DALEY OF CHICAGO
Lens, Sidney
Daley of Chicago by SIDNEY LENS Tn a recent review of Richard j. Daley's ten years as mayor of Chicago, one of the city's newspapers asked if he were the "last of the old-time bosses—or the first...
...The patronage-oiled machine is the heart of Daley's politics...
...Segregation in housing is reinforced by deliberate separation of the races in the schools...
...Of nearly 4,000 precinct captains and the thousands of others in the machine only a minute number are motivated by any such vagary as "good government...
...Yet the Mayor appoints the Board's members on the basis of recommendations made by still another body, which he also appoints, and the members of the Board are always close to important power blocs and to the Mayor personally...
...Had Daley restored this brutal and corrupt "normalcy" he would by now have been a memory...
...How much of Chicago's government (and by inference that of most other major cities) is by consent of the governed, and how much by exclusion of the governed ? The answer—if I may anticipate somewhat—is that the average man in Chicago is no better represented now than he was in the past...
...Normal" meant payoffs to the aldermen or ward committeemen for zoning permits...
...A report of the U.S...
...Daley had such a hall built on the lakefront and named it after the Colonel...
...Government jobs, for the most part, are supposed to be based on civil service...
...Normal" meant that a Negro woman coming home at midnight might be shaken down by a policeman on threat of being hauled in as a street-walker unless she paid, and that many bailiffs and judicial clerks were in on the racket...
...Stubby, ruddy-faced, glaringly double-chinned, grossly ungram-matical in impromptu talks, Daley is one of the keenest politicians in the country...
...his greatest needs are unmet...
...and they created many moderately-paying jobs that politicians could dispense as patronage...
...A large number of the ward committeemen and aldermen are insurance brokers—or their grown children are...
...It was once the pulse of populism and radicalism...
...Formerly the syndicate deeply infiltrated the police department, but since the police scandals of 1960, which Daley handled adroitly, it has lost much of that power...
...His books include "The Crisis of American Labor" and "The Futile Crusade...
...In the party primaries Marzullo ordinarily carries his slate by a margin of ten to one, and in the general elections he brings in the Democratic ticket by five to one...
...But the essence of machine rule—jobs and emoluments—-is still there...
...he would be wearing the two top political hats when elected Mayor...
...Government by interlocking power blocs inevitably includes the newspapers...
...Daley's labor policy generally has been far from enlightened—despite the fact that he enjoys the support of top labor officials...
...All of Marzullo's sixty-one precinct captains are on the city or county payroll...
...McFetridge is vice chairman of the Park District and a member of the police board...
...Once a year Marzullo runs a gala affair which nets the organization $25,000 to $30,-000, which in turn is doled out to dozens of churches, sports organizations, and charities...
...One of his close business associates, Charles Swibel—president of Marks & Company, which manages slum property—is the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority...
...But he predicates all this on sublimating the burning social problems of the day, principally the race issue...
...he stimulates business, particularly in the central district, and building, especially of upper class and middle class housing...
...The big businessmen on their boards decided to "move the neighborhood away" rather than the institutions...
...That is his secret of government...
...It is certainly, he adds, "the most residentially-segre-gated large city in the North"— a statement which is resoundingly echoed by the Federal Civil Rights Commission...
...and a near-partnership with the crime syndicate which controlled the ward committees in at least five of the city's fifty wards...
...The officers of craft unions maintain an artificially high scale of wages by deliberately keeping men in short supply, through refusal to admit Negroes...
...If all else fails, he appoints a "committee" to look into a disputed problem...
...vote frauds...
...Businessmen find it useful to buy insurance from them...
...Though the city instituted a dues check-off for union members on the city payroll in November 1965, it does not as yet recognize the right of its employes to collective bargaining, as do hundreds of other communities around the country...
...That Daley is a "boss" is indisputable...
...TWO insists that the key to everything is power—and power is precisely what Daley restricts...
...Three neighborhood units were seriously challenging the moderates, and under the leadership of a United Auto Workers official, Willoughby (Bill) Abner, a coalition of liberals, radicals, and laborites was on the verge of taking over control of the city-wide NAACP...
...The question has more than academic significance...
...Many of its employes were earning less than one dollar an hour, but management refused to recognize the union...
