American Pharaoh
Page 18
The newspapers were against Daley, and he knew it. The three largest, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Daily News, all endorsed Merriam, which was no surprise given their anti-machine stance. The machine did manage to secure the endorsement of the fourth, the Herald-American, for Daley. The newspaper was ailing financially, and the machine reportedly struck a deal that in exchange for a Daley endorsement, its precinct captains would sell subscriptions. More important than endorsements, however, was news coverage, and by this standard the papers — with their heavy coverage of Merriam’s charges of voter fraud, and their hounding Becker off the ticket — were also giving aid and comfort to the Merriam camp. Candidates work hard to win over journalists, but Daley, knowing that the Republican-leaning press was not about to go soft on the machine, seemed to delight in spurning them. He was known to give reporters the address of a vacant lot for his next speaking appearance. Daley’s view of reporters, one reporter wrote in the Sun-Times, was that he “doesn’t seem to want them around.” 84
Merriam was concerned, with good reason, that Daley and his supporters would attempt to steal the election. The Democratic Party was in the hands, Merriam charged, of “dictators who may spend a million dollars — over two hundred dollars per precinct — to try to buy the votes they cannot honestly win.” Merriam distributed the primary-day photographs of Sidney “Short Pencil” Lewis stealing votes, and backed them up with new evidence. A man named Admiral Le Roy had sworn out an affidavit saying he had personally observed “Short Pencil” wielding his famed pencil. Le Roy had himself been a victim of the machine’s brand of dirty politics. He had announced for alderman, challenging the organization, but he withdrew when he was “beaten up and had a gun pulled on him” and told to get out of the race. To further bolster his charges that the machine intended to steal the election, Merriam sent out thirty thousand letters to registered voters in machine strongholds. Nearly three thousand of them came back “unclaimed” or “moved, left no address” — proof, Merriam contended, that the machine had as many as 100,000 ghost voters hidden away on the Chicago voting rolls. Merriam filed a formal complaint with the Election Board. But he knew it would go nowhere because the Election Board chairman, Sidney T. Holzman, was a member in good standing of the machine — Merriam lambasted him as the “chief spokesman for the Morrison Hotel politburo.” County judge Otto Kerner, who presided over the Cook County election machinery and had appointed Holzman, was Daley’s good friend and Anton Cermak’s son-in-law. Merriam produced a photograph of Kerner warmly congratulating Daley on primary night, and asked how Kerner and Holzman could be trusted to keep the machine honest. Holzman responded that Merriam was “following Hitler’s tactics which consisted of this — if you tell a lie often enough, people will begin to believe you.” Merriam also charged that some precinct captains in the Ida B. Wells Homes housing project were threatening to evict tenants unless they voted for Daley. The CHA stayed out of the matter, and Daley scoffed at the charges. “Democratic precinct captains don’t have to use pressure of that sort to get votes,” Daley declared. 85
In the final days of the campaign, Daley made the most of his financial edge over Merriam. The machine had about $1 million to spend in the campaign, more than three times what Merriam had raised. The Daley campaign distributed thousands of dollars in walk-around money, used to pay for election-day operations and get-outthe-vote efforts. Some of the money went directly into the pockets of voters — or in some cases to buy bottles of whiskey that went into the pockets of voters. But the machine also had more subtle ways of translating dollars into votes. “I have heard it said that it costs about 20 thousand dollars to deliver a Ward in Chicago on election day,” one machine chronicler has written. “Most of this money is placed in the hands of precinct captains. The precinct captain has his own ideas on how to cut up the money. He talks to a woman who lives in a six-flat, * a woman who is favorable to his cause and well-liked by her neighbors. Will she be willing to help get her friends’ vote for the Party? Well, she might. Of course, there will be a few ‘expenses’ — And that is the cue for the precinct captain to dig into his pocket for a ten-spot or a twenty.” The machine added to its other advantages by resorting to a few of its traditional last-minute dirty tricks. In addition to the letters that went out from the nonexistent American Negro Civic Association endorsing Merriam, Republican voters got letters urging a vote for Daley, on letterhead of the fictional Taft-Eisenhower League. Rumors were also circulated that anyone who had voted in the Democratic primary could not vote for Merriam now. “Voters should beware of such poison, which is typical of the dirty methods of the Democratic machine,” Republican county chairman Edward Moore warned. 86
As in the primary, it seemed that the election would turn on the size of the turnout. Merriam implored Chicagoans to vote in large numbers to offset the machine’s strength. “There must be an outpouring of citizens April 5,” he declared. “If the confident bosses could defeat the wishes of the people as they did Feb. 22, it would be a catastrophe for Chicago.” Conventional wisdom held that the machine would produce about 600,000 votes for Daley. If more than 1.2 million Chicagoans showed up at the polls, Merriam believed, he would win. On election day, the early indications were that the turnout was exceeding all predictions. Merriam attended a memorial service for Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick at midday, and as he entered the Fourth Presbyterian Church he heard a city election official predicting that the turnout would reach 1,500,000. “I spent the whole hour, when I should have been thinking about the soul of Colonel McCormick, thinking about who I was going to appoint to my cabinet,” Merriam said later. 87
