by Adam Cohen
The truth was, Daley had received many advance warnings that building projects like Robert Taylor were socially destructive. Housing experts had been talking for years about the danger of concentrating poor people in densely populated public housing projects. In 1949, at a conference organized by the Chicago Defender ’s Public Service Bureau and attended by CHA board chairman Robert Taylor, the issue was confronted directly. “A public housing project which takes over or dominates a whole residential area . . . has the possibility of being segregated on two counts: (1) on a racial basis, and (2) on a low income basis,” South Side Planning Board director Wil-ford Winholtz warned. “Either basis of segregation can be as bad as the other.” 6 Samuel Freifeld of the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith advised a year later that “[i]nter-racial housing is brotherhood spelled out in terms of bricks, mortar and people living together as neighbors in a community.” And in 1954, Elizabeth Wood delivered a similar message in her final address before being pushed out at the CHA. Two years later, the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago’s Advisory Committee to the CHA also issued a direct warning about concentrating public housing in the “Negro ghetto.” Many of these warnings were made to Daley and his housing staff directly. When Daley presented his first plans for public housing, Ferd Kramer, a prominent developer, predicted that the “most obvious effect” of the proposed sites was “to create further concentrations of high density . . . segregated housing on the Central South Side.” In a letter to one of Daley’s housing aides, Kramer wrote that “We hope you will work for a program scattering small public housing developments throughout the city, instead of great colonies of racially, socially, and politically segregated housing.” 7
Daley said at the time that he was aware of the serious problems with high-rise public housing, but he insisted that he had no real alternative. The fault, he argued, lay with federal caps on construction costs. Local housing authorities were prohibited from spending more than $17,500 per unit, and the CHA’s cost estimates for low-rise housing came it at $22,000 per apartment. Daley went to Washington to testify for more generous spending guidelines, telling the Senate Housing Subcommittee that Chicago “cannot put up four-bedroom units for $17,500” except in high-rise towers. The trouble with Daley’s argument was that at that very moment, architect Bertrand Goldberg and developer Arthur Rubloff were building a complex of three-bedroom row houses on the South Side that sold for $12,900 each, including the cost of the land and the developer’s profit. Their design won the 1959 award for excellence from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Commerce and Industry. 8
There were, to be sure, extra costs associated with public housing. The Public Housing Administration required that buildings be constructed to last fifty years, and it insisted that even one-story garages have caisson foundations. But many of the forces pushing the CHA’s building costs up were of more dubious origins. Robert Taylor cost 22 percent more than comparable construction in New York, the most expensive housing market in the nation. The federal government suspected the CHA was involved in some kind of impropriety. “Perhaps the strongest reason that Chicago does not get good prices is that it does not get strong competition in bidding,” said the Public Housing Authority’s regional director. Another factor inflating the cost of public housing in Chicago was the city’s policy of keeping it segregated. Daley would build new projects only in the existing black neighborhoods, and land costs there were high because of the shortage of available sites and the need to clear the land of occupants and businesses. As much as $2,000 of the cost of each public housing unit went to land cost, far more than in most cities. 9
The Robert Taylor project was notable not only for its massive size and troubling design, but also for where Daley had decided to locate it: the State Street Corridor. The twenty-eight high-rise towers that made up the project lay directly south of three other large public projects that already lined State Street — the 797-unit Harold Ickes Homes, the 800-unit Dearborn Homes, and the 1,684-unit Stateway Gardens. Adding Robert Taylor extended this long strip of public housing along State Street by another two miles, and more than doubled the number of public housing units in it. It was the densest concentration of public housing in the nation.
