American Pharaoh
Page 36
In April 1962, a new coalition formed in Chicago that would become the driving force for the city’s civil rights movement. The Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) was a citywide organization that included representatives of both large national organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League and local groups such as Teachers for Integrated Schools and The Woodlawn Organization. The CCCO immediately threw itself into the battle over schools, and made one of its first causes the nominations Daley was about to make to the Chicago Board of Education. There were two vacancies on the board, and Daley’s all-white nominating commission had just sent him a list of candidates, all of whom were white and none of whom had a record of concern about matters of race. The CCCO met with Daley to express its unhappiness with the candidates. Daley went ahead and chose two of the white nominees, though he later invited a black group, the Cook County Physicians Association, to send a representative to the nominating commission. 10 Meanwhile, protests against Willis Wagons were gaining force. They made a good target for the protesters because they were a concrete enemy for a movement that largely concerned itself with abstractions. During protests in May and June, Reverend Brazier and other leaders emphasized that Willis Wagons were “a means of maintaining segregation.” The U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a report late in the year that found that, just as the black community was charging, there was enough extra space available in white schools to alleviate the overcrowding, but the school system had failed to use it. The Board of Education had most likely “impeded rather than promoted integration,” the report concluded. 11
Throughout these early school protests, Daley kept a low profile. He had no reason to get involved. He did not believe in school integration philosophically, and he realized it would not help him politically. Like open housing, school integration threatened to destabilize the working-class white neighborhoods that were the heart of the machine’s electoral base. But at the same time, Daley realized he had little to gain by coming out forcefully against school integration. He was in a different position from the southern politicians who were fulminating against integration and vowing “massive resistance.” Because blacks in the South were systematically denied the right to vote, white politicians there did not need to worry about offending black voters. But in Chicago blacks did vote, and their votes went overwhelmingly to Daley and the machine. There was no need to jeopardize this support needlessly by appearing insensitive on the subject of black education. Daley claimed he was staying out of the school controversy because of a philosophical commitment to keeping politics out of the school system. It was a position that sounded admirably reformist, but his philosophy was more likely rooted in some advice Mayor Kelley had given him years ago: “Avoid the public schools. They’ll kill you.” 12
Looking forward to the 1962 spring primary election season, Daley had some details to take care of. The district lines for the city’s fifty wards had been redrawn since the last election, the first redistricting since 1947. Daley instructed the ward committeemen that they were responsible for establishing precinct captains and ward operations in their new territories, but that under no circumstances were any precinct captains to lose their patronage jobs simply because redistricting had pushed them into another ward. Daley also had to fill the ward committeeman position for the 24th Ward, which had been vacant since Sidney Deutsch, the legendary Jewish ward boss, died. Daley chose Benjamin Lewis, who was already the alderman, thereby giving that black ward its first black ward committeeman. Lewis had proven his loyalty to the machine in the City Council, and the bad blood between him and Dawson meant there was little danger of Lewis bringing the 24th Ward back into Dawson’s weakened black submachine. “Lewis became Daley’s ‘house boy’ and took great pride in attacking Dawson publicly on signal,” notes historian Dempsey Travis. “He constantly bragged about the fact that none of his precinct captains were ‘Dawson men’ and that his telephone line ran directly to the fifth floor in City Hall and not to Dawson’s headquarters at 34th and Indiana Avenue.” Daley also elevated Seymour Simon, a Keane ally, from 40th Ward alderman to president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. To some machine-watchers, it appeared that Daley was promoting Simon to head the Jewish faction of the machine in order to further diminish the role of his onetime friend Arvey. 13
Daley’s most pressing concern going into the election was selecting a U.S. Senate candidate to challenge Republican incumbent Everett Dirksen. At a testimonial dinner in May, Daley had virtually endorsed Illinois House Speaker Paul Powell for the nomination. Daley may have been carried away by the moment, but back in the sober environment of City Hall it would have occurred to him that downstater Powell would do little to help the machine ticket win in Cook County. Word had it that Daley was trying to persuade Stevenson to give up his job as United Nations ambassador to make the run, but Stevenson refused. Daley next turned to Sidney Yates, a Chicago congressman. Yates would have a hard time winning the race, because his candidacy violated the Illinois tradition of reserving one of the two Senate seats for a downstater. “You are not going to beat Dirksen starting out by dropping at least 50,000 to 75,000 downstate votes,” a Democratic leader from Madison County warned the slating committee. “The practice of sharing the two Senate seats is more than a tradition — it’s a rule of politics.” The warning proved to be on the mark, but Daley was not all that concerned about sending another Democrat to the U.S. Senate. He was looking for a candidate who would help the machine win its races in Cook County and hold on to the thousands of patronage positions that came with those offices. If that meant nominating a candidate like Yates who was unlikely to put together enough votes statewide to win his own race, Daley considered it a small price to pay. 14
