by Adam Cohen
At Brooks Homes, the CHA had even less luck attracting white tenants. Brooks had been built on a site that was 80 percent black, and the CHA wanted to fill 20 percent of the units with whites. But it soon became clear that few whites were eager to move into public housing in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood. The CHA soon gave up its effort to attract white tenants and allowed Brooks to become entirely black. The CHA’s fifth wartime project, Altgeld Gardens on the Far Southwest Side, suggested what may have been the only easy solutions to the racial issues associated with public housing. Altgeld was designed as an all-black project, so the CHA did not need to worry about attracting white tenants. And to speed construction, the CHA had built it on a 137-acre tract of vacant land in a remote part of the Far South Side–Lake Calumet industrial area. It was so far from any existing neighborhood, white or black, that there was no one around to complain about it. 47
After nearly a decade in the state legislature, Daley was ready to return to Chicago. He wanted to spend more time with his family back in Bridgeport and, equally important, he was ready to redirect his ambitions toward Chicago politics. Daley’s current patron, Mayor Kelly, was in political trouble. Kelly had stepped in as head of the Democratic machine on the death of Pat Nash. The move had allowed him to consolidate political power — and to fend off other factions that were looking to take over the machine — but it had also cost him in popular support. Kelly’s administration already had a reputation for corruption and for being too close to the machine. His decision to tear down entirely the wall between City Hall and the clubhouse hurt him with many voters. Kelly was also being blamed for a series of school, police, and organized crime scandals that had struck the city. Not least, he was rapidly losing popularity among white ethnic voters because of his support for Elizabeth Wood and the issue of open housing. 48
Mayor Kelly had a great deal riding on the 1946 elections. He needed a slate of Democratic candidates that could come through for the machine, including a strong candidate for county sheriff to replace the incumbent, who was barred by law from succeeding himself. Kelly needed that rare ideal of a machine candidate: someone with enough of an appearance of integrity to appeal to nonmachine voters, but who could nevertheless be counted on to use his office to advance the machine’s interests, and to continue to employ the hundreds of Democratic Party workers who were currently on the sheriff ’s office payroll. Daley seemed like the perfect choice. He had won a reputation for honesty and hard work in Springfield — the Chicago Daily News had pronounced Daley one of the Democrats’ “brightest stars.” Yet Kelly knew better than anyone how completely Daley had subordinated himself to the interests of the machine. With Kelly’s backing, the machine slated Daley for county sheriff. 49
If Daley seemed like a good choice for the machine, it was less clear how good the job of county sheriff would be for Daley. Even by the low standards of Cook County politics of that time, the sheriff ’s office was notorious for its levels of patronage and graft. County sheriffs had been known for acquiring a quick personal fortune in the one term that the law allowed them, and then retiring wealthy. “Knowledgeable people had a rule of thumb at that time that if a sheriff couldn’t step out of office four years later with a clear $1,000,000 in his pocket, he just wasn’t trying,” a Chicago journalist has observed. Because of this history of corrupting its occupants, the office of county sheriff was generally considered a career-ender. Daley might become the rare sheriff who was able to raise the ethical standards of the office, but his friends and political allies were troubled by his decision to accept the nomination. “When I got back from the service and found out he was going to run for sheriff, I couldn’t believe it,” recalled Benjamin Adamowski, who had been off fighting in World War II. “I told him: ‘What in the hell do you want to do that for? You can’t help but get dirty in that office. Everybody does.’” Daley told Adamowski that Mayor Kelly wanted him to run, and that Daley’s law partner, William Lynch, thought it would be a good idea. “But he wanted it,” Adamowski said. “He would have run for anything, he was that eager for it, that hungry for power.’” Lillian Daley also advised Daley against running for sheriff, pronouncing the post unworthy of her son. But Daley’s beloved mother died during the campaign, before she could see how wise her counsel turned out to be. 50