On June 4, less than a month after the City Council approved Robert Taylor, Daley announced a dramatic new addition to the State Street Corridor: the Dan Ryan Expressway. The new highway was to be part of an elaborate network of superhighways radiating out of the Loop. Illinois politicians had dreamed for years of building this kind of highway system, but it was only in the mid-1950s, with the advent of programs like the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, that the dream started to become a reality. Work on the east-west Congress Expressway (later the Eisenhower) had started shortly before Daley took office. But he was the driving force behind the highways that followed: the Northwest (later renamed the Kennedy), the Southwest (later called the Stevenson), and the Dan Ryan. The Dan Ryan Expressway — named for the president of the Cook County board, who was a champion of the highway system — was intended to serve as a south route out of the Loop. The original plans for the Dan Ryan called for it to cross the Chicago River almost directly north of Lowe Avenue, Daley’s own street, and then to jag east several blocks, at which point it would turn again and proceed south. But when the final plans were announced, the Dan Ryan had been “realigned” several blocks eastward so it would instead head south along Wentworth Avenue. It was a less direct route, and it required the road to make two sharp curves in a short space, but the new route turned the Dan Ryan into a classic racial barrier between the black and white South Sides. 10
In its new location, the Dan Ryan reinforced the South Side’s oldest racial dividing line. Wentworth Avenue was the boundary that Daley’s Hamburg Athletic Club had defended in his youth and that Langston Hughes had been beaten up for crossing. Although Wentworth Avenue was a well-established dividing line, it was not necessarily a stable one. The population of the old Black Belt was growing rapidly, and Daley was adding to that growth by locating public housing for tens of thousands of additional poor blacks along State Street. Residents of neighborhoods like Bridgeport worried that the black population explosion just blocks away would push the ghetto past Wentworth Avenue and into their midst. Just when the construction of Robert Taylor Homes made those fears seem justified, the city announced plans to reinforce Wentworth Avenue with the Dan Ryan. It was to be one of the widest highways in the world, with a “dual-dual” design consisting of seven lanes in each direction, four high-speed through traffic and three slower-moving lanes. It was the most formidable impediment short of an actual wall that the city could have built to separate the white South Side from the Black Belt. 11
Years later, sociologists studying long-term unemployment and welfare dependence among blacks on the South Side would conclude that a large part of the problem was “spatial mismatch”— that these would-be workers simply were not located in physical proximity to jobs. 12 But the distance between the Black Belt and the world of work in downtown Chicago was psychological as well as physical. Researchers who interviewed South Side blacks who grew up in places like the State Street Corridor would find that a strikingly large percentage of them had never been to the Loop, and many had never journeyed outside their own neighborhoods. The result was that public housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes served, in the words of one longtime tenant, as a “public aid penitentiary.” 13 That social pathology would follow was all but inevitable. “Concentrating poverty concentrates things that correlate with poverty,” notes sociologist Douglas Massey. “People adapt to a hostile and violent environment by becoming hostile and violent.” 14
Once in City Hall, Daley began to come through for one of his biggest supporters: organized crime. In June 1956, he disbanded the Chicago Police Department intelligence unit known as “Scotland Yard.” A favorite of Mayor Kennelly’s, it had spent several years bugging, infiltrating, and oth