...Democratic Governor Otto Kerner, however, is as pliable as putty to Daley's touch...
...According to a union official who once held a high post in the state government, it is closer to 40,000...
...Perhaps one of the clearest indicators of whom the Daley machine serves is the Mayor's boast that the per capita debt of Chicago and its various sub-bodies, such as the Board of Education, is $170.75—"the lowest among the twenty cities in the United States with a population of 500,000 and over...
...He has eliminated the raucous and the bizarre, and has put a sophisticated veneer on an unsophisticated hulk...
...The crime syndicate, too, is a fact of life...
...There are the innumerable business arrangements with city and county government units that spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year...
...He does not smoke cigars, wear flashy rings, or spend his evenings playing poker...
...while nominally there are such things as nominating committees and central committees, a Daley veto of any candidate for any office is tantamount to rejection...
...There must be no awakening of what one politician calls "dangerous resentment...
...In Chicago the four newspapers, including the right-wing Tribune and American, are consistently behind the Mayor...
...His machine is as formidable as most of those in the past, but he has perfected a technique for assuaging the major power blocs so that he holds together —as a civil rights leader put it—a "coalition stretching from the State Street department stores to the crime syndicate...
...Eight years with Mayor Kennelly was a long time, however...
...Some of his associates may be, but Daley himself, by all accounts, is not...
...He has introduced modern street lighting and many new parking facilities, particularly in the central city...
...The areas between the University of Chicago on the south, the Michael Reese Hospital to the north, and the Illinois Institute of Technology to the west, were becoming appalling slums...
...Forty-one per cent of all Negro families in Chicago were reported living in dwellings that were dilapidated, deteriorating, or lacking in plumbing facilities—as against eighteen per cent for whites...
...The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), a coalition of 104 organizations representing 33,000 poor Negro families, is completely frozen out of CCUO's steering committee of about thirty members, and plays only a minority role in its own Woodlawn area advisory committee on poverty, even though it is the most important organization representing the poor in the city...
...Deton J. Brooks, executive director of this new Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity (CCUO), is a former researcher of the Cook County Department of Welfare, and is not known for any unorthodoxy...
...Chicago's government is of, by, and for the few thousand members of interlocking power elites...
...An astute "Jake" Arvey therefore forced him to retire and served up to the public a clean-cut, handsome, bachelor business man, Martin H. Kennelly...
...Chicago has changed...
...Even a cursory glance at his operation indicates that it is certainly not molded for an idealistic crusade...
...In the one area where Daley has promoted racially-integrated urban renewal the reasons and results provide a vivid illustration of the Daley style of government by power bloc...
...The possibilities of "making a buck" through judicious use of political power runs from the Negro precinct captain who gets a $4,000-a-year job with the county hospital to the lawyer and his engineering firm friends who profit from arranging $5 million contracts...
...Purchasing policies were modernized, and bidding practices are today above average...
...But TWO is a power-center Daley cannot control, and therefore will not enhance...
...To the ward-heelers, gamblers, barkeepers, and construction men, Kennelly was just a pain in the neck...
...If this is not the predominant mood of urban America in 1966 it comes close to it, and it makes the "Daley experiment" highly pertinent...
...Yet the syndicate controls a number of ward organizations and has its complement of bailiffs, judges, county clerks, and even lawyers in the State's Attorney's office who are linked to it...
...The Mayor's program conspicuously neglected the goals of militant Negroes, demands for the enforcement of the building code, and (until there was a dramatic expose) complaints about police inefficiency and corruption...
...Crime was rampant, particularly rapes and robberies...
...a gravy train for contractors...
...He makes scrupulous efforts to prevent any effective opposition from forming to challenge his power...
...In essentials the Daley style has produced a government as virulent as its predecessors...
...Accepting a report of the Chicago Home Rule Commission, Daley took away many powers of the aldermen, such as control of driveway permits and zoning decisions, which had brought some of them regular and sizable bribes...
...The bitterness of large sections of the Negro community can be gauged by a "Black Paper," issued by TWO: "Just like urban renewal" (which TWO calls "Negro removal") the poverty program "is benefiting the rich and powerful, with a pittance thrown out as a smokescreen to confuse the public...
