The Mayor of Half the People
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
The Mayor of Half the People American Pharaoh Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor Little Brown. 608 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Joseph...
...They saw their economic growth stunted as investors passed them by for more enlightened places like Atlanta, Georgia...
...He worked with all his might to protect theirneighborhoods from black encroachment...
...An Irish businessman who came to Chicago with an "Irish for McCarthy" group offered an eyewitness account: "I saw a policeman's club raised high in the air among the McCarthy workers still in the hall...
...After King was murdered on April 4, 1968, Chicago, like 168 other communities nationwide, was plunged into a nightmare of civil disorder...
...Yet for all the book's solid detail and determined explanation, it is oddly lacking in analysis...
...Modem mayors are harassed by a million competing interests—from downtown business bullies to welfare rights lobbyists to litigious not-in-my-backyard neighborhood coalitions—and they end up paralyzed...
...That's one reason why New York's creaky system of expressways, subways, bridges, and tunnels has barely changed at all in 35 years...
...Daley also dealt successfully with the humdrum details of municipal governance...
...If the housing projects along South State Street look suspiciously like an exercise in racial warehousing, that is exactly what they are...
...I think many big-city mayors would still like to know...
...Even modest improvements can take decades to complete...
...More than 30 years later, the police riots he defended continue to shock...
...Did any mayor get it right...
...Did the city pay for Daley's willingness to embrace violence...
...And while property taxes rose sharply on Daley's watch—an astonishing 86 per cent during his first seven years in office—he kept the city solvent in rigid fashion...
...Although the Mayor's disingenuousness was hardly admirable, it was better than what came later—when his diplomacy curdled and disappeared...
...The scene shook Daley to his core...
...When Martin Luther King Jr...
...American Pharaoh does not examine the question...
...Say what you will about him, he could get things done...
...Efficiency...
...It was followed by the distinctive squish of flesh and skin parting...
...I heard it hit a boy's head...
...Chicago repeatedly won national awards for its cleanliness...
...And when blacks moved in, whites would flee their neighborhoods for the suburbs, cutting into another important part of the machine base...
...But did he leave Chicagoans with a price to pay for his resistance to integration...
...The machine held on to black votes by giving the black community patronage jobs rather than civil rights, and it held onto the white vote by assuring the Bungalow Belt that it would not be integrated...
...For a long time it seemed to hang there...
...About halfway into it, a reader begins to wonder: Where is all this headed...
...While Daley toiled tirelessly to resuscitate the Loop, the authors point out, he "was not doing anything for Chicago's declining residential neighborhoods...
...In Chicago, King reasoned, he had only to persuade Daley to support open housing and—just like that—it would happen...
...The University of Illinois at Chicago was meant to serve as a neighborhood buffer...
...In his 21 years as Mayor, Daley built three brand-new expressways, brought a state university to the inner city, made O'Hare Airport the nation's busiest, drew countless new businesses into Chicago's Loop, and saved that area from encroaching blight...
...IN the end, Daley rebuffed King with the subtle deftness of a chess grand master...
...A few romantics like to argue that the big-city machines did a better j ob of meeting constituent needs than do modem political systems...
...In today's urban political environment, where timidity and compromise often trump leadership and vision, this is no small virtue...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" It is easy these days to wax nostalgic for Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago...
...Otherwise, you were on your own...
...Wrong...
...So they got passkeys and raided the entire floor, which was serving as Eugene McCarthy's headquarters...
...Beyond this, I would like to know if virtual dictatorship is the price every large city must pay if it wants to see crucial public works materialize...
...Whatever the Daley machine may have done for Chicago, and whatever influence it exercised nationally, its primary mission was to find jobs for a favored few—and to perpetuate itself...
...He also ordered them to "shoot to maim or cripple" looters...
...Sleeping staffers and volunteers were pulled from their beds and beaten...
...Many of them can't build anything...
...Though it has been 23 years since he died in office, Chicago still seems to bask in the glow of his reign...
...But what happened to Chicago after 1968...
...brought his Southern civil rights movement to the North in 1965, he chose Chicago for a reason: He thought the odds for success would be greater if he could bargain with only one man...
