American Pharaoh
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Along with the corporate and government construction, Daley’s plan for Loop construction emphasized using residential buildings to redevelop the Loop. Downtown business leaders were eager to see new housing go up to attract upper-income — and, there was no denying it, white — residents to the central business district. The business community believed that if pedestrian traffic in the Loop became too black, a “tipping point” would be reached, and whites would cease to shop there. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the Loop,” developer Arthur Rubloff told the Chicago Daily News. “It’s people’s conception of it. And the conception they have about it is one word — black. B-L-A-C-K. Black. We have a racial problem we haven’t been able to solve. The ghetto areas have nothing but rotten slum buildings, nothing at all, and businessmen are afraid to move in, so the blacks come downtown for stores and restaurants.” The Central Area Committee saw luxury apartment buildings as the solution. It was an idea as old as the 1958 plan, and by the early 1960s it finally started coming to pass. The most dramatic example was the $36 million Marina City, twin sixty-story corncob-shaped residential and office towers. Marina City was an upscale world on the banks of the Chicago River, with restaurants, built-in parking lots, movie theaters, a health club, and its own 700-boat marina. The complex’s 900 apartments, an immediate hit with the public, were fully rented before the buildings opened in 1965. As it happened, Marina City was put together by two men who were extremely close to Daley: janitors union president William McFetridge and CHA board chairman Charles Swibel. Swibel managed to obtain an option on the riverfront property at well below market value, and McFetridge pulled together money from the Janitors International Union and several locals to underwrite initial work on the project. Swibel then made the rounds of Chicago and New York banks to put together the rest of the financing. Swibel ended up doing very well as a result of his role in Marina City. His management company was awarded a lucrative contract to run the complex. And later, when the buildings’ apartments were converted to condominiums, Swibel would make more than $6 million by legally buying up apartments at insider prices and flipping them. 25
In transforming a dying downtown into one of the nation’s most dynamic, Daley benefited from fortunate timing. “It was the best of times for being mayor,” notes Continental Bank president John Perkins, who worked with Daley on downtown development. “I don’t mean to debunk the mayor or anything, [but] postwar prosperity was really starting to move Chicago.” Still, Daley should get credit for a good part of the turnaround. His 1958 plan laid the groundwork for many of the downtown improvements that followed. And Daley made things easier for projects that fit in with his plans for downtown. Developers’ first step was often to meet with a department head like Lewis Hill, Daley’s commissioner of urban renewal. “If you got a good reception Hill would probably say, ‘Let me talk to the mayor about it,’” says Daley aide Edward Marciniak. “Then there might be a meeting with the mayor. The mayor liked this because his job was not to say no, but to say yes.” Once the mayor was on a developer’s side, says mayoral aide Tom Donovan, he “could move through the bureaucracy.” Projects with Daley’s approval proceeded on a special track. Daley waived zoning requirements, extended water and sewer lines, and built and closed streets in order to see that buildings he wanted were built. Daley’s critics conceded that much good was being done downtown, but they were concerned that Loop development was being overemphasized. “You have to say that a cardinal point of his policy, perhaps the cardinal point, has been the subsidy and encouragement of the central area — the Loop and the Near North Side,” said Independent alderman Leon Despres. “They have been nourished, caressed, assisted, encouraged and dealt with in every way to produce the maximum development.” City Hall was not doing anything for Chicago’s declining residential neighborhoods, which also needed help to stave off decline. The problem, critics said, was that Daley answered only to power: the Central Area Committee had it, and the residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods did not. 26
