by Adam Cohen
In large part because of Mayor Kelly’s efforts, Chicago blacks began to defect to the Democratic Party slightly ahead of the national trend. In 1934, the Democratic machine embarked on a mission of virtual lèse majesté, challenging the South Side’s legendary three-term Republican congressman, Oscar DePriest. The first black elected to Congress since 1901, DePriest was a heroic figure to blacks across the country. He battled tirelessly against segregation and in support of black institutions such as Howard University. But for all of DePriest’s popularity and good works, it was becoming increasingly hard to be a black Republican. It also hurt him that he was a loyal party man, who regularly voted against the New Deal programs that were so popular with his constituents. In an outcome that marked a sea change in the city’s politics, a black Democrat, Arthur Mitchell, took DePriest’s seat. Any doubts that the movement toward the Democrats was real were dispelled the following year when Kelly ran for reelection. Days before the voting, black Republicans turned out for a massive pro-Kelly rally in Congressional Hall. “Lincoln is dead,” a former Republican alderman told the crowd. “You don’t need no ghost from the grave to tell you what to do when you go to the polls Tuesday.” The Democratic ticket, with Kelly at the top, swept the black South Side, taking more than 80 percent of the vote. 16
This political realignment led to the birth of a remarkable political organization: the black submachine. This new force in Chicago politics was the product of two contrary instincts on race. The Kelly-Nash machine believed firmly in Cermak’s pragmatic vision of serving as a “house for all peoples.” But at the same time, the reality was that Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s was not prepared for a truly integrated political machine. Chicago was not as racially divided as the Jim Crow South, but in many ways it came close. As late as 1946, a restaurant that served customers of both races on an equal basis was so rare that one was given an award by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations. Marshall Field, the prominent downtown department store, had a policy against hiring black employees until 1953. The black submachine balanced these competing interests in inclusion and separation. It was a fully functioning part of the larger Chicago Democratic machine, delivering votes for the machine ticket and receiving political patronage in return. But it was also a world apart, headed by its own black political boss, who supervised legions of black ward committeemen, precinct captains, and election-day workers — and who reported to the boss of the citywide white machine. 17
The first and only boss of the black submachine was William Levi Dawson. Dawson was born in Albany, Georgia, on April 26, 1886, a son of the segregated South and grandson of a slave. Dawson’s father, a barber, had a sister who was raped by a white man. When Dawson’s father retaliated against the man, the family was forced to leave Georgia. Dawson attended Fisk University, graduating in 1909 magna cum laude. During the summers, he earned his tuition and board by working as a bellhop and porter in Chicago, at the train station and at the old South Side Chicago Beach Hotel. After college, Dawson served in World War I with the 365th Infantry in France, where he was wounded and gassed during the Meuse-Argonne campaign. After the war, he returned to Chicago, where he attended law school. He joined the bar in 1920 and soon began practicing law. 18
Dawson was, in physical terms, an unprepossessing man. He had a wooden leg and a pencil-thin mustache, and he looked enough like a political hack to seem right at home behind a battered desk in the Near South Side’s 2nd Ward political office. But Dawson was far more intelligent and widely read than most of the Chicago machine politicians he spent his life working among. He could recite classical poetry from memory, and he was a jazz aficionado whose collection of Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington albums was among the finest on the South Side. But Dawson’s true genius lay in his mastery of human nature. “God gave me the key to understand men and to know them,” Dawson once said. “If you learn how to handle men ... you can get what you want.” 19 As far as Dawson rose — and he would for years be the nation’s most powerful black elected official — he never lost touch with the common man. Dawson spoke the language of the black South Side, most of whose residents had made the same journey he had up from the rural South. “Walk along, little children,” Dawson used to say when he wrapped up a speech at his headquarters on Indiana Avenue, “and don’t get weary, ’cause there’s a big camp meeting at the end of the road.” 20