erwise investigating the syndicate. “It was staffed with some of the best and most honest policemen in the history of Chicago,” says an FBI senior agent. Scotland Yard’s chief investigator reportedly had five filing cabinets of intelligence on six hundred syndicate leaders and thousands of lower-level mobsters. Police commissioner Timothy O’Connor gave little explanation when he ordered Scotland Yard to cease operations and padlocked its offices. Chicago Crime Commission director Virgil Peterson declared afterward that “the police department is back where it was ten years ago as far as hoodlums are concerned.” The syndicate toasted the good news. “Chicago hoodlums and their pals celebrated around a champagne fountain at the plush River Forest home of Mobster Tony Accardo,” Time magazine reported at the time. “The Accardo soiree, an annual affair, had a different spirit this year. Where once his guests had slipped their black limousines into a hidden parking lot on the Accardo property, they now made an open show of their attendance, and the Big Boss’s gardens rang with fresh and ominous joy. Inevitably, the bookie joints unfurled in the Chicago Loop last week like so many Fourth of July flags, .... [and] raked in a take every dollar as good as the rackets produced in Capone’s heyday. All this confirmed the Crime Commission’s long-held fear that the town would be opened up shortly after last year’s election.” 15
Daley never explained the closing of Scotland Yard. But the syndicate was a member of the Democratic machine, controlling the heavily Italian 1st Ward, which contained much of downtown Chicago, including the Loop. The syndicate also had considerable influence in the 28th Ward on the West Side. The 1st Ward’s alderman and ward committeeman, John D’Arco, was a well-known front man for Accardo and Sam Giancana. And many of the 1st Ward Democratic Organization’s patronage jobs went to notorious Mafia foot soldiers. “Mad” Sam DeStefano, a syndicate “juice man,” had a 1st Ward no-show job with the Department of Streets and Sanitation. “No one who knew him could ever imagine Sam sweeping the sidewalks or shoveling snow, but they paid him handsomely for it,” says an FBI senior agent. The 1st Ward Democratic Organization had less need for the golf outings and fund-raising luncheons that kept other ward organizations operating. It used mob pressure to collect an estimated $3,000 a month from each of the bars and strip clubs along South State Street. 16
Daley also owed a more personal debt to the syndicate. There are some who say it was responsible for giving Daley his start in politics. Alderman Edward Burke figures that Daley won his first important machine position, 11th Ward committeeman, because syndicate-connected Italians from the north end of the ward dumped “Babe” Connelly and backed him. “They were sick of the old man,” says Burke. “He was probably taking too big a slice of the gambling and whatever.” At the very least, the syndicate delivered its precincts strongly for Daley in his citywide campaigns. In the 1955 mayoral primary, Daley beat Kennelly in the syndicate-controlled 1st Ward by 13,275 to 1,961 and carried the syndicate’s 28th Ward handily. The syndicate also appears to have given Daley substantial financial help in his campaigns. FBI files indicate that Daley’s key connection to organized crime was Thomas Munizzo, a childhood friend from the 11th Ward. “Munizzo reportedly collected vast sums of money from the hoodlum element for the Daley mayoralty campaign,” the FBI’s files state. Once Daley was elected, Munizzo was “considered the contact man . . . between the hoodlums and the mayor’s office for favors... with respect to gambling or the crime Syndicate.” 17
Daley’s critics had warned all along that he was the candidate of the “hoodlum element.” On the eve of the general election, the Chicago Tribune advised that “[i]f Mr. Daley is elected, the political and social morals of the badlands are going, if not to dominate City Hall, then surely to have a powerful influence on its decisions.” The Tribune was not far from wrong. Daley’s practice was to let the machine’s various constituent groups have input on the decisions that affected them — Polish leaders would help select the Polish candidate on the machine slate, and labor unions would give advice on labor policy. In many ways, Daley treated the syndicate as just one more machine constituency that was able to help make calls on matters of interest to organized crime. Syndicate leaders were apparently able, under Daley, to replace an honest police captain from the district that covered the 1st Ward with a corrupt one. According to an FBI report, when the honest captain stepped down, a Chicago mobster named Murray “The Camel” Humphreys contacted D’Arco and asked him to use his influence with City Hall to get the syndicate’s man the job. “D’Arco then contacted Mayor Daley and advised him that he wanted this captain to command his district,” said the FBI report. “The appointment was then announced by Commissioner O’Connor.” Paul McGrath, a veteran Chicago newspaperman, says it was well known that Daley had an assistant whose job it was to field requests from the syndicate, and if necessary intervene with the police commissioner’s office. 18 The FBI believed that Daley was cooperating with Chicago organized crime, and that Munizzo was not his only conduit to the syndicate leaders. John Scanlon, a good friend of Daley and his former law partner, William Lynch, acted as a “go-between” for the syndicate and city government, according to FBI files. 19