Even before Daley announced for reelection in 1963, major endorsements started to pour in. Chicago’s business community was not only backing Daley, it was lobbying him to make sure he would run for a third term. Fairfax Cone of the advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding, who had been a mainstay of Daley’s previous nonpartisan business committees, announced that he would organize another Non-Partisan Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Daley. Within days, a long list of business leaders, including many of the same ones who backed him in 1959, had publicly come out for Daley. At the same time, organized labor remained firmly in Daley’s camp. On December 4, 1962, the Chicago Federation of Labor once again backed Daley, in a resolution introduced by Daley’s friend and civil service commissioner, William Lee. As these influential forces lined up behind Daley, he professed to be uncertain about whether to seek reelection. “Running for a third term is something you don’t make your mind up about overnight,” he said. Daley’s indecision did not last long. On December 14, 1962, he finally made his intentions known to a closed meeting of Democratic ward committeemen, who gave him their unanimous support. 27
The campaign started out on a sour note for Daley. Even before the Republicans had a candidate, they had their first issue. Charges about the machine’s links to the syndicate, which had plagued Daley since his first race for mayor, resurfaced just days after his announcement. John D’Arco, the 1st Ward alderman, was stepping down in favor of state senator Anthony De Tolve. The word on the street was that syndicate boss Sam Giancana had personally ordered the change after meeting with his fellow mobsters in a Loop hotel. “I’m shocked at the arrogance of the Syndicate in attempting to move their man into the city council,” Republican alderman John Hoellen declared. “Doesn’t Mayor Daley have courage enough to run the Syndicate out of Chicago ...? What unseen power holds the mayor back?” Daley challenged the accusers to come up with more support for their allegations. “Is there any proof or evidence of this?” Daley asked. “Is relationship with anyone the basis for condemnation?” At the same time, he said there was nothing he could do about what was occurring in the 1st Ward. “I do not interfere with any campaign for alderman in any ward,” Daley said. “I have been told by Mrs. D’Arco that he has refused to run because of his health.” His defense was patently false, of course, since he had frequently forced out officeholders who crossed him or threatened his power. 28
Things only got worse for Daley when the Republicans settled on their candidate, his old antagonist Benjamin Adamowski. Adamowski was a proven vote-getter, who had carried Chicago when he was elected state’s attorney in 1956. He had narrowly lost his position in 1960, but he still attributed that defeat to the vote theft by the machine. As a Polish-American, Adamowski also began with a built-in base among the city’s 600,000-strong Polish community, a critical part of the machine’s white ethnic base. Most important, Adamowski was smart and articulate, and his past investigations — including the Traffic Court and Summerdale police scandals — had done real damage to the machine’s reputation. During the election, Adamowski would have fresh scandals to exploit. The Sanitary District was being buffeted by charges of kickbacks, bribes, and fraudulent civil-service examination results. And reminiscent of Summerdale, the Chicago Fire Department was being accused of looting fire victims’ homes. A fire victim named John Nesbitt, who worked as a public information director for the National Safety Council, charged that his home and another in his building had been robbed by a fireman who responded to a fire call. Daley responded that Nesbitt was on a witch-hunt, and he demanded that he take a lie detector test. 29 Adamowski was also fortunate to be running at a time when the voters were unhappy with the city’s high spending, as they had demonstrated by voting down Daley’s $66 million in bonds a year earlier. He made clear from the outset that he would challenge Daley on taxes and question how much of the money raised was going to machine patronage and waste. “We’ll talk about his record — and the cost of it all to the taxpayers,” Adamowski
promised. “I think the big issue is the size of the tax bills.” 30
Daley began 1963 with the kind of show of strength that only the Democratic machine could exhibit. On January 2, he filed a sixteen-foot-high stack of nominating petitions containing 750,000 names. Daley kicked off his campaign by emphasizing his work redeveloping the city and improving municipal services. His reform of the police department was already translating into reduced crime rates, he said, and he boasted that Chicago had won awards in 1959 and 1961 as the cleanest big city in America. During the campaign, Daley also announced that he had received a telegram from the National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix-Up Bureau in Washington stating that Chicago was also designated the cleanest large city for 1962. The Chicago newspapers helped Daley out by picking up on his themes, and they generally gave him high marks. And Time magazine put Daley on its