American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Supporters of the neighborhood’s poorest residents mobilized in opposition. A focal point of the debate was how much public housing to include in the urban renewal area. Liberals argued that the blight was dilapidated housing, not the poor people who lived in it. Building public housing would upgrade the housing stock, while allowing current residents to remain in the neighborhood. But the university was adamantly against public housing. Levi denounced it as “something harmful to the neighborhood which the people did not want anyway.” One of the leading opponents of the university on this point was the Hyde Park chapter of the NAACP. Members of the group denounced the urban renewal plan as segregationist, and called for significant amounts of both public and middle-class housing to be added. They also demanded greater protections for the residents who would end up losing their homes and having to relocate. The Hyde Park chapter began its campaign by lobbying local aldermen to work for modifications in the Final Plan. It was at this point that the NAACP’s newly installed pro-machine administration stepped in. On September 6, 1958, Theodore Jones — who had been elected president of the Chicago chapter a year earlier — ordered the Hyde Park chapter and two other local units to close. Jones declared that they had been shut down because they acted “without complete sanction of the parent branch” on a variety of issues, not because of differences over Hyde Park urban renewal. The branch closings were bitterly opposed in Hyde Park, and by some members of the NAACP’s citywide board. Beatrice Hughes Steele, treasurer of the Chicago chapter, called Jones’s action “a destruction of the grass-roots heart of the branch.” After the closing of the Hyde Park chapter, black opposition to Hyde Park urban renewal was effectively quashed. 50

  The Catholic Archdiocese gave qualified support to opponents of the Final Plan. The Church did not dispute the need for urban renewal, but it argued for the construction of at least some low-income housing in Hyde Park, and for greater assistance for people whose homes would be destroyed. “I was not opposed to the plan as such,” one archdiocese official explained later. “I wanted the University of Chicago to have protection, but I wanted the people to have protection, too. They couldn’t just ride roughshod over 20,000 people.” The archdiocese also expressed concern that so much money would be poured into the area surrounding the university — more than $30 million in federal and local urban renewal funds — that little would be left for other Chicago neighborhoods. The Church’s stand in favor of the victims of urban renewal may have been motivated at least in part by self-interest. Priests and parishioners in the working-class white neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park were complaining loudly that thousands of poor blacks pushed out by urban renewal might end up moving into their parishes. In this conflict between the Church and the university, Daley, who attended Mass every day, had no problem siding with the university. Julian Levi recalled discussing the archdiocese’s opposition to the Final Plan with the mayor. “He said, ‘I go to mass, but I accept no intrusion on public responsibilities.’”

  Daley pushed the university’s urban-renewal plan through the City Council, and secured the federal and local money needed to implement it. Thousands of units of slum housing were razed in Hyde Park — the New York Times declared at the height of the project that the “areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II.” Throughout the neighborhood, substandard buildings and blight were replaced by new housing or open space. When urban renewal was complete, the new Hyde Park that emerged was more attractive, more sparsley populated, wealthier, and whiter. From 1960 to 1970, the neighborhood’s population declined more than 26 percent. The people who were being pushed out of Hyde Park were just the ones the university was concerned about: the poor, and blacks. During the 1960s, average income in the neighborhood soared 70 percent, and the black population fell 40 percent.

  Daley’s urban renewal plan gave the university the kind of neighborhood it wanted, but the transformation came at a cost. The poor, black residents who had found their way to Hyde Park, one of the city’s few integrated neighborhoods, were once again pushed back into the ghetto. No doubt many of them ended up, as historian Arnold Hirsch has suggested, in the new housing projects that were going up along the State Street Corridor and elsewhere. Advocates for the poor had hoped that some of the substandard buildings in Hyde Park would be replaced with public housing, so poor people could remain in the neighborhood, but the university succeeded in blocking almost all of the proposed units. In the end only thirty-four public housing apartments were built, and twenty-two of them were reserved for elderly tenants. Hyde Park urban renewal also erected racial barriers between the neighborhood’s middle-class residents and the black neighborhoods surrounding it. Perhaps the starkest example was the University Apartments, two extremely long mid-rises that stretched down the middle of 55th Street. The buildings, which stand between the university campus and ghetto neighborhoods to the north, were designed as “barrier-type” buildings, Alderman Despres observed, designed to separate racial groups. 51

