American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  The election law stated that only election judges could handle election materials and tally votes. But it was most often the Democratic precinct captain and his assistants who had control over the ballot box. As a result, in precincts that still used paper ballots, machine workers could simply add and erase pencil marks until the tally turned out right, as “Short Pencil” Lewis was alleged to have done back in 1955 when Daley was first elected. Votes could be stolen just as easily with voting machines. One nonpartisan poll watcher showed up at the 51st precinct of the 24th Ward to observe the voting in the 1972 election. When he arrived at the polling place, a barbershop on Pulaski Avenue, a half hour before the polls opened, he was not allowed in. He watched through a window, however, as precinct captain Walter Simmons and five election judges jump-started the democratic process. “We looked into the polling place and saw the [ judges] and Mr. Simmons voting repeatedly,” the watcher reported. “Simmons voted five or six times, and each of the [election judges did the] same thing two or three times.” Before the polls officially opened, the machine slate was twenty votes ahead. In one 21st Ward precinct, a reporter watched as a Democratic judge voted three times on paper ballots, and three times in the voting machine. And Recktenwald watched one man stand in a voting machine and vote seventy times. When Recktenwald asked what he was doing, the man said he was testing it. The Democratic machine also transported voters by van from one polling place to another, and had them vote each time they got out. “You could register to vote in twelve different precincts,” says Andre Foster. “There was no way to check it, and that’s what we did.” 53

  Adamowski continued challenging the outcome of the election even after Kennedy took office in January 1961, but the machine’s brand of vote theft was difficult to detect through recanvassing. The Cook County Circuit Court, a machine stronghold, was also imposing heavy expenses on Adamowski for the labor-intensive process of hand-checking ballots. Before long, he gave up the challenge. “Under the guise of expediting the case, the court took the recount out of the hands of my attorneys and proceeded to burden me with every conceivable expense,” he said after Ward’s election was certified. “It was justice by bankruptcy.” As it turned out, that was not the end of it. A final inquiry was conducted by a special prosecutor, Morris J. Wexler, who was appointed to act in place of state’s attorney Ward, who was deemed to have a conflict. Wexler investigated vote theft for several months, tracking down specific allegations of miscounts, vote buying, and other improprieties. His report, released April 13, 1961, confirmed that something had been amiss in the election. He found that in precincts with “major mistakes” in both the presidential and state’s attorney tabulations, when both were in favor of the same party — suggesting possible malfeasance — a statistically improbable 7 of 7 favored the Democratic candidates. 54 He also found a variety of other troubling practices, like a voting machine in one precinct that was set up so party workers could see how voters were voting. But ultimately, Wexler’s findings were inconclusive. In a public statement, Wexler estimated that Adamowski might have been illegally deprived of as many as 10,000 votes — more than Kennedy’s statewide victory margin. 55

  Wexler stunned Chicago by deciding to bring criminal charges against 650 election officials for their part in the alleged fraud. The machine maneuvered to get the case assigned to a Democratic judge from East Saint Louis who was an old friend of Democratic county clerk Edward Barrett. Judge John Marshall Karns’s pro-defense rulings over the course of the prosecution eviscerated Wexler’s case. In the end, all of the defendants had their charges dismissed. The machine’s critics were appalled. The Republican Chicago Tribune fumed that Judge Karns had “never allowed the prosecution to present” its case, or to vindicate “the legal right of citizens to have their votes counted and not stolen.” With this setback, the attempts to learn the truth about the 1960 election were almost concluded. Charges of vote theft in the election surfaced one last, idiosyncratic time, in another criminal case. In the spring of 1962, a precinct captain and two precinct workers from the 28th Ward were prosecuted after an election judge confessed to her priest that she had witnessed vote tampering in her precinct on election night. Several election judges cooperated with the government and testified that ballots had been changed. The FBI supported the prosecution with the results of their examination of the ballots in question. Faced with this compelling evidence, the three defendants changed their pleas to guilty. On March 6, 1962, the men were sentenced to short jail terms. 56