The 1946 campaign for county sheriff was a fierce one. Daley’s Republican opponent, Elmer Michael Walsh, attacked him for his ties to Kelly and the Democratic machine. “‘D’ is for Daley and also for doubles on the payroll,” Walsh told a Republican women’s organization on the Far South Side. “He draws one salary as state senator and another as deputy county controller. Here is another example of how the present city and county administrations fail to give the public dollar value. Nephews, aunts and even cousins have been uncovered feeding upon the spoils of the Kelly machine.” Daley responded with platitudes. At the birthplace of the National Temperance Union, he warned an audience of women about the dangers of underage drinking. “Boys and girls often go wrong when allowed to frequent disreputable resorts where liquor is sold to minors.” More potently, Daley showed his talent for building coalitions and collecting endorsements. Adamowski, who had a strong following in the city’s Polish wards, chaired a lawyers’ committee for Daley. And William A. Lee, head of Local 734 of the Bakery Drivers Union, and president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, headed a labor committee for Daley. As the Democratic candidate, Daley started out with strong support in the black wards, and he courted black voters during the campaign by speaking out against racially restrictive covenants. 51
Daley could not control the national political trends, however, and 1946 was shaping up as a disastrous year for the Democratic Party. President Truman had come into office on a wave of goodwill when he took over after Roosevelt’s death, but eighteen months later, America found itself wracked by inflation, meat shortages, and red scares. A consensus was emerging that Truman was a bumbling incompetent, and his approval ratings had skidded to 32 percent, a 50 percent drop in the space of a year. New York impresario Billy Rose was promoting W. C. Fields for president in 1948 on the logic that “If we are going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” The best thing Truman could do to help Democratic candidates in the 1946 elections, national party leaders told him, was to hide in the White House. Daley did what many Democrats across the country were doing — distanced himself from Truman and told audiences that he still believed in “those policies for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was the great spokesman.” But when election day arrived, Democratic candidates were trounced from coast to coast. The Republicans took control of the House 246–188 and the Senate 51– 45, the first time they had held both houses of Congress since the 1920s. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire exulted that “[t]he United States is now a Republican country.” The aggressively Republican Chicago Tribune declared the Democratic defeat to be the nation’s greatest victory since Appomattox. 52
The Chicago Democratic machine was dragged down in this national Democratic rout, and Daley was no exception. Losing to the Republican Walsh seemed like a significant setback at the time, but it probably worked out for the best. Daley was never tempted to test the million-dollar rule of thumb, and he could not be faulted, as county sheriffs always were, for looking the other way as organized crime ran its gambling operations and loan-sharking rackets with impunity. Nor would the loss be held against him personally, since the entire Democratic ticket had been defeated. Daley still had his position as deputy comptroller for Cook County, which made him the machine’s point man on large county contracts — and gave him a platform from which to plan his next move.53
With the end of World War II, the Chicago Housing Authority’s job was becoming even more complicated. Thousands of discharged soldiers were streaming into Chicago, and the city was scrambling to find room for them in converted barracks, trailers, and Quonset huts. There was strong popular sentiment to do better for these returning national heroes, and the
City Council quickly allocated millions of dollars to build new veterans’ housing. To get the housing built quickly, Mayor Kelly directed that it be constructed on sites already owned by the Park District, the Sanitary District, and the Board of Education. As it happened, most of this land was in outlying white sections of the city. The CHA found itself in a bind. About 20 percent of the veterans needing public housing were black, and federal law required that they receive a proportionate share of new apartments. But the Neighborhood Composition Rule, which required public housing to reflect the racial mix of the surrounding community, dictated that the new housing be almost entirely white. Something had to give, and in 1946 the CHA abandoned the Neighborhood Composition Rule. Liberated from the constraints of the rule, Elizabeth Wood and her staff were free to pursue racially integrated housing with the new veterans’ projects. The CHA developed a list of twenty-two sites for the new housing, and most were in white areas. 54
