American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Other controversies followed in quick succession. Daley’s 1957 budget included $14 million in pay raises, and members of the City Council’s “economy bloc”— the twelve Republicans and one independent critical of Daley’s spending practices — detected a pattern to who got them. Among the largest percentage raises were a 15 percent salary hike for Joseph McDonough, an administrative assistant in the city purchasing department who was the son of Daley’s old 11th Ward patron. Another generous increase went to an electric light and power inspector who was the brother of 27th Ward alderman Sain, and a 5th Ward precinct captain. Alderman Freeman of the 48th Ward complained that Daley had pushed the pay increases through after the finance committee had completed its hearings, and that they were “90 percent political.” After the salary scandal came a dust-up with the new state’s attorney. Benjamin Adamowski found his position a perfect perch from which to attack Daley — and he lost no time in lobbing potshots in the direction of his old foe. Adamowski thrust himself into a minor dispute over taxicab licenses — Daley and two aldermen disagreed on the number of war veteran licenses that should be issued — and threatened to convene a grand jury to investigate. The state’s attorney’s office did launch an investigation of whether the $279,244 the city paid to clean the exterior of the City Hall–County Building was excessive. Daley denied it was, pointing out that it was cleaned at night, and made from a kind of stone that was difficult to clean. Life magazine then weighed in with an article saying that Chicago “probably has the worst police department of any sizable city.” Daley sent off an angry letter to the editor, calling the article an “unwarranted slur,” and saying that although the reporter had “easy access to all of the facts” he had chosen to resort to “wild generalizations.” 37

  Throughout the fall, Daley continued to promote his wide-ranging agenda for the city. He invited Queen Elizabeth II to visit Chicago in July 1959 for the formal opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which would make Chicago one of the world’s leading seaports. Daley also returned to Washington to tell a Senate committee that Chicago would need an additional $100 million for slum clearance over the next ten years. And he urged the Eisenhower administration to release another $200 million in slum-clearance money appropriated by Congress but not yet allocated. When he returned to Chicago, Daley announced that he would meet with his corporation counsel, John Melaniphy, to discuss a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Chicago’s ban on the showing of the French movie The Game of Love . Daley had no patience with the Court’s emerging free-expression jurisprudence, which seemed to him to be about protecting trash. “I thought the trend throughout the country was to suppress obscene literature and indecent pictures,” Daley declared. “Everyone agrees something must be done to protect our children from obscenity and filth.” 38

  In the summer of 1957, Chicago was swept by a new round of racial violence. The Black Belt was spreading west and south, and as blacks moved into white neighborhoods, interracial conflict followed. Many of the clashes started when newly arrived blacks insisted on using local parks and beaches. In one South Side neighborhood in late July, more than six thousand whites attacked one hundred blacks picnicking in a park that had been exclusively used by whites. The battle raged on for two days, and five hundred police were needed to restore order. The same month, hostilities reignited in Trumbull Park, which had been relatively peaceful for two years. The black residents who remained in the projects were becoming more assertive about their right to use streets and stores in the neighborhood, and the South Deering Bulletin was continuing to fan the flames of white resistance. A mob of almost one hundred descended on the apartment of one of the most outspoken black families living in Trumbull Park, breaking furniture, turning on the gas jets in the kitchen, and setting fires. Within four months, nine of the thirty black families living in Trumbull Park moved out. 39

  As the racial violence heated up, Daley looked the other way. In August, an interracial group of sixty-seven prominent South Side residents charged him with failing to act during “this hour of crisis in our city.” Daley’s “official laxity,” the group argued, “had permitted hoodlum elements to outstrip our city’s law enforcement procedures.” At a national meeting of the Urban League in September, Edwin Berry, executive director of the Chicago Urban League, declared that Chicago was the most segregated major city in America and that in the city “a Negro dare not step outside the environs of his race.” Daley responded to the charges only obliquely, saying that Chicago was not “as bad as some people say it is.” 40

  In fact, Daley had a plan for addressing Chicago’s growing racial violence: clamping down on civil rights activism in the black community. The leading instigator of civil rights protests in the city was the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. The chapter had not always been so outspoken — for years, it was led by a succession of “legal moderates,” who believed all racial progress would come in the courts. But beginning in late 1953, the chapter came under the leadership of Willoughby Abner, who started out as chairman of the executive committee and was then elected chapter president. Abner developed an aggressive agenda for civil rights in Chicago, calling for increased employment opportunities for blacks, an end to overcrowding and double shifts in black schools, and improved police protection in racially tense neighborhoods on the South Side. Abner, an official with the United Auto Workers, believed in demonstrations rather than litigation. He had been the driving force behind the 1955 march outside City Hall to protest Daley’s failure to act decisively on Trumbull Park. Abner also rallied Chicago blacks behind the civil rights struggle then unfolding in the South. He championed, in particular, the case of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicagoan lynched in Mississippi in 1955. In June 1957, more than seven thousand NAACP members and sympathizers turned out at the Coliseum to hear the Reverend Ralph Abernathy describe his work with Martin Luther King Jr., organizing the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. Abner’s newly energized NAACP was attracting unprecedented levels of support in the black community. A single Freedom Day dinner, featuring Jackie Robinson as a guest speaker, brought in $25,000, allowing the organization to increase its staff. After his first year as chapter president, Abner was reelected with near-unanimous support. 41

