by Adam Cohen
One month after the first school boycott, on November 22, 1963, Daley was having lunch with aides at the machine offices at the Morrison Hotel. His secretary, Mary Mullen, arrived with news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was near death. Daley burst into tears and then dictated a statement before heading home for the rest of the day. “I cannot express my deep grief and sorrow over the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy,” Daley said. “He was a great President — a great leader.” Daley’s friend William Lee called Kennedy’s death “the most terrible moment in our history.” The following day, Daley led a memorial service in the City Council chambers. Speaking from a rostrum decorated with a large picture of the slain president, American and Chicago flags, and white chrysanthemums, Daley declared that Kennedy “lived and died in accordance with his own words, ‘And so, my fellow Americans: “Ask not what your country will do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”’” At the end, Daley added, “I have lost a great friend.” One week later, the City Council voted unanimously to rename the Northwest Expressway in Kennedy’s honor. 54
The whole nation was stunned and saddened, but Daley had reason to feel Kennedy’s death more than most. The two men had remained close since the 1960 election, and just a few months earlier Daley had stopped by the White House while he was in Washington to testify before Congress. He had said at the time that he had no urgent business but that he “just dropped in to say hello.” Their relationship was no doubt driven to a large extent by political calculation on both sides, but Kennedy had at least been a reliable political ally, whether it meant approving an urban renewal grant Daley wanted or putting in an appearance the week before Daley’s closest mayoral election. Just a few months earlier, Kennedy had nominated Daley’s old friend Abraham Lincoln Marovitz to a Federal District Court judgeship at Daley’s urging. Daley’s relationship with Lyndon Johnson was not as warm. The new president likely knew that Daley had pushed Kennedy at the 1960 convention to keep him off the ticket. Johnson and Daley did not share an ethnic bond, and Johnson did not have the ties to Chicago that the Kennedys did through the Merchandise Mart. Still, the 1964 election was coming up, and Johnson was a shrewd enough politician to understand Daley’s importance. He called Daley shortly after he was sworn in, and kept calling, writing, and visiting. And Daley was one of only four guests invited to sit with Johnson’s wife and daughters during his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Daley and Johnson would in time become close, particularly over their common interest in Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Daley was able to deliver the votes of the Chicago congressional delegation for the social programs Johnson wanted passed. Johnson, in turn, “was very much into doing programs [that brought] money to cities, trying to solve problems in cities,” says William Daley. In the end, he says, his father had “a different, but in some ways a better relationship” with Johnson than he had with Kennedy. 55
Daley’s difficult year ended with a round of criticism over his latest municipal budget. The $532 million he was proposing to spend in 1964 was a record, and taxes would once again have to be raised. Daley’s critics charged, as usual, that the money would be used to fund the machine’s patronage operations. The Civic Federation, a nonpartisan taxpayers’ organization, examined Daley’s 1964 budget and concluded that it was riddled with wasteful spending. Among its findings was that the city was routinely paying exorbitant wages to employees who did clerical work. The city was also paying 28 percent more than the going rate for carpenters when, according to the Building Employers Association, because of the advantages of working for the city it should have been paying 20 percent less. According to another study, the number of temporary workers — most of them patronage hires — had now tripled since Daley took over from Kennelly. Two of Daley’s leading critics on the City Council issued a joint statement charging that it was “almost impossible to overstate the loss” to the city from employing the 8,493 temporary workers now on the payroll. Daley once again argued that the spending was needed to deliver the high level of municipal services Chicago enjoyed. But a new study cast doubt on Daley’s constant assertions about the quality of city services. The National Board of Fire Underwriters issued its national evaluations of fire-preparedness. The group gave Chicago 1,235 deficiency points for shortcomings in fire protection, giving the city a rank of 3 on a scale from 1 to 5. No city had a 1 rating, but seven large cities received 2’s, ranking them ahead of Chicago. The insurance industry used the NBFU’s ratings to calculate risk, which meant that Chicagoans had to pay higher premiums as a result of the city’s mediocre standing. Despite the charges of waste and patronage, Daley’s 1964 budget sailed through the machine-controlled City Council in early December. One critic warned, however, that “Mr. Daley’s policies are driving homeowners out of the city and destroying neighborhoods.” 56
