American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley had the kind of social skills that serve a politician well. He had a knack for remembering people; it was said that he could greet half the city’s employees by name. David Stahl took his young sons to work one Saturday and introduced them to Daley. Six months later, Daley’s secretary called to offer Stahl three tickets to a White Sox game. When Daley showed up, he immediately greeted the Stahl children. “He said, ‘Hi Steve, Hi Mike.’ Nobody had given him a card. He had an incredible photographic memory.” Still, Daley was not a warm man. “You never touched him,” says Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski, a friend and political protégé of Daley’s. “You wouldn’t hug him.” Apart from family members, Daley’s relationships were largely defined by politics. Many of the people he was closest to were politicians, and Daley was inclined to view them more as rivals than friends. Near North Side alderman Joseph Rostenkowski, Daniel’s father, was nominally a friend, but Daley always regarded him warily because of his strong following in Chicago’s large Polish community. Daley was able to let his guard down a bit more with younger people. “He never feared me,” says Daniel Rostenkowski, who was in his early twenties when he started out with Daley. “I wasn’t a threat to him.” Daley was a gregarious loner, acquainted with thousands of people but close to almost none. “He’s like a post office clerk sorting mail,” one Daley associate said. “He keeps men in slots. In a general human sense of trusting somebody, the only person really close to him is his wife.” Daley also kept people at arm’s length with a fierce temper that rose up without warning. “He was essentially a quiet, soft-spoken person,” says David Stahl. “But he had the capacity to get angry and bellow. He did it almost every day of the week.” Daley’s associates had a gallows humor about his frequent red-faced outbursts. Asked about the best way to approach the mayor they would respond: on tiptoe. 21

  Daley was also suspicious and secretive, in both his private and public lives. He rarely talked about his family or his past. “That was a private world he hung on to,” says human relations commissioner Edward Marciniak. Daley was so reticent about even the most basic personal details that when one author set out to write about Daley he found himself unable to verify that he was an only child. “I checked with two people, one a Democratic politician who has known Daley for twenty-five years, and the other, a man who had worked in Daley’s office closely with him for a number of years and who had been invited to the weddings of Daley’s children,” the author wrote. “When asked whether Daley was an only child or whether there were any brothers or sisters, both men replied that they thought [he was an only child] but were not sure.” Daley quickly imposed this diffident style on his mayoral administration. He held press conferences almost every day, but he addressed only the topics he chose. City employees were instructed not to answer even simple inquiries from reporters or civic groups without checking with him. Lois Wille, a Chicago Daily News reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on health care for indigent women, says it was almost impossible to get basic facts on issues like infant mortality out of Daley’s City Hall. In one case, she had to arrange a secret rendezvous with a woman doctor at the perfume counter of a department store to get health data that, in any other city, would have been available through the mayoral press office. 22

  Becoming mayor did change Daley in one respect: he quickly came to demand a new level of obeisance from subordinates and friends. Shortly after the 1955 election William Lee, a union official who had provided critical support during the campaign, saw his old friend arriving late for a civic function. “You’re late, Richard,” Lee said to Daley. “Don’t you ever call me ‘Richard’ in public,” Daley replied. “I am the mayor, and don’t you ever forget it.” Like a rich man who does not like to be reminded of the days before he had money, Daley did not like to be reminded of his more humble origins. South Side alderman Edward Burke recalls a meeting at the LaSalle Hotel where Attorney General William Clark made the mistake of mentioning in his speech that his father was on the City Council when Daley used to get coffee for the aldermen. “He was trying to allude to his long family relationship to the party, but Daley didn’t like being reminded he was a gofer,” says Burke. “That cast the die for Bill Clark. Daley wouldn’t give him the time of day.” 23 In this case, Daley’s anger did not last. Clark remained a loyal member of the machine, and years later Daley slated him in a losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.

