by Adam Cohen
Had the machine been more united, it might have ousted Kennelly before he could win a second term. But with the bitter power struggle between the Arvey-Daley and Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash factions still unresolved, the machine could not agree on an alternative candidate. Dawson and the other ward committeemen allowed Kennelly one more term, but they were not enthusiastic about it. “We as troops knew there was something wrong at the top,” said a Dawson precinct captain during Kennelly’s reelection campaign. “In any good organization its members can just about get the temperament or the feel of there being something rotten in Denmark. ...We were just dragging our feet.” Kennelly was reelected in 1951, but he failed to realize what even Dawson’s foot soldiers had figured out: that his second term as mayor would be his last. 11
The 1952 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, in the International Amphitheatre, just a few blocks from Daley’s home. Joseph Gill, whose reign as party boss was scheduled to end after the 1952 presidential election, went out in a burst of glory, by presiding over the convention. The delegates nominated Adlai Stevenson for president — the favorite son of Illinois, and of the Chicago machine, which had plucked him from obscurity four years earlier. Stevenson’s nomination was marred only by the fact that most people at the convention knew in their hearts that he had little prospect of defeating Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II general who would be carrying the Republican banner. In fact, Eisenhower’s appeal was so broad that Jake Arvey had initially tried and failed to recruit the unaligned hero to run for the Democratic nomination. 12
The Democratic convention was also notable as the site of an odd outburst of Daley ambition. When Stevenson got the nomination, it created a vacancy at the top of the statewide ticket. Edward J. Barrett, Illinois secretary of state and a Chicagoan, was eager to get the Chicago machine’s nomination for governor. He approached Daley on the convention floor, in the presence of several witnesses, and asked for his support. “Without any hesitancy, Daley answered, ‘Absolutely,’ and we shook hands on it,” Barrett said afterward. “He said I should be the man and that he would be with me.” But the Monday morning after the convention ended, Daley told reporters that he was throwing his own hat in the ring. “I’m available,” he said from his county clerk’s office. “Many people have suggested that my background of legislative leadership and as state revenue director under Governor Stevenson would fill the bill.” Daley was undeniably going back on his word, and in reporting it the Tribune noted that Daley “had been considered a backer of Barrett.” When Stevenson threw his support behind his lieutenant governor, Sherwood Dixon, it was clear that Daley had no chance of winning the nomination. Three days after announcing his interest in running, Daley was insisting the whole matter had never occurred. “I am not, and was not, a candidate for the nomination for governor,” Daley said. It was just as well that Daley did not get the nomination. Eisenhower was elected in a landslide, rolling up a 400,000-vote victory even in Stevenson’s home state. Dixon lost to Republican William Stratton in the statewide Republican rout. 13
With the elections over, the maneuvering to replace Gill as machine boss heated up. Daley, now the vice chairman, remained eager for the position. The Wagner-McDermott-Duffy faction put Judge McDermott forward as its candidate. McDermott’s supporters had considerable pull but the Arvey-Daley faction looked to be slightly stronger — particularly by the critical measure of patronage positions. As county clerk, Daley himself controlled hundreds of patronage jobs. The retiring boss, Gill, who was backing Daley, had another large army of patronage workers working for him in the Municipal Court clerk’s office. And another Daley supporter, Municipal Court bailiff Al Horan, doled out both patronage jobs and lucrative insurance and bonding work. The cold war between the two factions finally broke out into open warfare on July 8, 1953, when Gill formally submitted his resignation to the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. 14
The meeting at the Morrison Hotel began with vice chairman Daley reading Gill’s resignation letter. The script then called for Daley to be nominated and elected. But the Wagner-McDermott-Duffy-Nash faction, knowing it did not have enough votes to prevail, pursued a different strategy. After almost two hours of debate, Wagner moved to adjourn the proceedings for two weeks. His un-spoken plan was to use the extra time to round up additional support for McDermott. When Daley emerged from the meeting, reporters waiting outside were incredulous at the turn of events. “They didn’t give it to you?” asked one reporter, who, on the basis of that morning’s Tribune, had expected to be interviewing the new machine boss. Daley, his eyes moist, shook his head and explained. “Clarence [Wagner] stopped it,” Daley said. “Gill calls for a motion to nominate me and Clarence gets up and says ‘Now, wait a minute. Let’s not be hasty.’ And there was a big argument and we didn’t get to vote.” 15
Wagner decided to go off on a fishing trip to Canada while Mc-Dermott and Duffy tried to win over wavering committeemen.Wagner and friends, including state senator Donald O’Brien, packed into a city-owned Cadillac and headed north until Wagner crashed the car over an embankment. Wagner died, though all his passengers survived. “It’s hard to know, even now, what actually happened,” O’Brien said later, “but those highways up there are full of curves, and I think that Clarence mistook a small dirt road that went off into the woods for a turn in the highway.” Daley had already built his career on a series of well-timed deaths, but none was more convenient for him than this one. 16