Daley arrived at the Morrison Hotel at 5:00 P.M., and holed up in the private offices of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee to wait for the returns. With Arvey at his side, he pored over precinct returns as they were called in by ward leaders. As the hours went by, the offices filled up with Daley’s machine allies. Adhering to the machine’s rigid hierarchy, operatives below the rank of ward committeeman were kept out of the office by a guard posted at the door. The numbers that were pouring in were good, and equally important, turnout was not as robust as the machine had feared earlier in the day. By 8:30 P.M., Daley emerged from a side door and made his way to the hotel’s Madison Room for a victory statement. Daley declared to a cluster of television cameras and radio microphones, “I promise no miracles — no bargains — but with unity, cooperation, and teamwork, we will continue to build a better city for ourselves and our children.” 88
Daley won the mayoralty with about 55 percent of the vote, a healthy victory but the narrowest margin in more than a decade. Daley had received 708,222 votes, more than the Merriam forces had counted on, but not an insurmountable number. With a higher turnout, Merriam might have prevailed, but since only 1.3 million votes were cast in the end, that left less than 600,000 for Merriam. The ward-by-ward results were remarkably similar to the primary. Daley and Merriam had run evenly in most of the city. Again, it was the Automatic Eleven that had given Daley his victory — in this case, a margin of 125,179 votes, almost all of Daley’s 126,967-vote citywide edge. And once again, the black vote proved critical. Dawson’s five wards gave Daley 81,910 votes to 32,547 votes for Merriam — more than a 49,000-vote margin. When other heavily black wards were added in, Daley’s margin from predominantly black wards exceeded 103,000. If these black voters had voted Republican rather than Democratic, Daley would almost certainly have lost. The syndicate performed even more impressively. Daley took close to 90 percent of the 1st Ward vote, winning by 18,233 to 2,304. It may have been the mob’s work for his election that caused the Chicago Daily News to editorialize: “Some of the finest, high-principled men in the Democratic party worked for Daley in the election. So did some of the most notorious rascals in politics anywhere. Both kinds helped to deliver the votes to the winner. Daley knows which is which. We pray he has the strength to govern himself and the city accordingly.” 89
The Tri
bune welcomed the new mayor cautiously. “We congratulate Richard J. Daley,” the paper wrote after the election. “We hope, for his sake, as well as Chicago’s, that he will do nothing in the coming four years to sully his good name.” More prescient assessments came from those who knew Daley better. Charlie Weber, alderman from the 45th Ward on the Northwest Side and a machine loyalist, told reporters on election night: “Let me tell ya, this Daley — he’s gonna be one tough sonofabitch.” But it was Paddy Bauler of the 43rd Ward, among the last of Chicago’s saloon-aldermen, who got off the line for the ages. The 245-pound Bauler danced a little jig and declared that Daley’s election meant that “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!” Bauler also gave reporters another less quoted, but equally perceptive, assessment. “Keane and them fellas — Jake Arvey, Joe Gill — they think they are gonna run things,” Bauler said. “Well, you listen now to what I am sayin’: they’re gonna run nothing’. They ain’t found it out yet, but Daley’s the dog with the big nuts, now that we got him elected. You wait and see; that’s how it is going to be.” 90
CHAPTER
4
I Am the Mayor
and Don’t You Forget It
Paddy Bauler had good reason to dance a jig on election night: Daley’s victory had averted the most serious threat to the Chicago machine in decades. Machine politicians had long belittled reformers and their dreams of cleaning up city government. George Washington Plunkitt, the sachem of New York’s Tammany Hall, once dismissed reformers as “mornin’ glories — looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever like fine old oaks.” Chicago machine politicians were equally dismissive of their good-government opponents: Bauler described one reformer as “so dumb he probably thinks the forest preserve is some kind of jelly.” But by 1955, reformers were showing undeniable success in dismantling Democratic machines across the country. In Boston, another city with a long history of Irish-Catholic machine politics, reformers had seized City Hall in 1951. In New York, Tammany Hall had been badly wounded by the reform mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia. And in Chicago, as in the rest of the country, a combination of factors — including suburbanization, ethnic assimilation, and the rise of civil service — were cutting sharply into the machine’s base. The Cook County Democratic Organization’s power had already begun to wane under Mayor Kennelly. If Kennelly had been reelected, or if Merriam had won, the machine might well have faced extinction. 1
