American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley’s campaign benefited from some of the machine’s more un-savory practices. The machine’s patronage army — government workers who knew that their jobs were at stake — went into battle for Daley in this election as they had never battled before. And the campaign was flush with campaign money extracted by the machine from its usual sources. Companies doing business with the city and county kicked back thousands of dollars, knowing that failure to do so could mean the end of their government contracts. Daley, who subscribed to his own version of Tammany Hall leader George Washington Plunkitt’s famous distinction between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft,” saw nothing wrong with the kickbacks. “A real crook, in the eyes of Daley, was somebody who’d take the $5,000 for himself,” said Lynn Williams, a township committeeman and member of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. “A fellow who would ask someone to make a $5,000 contribution to the party was a loyal party worker.” The machine also had a tradition of charging “assessments” to each of the ward organizations for the cost of a citywide campaign. Ward organizations came by this money in a variety of legal and illegal ways, including forcing patronage workers to give back 1 percent to 2 percent of their salaries, shaking down businesses for zoning variances, and siphoning off protection money from illegal activities in the ward. During the campaign, an unidentified man appeared on TV with his back to the camera to say that fully 10 percent of the city’s illegal gambling revenues went to politicians in the form of “juice money.” This year, much of that juice money would be used to turn out voters for Daley. 56

  Daley’s supporters were not above using violence or threats to intimidate the opposition. In the final days of the 1955 campaign, an anti-machine aldermanic candidate in the South Side 6th Ward — a hotly contested ward the black submachine was trying to move into — had to dive into his basement window for cover when he was shot at outside his home. A month earlier, Dawson had asked him to withdraw from the race. And just days before the primary, the 11th Ward alderman whom Daley had handpicked after his defeat of Babe Connelly — Stanley Nowakowski — was charged with threatening a campaign worker who allegedly pulled down some of his signs. “They told me I’d better watch myself going home, and to lay off, or we’ll take care of you once and for all,” said Frank Serafini, owner of the Automatic Heating and Equipment Company. “They said they had Daley’s okay on it.” 57 s

  Kennelly declared that his reelection battle was a fight of “the people against the bosses.” He told a luncheon audience at the City Club on January 31, 1955, that he had won the enmity of the machine because he had moved employees out of the patronage system and into civil service. Twice as many civil-service exams were held during his two terms as mayor, he said, as in any other comparable period in Chicago history. A machine alderman had approached him six months earlier, he said, and told him he could have the party’s backing if he dumped the Civil Service Commission chairman. “With me, dumping is an ugly word,” Kennelly said. “Why would I do it? He was doing a good job. All we tried to do was live up to the law we were sworn to uphold. The pressure to ‘go easy’ was very great. It still is.” At a February 6 candidates’ forum at Temple Sholom on Lake Shore Drive, Daley exploded when Adamowski and Kennelly accused him of having fixed the machine’s nominating process. “The hocus-pocus is over,” Adamowski said. “He can’t deny that he picked the committee to run him for mayor.” Daley seethed as Kennelly added to the point. “[T]hey gave me three minutes and 56 seconds to tell about what has been done in eight years, how the city government has been improved,” the mayor said. At this, Daley jumped up in a rage. “The mayor took two minutes,” Daley shouted. “He could have had all day if he wanted it! Nobody stopped him! He could have had all afternoon.” When Kennelly told the audience about how he had spotted Daley “almost hidden on the sofa” while the slate-making committee met, Daley jumped up to the microphone only to be blocked by the female moderator. 58