Dawson began his political career as a Republican. In the days when the Republican Party still controlled Chicago’s black wards, Dawson started out as a precinct aide, moved to the 2nd Ward, and in 1933 was elected alderman with the backing of the powerful Congressman DePriest. Dawson would have had a bright future as a Republican, except that during the New Deal all of his constituents were becoming Democrats. Dawson tried, at first, to resist the tide. He ran for Congress as a Republican in 1938, but despite campaign literature that pleaded with voters to “Vote the Man — Not the Party,” Democrat Arthur Mitchell held on to the seat. Dawson’s political future was mapped out for him the following year when a Democratic lawyer took his aldermanic seat away. Unable to beat the Democrats, Dawson decided to join them. 21
Just as Dawson was preparing to jump ship, Kelly and Nash were looking for established black leaders to represent the machine in the city’s black wards. The need was particularly dire in Dawson’s own 2nd Ward. The Democratic ward committeeman for the 2nd Ward was a white man who was loathed by his black constituents. It was hard to blame blacks for being dissatisfied with him: when meeting with constituents at the ward office, he talked to every white in the room first, and then held what he called “colored folks hour” for the blacks who remained. He also made a point of giving his most lucrative patronage positions to whites who lived outside the ward. 22 Kelly and Nash were worried that blacks would shift back to the Republican Party or, more dangerous still, start their own Democratic organization. Before the end of the year, they offered the position of Democratic 2nd Ward committeeman to Dawson, who eagerly accepted. 23
With this new lease on political life, Dawson immediately set to work consolidating his power. His biggest obstacle was that he held only one of the two major political positions in the ward — Alderman Earl Dickerson had the other. Kelly and Nash were happy to have the two men serve as coleaders of the ward, but Dawson regarded that arrangement as intolerable. He schemed to undermine Dickerson every way he could think of, including “forgetting” to invite his rival to important meetings. But Dawson’s biggest advantage in this intra-ward battle was that Dickerson was serving as president of the Chicago Urban League and had begun speaking out in favor of civil rights. Though Kelly was relatively supportive on the issue of racial discrimination, there was no room in the Democratic machine for a politician who put civil rights ahead of loyalty to the organization. Dickerson’s worst run-in with the machine leadership came when he opposed a bill in the City Council favored by Mayor Kelly, because it would not have barred unions from discriminating on the basis of race. Dawson, who steered clear of the race question, rose in the machine’s estimation as Dickerson fell. In 1942, Congressman Mitchell decided not to run for reelection, and both Dawson and Dickerson wanted his seat. Not surprisingly, the machine backed the compliant Dawson over the “race man” Dickerson, and Dawson won the Democratic primary handily. Dawson still had a tough race against a Republican, and Dickerson’s support may have made the difference. Dawson had promised Dickerson that, in return, he would back him for reelection. But once Dawson was elected to Congress, he quietly brought a machine ally named William Harvey down to City Hall to seek Mayor Kelly’s blessing. With the backing of Kelly and the machine, Harvey defeated the double-crossed Dickerson and put the 2nd Ward aldermanic seat firmly under Dawson’s control. 24
With his home ward now secure, Dawson began to turn his attention to neighboring wards that were in racial transition. In these, the racial change usually came to the machine hierarchy from the bottom up. White ward committeemen generally kept their jobs, but they
added more and more black precinct captains, in some cases creating a virtual mini–black submachine at the ward level. In the Near South Side 6th Ward, the longtime white ward committeeman adapted to the racial transition by segregating his precinct captains along racial lines and designating a black man named Emett Paige to serve as de facto boss over the black precinct captains. “Paige would call the black precincts together, sort of herded them together, and anything of reference to blacks getting jobs, problems of the blacks, would be referred to ‘Doc’ Paige,” recalled one machine member. “[H]e was a big, talkative black guy with a lot of personality — hail-fellow-well-met, a person who could be used to corral the blacks. It was a means whereby [the white ward committeeman] didn’t have to be bothered by the blacks. He’d say, ‘Go see Doc Paige, whatever you want.’” This system worked while the wards were still racially mixed, but as they became almost all black, the machine began to look for black ward committeemen to lead them. Dawson used his influence with the machine leadership to get his allies appointed as ward committeemen. In the 3rd Ward, Dawson persuaded Nash to appoint an old army buddy as ward committeeman. And Dawson had his eye on several other wards that were ripe for takeover, his ultimate goal being to build an empire that encompassed the entire black South Side. 25
