming. The Irish and blacks had much in common. Ireland’s many years of domination at the hands of the British resembled, if not slavery, then certainly southern sharecropping — with Irish farmers working the land and sending rent to absentee landlords in England. The Irish were dominated, like southern blacks, through violence, and lost many of the same civil rights: to vote, to serve on juries, and to marry outside their group. Indeed, after Cromwell’s bloody invasion in the mid-1600s, not only were Irish-Catholics massacred in large numbers, but several thousand were sent in chains to the West Indies, where they were sold into slavery. But these similar histories of oppression did not bring Chicago’s Irish and blacks together. Much of the early difficulty stemmed from rivalry between two groups relegated to the lowest levels of the social order. As early as 1864, a mob of four hundred Irish dockworkers went on a bloody rampage against a dozen blacks they regarded as taking jobs from unemployed Irishmen. The Chicago Tribune — whose WASP management had little affection for Irish-Catholics — argued that this kind of anti-black violence was particularly the province of Irish-Americans. “The Germans never mob colored men from working for whoever may employ them,” the Tribune declared. “The English, the Scotch, the French, the Scandinavians, never molest peaceable black people. Americans never think of doing such a thing. No other nationality consider themselves ‘degraded’ by seeing blacks earning their own living by labor.” 36

  Nor was the Catholic Church a force for racial tolerance during these tense times. The Church had more reason to fear the black influx than other white institutions. Unlike some faiths, Catholicism is firmly rooted in geography: Catholics’ relationship to their Church is determined by the parish in which they reside. Catholics “ascribe sacramental qualities to the neighborhood,” one historian has explained, “with the cross on top of the church and the bells ringing each day before Mass as visual and aural reminders of the sacred.” Protestants and Jews who saw blacks moving into their neighborhoods could move to the suburbs, taking their houses of worship with them or joining new ones when they settled in. But for Catholics, the ties to the land were greater, and the threat of losing their parish more deeply felt. “[E]verything they have been taught to value, as Catholics and Americans, is perceived as at risk,” wrote a reporter in Cicero, describing the racial siege felt by a parish there. “The churches and schools they built would become empty, the neighborhood priests, if any were left, would become missionaries. . . .” In 1917, the same year the Chicago Real Estate Board endorsed new steps to preserve racial segregation, Chicago’s Archbishop George Mundelein declared that Saint Monica’s Parish would henceforth be reserved for the city’s black Catholics. Since Mundelein had in the past opposed “national” parishes on principle, it seemed clear that his intention was to keep the races separate within the Church. 37

  The demographic pressures kept mounting as trainload after train-load of blacks arrived from the South — and it was not clear how much longer these new migrants could be squeezed into the borders of the overcrowded Black Belt. The end of World War I had brought the return of black soldiers, many of whom were less willing to accept racial discrimination back home after they had risked their lives for their country. And Chicago had just reelected William Thompson, a mayor many whites felt they could not trust to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. Republican Thompson’s close ties to the black community, and his record number of black appointees, had led resentful whites to dub his City Hall “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The racial backlash growing in white neighborhoods was palpable, and word began to spread in the black community that whites were plotting some kind of bloody attack to re-assert their control of the city — perhaps even an invasion of the Black Belt designed to drive blacks out of Chicago. 38

  On July 27, 1919, these tensions exploded when six black teenagers went swimming in the wrong part of Lake Michigan. Young Eugene Williams drifted too close to a “white” beach on the South Side, and drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a white man standing on the shore. False rumors spread rapidly through both the white and black communities. Blacks reported that a policeman had held a gun on a black crowd while whites threw stones; whites spread word that it was a white swimmer who had drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a black. Five days of bloody riots ensued, from July 27 to July 31, followed by another week of intermittent violence. White gangs roamed the South Side, attacking blacks indiscriminately, and whites drove through the Black Belt shooting at blacks out of car windows. Black gangs wandered through black neighborhoods, beating up white merchants. In the end, it took the state militia and a driving rainstorm to bring about a tense peace. But before the hostilities had died down, 23 blacks and 15 whites had been killed, and another 537 injured, two-thirds of them black. 39

  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’ hou
se 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 as
sistant, 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

  The Chicago machine that Daley signed on with was a remarkable political organization. It was formally the Cook County Democratic Organization, reflecting its true sphere of influence — beyond the Chicago city limits and into the surrounding suburban ring, which made up the rest of Cook County. At the top of the machine was the county chairman, or party boss, who was elected by ward committeemen from the city’s fifty wards, along with a smaller number of committeemen from the suburban townships. The machine was as rigidly hierarchical as the Catholic Church that most of its members belonged to. The county chairman presided like a secular cardinal, and beneath him were ward committeemen — the political equivalent of parish priests — who controlled their own geographical realms. Each of the fifty wards had its own Democratic ward organization, with its own headquarters, budget, slate of candidates, and army of workers. Daley was one of more than three thousand precinct captains, spread out across the fifty city wards, who were responsible for the machine’s performance at the block level. Like the Catholic Church, the machine offered its members not just a structure, but a worldview and a moral code. One academic who studied the Chicago machine concluded that it was guided by what he called the “regular ethic.” Among the tenets of the regular Democrat’s creed: (1) Be faithful to those above you in the hierarchy, and repay those who are faithful to you; (2) Back the whole machine slate, not individual candidates or programs; (3) Be respectful of elected officials and party leaders; (4) Never be ashamed of the party, and defend it proudly; (5) Don’t ask questions; (6) Stay on your own turf, and keep out of conflicts that don’t concern you; (7) Never be first, since innovation brings with it risk; and (8) Don’t get caught. Another scholar of Chicago politics summed up the machine ethic more concisely in a book title: Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers. 48