  Kennelly was helped in his anti-machine crusade by a well-timed scandal. The newspapers were reporting that Alderman Benjamin Becker, the machine’s candidate for city clerk, had been sharing zoning case fees with an attorney and former 40th Ward machine operative. It was classic machine-style corruption: the powerful elected official who extracted a favor from city government in exchange for a kickback. The alderman refused to respond to the allegations, saying he was “not going to be tried in the newspapers,” and he argued that only the Chicago Bar Association, not the press or the public, was in a position to evaluate the charges. The bar association was willing to conduct an inquiry, but the organization’s president said there was no guarantee it would be completed before the primary. Pressure mounted to dump Becker from the ticket, but Daley stood by his running mate. “Don’t you think this man is entitled to a fair trial in accordance with American tradition?” Daley demanded. Employing a technique Daley would use time and again in his career, he lashed out at those making the accusations. “There are false charges and malicious remarks being made about us,” he told a rally of ward committeemen. “Where is the proof? Where are the facts behind the rumors? I have not heard of the facts because there are no facts!” 59

  Daley’s shrewder, and ultimately more effective, strategy for blunting the anti-machine charges against him was to wrap himself in the mantle of reform. Following the model of Arvey’s shrewd slating of Stevenson and Douglas, Daley convinced a respected reform lawyer who had been an important backer of Douglas in 1948 and 1954 to lead a “Volunteers for Daley” committee to rally nonmachine Democrats to the cause. At the same time, Daley drew on his own long association with Stevenson, leader of Illinois reformers and the man Time magazine had recently called “the nation’s top Democrat.” Breaking his rule against endorsing in primaries, Stevenson backed Daley. He was acting, he said, out of “personal respect and friendship,” but there were more practical reasons at work. The Chicago machine had launched Stevenson’s political career, and he would need its backing when he sought the 1956 Democratic nomination for president. Win or lose in the race for mayor, Daley would be head of the machine when that decision was made. Daley also convinced Douglas, the machine’s other loyal reformer, to endorse him. At a February 4 rally of party workers at the Morrison Hotel, Douglas spoke of his respect and admiration for Daley and the entire machine. “On the basis of my own experience, I have never been treated more honorably by any group than by the Democratic organization here in Cook County,” Douglas declared. “[T]hey having stood by me when I was under fire, I believe unjustly, I think I should testify to the truth now when they are under fire.” As with Stevenson, any genuine warm feelings Douglas may have had for the machine were mixed with an appreciation of its practical value to his career. Douglas had lost the 1942 Senate primary when he ran without the machine’s backing, and was elected to the Senate six years later when the machine was with him. Keeping company with distinguished reformers like Stevenson and Douglas, Daley almost seemed to be moving beyond the machine. To further support this impression, he pledged that if he were elected mayor, he would step down as head of the machine. Daley said he had offered to resign on December 20, when the machine slated him for mayor, but that the machine leadership had convinced him to stay on. If he were elected mayor, though, he would resign his party post to “devote my full time and attention to the duties of the mayor’s office.” Convincing though it sounded at the time, it was not a promise he intended to keep. 60

  While Kennelly and Adamowski wanted to make the election a referendum on bossism, Daley tried to shift the focus to populism. He took every opportunity to contrast the working-class people of the neighborhoods who formed the backbone of his support with the downtown business titans and blue-blooded reformers who were backing Kennelly. “There are worse bosses than bosses in politics,” Daley declared. “They are the bosses of big business and big influence.” These “big interests” were using Kennelly’s candidacy, Daley contended, “to retain control of the mayor’s office.” Fixing on a them
e he would use throughout his career, Daley insisted that the important division in the city was not between the machine and reformers, but between Chicago’s business elites and its blue-collar neighborhoods. “What we must do is have a city not for State Street, not for LaSalle Street, but a city for all Chicago,” Daley told an enthusiastic meeting of the Democratic Organization at the Sherman Hotel. “I’m a kid from the stockyards,” he reminded a brass-band rally for 3,700 precinct captains. Though Daley headed up the nation’s mightiest political machine, he presented himself as a struggling David to Kennelly’s Goliath. “I know, and so do you, that they have control of the communications — of radio and of television,” Daley complained.