...Unfortunately, the changes that intrigue Fortune are only on the surface...
...These are major changes in the American way of life, and Daley has carefully taken them into account...
...As national government becomes larger and more complex the individual citizen increasingly finds himself reduced to irrelevance...
...Such a large nest egg makes the Democratic Party unbeatable—unless it is besmirched by a scandal on a scale that arouses massive protest...
...In all major cities, as the immigrant moves up the social ladder and is replaced by the Negro, and as the economy continues to soar, the new corporate technique is to reduce graft, put (city administration on a businesslike basis, and "get things done...
...The so-called War on Poverty is actually a war against the poor...
...He was an outsider who did not appreciate the intricacies of running a wide-open city, who was not as sympathetic to the problems of patronage as a "good" Democrat in Chicago ought to be...
...He has tailored a style of government to the measure of a new era...
...It is a government by manipulation, rather than participation, and its purpose—subtly hidden from public purview—is to preserve the social status quo...
...It is symbolic of this trend that young radicals in the Students for a Democratic Society raise the banner for participatory democracy, and that, at the other end of the political spectrum, conservatives speak nostalgically of the need to return government to the grass roots...
...Fortune magazine called him "about as able a police chief as any city is going to get...
...School Superintendent Benjamin Willis, a highly controversial figure and the primary target of the Negro community's protest, denies that there is any deliberate school segregation...
...Services such as health and sanitation improved, and the welfare department, under Raymond Hilliard, became one of the best administered in the country...
...For Chicago "normalcy" was a devious game in which policemen became sergeants by "paying off" politicians...
...He has revived the downtown business area— his main preoccupation in the decade he has been in office—and he has concentrated on helping the business community generally...
...city services are badly hampered by inept personnel...
...The city administration, far from breaking this pattern, has worked hard to reinforce it...
...Research for this article was made possible by the Philip M. Stern Family Fund...
...JOIN (Jobs or Income Now), the poverty group sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society in the uptown area (among poor whites), is also deprived of any important role in CCUO...
...In the Woodlawn area—virtually all Negro—one-fourth of the population is on welfare, according to TWO research workers, and fully thirty per cent is unemployed...
...The majority of the Chicago Board of Education is not zealous in its pursuit of racial mixing...
...Arvey was so powerful he could also select Adlai Stevenson to run for governor and Paul Douglas for the U.S...
...Kennelly had been effectively sidetracked in a primary fight by Richard J. Daley, and Daley was a man the "boys" could understand...
...He does not try to bludgeon them out of business...
...The Tribune publisher, the late Colonel Robert McCormick, was a strong contender for a new convention hall...
...Though believed to be incorruptible himself, Daley knew what was going on around him, so that the gentlemen who normally enriched themselves at the public's expense looked forward to his election...
...thus far the style presents a handsome visible front but glosses over or ignores the truly desperate social and economic problems of the people...
...His power fans out beyond the ward, to the city, state, and even Federal government...
...The jobs bring votes, the votes bring power, the power can be translated into money by those who want it...
...Ironically, such housing projects are good for the Negro political machine under Daley's control because they keep the Negro constituency intact...
...But Negro leaders such as Al Raby, a former teacher and now convener of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, disagree...
...There is no city in the North," says Edwin C. Berry, director of the Chicago Urban League, "that is more segregated than Chicago...
...The crime syndicate is still functioning in Chicago, but it does not bluster openly or pretend to own City Hall...
...The budget, previously formulated by the City Council and therefore an inept set of bargains among powerful aldermen, was put into the hands of the administration, as in the Federal government system...
...Other bosses— Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Carmine De Sapio in Manhattan, for instance—had collapsed under the weight of their own rapacity...
...In 1959 the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employes organized the Mount Sinai hospital...
...During the years he headed the United Service Employes Union Local 329, he negotiated more than 150 union contracts with a wide variety of Chicago employers...
...The Mayor argued that he had no power to intervene...
...The Daley style of government pretends to be a consensus of the people while in reality it serves the interests of an interlocking power elite...
...There is no semblance of a democratic structure or democratic decision-making in Marzul-lo-land...
...The political machine based on vast patronage, with all the evil that implies, is still the backbone of Chicago's government...
...One of Chicago's illustrious aldermen expressed it plainly: "Chicago ain't ready for reform yet...