  One of Daley’s first priorities in office was to rescue political patronage. Despite his campaign rhetoric, he never had any intention of continuing Mayor Kennelly’s civil-service reform efforts. The patronage system was simply too critical to the machine’s grip on power for Daley to allow it to be undone. Political patronage is often thought of by the uninitiated as a casual practice in which friends hire friends and relatives hire relatives for government jobs. In fact, in a well-run political machine like Chicago’s, patronage was anything but casual. Machines held on to power through their ability to trade jobs and other material inducements for political support. Paddy Bauler used to say that reformers could never hope to compete with the machine because their workers simply did not have the incentive to campaign that came with knowing that their livelihoods were at stake. “The type of people you got over there don’t need a job as bailiff, so you got to rely on amateurs for your organization,” Bauler scoffed at one reform leader. But the supply of patronage positions was limited, and the machine could afford to hand them out only to workers who could be counted on to work hard for it on election day. In his own 43rd Ward, Bauler once boasted, every one of his seventy-six precinct captains had city, state, or county employment. But in exchange, they all turned out their vote on election day. 24

  Patronage workers were chosen carefully, and their value to the machine was constantly reassessed. Daley had individual meetings with each of the fifty ward committeemen to discuss how much patronage his ward would receive for the year. To ready for these meetings, Daley patronage aide Matt Danaher prepared precise tabulations of how each precinct in each of the fifty wards had performed in the last election — more than 3,000 separate vote tallies that Daley personally pored over in making his patronage decisions. Everyone understood there was a “pecking order,” recalls Tom Donovan, who followed Danaher as Daley’s patronage chief. “Someone who’s with the best ward in the city naturally is going to have a better chance of getting key positions than someone who isn’t.” But there was also room for the machine boss to exercise his discretion, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. “We didn’t have a set form,” Donovan recalls. “It was something you had a feel for.” Ward committeemen with strong connections to Daley, including most of the Irish titans of the machine, tended to do especially well. Daley’s political base, the 11th Ward, may have had as many as 2,000 patronage positions, considerably more than it was entitled to based on electoral performance alone. At the other extreme, Frank Keenan, who had defied Daley and the machine by backing Kennelly for mayor, had his patronage cut off entirely. 25

  Despite the inroads made by Kennelly’s civil-service crusade, the machine’s patronage operation was still vast when Daley took power. Thousands of workers were on the city payroll directly, and many more were on the payroll of specialized government bodies like the Sanitary District, which had their own budgets and taxing authority. Thousands more were placed with machine politicians who controlled large staffs of their own. The president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners at one time employed 3,100, more than half of whom were patronage hires. The clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County had 1,700 employees, three-fourths patronage workers. In addition to these government jobs, thousands of private-sector positions in Chicago required sponsorship from the Democratic machine. Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s mail-order operations, located in the 24th Ward, used to turn away walk-in applicants who did not come with a letter from alderman Jacob Arvey. All told, the Chicago machine at its height controlled as many as 40,000 patronage jobs. “We had everything that wasn’t police or fire or care
er civil service,” recalls Daley patronage chief Tom Donovan. “That gave us a lot of positions to put our people in.” Even the worst patronage jobs offered a decent salary, and the best came with some appealing fringe benefits. Some jobs at the Forest Preserve District, a bastion of patronage, included a free house in the forest. Relatively minor supervisory positions often came with city cars. When 29th Ward precinct captain Thomas Fitzsimmons was supervisor of buildings and grounds at the Chicago Tuberculosis and Sanitarium District, he was entitled to a car and driver, although he did not take it. “He didn’t believe in calling attention,” says his granddaughter, Martha Fitzsimmons. 26

  To get a patronage job, the key was showing up with the right “sponsorship.” If the 10th Ward was entitled to six positions with the Sanitation Department, for example, the ward committeeman would send over six men with official “sponsorship letters.” Employers kept detailed patronage files, including when an employee was hired, who his sponsor was, and whether a sponsorship letter was on file. William Dawson’s correspondence files contain a letter that illustrates how the process worked. “I understand that my friend and office associate, Joseph J. Attwell, Jr., has received the endorsement of the 20th Ward Regular Democratic Organization for the position of trial attorney in your office,” Dawson wrote to Cook County state’s attorney John Boyle. “I also understand that there are already several appointees in your office from the 20th Ward. Since Mr. Attwell also meets with my approval, I would be happy to have you let your records show that you are charging his position to the Second Ward if that would facilitate his appointment.” 27