  Daley’s supporters took every opportunity to contrast Kennelly’s patrician ways with the modest background of their own candidate. “Kennelly ain’t lived with people,” one Daley campaign lieutenant argued in typically homespun fashion. “He picks a fancy apartment, an elevator to take him up away from the people, and when the elevator brings him down his car is waiting. But Richard Daley lives in a bungalow, walks to church, sees his neighbors, and understands people.” The Daley campaign also realized the uses to which the candidate’s large Irish family could be put. “Those seven kids of his don’t hurt,” one Daley strategist noted. “I was the one that told him to get their pictures in his ads.” Daley increased his working-class appeal by picking up the endorsement of the city’s major unions, which all had long-standing ties to the machine. The Chicago Federation of Labor, led by an old friend, endorsed Daley on January 4. A few days later, the state Congress of Industrial Organizations fell into line as well. 61

  On the tricky issue of race, Daley carefully appealed to both sides. The vote in the black submachine wards was simply too large for a machine candidate to ignore. Fortunately for Daley, Dawson had already come out against Kennelly because of his stand on the jitneys and policy wheels, and Daley made private assurances to Dawson that he would not interfere in these spheres. Daley also spoke warmly of Dawson personally. In his attacks on the machine, Kennelly often singled out Dawson as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the Morrison Hotel crowd. “The congressman is a political boss,” Kennelly said in a January 30 speech. “I can understand why Dawson passed the word that he couldn’t stand for Kennelly. I haven’t been interested in building up his power. Without power to dispense privilege, protection and patronage to preferred people, bossism has no stock in trade.” Daley came to Dawson’s defense — particularly before all-black audiences. On the eve of the election, Daley traveled to the Grand Ballroom in the 6th Ward — the latest territorial addition to Dawson’s growing submachine empire — and stood behind the South Side congressman at a rally of 1,200 submachine workers. “Why should they castigate leaders in the lifestream of politics as bosses?” Daley said, one machine head defending another. “I don’t say Bill Dawson is a boss. I say Bill Dawson is a leader of men and women.” At the same time that Daley was appealing to blacks on welfare issues and personality politics, he sent signals to white voters that on the overriding racial issue of the day — integration of white neighborhoods — he stood with them. In an address to 7,500 members of the United Packinghouse Workers on February 17, Daley told his overwhelmingly white audience that the police department should “not be used to advance the interests of any one group over another,” a coded reference to the role of the police in integrating Trumbull Park. 62

  Heading into the final weeks of the election, Daley trailed Kennelly by a substantial margin, according to the rudimentary opinion polls used at the time. A Tribune poll found that nearly 57 percent of the 104 voters who expressed a preference backed Kennelly, against only 33 percent who intended to vote for Daley. Kennelly’s camp had also been encouraged by the results of its own straw polls. A car carrying four women poll takers and a male supervisor would pull up to street intersections in bellwether wards, get out, and survey passersby. Kennelly’s teams kept their stops brief, because within thirty minutes of arriving at a corner, word would reach the machine, and it would dispatch ringers to artificially boost Daley’s numbers. But in their shorter and more random stops, Kennelly was outpolling Daley by better than 2–1. “Every sign from these and other sources shows sentiment for Mayor Kennelly is growing every moment,” his campaign manager declared. “No matter where you go, there is no grass roots sentiment at all for the Morrison Hotel candidate.” But again, the Kennelly campaign was showing a dangerous naïveté about the way the machine operated. One voter polled by the Tribune, a retired accountant walking down Clifton Avenue in the North Side 46th Ward, tried to explain how Chicago politics worked. “This is Joe Gill’s ward,” the accountant said. “Gill is one of the bosses who decided to dump Kennelly. The people in this ward will be herded to the polls like cattle and they will vote as they are told. It’s the same in nearly every other ward.” 63