Daley was too politic to join Bauler in publicly celebrating the defeat of political reform. To the contrary, he rushed to reassure the city’s voters and editorial writers of his good-government intentions. On election night, Daley called on the state legislature to come up with the money for two thousand new police officers he had pledged during the campaign. It was an indication that he intended to keep his campaign promises, but also a subtle rebuke to those who had labeled him the candidate of the “hoodlum element.” Daley also vowed on election night that his administration would keep civil service operating at its “present high standard.” He also declared, as he repeatedly had as a candidate, that he would resign as party chairman to “devote all of my time to the mayor’s office.” In fact, Daley had no intention of preserving civil service or of stepping down as boss, but his election-night pledges had the effect of breaking the bad news about his anti-reform intentions gently. 2
At his April 22 inauguration, Daley gave a more honest indication of how he intended to operate. Mayoral inaugurations are usually bland ceremonial affairs — a hall filled with friends and political supporters, and an address setting forth lofty goals for improving civic life. Daley had no problem producing the admirers. From the moment the vote totals were in, he had been inundated with congratulatory telegrams and letters from what seemed to be almost everyone he had ever known in his fifty-three years, and many more he did not know at all. His desk at the county clerk’s office had quickly been buried under a scrapbook-collection of old names and familiar signatures. “Joe would have been as proud of you as I am,” read one telegram, sent by Mae McDonough, widow of Daley’s old political patron. Many of these well-wishers were among the capacity crowd of two thousand who jammed into the seats and standing room of the ornate and historic City Council Chambers. Hundreds more mobbed the corridors, or listened to the proceedings through loudspeakers outside on the street. Sis and six of the seven Daley children were proudly seated in the front row, while the remaining daughter watched on television from the Sisters of Mercy novitiate. Daley was sworn in by his old friend Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, who was now a county judge. 3
What made Daley’s inauguration unusual was the bluntness of his address. Dressed simply in a blue suit, blue tie, and white shirt, he began with the usual words of appreciation for Mayor Kennelly, Democrats, Republicans, the City Council, and “all the people of Chicago.” He also delivered his customary warm words about Bridgeport. “I have lived all my life in a neighborhood of Chicago,” Daley said. “All that I am I owe to the influences of my family, church, our neighborhood and our city.” But as he spoke, Daley’s tone became more serious. He told the City Council he had no intention of interfering with their “proper functions.” But it would be his duty, he said, to exercise his veto power “against measures which would be harmful to the people.” More significant, he said that he would work to implement proposals made by the Chicago Home Rule Commission to strip the City Council of its executive and budgetary functions and transfer them to City Hall. His goal was “to relieve the council of administrative and technical duties ... and permit the aldermen to devote most of their time to legislation.” What Daley was saying to the City Council, in words that disguised his power grab as a favor, was that he had every intention of turning them into a rubber stamp. 4
True to his word, Daley went to work to change the balance of power between the mayor and the City Council. A few months before his election, he had arranged for the Chicago Home Rule Commission to recommend shifting responsibility for preparing the city budget from the City Council to the mayor. The commission also called for ending the long-standing requirement that the City Council approve all city contracts over $2,500. When these recommendations became law, Daley could afford to treat the City Council as little more than an advisory body. Equally important, his dual role as mayor and machine boss made the vast majority of the council his political supplicants. With a few words at a slate-making meeting, Daley could end the political careers of most of them. The result was that, except for a few Republicans and independents, the council quickly became a Daley cheering section. In October, Daley submitted three new appointments to the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium Board. After voting 36–11 to suspend its own rules requiring that the nominees be evaluated in committee, the council approved the appointees by voice vote less than an hour after Daley presented it with the names. Daley had taken Chicago’s aldermen far from the day when their independent and rapacious ways earned them the nickname “the Gray Wolves.” By the time the tuberculosis sanitarium nominees flew through the council, Republicans aldermen were lamenting that Daley had reduced them and their colleagues to mere “puppets.” That is how the council would function for the next two decades under Daley. “In the years he was here, we were useful to fill chairs and vote the way we were told to vote,” recalls machine alderman Edward Burke. “That was the extent of it.” 5
Daley also went after the City Council’s informal powers. The city’s fifty aldermen had long had the ability to dispense a wide variety of favors within their wards. A businessman seeking a zoning variance or a driveway permit would ask his alderman to intercede with the appropriate unit of city government to make it happen. One of Daley’s first acts in office was to centralize more of this power in City Hall. Under the new rules, all requests for favors of any significant size were channeled to “the fifth floor,” the location of the mayor’s office in City Hall, and usually to “the Man on Five” — Daley himself. The city council was not happy
about the change — some aldermen were charging as much as $20,000 for a driveway permit. But Daley understood the importance of the power to grant these routine favors for a machine politician. “Let me put it in a crude way,” Daley’s mentor Jake Arvey used to advise young men starting out in politics. “Put people under obligation to you.” 6