cover shortly before the election, with his preternaturally jowly face set off against a bright Chicago skyline, and the headline “Clouter with Conscience.” Inside, Time included photos of the city’s new skyscrapers, O’Hare International Airport, and an autographed photograph of President Kennedy welcoming the Daley clan to the White House. Chicago was in the midst of reinventing itself — a “new facade is rising in steel and zeal”— the magazine cheered, and it gave credit for the transformation to the city’s singular mayor. “Daley’s stubborn resolve to rebuild his city has given Chicago a new stature,” the article said. “Making things happen is Daley’s passion.” The magazine’s brief mention of Adamowski dismissed him as a former state’s attorney who “distinguished himself by never successfully prosecuting a major case.” 31
Adamowski ran a spirited campaign that challenged Daley’s upbeat picture of Chicago government. He refused to concede that city services had improved since Daley took office. The Chicago Fire Department, when it was not looting homes, was letting fire deaths soar 150 percent in the last year, Adamowski charged. He also blamed Daley’s fire department for one of the worst tragedies in Chicago history, the infamous 1958 fire at Our Lady of Angels School, in which ninety students and three nuns perished. Adamowski also questioned how much progress had been made at the police department since the Summerdale scandal. The Chicago police had recently allowed the “babbling burglar” himself, Richard Morrison, to be ambushed and shot while leaving the Criminal Court Building after testifying in a Summerdale-related matter. Adamowski also hammered away at Daley, as promised, on waste and high taxes. His charge that Daley routinely overpaid municipal workers was buttressed by a new study that found that the city was paying $3.34 a square foot for cleaning and maintenance, compared to an average of 55.2 cents in thirty-nine Loop offices studied. 32 Republican state legislators also helped Adamowski by introducing a bill to put a tax ceiling on Chicago’s general expenditure fund. Daley was adamantly opposed to it, and he was forced once again to publicly oppose a measure he had helped defeat in 1957, 1959, and 1961 — and thereby associate himself in the voters’ mind with high taxes. With Daley positioning himself as the candidate of business and big labor, Adamowski tried to present himself as the people’s candidate. “I hear State Street is against me, the bankers are against me, and the labor leaders are against me,” he declared, in remarks that sounded uncannily like Daley’s in 1955. “State Street doesn’t make Chicago big, it’s the other way around. I’ll take Western Avenue, Nagle Avenue, Ashland Avenue, and Milwaukee Avenue, where the little people reside. I’ll take the bank depositors over the bankers any day. That goes for the little people in labor, too.” 33
Even while Daley was in the midst of his usual election-time denials that he was a machine boss, he was quietly pulling strings in the upcoming aldermanic races. In the racially changing 21st Ward on the Southwest Side, the white ward committeeman had the necessary support from the ward’s precinct captains in his race for alderman, but Daley decided he would have to step aside in favor of a black candidate. At the same time, in the 17th Ward on the Far South Side, which had become 80 percent black, Daley refused to let the white incumbent be removed. And at a closed-door slating meeting at the Morrison Hotel with top ward committeemen — including Dawson, Keane, Parky Cullerton, and Joseph Gill — Daley beat down a challenge to another white alderman. Keane urged Daley to dump independent alderman Leon Despres, his biggest irritant in the City Council. Dawson, who was eager to put his own man in as 5th Ward alderman, joined Keane’s appeal. But Daley instructed the 5th Ward Organization to back Despres, because he did not want to alienate the liberal independent voters of Illinois, who backed Despres and whose support he wanted in the mayoral election. As word of Daley’s dictates leaked out, Adamowski said they were further proof that “we do not have one-party rule, we have one-man rule.” 34
