by Adam Cohen
On December 1, 1954, Kennelly announced that he would be running for reelection the following spring. Asked by a reporter if he had notified the machine of his plans, Kennelly said cheerfully that he intended to call Daley as soon as the press conference was over. If Kennelly still did not grasp the depth of his troubles with the machine, he was one of the few people active in Chicago politics who missed it. “It is symbolic of the difficulties that have arisen between the mayor and the party machine that only after handing his announcement to the press did he telephone the news to Richard J. Daley,” the Chicago Daily News explained for him on its editorial page the next day. “It is this aloofness which angers and alienates the ward committeemen.” The aloofness ran in both directions. Asked if he would attend the opening of Kennelly’s reelection headquarters in his capacity as party leader, Daley offered a curt response: “No, I have to take my kids to Santa Claus.” 41
Daley was evasive about whom he intended to support. “I expect the Democratic mayoral primary to attract the most able men in our great city,” he said. “I have been asked as chairman of the Democratic Party just whom the Democratic Party will endorse. Obviously, I cannot answer that question because I do not know. The Democratic Party will meet and discuss all candidates, and it will select the best candidate.” Daley was being unduly modest about the role he would play in the process. As he had done a year earlier, Daley would appoint the slate-making committee that would choose the machine’s candidates, and he would be sure to stack it with men who could be counted on to follow his lead. Daley named Joe Gill, his predecessor as boss and a reliable ally, as chairman. He appointed Barnet Hodes, Jake Arvey’s law partner, and Michael McDermott, committeeman from the 13th Ward on the Southwest Side, whose day job was chief clerk in Daley’s county clerk’s office. And Daley named submachine leader Bill Dawson. Dawson was not as much of a Daley crony as other members of the committee — that would come later — but Daley had been assiduously cultivating him, stopping by his district office at 35th and Calumet on a regular basis for visits on his way home from the Loop. At the least, Daley knew that Dawson was a reliable anti-Kennelly vote, since he had vowed four years earlier that the mayor’s current term would be his last. 42
Reports were by now rampant that Daley himself was on the verge of entering the mayoral race. Daley fueled the speculation. Asked if he would be making a presentation to the slate-making committee, Daley said he would “if asked to make one.” Asked if he would run for mayor, Daley responded: “That’s up to the slate committee.” On December 15, 1954, Kennelly walked from City Hall to the smoke-filled rooms of the Morrison Hotel and read a prepared statement to the slate-making committee in which he assured them that “[w]henever there has been conflict between the interests of the public and personal or political considerations, my decisions have been made upon the basis of what is good for the city and its citizens — and what benefits the city benefits the Democratic Party.” His stony-faced audience was buying none of it. When Kennelly was through reading, he said to Gill, who at Daley’s behest chaired the committee, “You invited me, I’ll be glad to answer any questions.” But no one spoke up. “Is there anything you want me to explain?” the mayor asked. “No,” Gill responded. Kennelly looked from one ward committeeman to the next, and saw that he was not going to win them over. “I presume it’s unanimous?” he asked. “They gave me a fast deal,” he would complain later. 43
Most ominous of all for Kennelly’s prospects was the fact that Daley had sat in on the proceedings, even though he was not on the committee. “My office as chairman is next door to the room where the committee is meeting,” Daley explained. “I pop in now and then.” In contrast to Kennelly’s brief appearance, Daley met with the committee for two hours. The slating committee later insisted it had “seriously” considered Kennelly, Adamowski, and others, but it unanimously voted to draft Daley. It had been a foregone conclusion that the committee would choose Daley, but it was not certain it would be unanimous. The unanimity indicated that the anti-Daley factions were beginning to reconcile themselves to Daley’s leadership, and that Daley would have the support of a united machine in the primary. 44