...Negro leaders maintain that the problems of housing, schools, and poverty can be solved only if there is a conscious and aggressive campaign of "move-ins," "break-outs," and similar actions...
...From 1919 to 1955 a total of 913 gangland murders were committed, fewer than a dozen of which ever resulted in convictions and not one in a death sentence...
...Redevelopment is thus accomplished at the expense of those who need housing most ¦—to satisfy the men of power who are on the boards of directors of three influential institutions...
...Daley does not look upon these conditions as evil, but as necessary facts of life...
...The advertising program book for last year's affair, a dinner-dance, came to a handsome 366 pages and carried greetings from friends ranging from Sam's Grocery and the Harvey Wrecking Company to the St...
...Daley checkmated this movement...
...Other "legitimate rackets" include purchasing land or property where an insider knows that a new road will be built or a new housing development is about to go up...
...Whatever the actual figure for patronage, everyone admits that it assures Daley at least 200,000 straight Democratic Party votes before the polls open on election day...
...Daley," one of his key aides told me, "never shuts the door in the face of the power blocs...
...some crooked union operations...
...The syndicate, like everything else, has been superficially civilized...
...Ethnically the ward is made up of thirty-five to forty per cent Poles, twenty-five per cent Negroes, and ten or twelve per cent Italians, a mixture which is held together neatly through a variety of institutional links and a judicious distribution of jobs...
...This is the specter that haunts the power blocs and predetermines Daley's political behavior...
...In the city council the only effective voices opposing Daley are those of Aldermen Despres and Charles Chew (a Negro who beat the machine when it put up a white candidate in a Negro ward...
...The overwhelming majority has a monetary stake in perpetuating the machine...
...A political rival, Republican Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, claims that if city, state, sub-division, suburb, Federal, and private jobs are included, the number would run to 80,000 or 100,000...
...Garbage was collected more frequently...
...According to John Leonard East, deputy chairman of the Cook County Republican Party, the figure is closer to 400,000...
...By anti-poverty rules the city should be aiding organizations such as TWO and JOIN...
...This West Side ward has a population of about 80,000, some 31,000 of whom vote on election day...
...When the anti-poverty program got under way a year and a half ago, the Mayor of Chicago did a magnificent job of getting Federal funds—proportionately better than any other city in the multi-million population class...
...The "Daley" style of city politics may be a portent of the future and will bear watching...
...The insiders call this a "legitimate racket...
...it usually does not cost more and it provides both protection against harassment and some help when a businessman has violated a minor ordinance...
...Negroes were paying ten dollars a month more than whites for comparable housing, though their annual income was thirty-nine per cent less than that of white families...
...Overwhelmingly, the real estate brokers refuse to show Negroes properties outside the ghetto, and lending institutions refuse to grant mortgages to them for properties outside the walls of the ghetto...
...No man becomes a Democratic Ward Committeeman without the Mayor's approval...
...Today the figure is 900,000, and by 1990, according to Dr...
...Thus the city has met the dwelling needs of only one-seventh of the impoverished—and even that small proportion has been virtually completely segregated...
...What could not be done when proposed by the Quakers suddenly became a feasible scheme...
...The time came, however, when three large institutions—all related to the power blocs—awoke to the fact that their existence was in jeopardy...
...Politics," says twenty-fifth Ward Committeeman Vito Marzullo, who also serves as alderman, "is a business...
...the Republicans on the council are ineffective...
...The tax system, like other features of government by interlocking power blocs, favors the wealthy and big business...
...The three institutions were faced with a choice: They would either have to move or uproot the slums...
...The machine has those completely under its control...
...The number of library books available per child in white schools was just double that in Negro schools...
...Craft union employes of the city are paid "scale" and given a number of other prerogatives, but there is no formal grievance procedure for clerical employes...
...In the great "Black Belt" of the South Side there are a number of housing projects with a total population of more than 40,-000...
...Congressman Frank Annunzio, State Representatives Sam Romano and Matt Ropa, County Commissioner Charles Bonk, and County Judge Thaddeus Adesko...
...Daley is responsible for finishing the modern O'Hare Airport, and for a vast network of efficient freeways...
...Chicago has changed," stated a recent issue of Fortune...
