American Pharaoh (17 page)

When the time came to settle the issue, neither side had the votes to win the chairmanship. The committeemen decided to elect
another caretaker boss, but this time one who would serve only through the 1952 presidential election. The two factions settled
amicably on Joseph Gill, who was both Municipal Court clerk and ward committeeman from the 44th Ward on the North Side. The
sixty-five-year-old Gill was the oldest member of the Cook County Democratic Committee, and was considered unlikely to try
to stay on past his agreed-upon retirement date. Gill had been a noncombatant in the battles between the machine’s rival camps,
and both regarded him as neutral. For Daley, the selection of Gill was a disappointment, eased somewhat by the fact that he
was elevated to first vice chairman, inching him ever closer to the top job. When the maneuvering was complete, Senator Douglas
invoked a well-known hymn on Daley’s behalf. “I do not ask to see the distant scene,” Douglas said, quoting John Henry Cardinal
Newman. “One step is enough for me.”
⁷⁹

CHAPTER

3

Chicago Ain’t Ready for Reform

A
fter three years in office, Kennelly was turning out to be an ineffectual and not particularly popular mayor. Content to preside
over ceremonial functions, he let the rapacious and independent-minded leaders of the City Council — the so-called Gray Wolves
— plunder the city coffers. Kennelly’s ineptitude had become a citywide joke: one police captain testified at a City Council
hearing that “the only thing [the moving company owner turned mayor] learned in the moving business is never to lift the heavy
end.” Unfortunately for the machine, the one cause Kennelly pursued with determination and effectiveness was political reform.
He had steadily whittled away at the patronage system, the machine’s lifeblood, taking 12,000 jobs away from the ward bosses
and turning them into civil-service positions. Kennelly had also put teeth in the civil-service system by appointing reformer
Stephen Hurley to head the Civil Service Commission. Hurley was wise to all of the machine’s tricks — hiring “temporary” employees
to get around civil-service hiring lists, “forgetting” to schedule civil service exams, and changing job titles to wiggle
out of civil service rules. Kennelly’s anti-patronage campaign had an impact. In the days of Kelly and Cermak, ward committeemen
and aldermen each had about 285 jobs to dispense at their discretion. By the end of Kennelly’s first term, they had only a
handful of jobs. The machine leaders were by now openly referring to Kennelly as “Snow White” and plotting his downfall.
¹

As damaging as Mayor Kennelly’s war on patronage was to his political future, it was another moralistic campaign that more
directly led to his undoing. Kennelly had worked throughout his first term to rein in two revered institutions in black Chicago:
policy wheels and jitney cabs. “Policy” was an immensely popular, if illegal, lottery-like gambling game. It was divided into
a variety of “pools,” which had evocative names like “Harlem,” “Monte Carlo,” and “Royal Palm.” Each pool issued its own “slips,”
inscribed with different combinations of numbers. Players selected a combination of numbers and placed their bets at any of
the “policy stations” scattered in barbershops, shoe-shine parlors, or basements throughout the South Side ghetto. Policy
operators selected winning combinations, or “gigs,” by drawing numbered balls out of drum-shaped containers.
²
Jitney cabs were another great, illegal South Side institution. In Chicago, as in much of the country, big taxi companies
operated cabs with white drivers who drove almost exclusively in white neighborhoods. That left black neighborhoods with jitney
cabs, unofficial taxis that were generally owned and driven by blacks. In many parts of the Black Belt, they were the closest
thing there was to public transportation.