The question of where Daley’s patron, “Big Joe” McDonough, would fit into the new Kelly-Nash Democratic machine was never fully answered. McDonough died unexpectedly on April 25, 1934, at the age of forty-five. Even his obituary candidly conceded that he was “no angel,” but McDonough was sincerely mourned, especially in Bridgeport. A well-attended requiem Mass was held at Nativity of Our Lord, and newspapers printed the names of more than one hundred federal, state, and city officials who had been named honorary pallbearers. Daley had the greater honor — and far more onerous responsibility — of serving as one of McDonough’s eight “active pallbearers.” He and the other seven undertook the task of hoisting McDonough’s three-hundred-pound body toward its eternal reward. Once McDonough’s body was interred, Daley’s future was in considerable doubt. The death of one man had left him deprived of a ward committeeman, alderman, employer, and political mentor.26
The upside to the death of a machine politician was that it created vacancies to fill. McDonough’s departure opened up three positions for which Daley could reasonably put in a bid. Daley was more than qualified to move up to county treasurer, since he had already been doing the job in everything but name. But he lacked the prominence and political connections to get a position of that magnitude. Nash ended up selecting his own cousin, a criminal lawyer who represented the likes of Al Capone, to succeed McDonough. Daley was kept on, however, as deputy. Daley also failed to get the machine’s nod for the aldermanic seat McDonough had held on to when he was elected county treasurer. The machine summoned a four-term congressman, an alumnus of the Hamburg Athletic Club, who returned from Washington willingly, on the self-evident principle that the chance to be a Chicago alderman — and to partake of the patronage and back-room deal making that came with the position — was a step up from Congress. The final position McDonough left behind, ward committeeman for the 11th Ward, was the most logical one for Daley. The new ward committeeman would be selected from among the 11th Ward precinct captains, and in his eleven years of service Daley had been as hardworking and ambitious as any. But the machine selected Hugh “Babe” Connelly, a saloonkeeper and bookie eleven years older than Daley, to be the next ward committeeman. 27
As it turned out, the former congressman did not remain 11th Ward alderman for long. Even in the hard-drinking ranks of Bridgeport’s Irish politicians, he had stood out. Within a year of his return from Washington, his health gave out and he was dead at the age of forty-eight. Responsibility for filling the vacancy fell to the ward committeeman, and Connelly followed a revered Chicago tradition when he appointed himself. Daley kept his disappointment to himself, and proceeded to forge a close alliance with the increasingly powerful Connelly. By virtue of his ties to Connelly and his substantial government service, Daley was regarded as someone with a bright future, and a leading contender for the next vacancy to open up. Daley continued to toil away at the county treasurer’s office while he waited. His break came soon enough, with another 11th Ward death. One of the three state representatives who represented Bridgeport in Springfield died on October 19, 1936, just fifteen days before the 1936 elections. A Republican, he ran unopposed as part of a not uncommon deal between 11th Ward Democrats and Republicans that sent two Democrats and one Republican to the legislature from the district. To much of Bridgeport, the most interesting aspect of his passing was that he had summoned a priest to his deathbed and married his secretary of twenty years, who then inherited hundreds of thousands of dollars from him. But to Daley, what mattered was that the death had left a Bridgeport legislative seat in an unusual state of limbo. The Republicans tried to substitute another candidate, but the Democratic-controlled state election board ruled that it was too late to reprint the ballots. As a result, neither party was officially fielding a candidate, and the election would have to be decided by write-in votes. 28
Daley quickly announced his candidacy and rallied the support he had been building up in Bridgeport for years. Babe Connelly, the ward committeeman, supported Daley and put the 11th Ward Democratic Organization to work for him. Daley also enlisted his old Hamburg Athletic Club gang to turn out voters. Daley’s well-organized campaign was a success — he defeated his Republican-supported opponent. Because the vacancy on the ballot was a Republican one, Daley had to be written in as a Republican, and he therefore won his first elected position as a Republican. When Daley arrived in Springfield, legislative rules required him to sit on the Republican side of the aisle. It was only after his friend and fellow legislator Benjamin Adamowski made a motion to let Daley sit as a Democrat that he was allowed to cross over and rejoin his party.