When whites learned that public housing was coming to their neighborhoods — and that 20 percent or more of the residents might be black — they reacted with barely disguised panic. Racially integrated living was something that few of them had any experience with, and something that struck most of them as implausible. Most were convinced that integrated public housing would be the end of their neighborhoods, causing whites to flee for the suburbs and allowing blacks to take their place. It was a frightening prospect for working-class whites who had large stakes, both financial and emotional, in their neighborhoods. Elected officials from the neighborhoods targeted by Wood rose up in opposition to the CHA’s plans for veterans’ housing. “Some of the housing people are on the square but there are as many more who are interested in stirring up trouble,” said City Council finance chairman John Duffy, who represented the heavily Irish 19th Ward on the Far Southwest Side. “By putting up a project in every section of Chicago they could infiltrate Negroes,” Duffy charged, the CHA was trying to “stir up trouble and keep the pot boiling — never let it stop.” To appease its critics in the white neighborhoods, the CHA decided to keep many of the smaller projects entirely white. Black veterans would be limited to the largest of the new projects, and even these would start out with an informal cap of 10 percent. Wood also insisted on careful screening of the applicants. In selecting black tenants for public housing, the CHA looked particularly for former military officers with combat records, and wives known to be good housekeepers. 55
In late 1946, Airport Homes opened in an all-white Southwest Side neighborhood near Midway Airport. The CHA made clear from the outset that the 185-unit project was going to house both black and white veterans, but the neighborhood had other ideas. The CHA admitted 125 white veterans to the project, but before it could complete the more probing background checks it applied to black veterans, the community acted. White residents from the area helped themselves to keys to the vacant apartments and simply moved in. The surrounding neighborhood, caught up in anti-integration fervor, vocally supported the white squatters. Presented with a racial crisis, the CHA decided to try to work out an accommodation with the neighborhood. It allowed white squatters who were legally eligible for public housing to remain, but it required those who were not to vacate their apartments. The ineligible tenants moved out only when it was clear that a court would order them to leave. 56
Wood and the CHA were determined to fill the newly vacant apartments with black veterans. On December 5, 1946, the CHA tried to move two black families into Airport Homes. It would prove to be the start of “an era of hidden violence and guerrilla warfare” in Chicago. The two black men who were chosen to break the color line at Airport Homes both had distinguished war records: one had seen combat in the Pacific and the other had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and been awarded four battle stars. Despite their war service, both were greeted with violent protests at Airport Homes. The CHA’s strategy had been to move the families in at noontime, when most of the neighborhood men would be at work. But the neighborhood women, most of whom were at home, proved more than able to defend their turf. A crowd of two hundred dirt- and rock-throwing demonstrators, primarily middle-aged women, surged on the truck delivering the families’ household furnishings, breaking its windows with rocks, and forcing the new tenants and their moving men to run to safety in the housing project office. It took four hundred policemen to restore the peace. The following day, the protests continued. Demonstrators turned over a police car, and police responded by cracking heads with nightsticks. As the violence raged at Airport Homes, Wood announced that seven black families had changed their minds and asked to be removed from the waiting list. While the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations warned that the city was moving toward mob law, the CHA found that it could no longer locate any black veterans willing to move into Airport Homes. The project remained all white. 57
For the next veterans’ project the CHA sought to integrate, Fern-wood Park Homes on the Far South Side, Wood personally attended a community meeting in May 1947 to emphasize that her agency did not intend to be defeated again. Wood’s assertion that “we must invite them all in the exact order of their application and on the basis of their need” was not well received by the audience of 350 white residents from the neighborhood. The local alderman, Reginald DuBois, spoke after Wood and blamed her and the CHA for integration. “I believe that Negroes would not ask to be assigned to this project if they were not pushed to do so,” DuBois said. “We all want to protect our homes, and the people of this community will put up a stout fight.” 58
