American Pharaoh (24 page)

The mayoral election was shaping up as a contest between two men who, by all external appearances, could hardly have been
more different. Merriam had style and sophistication, while Daley exuded working-class Bridgeport. Daley was a fifty-three-year-old
father of seven who had spent decades of his life plodding his way up the ranks of the machine. A short and pudgy man, he
had a face that drooped into a vast expanse of hanging flesh. “He would be doomed in the cosmetology of today’s politics:
those jowls, that heavy-set look,” David Halberstam would write in a profile years later. “He doesn’t look like a modern municipal
leader, a cost-accounting specialist; he looks, yes, exactly like a big city boss.” And Daley spoke in the heavy accent of
ethnic Chicago, sprinkling his sentences with “dis’s” and “dat’s.” He spoke awkwardly and at times incomprehensibly. According
to one observer, he alternated between “a controlled mumble for TV and an excited gabble for political rallies.” And throughout
his career, his words had a way of coming out in a tangle. When he opened a bicycle path in Odgen Park, a year into his mayoralty,
he referred to a bicycle-built-for-two as a “tantrum bike,” and expressed concern for the park’s “walking pedestrians.” The
same year, at an atomic energy exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, he would declare it “amazing what they will
be able to do once they get the atom harassed.” He would declare to reporters, “I resent the insinuendos,” offer information
“for the enlightenment and edification and hallucination of the alderman,” and implore his audience to “reach higher and higher
platitudes.” And in a moment of despair toward the end of his career, he would exclaim, “They have vilified me, they have
crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.”
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Daley was especially unprepossessing when contrasted with the captivating young Robert Merriam. Merriam may have been polished,
but he also looked, as one political observer put it, “like a South Side Chicago image of an Ivy Leaguer.” His distinguished
manner seemed to put him above the workaday Chicagoans whose votes he was seeking. “You know what the party workers say?”
Merriam complained after the election. “They say to each other, ‘Have you ever seen this Merriam take a drink? Does he ever
drink? I mean, have you ever actually seen him take a drink?’” And Merriam’s high-minded reform politics might appeal to the
blue bloods who lived near the Lake, but they left many working-class voters cold. Supporters of Boston’s legendary Mayor
James Michael Curley used to tell the story of the Beacon Hill lady who went door-to-door in working-class South Boston campaigning
for a reformer for school committee. One Irish housewife listened to her pitch politely, and then asked, “But doesn’t he have
a sister who works for the schools or who has something to do with the school system?” The Boston Brahmin lady immediately
protested: “I assure you, madam,” she said, “he is not the kind of man who would ever use his position to advance the interests
of his sister.” The Irish housewife replied, “Well, if the son-of-a-bitch won’t help his own sister, why should I vote for
him?” Merriam’s upper-crust idealism was not for everyone.
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Merriam’s charisma and articulateness did little for him in the campaign. In 1955, television was just beginning to come into
its own as a political force. The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, which revealed Senator Joseph McCarthy as a bully and tyrant
before an entire nation, had powerfully demonstrated the potential the new medium held to influence public affairs. But Adlai
Stevenson, an engaging orator, still lost the next year’s presidential race to the less articulate Dwight Eisenhower. Election
campaigns were still largely won or lost through retail politics. This was particularly true of machine candidates, who generally
prevailed not because of their personal qualifications or charisma but because of the strength of the organization backing
them. George Washington Plunkitt, a leader in New York’s legendary Tammany Hall organization and the foremost philosopher
of machine politics, noted in his primer
How to Become a Statesman
that organization candidates who “cram their heads with all sorts of college rot” are wasting their time if the machine is
doing its job properly. In choosing the machine candidate, a voter was supporting a whole political system — the ward office
that got his street repaved, the ward committeeman who got his child out of a scrape with the law, the patronage system that
provided him or a relative with a job. For all of this to continue, the machine candidate had to win. Daniel Rostenkowski,
who would rise to be an influential congressman as a result of Daley’s patronage, recalls that when his wife saw Adamowski
on television, he impressed her so much more than Daley that she asked her husband if he was sure he was backing the right
man. “I said, ‘LaVerne, it’s just bread and butter.’”