  What mattered, in other words, was not abstract public opinion but actual votes, and the machine had a knack for getting its voters to the polls. Kennelly was pinning his hopes on a large turnout to overcome the machine voters, who would turn out without fail for Daley. As it happened, the election fell on Washington’s birthday, when banks and schools were closed, and the Kennelly camp was hoping the holiday would stimulate voting. If turnout was above 900,000, they believed, the mayor would be reelected. In the waning days, the Kennelly campaign concentrated on stimulating turnout, but lacking the machine’s precinct captains and foot soldiers, it had to get the message out through television. In a commercial repeated at fifteen-minute intervals the day before the election, Kennelly called on voters to show up at the polls in massive numbers to send a message to the party bosses. And in a final half-hour television appearance broadcast from the Erlanger Theater, Kennelly declared that “every vote counts today to maintain the integrity of local government.” 64

  The primary was February 22, and Daley’s election-night party was held at the Morrison Hotel. Outside the machine headquarters, a crowd of machine true-believers sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” In the inner sanctum, the machine’s leaders, the men responsible for turning out the loyal voters, were all in attendance. Dawson had arrived, bringing word that blacks had turned out in force in the submachine wards. The city’s labor titans, who had supplied many of the enlisted men in the machine’s election-day army, had also shown up — William A. Lee, the Bakery Drivers Union leader who was president of the Chicago Federation of Labor; William McFetridge of the Flat Janitors Union; and Stephen Bailey of the Plumbers Union. Sargent Shriver, at that time a member of the Chicago Board of Education and head of the Kennedy family’s Merchandise Mart, was on hand with his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. When the polls closed for the night, nervous ward committeemen filed into headquarters and reported directly to Daley on the precinct-by-precinct tallies in their wards. It was a ritual Daley would act out time and again, accepting the ward committeemen’s proffered numbers and reviewing them silently. If the results pleased him, he would jump up excitedly and pump the ward committeeman’s hand. If he was unhappy, there was a good chance Daley would scream at the bearer of bad tidings. Daley was once so upset with a ward’s results, according to a machine insider, that he reached over his desk and began shaking the terrified ward committeeman by his necktie. 65

  But this night, Daley was happy. The weather had been good all day, but even the clear skies had not prompted a turnout as high as the Kennelly camp hoped — or the machine feared. In the end, fewer than 750,000 Democrats had cast ballots. As the numbers poured into the Morrison Hotel, it was clear to Daley that he had triumphed. At 9:00 P.M.., Kennelly went on television to concede. Fifteen minutes later, a telegram of congratulation arrived from Adamowski. At 9:32, Daley came out from his office to make a victory statement. He thanked everyone in the crowd for their hard work on his behalf, ending his remarks by saying, “I shall conduct myself in the spirit of the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: ‘Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.’” 66 Daley arrived home a
t midnight, and his family was still awake. Reporters could hear Sis Daley shout, “Here he is, kids!” Daley hugged six of his seven children — Patricia, the firstborn, was at a Sisters of Mercy novitiate in Des Plaines — and promised he would take them fishing. “Tell your mother not to fix anything for dinner,” Daley exclaimed. “We’re going to bring home some trout.” 67

  In the round of postmortems that followed, the ward-by-ward vote totals showed that Daley’s edge had come from just a few wards, and they revealed which constituencies put him in office. Daley and Kennelly ran remarkably evenly in thirty-nine of the city’s fifty wards. It was the remaining eleven wards, known as the machine’s “Automatic Eleven,” that were responsible for Daley’s victory. He carried these wards by 98,859 votes, almost his entire 100,064-vote victory margin. The Automatic Eleven voters belonged overwhelmingly to the machine’s three key voting blocs: working-class white ethnics, blacks, and the syndicate. Several were old-style machine wards, in which powerful white ward committeemen used the traditional methods to turn out a strong vote for the machine slate. Daley also fared well in the so-called plantation wards, which had turned majority black but remained under white control, and in the city’s “skid row.” Dawson’s submachine of five wards also racked up big margins for Daley. Finally, Daley ran unusually well in the syndicate-dominated 1st Ward. 68