...They range from the politician whose florist shops get an inordinate share of the city's purchases to the politician who has a hidden share of ownership in a construction company...
...The old boss was faced with periodic enervating depressions...
...this is the reason he recites the rhetoric necessary to the national and local temper, and makes a few concessions to the Negroes within his immediate domain, while Chicago remains a segregated, prejudiced city...
...Daley of Chicago by SIDNEY LENS Tn a recent review of Richard j. Daley's ten years as mayor of Chicago, one of the city's newspapers asked if he were the "last of the old-time bosses—or the first of a new breed...
...In 1955, the city was about to return to "normal...
...Representative William Dawson several years ago, he was able to carry a number of middle-class Negro sections, but not the areas where the poor Negroes live...
...Daley, however, appointed a large committee of seventy-three, its leaders fully under his domination...
...As Harvard professors Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson point out in their authoritative book, City Politics, "The civic projects that Mayor Daley inaugurated . . . were shrewdly chosen...
...He chooses the executive committee of the Democratic Party ward organization, appoints and removes the precinct captains, and calls meetings only when he wants—or near election time—to tell the captains what they are expected to do...
...It did not protest because the two major figures in the house of labor, William L. McFetridge and William Lee, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, are themselves a power bloc associated with the regime...
...In no city in the country has the new method been used so effectively and successfully as in Mayor Daley's Chicago...
...A committeeman like Marzullo, and there are others, has a feudal empire at his command, a dukedom which only a political tornado can blow away...
...its vice president, Thomas Murray, said on a CBS television program that "Chicago is not yet ready for more integration...
...According to the Urban League, "the Chicago real estate industry...
...The rules of the Office of Economic Opportunity provide that the poor themselves should play a major role in OEO activity...
...The housing projects for the poor have been so planned as to continue segregation, while nongovernment projects have catered mostly to middle- and high-income families...
...Roman's Church on Washtenaw Street...
...for the most part they were non-controversial...
...So are three smaller ones, and so will be the five new projects planned for the future...
...The changes in Chicago, glossy as they seem to the uninitiated, are shallow, and they favor a small power elite...
...All the Democratic Committeemen, like Marzullo, will have every home in the district canvassed many times, because the jobholders do as they are told under penalty of being dismissed...
...Most judges are chosen to run for election from political rather than judicial considerations...
...Just two years earlier he had been chosen Cook County chairman of the Democratic Party...
...The syndicate wards deliver votes, and, under the Daley thesis of not rocking the boat, the political bastions of the syndicate remain substantially untouched...
...He has paved the way for erection of a host of new skyscrapers in Chicago, significantly altering the city's famous skyline...
...continues to subsidize local groups that oppose housing integration and itself opposes fair housing legislation...
...The Chicago story is significant not only because it concerns the nation's second largest city but because Chicago in 1966 reflects, in a sense, a consensus of America...
...Whatever else Daley did to mold a new image of Chicago's government, he left this grass-roots source of power—the Marzullos, their precinct captains and patronage—solid and intact...
...Government by interlocking power blocs not only leaves the race problem unsolved but is designed to create a social standstill in many other areas as well...
...Before World War II the Negro population was only seven per cent—250,000...
...What Daley did was to change the tone of government—without changing its purpose...
...Daley's regime has been a whirlwind of activity...
...The city which has spawned "Hinky Dink" Kenna, "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, Al Capone, "Big Bill" Thompson, and Ed Kelly was—in the opinion of many—going back to "normal...
...It is in such areas that the Daley machine wins an overwhelming majority of the vote, because so many of the poor Negroes are led to believe that they may lose their low-cost apartments or their relief checks unless they "vote right...
...Chicago's NAACP remained—and remains -—"safe...
...He and his supporters imply that school segregation is the result of segregation in housing...
...And that is precisely where Daley's genius comes into play—to avoid scandal, to service the community sufficiently so that hostility and countervailing power do not build up...
...According to a highly-reliable and independent alderman, Leon Despres of the Fifth Ward—who, with one exception, is the only genuine challenge Daley faces in the City Council—there are "35,000 patronage jobs outside civil service...
...The labor movement, for instance, made no protest when the Mayor imposed a sales tax which fell most heavily on the poor...
