Local Boy Makes Good
SHAPIRO, HARVEY D.
Local Boy Makes Good Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago By Mike Royko Dutton. 215 pp. $5.95. Daley of Chicago By Bill Gleason Simon and Schuster. 384 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Harvey D....
...Social forces he doesn't really comprehend have ruffled the mayor's vision of metropolis in recent years, and he has reacted fiercely...
...Race...
...In 1950 when the Cook County clerk died, Daley took over that patronage-rich job and used it as a base to win the chairmanship of the county Democratic organization in 1953...
...Thus black anger rose, and began to be directed at Daley...
...In fact, new schools and public housing projects were constructed where they would reinforce existing racial patterns, and an expressway was moved a few blocks, apparently to bolster the border between white and black neighborhoods...
...With this kind of opposition, the Republican nomination frequently has been bestowed like the ambassadorship to Luxembourg, an honorific post for those with enough cash to accept it...
...True, the machine's victory margins have been growing smaller, and the safe areas are becoming less numerous...
...Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Free-lance writer based in Chicago When Richard J. Daley Jr...
...A black student moved in, leading to an embarrassing disturbance a few blocks from the mayor's home...
...Mike Royko writes a column for the Chicago Daily News, combining the investigative reporting of the late Drew Pearson with the style of Art Buch-wald...
...made his maiden speech as a delegate to Illinois' Constitutional Convention last year, photographers snapped pictures of his father smiling from jowl to jowl, paternal pride bursting from beneath his blue serge suit...
...Carl Stokes probably has big plans...
...The poor, uprooted by the highways without a chance to voice their grievances, and the blacks, shackled by Chicago's rigid de facto segregation, were not as impressed...
...Royko says the mayor spent the summer showing up at even the most minor events in the black community...
...As Chicago alderman Paddy Bawler used to say, "Chicago ain't ready for reform yet...
...He had worked hard, and it was his turn to move up...
...Then, as now, many Illinois legislators acted like Shriners at a convention without their wives...
...Four years later Daley lost the election for county sheriff, yet went on to gain control of Bridgeport's Democratic organization...
...He installed new street lights, built new expressways, opened O'Hare Field, and spurred a vast building boom in the Loop...
...The practices of Chicago's notoriously corrupt police department went unchallenged until 1960, when the city was shaken by the revelation that several policemen were moonlighting as burglars, going so far as to cart away their loot in squad cars while on duty...
...It now controls some 25,000 city and county patronage jobs, and will have more to dispense if the party takes the governorship in 1972...
...His successes are unparalleled...
...landlords are threatened with harassment by building inspectors...
...The poor find they may be moved out of public housing or cut off from welfare if they are not cooperative...
...Royko describes another man, one who by luck, pluck and devotion achieves the political-machine version of the American dream...
...Despite his bad press nationally, Daley remained popular and powerful at home...
...Now two Chicago newspapermen attempt to tell us more about the mayor and the city he controls...
...He is good on buildings, but he is poor with people, and deplorably poor with people who are black...
...Daley was put on the public payroll as a clerk in the city council, and when the ward leader was elected county treasurer, he moved on to a patronage job in that office...
...Daley could end up "the greatest mayor Chicago ever had," Gleason writes...
...He believes loyalty--to family, friends, party--is the paramount principle...
...Besides jobs for the faithful, the organization cultivates loyalty and support among a variety of firms which sell insurance, real estate, and whatever else brings a company into contact with city agencies...
...But Richard J. Daley can see no greater honor than being mayor of his city...
...In sociologist Robert K. Merton's terms, Daley is a "local" rather than a "cosmopolitan...
...He is not merely unwilling but perhaps unable to look beyond Bridgeport to see what is happening in Chicago and the nation...
...Ostensible civil service slots are filled with "temporary" employes for years at a stretch...
...Although to understand Daley is to understand a great deal about Chicago, little has been written about either that probes beneath the "last big-city boss" and "hog butcher to the world" cliches...
...It was a happy, homey picture, the sort of thing Norman Rockwell used to paint for the Saturday Evening Post...
...For the machine uses coercion where bribes are not practicable...
...He has always gone to mass daily, come home to dinner, and eaten his wife's homemade bread...
...Some "payrollers" collect their wages without even showing up for work...
...Richard J. Daley Sr...
...He likes ice cream and baseball...
...Considered a tough-minded liberal when he was backing Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas, these days Daley is more often bunched with George Wallace and Spiro Agnew...
...Richard J. Daley was born on May 15, 1902, in an enclave of working-class Irish and Eastern European immigrants...
...To relieve some of the pressure...