  Daley, true to form, tried to respond to the accusations of corruption by appealing to a respected institution to lend him some of its moral stature. He appealed to three University of Chicago professors, all Democrats, to prepare a report on the charges of vote fraud. One of the study’s authors had been appointed by Daley to the board of the Chicago Regional Port Authority. The professors made no real attempt to undertake an independent investigation of whether fraud had occurred. Instead, they conceded, they proceeded by attempting to “examine evidence put forward by Republican leaders and the Chicago newspapers to support the charges which they made.” They also relied heavily on information provided to them by Daley press secretary Earl Bush. Based on this very limited inquiry, they concluded in their forty-eight-page report that the accusations that “wholesale election fraud was perpetrated in Chicago were baseless and unsubstantiated.” Daley and the machine also continued to insist that Republicans had stolen votes in Kankakee, LaSalle, and other downstate counties, and that this vote theft in Nixon’s favor was not being investigated.

  Still, despite the machine’s best efforts, neither Daley nor Kennedy would easily shake the suspicion that Illinois had been stolen for the Democrats. A joke was making the rounds in Washington that had President Kennedy, Dean Rusk, and Daley in a lifeboat that had only enough food for one. The three men had to decide which two would jump overboard. Kennedy said that he was too important. Rusk said that he was too important. And Daley said the only democratic thing to do was to vote. Daley won the vote, 8–2. At the spring 1961 Gridiron Club roast, attended by President Kennedy, the Washington press corps put on a humorous skit about the presidential election. Washington reporters impersonated Cook County poll watchers and sang, to the tune of “Tea for Two”:

  Two for you, and three for me

  And here’s a few; they all are free

  And counting fast, I see they’re all cast for Jack. 57

  CHAPTER

  8

  Beware of the Press, Mayor

  Mayor Daley was given exalted treatment at the Kennedy inauguration. He and Sis were invited to join the Kennedys in the presidential box. At the main ball, the new president made a point of walking out of his box and stopping by Daley’s table, saying he just wanted to “visit.” Kennedy also invited the Daleys to the White House the following morning. When they arrived for their 10:15 appointment, they were the first visitors to the Kennedy White House other than a former occupant of the residence, Harry Truman. Daley said later that his visit was “strictly social,” but word quickly spread that Kennedy had offered to appoint him anything from commerce secretary to postmaster general. Rumors of a cabinet appointment are, of course, far easier to come by than an actual appointment. Around the same time, William Dawson’s name began to be mentioned as a candidate for postmaster general. When the elderly congressman’s name made it into the papers, it was arranged that he would be offered the position with the understanding that he would turn it down. Even if Kennedy had made Daley a real offer, it is unlikely he would have accepted. “He always wanted to be considered,” says Daniel Rostenkowski, “but when shove came to push he wasn’t going to take it.” Chicago City Hall, not Washington, was the center of Daley’s world. Years later, when machine loyalists briefly sported “Daley for President” buttons at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, it was understood that he would not be interested in that job. “The mayor doesn’t want to be president,” the joke went. “He just wants to stay here and s
end one of his guys down there to the White House.” 1