...It was sharper and louder than a door slamming, like the sound of the impact in an auto accident...
...Crime was bad...
...City workers today are better trained and there is more devotion tojobs...
...InNewYorkCity, public works stopped cold after Robert Moses—an autocrat who could make Daley look like a slacker—was forced into retirement in the late 1960s...
...Still, despite months of negotiations with the civil rights champions, and despite tense marches in the streets, King went home with nothing...
...They should read this book...
...Lights went off...
...The Cook County Democratic machine—with Mayor Richard Joseph Daley at the controls—could be appallingly stingy and grossly unfair to all except a very small clique of faithful insiders...
...He installed anew water filtration system, upgraded street lighting, and hired more police officers and firefighters...
...Expressways were designed with racial containment in mind...
...By the time the Democratic National Convention was set to open in the Chicago Amphitheater that August, Daley had turned his city into an armed camp...
...After two days of rioting, 11 Chicagoans were dead, countless businesses were looted and block after block of black neighborhoods were charred ruins...
...It is useful to remind us what a nasty and brutish outfit the Cook County Democratic machine was...
...Not even a mayor as fierce as Rudolph W. Giuliani has been able to make headway on capital projects such as a rail-freight tunnel under New York Harbor...
...The boy had done nothing to provoke this...
...Such calculations were vital to the machine, but not everyone grasped the point...
...As Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor remind us, there were many...
...But how could things have been better...
...Cohen and Taylor were correct to compare Daley unfavorably to New York City's Lindsay on race...
...Then it descended with a gleaming arc with rapid and enormous force...
...Was there a leader in America in the 1960s and '70s who successfully negotiated the problems of integration, met the trials of suburbanization, built an infrastructure that would sustain a modern in-town economy, and all the while kept tax rates low, services to the needy at humane levels and democracy in healthy repair...
...It is easy to say what Daley shouldn't have done...
...But Daley's triumphs must be measured against his worst abuses of power...
...A great deal of money was wasted," the authors say, "to pay city workers who were hired for political purposes and who often did no work...
...The problem, critics said, was that Daley answered only to power: The Central Area Committee had it—and the residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods did not...
...Daley's legacy of public works is wellknown...
...Daley could even sound like a committed civil rights activist when he wanted to—denouncing poverty, slums and segregation...
...But Daley did do one thing to maintain the allegiance of Chicago's white voters...
...The benefits of government were doled out unequally—to those who lived in some parts of the city, and to those with connections to the Democratic machine," the authors write...
...Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, made similar mistakes and spent decades trying to rebuild their shredded national reputations...
...Blacks would move out of the traditional black wards, where ward committeemen and precinct captains had for years been turning them out consistently for the machine's candidates...
...The Mayor treated the civil rights leader with outward respect and worked hard to show that he was not just a Northem version of Montgomery, Alabama, Sheriff Jim Clark...
...Here, too, is a former Cook County Board president named Seymour Simon: "The streets had potholes galore...
...If King succeeded in integrating Chicago," report Cohen and Taylor, "it would change the demographic layout of the city to the detriment of the machine...
...Within days, he famously ordered his police to "shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand...
...If you owned property inside the Loop—or in a few Democratic wards outside it—you got the services youneeded...
...A quick illustration: Cohen and Taylor say police thought people were hurling things from the 15th floor of the Hilton on one night of the convention...
...Anything...
...In New York, Mayor John Lindsay had responded to riots in Harlem by walking the streets of black neighborhoods, doing call-in shows, and assuring blacks that he empathized....' THERE was more strife to come...
...Many cities had been tom by rioting in the wake of King's assassination," the authors recount, "but Daley was alone in advocating that his citizens be fatally shot...
...And yet, as writers such as Fred Siegel emphasize, it was Mayor Lindsay who left New York with an escalating welfare tab it could not handle and a shrinking tax base—while middle-class residents and Fortune 500 companies scurried for the hinterlands...
...What King did not understand, at least initially, was that he might as well have asked the machine to dismantle itself piece by piece and become an arm of the League of Women Voters...
Vol. 83 • March 2000 • No. 1