The machine’s official line was that Daley had been “drafted” to run for mayor. Daley played his part in the little drama, exclaiming that the draft was “a great honor, and I never dreamed it could happen to me.” He said he would need time to decide whether he would be willing to run. Two days later, to the surprise of absolutely no one, in a prepared statement, Daley said he would accept the draft, “[a]lthough I have not sought this honor.” The slate-making committee’s nomination was technically only a recommendation that was forwarded to the full Cook County Democratic Central Committee. Frank Keenan, the powerful Cook County assessor and Kennelly’s newly appointed campaign manager, delivered a passionate speech to this larger group in favor of renominating the mayor. In the end, Daley won 47–1, with Kennelly winning only Keenan’s vote. 45
Kennelly was not about to give up City Hall without a fight. “It is already evident that the ‘draft’ is building to a hurricane of resentment against boss rule,” Kennelly declared. “The question is whether the people of Chicago will rule or be ruled by the willful, wanton inner circle of political bosses at the Morrison Hotel.” As an embattled candidate taking on the machine, Kennelly started to show a spirit he never exhibited as mayor. Five of the ward committeemen who voted for Daley in the Democratic Central Committee held city jobs. Kennelly demanded their resignations; two were forced out just two days before Christmas. Kennelly also stopped putting patronage workers recommended by the party bosses on the city payroll, and vowed to fire all non-civil-service city employees who campaigned against him in the upcoming election. Though Kennelly had lost the machine, he was not without supporters. The business community — a traditional antagonist of the machine — threw its weight behind his candidacy. And in an editorial headlined “The Man They Dumped,” the Chicago Tribune — another longtime machine opponent — lauded Kennelly as a public servant who “hasn’t regarded service to the party organization as his first duty in office.” 46
The Democratic primary was complicated further when Benjamin Adamowski, Daley’s old friend from Springfield, entered the race on an anti-machine platform. Adamowski is one of the great might-have-beens of Chicago politics, and someone whose career stands in dramatic counterpoint to Daley’s plodding but utterly effective ascent up the machine ranks. Adamowski was born into machine politics to a far greater degree than Daley. He was the oldest of nine children of Max Adamowski, a three-hundred-pound Polish immigrant saloonkeeper and organization alderman from Little Poland, on the near North Side. Adamowski earned a law degree from DePaul University in 1928, and took a job as examiner of titles for the Cook County recorder of deeds. But he was too ambitious to remain in the county bureaucracy for long. In 1931, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected to the state House of Representatives. After the election, Adamowski submitted his resignation as examiner of titles. The Cook County recorder of deeds, a good machine politician, tried to talk Adamowski into staying on. The machine liked having legislators on its payroll, and the legislators — who earned as little as $1,750 a year — were usually grateful for a second salary. But Adamowski decided to take a more independent path, spurning the machine’s offer and opening a law office on LaSalle Street instead.
In the legislature, Adamowski put even more distance between himself and his father’s political machine. While Daley was doing the bidding of Mayor Kelly and the Democratic Organization, Adamowski aligned himself with the liberal, reformist governor Henry Horner, Kelly’s rival in the statewide Democratic Party. It was not a good career move — as Daley understood, the machine could do more for an ambitious Chicago politician than an unaffiliated governor could — but Adamowski was acting on principle. As a legislator, Adamowski was a force to be reckoned with. He was a man of unusual intelligence and a skilled orator, whom one University of Chicago philosopher called the “
Daniel Webster of the West.” After rising to majority leader, Adamowski left the legislature and returned to Chicago to become Mayor Kennelly’s corporation counsel. Adamowski took the job because he believed Kennelly was prepared, despite his machine backing, to usher in a new age of reform for Chicago. After three years, Adamowski resigned, disillusioned by the degree to which the machine bosses continued to have their way at City Hall. “Kennelly was just a nice guy,” Adamowski said later. “He should never have been mayor of Chicago. He should have been a cardinal or a monsignor. He was that kind of person.” 47