The Springfield that awaited Daley in 1936 was a town of surprising decadence. Nestled among the wheat fields and grain silos of central Illinois was a state capital culture that revolved around good-time women, free-flowing liquor, and lobbyists who carried wads of cash into dinner meetings with legislators. Many young legislators quickly found themselves caught up in the city’s corrupting ways. “In Springfield you could tell real fast which men were there for girls, games and graft,” Adamowski would say later. Daley was not one of them. He was, as even his worst enemies would readily concede, straitlaced when it came to sex and alcohol. During Daley’s years in Springfield, he spent much of his time back in Chicago, where he and Sis were building a family. Their first child, Patricia, was born on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1937. In 1939, after the birth of a second daughter, Mary Carol, the Daleys built a seven-room bungalow at 3536 South Lowe — the same block Daley had been born on. Other children came in quick succession: Eleanor, Richard, Michael, John, and William, who was born in 1949. Daley was devoted to Sis, and had low regard for the many politicians he saw all around him breaking their marital vows or drinking heavily. Later, when Daley was mayor, the story was told of a Daley administrator who was getting drunk one night when he received a phone call at the bar. “This is Mayor Daley. Your wife is rather upset. I think you better get home,” said the voice at the other end. “I don’t know how he knew where I was,” the hapless appointee said later. “But, of course, I went home right away.” 29
Nor was Daley tempted by the special-interest money that flowed so freely. In those days, the legislative calendar was larded with “fetcher” bills. These were bills drafted for the express purpose of posing financial damage to any of the well-funded special interests that sent lobbyists to Springfield. When a fetcher bill was introduced, a little ritual was enacted: lobbyists duly showed up with cash-filled envelopes which they handed out to legislators, and the bill mysteriously disappeared. But cash-filled envelopes did little for Daley. It was clear even at this early stage of his career that Daley was driven to pursue power, not money. Still, if Daley did not perso
nally get caught up in the corruption of the capital, he felt no obligation to speak out against it. “Daley’s moral code was emerging” in Spring-field, the newspaper columnist and Daley critic Mike Royko would later say. “Thou shalt not steal, but thou shalt not blow the whistle on anybody who does.” 30
Daley conceived of his role in Springfield as a simple one: following the orders of the Democratic machine back in Chicago. As he had in every previous job, Daley relied on “hard work, a disposition to do what he was told, and a willingness to dive into the most mundane details of governance to set himself apart.” While less serious lawmakers crammed into the saloons and cadged drinks off lobbyists, Daley holed up with draft bills and budget documents. “Most of the time he kept to himself, stayed in his hotel room, and worked hard,” Adamowski recalled. Along with Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, another state senator from Chicago, Daley and Adamowski used to walk up and down Springfield talking endlessly about legislative business. The topic was frequently Daley’s greatest preoccupation, finance. “Dick Daley knew more about budgets than anyone else,” recalled one representative. “Even as a first-termer, people went to him to ask questions about the budget.” 31
As a legislator, Daley had no trouble finding ways to make himself useful to Mayor Kelly and the Democratic machine. Chicago always had a great deal at stake in Springfield. With the depression raging, Kelly’s agenda consisted chiefly of New Deal–style legislation to advance the economic interests of his poor and working-class constituents. By doing the machine’s bidding, Daley ended up being something of a progressive force in the capital. He introduced bills to replace the state’s sales tax, which fell disproportionately on the poor, with individual and corporate income taxes. Despite Daley’s best efforts, the bill failed. Daley was also an early supporter of the school lunch program, and backed legislation to make it more difficult for people to be evicted from their homes. And he pushed for a law to make it easier for Chicago city government to take over and improve substandard properties. “One building without tenants, with the windows out, generally run down, can blight an entire block or neighborhood,” Daley said in support of the bill. “This bill is a forerunner to rebuilding the blighted areas of Chicago and to stop the formation of new blighted areas.” Daley could claim one major achievement during his time in the legislature: he shepherded through the law that created the Chicago Transit Authority out of Chicago’s bankrupt Chicago Surface Lines and the Chicago Rapid Transit System. Daley was a machine operative during his years in Springfield, but an unusually effective one. It was perhaps the highest praise he could aspire to when a political columnist called Daley “probably the best exhibit of the hard-working, decent, honest organization politician that the Kelly machine can produce.” 32