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Daley made the most of his party affiliation. He never tired of reminding voters that he was the Democrat and Merriam the
Republican — not bothering to explain that Merriam had jumped parties because of his frustration with the machine’s lock on
his party. He taunted his opponent for not being a loyal member of either political party. Merriam was trying to convince
Democrats he was not a Republican, and Republicans he was not really a Democrat, Daley said in one debate. “I can’t think
of anything more difficult than trying to mate an elephant with a donkey.”
⁷⁵

But Merriam’s best chance of winning was, in fact, trying to accomplish a mating of that kind. He appealed to supporters of
Kennelly and Adamowski to cross party lines, arguing that he was the rightful heir to their anti-machine campaigns. If he
were elected, Merriam promised, he would reappoint Kennelly’s Civil Service Commission chairman, who had been targeted by
the machine. Merriam had some successes in winning over his fellow Democrats. The Independent Voters of Illinois, the city’s
most powerful reform organization, abandoned its usual Democratic loyalties to endorse Merriam. But what really would have
given Merriam’s campaign the aura of Democratic-Republican fusion was an endorsement from either of Daley’s Democratic primary
opponents, and in this endeavor he failed. Kennelly remained neutral. Adamowski, for all his warnings of the dire consequences
that would befall Chicago if Daley won, told Merriam that as a lifelong Democrat he could not endorse a Republican. “The next
year,” Merriam noted later, “he ran as a Republican for state’s attorney.”
⁷⁶

Issues, in the conventional sense, played only a minor role in the campaign. Daley’s positions ran heavily to platitudes.
He was against crime, favored hiring more policemen, and strongly supported “beat walking.” Daley also wanted government to
operate more efficiently. And, in what would become one of his trademarks, he made insistent but vague promises about doing
more for the city’s neighborhoods. “The neighborhoods are the backbone of the city,” Daley told one local crowd. “Revitalizing
and protecting them is the first and main job of an administration centered on the people of Chicago.” Merriam, by contrast,
actually offered creative solutions to many problems confronting the city. To improve transportation, for example, he called
for tearing down the ugly and noisy elevated tracks in the Loop and replacing them with a subway system, and for offering
transfers between the commuter rail lines and the city bus system.
⁷⁷

As he had in the primary, Daley pursued a two-track approach to the racial question. He continued to embrace Dawson and the
sub-machine, and campaigned heavily in the Black Belt. Daley, who had grown up close to blacks and attended high school in
a black neighborhood, threw himself into Bronzeville in a way that more patrician whites like Kennelly would not. “One of
my first experiences in politics was on the South Side at an infamous nightclub at 55th and State,” recalls Ira Dawson, William
Dawson’s nephew. “I watched Daley parade down through that packed, smoked-filled nightclub — it was like the Cotton Club in
Harlem — and being very accessible.” Daley managed to present himself to the black community as someone who supported them
in their struggle for equal rights. In a front-page editorial entitled “Elect Daley Mayor,” the
Chicago Defender
declared that “[o]n the vital issues facing Chicago,” including civil rights, Daley had “taken a firm and laudable stand.”
But the truth was, Daley’s stand was not especially laudable, and it certainly was not firm. When whites were present, Daley
made every effort to dodge direct questions about integration. At a March 28 meeting of the City Club of Chicago, he was asked
where public housing should be located. Daley spoke in favor of public housing, but he would not address the most vexing question
about it. “Let’s not be arguing about where it’s located,” Daley responded. Through the machine’s back channels to the ethnic
neighborhoods, Daley got out word that white voters could count on him to hold the line on integration. The militantly anti-integration
South Deering Improvement Association, which was leading the battle against blacks moving into Trumbull Park, endorsed Daley
for mayor. The group sent out sound trucks on primary day announcing that it had struck a secret deal with Daley, and urged
its followers to vote for him. In the days after the election, the
South Deering Bulletin
declared confidently that Daley would be good for the cause because he lived in a neighborhood “very much like South Deering”
and he had stood up for “preservation of neighborhoods.” The machine also employed more blatant racial appeals, but it made
them quietly. It circulated letters in the Bungalow Belt — the working-class white neighborhoods on the Southwest and Northwest
sides — from a made-up group called the “American Negro Civic Association” praising Merriam for his steadfast support for
open housing. The machine also spread rumors in these same neighborhoods that Merriam’s wife — whose French ancestry made
her exotic by Bungalow Belt standards — was black. While they were at it, they also stirred up Catholic voters by circulating
copies of Merriam’s divorce papers. In a television appearance for Daley, Near North Side alderman Thomas Keane spoke movingly
of Daley’s family — “that enchantingly adorable mother . . . and those seven children kneeling at the side of their bed at
night in family prayer” — and emphasized that “Daley has seven children and they are all his own.” It was a reminder that
Merriam had divorced, remarried, and was raising two children born to his wife during her first marriage.