Daley aided the syndicate and syndicate-backed business on other occasions. Ward committeeman John D’Arco co-owned an insurance company called Anco., Inc. with other 1st Ward Democratic leaders, including Benjamin “Buddy” Jacobson, who had been linked to a number of syndicate bosses. Major hotels, nightclubs, and department stores in the Loop found it was easier to get city licenses and permits if they insured with Anco. Businesses that declined to use Anco had city inspectors show up shortly after the refusal looking for code violations. But when the Chicago Crime Commission included Anco on a list of thirty-one “hoodlum-tainted” businesses, Daley rose to D’Arco’s defense, saying the commission’s charges were all based on “hearsay.” Daley never publicly expressed any discomfort about a relationship that the Chicago Daily News referred to as “the crime-politics alliance.” One former board member of the Building Service Council recalls that he asked Daley how he managed to be so tolerant of the syndicate. “Well, it’s there, and you know you can’t get rid of it, so you have to live with it,” Daley said. “But never let it become so strong that it dominates you.” And the syndicate was generally pleased with the treatment it received from Daley. “This mayor has been good to us,” the FBI overheard Humphreys saying to D’Arco in 1960 in a wiretapped conversation. “And we’ve been good to him,” D’Arco responded. “One hand washes the other.” 20
The Democrats held their 1956 National Convention in August in Chicago’s International Amphitheatre. Daley attracted some national media attention as host mayor. On August 5, a week before the convention started, he appeared on the popular television show What’s My Line? Daley was introduced to the blindfolded panelists as someone who was “salaried,” and after fifteen questions journalist Dorothy Kilgallen correctly identified his “line” as mayor of Chicago. Daley, who was usually cagey about whom he was backing, went into the convention committed to Adlai Stevenson, Illinois’s native son and a good friend of the machine. Stevenson had beaten Estes Kefauver in the primaries — capped by a nearly two-to-one victory in California — and on August 1 Kefauver withdrew in favor of Stevenson. That left New York’s Governor Averell Harriman as Stevenson’s main opposition. Daley did his best to shore up support for Stevenson. After the Texas governor, Allan Shivers, came out against him, Daley responded that Stevenson would win the nomination “by acclamation.” And when former president Truman caused a small furor by making positive comments about Averell Harriman, Daley rushed to bring the momentum back to Stevenson. “Mr. Stevenson is the titular head of the Democratic Party and the greatest statesman of our era,” Daley said. “I am hopeful and confident he will win the Democratic nomination in 1956 and then go on to become the next president of the United States.” Jake Arvey did his part by insisting that newspaper reports of Truman’s comments must have been “garbled.” Eleanor Roosevelt, an ardent Stevens
on supporter, suggested to reporters that Stevenson was better qualified to be president than Truman had been when he succeeded her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt. By the start of the convention it was clear that the nomination was Stevenson’s. 21
The convention had an air of futility about it. The Democrats had briefly gotten excited about their chances when it looked as if President Eisenhower might not seek reelection. The previous September, he had suffered a heart attack after playing golf. In June, after he had already declared that he was running, he was rushed to Walter Reed Hospital for emergency surgery for an abdominal obstruction. But Eisenhower continued to insist that he was a candidate. Even most Democrats conceded that Stevenson did not have much chance of defeating him. Four years earlier, Stevenson had lost in a landslide, winning only 44 percent of the popular vote and only 89 of 531 votes in the Electoral College. As a popular incumbent in a time of peace and prosperity, Eisenhower would likely run even more strongly this time. But winning the White House was not Daley’s highest priority. As always, he evaluated the candidates based on what kind of coattails they would provide to the machine’s slate. As a native son and former governor, Stevenson was the strongest candidate for the machine to have at the top of its ticket. It also counted, of course, that Stevenson had been a loyal friend of the machine over the years. When the time came for the roll call, Stevenson won with 905½ votes to Harriman’s 210, and 80 for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.
