by Adam Cohen
The machine began bestowing its own generosity on Daley almost as soon as he arrived in Springfield. On December 10, 1936, the deputy Cook County controller died, and Daley was appointed to fill the vacancy while continuing to serve in the legislature. The new job kept Daley in close touch with Chicago politics during his sojourn in the wilderness of Springfield. It also had a more practical benefit: joining a long line of machine double-dippers, Daley earned another $6,000 a year in salary to spend on his growing family. Within two years, the death of another machine politician helped to advance Daley’s career. When the state senator for the district that included Bridgeport died, the machine tapped Daley to move up to the higher chamber. On February 1, 1938, Daley led a field of nine candidates in the Democratic primary, and in the November general election, he beat his Republican opponent by almost 3 to 1. After three years in the state senate, Daley was elected minority leader, with the support of the body’s large contingent of machine Democrats. Only thirty-eight, he was the youngest party leader in the history of the Illinois Senate. 33
Daley’s legislative agenda consisted of more than just New Deal programs and slum improvement: he spent much of his time promoting the parochial interests of the Kelly-Nash machine. Even in a body that seemed to function only to meet the needs of lobbyists and political operators, Daley stood out for his forthright commitment to the interests of the Chicago machine. One Daley tax reform, which he tried to pass four times, would have allowed Cook County residents to appeal their tax bills directly to the county assessor, rather than proceed through the court system. It might have made appeals simpler for taxpayers, but its greatest beneficiary would have been the ward committeemen and aldermen who could then use their ties to the highly political county assessor’s office to reduce the taxes of their friends and supporters. Daley was also doing the machine’s bidding when he crusaded to revise the state’s divorce laws to make the state’s attorney part of every divorce. The change would have given the state’s attorney’s office a five-dollar fee for every divorce action filed in Cook County, generating revenue and work for an office that was usually filled by the machine and that employed an army of Democratic patronage workers. The machine also looked to Daley for help with electoral issues that came up in Springfield. Daley tried and failed in 1943 to enact a redistricting plan that would have given Cook County representatives majority control in the state legislature. And in 1944, when the Republican-controlled state senate seemed close to passing a resolution condemning a fourth term for Roosevelt, it was Daley who organized the Democrats to block a roll call vote. Daley also served as the designated defender of the machine’s extensive system of political patronage, fighting off Republican attempts to scrutinize the peculiar hiring practices that were rampant in Chicago and Cook County government offices. When the Republicans called for an inquiry into the Civil Service Protective Association of Chicago, Daley fought them to a draw by calling instead for an investigation of the Republican-run state civil service agency. 34
Daley’s years in Springfield continued the two constants in his political rise: learning about the minute workings of government, and ingratiating himself to the machine. It also gave him an opportunity to hone his political skills, teaching him how to build coalitions, field requests from lobbyists and constituents, and — not least — handle reporters. Not long after Daley arrived in Springfield, the Chicago Tribune ran a small story about the Cook County Board agreeing to pay a ten-dollar bounty to two hunters who had killed wolves inside the county limits. The chairman of the wolf bounty committee said the pelts should be examined, since the county had once been accused of paying a wolf bounty on five police dogs. “Having served with the state legislature last year,” Daley was quoted in the paper as responding, “I consider myself an authority on wolves. I will certify that the pelts on which we are paying belonged to two timber wolves.” It was a good line, but not one calculated to ingratiate himself with his Springfield colleagues. Daley wrote to the newspaper the following day “emphatically” denying that he had made the statement attributed to him, and demanding a retraction. The paper does not appear to have retracted the story, but Daley learned a lasting lesson about the perils of talking too freely to the press. 35
Federally funded public housing is a product of the early days of the New Deal. During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s breakneck First Hundred Days in 1933, Congress enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act, which laid the groundwork for a public housing program. The act authorized the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration to buy and condemn property, and to build housing on it. Public housing was sold to a skeptical Congress by emphasizing its most conservative aspects: that it would clear slums and create work for unemployed members of the building trades. But to its creators, the public housing program was about something more idealistic. It was intended to be “more than a means of providing shelter for those unable to pay a fair, or economic, rent,” one New Dealer wrote. “It is a visible proof that this is a country which believes in the dignity of all human beings, a living testimonial to the America for which Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Roosevelt dreamed and fought.” The PWA started off with a program of fifty-one “demonstration projects” to be built around the country at a cost of $134 million. 36
