American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley unveiled a new master plan for the city to coincide with his reelection campaign. The $6 billion plan, which had been in development for five years, was the first comprehensive plan for Chicago since Burnham’s in 1909. It called for clearing 1,850 acres of slums, building 35,000 new units of public housing, adding 50 more acres to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, and building a controversial Crosstown Expressway. Unlike Daley’s 1958 plan, this one contemplated development outside the Loop. It called for the city to draw up sixteen distinct development plans for neighborhoods across the city. At the time of the announcement, though, only two of those plans had yet been drafted, for the University of Illinois area and the Near West Side — both, as it happened, neighborhoods on the fringes of the Loop. Daley’s 1967 plan demonstrated how much the racial climate in Chicago had changed since 1958. In the four years since his near-defeat by Adamowski, Daley had been sending clear messages to white voters that he would protect them from black encroachment. That sensibility was reflected throughout the 1967 plan. Where the 1958 plan had spoken in code language about removing “blight” from the central area and moving in more affluent families, the 1967 plan boldly stated its racial intentions on its first page. The city wanted to have a “diverse, harmonious population,” the drafters wrote. But it was also seeking to make the changes necessary to “reduce future losses of white families.” 3

  Daley kicked off his campaign with a flourish. On January 4, he appeared in person at the city clerk’s office wheeling a handcart with nominating petitions stacked ten feet high. According to his aides, the pile contained the signatures of 500,000 Chicagoans. Waner, who was at the clerk’s office at the same time, had only 11,000 signatures. It was more than enough to qualify, but the discrepancy was daunting. Waner said Daley had benefited from the tens of thousands of patronage workers and their families who were pressured to sign and carry the machine’s petitions. In the privacy of the voting booth, he insisted, they would vote Republican. In the end, Dick Gregory did not even try to get his name placed on the ballot. The word in political circles was that this was just as well — that no matter how many signatures he had submitted, Daley would have made sure that the machine-dominated board did not certify him to run for mayor. 4

  Once again, Daley had to engage in a difficult racial balancing act. In his public comments on civil rights, he tried to appeal to white and black voters at the same time, which often left him speaking in meaningless platitudes. “There are some who say that we have gone too far with our community improvement programs, while there are others who say we have gone too slow,” Daley said in a speech kicking off his campaign. “There are some who say that we have done too much for minority groups, while there are those who say we have not done enough. It is important that we keep pace with the times.” In fact, Daley had good reason to worry about his standing with both groups. For all of his success in defeating King and the civil rights movement, it was not clear how white ethnic voters were feeling about him or the machine. If James Murray was now widely hated in the 18th Ward, Daley himself might not be much more popular. At the same time, Daley had to worry about defections in the black wards. The most recent sign of trouble was that King had returned to Chicago on December 2 to announce that he would be sending sixteen civil rights activists to town to staff a “massive” new drive to register black voters. King insisted that the drive was non-partisan. “We do not endorse candidates,” he said. “We feel the people will be intelligent enough to vote for the right candidates when they know the issues.” Still, the machine, which once had a lock on black voters, was nervous enough that Daley refused to help with the drive. When civil rights activist Hosea Williams asked city officials to set up neighborhood registration centers, he was turned down. “They said it would be too expensive,” said Williams. “They wouldn’t even give us what we got in Birmingham!” 5

  Daley was counting on the black machine to keep its voters in line, and most of Daley’s black supporters seemed eager to do their part. On January 7, twenty-two black clergymen wearing Daley campaign buttons stopped by City Hall to endorse Daley. The Reverend Clarence Cob, pastor of the First Church of Deliverance, said many blacks were confused about Daley’s record, and that he and his colleagues would educate them. The truth was, despite the civil rights insurgency of the past year, there was still a lot of life left in the old black submachine. A key factor in its staying power was its knack for co-opting anti-machine candidates. In the 29th Ward, an undertaker named Robert Biggs had almost defeated the machine candidate in 1963. Ward committeeman Bernard Neistein made Biggs the machine candidate in 1967, and Biggs was elected as a pro-machine alderman. Charles Chew, who had been elected 17th Ward alderman in 1963 and then state senator on an anti-machine platform, had come around to the view that his future would be brighter if he made peace with the machine. Chew was now a supporter of Daley and a critic of the Freedom Movement — and he drove around the ghetto in a white Rolls-Royce. 6