  Daley’s highest priority, when he returned to Chicago, was once again working on his plans for urban renewal and new construction. In April, he unveiled an ambitious new five-year capital improvement program that included more than 1,200 projects at a cost of $2.1 billion. Daley budgeted $179 million for new expressways, $145 million for new public housing sites, $83 million for new bridges, viaducts, and grade separations, and other large sums for street improvements, streetlighting, airports, and sewers. He hoped that with a new Democratic administration more federal money for cities would be forthcoming, and he tried to help the process along, traveling to Washington to testify for a Kennedy-backed housing bill that would increase federal spending by $3.2 billion over the next ten years. With the proper funding, Daley told the congressional committee, Chicago’s slums could be eliminated in that time period. But even with more funds from Washington, Daley understood that much of the money he wanted would have to be raised locally. One of his ideas for increasing municipal revenue was to raise the city sales tax by 0.5 percent. To get authority for the tax increase, he had to go to the state legislature, just as he had after his election in 1955. This time, the governor was the machine’s own man, Otto Kerner, and he immediately endorsed the tax hike. 2 Daley worked to build a coalition of supporters that extended beyond the Chicago city limits, but he always had trouble working with politicians he could not control. He emerged from a dinner with mayors and village presidents and announced that the group had unanimously voted to support his sales tax bill. But one member of the group, the village president of Mount Prospect, disputed Daley’s account, saying that in fact between one-third and one-half of those present had not raised their hands when Daley asked for their support. Even with Governor Kerner’s support, Daley’s tax bill failed in the Illinois legislature. The Democratic-controlled House passed it, despite Republican sniping that it was an “attempt to bail out a corrupt administration in Chicago.” But the bill — which was quickly dubbed the “Daley double,” because it would double Chicago’s share of the sales tax — was voted down in the Republican-controlled Senate in a party-line vote. 3

  Without the authority to raise sales taxes, Daley was forced to fall back on trying to raise property taxes. His 1962 budget called for a nearly 11 percent property tax hike. But that route also proved problematic. Daley’s critics pointed out that taxes had been rising steeply since he took office, up 14 percent in the last year alone. And they argued that he should not be given more tax money until the machine stopped raiding the city’s coffers for political purposes. A citizens’ committee appointed by Daley recommended that the city stop the use of temporary employees, because those positions were so frequently used for political patronage. Daley accepted some of the committee’s minor proposals, but not that one. James Worthy, president of the Republican Citizens League of Illinois, accused the machine of defending municipal waste. “The loafing city gangs of so-called workers, exposed time after time by the newspapers, are all immune to punishment because of powerful political sponsorship,” he charged. Daley’s response was an ad hominem attack on the suburbanite Worthy. “Does Mr. Worthy live in Chicago?” Daley asked. Daley’s talk of higher property taxes eventually prompted a grassroots uprising. More than one hundred civic leaders from the South and Southwest Side met in Marquette Park to plan a march on City Hall. 4

  The big showdown over Daley’s property-tax proposal came late in 1961, when the City Council had to vote on Daley’s 1962 budget. George Hermann, vice president of the Republican Citizens League of Illinois, came to the City Council to testify against the budget. Daley and Keane had seen a written version of Hermann’s remarks in advance, and Keane had pointedly introduced Hermann as a resident of suburban Winnetka who had come to “deliver a political diatribe in behalf of a political party.” Hermann responded that he owned a business in Chicago and paid city taxes. In his testimony, Hermann called the budget “strong arm robbery.” Daley was trying to stock the city payroll, Hermann charged, with patronage workers, including “bookmakers and juice men, subsidized by Chicago taxpayers as courtesy to the Democratic political organization.” As Hermann left the chamber, a red-faced Keane shouted out questions about the budget of Winnetka after him. When Hermann’s appearance was over, Daley collapsed in his chair and gulped from a glass of water, as the Democratic aldermen gave him a standing ovation. To the surprise of no one, the City Council adopted Daley’s budget 40–3. 5

  The other big issue confronting Daley at the start of the new decade was race. Black Chicagoans had been watching the civil rights drama unfolding in the Deep South, many with extra interest because they were born down South or had family there. For years, Chicago’s black community had been largely quiescent. There had been a few isolated demonstrations in the 1940s, including the White City Roller Rink protests of 1946. In the 1950s, Willoughby Abner organized the NAACP’s Chicago chapter into an activist organization promoting the cause of racial integration. But it was really after the southern sit-in movement got its start at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that a modern civil rights movement began to emerge in Chicago. The Chicago chapter of CORE and the Youth Chapter of the NAACP organized scattered pickets of Woolworth stores, in solidarity with the southern lunch counter protests. And in the summer of 1961, blacks and whites on the South Side organized “wade-ins” to protest the racial segregation that still prevailed at the beaches along Lake Michigan. But the first major flash point of Chicago’s civil rights movement was the public schools.