No part of the country was more desperately in need of this new federal housing than Chicago. The housing available to poor Chicagoans during the Great Depression rivaled any city’s in scarcity, dilapidation, and dangerousness. Chicago’s housing inadequacies traced back to the Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed 17,000 buildings — one-third of the city’s total — and made 100,000 people homeless. The City Council responded to the devastation by passing a law permitting the construction of temporary wooden structures as emergency housing. But the emergency was never declared to have ended, and this kind of shoddy housing continued to be common well into the 1900s. Chicago’s grim housing situation was made considerably worse by the depression. The city’s population was growing rapidly, with much of the growth coming in the form of an influx of displaced farmworkers and rural families. But just when the need was greatest, new housing construction had all but ground to a halt. In 1933, the worst year of all, only twenty-one new apartment units were built in the entire city. At the same time, with more than 700,000 Chicagoans out of work and one-third of workers earning $1,000 or less, much of the city’s population was facing eviction from their private-market apartments. Depression-era Chicago was littered with “Hoovervilles” and “Hobovilles,” squalid outposts that the homeless fashioned out of scrap lumber and tar paper. Hard times had also introduced a new form of civil disturbance, the eviction riot, in which friends and neighbors attempted forcibly to prevent bailiffs from serving eviction papers. In one heated eviction riot on the South Side, three demonstrators were killed when police squared off against a crowd of 2,000 trying to stop an African-American family from being removed from its home. Recognizing its desperate straits, the Roosevelt administration was generous to Chicago when the time came to apportion the first round of public housing. Of the first fifty-one demonstration projects built by the PWA, it was decided that Chicago would get three: Julia C. Lathrop Homes on the North Side, Trumbull Park Homes on the Far South Side, and Jane Addams Homes on the West Side. 37
With Roosevelt’s support, Congress enacted the United States Housing Act of 1937, which authorized the United States Housing Authority to underwrite construction and maintenance of public housing. The new law also called for local governments to establish their own housing authorities to manage public housing projects and plan new ones. Cities around the country reacted to the program — and to the promise of large federal subsidies — with enthusiasm. 38
The Chicago Housing Authority was established in 1937, and to run it Mayor Kelly appointed a housing activist named Elizabeth Wood. Wood was an unusual government bureaucrat. She had been born in Nara, Japan, the daughter of a Christian lay missionary. When she was five, her family came back to Amer
ica because of her father’s failing eyesight. On their return, he became a professor of natural history at Illinois Wesleyan University. Wood’s parents could not afford to send her away for college. “We were just plain poor,” she once recalled. So she enrolled at Illinois Wesleyan as a biology major, taking some of her father’s classes. She worked a series of odd jobs — teaching violin for fifty cents a lesson, doing bacteriological testing for a milk company — to pay for a senior year at the University of Michigan. Wood went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in rhetoric at the University of Michigan, and took a position teaching English at Vassar College, in upstate New York. She headed back to the Midwest to pursue a doctorate in English at the University of Chicago, but she remained restless in academia. 39
Wood embarked on a series of short-lived undertakings, including writing a novel, before stumbling into a job doing promotional writing for a Chicago housing project. Her lifelong interest in public housing was born. She worked briefly as a caseworker for United Charities, but found that her ability to bring about meaningful reform was limited. “It was a spit-in-the-ocean job,” Wood would later recall. “You could work your heart out and kids still got TB or starved, rats still bit babies and youngsters still ended up in Juvenile Court. I got out of it as soon as I could.” The more poverty and deprivation she encountered, the more convinced she became that the root cause of these ills was the deficient conditions under which people lived. “I really got a terrible feeling,” she once said, “for the folly of pouring funds for medical and psychiatric treatment into families that live in the slums, without taking the people out of these surroundings.” When Chicago’s Council of Social Agencies began to shift its focus toward housing issues, Wood became head of its housing committee. She went on to serve, from 1933 to 1937, as the first executive secretary of the Metropolitan Housing Council, and as executive secretary of the Illinois Housing Board. She left when Mayor Kelly named her to head the Chicago Housing Authority. 40
Wood did not fit easily into the earthy male world of Chicago politics. As a woman heading a big-city housing authority from the 1930s to the 1950s, she was an anomaly. An early profile of her in the Chicago Tribune marveled that “45 male engineers, designers, and department heads call her ‘boss’ and like it!” As much as her gender, Wood’s bearing set her apart from the rough-hewn men who ran Chicago. An ocean of cultural distance separated the barely literate aldermen from the refined author of Afterglow, Wood’s psychological novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship. “When people get to calling me names now — and a lot of people do — they bring up that book and also teaching poetry at Vassar,” Wood once complained. “Those are pretty black marks for a public servant to have on his record.” But for all of her refined ways, Wood brought a scientist’s discipline to her job and had an impressive knowledge of the technical details of housing. “She may have taught poetry at Vassar, but she could read a blueprint faster than most people could read a comic strip,” recalls the director of research for the CHA under Wood. 41