...Persuasion, rather than muscle, is now the technique...
...Some of them could find jobs in suburbs and in distant sections of the city, but they are too poor to own cars, and no poverty program has been willing to supply the transportation to help them "break out" of Woodlawn—nor is likely to...
...The way the machine hangs on to jobs is an art in itself...
...The common man benefits only minimally...
...Lee is a former chairman of the civil service commission...
...The maze in Washington is so impenetrable that he turns more and more to the smaller units of government— at the state and city levels—as the only arenas where he can effectively express his concerns...
...It calls the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity a "colonial power, and we black people are its 'natives.' We are confined to a ghetto because of money...
...Housing for the poor has been grossly inadequate: The Community Renewal Program Report of March, 1964, pointed out that while 30,845 families were living in low-cost housing units, there were an additional 186,000 families who qualified for such housing...
...Its behavior is nowhere near as flagrant as it was a generation ago...
...bombings...
...In 1956, for instance, there was a "danger" that the Chicago National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would fall into the hands of militant leadership...
...The fire department was so modernized that it achieved a Class Two Fire Underwriters rating...
...instead it is harassing and trying to undermine them because they may be the nuclei of a political opposition...
...The result has been that while private hospital workers both in New York and California were organized by the thousands, in Chicago hospital employes are still unorganized and are among the lowest-paid in the city...
...The only opposition that confronts him today consists of civil rights groups such as those headed by Al Raby, mavericks like the comedian Dick Gregory who threatens to run for mayor in 1967, or the Daniel Burnham committee which organized recently on an ad hoc basis to save trees in the city's parks and is apparently becoming a permanent conservation lobby...
...The men who have power and wealth in Chicago hold their position and wealth largely because of money wrested from black people...
...Daley controls, absolutely, not only the City Council but the Cook County Board and virtually all the sub-bodies in the city such as the Sanitary District, the Park District, and the Chicago Housing Authority...
...In Daley's style of government the number of people offended must be kept to a minimum...
...The Mayor's contribution has been to civilize the system to an extent...
...Yet Daley is a new breed of political boss...
...Marzullo's associates, beholden to him in part or in whole, include U.S...
...The Mayor of Chicago is a deceptive figure...
...If Negro citizens were dispersed throughout the fifty wards, the Negro politicians would lose control of some votes and be reduced in rank...
...Kelly, a rough and tumble politician of the old school, had been in office since 1933, but the stench associated with his rule had become too much even for the fumigators...
...Even his detractors admit he is not filling safety deposit boxes with the fruits of graft, as did so many of his predecessors...
...The Chicago Daily News put it this way: "Daley has refined the citizen committee technique into a science...
...in which even teachers bought their jobs through political intermediaries...
...the SIDNEY LENS, writer and lecturer, has lived in Chicago for more than thirty years...
...The facts on this score are indisputable—they have been confirmed in two studies for the Board of Education by University of Chicago Professors Philip Hauser and Robert Havighurst, whose reputations are beyond question...
...He admits to about 100 other patronage jobs, though many outsiders place the figure three or four times higher...
...Citywide, the rate of Negro unemployment is three times that of white, and among teenagers the disparity is even wider...
...He gives them what they want—though he usually leaves himself something to bargain with by not giving them 100 per cent what they ask for...
...new one contends with a growing and Americanized middle class which he tries to prevent from escaping to the suburbs...
...When Daley took the helm in 1955 he did not bring back "normalcy...
...He deserves credit—along with some discredit—for the redevelopment of the Hyde Park area near the University of Chicago, and for twenty-six other community improvement projects either completed or in progress...
...Most syndicate profits today, while still derived from gambling, prostitution, the numbers game, and the like, are probably ploughed back into legitimate businesses such as real estate and restaurants...
...The Negro ghettos are slums, fire-traps, and centers of despair and disillusionment...
...the poor were conspicuously absent from the committee roster...
...Today it is a city that would be bland, if it could, shunning ideologies and controversies, but is instead disturbed and taut, mainly over the influx of hundreds of thousands of Negroes, and also beset by the national problems raised by war and cold war...
...Each job, it is estimated, is food for a minimum of eight sure votes—wives, brothers, relatives in the ward—plus many more as a result of heavy pre-election campaigning...