  On March 4, 1958, Daley presided at the dedication of newly restored City Council chambers, a little less than a year after they had been damaged by fire. The following month, the City Council experienced a more substantive change. Alderman Tom Keane ascended, with Daley’s backing, to chair the Finance Committee, the most powerful on the council. Keane was already Daley’s floor leader, and the combination of the two posts made him the most influential alderman in Chicago history. Around the same time, Daley was reelected to another two-year term as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. In his acceptance speech, Daley called the machine precinct captains “the strength of our party.” No one was more important in a Democracy, Daley said, than “those who translate issues and problems for the electorate.” 52

  As his new term as party boss began, Daley was in the process of quietly eviscerating Dawson and the black submachine. Dawson had been one of Daley’s most consistent supporters. He had backed Daley for party boss against the Wagner-Duffy faction, and he had schemed with Daley to remove Kennelly from City Hall. At election time, Dawson had always delivered overwhelming majorities for the machine slate. And Dawson had always given Daley cover on race, serving as the black face of the Democratic machine and putting down civil rights uprisings in the black community. Daley’s objection to Dawson was not how he exercised power, but how much power he had. As head of the black submachine, Dawson was in a unique position. Unlike other ward committeemen, his influence extended into several wards, and these wards were of considerable importance to the machine. This meant that if Dawson wanted to make things difficult for the machine, he could. Dawson had never given Daley trouble, but Daley had seen how the wily black boss had helped to force Kennelly out of office. With the city’s black population soaring, Dawson’s power was also rising. Ignoring Dawson’s years of personal loyalty, Daley decided to act before it was too late.

  The first public sign that Daley was out to undermine Dawson came when 24th Ward alderman Sidney Deutsch died. The once-Jewish 24th Ward had by 1958 become one of the city’s leading “plantation wards,” so called because they were majority black, but ruled over by white leaders. In the past, Dawson would have been allowed to name the new alderman, extending the reach of the black submachine into yet another ward. But breaking with tradition, Daley decided to install his own man. In the same year, Daley intervened in a dispute in another of Dawson’s wards in a way that demonstrated that the old submachine boss had lost his ability to keep the machine out of his turf. As it happened, the clash came over an issue Daley and Dawson agreed on: civil rights. Alderman Claude Holman, of the black 4th Ward, had agreed to cosponsor an open-occupancy bill with independent 5th Ward alderman Leon Despres. Dawson, who naturally opposed the bill, told Holman to back down, and when he refused, Dawson asked the machine to strip Holman of his patronage. It was the traditional machine response to this kind of act of insubordination, but Daley refused to do it. Dawson’s inability to bring down retribution on Holman se
nt a clear message to other members of the black submachine that they no longer needed to fear their onetime leader. 53

  It did not take long for Dawson’s ward committeemen to switch their allegiance to City Hall. “They began to splinter off,” says Dawson’s nephew, Ira Dawson. “Everyone vied for power from [Daley] in order to keep themselves in power.” The aldermen who once reported to Dawson now saw themselves as working directly for Daley. Holman, who had been edging toward the civil rights cause, swung violently back and became Daley’s chief spokesman against open-housing and fair-employment bills in the City Council. Holman’s blustery opposition to civil rights was far less subtle than Dawson’s behind-the-scenes scheming. “Anything I suggested, Holman would find a way of twisting it and showing that it really wasn’t for freedom, or if it was a good measure, he’d get up and say that my motives were bad,” says Despres. “Holman had no inhibitions. He would flatter Mayor Daley and tell the mayor publicly in the city council that he was the greatest mayor, in the glare of the cameras and radio microphones. I remember once he said, ‘You are the greatest mayor in history, greatest mayor in the world and in outer space, too.’” 54