In the aldermanic election, the machine-and Independent-backed Despres overwhelmingly defeated Dawson’s candidate. But the big news came two days later, when newly reelected alderman Benjamin Lewis was found in his West Side 24th Ward office handcuffed to a chair and shot three times in the head. Lewis was in the process of easing white precinct captains out of the ward, and he had been talking about keeping a larger share of the ward’s gambling money for himself. The killing had the look of a syndicate hit, but no one was ever arrested. The Lewis killing was embarrassing for Daley and the machine, and it caused a rapid volley of charges and countercharges over which of the two mayoral candidates was more corrupt. Lewis’s death was only the latest “chapter in the sordid history of the Chicago Democratic machine,” Adamowski declared. “Now we are apparently at the beginning of an era of violence and bloodshed.” Daley mobilized his supporters to attack Adamowski’s integrity. Daniel Ward charged that when he took office as state’s attorney he discovered that Adamowski had failed to account for $833,984 in discretionary funds. Adamowski responded that he had destroyed the relevant records to protect informants who had helped him to investigate corruption in city government and other scandals. And he threw the charges back at Daley, asking for documentation on the forty-three city contingency funds under the mayor’s control. Daley promised to divulge his contingency fund spending, but he never did. Through it all, Daley continued to insist that he was not a machine politician. A reporter visiting from Brazil told him, “You have quite a reputation in Brazil as the last of the city bosses.” Daley responded, “No, I’m the first new leader.” 35
Adamowski tried to appeal to white ethnic voters by coming out against open housing. Politically, it was not a difficult choice for him. Daley and the machine had a virtual lock on the black vote, and Adamowski would be unlikely to pick up many black votes even if he took a pro–civil rights stand. But he had a chance of making significant inroads into the machine’s white ethnic base by strongly opposing integration. Adamowski’s stand put Daley in a difficult position. Daley had no intention of supporting open housing, both because he opposed it and because he did not want to lose support in the Bungalow Belt. But he was constrained, as Adamowski was not, by the need to avoid offending black voters. He needed blacks both to support him and to turn out enthusiastically. Daley’s solution was to duck the issue. Asked at a City Hall press conference if he supported open housing, Daley said, “Everyone knows my record on adequate housing for all people.” When the reporter pressed him again, Daley simply responded: “You know my record.” 36
As always, Daley’s electoral strategy relied on energizing the machine faithful. He pulled out all of the usual tricks, including a torch-light parade, and a luncheon for 1,400 precinct captains and other machine functionaries at the Morrison Hotel, where he was lauded by Governor Kerner and Senator Paul Douglas. He also pulled out some new ones, like another rally downtown with an elephant wearing a banner reading, “I am voting for Dick Daley too.” Just as he appealed to both sides on race, Daley played both sides of the organized crime issue. He received enthusiastic applause at a meeting of the syndicate-dominated 1st Ward organization when he boasted of his proven record of putting convicted criminals on the city payroll. “I’ve been criticized for doing th
is,” he told the standing-room-only crowd, “but I’ll make no apologies. I’ll always stand alongside the man with a criminal record if I think he deserves another chance.” 37
This time around, Daley was able to call in a better class of political debt. On March 25, barely a week before voters went to the polls, Daley decided that it was time for another O’Hare dedication now that the airport’s circular restaurant was complete. President Kennedy agreed to attend, and Daley’s campaign made the most of it. Crowds up to five deep lined the seventeen-mile route between O’Hare and the downtown Conrad Hilton Hotel, where Daley presided over a “civic luncheon.” Cynics in the press grumbled that the ceremony “may make O’Hare the most dedicated airport in the nation.” But Daley was able to bask in Kennedy’s well-timed declaration that O’Hare “could be classed as one of the wonders of the modern world,” and that it stood as “a tribute to Mayor Daley who kept these interests and resources together, working together, until the job was done.” 38
When the votes were counted on April 2, Daley won 679,497 to 540,705. Daley’s 56 percent of the vote was a sharp drop-off from the 71 percent he had taken four years earlier, and less than he had predicted going into the election. It was also the first time that his vote total had fallen under 700,000. The ward-by-ward mayoral election returns revealed the source of the machine’s difficulties. Daley had run strongly among black voters, taking 81 percent of their votes. But his support among white voters had actually slipped to 49 percent. In part, it was due to ethnic voting. Adamowski had run strongly among his fellow Poles, most of whom usually voted a straight machine ticket. But Daley had also suffered significant falloffs in wards like Tom Keane’s 31st, where his vote total was about half what it had been four years earlier. In the 1st Ward, where he was hurt by his University of Illinois stand as well as tensions with the syndicate, his vote fell about 40 percent. 39