  The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education had drawn the nation’s attention to the problem of racial segregation in southern schools. What was less well known was that many of the large northern school systems were almost as segregated, by practice if not by law. A 1958 NAACP study had found that 91 percent of Chicago’s elementary schools were segregated, which it defined as being either 90 percent black and Puerto Rican or 90 percent white. Chicago’s schools turned out to be as unequal as they were separate. As the city’s black population grew, black school enrollment had also been increasing rapidly. From 1953 to 1963, overall Chicago school enrollment jumped from 375,000 to more than 520,000, and much of that growth had occurred in black neighborhoods. The NAACP report found that the average black elementary school had almost twice as many students as the average white elementary school. The city had built some additional school buildings to handle the enrollment increases, but not enough. 6

  School superintendent Benjamin Willis’s response to the overcrowding in black schools was to require their students to attend class in double-shifts, the first group in the morning and the second in the afternoon. The educational consequences of attending school in shifts were significant: for double-shift students, the school day ended as early as noon. Some white schools were also on double-shift, but more than 80 percent of all double-shift students in the city were black. Willis’s other solution to the overcrowding problem was expanding the use of mobile classrooms, which were quickly dubbed “Willis Wagons.” What made the situation particularly troubling for many in the black community was that while black students were going to school in shifts and trailers, there were vacancies in many of the city’s white schools. Prodded by the Chicago Defender and civil rights groups, many black parents applied to the Board of Education to transfer their children to underutilized white schools. As part of this campaign, called “Operation Transfer,” CORE sent the Board of Education a seven-page list of schools that were reported to contain empty classrooms, and urged that black students be admitted to them. The Board of Education refused the transfers. 7

  Protests against the school system began quietly at the grassroots level. The movement started in middle-class neighborhoods along the expanding borders of the Black Belt. In September 1961, parents from the South Side neighborhood of Chatham whose children were denied transfers to white schools filed a lawsuit. A few months later, mothers staged a protest at
an overcrowded school in another black neighborhood when their children were transferred to a distant black school, bypassing a closer, underused white school. But the most heated rhetoric about schools was coming out of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The Woodlawn Organization, a community group founded by radical organizer Saul Alinsky, was encouraging poor parents to protest about the conditions in the neighborhood and teaching them how to bring their concerns to the attention of the city. TWO quickly became a driving force in the school movement. Led by the Reverend Arthur Brazier, the group organized a massive protest at an October 1961 public hearing at the Board of Education. The following month, TWO began holding “death watches” at Board of Education meetings, with several members in the back dressed in black as an arresting form of protest. School activists also started holding teach-ins across the city to educate more citizens about the problems in the Chicago school system and what should be done. In February 1962, the Chatham–Avalon Park Community Council sponsored a conference called “Segregation in the Chicago Public Schools.” A month later, the Chicago Urban League held a citywide conference on “quality and equality” in the schools. 8

  Around the same time, an influential interracial group of teachers, Teachers for Integrated Schools, was forming. One of TFIS’s first projects was producing a short pamphlet called “Hearts and Minds,” which made a personal appeal to Mayor Daley to do something about the overcrowding, segregation, and educational shortcomings of the city’s public schools. On May 17, 1962, the eighth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, teachers affiliated with TFIS fanned out across the Loop at the end of the workday to hand out “Hearts and Minds” and urge Chicagoans to take a stand in favor of integrating and upgrading the public schools. These teacher-activists distributed some 65,000 copies of “Hearts and Minds” in downtown Chicago, an extraordinary event for that still politically restrained era, but there were no news stories about it the following day. “The most curious thing about the pamphleteering was that nobody mentioned it,” recalls college professor Meyer Weinberg, who helped found TFIS. “No newspaper, not even the Defender, and none of the local news shows.” Shortly after the demonstration, Weinberg ran into an old classmate who was working at the Chicago Daily News and asked why they had not covered it. “He said, ‘Don’t you know they refer to this as “nigger news,” and nobody [wants] to get into trouble by printing ... it....’” 9