McDermott did not give up his quest immediately. “I know that [the Daley forces] have the shiv out for me,” he declared, “but I think it looks pretty good for us.” But with the powerful Wagner dead, he soon realized that there was no chance of defeating Daley. “In the interest of my party and to bring about unity and harmony, I have requested those committeemen who advanced my name to withdraw it,” McDermott said the day before the county committee was to meet for its vote. On July 21, the fifty-one-year-old Daley was voted in as the new chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. Daley rose to thank McDermott for “putting the unity and harmony of the party first.” Then he made the kind of implausible assertion he liked to offer whenever he won a new office: “I have made no deals or commitments to anyone, nor will I.” 17
Daley’s victory over McDermott was widely hailed as a victory for progressivism and reform within the machine. The comparatively liberal Sun-Times welcomed Daley as “an associate of the more enlightened progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” and said his challenge would be to convert the machine’s “old-timers” to his way of thinking. The hard-core Republican Tribune declared that “[o]ne result of Daley’s election will be to continue the New Deal color of the Democratic organization, with semireform overtones.” Daley was already being mentioned as a candidate for mayor in 1955, and some observers wondered if he was hurting himself by becoming head of the machine. It would make him an easy target for opponents who wanted to charge him with bossism. But the political reality was that if the Wagner-McDermott-Duffy group had seized control of the machine, it is unlikely Daley would ever have received the Democrat nomination for mayor. Daley insisted that the point was moot. Two days after winning the chairmanship, he appeared on television to declare that he would seek reelection as county clerk. Daley promised that he would support Mayor Kennelly for reelection in 1955, “if the mayor is interested in being a candidate.” 18
After the Duffy-Lancaster Compromise, it was clear that the tide had turned forcefully against integrated public housing. The CHA began to lose some of its key integrationists. Elizabeth Wood’s top staff member had been forced out when Mayor Kennelly took office. Within months of the City Council’s vote on the Duffy-Lancaster plan, two of the strongest supporters of integration resigned from the CHA board of directors. 19
With site selection resolved by the Duffy-Lancaster plan, the battle over race in public housing shifted to tenant selection. Many of the CHA’s public housing projects remained racially segregated. Th
ere were a number of all-white projects — including Trumbull Park Homes, Lawndale Gardens, Lathrop Homes, and Bridgeport Homes — reflecting the all-white neighborhoods in which they had been built. And others were all black, including Ida B. Wells Homes and Altgeld Gardens. The CHA had announced a policy of nondiscrimination in 1952, under which blacks would be admitted to the all-white projects. But top CHA officials later admitted that the board had ordered the agency to continue to exclude blacks from these projects. It was a secret policy, Wood would later charge, identical to “the discredited ‘separate but equal’ doctrine which the Dixiecrats have used to support segregation.” Wood tried to resist the board policy by continuing to recommend blacks for the city’s all-white projects, but her candidates were routinely rejected. 20
The next white public housing project to be besieged by racial unrest was Trumbull Park Homes, in the Far South Side neighborhood of South Deering. The all-white project was accidentally integrated in the summer of 1953, when the project’s administrative staff mistakenly gave Betty Howard and her family an apartment. Howard was a black woman with an extremely light complexion, whose application listed her as living in a neighborhood that was not identifiably black. Because Mr. Howard was a veteran, the CHA waived its customary home visit, and therefore did not meet the rest of the family. With no clear indications that the Howards were black, Trumbull Park’s housing clerk assumed they were white and approved their application. The Howard family moved into the project on July 30. It was not until the following week that Trumbull Park’s manager called the city with some troubling news — Mrs. Howard, the manager reported, “might be Negro.” 21
Word of the unwelcome new neighbors spread quickly through Trumbull Park. On August 5, a crowd of about fifty white teenagers gathered at the Howards’ apartment, yelling threats and throwing rocks and bricks. Four days later, the angry mob had grown to more than one thousand. They threw rocks, bricks, and sulfur candles through the Howards’ windows, forcing them to board them up with plywood. The Howards lived as virtual prisoners in their home, as the white-looking Mrs. Howard escaped for occasional trips for food and other supplies. By week’s end, forty-one protesters had been arrested, twenty injured, and a round-the-clock vigil of 250 police officers was needed to keep the peace. The mob at Trumbull Park was a mixture of white ethnic groups — Irish, Slavs, Poles, and Italians — with no one group predominating. The Chicago Defender would note of the white mobs that “although there was no unity in the language backgrounds, they had a common . . . hatred for Negroes.” The Trumbull Park mob enforced a fierce racial solidarity: within a month of the Howards’ arrival, a white-owned liquor store that served blacks was set on fire. Adding to the feeling of terror, bombs exploded regularly in the area around the Howards’ apartment. 22
South Deering’s whites were convinced that the black incursion into Trumbull Park Homes was only the first step in a campaign of racial infiltration. Blacks would soon start using the neighborhood’s parks and playgrounds. Then they would begin buying up private homes in the neighborhood. In no time at all, the whites believed, “the whole thing will be Black and they will buy at their own price.” When the housing battle was won, blacks would begin taking away white jobs at the nearby Wisconsin Steel Works, which had started hiring blacks only during the labor shortages of World War II. The great underlying fear for many South Deering residents — as it was in the Deep South — was interracial dating and miscegenation. “White people built this area [and] we want no part of this race mixing,” the South Deering Bulletin declared. According to one fair-housing investigator who had been sent into South Deering, neighborhood residents were saying that “it won’t be long now and Negroes and whites intermarrying will be a common thing and the white race will go down hill.” In fact, the investigator reported, no doubt with some exaggeration, that South Deeringites lately talked “about nothing else.” 23