  Applicants without political sponsorship were usually ineligible for patronage jobs, no matter how qualified they were. There is a classic study of the Chicago machine entitled We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent, and that was precisely the ethic that prevailed. When Jesse Jackson came to Chicago in 1964 to attend Chicago Theological Seminary, he needed a job. He had a letter of introduction to Daley from North Carolina governor Terry Sanford. Daley met with Jackson, and advised him to work for one of the ward organizations on the South Side. He also offered Jackson a job as toll collector on the Calumet Bridge. Jackson, insulted, turned the job down. “He thought he was going to get something that was more commensurate with his self-concept, if you will,” says Jackson’s friend Henry Hardy. “You know, he had come out of school as a star athlete, president of the student body, with a letter from the governor — there were other toll collectors, I’m sure, who never had a letter from a governor.” Still, there were not many toll collectors who had gotten their job without doing precinct work first. 28

  Workers were generally assigned patronage jobs that corresponded to their place in the machine hierarchy. Precinct captains and assistant captains often became supervisors in the government bureaucracy or minor department heads. Lower-level precinct workers might get jobs as clerical workers, janitors, or street cleaners. Being qualified to do the work was not an important consideration. A high-level Chicago bureaucrat once explained the difference between hiring workers sent by the 29th Ward’s Bernie Neistein and those sent by the 26th Ward’s Matthew Bieszczat. “Bernie Neistein is reasonable,” the bureaucrat said. “If he sends you five guys to put to work, only two are illiterate. But Matt Bieszczat sends you five illiterates and wants you to take them all!” In many cases, little actual work was expected of patronage workers, at least in their nonpolitical jobs. Ed Quigley, who was both Daley’s sewer commissioner and ward committeeman for the 27th Ward, was known to be particularly undemanding. “It was the only sewer department in the country where people came to work in white pants, and when they went home they were just as clean,” recalls one veteran political reporter. “You didn’t have to work hard, and you could often hold down another job.” 29

  The patronage system built a political army willing to do battle for the machine in every election. “It gave the mayor a cadre of people who wanted to see him succeed,” says Tom Donovan. Patronage workers circulated nominating petitions, put up posters, worked at polling places, or rang doorbells to get their neighbors out to vote. In many departments, any employee who brought a letter from his ward organization could get a paid day off on election day to do political work. Patronage workers were expected to kick back up to 5 percent of their salary to their ward organizations. In some wards, the machine calculated the annual amount and sent workers a schedule of monthly payments. Patronage workers were also expected to attend ward dinner-dances and golf outings and sell tickets to their friends and family, and to buy books of ward-organization raffle tickets to resell. In the 5th Ward, they sold ads in the official program for the annual “Marshall Korshak Night,” honoring the ward committeeman; in the 11th Ward, they canvassed to support the annual indoor picnic at the Amphitheatre, in which 12,000 ward residents, most of them children, gathered for a free day of ice cream, soda, Ferris wheels, and merry-go-rounds. Patronage workers were also often pressured to contribute directly to their employers. The summer was a particularly costly time of year for patronage hires. In August 1958, the Chicago Tribune noted that four elected officials had already held golf outings, and four more were coming up shortly. “These are the months dreaded by the thousands of temporary workers on the government payrolls,” the paper noted. “They are the people expected to make a ‘drop’ of money for tickets to their ward organizations — either from their paychecks or thru the sale of tickets to others. Workers who fail to meet quotas for ticket sales may find themselves slipping off the payroll.” 30