Wood did not back down. On August 13, 1947, the CHA began to move the first fifty-two families, eight of them black, into Fern-wood Park. A mob of five thousand white demonstrators was on hand to greet the new black tenants. The crowd returned night after night, engaging in intermittent acts of violence and trying to drive the black tenants out. The police sent seven hundred officers to hold the mob in check. Eventually, the white resisters realized they would not succeed in driving the black tenants out. Still, the protests took their toll and opposition grew to Wood and the CHA. Alderman DuBois, one of the leaders of this backlash, introduced a resolution in the City Council declaring that the CHA “persists in theories of housing which are shared by no other representative local government agencies in Chicago, and are not in accord with those of a great majority of citizens.”59
Defeat was the one unforgivable sin in machine politics. When the organization slate lost, the machine leadership saw its power ebb, and lower-ranking members lost their jobs and the ability to put food on the table. Although the 1946 losses were part of a national rout for the Democrats, machine leaders insisted that Mayor Kelly step down as party boss. When the Cook County Central Committee met in June to select a new chairman, the Irish politicians who controlled the selection process divided into warring factions. The committee compromised on Jacob Arvey, ward committeeman from the West Side’s heavily Jewish 24th Ward. Arvey made an ideal caretaker because of his relative powerlessness. An Irishman would necessarily have belonged to one of the rival Irish factions, and once installed in office would give his camp effective control over the machine. Poles were a large enough ethnic bloc that if one became boss, it might be impossible to wrest control of the machine back for the Irish. But Jews were a less powerful voting bloc, and their influence was waning, as they fled old machine neighborhoods for the suburbs or for wealthier reform wards along the lakefront. Arvey could be counted on to run the machine competently and could be pushed aside when one Irish faction or the other gained the upper hand.
A child of Russian immigrants, Arvey was born on La Salle Street in 1895. He attended the Chicago Hebrew Institute, and worked his way through night law school by covering settlement-house basketball games for the weekly Jewish Sentinel. Arvey began his political career in 1914, when one of his law professors ran for judge in the 24th Ward. When he graduated, he took a five-dollar-a-week clerk job at a law firm, and began working in politics on the side. Arvey rose through the ranks of the 24th Ward politica
l organization, becoming a precinct captain, and then campaign manager for a ward committeeman who in 1923 exercised his slate-making prerogatives to install the twenty-seven-year-old Arvey as alderman from the 24th Ward. A decade later, Arvey became ward committeeman himself. Arvey took control of the 24th Ward at an opportune moment. Jewish Chicagoans had only a loose identification with the Democratic Party until the early 1930s, when Roosevelt and the New Deal turned Jews across the country into committed Democrats. Just as Arvey became ward committeeman, the 24th Ward was becoming one of the Democrats’ strongest wards in Chicago — and in the nation. In 1936, it went for Roosevelt over Alf Landon by the remarkable margin of 26,112 to 974. Even President Roosevelt was impressed, telling Arvey that Chicago’s 24th was “the No. 1 ward in the entire Democratic Party.” 60
The first item on Arvey’s agenda as party boss was deciding how to handle the mayoral election of 1947. Mayor Kelly wanted to run for reelection, but the voters had turned against him. Kelly was widely regarded as too corrupt, even by the prodigious standards of Chicago mayors. Record levels of patronage hiring appeared to be interfering with the functioning of the public schools. And Kelly had happily looked the other way as the Chicago police took payoffs to let the syndicate operate its various gambling and prostitution rings unimpeded. “The truth is,” one political observer wrote at the time, “Chicago’s municipal affairs are shot through with political knavery, overt and concealed corruption . . . inefficiency and fakery.” The machine leaders had nothing against corruption, but under Mayor Kelly it had been so blatant and artless that it seemed clear it would produce another anti-machine backlash at the polls. Equally problematic, Kelly was hurting the machine with white voters because of his support for racial integration. Arvey and a few other machine leaders had decided to assess Kelly’s strength by conducting informal public opinion polls, approaching voters at neighborhood movie theaters, and calling them at home to ask them about the mayor. Arvey’s poll takers heard, particularly from Irish voters, a consistent theme: that Kelly was “too good to the niggers.” Armed with this evidence of the mayor’s low standing with the Chicago electorate, Arvey persuaded Kelly not to seek reelection. 61