  On January 16, McCormick Place was destroyed by fire in the middle of a National Housewares Manufacturers Association exhibition. The roof of the main exhibition center, which was as large as six football fields, collapsed. It was unclear how such a new building could have burned so easily, and why it was built with no sprinkler system or fire walls. Daley said that the most important thing was to ensure that the facility, which he credited with making Chicago “the convention capital of the United States,” was rebuilt as quickly as possible. Within a day, he gathered the chairman, the general manager, and virtually the entire board of the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority, at City Hall to announce plans to build a new McCormick Place twice as large as the old one. Daley kept up his flurry of pre-election development work, personally presenting the city’s proposal for fifteen miles of transit lines along the Kennedy and Ryan expressways to the Chicago Plan Commission, which immediately approved them. Daley also announced some well-timed federal grants. Almost $1.3 million in federal funds had come through for the social services center that the city and the University of Chicago had been planning for Woodlawn. And HUD approved $15.5 million for five urban renewal projects, including the one Daley had been planning near the University of Illinois campus. 7

  As they did every four years, downtown business leaders came together to form a Non-Partisan Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Daley. The business leaders had the usual reasons for supporting him. Some wanted him to keep up his urban renewal efforts in the Loop, and others wanted help with development projects of their own. Committee cochairman C. Virgil Martin was president of the company that held the lucrative restaurant concession at O’Hare. The city’s business titans made large contributions to Daley’s campaign, but the machine was also skilled at extracting money from small contributors who wanted specific favors, ranging from lowered tax assessments to the kind of minor perks the machine specialized in. “There are lots of goofs out there,” Waner said later. “Here’s a guy that is maybe cum laude from some college and has a very successful business, but he is obsessed with the idea that he has got to have a three-letter license number, which is a very simple thing for a politician to do. He sends him a three-letter license number, then someone will come around and say, ‘So and so is running for office. Would you care to make a little contribution?’ He takes out a checkbook and sends a few thousand dollars.” 8

  The machine’s dominance left Waner with few places to raise money for his own campaign. When he tried to put together his own committee of businessmen, he found that even die-hard Republicans had already committed themselves to Daley. He held a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner, the kind of event Republican candidates were usually able to pack with wealthy contributors, and it lost money. Waner did manage to convince one prominent Republican, John T. Pirie Jr., chairman of a downtown department store, to raise funds for him. But shortly after Pirie signed on he backed out, hailing Daley for his “truly remarkable achievements.” Waner commented bitterly that Daley’s camp “probably told h
im they’d tear up the sidewalk in front of his store.” In the end, Waner’s total campaign budget was about $175,000, much of it his own money. John Lindsay, the man whose candidacy the Republicans were using as a model, had spent $3 million to be elected in New York two years earlier. 9

  Some of Waner’s supporters were urging him to make a bid for white-backlash voters, but he ran a campaign that was more pro– civil rights than Daley’s. Waner hammered away at Daley for being “more interested in maintaining plantation politics in public housing” than in solving the problems of those who lived there. At the same time, he was not prepared to write off his Republican base by backing open housing. Waner argued that other issues, such as jobs and urban renewal policies, were ultimately of greater importance to the black community. “Since 1960, the city has displaced over 50,000 people, and after the new buildings went up, no one could afford to move back into the new neighborhood,” he said. “There was no attempt made to provide decent low-cost homes for rent or for purchase.” Democrats preferred to have blacks trapped in public housing, Waner charged, “because it enables the Democratic precinct captain to corral votes for the machine.” 10

