by Adam Cohen
In late September, the Metropolitan Chicago Leadership Council for Open Housing was formed to implement the summit agreement. Daley attended the Palmer House press conference where James Cook, president of Illinois Bell Telephone, was named president of the new organization. “We’re fortunate indeed to have such a fine man to head up such an important council,” Daley declared. “Chicago is leading the way for the entire nation.” That was not an opinion widely shared among supporters of open housing. Cook’s organization faced some significant obstacles, including the fact that it had no office, no staff, and no budget. The financial problems were solved when Chicago’s corporate leaders responded to Cook’s solicitations for contributions. And within a month, Cook persuaded Edward Holmgren, Elizabeth Wood’s venerable onetime assistant, to serve as executive director. The Leadership Council went on to become an influential force for open housing in Chicago and the suburbs. It organized conferences, disseminated information, and filed hundreds of lawsuits challenging housing segregation, including two that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I say the freedom movement won because we got the Leadership Council . . . out of it,” says Marciniak. “We have the business community and other civic leaders espousing fair housing, so they were on our side.” Well-meaning as the Leadership Council was, there were limits to how much change a single advocacy organization could bring about. The real test of the summit agreement, as Bevel insisted all along, was whether it was enforced and whether it changed the lives of Chicago’s black citizens. 36
Daley’s advisers already knew for certain what the leaders of the Freedom Movement only suspected: that Daley had no intention of keeping the promises he made at the summit. He could not say it outright, since he needed the civil rights marches to stop and for King to go home, but this was always Daley’s plan. “I remember my father saying he was at a meeting with Martin Luther King, talking about King marching through the South Side,” says Anthony Downs, son of James Downs, Daley’s top housing adviser. “My father came home and said, ‘I could just see the mayor decide at that moment how he was going to handle King, that he was going to lie to him. I could just see the moment in which he decided the only way he could get rid of the guy was to tell him a whole lot of lies.’” Daley made some gestures, in addition to creating the Leadership Council, that suggested he was committed to reform. William Robinson, former treasurer of the CCCO, was named to head the Cook County Public Aid Department. It was an important job, and one the civil rights community cared about deeply, but Robinson would not have the power to integrate the white neighborhoods Daley was concerned about protecting. Despite all of the talk at the summit, the city was less than aggressive about suspending the licenses of Realtors who continued to discriminate. The changes at the Chicago Housing Authority were largely cosmetic. The agency did not start assigning black families to white projects, or otherwise try to integrate its existing housing stock. When it opened two new elderly projects in white neighborhoods in the months after the summit, it did not assign a single black tenant to either one. Swibel did announce, with great pride, the installation of $18,000 in new door locks, and plans to send 500 housing project children to one week of summer camp. 37
With King gone from Chicago and the marches over, Daley’s attention shifted back to downtown. In September, he proposed a major urban-renewal project for a 156-acre area adjacent to the University of Illinois campus on the New West Side. It would be the biggest slum-clearance project yet, surpassing the 100 acres razed to build the Lake Meadows development. Daley wanted to add about 50 additional acres to the campus, and use the remainder of the cleared land for commercial purposes. Perhaps as a lingering response to the Freedom Movement and the housing summit, Daley also announced that the city and the University of Chicago were jointly seeking a federal grant to build a social service center to serve the Woodlawn neighborhood. The center, which would be operated by the university’s School of Social Service Administration, was badly needed in Woodlawn, and it would connect the university to a neighboring community upon which it had turned its back. But Daley’s support for the project cost him little. It was aimed at improving living conditions in the ghetto, not at helping ghetto residents to move out. The university would take responsibility for running it, and the federal government would be paying the bills. 38
In the fall of 1966, with the Chicago Freedom Movement only an unpleasant memory, Daley was worried about the November elections. The stakes for the machine were high. Senator Paul Douglas, the Hyde Park liberal who had stood by Daley over the years, was facing a tough challenge from Republican Charles Percy. The boyishly appealing Percy had come within 179,000 votes of defeating Kerner for governor in 1964, even as Goldwater was losing Illinois by almost 900,000. This time he did not have the burden of running with Goldwater at the top of the ticket, and he was waging an aggressive campaign that portrayed the seventy-four-year-old Douglas as a relic from another age. Daley also had a full slate of statewide and Cook County candidates to worry about, and a delegation of Chicago congressmen who were taking heat from their constituents over civil rights. According to the polls, the civil rights issue was actually hurting Democrats with both black and white voters. In working-class white wards, voters blamed the Democrats for appeasing the Freedom Movement at the housing summit and for being too soft on open-housing demonstrators. In Cicero, which deeply resented becoming a backdrop for the open-housing marchers, polls showed Douglas’s support down by as much as 30 percent from 1954 and 1960. At the same time, civil rights activists were urging black voters to abandon the machine’s candidates to protest that more was not being done. “It is a myth that the Negro is in any way indebted to or obligated to vote for the Democratic party,” James Bevel proclaimed.” 39