Daley began the year’s first cabinet meeting by declaring that “our aim in 1964 is to give the best service in the most economical manner.” But he was soon hit with yet another study documenting the large number of patronage employees being supported by Chicago taxpayers. The Better Government Association charged that more than twenty thousand — or almost 30 percent — of the employees of Chicago’s six main local government units were outside civil service, and that the vast majority of these were patronage hires. Many more patronage workers were tucked away in state government, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago Housing Authority, and other payrolls the machine had access to. The BGA charged that Daley’s Civil Service Commission was contributing to the problem by conducting few civil-service examinations, making it easier to make non-civil-service patronage hires. In the previous year, exams were held for only forty-four of the city’s 1,656 job titles. The BGA also found other instances of corruption, including a widespread practice in the Sanitation Department of supervisors taking bribes to let their crews work overtime, for which crew members were paid time-and-a-half on Saturday and double-time on Sunday. Days later, the State, County, and Municipal Employees Union joined in, charging that Daley was ignoring a list it had compiled of two thousand workers who were being overpaid as a result of phony job titles. Victor Gotbaum, district director of the union, said patronage workers were routinely being promoted to jobs that should have gone to the civil-service workers he represented. Daley responded, as usual, that the attacks on him were partisan. He charged that the BGA was “an arm of the Republican Party,” despite the fact that it had a bipartisan board of directors and had previously endorsed him for mayor. 57
The new year brought Daley no relief on the school front. He was asked at an early January press conference whether he still supported Willis. With a second school boycott looming, he sounded less than enthusiastic. “I have great confidence in the entire membership of the school board,” he responded. If Daley wanted to weaken Willis’s position, he would soon have the chance. There were two vacancies coming up on the school board, and Daley was about to fill them. The CCCO sent a twenty-member delegation to urge Daley to select members who would work for integration — one of whom they hoped would be black. Daley heard his visitors out but, true to form, told them he could not commit himself “to any positive course.” Before long, the single black member of the nominating committee broke the news to the civil rights activists that Daley was unlikely to appoint the sort of members they were hoping for. “The Southwest Side is more active and influential than we are,” he told them. In fact, Daley was not about to yield any ground to the integrationist forces. Dr. Eric Oldberg, the politically moderate suburban doctor who chaired the nominating committee, said that he and other moderates had been urging Daley not to continue to appoint pro-Willis board members. “I told him, ‘Goddamn it, Dick, it won’t work — maintaining a school board that is polarized.’ ... But he was obdurate; he bluntly told me that nobody was going to tell him who he could appoint, to the school board or anything else.” Daley ended up appointing two whites with no known civil rights sympathies: Cyrus Hall Adams, a
downtown merchant, and Mrs. Lydon Wild, a South Shore socialite and friend of the Daley family. 58
With planning for the second school boycott now under way, Daley took back the freedom he had previously given black machine members. He now expected them to support Willis strongly, and to work actively against the civil rights sentiment sweeping through the black wards. In the City Council, the only black member of the City Council school committee fell into line and voted in favor of the nomination of Cyrus Adams and Wild, even as liberal white alderman Leon Despres voted against them. And black machine politicians formed a new group called the Assembly to End Prejudice, Injustice, and Poverty that, despite its name, opposed the CCCO and the school movement. “We hope the school boycott fails, and we’re working hard toward that end,” the group’s president, South Side 20th Ward alderman Kenneth Campbell, said at a February 4 press conference. The black machine sent precinct workers door-to-door in the same wards the CCCO was trying to organize, warning parents that the boycott was an “ineffective weapon” that “harms children.” Machine canvassers carried leaflets to be signed and returned by parents, saying: “Your children need all the education they can get. Let nobody fool you into believing that another school boycott can do any good.” Daley denied, not very convincingly, that he had any involvement in the formation of the Assembly to End Prejudice, Injustice, and Poverty. “They sent me a copy of the programs and objectives,” he insisted. “That’s all I know about it.” But civil rights activists were not convinced. “Captain Richard J. Daley has cracked the whip,” said Rose Simpson, whose recent meeting with the mayor had gone so badly, “and his plantation overseers jumped in line.” 59