  As he always did, Daley got to work energizing the machine to turn out a large vote. The second important stage in the campaign, after the filing of petitions, was the February 28 primary. Daley called a secret meeting of the machine inner circle — including county assessor Parky Cullerton, city clerk John Marcin, 5th Ward committeeman and city treasurer candidate Marshall Korshak, 29th Ward state senator Bernard Neistein, and Democratic state chairman James Ronan — and told them he wanted to win with 400,000 votes, up from the 396,473 he received four years earlier. When the votes were counted, the machine more than met this benchmark, pulling out 420,000 votes for him, far ahead of the 72,000 Waner attracted in the Republican primary. Daley could also take comfort in the fact that he outpolled Marcin and Marshall Korshak. Waner tried to put a positive spin on the results. “With 50,000 employees and their families, Mayor Daley can produce 400,000 votes at will in a primary,” he said. “But when the voters turn out and don’t have to reveal their party, they will defeat the last big city machine in the country, April 4.” 11

  After the primary, Daley gathered his ward committeemen for a meeting at party headquarters at the Sherman House Hotel. He informed the ward committeemen who had not produced 8,000 votes — their one-fiftieth share of his 400,000-vote goal — that they had to do better in the general election. On March 14, Daley announced that the federal government had approved almost $46 million in federal grants for his planned transit lines along the Dan Ryan and Kennedy expressways. The timing was obviously political — yet another favor Daley managed to extract from the Johnson administration — but Daley denied it. “It is a customary program for a dynamic city,” he said. “It had nothing to do with the election.” Daley also had city employees working overtime to clean up the city before the election. Sanitation workers were putting in six-day weeks filling potholes, and Bureau of Electricity employees were working nine-hour days, six days a week rushing to finish installation of lighting in all 2,300 alleys in Chicago. 12

  Martin Luther King ended up helping Daley’s reelection campaign in a backhanded way. King was in Chicago March 24 to speak to an anti–Vietnam War rally at Liberty Baptist Church. Asked about housing, he lamented the city’s “failure to live up to last summer’s open-housing agreement.” After reviewing a report prepared by the Chicago Freedom Movement’s evaluation committee, King said it might be necessary to hold even bigger open-housing marches over the upcoming summer. Daley immediately struck back, charging King with making “political” statements designed to hurt him in the election. No matter what King said, Daley promised, he would not permit civil rights marchers to disrupt the city. It was the second year in a row Daley attacked King on the eve of an election, and Republicans were convinced it was a bald attempt to win the white backlash vote. In fact, Daley had spent the last four years using the race issue to appeal to white voters. In 1963, he was a politician with a strong black base, whose urban-renewal programs appeared to be destabilizing the city’s black community — and, the fear was, driving them into white neighborhoods. By 1967, he had a strong record of racial resistance: standing up for Willis; forcing the federal government to release the school funding Francis Keppel had withheld; going to court to enjoin civil rights marches in white neighborhoods; moving blacks into housing projects in the ghetto and keeping them out of white projects; and presiding over the housing summit that ended the Chicago Freedom Movement and sent King home to Atlanta. Daley’s political realignment seemed to be working. Polls showed him running far more strongly in the Bungalow Belt than he had against Adamowski four years earlier. The Chicago Tribune reported that its interviews with voters showed that those who had been “grumbling about Daley’s concessions to Negroes” were now backing him because “they decided Daley was a seasoned veteran of such problems.” 13