  Patronage employees who did not produce risked losing their jobs. A large number of patronage employees were officially classified as “temporary” workers, who were hired for periods of 60 to 180 days, after which their employment had to be renewed. The temporary worker category was a gaping loophole in Chicago’s civil-service system. The law permitted these workers to be hired outside the civil-service guidelines when no competitive examinations had been held — which gave the machine an incentive to see that exams were held as infrequently as possible. In some agencies, like the Park District, more than half of the new employees in a given year would be classified as temporary. Temporary workers who remained in the good graces of the machine could remain on the payroll for twenty-five years or more in their “temporary” capacity. The temporary worker system kept the pressure on patronage workers to fulfill their political responsibilities if they wanted to remain employed. Years later, when the patronage machine was challenged in federal court, workers would come forward with stories of being fired for failing to produce the votes that were expected of them or for not kicking back money to their ward organizations. Ida Barnes, who worked in the traffic ticket collection office of the clerk of the Circuit Court, testified that she lost her job after protesting she could not afford to buy a $50 ticket to a dinner sponsored by the 16th Ward Democratic Organization. 31

  From a purely political standpoint, the patronage system worked. By one estimate, each patronage job produced about ten votes for the machine: the worker’s own, the votes of his family and friends, and the votes that his campaign work and financial contributions produced. If the machine in fact controlled 40,000 patronage jobs, it went into every election with a 400,000-vote edge over its opponents. In local races, the impact could be even more dramatic. By one estimate patronage workers could account for as much as 25 percent to 50 percent of the vote in some aldermanic races. James Murray, onetime 18th Ward alderman, recalls that at one point his ward had about three hundred patronage jobs and produced a fairly good vote for the machine. “I remember Matt Danaher said to me, ‘Why aren’t you as good as the 11th Ward,’” Murray recalls. “I told him, ‘We would be if we had the jobs you have in the 11th Ward.’” Daley was a firm believer in the power of patronage. Once, at a meeting of the Cook County Central Committee, a committeeman from suburban Wheeling Township complained that he had more than one hundred precincts but only twelve precinct workers available to cover them on election day. Daley responded that the c
ommitteeman should focus on running slates of candidates for office in the villages across his township, with the goal of taking control of the village governments. Once he controlled these local governments, Daley advised, he could hire patronage employees and turn them into political armies. 32

  The patronage system meant more to Daley than just votes. He liked the control it gave him over people. Daley was not comfortable dealing with people who were not under obligation to him. Jerome Torshen, an antitrust lawyer with no ties to the machine, worked closely with Daley on a sensitive litigation project. Torshen was paid for the work, but Daley was uneasy with the fact that when it was over Torshen had no stake in the machine. Torshen recalls that one day he was walking through City Hall and ran into Daley, who greeted him warmly. Mistaking Torshen’s specialty of antitrust law for the trust-and-estate work the machine handed out freely to politically connected lawyers, Daley urged Torshen to pick up some legal work from one of his patronage dispensers. “Get some trust work from the city,” Daley urged Torshen. “You can start tomorrow.” 33

  More fundamentally, Daley simply believed that the patronage system was the way the world should work. A patronage job was a reward for hard work, and for loyalty to the political hierarchy — a secular equivalent to Catholic concepts of getting into heaven through a life of religious duty. To Daley, the innate justice of the patronage system was a given, and should have been obvious even to those who did not rise through the machine. In a phone call with Lyndon Johnson, captured on the White House taping system, Daley can be heard urging the president to appoint his machine ally Edward Hanrahan as a United States attorney. Daley’s pitch to the president of the United States sounded like a ward committeeman trying to push a candidate for street sweeper on a wavering streets and sanitation commissioner. “He’s a great Democrat,” Daley told Johnson. “He ran for Congress. He was defeated. He’s a graduate of Notre Dame, of Harvard.” After reciting Hanrahan’s résumé, Daley delivered what he assumed would be the clincher. “But more than that, Mr. President, let me say with great honor and pride, he’s a precinct captain! ” 34