The Republicans were eager to exploit the trouble civil rights was causing the Democrats. Percy formed an alliance with David Reed, a twenty-five-year-old “independent Republican” who was challenging Congressman Dawson. Percy, who sponsored six “Reed-Percy” campaign headquarters in Dawson’s district, hoped to benefit from Reed’s message that “for too long the people of the First District have lived on Mayor Daley’s Plantation.” The polls showed that Douglas was in trouble, but Daley remained optimistic in his public pronouncements. “We still have work to do and we’re going to do it,” he said. Daley, who was predicting Douglas would win by 200,000 votes, said the press was wrong when it said “white backlash” would be a significant factor in the voting. “I hate to think that anyone would cast a ballot on the basis of hate,” he said. To minimize defections on both sides of the color line, Daley tried to frame the election as being about anything but race. “It is the Democratic Party that has given the people Medicare and expanded social security; federal aid to schools, including expanded opportunities for attending college; the minimum wage and increases in minimum wage; and measures to rebuild cities that provide decent housing, end air and water pollution, and improve transportation,” he wrote in a pre-election statement in the Chicago Tribune. Daley reached out to the machine’s white ethnic base with unusual vigor this time. In a four-day period, he marched with 250,000 Poles in the Pulaski Day parade and 300,000 Italians in the Columbus Day parade. Daley also brought Douglas around to the Plumbers Hall, and urged the 4,000 union leaders and members in the audience to get the labor vote out on election day. “We are not on the ropes,” Daley said. “But we have to get the people out to vote.” Daley hoped Johnson would come to Chicago for an election-eve rally, but the president pleaded health problems and did not attend. Still, the machine held a lunchtime pre-election parade through the Loop, complete with bands, one hundred floats, and a telegram from Johnson. It was, Daley declared “another great day for a great city.” 40
Daley’s public good cheer masked his worries that the machine ticket would lose badly. He called in the ward committeemen from all fifty wards and gave them an unusually tough talk about coming through on election day, threatening sanctions for those who failed to deliver. Hundreds
of precinct captains and patronage workers were also called down to machine headquarters and admonished to redouble their efforts. The machine also resorted to another of its traditional tactics: dirty tricks. Percy leaflets began to appear in working-class white neighborhoods with pictures of the candidate with blacks and declarations of his support for open housing. Percy threatened to file a complaint with the largely ineffective Fair Campaign Practices Committee, but the machine insisted it did not know who was behind the leafleting. Daley had one more clever idea for finessing the race issue. On the eve of the election, he announced that King had come to Chicago for the first time since the housing summit to urge blacks not to vote Democratic. He also complained that Bevel had urged blacks to abandon the Democratic Party. Daley’s charges about King were untrue. King had actually been coming to Chicago almost weekly since the summit ended, and had scrupulously avoided taking any partisan political stands. But it was clear what Daley was up to: he was telling white voters not to worry that the Democratic Party had become the party of civil rights. Speaking from Atlanta, King called Daley’s accusations that he had come out against the Democratic ticket “totally unfounded” but “shrewd and timely . . . for his purposes.” 41
In the end, Daley’s shrewd tactics were not enough. Douglas carried Chicago by only 184,000 votes, and lost Illinois by 400,000. The news was not much better in the Cook County races. Sheriff Richard Ogilvie was elected president of the Cook County Board, the first time a Republican had won the office in decades, robbing the machine of 18,000 patronage jobs. Republicans were also elected county treasurer and sheriff. County assessor P. J. “Parky” Cullerton and county clerk Edward Barrett were among the few Democrats to survive the Republican sweep. It was the Republicans’ best off-year election performance since 1950. One of the few bright spots was that thirty-six-year-old Adlai Stevenson III, Daley’s handpicked candidate for state treasurer, won his race. Daley also managed to return all of his incumbent congressmen, but the margins in some of the races were uncomfortably close. 42
It was, all things considered, a disastrous election for the Democrats. The results were particularly ominous for Daley, who would be running for election the following year. Douglas had won only 57 percent of the vote in Chicago, and ward-by-ward tallies showed that the Republicans had indeed made deep inroads throughout the Bungalow Belt. Congressman Pucinski, whose district had been the site of open-housing demonstrations over the summer, was reelected by only 4,700 votes. Two years earlier, he had won by 31,000. “I’ve been the guy who was claiming there was no backlash,” Pucinski said afterward, “but I’m the first to admit now I was dead wrong.” Just as troubling, the Democratic vote had fallen sharply in the black wards, where it seemed that many voters had simply decided to stay home. Daley tried to put the result in the best possible light. “The city of Chicago went overwhelmingly for every Democratic candidate,” he said on election night. “I think the good people of Chicago are still Democratic.” But Percy, in a burst of victory-night enthusiasm, hailed the “Republican resurgence” and predicted that Daley would be defeated if he ran for reelection. 43
With the election safely over, the truth about the housing summit agreement came out. Keane, the number-two man in city government and Daley’s co-negotiator at the summit, declared on the floor of the City Council that there was no open-housing agreement. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” he said during finance committee hearings on the city’s 1967 budget. When word of Keane’s statement reached King, he was outraged. “Hundreds of thousands of Chicago citizens live in slums today awaiting the severities of winter,” King said. “Last summer they were given the hope that their hardship would come to an end, that the slums could be eliminated, and that decent homes would be made available to all families in all neighborhoods. Any attempt to destroy that hope is an act of cruelty and a betrayal of trust.” King insisted Daley now had an obligation to speak out. “[B]ecause Mr. Keane so often seems disposed to speak for the entire city government, I think that Mayor Daley himself should clarify his own position,” King said. “After all, the mayor praised the open housing agreement when it was reached last August.” 44
Daley did take a stand, but not the one the Chicago Freedom Movement had in mind. He agreed with Keane that the housing summit had produced no enforceable agreement, although he did concede that there was a “gentleman’s agreement under a moral banner” to address the concerns that were raised there. Once again, Daley was engaging in shrewd racial politics. By backing up Keane, he was sending a clear signal to the white wards that they did not need to worry that the summit agreement would cause their neighborhoods to be integrated. At the same time, his talk of a “gentlemen’s agreement” and a “moral banner” offered blacks just enough that they could probably be convinced to continue to vote for the machine. Civil rights leaders were not impressed by Daley’s carefully parsed expressions of support. In December, Raby complained publicly that nothing had changed since August 26, the day the agreement was reached. That would become a common refrain in the days ahead.