  Daley won in a landslide, taking 73 percent of the vote and winning all fifty wards. His 792,238 votes surpassed his previous record of 778,612 votes in 1959. Dick Gregory, who in the end ran as a write-in candidate, took less than 1 percent of the vote. The polls that detected the white ethnic neighborhoods shifting back toward Daley turned out to be correct. In 1963, his support in nonreform white wards had fallen to 44 percent; this time, he took 69 percent of the vote in these same wards. In the race against Adamowski, Daley had won 66 percent of the vote in Tom Keane’s 31st Ward, a weak performance in one of the machine’s strongest wards; this time he took almost 84 percent. It was a testament to Daley’s skill in handling the race issue — and to the hold the machine still had on black voters — that his support in the black wards had eroded only slightly in four years, from 84.1 percent to 83.8 percent. Daley defeated Waner in the heavily black West Side 24th Ward 15,336 to 918, with 351 write-in votes cast for Dick Gregory, compared to 17,429 to 968 against Adamowski in 1963. There is no single answer to the intriguing question of why Daley, who had spent the last year at logger-heads with Martin Luther King Jr., fared so well among black voters. In part, it was due to his careful expressions of support for equal opportunity and improving conditions in the slums, even while he co-opted the Freedom Movement’s attempts to take on those issues. It helped, certainly, that the Republican Waner was not a particularly appealing candidate for black voters, and that Gregory was not officially listed on the ballot. But Daley’s success in the black wards was at least in part a quiet rebuke to the Chicago Freedom Movement, and a reminder of the power of a political spoils system to deliver the votes of the poor. The goals of the Freedom Movement did not always speak to the immediate needs of poor blacks. Many did not aspire to move into hostile all-white neighborhoods, or to put their children onto buses to attend schools in white neighborhoods. Daley’s precinct captains, in contrast, offered things that did make a difference in their daily lives: help in getting welfare and public housing; assistance in navigating a confusing government bureaucracy; and, most of all, patronage jobs. Daley had relied on machine politics to overcome idealism among black voters, and the election returns showed that, at least this time, his strategy had worked. 14

  On election night, Daley promised that he would continue his hard line on disruptions of the peace. “No one is going to take the law into his own hands,” he said in his victory statement at Democratic headquarters in the Sherman House. “There will be law and order in this city as long as I am mayor.” The following day, he expanded on his pledge. “There will be no demonstrations that close off traffic or interfere with people’s rights,” he said. “We won’t prohibit demonstrations and marches, but we say they cannot conflict with your rights as a private citizen. If you are driving home or on a bus, no one has the right to hold you up.” Daley also promised that there would be more development in the next four years than in the previous four. Among his plans were replacing the elevated tracks that circle the Loop with a subway, and building a third Chicago airp
ort on a man-made island in the middle of Lake Michigan. On May 9, President Johnson and the Democratic leadership in Congress honored Daley as Democrat of the Year for 1967. The award gave Daley a national platform to speak out about his encounters with political demonstrators, and the importance of standing up to them firmly. “I believe in civil rights, but with law and order in our streets, and not with disorder,” Daley said. “Today we have many faint hearts in our party.” 15

  The War on Poverty — and particularly Chicago’s self-styled version of it — remained as controversial as ever. On May 18, a Senate subcommittee came to town to investigate the Chicago program once again. New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits repeated the standard line about machine domination of the Chicago program. When his questioning of Daley failed to produce any damaging admissions, Javits moved on to Deton Brooks, challenging him about his work in the reelection campaign of Roman Pucinski while he was director of the Chicago anti-poverty program. Javits had brought along a memorandum that quoted Brooks as saying, when asked about his political work for the machine, “I’ll do what I darn please.” When the hearing ended, Javits expressed his suspicions that Daley had hijacked the program. “It is not easy to find proof, but there is a heavy overtone that it is being politically run,” he said. “I’m not persuaded that the Chicago system gives the poor representation on community boards.” But the Democratic senators on the committee — including New York’s Robert Kennedy and chairman Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania — came to Daley’s defense. Chicago’s program was no worse, they said, than programs in many other cities. 16 Civil rights activists also continued to speak out against the way the War on Poverty was being run both in Chicago and nationally. Chester Robinson, director of the West Side Organization, charged that War on Poverty programs were still failing to address the greatest forms of deprivation in poor people’s lives. “What good does it do a poor person if the Great Society takes his child for a tour of the art museum?” Robinson asked. “The child still has to come back to the same rat-infested, overcrowded, underheated slum tenement, go back down to the same overcrowded, understaffed slum school and bear the same burden of his father’s inability to get a good-paying job.” 17