Daley was still looking for new ways to raise money for his ambitious spending projects. He put together a $66 million package of six bond initiatives, including a $22.5 million bond for urban renewal, $22.5 million for sewers, and $7 million for garbage disposal and streetlighting. Daley’s plan was to put the bonds up for a vote in the upcoming April election. It was a favorite technique to put new spending initiatives on the ballot in low-turnout elections that the machine could win by delivering its faithful voters to the polls. Republican alderman Sperling charged Daley with playing politics and urged that the bonds be put on the November general election ballot, when more people would be voting. Daley offered the unconvincing response that if the bonds were on the ballot in November “some would attempt to make partisan politics out of what is strictly a municipal government question.” Daley campaigned hard for his bonds. The week before the election, in good machine fashion, he invited almost a thousand ward committeemen and precinct captains to a Morrison Hotel lunch and implored them to get their people to vote yes. But when the votes were in, all six individual bond issues on the ballot had been defeated by margins of almost 3–2. The urban-renewal bond had lost by the largest margin of the six. Daley’s strategy of putting the bonds up for vote in an off-election had been thwarted: turnout was an unusually high 44 percent. The results, which Time magazine called a “tax-time tantrum,” were widely interpreted as a taxpayer rebellion against the city’s fast-rising property taxes. The Republicans argued that the vote had also been a referendum on the integrity of Daley and the machine. But there also appeared to be a racial element lurking in the returns. The bonds had been labeled in some quarters as an urban-renewal initiative, and to many white Chicagoans, urban renewal was becoming synonymous with uprooting blacks from the ghetto and potentially dispersing them into white neighborhoods. 15
When a seventeen-year-old Girl Scout, Ann Graham, visited City Hall in May to serve as mayor for the day, Daley had some simple advice for her: “Beware of the press, Mayor.” It was wisdom Daley had come by the hard way. The Chicago Tribune had just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for an exposé of corruption in the Sanitary District. When an alderman had introduced a resolution in the City Council to congratulate the reporter who won, a furious Daley
had ordered it buried in committee. Throughout the spring and summer of 1962, the exposés kept coming. In June, the Better Government Association released a report on loafing in the city’s patronage-heavy Forestry Division that it said was costing taxpayers “millions a year.” BGA investigators had taken motion pictures and still photos of forestry crews sleeping, sunbathing, and wasting time during the workday. They also caught forestry workers going into taverns and drinking during the workday. One worker actually went behind the bar to serve a BGA investigator a drink. A forestry truck was observed delivering lumber to a private home, and another was driven to Gary, Indiana. Confronted with this seemingly incontrovertible evidence of municipal waste, Daley responded angrily that the BGA was “lock, stock and barrel an arm of the Republican Party.” At a City Hall press conference, he reminded reporters that cutting down a tree is hard work, and asked the press corps if any of them had ever cut down a tree. 16 Daley insisted that it was wrong for the BGA to “blacken all city employees by use of a report dealing with 15 people,” but by the end of June he grudgingly announced that four forestry workers had been suspended for periods ranging up to twenty-nine days. The BGA director responded that the suspensions were a “very fine start,” but that his group’s investigation indicated that the Forestry Division could cut its staff by one-third without appreciably affecting its work. 17
Increasingly, Daley’s critics tried to tie the use of patronage employees to the city’s soaring tax rates. Since Daley took office seven years earlier, property taxes had climbed 86 percent. Daly bristled when the subject of tax increases came up. At one press conference, he lectured the City Hall press corps that the cost of newspapers had doubled in the past ten years, while the cost of government had not. But the Chicago Tribune did the math and then pointed out in its news pages the next day that while its price had increased from five cents to seven cents in the past decade, the operating budget of the city had actually soared 114 percent. 18
The attacks over municipal waste and high taxes were beginning to take their toll on Daley. Reports were even circulating that he was losing favor to Tom Keane, the second most influential force in the Democratic machine. Keane had demanded that Daley let him name either the next Cook County board president or the next tax assessor, Chicago Tribune political columnist George Tagge reported, and Daley ended up slating Keane’s protégé, Seymour Simon, for Cook County board president. As Tagge saw it, Daley gave in because, after losing on the spring bond issues, he was becoming more risk-averse when it came to slating. Daley realized it would look bad if he turned Keane down and then his own candidates went on to lose. Daley also did something odd in the way he slated the seventeen Superior Court judge candidates for the November 1962 elections. He stole away six Republican candidates who had lost in the April judicial elections and put them on his own “good government” ticket. Republican leaders were outraged by Daley’s effrontery, but once again some political observers interpreted it as sign of weakness or at least risk-aversion. Rather than load up the ticket with a full slate of machine loyalists, Daley was willing to give up some of the judgeships in the hope of luring Republican and independent voters. 19