  The once-mighty black submachine was no more. But Daley did not destroy Dawson entirely. He allowed his old ally to keep his seat in Congress, and to stay on as boss of the 2nd Ward. Daley also let Dawson continue to hold himself out as the leading black in the Chicago machine, an arrangement that suited Dawson’s ego and Daley’s political needs. “Whenever a Negro delegation approaches Mayor Daley with a community problem,” the Chicago Defender complained, “they are usually told: ‘See Bill Dawson, he’ll take care of it.’” Dawson made some minor attempts to regain his lost standing. In 1959, he tried to form a black-Polish alliance to challenge Daley. But the truth was, even if the Poles wanted to ally themselves with Chicago’s blacks — and they did not — Dawson could no longer deliver the black community. His days as a boss were over. “What Mayor Daley had created — the most powerful black politician in the country,” historian William Grimshaw has observed,

  “Mayor Daley destroyed, and for the same reason: to advance his own political interest.” With the civil rights movement gaining force both at home and nationally, Daley’s newfound control over Chicago’s black political leadership — from the ward organizations to the local NAACP — would have important implications in the racial struggles to come. 55

  CHAPTER

  6

  Make No Little Plans

  In August of 1958, Daley unveiled a sweeping plan for redeveloping downtown Chicago. Daley’s proposal was in the bold tradition of the Plan of Chicago, the blueprint for redesigning Chicago that Daniel Burnham prepared for the Merchants’ Club in 1909. “Make no little plans,” Burnham, a prominent architect and principal designer of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, advised. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Burnham’s plan had been anything but little. He called for more extensive use of Lake Michigan, including expanded lakefront recreational areas, and the construction of a series of offshore islands. Anticipating the great highways that would one day come, Burnham called for the city to build a major east-west artery stretching out from the lake, and he urged construction of a civic center. The plan advocated a system of broad boulevards, modeled on Paris, Budapest, and Geneva, to ease traffic through the city. But its true genius lay in its vision of the city as a single organism that combined industry and commerce with residential neighborhoods and recreational outlets. Burnham’s Plan of Chicago of 1909 was greeted with enormous enthusiasm. A popularized version of the plan became a bestseller, and in textbook form it became required reading for eighth-graders across the city. Like most Chicagoans of his era, Daley read the book as a student. This compendium of bold ideas for refashioning Chicago was, he once said, his favorite book. 1

  Daley invoked Burnham’s plan, and quoted his injunction to “make no little plans,” when he presented his own development plan for the central area of Chicago. At the unveiling, Daley stood before an enormous scale model showing how downtown would look after twenty-two years and $1.5 billion in renovations. The models spread out in his office were, Daley declared, “the future of Chicago.” In the limited part of the city that it addressed, Daley’s plan was every bit as sweeping as Burnham’s. It called for erecting several government building complexes downtown, including a new civil court building on Washington Street, a new government mall stretching from City Hall to State Street, and a new federal court building on the site of an existing federal building on the Dearborn-Clark-Adams-Jackson block. It also proposed consolidating railroad stations and using the land under railroad tracks south of the Loop as the site of a new Chicago campus for the University of Illinois. And it sketched out a variety of other ambitious undertakings, including a consolidated transportation center combining access to railroads, buses, and airport terminals and limousines, and construction of new housing for 50,000 families in the downtown area. Some of its suggestions, including expanded access to Lake Michigan beaches and construction of two new islands in the shallow water south of 23rd Street, were drawn straight from Burnham. 2