...He does not conform to the old stereotype of a big-city boss...
...According to the Bureau of the Census in 1960, of the ten largest cities Chicago had a greater percentage of substandard housing than any except St...
...and those who aspired to be school principals were overlooked unless they could muster political pull...
...They were highly visible...
...Wilson, by his own admission, has failed to smash the crime syndicate, but he has greatly improved the police system and introduced modern crime detection methods which have reduced certain major crimes and made the city safer...
...Such complete segregation also satisfies the real estate power bloc, which considers open occupancy the ultimate evil...
...and above all, the apparatus of government—including the presumably independent Board of Education—has become a conspiracy to preserve Jim Crow, segregation, slums, slum landlords, and poverty...
...Many years ago the Quakers in Chicago urged a redevelopment program in an extensive South Side area, but the plan was quietly filed away as impractical...
...Louis—twice as much as Los Angeles, fifty per cent more than Washington...
...From the time he became a precinct captain at the age of twenty-one he had been a model of Democratic orthodoxy...
...Segregation is not accidental...
...The Mayor's hands-off policy thus meshed with that of his allies in the labor movement...
...Theoretically their tenure is only four months, but somehow they remain "temporary"— requiring no civil service test—in perpetuity...
...Donald Bogue of the University of Chicago Population Research Center, Negroes will constitute half the population of Chicago...
...Conspicuous bribery and "fixes" are shunned...
...What is more, the proportion of all Negro pupils attending 100 per cent Negro schools rose nearly three per cent in the last school year...
...The question is: How does all this affect the role of the citizen in the administration of his city...
...In 1947, Colonel Jacob Arvey, who then dominated the Democratic Party machine, had decided that Chi-cagoans might topple his empire if he insisted on running the incumbent, Edward J. Kelly, for reelection...
...But it is significant that while 6,000 housing units were torn down in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area, eighty per cent of them the homes of poor Negro families, only 1,882 units are replacing them...
...The fresh breed of politicians generated by the new approach is destined to grow, for the breed fits the mood of urban America in the Sixties...
...He had made the long trek through the muck and mire of city politics, as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and Senate, later as State Director of Revenue, and Cook County Clerk...
...Craft union leaders in the Chicago Federation of Labor—notably William L. McFetridge, then an AFL-CIO vice president—were hostile to AFSCME because of a jurisdictional dispute, and therefore gave no aid to the Mount Sinai employes when they went on strike...
...Meanwhile the Mayor is careful not to anger the real powers that be...
...The Daley method of reducing and containing friction does work...
...Whether Daley is representative of a "new breed" of city officials and whether that new breed actually involves the alienated voter in its deliberations is, therefore, of more than local interest...
...Chicago is the only city with more than a million inhabitants to rank so high...
...The old city boss lived in a milieu of poverty-stricken immigrants...
...the new one lives in a climate of affluence where the poor, to use Michael Harrington's term, are "invisible...
...When A. A. Rayner, a Negro liberal and non-machine Democrat, ran against Negro U.S...
...Politicians and their friends continue to feed off the public, but no longer like uninhibited gluttons...
...The taxes in Chicago are relatively low, falling less heavily on industry and business than in other cities...
...Senate...
...Civil Rights Commission in 1962 revealed that in Chicago it cost $342 to educate a student in a white school, as against $269 in a Negro school...
...But development of housing, schools, and social facilities is minute compared to need...
...The largest of these, the Robert Taylor homes, is 100 per cent Negro...
...If he does not dominate state politics as he does Chicago's, it is only because the Republicans control one of the two legislative houses...
...Each Democratic ward committeeman has hundreds of jobs that "belong" to him, to be filled as he pleases...
...He has served on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and has taught courses on industrial relations at the University of Chicago...
...For those who believe that freeways and skyscrapers are the soul of social progress, and that "legitimate rackets," if they are not too brazen, are necessary in our way of life, Fortune's estimate is valid...
...In 1960, when policemen at one station were exposed as accomplices of criminals in store burglaries, Daley reacted to the scandal by calling in Orlando W. Wilson, dean of the University of California's School of Criminology, to become police commissioner...
...The number of jobs that Daley and his machine control is estimated by a Daley associate at the ridiculously low figure of 2,000...