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Daley sought, as he had in the primary, to fashion his campaign into a populist struggle. He once again made the rounds of
the ward luncheons and neighborhood meetings, and he drew on the machine’s grassroots contacts to stage a series of “family-to-family”
meetings in private homes. Without the benefit of the machine’s connections, Merriam’s forays into working-class Chicago often
left him in front of unreceptive, or at best indifferent, audiences. In one of the low points, Merriam arrived at a South
Side revival meeting just as a woman writhing with religious ecstasy was being carted out. “Say what you got to say,” the
preacher told Merriam. “Do it in five minutes and git out of here.” The candidate did as he was told.
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Daley also used his organized labor support to reach out to everyday Chicagoans. He was warmly received in the city’s union
halls. On March 4, an enthusiastic crowd of four thousand members of the AFL International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
heard Daley introduced as “the man who can do us the most good.” Several weeks later, he promised a meeting of twelve hundred
transit workers that if elected he would appoint a “labor union man” as a member of the Chicago Transit Authority board. In
fact, Daley promised, he would appoint labor representatives to city boards in every area — including schools, parks, and
health. “I have found union leaders want to serve not only for their unions but for all the people,” he said. “That is the
kind of leadership we need.” Daley brought his father, Michael, with him to a rally of the Sheet Metal Workers Union, of which
the elder Daley had been a member for half a century. “Give Dick a vote,” Michael Daley implored his union brothers. “We’ve
never had a member or a member’s son elected to such a high office.” Daley also paid a pre-election visit to the stockyards,
mounting a horse and reminiscing for a crowd of 500 about his days as a stockyard cowboy.
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Merriam, like Kennelly and Adamowski before him, painted a dark picture of the kind of city Chicago would be under Daley.
This was an election, Merriam argued, that would determine whether the city would fall hostage to the “arrogant Morrison Hotel
bosses” and their brand of machine politics. “Their transparent and nefarious manipulations,” he said, proved “that the Democratic
party cannot be trusted to govern the city in the interests of all the people.” Merriam also tried to tie Daley to the syndicate.
Kennelly had been dumped, Merriam charged, to clear the way for a “wide open city” for syndicate gambling and other illegal
activities. He cited an article in
Variety
reporting that strip joints were starting to reopen in Chicago in anticipation of a Daley victory. “I’ve been hearing reports
that Democratic precinct captains around town are spreading the word that after the election — if their man becomes mayor
— everything is going to go,” Merriam declared. “Every syndicate operation is going to open up in Chicago: open for high stake,
high pressure gambling, crooked dice games and all the rest.”
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As in the primary, Daley responded to Merriam’s charges of bossism with sentimental pleas that the voters see his innate goodness.
“I would not unleash the forces of evil,” Daley protested. “It’s a lie. I will follow the training my good Irish mother gave
me — and Dad. If I am elected, I will embrace mercy, love, charity, and walk humbly with my God.” A key to Daley’s strategy
of deflecting the charges of machine politics was once again securing the endorsement of reform icon Adlai Stevenson. At a
Palmer House dinner for the reform-minded “Volunteers for Daley” group, Daley endorsed Stevenson for president in 1956. Daley’s
logrolling worked. At the dinner, Stevenson called Daley a “four square friend of judicial and tax reform,” and later went
on to back him against Merriam.
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