  Abner was outspoken in his opposition to Daley’s surrogates in the black community — Dawson and the black submachine. Abner argued that the submachine represented nothing more than black subservience to an oppressive white power structure. In a scathing “Open Letter to Congressman William Dawson,” sent out on NAACP letterhead on August 29, 1956, Abner painted a devastating portrait of Dawson as a traitor to his race. Chicago’s only black congressman had remained “thunderously silent,” the letter charged, when Emmett Till — his own constituent — was lynched. Nor did Dawson take action when civil rights worker Gus Courts was shot, and Lamar Smith and the Reverend George W. Lee were killed, fighting in Mississippi for black voting rights. The letter recounted that when the NAACP asked if he had introduced any civil rights legislation in the latest congressional session, Dawson replied that he had not and would not. And Dawson was the only Chicago-area congressman, Abner wrote, who voted against the Powell Amendment, which would have withheld federal funds from states and school districts that openly defied Brown v. Board of Education. When Dawson got a position on the platform committee of the 1956 Democratic National Convention, he had had yet another chance to come through for his fellow blacks. “Perhaps now at last we would see the fruits of ‘working behind the scenes’— a strong, forthright honest plank on civil rights,” Abner wrote. “Perhaps now, the inexpli[c]able would become clear. But, alas, our hopes were drowned in a sea of meaningless platitudes, outright evasions and surrender to the Confederacy.” Dawson played a critical behind-the-scenes role at the convention, working against a minority report backed by the NAACP, the Americans for Democratic Action, and UAW President Walter Reuther calling for a tougher civil rights plank. The letter concluded by urging Dawson to reconsider his loyalty to “
a political philosophy that puts party above all else.” 42

  Dawson was publicly dismissive of Abner and his newly radicalized NAACP chapter. “What are they going to do, come into my district and beat me?” Dawson asked. But privately, he was plotting political retribution. The Chicago chapter was scheduled to hold its election of officers on December 17, 1957. Precisely thirty days before the election, the submachine took out memberships for between four hundred and six hundred of its precinct captains and patronage workers. It was the last day that an applicant could join and be eligible to vote, which meant that when Abner and his supporters learned that the chapter’s membership rolls had been flooded, it was too late to respond in kind. On the appointed night, the sub-machine’s troops turned out in force. A parade of Dawson and Daley loyalists rose to denounce Abner. One of the denouncers was Building Services Union president James H. Kemp, who served with Daley ally William Lee on the executive committee of the Chicago Federation of Labor. In the end, the chapter’s members voted to replace Abner with Theodore Jones, an executive with the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company who could be counted on to take a more moderate course. Dawson never denied that he played a role in ousting Abner and his fellow civil rights activists. “I’m not interested in controlling the NAACP or its policy making body,” Dawson later told historian Dempsey Travis. “However, I do want to see the ‘right man’ as president.” 43

  The 1957 NAACP elections would forever be remembered as the machine’s “political takeover” of the branch. “The invaders of the NAACP were elected to make certain that no one in the newly elected NAACP hierarchy or their successors would ever rock Daley’s political boat,” Congressman Charles Hayes said later. The change in philosophy could be felt immediately. In a victory statement in the Chicago Defender, Jones vowed to “take an inventory of the programs and projects in which the branch was committed.” Among the first to go were the chapter’s challenges to Daley over Trumbull Park and public housing integration. Daley quickly threw his support behind the politically neutered NAACP chapter. He declared a citywide “NAACP Tag Day” in May 1958, and urged Chicagoans to buy NAACP tags that volunteers were selling on street corners. Jones tried to develop a nonmachine base within the NAACP chapter, but his efforts met with only modest success. When the time came for him to run for reelection, he had to bring out the machine foot soldiers once again. “He called us about a week before the election,” one black politician recalled later. “He must have woke up and saw that the people he had counted on weren’t going to deliver as they had promised. His supporters were supposed to deliver 150 or 200 votes each. But it was closer to 50 or 75 each. ...So we sent in some people from our wards. If it hadn’t been for the organization, I think he would have lost the ball in the weeds.” 44