...The people can be—and are—bypassed in such an arrangement...
...The men of power in Chicago would rather keep black people miseducated, ill-housed, unemployed, dependent on an impersonal bureaucracy, and thus broken in spirit, than to share their power and wealth...
...There are a thousand and one ways by which ward committeemen, aldermen, and even precinct captains can earn an easy dollar as a result of their positions...
...in which committeemen dominated local police and chose police precinct captains...
...But in Chicago there are thousands that are listed as "temporary...
...This is symptomatic of his studied effort to work with, appease, and placate elements of the power bloc, no matter where they appear on the political rainbow—even the far right...
...When the heat is on, you merely toss a lateral to the committee...
...He is a sincerely devout Catholic and a strong family man with a wife and seven children...
...Happy days and "normalcy" were about to return...
...It gives the illusion of a government by consent, though it is actually government by benevolent machine...
...Under such "normalcy," according to Virgil W. Peterson of the Chicago Crime Commission, "it was estimated that graft received for the protection of gambling and vice amounted to approximately twenty million dollars annually...
...When Daley was first elected in 1955 there was great rejoicing in the more seamy sectors of Chicago's society...
...Chicago's massive political apparatus rests first and foremost on jobs, jobs for little men and jobs for big men, jobs that are sometimes given for merit, but in the overwhelming number of cases for loyalty to the machine...
...This new method of controlling and maintaining power in city politics is replacing the domination of the cruder political bosses of the past...
...Daley's decade as Mayor reflects this talent for accommodation...
...When Raby and others put the blame for the school situation on Mayor Daley his response is that the Board of Education is an autonomous body, free from the kind of political influence that bedeviled it in the "old" days before his regime...
...They failed to recognize that favors and the spoils system were no longer adequate to keep the voter in line...
...The power elite referred to includes the State Street Council, the banks, the Association of Commerce, the Real Estate Board, the segregationist community groups, and certain leaders of the craft unions...
...The Negroes with "power" in Daley's Chicago are those in his own following, those who are dedicated, for purely selfish reasons, to keeping things as they are, with only minor modifications...
...Gambling and prostitution remained, but did not flourish wide-open any more than under Kennelly "reform...
...As chairman of the Cook County (Chicago) Democratic Party he has forty-two of the fifty aldermen on the City Council in his vest-pocket...
...The vast majority of the city population—the basically unrepresented millions—fares worse than it might if it had some say in government, particularly the twenty-eight per cent that is Negro...
...Raby insists that the Board of Education and the Chicago Real Estate Board have "acted in concert" to "create racial segregation in the public schools to coincide with residential racial segregation...
...The NAACP election meeting suddenly found itself inundated with Democratic Party precinct captains...
...They didn't have to burn it down after all...
...When he speaks to the press his voice is deliberately held low, as if he were trying to keep his temper in rein, but he is a genius at persuasion, and an expert at finding quid pro quos between antagonistic forces...
...Negro schools are grossly overcrowded, manned largely by inexperienced and uncertified teachers, and usually more poorly equipped than white schools...
...The political machine is solidly intact and the Mayor is a one-man boss, but he meets with opponents and listens respectfully to their criticism...
...The ward committeemen paid hundreds of two dollar membership fees on the eve of the voting to be able to tilt the scales in favor of the Daley allies in the Negro community...
...Mayor Daley builds great concrete ribbons—freeways —from one end of the city to the other...
...This was and will continue to be practically the only racially-integrated area in the city (except for those that are temporarily interracial because they are changing from all white to all black), but whatever Negroes are moving back into Hyde Park-Kenwood are not the poor, but the middle-class Negroes...
...With the help of his friends in the Janitors Union, Daley initiated a "clean city" program...
...He lists one case after another in which he claims Willis has built new schools in the heart of the Negro ghetto to avoid integration...
...civil rights activists usually have to run around it...
...instead he seeks compromise...
...they did not require much increase in taxes...
...Indeed, Daley's efforts on behalf of business have drawn hundreds of leading Republicans into his fold, as well as all four Chicago newspapers, which are similarly Republican...
...Eighty-five to ninety per cent of the Negro children attend segregated schools and the few in "integrated" ones usually live in neighborhoods that are "changing...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
