After Daley, What?
Whitehead, Ralph Jr.
AFTER DALEY, WHAT? RALPH WHITEHEAD, JR. Needed, someone to run the business For the first time in 24 years, the Democratic Organization of Cook County is looking for a new boss, someone to...
...It was an on-going contract...
...In the annals of the machine, they are acknowledged as its strongest bosses...
...To me, the essential thing about him was that he took care of his own...
...Through its patronage, on public and private payrolls alike, it keeps a large work force...
...Sometimes I was suffered for five, ten, fifteen minutes, actually conversed with about school, baseball, family news...
...No literary luminary, from Upton Sinclair to James T. Farrell to Saul Bellow, has ever succeeded in recapturing or even evoking the recollection of the stench that pervaded our little world from the blood, entrails and hides of the slaughtered animals on a hot summer's day...
...They held the party chairmanship and did much of their work offstage...
...Of course, influence was actually shifting at this time, the Mayor was pulling more decisions into his own hands...
...My father was a city employee...
...Blacks and Jews there weren't...
...But, in the end I always got my tribute and they got their privacy...
...The young pol never failed to lay a nickel, dime and, as the romance waxed, sometimes a quarter on me together with a suggestion about where one might get the best ice cream cones in the neighborhood--not the closest place, mind you, but the farthest store where they had the best...
...Since one of the major industries in Chicago is bifilding Chicago, The Organization uses its clout in real estate and construction...
...I lived in this world and also in a ten-yearold's world of needs--for ice-cream cones, candy bars, caps for my toy pistol, with the ultimate a bleacher seat at Comiskey Park, home of the last-place White Sox...
...Every time he put his finger into presidential politics, for instance, Dick Daley did it solo, and it will be a long time, if ever, before the next boss is courted by national politicians as warmly as he was...
...Through its control of public agencies--the City of Chicago, the Chicago Board of Education, the Chicago Park District, the Metropolitan Sanitary District, the Cook County Board, and others--it can influence the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars...
...Consequently, it also needs someone to guide and oversee all these campaigns...
...Richard J. Daley laid several bribes on me about forty-five or forty-six years ago...
...Its candidacies have become steadily more vulnerable to sophisticated campaigns like those run by Charles Percy and the new governor of Illinois, James Thompson...
...Anyhow, it's likely the late Mayor didn't take all of The Organization's power with him into the ground at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, but his heirs in the machine will have to prove it, and do it dramatically...
...I 4 February 1977:80...
...During the depression they paid in scrip and the boys downtown were cashing it for the boobs at a nice, 15 to 20 percent discount because the city stood behind it...
...Some of the Daley mystique was overdone, though, partly because his own press agents puffed it up and partly because the press does find it easier to focus on a person than to try to comprehend an organization, especially if it's large and complex and secretive...
...Some of the dimensions of Chicago's political machine are those of a major corporation...
...manship and the office of Mayor at the same time: Anton Cermak, Edward Kelly and Richard Daley...
...mailing lists, run the door-to-door canvasses--in short, it must walk through a hundred petty details, all of them crucial to sound political work...
...More and more, its power came to be seen as his power...
...The campaign will be a Chicago campaign, of course, but it must play to other audiences as well: the electorates of Cook County and of Illinois, for example, and national leaders of the Democratic Party, particularly President Jimmy Carter...
...The other three held the chairRICHARD 3...
...It regularly puts up slates for hundreds of positions---for every city office, every countywide office, every statewide office, and for a dozen seats in the United States House, as many as 80 seats in the legislature, and scores of judgeships...
...Aunt Nora's daughter, Sis, was being courted by a short, heavy-set guy already in polities...
...Commonweal...
...We were urban provincials-often crude, sometimes tough, rarely well-educated, probably scared, and we had needs---many of them...
...79 All told, eight men have run The Organization since 1900...
...Estimates run from 35,000 jobs up to 45,000 but, at either end of this range, the size of the payroll would be large enough tO place The Organization high on the Fortune 500...
...It is two and a half miles southwest of the Loop and its back door was the stockyards...
...Needed, someone to run the business For the first time in 24 years, the Democratic Organization of Cook County is looking for a new boss, someone to succeed the late Richard Daley, and it's learning the job can be a tough one to fill...
...Five of them--the best known is Jacob Arvey, the boss for the first years after World War II--were strictly inside men...