As the 1955 election approached, Adamowski felt he had seen enough of Daley and Kennelly to know that he could do a better job as mayor than either of them. The question for Adamowski was how he could outpoll a well-known two-term mayor and the head of the powerful Democratic machine. Adamowski was convinced that Kennelly would drop out of the race. “My experience with him was that in a contest, he’d back off,” he said. Then, in a one-on-one race against Daley and the machine, Adamowski believed he could win by combining the anti-machine vote with his following in the city’s large Polish community. The problem with Adamowski’s plan was that Kennelly remained steadfast, and Chicago’s first contested mayoral race in modern times ended up as a three-man race. 48
The ugly tone the election would take became clear on December 29, 1954, the day nominating petitions were due. In Chicago, candidates were listed on the ballot in the order in which the city clerk received their petitions. This top spot was coveted because so many voters routinely pulled the lever beside the first recognizable name. The city clerk’s office opened at 8:30 A.M., and Kennelly’s Corporation counsel, John Mortimer, arrived in the outer office at 7:45 A.M. to deliver the petitions. He patiently waited for the office to open, confident that Kennelly would be first on the ballot. Somehow, though, Daley’s men managed to enter through a side door and get their petitions time-stamped at 8:13 A.M., while Kennelly’s followed by three minutes. Kennelly’s camp protested foul play but was unable to push Daley off the top of the ballot. 49
Daley was less successful in an attempt to strong-arm the Cook County Board. Word leaked out on December 30 that Daley had applied “extreme pressure” to the Democratic board members to slash the budget of county assessor Frank Keenan, the most prominent elected official backing Kennelly. Daley’s attempt to undermine Keenan was rebuffed at a closed-door meeting at which Daley and board president Daniel Ryan reportedly almost came to blows. Daley later denied he had ever approached the board on the subject, saying that “the woods are full of rumors these days” and “a lot of people are trying to spread rumors to hurt Dick Daley.” 50
Daley’s campaign was run out of the machine’s headquarters in the old Morrison Hotel. The offices of the Cook County Democratic Organization were prosaic in appearance. “An out-of-town conventioneer ... would think he had stumbled into the local sales office of a business firm that distributed literature and brochures advertising the company’s product,” one student of the Chicago machine wrote some years later about its offices, which by then had moved to the LaSalle Hotel. “There are no smoke-filled rooms reeking of cigars (Chairman Daley does not smoke), no jangling batteries of telephones, no authentic characters out of The Last Hurrah lounging around. . . . Except for a large Buddha-like photograph of a Chairman Daley, smiling enigmatically down on all who enter, and pictures of the local candidates at election time on the walls, the decor is typical of any business office in the Loop.” In Daley’s campaign for mayor, the main emphasis was on coordinating the efforts of, and providing backup to, the fifty ward organizations that would do the real work of turning out voters on election day. “What do they do over at the Morrison?” Jake Arvey once asked rhetorically. “Actually, the Morrison is just like any sales organization trying to sell its product and straighten out its problems. Setting up an organization in a ward where we’re weak. Then there’s the matter of literature — deciding on it, distributing it, getting it into the hands of four or five thousand precinct captains. Then there’s organized labor. Labor and fraternal groups are for you but you’ve got to see to it that they do the work, get special literature, and so on.” Daley’s strategists at the Morrison were responsible for those functions that had to be performed on a citywide basis — sending out speakers to community groups across the city, organizing the big downtown rallies, and hosting the massive pre-election precinct captain luncheons. Machine headquarters also told the ward committeemen how many votes they were expected to deliver, and mediated conflicts between rival factions in a ward. “It’s a full-time job, eight-thirty to six at night,” said Arvey. “That’s what makes an organization.” 51
Daley’s run for mayor was a tour de force of old-style machine politics. He spent relatively little time introducing himself to actual voters, and almost none working out plans for the city or positions on controversial issues. Classic machine campaigns like Daley’s were focused on gearing up the machine to work as efficiently as possible on election day. Daley spent much of his time meeting with the city’s fifty ward committeemen and building personal relationships with as many of the three thousand precinct captains — he always pronounced it “presint captains” — as he could. Daley knew that if he could fire them up, they would in turn fire up their voters. Although he was not an eloquent man, Daley had a rare ability to reach party workers with what has been called his “I’m witchoo treatment.” 52