When February 25 came, about 125,000 students stayed away from school, an impressive showing in absolute terms, but a sharp fall-off from the first boycott. The black machine’s new campaign had made itself felt. In a march on City Hall coinciding with the boycott, demonstrators carried placards reading “The polls are next — watch out Daley,” and “If we don’t get rid of Daley, we’ll have boycotts daily.” The protesters also carried a mock coffin bearing the names of Dawson, Willis, and the six black aldermen from the submachine who opposed the boycott. The message the civil rights protesters and the parents of the 125,000 school children were trying to send was lost on Daley. “I don’t think civil rights is a political issue,” he said. “It is not a political issue, just as education and unemployment are not.” 60
Civil rights activists had long maintained that the Chicago schools were highly segregated, and on March 31, 1964, they received official confirmation. University of Chicago professor Philip Hauser had been commissioned, as part of the settlement of a federal discrimination lawsuit, to study the racial situation in the Chicago school system. Hauser’s report struck a conciliatory tone, noting that the problem of school segregation was not “unique to Chicago.” Still, it found that 84 percent of the black pupils in Chicago attended schools that were at least 90 percent black, and that 86 percent of white students were in schools that were at least 90 percent white. The Hauser Report faulted the Board of Education for not moving “earlier and more rapidly . . . to resolve the problem of school integration.” As debate raged over the report, Daley had the chance to fill three more vacancies on the Board of Education. 61
The most controversial issue Daley faced was whether to reappoint Mrs. Wendell Green to another five-year term. The elderly Green, who had risen out of the black submachine, remained the greatest apologist for Willis and the school system on the question of race. “I don’t know what integration means,” she told the City Council when she testified seeking reappointment. “There is no segregation in Chicago schools.” Edwin Berry of the Chicago Urban League spoke for most of the school movement when he warned Daley that “[r]eappointment of Mrs. Green would be a monumental tragedy.” Dr. Oldberg tried to talk Daley into appointing her to a vacant two-year term, rather than the full five years. “Dick, she’s going to be over eighty,” Oldberg argued. “Since there’s been such a ruckus, give her the short term.” “Fine, Doc,” Daley replied. But in the end, he reappointed Green to a five-year term. In a surprising act of political independence, 6th Ward alderman Robert Miller broke with his fellow members of the “silent six” and voted against Green in committee. He changed his position by the time her nomination reached the floor, but by then it was too late to restore his standing with the machine. In his usual punitive fashion, Daley withdrew the machine’s support in the next election, and Miller lost to an independent candidate. “Daley wouldn’t forgive him for going against his wishes,” challenger A. A. “Sammy” Rayner said afterward. “I really won by default.” 62
President Johnson traveled to Chicago in April 1964 to address a machine fund-raiser, where he declared his commitment to build “a Great Society of the highest order.” The crowd of six thousand loyal Democrats greeted Johnson’s declaration with raucous applause. “If you could make a graph of this administration, perhaps this would be a sort of peak,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary. The Great Society was Johnson’s plan for extending the progressive ideals of the New Deal through programs like the War on Poverty and Medicare. The War on Poverty was actually a holdover from the Kennedy administration. The late president had asked his aides in the fall of 1963 to develop a program that would extend the nation’s growing prosperity to those who were being left behind. After Kennedy’s death, Johnson picked up the torch and instructed his staff to “[g]ive it the highest priority.” Johnson, who started out in humble circumstances in rural East Texas, had strong personal feelings about fighting poverty. One of his proudest accomplishments was his early work bringing electricity to rural Texas. “Electricity changed those people’s lives, made things easier, brought light into the darkness,” he recalled to an aide who was helping to develop the Great Society. Johnson also saw his anti-poverty campaign as an integral part of the drive for racial justice. As the battle against Jim Crow was being won in the South, blacks would still need economic assistance to bring them up to the status of whites. Johnson was committed, he said in his first State of the Union address, to using his office on behalf of those who “live on the outskirts of hope — some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both.” 63