Tensions in South Deering ratcheted up in the fall, after Wood announced plans to move another three black families into Trumbull Park. The rabidly anti-integrationist South Deering Improvement Association stirred up opposition among neighborhood residents, cheered on by the hate-filled reportage of the South Deering Bulletin. Elected officials from the area aimed their most inflammatory rhetoric at the CHA. The local alderman denounced Wood for seeking to “cause racial tension” and demanded her resignation. Another, from a nearby ward, joined in, declaring that “there’s vindictiveness and revenge in this picture because we have pinkoes in the CHA.” On October 13, 1953, the day the three new families were scheduled to move in, the police presence was increased to twelve hundred and the new tenants were brought in “in a caravan under police escort.” About two hundred protesters were on hand, pelting the new arrivals with an array of projectiles, but the police were able to contain the conflict. The CHA instituted a brief moratorium on new black tenants to quell the demonstrations, but in February 1954, the housing authority once again began moving small numbers of black families into Trumbull Park Homes, without prior announcement, under heavy police guard. 24
The Howards moved out of Trumbull Park on May 3, 1954, after it was determined that they did not meet the project’s income requirements. But by the time they left, another ten black families were living in the project. Over the summer, the battle of Trumbull Park shifted to the actual park. On June 22, a mob of whites attacked two blacks who were trying to play ball in the park. When blacks came to the park on July 10 to use a baseball diamond, the police had nearly four hundred officers on hand to keep the peace. Still, a riot broke out, and police ended up arresting fifteen white demonstrators and one black baseball player. The Trumbull Park disturbances, which started out as a neighborhood controversy, were increasingly gaining national attention. On July 4, 1954, Eric Sevareid devoted his entire CBS news review, American Week, to the conflict. 25
Adding to her political troubles, Elizabeth Wood had continued to flout the machine on personnel matters. The reform-minded Wood always refused to hire the patronage workers that other agency heads understood they had to make room for. As long as Mayor Kelly was protecting her, there was little the machine could do but complain. But without a strong patron in City Hall, Wood found herself increasingly being “subjected to the opposition and attack of persons and interests who would wish the situation otherwise,” she said. Wood’s strong stand against patronage and favoritism had made headlines in the spring of 1953, when she refused to hire one particularly well-connected office-seeker: Richard Daley’s cousin, John
M. Daley. Kennelly had urged the CHA to hire John Daley as the agency’s general counsel, no doubt in an effort to curry favor with the county clerk and powerful 11th Ward committeeman, and to enlist his support for a third term as mayor. John Daley was approved by the CHA, but Wood refused to make the appointment. She told the press he was not even technically qualified for the job, since he had only five years of legal experience, while the CHA’s rules required that the general counsel have eight. Wood also pointed out that Daley had graduated 183rd in a law school class of 193. “Up to now, the commissioners have taken pride in the fact that the CHA has been untainted by politics,” Wood said. “The commissioners do not set a very good example for the staff when they make a political appointment of this nature.” Daley eventually withdrew himself from consideration. Wood was, of course, correct about Daley’s utter lack of qualification for the job, but he chose to present himself as a victim of bias against Irish-Catholics at the hands of the patrician Wood. “As a young American,” Daley said in a statement, “I thought I would be entitled to the same fair play that any person, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, or nationalistic origin, is entitled to.” 26
It was time for the machine to choose its candidates for the 1954 elections, Daley’s first slating decision since becoming boss of the machine. Slating was inherently undemocratic. Rather than give the voters a choice among candidates in a primary election, the Cook County Democratic Central Committee selected the Democrat
ic Party’s nominees. The actual selection process was even more autocratic: Daley, in his capacity as machine boss, handpicked a subcommittee of ward committeemen who served as a slating committee. The slating committee joined Daley in meeting with and evaluating candidates seeking the machine’s support. The interview process under Daley, a reform member of the Central Committee recalled, was far from substantive:
The candidate would come forward and make a speech, and answer some very perfunctory questions. Usually, there are two questions. One, “If you were not to be slated for the office you seek, would you accept slating for any other office?” And the right kind of a guy would be expected to say, “I’m a loyal Democrat, and if, in the wisdom of this committee, I’m chosen for some other post, I can assure you that every bit of energy and talent that I have will be devoted,” and so on. Another question is, “If you are not slated, will you support the guy that is slated?” And you are supposed to say, “I will be disappointed if I were not chosen, but I am a loyal Democrat and I will support whomever you choose.” And another question is, “Will you support the candidate of the party after the primary against the Republican opponent?” And you say, “Of course I will.”