In the end, there were many reasons the Chicago Freedom Movement failed where the southern civil rights movement had succeeded. Chicago was certainly more difficult terrain. It was harder to fight complex social ills like slum conditions than to challenge the segregated buses and closed voter rolls blacks faced in the South. But much of the credit for defeating the Chicago Campaign — and for taking the steam out of the civil rights movement as it tried to move north — belongs to Daley. His response to King and his followers was shrewd: he co-opted their goals; he dispatched black leaders like Dawson and the Reverend J. H. Jackson to speak out against them; and he refused to allow them to cast him as the villain in the drama. The housing summit was Daley’s masterstroke, a way of ending the protests and driving the movement out of town in exchange for vague and unenforceable commitments. “[L]ike Herod, Richard Daley was a fox, too smart for us, too smart for the press, . . . too smart for his own good, and for the good of Chicago,” Ralph Abernathy would write in his memoirs. “Did we make a mistake in taking his word and leaving Chicago with our signed agreement and our high hopes? I believe we did the right thing, even though the outcome was bitterly disappointing.” 45
The Chicago Campaign was nominally about open housing and slums, but it was also about something larger: a battle between two very different visions of what kind of city Chicago should be. The Freedom Movement’s goal was what it called an “open city,” in which residents would be free to live wherever they wanted without regard to race. When it came to development, the civil rights activists wanted the emphasis to be on improving living conditions in the city’s worst neighborhoods. At the same time, Daley was working to build a wealthier and more powerful Chicago, anchored by a revitalized Loop. Racial integration was not necessarily inconsistent with Daley’s vision, but he saw it as a threat because it had the potential to drive middle-class whites to the suburbs, and to discourage businesses from investing in and locating downtown. The defeat of the Freedom Movement was a victory for Daley’s city of stable, middle-class, white ethnic neighborhoods, and a booming downtown. With King and his followers out of the way, Daley could return to his work in building his city.
CHAPTER
12
Shoot to Kill
In late 1966, Daley was hard at work planning his reelection campaign. As usual, his allies weighed in early. On December 6, the Chicago Federation of Labor, headed by his friend William Lee, endorsed Daley, pronouncing him “the greatest mayor in American history.” Two days later, the machine slate-makers drafted him to run again. On December 29, Daley formally announced that he would seek an unprecedented fourth term. Adamowski wanted the Republican nomination again, but Cook County Board president Richard Ogilvie and the rest of the Republican leadership were against it. The party leaders were looking for a candidate in the mold of John Lindsay, the dashing Republican-Liberal elected mayor of New York in 1965. They made
overtures to a young, charismatic bank executive, but when he turned them down, they offered the nomination to 23rd Ward Republican committeeman John Waner. Waner, a wealthy heating and air-conditioning contractor, did not have much in common with New York’s WASP prince. The son of Polish immigrants, Waner — who was born Jan Ludwig Wojanarski — did not learn English until the age of nine. But Waner was a fresh face, he could make an ethnic appeal to the city’s large Polish population, and he had the resources to finance his own campaign. 1
The same day Daley announced that he was seeking reelection, Alderman James Murray announced he was not. Murray, who had served in the City Council since 1954, was convinced he could not win again. Murray’s 18th Ward on the Southwest Side had become a hotbed of white-backlash sentiment. His constituents had never forgiven him for sponsoring Daley’s 1963 open-housing ordinance. The law was political window dressing, Daley’s effort to convince black voters that he was on their side when he was not. But even that toothless law was too much fair housing for 18th Ward whites. And this year, passions on the issue of race were running higher than ever: one Bungalow Belt alderman was campaigning as Casimir “I voted against the fair-housing ordinance” Laskowski. Murray says he knew he was in trouble when he went to a civic association meeting in the ward to discuss mundane neighborhood improvements. “A guy got up and said, ‘This guy would be a great alderman if he wasn’t such a nigger lover,’” Murray recalls. 2