Daley also forced the Sanitary District — which had been the subject of both a Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé and a federal grand jury investigation — to clean up its operations. A blue-ribbon panel had selected a reform candidate, Vinton Bacon of Tacoma, Washington, as the next superintendent, but the Sanitary District trustees balked. The trustees said it was because they wanted to be given three candidates to choose from, but it seemed that they just were not ready for reform. In the middle of the meeting to consider a new superintendent, the president of the board of trustees got up to take a phone call and returned to say that he was now backing Bacon. It was widely suspected that it was Daley on the other end, although he later insisted that the choice had always been the trustees’ to make. 20 There were still more signs of trouble for the machine in the upcoming election. When William Dawson got up at a party rally to introduce senatorial candidate Yates to machine workers, he put in an embarrassing performance, repeating a few sentences over and over until a state representative led him off the stage. And the issue of machine voting improprieties loomed again when Adamowski declared that he had come into possession of devices that could be used to prevent voters from casting a ballot for certain candidates on a voting machine. He said he had gotten them from a well-connected political worker, and he charged that they had been widely used in poor wards in the 1960 elections. Daley’s response to the wave of bad news was to focus on energizing the machine to work its hardest for the Democratic slate. At the annual 11th Ward family circus at the International Amphitheatre, in his own neighborhood of Bridgeport, Daley mingled with the precinct captains and told them that the Democratic Party was “one family.” Daley also organized a traditional pre-election luncheon for one thousand at the Morrison Hotel’s Terrace Casino, where precinct workers could hear in person from the full Democratic slate, from Yates on down to the three candidates for Sanitary District trustee. As a final election ploy, Daley filed his 1963 budget early, so voters could see it before the election. The new budget called for cutting spending by $44 million compared to the previous year, and it contained a $7 million property-tax cut. Republican alderman Sperling attacked it as “a self-serving political document designed to mislead the people,” but it clearly demonstrated that Daley understood the voters’ sour mood about rising taxes. 21
The 1962 elections turned out fairly well for Daley. Yates did lose to Dirksen, in large part because of the drubbing he received down-state, but the loss was of little consequence to the machine. Within Cook County, the Democrats swept all but one of the major offices. On closer inspection, however, the returns contained some troubling signs for the machine. The Democratic candidate for assessor won, but his margin of victory was less than half of what it had been in the 1958 Democratic landslide four years earlier. The machine’s candidate for Cook County board president won by only 150,000, compared to 446,000 four years earlier. Daley himself was up for reelection in six months, and this erosion of support for the machine was an indication of the trouble Daley himself would encounter. 22
Architectural Forum devoted its entire May 1962 issue to the boom times in Chicago. The city had been transformed, the magazine declared, since Daley took over. Most notably, “that most glamorous structure, the office building, is sprouting again, in the Loop and on its fringes.” Technically speaking, the Loop revival began slightly before Daley became mayor. The Prudential Building, the first new Loop skyscraper since the 1930s, opened in 1955, the year of Daley’s election, but ground had been broken for it three years earlier. Still, there was no denying that the pace of downtown development had picked up considerably during the Daley years. Since the Prudential went up, another 3 million square feet of office space had been built in the Loop. The Inland Steel Building opened in 1957, part of a wave that would go on for decades, culminating in the Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building, in 1974. With the new boom in downtown construction, the city’s downtown business district began to expand beyond its traditional boundaries. On June 20, 1963, Daley presided over groundbreaking ceremonies for the $30 million, thirty-five-story Equitable Life Assurance Society Building. The Equitable Building, located on the northern bank of the Chicago River, was part of a northward migration of the business district that would in time turn North Michigan Avenue into an impressive array of upscale office buildings and luxury stores. In 1965, Gateway Center I opened, marking an important step in the Loop’s drive westward, onto the western bank of the curving Chicago River. And in the late 1960s, an underdeveloped eighty-three-acre parcel east of Michigan Avenue was developed as the sprawling mixed-use Illinois Center, pushing the downtown business district eastward. The hodgepodge of buildings, including the Mies van der Rohe steel-and-glass skyscrapers at One and Two Illinois Center, anchored a previously underdeveloped area tucked between the Chicago River and
the north end of Grant Park. 23
In addition to the boom in office construction, the Loop also saw a dramatic increase in government buildings. Daley used his influence with Washington to see that Chicago got more than its share of federal construction dollars. Starting in the late 1950s, work began on a new complex of Mies van der Rohe federal buildings for the east Loop: the thirty-story Everett McKinley Dirksen federal court building; the forty-two-story John C. Kluczynski Building; and a one-story U.S. Post Office, Loop Station. These three buildings, all of which face a central plaza, form what is perhaps the most imposing federal complex in any downtown outside Washington, D.C. Daley could also claim substantial credit for construction of Mc-Cormick Place, the world’s largest exposition hall, which opened South of the Loop on the shores of Lake Michigan in 1960. Mc-Cormick Place, named after the late Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick, arose out of negotiations Daley had with Governor Stratton. They agreed on a bipartisan bill, passed by the legislature in June 1957, to create a public authority that was authorized to issue bonds to finance its construction. The location was controversial: some Chicagoans were troubled that it violated Burnham’s dictum that the lakefront should remain “forever open, clear and free.” But from a commercial standpoint McCormick Place, with its 300,000 square feet of exhibition space, was a great success, putting Chicago in a far better position than it had been to lure conventions and trade shows. 24