Policy and jitneys were not merely popular on the South Side — they were big business. There were, by one estimate, 4,200
policy stations spread across the South Side, handling bets from 100,000 people a day. The policy wheels were “as efficient
and as well run as any marble-lined bank or brokerage house on LaSalle Street and many times more profitable,” one historian
observed.
³
They also provided thousands of well-paying runner, clerk, and cashier jobs for black Chicagoans, who faced an otherwise
grim employment market. “Sometimes the girls could make $20 a week,” one study reported. “There isn’t a laundry in the city
or a kitchen in Hyde Park where a girl without learning could earn $20 for a week’s work.” The jitneys were also an important
source of jobs for black workers, and they were a critical part of the ghetto infrastructure: for many blacks, they were the
only means of getting to grocery stores and doctor appointments.
⁴

The policy wheels also contributed a great deal of money to the black submachine, particularly William Dawson’s 2nd Ward Democratic
Organization. Both the policy wheels and jitney cabs had operated for years with the protection of black politicians. Dawson
and the machine defended the black policy wheels against both police extortion and the white syndicate, which tried repeatedly
to extend its gambling empire into the black wards. Each time the Al Capone mob bribed a police captain to let white mobsters
move in, Dawson had gone to Mayor Kelly and got the captain transferred out of the ward. But Mayor Kennelly, as part of his
reform program, directed his police to undertake a massive crackdown on illegal activity in the black neighborhoods. The black
community was outraged. Kennelly’s edict was doing real harm to black Chicagoans — jitney cabdrivers were being thrown out
of work, and employees of the policy wheels were being arrested. Kennelly was also violating the long-standing tradition of
allowing black leaders to determine what illegal activity would be allowed in the black wards. Not least, many blacks suspected
that for all of his good-government talk, Kennelly was simply clearing the way for white organized crime to replace black
organized crime. “If anybody is to profit out of gambling in the Negro community, it should be the Negro,” William Dawson
fumed. “I want the money my people earn to stay in the Negro community.” Dawson resolved to put a stop to Mayor Kennelly’s
incursions.
⁵

Dawson’s response to Kennelly was the indignation of a classic black “welfare” politician. In his book
Negro Politics,
James Q. Wilson divided black leaders of the pre–civil rights era into two types: those who pursued “status” for the black
community and those who pursued “welfare.” Status leaders, many affiliated with groups like the NAACP and the Urban League,
devoted themselves to uplifting the social standing of the race — integrating neighborhoods and public facilities, or pushing
for equal employment opportunity. That was not Dawson. Well into the 1940s, much of Chicago was racially segregated, and blacks
were as a rule barred from white hotels, bars, soda fountains, taxis, and bowling alleys. But Dawson was best known in civil
rights circles for the battles he failed to join — like the 1946 protests at Chicago’s aptly named White City Roller Skating
Rink, challenging its policy of denying admission to blacks. When Dawson did take a stand on integration, he was liable to
oppose it. Chicago’s leading black politician outraged the NAACP and his black congressional colleagues in 1956 by coming
out against a federal bill to end segregation in public schools. He argued that requiring integration could endanger federal
funding to public schools, which he viewed as more important. And during the 1960 presidential campaign, Dawson served on
the civil rights issues committee of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign — known as the Civil Rights Section. The first
thing Dawson tried to do was get the name changed. “Let’s not use words that offend our good Southern friends, like ‘civil
rights,’” he told the group’s first meeting. His office in the campaign headquarters was quickly dubbed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Dawson’s primary loyalty was to his political organization, not his race — and when the two were in conflict, the Democratic
machine always won. “You would not expect Willie Mays to drop the ball just because Jackie Robinson hit it,” Dawson liked
to say.
⁶

Dawson was doing the machine’s bidding when he opposed civil rights, but he also had his own self-interested reasons for opposing
the status goals of civil rights activists. The black submachine that he led owed its existence to racial segregation, and
Dawson’s personal political power derived from his ability to mine the rich lode of Democratic votes in the black wards. The
Black Belt was growing as a result of racial segregation, and as it grew Dawson incorporated more wards into the black submachine.
If the status leaders got their way and achieved racial integration, black voters would disperse across the city — and would
end up on the tally sheet of white ward committeemen. Civil rights activism had another practical drawback: it threatened
to destroy the black submachine’s monopoly on black politics. Now, the only candidates in the black wards were put up by the
machine, and they had no significant opposition. If the black community divided over integration, civil rights supporters
might run their own slate of candidates and turn every election into a referendum on racial progress. Whatever civil rights
activism meant for the race — and Dawson remained skeptical on this point — it spelled disaster for the black submachine.
⁷

