American Pharaoh

...He would go on to get a law degree at night school and work his way up the machine hierarchy (state representative, state senator, failed candidate for sheriff of Cook County...

...Mayor Daley--Richard J. Daley, who had dominated Chicago's all-powerful Democratic machine for over twentyone years--had died in office...

...Once he arrived in the fifth floor mayor's Office at City Hall, in 1955, he was in a position to administer the raging flood of funds that the federal government was throwing at public housing, and he did so in such a way as to concentrate blacks in the ghetto in an effort to stem the white flight out of Chicago...

...Daley was born in 19oz to a working- ! class family in Bridgeport, a South Side "Bungalow Belt" neighborhood formerly, and aptly, known as Hardserabble...

...Machines run on patronage (in Chicago's case, some Young Dick Daley first found his talent for leadership at the Hamburg Athletic Club...

...He reigned during an era in which suburbanization, crime, and white flight were wreaking havoc on other midwestern cities...

...The more immediately engaging events that power the narrat i v e - the national political conventions, the 196o presidential election, the co-opting of Martin Luther King's northern campaign, the scandals, the riots--really do seem to have held only a secondary importance for Daley...

...Grover and Frances bought a house in Princeton, where the ex-president spent the remaining 12 years of his life serving as a university trustee, writing articles for magazines, and compiling a volume of sketches on hunting and fishing...

...N The American Spectator _9 September 2000 69...

...N The Chairman With the Bridgeport Sensibility American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor Little, Browr...

...As Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor make clear in their masterly biography, the original Daley was very much the real thing--the classic American bigcity machine mayor...

...But in a city where "who sent you" meant almost everything, it may also be true that at the time, a machine like Daley's was the easiest way to move the disparate elements that composed the electorate toward something like a consensus...

...He had risen through the ranks as a party hack, and he understood intimately the possibilities and pitfalls of ward politics...

...After listening to the facts of Daley's demise (the collapse at his doctor's office, the heart failure) and a brief obituary, you would have heard the anchorman close with "an old Irish saying...

...If Daley didn't necessarily order the vote stealing directly, the pressure he placed on his ward bosses--and which they in turn applied at the precinct level-- was enough to get the machine rolling...

...The Princeton years were more notable in another way: Frances had two more babies, bofli boys, the last born when Big Steve was 66...

...Apart ~ 68 S ep t e m b e r 2 o o o - The American Spectator from brief stints in the state capital of Springfield, he would live there for the rest of his life...

...Between baseball and football games, the members of these clubs undertook "the work of patrolling the South Side's racial borders"-that is, of threatening or beating any black people who wandered into their neighborhood...

...Part social circle, part political organization, and part street gang," as Cohen and Taylor put it, the Hamburg Athletic Club was one of a number of such organizations in Chicago--and, indeed, in many other large cities at the time...

...and, when all else failed, just walking into a voting booth and pulling the Democratic straight-ticket lever over and over...

...Among other things, his policy resulted in the State Street Corridor on the South Side, which "remains today the densest concentration of public housing in the nation" and a social sink of poverty, crime, single motherhood, and all the rest...

...Seemingly middle-aged from birth (in American Pharaoh there is a picture of him as a prematurely jowly altar boy) and a stolid, ploddingly inarticulate overachiever, young Dick Daley first found his talent for leadership at the Hamburg Athletic Club...

...He has lost his sense of proportion...

...Perhaps it was just force of habit after generations of practice in the black art of election theft: accompanying voters into the booth to "assist" them in their decision...

...Certainly one expected that the machine would make a stab at continuity, and it did, but Michael Bilandic was no Chairman Daley...

...The concerns of other people and even his own affairs seem too small to be ~orth bothering about...

...Whatever the reason, and whatever the methodology, the 1971 election saw one precinct cast 27z votes, despite the fact that its voters had requested only z59 ballots...

...then) when Chair~ f you were dumbly glued to the reruns on Channel 2, Chicago, the afternoon of December 2o, 1976, you would have seen news anchor Walter Jacobson (if memory serves) break in with a piece of truly mind-boggling news...