  The new plan was, as a formal matter, the city’s. It had been drawn up under the direction of the commissioner of city planning, Ira Bach. The true guiding force, however, was the business community and the Central Area Committee. The CAC was listed prominently as a consultant on the plan, along with some of its individual leaders, like Clair Roddewig, and its influence was apparent on every page. The first topic addressed by the plan was “traffic flow,” a cause close to the hearts of downtown businessmen. Leading city planners of the day, such as Jane Jacobs, were writing eloquently about the importance of pedestrian traffic and street life to the vibrancy of large cities. Daley’s plan, however, was focused on automobiles. Downtown businesses were worried that their best customers were increasingly driving to new stores in the suburbs, leaving them with a poorer clientele who arrived downtown by mass transit or on foot. “The people [the downtown businesses] needed were not the low-income whites and Negroes who lived closest to the Loop,” one contemporary study noted, “but people with purchasing power to support the great stores, banks, and entertainment places that were the heart of Chicago.” The Daley plan contained elaborate super-highways designed to whisk shoppers in from the neighborhoods and the suburbs, and parking lots and new “pedestrian conveyance systems” that would ease their path to downtown stores. The plan called for some residential building, but it too was geared toward the needs of business. Downtown business leaders had long been clamoring for construction of luxury high-rise apartments in and around the Loop. Their hope was that upscale housing would raise the economic status of the area and improve downtown retailing, since the “[p]eople who could afford to live in them would be a good customer base for downtown stores.” The plan followed the business community’s lead, placing a “special emphasis” on “the needs of the middle income groups who wish to live in areas close to the heart of the City.” 3

  Nowhere did the visions of the CAC and the drafters of the plan align more closely than on the matter of defending the borders of the business district. The Chicago central area, broadly defined, is surrounded by water on three sides. The curving Chicago River cuts it off from adjoining neighborhoods to the north and west, and Lake Michigan lies to the east. But there were no natural barriers between the Loop and the expanding ghettos and public housing projects of the South Side. Downtown businessmen at the time were “really concerned about what would happen south of the downtown area,” observes a modern-day Central Area Committee president. Of greatest interest to them was a large stretch of land just south of the Loop that contained a combination of railroad tracks and vacant and underutilized railroad property. In time, the tracks would be consolidated and a decision would have to be made about the disposition of the land. Downtown businessmen were concerned that it would be used for public housing, or that it would naturally be filled by the fast-expanding South Side Black Belt. They
were relying on Daley to find a use for the land that prevented the ghetto from coming right up their front door. 4

  Daley’s plan addressed these concerns about the Loop’s southern flank directly. In its projections for the future, the plan anticipated that the Loop would expand in three directions — east, west, and north, all of which led toward white neighborhoods. The one direction it did not see the Loop expanding was south, toward the Black Belt, even though that was precisely the area where the underused railroad properties lay. Instead, the plan proposed using the land to the south of the Loop to build a new Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. The plan stated candidly that this campus would “act as an anchor to contain further southward expansion.” The remaining open land between the Black Belt and the Loop was designated in the plan as a “residential re-use area,” meaning that new — primarily middle-class — housing would be built, and it too would act as a buffer. To those of a conspiratorial mind-set, the plan seemed expressly designed to keep the central area white, and to physically cut it off from black Chicago. Certainly those rumors spread through the black community, which like black communities across the country harbored suspicions of various white “master plans” for using urban renewal and other development policies to shift greater control to whites. But in the case of Daley’s 1958 plan, at least some of those suspicions had a basis in fact. The plan, of course, never addressed these racial issues head-on. In fact, one of Daley’s housing consultants recalls that when development documents were drafted in City Hall, “the mayor didn’t want any mention of race.” Nevertheless, the 1958 plan must be seen now as an important step in a long-evolving process of making Chicago America’s most racially segregated large city. 5

  The business community, not surprisingly, was delighted with Daley’s 1958 development plan. The Chicago Sun-Times, owned by the downtown department store company Marshall Field, greeted it with breathless headlines, including “Let’s Dream a Dream of Chicago: What City Would Be Like If All Plans Work Out.” What the Sun-Times did not dwell on was that, unlike the plan of 1909, Daley’s was almost single-mindedly focused on the downtown business district. Where Burnham had looked at Chicago as an organic whole, Daley’s planners proceeded as if downtown were the only part of the city whose future mattered. Despite the plan’s claim of giving “to all the people the best there is of urban living,” the recreation, beautification, new housing, and other improvements it called for were exclusively located in and around the central business district. The only improvement it offered to most of the city’s residential neighborhoods was a highway that would move cars more rapidly through them on the way to shopping in the Loop. 6