...Backing Adlai Stevenson for governor and Paul Douglas for senator in 1948, he brought in his ward so big that he was named to Stevenson's cabinet as state director of revenue...
...independent politics is increasingly attractive to young whites and middle-class blacks, while poor blacks are simply refusing to vote...
...Downtown merchants, the construction industry and the building-trades unions were ecstatic, and the people in the ethnic neighborhoods who ventured out thought they saw progress...
...But it isn't all one big happy family of grafters...
...In the light of this and the rioting in subsequent years, Daley's greatest fear in 1968 was of black demonstrations during the Democratic convention...
...The machine controls thousands of positions in public facilities and the transit authority, too, and can arrange union cards and jobs in private industry...
...He appoints his neighbors to high office and socially is most comfortable with them...
...has lived in the same Chicago community, Bridgeport, all his life, and calls it "the best neighborhood in the world...
...Royko's Boss is a savage, though understated attack on the Daley machine, while Gleason's Daley of Chicago is an overwritten, somewhat simplistic apologia for the mayor...
...Bill Gleason is a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a good color man, the sort whose descriptions of the agonies of defeat can bring a tear to the eye...
...Republican business leaders list themselves as chairmen of Daley's fund-raising committees...
...In 1964, for example, civil rights activists bought an apartment building in Bridgeport...
...At 21 he was a precinct captain, soon thereafter becoming secretary to the Democratic ward leader...
...Joseph Alioto wanted to be Vice President...
...Daley fired his police commissioner and hired Orlando Wilson, a prestigious professor...
...All four Chicago papers, including the arch-Republican Tribune, regularly endorse Daley...
...The press marked him as one of the "new breed" Democrats and he instituted several administrative reforms...
...His failure is singular...
...The mayors of New York and Los Angeles must sit in wonderment at the array of forces Chicago's machine is able to orchestrate...
...But the Daley dinosaur is far from extinct...
...On April 6 he won reelection easily, gathering nearly 70 per cent of the vote...
...Generally, urban political machines begin to crumble as material inducements lose their appeal to an increasingly middle-class, issue-oriented electorate...
...Throughout his 16 years in office, Daley has used his awesome administrative and political powers to push highly visible construction projects, shunting aside pressing social problems...
...By 1942, Daley was the legislative spokesman for Chicago's mayor, and was put on the payroll of the Cook County comptroller as a reward...
...Sam Yorty would like to be senator...
...In 1936, Bridgeport's state legislator died 15 days prior to the election, prompting the Democratic organization to run a write-in campaign for Daley...
...When the convention came, of course, blacks were calm, even uninterested, while white kids battled the police in a spectacle that helped defeat Daley's candidates for President and governor...
...Royko employs parts of William Kunstler's interrogation of Daley at last year's "Chicago Seven" conspiracy trial as epigraphs for narratives covering much the same ground...
...The organization rewards its friends throughout the year, and collects on its ious in election campaigns...
...In an adroit finesse, it became Wilson and Daley, dedicated partners for reform...
...Here the similarity ends...
...John Lindsay may soon be a candidate for higher office...
...Daley had nothing to do with the wine, women or graft, Royko writes, for he was busy developing his individual moral code: "Thou shalt not steal, but thou shalt not blow the whistle on anybody who does...
...The mayor's puritanical streak has led him to put a damper on vice in Chicago, but otherwise not much has been done to disturb the Democratic organization's smoothly functioning mutual-benefit society...
...Meanwhile he went to law school at night...
...In the 1970 elections, with Adlai Stevenson III heading the state ticket, the organization did well, and last February Daley reaffirmed his hold on the city council, retaining control of 37 out of 50 seats...
...Their books have an odd structural similarity: Gleason sends the mayor on an imaginary walk across Chicago's south side, using certain landmarks to introduce stages of Daley's career...
...A staunch defender of the little man, he won the Heywood Broun journalism award for his work in 1970...
...Chicago has been called the most segregated city in America, and city hall seemed unwilling to improve the situation...
...Through a technicality he was elected to his first public office as a Republican, though he left the gop on his very first day in Springfield...
...He attended parochial schools and commercial high school before getting a job as a clerk at the nearby stockyards...
...Two years later he ousted the incumbent mayor in the primary and was elected mayor, easily winning reelection every four years since...
...His failure is the failure of all of us, of the nation...
...Much of the middle class has fled the city, but in the '60s the organization began having problems with its once most docile component, the blacks...
...Reforms have been initiated only in times of crisis...
...The state had, Royko says, women employes called "monkey girls because they hang onto their jobs with their tails...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 9