Johnson guided a series of Great Society initiatives through Congress in 1964 and 1965. He established the Department of Housing and Urban Development to take on the problems of the nation’s large cities, and allocated $900 million to fight rural poverty in Appalachia. And he persuaded Congress to support his Medicare program, signing it into law in Independence, Missouri, with eighty-one-year-old Harry Truman at his side. It was the Economic Opportunity Act, however, that laid the groundwork for the War on Poverty. The new law created an Office of Economic Opportunity, which Johnson put under the leadership of Sargent Shriver, director of the Peace Corps and brother-in-law of President Kennedy. The choice of Shriver was an indication that Johnson intended the agency and its anti-poverty mission to play an important role in his administration. Shriver was a tireless worker and a bureaucratic warrior who, as the Peace Corps’ first director, had turned a start-up program into one of the defining undertakings of the Kennedy era. Daley and Shriver had strong ties, going back to Shriver’s time in Chicago as manager of the Kennedy family’s Merchandise Mart, and as a member of the Chicago School Board. 64
The architects of the War on Poverty intended for it to take a bold new approach to the nation’s ills. It was aimed, Johnson declared, “at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.” The OEO included eight major programs designed to take on distinct aspects of economic disadvantage. Head Start focused on improving early childhood education for 1.3 million low-income pre-schoolers. The Job Corps was designed to provide job-training opportunities for underprivileged youth. And Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, was established as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. Conservatives complained that the War on Poverty was undermining the free market by c
reating unnecessary government programs and entitlements. Republicans began sporting buttons proclaiming, “I’m fighting poverty, I work.” But for the most part, Johnson’s efforts to reach out to the nation’s most disadvantaged citizens were well received in the early days. “This is the best thing this administration’s done,” Johnson told Shriver. “I’ve got more comments and more popularity on the poverty thing than anything else.” 65
The most innovative of all the new anti-poverty initiatives was the $1 billion Community Action Program (CAP). Traditional welfare programs placed bureaucrats and social workers in downtown office buildings and put them in charge of dispensing checks to needy people who lived far away. CAP called for moving welfare programs out of downtown and into the neighborhoods where poor people lived. The most innovative piece of the CAP model was its “maximum feasible participation” rule. The Equal Opportunity Act required that local programs be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served.” Buried in this dense statutory language was a truly radical notion. Poverty programs were to be run by neighborhood-based organizations that were “broadly representative of the community.” If the mandate was followed faithfully, it would empower poor people to run their own programs for the first time, and give them millions of dollars in federal money to distribute in their communities. Robert Kennedy, testifying in favor of the act, hailed its departure from the traditional model of anti-poverty efforts that “plan programs for the poor, not with them.” Richard Boone, a key framer of the OEO legislation, said it was intended as an end-run around city halls and welfare bureaucracies that did not have the interests of the poor at heart. Advocates for the poor believed CAP had the potential to completely change the national landscape. Shriver called it “the boldest of OEO’s inventions,” and predicted that its grassroots network of neighborhood offices would become “the business corporation of the new social revolution.” Michael Harrington, author of the influential anti-poverty manifesto The Other America, declared that the Equal Opportunity Act could end up doing as much to organize the poor as the Wagner Act had done to organize workers thirty years earlier. 66