Daley traveled around the city and spent countless hours visiting with machine workers in the ward organizations. “We will continue to carry the message as the early Christians did,” he liked to say, “by word of mouth.” Daley knew how to speak the language of the neighborhoods. He asked after the workers’ families, talked with the men about the White Sox, and with the women about church and children. When he delivered prepared remarks, Daley spoke “as a good father, good neighbor, and good citizen.” And like any good politician, he could deliver a well-worn joke. “There was a fellow who was hard of hearing, and he had been doing a lot of drinking,” went one of Daley’s favorites. “So he went to see Doctor Hughes, over at Thirty-seventh and Wallace, and the doc told him, ‘Pat, I’m telling you this: If you keep up your drinking, you’ll lose your hearing.’ Well, the fella came back in a month, and he says, ‘Well, Doc, I’ll tell you, I been enjoying what I been drinking so much more than what I been hearing that I thought I’d just keep on drinking.’” Daley fine-tuned his message to the personalities and ethnic politics of particular wards. At a 25th Ward Democratic Organization rally, presided over by Alderman Vito Marzullo, Daley was introduced as someone who “will recognize the Italian-Americans and other nationality groups in Chicago.” 53
Daley’s campaign also made great use of a Chicago machine tradition — massive luncheons and rallies for the precinct captains. These meetings were held in the large downtown hotels and various civic centers around the city. Red, white, and blue bunting hung down from the balconies, photographs of the candidates were strategically placed around the auditorium, and thousands of hardworking machine loyalists hooted and hollered from their seats as a parade of speakers rose to the podium to heap praise on even the most mediocre member of the machine slate. On Valentine’s Day 1955, candidate Daley spoke to an audience of almost five thousand of the machine’s best workers gathered at the Civic Opera House. As a brass band struck up “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” the party faithful — crammed into 3,700 seats and jamming the aisles — waved “Daley” placards and roared their approval for five uninterrupted minutes. A chorus sang “Back of the Yard,” in tribute to Daley’s 11th Ward. As Arvey spoke, Daley moved through the exuberant mass of humanity, surrounded by a wedge of family and uniformed ushers. He waved and grinned at the crowd, which was by now calling out “Dick!” and cheering wildly. When he got to the podium, Daley told the machine workers that their calling was a noble one. “My opponent says, ‘I took politics out of the schools; I took politics out of this and I took politics out of that.’ I
say to you: There’s nothin’ wrong with politics. There’s nothing wrong with good politics. Good politics is good government.” In Daley’s speeches, the Chicago machine took on an almost religious quality — as if he were confusing it with the other Irish-Catholic, hierarchical institution that loomed so large in his life, the Catholic Church. “I am proud to be the candidate of this organization,” he told a rally of precinct captains at the Morrison Hotel. “No man can walk alone.” For the black precinct captains, Daley often hauled out Congressman Bill Dawson to do some country-style preaching. “If we were not successful we’d be just an organization,” Dawson told one group of the submachine faithful at a rally during the 1955 mayoral election. “May we always be a machine!” Before he was done, an audience member shouted from the balcony, “Pour it on!” 54
Daley’s ministrations to the Democratic foot soldiers had an electrifying effect. “This election has revived the whole damn party,” North Side alderman Paddy Bauler would say after the primary. “It’s fired up the precinct captains like they ain’t been in thirty years. My guys are going all out for Daley in the general election. They like a guy who takes care of them.” Mayor Kennelly, who had been the machine’s candidate twice but never bothered to understand machine politics, never grasped the significance of Daley’s work in the ward organizations. He believed that politics was about standing up for the right principles, and he was convinced that if the voters were told of his views on such issues as civil-service reform, they would naturally support him over Daley. “Television is our precinct captain,” a Kennelly aide boasted during the campaign. But Daley understood Chicago politics far better than Kennelly ever would. “Can you ask your television set for a favor?” he responded. 55