From the very beginning, Wood was on a collision course with the city’s political establishment. She never succeeded in forging good relationships with the city’s most powerful aldermen, and even Mayor Kelly, who liked Wood and strongly backed her up, was not close to her. “Kelly admired and respected what I stood for, but he hated to talk to me,” Wood once said. “We didn’t talk the same language.” She often sent her leading staff adviser to meet with the mayor, since he was able to “talk the language of the street.” But what really distinguished Wood from the politicians around her was her unadulterated idealism, a quality that quickly earned her the nickname “the Jane Addams of public housing.” Wood was guided in her work by the conviction that “houses work magic,” and that good housing provides poor people “ladders to climb.” Her constituency was not the machine politicians but the poor mothers and children crammed into the city’s crumbling tenement houses and slum shacks. “These people have social pressures to face when they read newspaper advertising, or pass a downtown store window and see how a living room or kitchen can be furnished — while their own living space does not provide enough room so all the family can eat together at one time,” Wood said. “Give these people decent housing and the better forces inside them have a chance to work. Ninety-nine percent will respond.” 42
Wood’s idealism led her to refuse steadfastly to let her agency hire, contract, or select workers or tenants on the basis of patronage. To aldermen whose grip on power depended on finding jobs and providing favors to their supporters, her stand was unacceptable. “They really hate us,” she told a reporter toward the end of her tenure. “They’d love to have that gravy.” Most unforgivable of all, Wood strongly believed in using public housing to promote racial integration. “I think it came out of the Christian ideology in which she was raised,” says a CHA division chief under Wood. “She did it not out of a sense of noblesse oblige, but because it was the right thing to do.” Wood herself lived on Drexel Avenue in a neighborhood with many blacks. And she regularly invited black friends to her home for dinner parties, which was not common at the time. To the great frustration of her critics, Wood received unwavering support from City Hall for her racially progressive policies. City Council leader John Duffy complained that “[u]nder Kelly, the Housing Authority submitted a proposal and that was it.” 43
For all of the liberal impulses behind it, federal public housing was never meant to disrupt the nation’s racial status quo. Southerners were a powerful force in Congress, and supporters of public housing understood that requiring it to be racially integrated would have doomed it to defeat. Time and again, congressional liberals compromised on integration in order to get more units of housing. “[I]t is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing program as planned,” Illinois senator Paul Douglas told his fellow liberals in one debate over a proposed nondiscrimination clause, “rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it, and defeat all hopes for rehousing four million persons.” When the public housing program began, the federal government’s solution to the thorny issue of race was the Neighborhood Composition Rule, developed by interior secretary Harold Ickes himself. The regulatory rule stated that the racial mix of tenants in a new public housing project had to match the racial composition of the residents who had previously lived on the site. The Neighborhood Composition Rule had the virtue of seeming to sidestep the whole question of race by simply maintaining the status quo. But it put local public housing authorities in the business of monitoring the race of all of their applicants and tenants. And like many such pronouncements from Washington, it proved extremely difficult to implement out in the field. 44
It was clear from the beginning of Chicago’s public housing program that virtually every decision relating to race would be fraught with controversy. Chicago’s three “demonstration projects” were ready for occupancy in early 1938, and the CHA had to make its first decisions about racial composition. There was no debate about Lathrop Homes and Trumbull Park Homes: both were located in all-white sections of the city, and under the Neighborhood Composition Rule their first tenants would be exclusively white. But Jane Addams Homes was located on a site that had previously had a small black population. The CHA initially admitted twenty-six black families to the 1,027-unit project, but after a dispute over the calculations and the threat of a lawsuit, the agency raised the number of black units to sixty. In 1941, the CHA opened a fourth housing project, Ida B. Wells Homes, in an all-black neighborhood on the South Side. The housing situation for blacks was so dire that the CHA received ten applications for each of the project’s 1,662 apartments. It was an indication of just how strong feelings ran about race and public housing that even this all-black project in an all-black neighborhood stirred up a racial firestorm. Residents of nearby white neighborhoods sued to shift Ida B. Wells a half-mile deeper into the black ghetto. When the suit failed, white homeowners in the area added r
estrictive covenants to their deeds in an attempt at racial containment. 45
As the CHA built more housing projects, the racial balancing act became more complicated. Four more projects went up during World War II. Two of these presented no difficult racial issues. One was located between 31st and 32nd streets off Lithuanica Avenue, a short walk from Daley’s home. In addition to having an entirely white tenant population, this project was designed as two-story row houses, virtually indistinguishable from the private housing around it. Another all-white project, built in a lightly populated industrial area, was also easily dealt with. But when the CHA set out to find tenants for the other wartime projects — Francis Cabrini Homes and Robert Brooks Homes — it was confronted with the practical limits of the Neighborhood Composition Rule. Cabrini was built on the Near North Side, on the site of an old slum called “Little Sicily” that had some black residents mixed in among the Sicilians. Applying the Neighborhood Composition Rule, the CHA determined that occupancy of the project would be 80 percent white and 20 percent black. But it proved difficult to attract the full complement of whites to public housing in a racially changing neighborhood, and there were far too many black applicants. The CHA tried to surpass the 20 percent quota for blacks, but backed down when white residents resisted. As a temporary measure, it decided to leave 140 units unoccupied, but when it became clear that the missing whites would never be found, the CHA departed from the 80–20 ratio. By 1949, the project was 40 percent black. 46