...Although changes in the rules and composition of the Democratic Party (as well as a series of devastating court rulings) had already begun to dismantle the machine in the early 197o's, perhaps the voters of Chicago will never see another one like Daley again for a very good reason: They've decided they don't need to...

...Indeed, the patronage and favoritism afforded by big-spending government at all levels (and the waste and corruption it entails) drive the rhythm of this book: an insistent ostinato of greed and power...

...Daley was a coalition-builder- indeed, had to be one given the demographic shifts in the ever-blacker City of Chicago during his time in office--and certainly blacks formed a substantial part of his coalition...

...well, you're pret b, much going to get your way, no matter what...

...40,000 jobs by the time the courts started gutting the system in the early 197o's), and although blacks received fewer and lower-paying jobs for their votes, there is no question that Daley held their votes "through patronage and the work of the black ward organizations...

...In fairness to the author, it could hardly be otherwise...

...voting for non-citizens, non-residents, non-people (the dead forming, as they will, a particularly quiescent constituency...

...man Mao died...

...Certainly the taxpayers got a raw deal under the system (and occasionally came close to rebelling over rate increases...

...but Daley kept his small house in Bridgeport and kept his Bridgeport sensibility throughout...

...Perhaps another mayor would have done a better-and certainly a fairer--job of managing the situation...

...A lthough they take Daley to task for his housing policies and for his attitudes on race generally, Cohen and Taylor seem to recognize that his was not the overt racism of, for example, George Wallace...

...Though not placid in the sluggish sense, he had a rare gift of contentment...

...It deserted him only when he had to cope, not once but twice, with the unique probIem of being an ex-president: After the long exercise of power [he wrote], the ordinary affairs of life seem petty and commonplace...

...Even Richard Daley fils--Richard M. Daley, the current mayor--has turned out to be no substitute for the real thing...

...6~4 !~ages / $~6.95 REVIEWED BY John Lilly returned to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress...

...And Daley was Chairman Dale}': That was the whole point...

...Then you would have been JOHN LILLY is a writer living in New York...

...This was a man who could whip his precinct captains into such a frenzy of cajoling and strong-arming that they returned his nominating petition for the 1971 mayoral race with 975,000 signatures, representing two-thirds of the registered voters in the City of Chicago...

...threatening violence...

...He had one foot in heaven before the Devil knew he was dead...

...Psychohistory requires a certain degree of torment, but Cleveland was as simple and hearty, as the big German meals he enjoyed in Buffalo's restaurants...

...It was like being in Peking (as we still called it...

...It is one of Cohen and Taylor's central contentions that Daley essentially stayed in that line of work for the rest of his life...

...An ex-Presiden{ practicing law or going into business is like a locomotive hauling a delivery wagon...

...He concentrated at least as much on the amassing of power and the patronage that maintained that power, sallying forth flora party headquarters at the Morrison (and later, the LaSalle) Hotel to conquer the precincts with a wellorganized army, rather than through direct campaigning on the issues...

...And after Bilandic, all bets were off: a woman (Jane Byme), followed by the mediocre Harold Washington...

...arresting poll-watchers...

...Without his own constant tax increases, and without the gargantuan social programs funded by the federal government (but administered by Daley's underlings, in a novel scheme he called the "Chicago Concept"), there would have been less patronage on offer, and fewer votes for the machine...

...This is as honest a statement as we are likely to find of what lies uneasily in the minds of those who know Bill Clinton...

...And when election day rolled around that year, the same precinct captains still had the energy (and--remarkably, given the roaring landslide--the inclination) to engage in a characteristically massive and bald-faced orgy of voting fraud...

...But even if you were eleven years old at the time, you would have realized in that moment that Chicago politics would never be the same again...

...An Honest President provides a thorough overview of Grover Cleveland's public life, but readers who enjoy "psychohistory" may find it disappointing...

...but it does seem true, as Cohen and Taylor assert in their introduction, that "Daley may well have saved Chicago...

...Detroit, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Saint Louis were all prosperous, middle-class cities when Daley took office, and all declined precipitously after World War II7 In contrast, Chicago's skyline exploded during the same years...

...and despite the riots of the late 196o's and a persistent movement of whites to the suburbs, the city never became a bombed-out hull of urban despair...

...When you're Mayor of Chicago and Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party...