To his critics, Dawson’s civil rights record made him “perhaps
the
classic Uncle Tom politician,” currying favor with the white power structure by selling out his own people. But Dawson vehemently
rejected the label, insisting that he was more in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, who taught his politically dispossessed
black followers the pragmatic gains that came from working within the system. “Yes, they called Booker T. an Uncle Tom,” Dawson
once said. “But today the bust of Booker T. Washington is displayed in the Hall of Fame. Congress has just approved an appropriation
to help preserve his birthplace for posterity while the names of his detractors have long since been forgotten.” In fact,
Dawson’s career is too complex to dismiss with the epithet “Uncle Tom.” Having grown up in the Jim Crow South, and having
been forced to flee his hometown in a Faulknerian scenario involving interracial rape and revenge, he knew at least as well
as his critics how bad things were for blacks. In his speeches, he occasionally alluded to these racial wounds. “Were it my
desire,” he once told an audience at Ohio’s historically black Wilber-force University, “I could cite to you from my own personal
knowledge incidents which would chill the blood within you, whip your temper into a frenzy, and fan the fires of your wrath
into a devastating flame on which reason and judgment would be quickly consumed and give place to bitter vengeance and unbridled
retaliation.” Rather than unleashing this spirit of “unbridled retaliation,” Dawson believed in working through the political
process for incremental gains. For years, he had a sign over his desk with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant
me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
For Dawson, these words were a racial credo.
⁸

What Dawson believed in was welfare politics: jobs, money, and favors. Dawson went downtown to the Democratic machine headquarters
just as the white ward committeemen did, demanding patronage, and because he delivered on election day, the machine gave it
to him. Dawson and the submachine did not get the same number of patronage jobs as his white counterparts did, and the black
sub-machine’s positions were generally low-level ones. In 1955, when blacks were 19 percent of the Chicago population, and
regularly gave machine candidates more than 70 percent of their votes, they had only 5 percent of judgeships and no city commissioners.
Still, in the impoverished black wards Dawson represented, even the lowliest patronage jobs were prized. “He’d take a hundred
menial jobs over ten judgeships,” observed historian Dempsey Travis. “He counted numbers.” Dawson and his precinct captains
were also able to dole out favors, just as white machine politicians did — calling the city to get garbage picked up or intervening
with a judge to get a young person out of a scrape with the law. And until Kennelly’s crackdown on the policy wheels and jitney
cabs, the machine had always given Dawson a measure of autonomy over the black wards — allowing him, as the saying went, to
“stand between the people and the pressure.” Kennelly’s decision to go after the jitneys and policy wheels was an attack on
this autonomy, and on Dawson’s ability to deliver for his followers on a classic welfare issue.
⁹

Dawson was in a strong position to make his displeasure about Kennelly’s actions known. He was, by now, a substantial figure
in the Democratic Party. He had risen in Congress to become chairman of the committee that would later be called Government
Operations, the first black to serve as chairman of a regular House committee. In 1948, he had headed up the Negro division
of the Democratic National Committee, raising money and hitting the hustings in black neighborhoods across the country. Far
more important, though, was his power at the local level. Dawson’s submachine was in the process of extending its reach to
include five majority-black wards that, along with the River Wards, were the machine’s most productive. Dawson knew that he
and his voters had played a large part in putting Kennelly in City Hall — it was only Kennelly who seemed to have forgotten
it. Before the 1951 election, Dawson exploded at Kennelly, in a meeting that immediately became part of Chicago’s political
lore. “Who do you think you are? I bring in the votes. I elect
you. You
are not needed, but the votes are needed. I deliver the votes to you, but you won’t talk to
me?
” Many white machine leaders felt as Dawson did, bitterly resentful that Kennelly wanted them to back him for reelection
at the same time as he was turning their patronage jobs into civil-service positions.
¹⁰