...They didn't hold a public office themselves...
...The special election to fill the last two years of Mayor Daley's term will be held in the next six months, the primary set for April 19, followed by the general election on June 7. The political lore of Chicago suggests that a strong leader of The Organization must hold two separate positions: the office of Mayor, and the chairmanship of the Democratic Central Committee for Cook County...
...This can be seen as a narrow, xenophobic, and far from purely philanthropic trait...
...I ! seemed to believe in cities . . . "urbi et orbi" as each new Pope says when he lays on the first barucha...
...Consequently, The Organization's ward bosses are looking for someone to run the business, someone to play it on the square inside the family by giving a fair handling to their requests for jobs and for political business, and someone who can also work well outside of The Organization to secure itself financial base., mainly by making sure the climate for land development remains friendly...
...Each group had its own church, usually Catholic...
...It used to enjoy a solid reputation, but, 15 years or so ago, a mystique began to gather in the person of its leader, Richard Daley...
...His and my code demand at least the effort...
...I needed one...
...From about '30 to '34 our dinner table kept expanding in direct proportion to the number of unemployed bricklayers, steamfitters, carpenters who were our cousins, brothers-in-law, uncles, aunts, nieces and old friends...
...One of the few ways up or out if you weren't brilliant was politics...
...It needs to field strong candidates for every spot, put together some money, find some issues, talk to the newspapers, build up the I RALPH WHITEHEAD, JR., a native Chicagoan, is on the faculty o] the University o] Massachusetts...
...I didn't say we were nice...
...Finally, The Organization needs to make a name for itself...
...Neither did anyone else with the possible exception of his wife...
...As the election seasons grow longer, The Organization comes closer and closer to running a campaign, somewhere, virtually every day of the year...
...PERSON I IEI IOIR MICHAEL McAULIFFE He never understood me and Christ knows I never understood him...
...Although I was an altar boy, I still spent a lot of time in the temporal world of those humble houses, that awful stench, the capacious emptiness of my schoolboy pockets...
...Most of us, including Dick Daley, were not brilliant...
...How many humans, told as the shadow approached that this was to be the inscription on their tombstone, would rail against it...
...In those days, people MICHAEL MCAULIFFE, /ormerly o/ the Chicago Sun-Times and Billboard magazine, is a communications consultant in New York...
...It wasn't a flood but one of the few working trickles in the block...
...So, I would saunter down to my aunt's living room and get very talkative with the young couple as my aunt hovered a discreet room or two away...
...But it is not necessarily a negative one...
...We were Polish, Irish, Czech, a few Germans...
...Of course, The Organization also runs people for public office...
...It was a ramshackle place, we were all poor...
...I may well be the only guy on earth who ever grafted Dick Daley for something approaching hard cash with anything resembling consistency...
...My father's sister, Nora Guilfoyle, a widow with ten children, lived down the road from us on Throop Street, in a neighborhood called Bridgeport, in Chicago, Illinois...
...Meanwhile, dozens of alleged pundits have had a go at him and several wrote the 'definitive words' many hours before they got him into his grave at Holy Sepulchre...
...Somehow, the powers of the chairman and the powers of the Mayor seem to blend magieally into the making of a strong leader...
...It can be regarded fairly as Chicago's largest plumbing contractor, largest masonry contractor, largest electrical contractor, and so forth...
...we had these needs for jobs, food, spending money, and to call each other names...
...I developed a racket...
...Please forgive me for the subjective, egotistical hunch that I knew Richard Daley longer, better, and in a more human context than most biographers, commentators, obituary writers, critics, and even lackeys...
...With the cashed-in scrip we managed a cash-flow...
...Once, this was a long suit for The Organization, but the technical side of campaign work has undergone important changes--and, for a variety of reasons, the intelligent use of polling and media has been lost on the regulars in Chicago...
...He was going to night school and was also secretary to "Pighead Joe" McDonough, our neighbor and County Treasurer, so named I guess because he was fat, bald, and had distended nostrils...
...I took them, and I never paid off, so this is a last attempt...
...Pretty soon I knew this young pors schedule better than his intended, my cousin, Sis...
...Consequently, the next boss must be capable of running for Mayor of Chicago and winning by a large margin...
...The skills of campaign management are a crucial piece of the boss's job description...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 3