  In February 1958, the University of Chicago unveiled an urban renewal plan that would change the face of one of Chicago’s most prominent neighborhoods. Hyde Park was an independent township until it was absorbed by the city in 1889, a year before the founding of the University of Chicago. The area underwent a surge of building in the 1890s, when ground was broken on many of the university’s Gothic halls, and numerous elegant apartment buildings and single-family homes were constructed. Before long, Hyde Park was home to some of the city’s finest examples of Chicago School architecture, and at least one world-famous building: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School Frederick C. Robie House. The neighborhood’s character began to change in the 1940s when poor blacks began to move in. Many of the new arrivals were fleeing the overcrowded Black Belt, which was itself being flooded by migrants from the South. Between 1940 and 1950, Hyde Park’s black population more than tripled. 45 During the early 1950s, the black influx continued, and many whites began to move out. In 1956, the population of the greater Hyde Park–Kenwood neighborhood was more than one-third black. 46

  By the late 1940s, University of Chicago administrators and some neighborhood residents worried openly that Hyde Park was on its way to becoming a slum. In response, local residents formed the Hyde Park–Kenwood Community Conference in 1949. Three years later, the University founded the South East Chicago Commission. Both organizations had the goal of preventing the area from going into decline. The community conference supported the idea of an integrated community, but sought to preserve the neighborhood’s “high standards.” The SECC was more concerned about maintaining a large white presence, and seeing that as much of the black population as possible was middle class. The SECC’s stand was far from the first time the university allied itself with attempts to keep blacks out of Hyde Park. In the 1930s and 1940s, the school had actively promoted the use of restrictive covenants to keep houses in the neighborhood occupied by whites. When the Chicago Defender objected to the policy in 1937, university president Robert Maynard Hutchins responded that the covenants were legal and that Hyde Park residents had the “right to invoke and defend them.” By 1957, that was no longer true, since the Supreme Court had declared restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948. The university’s new goal was, at least publicly, the more modest one of neighborhood “conservation.” But in their private communications, top administrators were less circumspect. The high-income housing the SECC was seeking to bring to Hyde Park was, Chancellor Kimpton declared, “an effective screening tool” and a way of “cutting down [the] number of Negroes” living in the area. 47

  Daley’s support for Hyde Park urban renewal dated back to before he was mayor. After Daley got the Democratic nomination in 1955, Kimpton went to meet with him and sound him out on the question. Daley readily committed himself to helping the university in its efforts to shore up Hyde Park. His support was, of course, in large part political. Daley, the rough-hewn son of Bridgeport, was eager to ingratiate himself with the administrators, trustees, faculty, and alumni of the city’s premier educational institution. In the 1955 general election, many of these university constituencies would back Daley’s opponent, Robert Merriam, who was both Hyde Park’s alderman and the son of a University of Chicago professor. But in later years, Daley would win surprising levels of support from the university community. Daley also supported Hyde Park renewal to bolster an important city institution. University administrators were predicting disaster if they were not successful in defending the neighborhood. In fact, reports were circulating that the university given the school’s enormous investment in its physical plant, but it was not a risk Daley was prepared to take. A more likely prospect was that the university might go into decline as students and faculty were increasingly put off by the neighborhood. Daley evaluated these concerns, of course, as a resident of Bridgeport, who himself lived only blocks away from the rapidly expanding South Side ghetto. 48

  Hyde Park urban renewal was under way even before Daley became mayor, and it proceeded through a number of loosely coordinated projects. But the capstone of the urban renewal effort was the University of Chicago’s Final Plan, released on February 1958. The plan was the brainchild of Julian Levi, the executive director of the SECC and the university’s shrewd point man on urban renewal. A lawyer and the son of a rabbi, Levi had grown up in Hyde Park and was considering relocating to the suburbs. It was a remote possibility attended both college and law school at the University of Chicago. Levi was a tenacious advocate for his cause, equal parts missionary and streetfighter. To an academic audience, he could make the intellectual case for urban renewal. In meetings with opponents, he could scream and intimidate to get his way. And out in the community, he was skilled at throwing around the university’s money to achieve his goals. Levi’s Final Plan, which covered a large stretch of land between 47th Street and 59th Street, was a blueprint for reversing the social transformation that had occurred in Hyde Park over the past two decades. It called for demolishing about 20 percent of the neighborhood’s buildings, spread out over an 855-acre urban renewal area. In the name of removing “blight” and creating a “compatible neighborhood” for the university, the plan proposed destroying almost twenty thousand homes
in Hyde Park. 49