American Pharaoh (25 page)

Merriam’s warning that Daley would usher in an age of corruption received a boost when the Chicago Bar Association brought
charges against Alderman Becker in connection with the zoning-kickback allegations. Daley, who had stuck by Becker when the
accusations were first made, decided to act. He forced Becker off the machine ticket and pushed John Marcin, the nominee for
city treasurer, up to the city clerk slot. To replace Marcin, Daley chose Morris Sachs, who had run for city clerk on Kennelly’s
ticket and lost by a mere 21,000 votes — running 79,000 votes ahead of the mayor. Sachs, who started out as a poor immigrant
selling clothing from a pack on his back, had risen to success as a clothing retailer and as creator of the popular
Sachs’ Amateur Hour
television show. Sachs was a beloved figure in Chicago, known for his folksy ways. “I sold Dick Daley’s mother the first
pair of long pants for Dick,” he used to boast on the campaign trail, to the delight of his audiences. “Without me, where
would he be?” It also did not hurt that Sachs was Jewish, which kept the Democratic ticket ethnically balanced after the removal
of Becker. The
Tribune
wasted little time in running a cartoon depicting Sachs as a bellboy at the Morrison Hotel, but Sachs remained popular with
the voters, and his ebullient personal style quickly overshadowed the Becker scandal. Daley once again relied on the well-disciplined
Chicago machine to turn out his voters. As party boss, he sent word out from the Morrison Hotel that every ward committeeman
and precinct captain was expected to produce in this election as he never had before. Daley’s frenetic campaigning in the
ranks of the machine reached its high point on March 28, at a final rally for nearly six thousand precinct workers at the
Civic Opera House.
⁸³

The newspapers were against Daley, and he knew it. The three largest, the
Tribune,
the
Sun-Times,
and the
Daily News,
all endorsed Merriam, which was no surprise given their anti-machine stance. The machine did manage to secure the endorsement
of the fourth, the
Herald-American,
for Daley. The newspaper was ailing financially, and the machine reportedly struck a deal that in exchange for a Daley endorsement,
its precinct captains would sell subscriptions. More important than endorsements, however, was news coverage, and by this
standard the papers — with their heavy coverage of Merriam’s charges of voter fraud, and their hounding Becker off the ticket
— were also giving aid and comfort to the Merriam camp. Candidates work hard to win over journalists, but Daley, knowing that
the Republican-leaning press was not about to go soft on the machine, seemed to delight in spurning them. He was known to
give reporters the address of a vacant lot for his next speaking appearance. Daley’s view of reporters, one reporter wrote
in the
Sun-Times,
was that he “doesn’t seem to want them around.”
⁸⁴

Merriam was concerned, with good reason, that Daley and his supporters would attempt to steal the election. The Democratic
Party was in the hands, Merriam charged, of “dictators who may spend a million dollars — over two hundred dollars per precinct
— to try to buy the votes they cannot honestly win.” Merriam distributed the primary-day photographs of Sidney “Short Pencil”
Lewis stealing votes, and backed them up with new evidence. A man named Admiral Le Roy had sworn out an affidavit saying he
had personally observed “Short Pencil” wielding his famed pencil. Le Roy had himself been a victim of the machine’s brand
of dirty politics. He had announced for alderman, challenging the organization, but he withdrew when he was “beaten up and
had a gun pulled on him” and told to get out of the race. To further bolster his charges that the machine intended to steal
the election, Merriam sent out thirty thousand letters to registered voters in machine strongholds. Nearly three thousand
of them came back “unclaimed” or “moved, left no address” — proof, Merriam contended, that the machine had as many as 100,000
ghost voters hidden away on the Chicago voting rolls. Merriam filed a formal complaint with the Election Board. But he knew
it would go nowhere because the Election Board chairman, Sidney T. Holzman, was a member in good standing of the machine —
Merriam lambasted him as the “chief spokesman for the Morrison Hotel politburo.” County judge Otto Kerner, who presided over
the Cook County election machinery and had appointed Holzman, was Daley’s good friend and Anton Cermak’s son-in-law. Merriam
produced a photograph of Kerner warmly congratulating Daley on primary night, and asked how Kerner and Holzman could be trusted
to keep the machine honest. Holzman responded that Merriam was “following Hitler’s tactics which consisted of this — if you
tell a lie often enough, people will begin to believe you.” Merriam also charged that some precinct captains in the Ida B.
Wells Homes housing project were threatening to evict tenants unless they voted for Daley. The CHA stayed out of the matter,
and Daley scoffed at the charges. “Democratic precinct captains don’t have to use pressure of that sort to get votes,” Daley
declared.
⁸⁵

In the final days of the campaign, Daley made the most of his financial edge over Merriam. The machine had about $1 million
to spend in the campaign, more than three times what Merriam had raised. The Daley campaign distributed thousands of dollars
in walk-around money, used to pay for election-day operations and get-outthe-vote efforts. Some of the money went directly
into the pockets of voters — or in some cases to buy bottles of whiskey that went into the pockets of voters. But the machine
also had more subtle ways of translating dollars into votes. “I have heard it said that it costs about 20 thousand dollars
to deliver a Ward in Chicago on election day,” one machine chronicler has written. “Most of this money is placed in the hands
of precinct captains. The precinct captain has his own ideas on how to cut up the money. He talks to a woman who lives in
a six-flat,
^*
a woman who is favorable to his cause and well-liked by her neighbors. Will she be willing to help get her friends’ vote
for the Party? Well, she might. Of course, there will be a few ‘expenses’ — And that is the cue for the precinct captain to
dig into his pocket for a ten-spot or a twenty.” The machine added to its other advantages by resorting to a few of its traditional
last-minute dirty tricks. In addition to the letters that went out from the nonexistent American Negro Civic Association endorsing
Merriam, Republican voters got letters urging a vote for Daley, on letterhead of the fictional Taft-Eisenhower League. Rumors
were also circulated that anyone who had voted in the Democratic primary could not vote for Merriam now. “Voters should beware
of such poison, which is typical of the dirty methods of the Democratic machine,” Republican county chairman Edward Moore
warned.
⁸⁶

As in the primary, it seemed that the election would turn on the size of the turnout. Merriam implored Chicagoans to vote
in large numbers to offset the machine’s strength. “There must be an outpouring of citizens April 5,” he declared. “If the
confident bosses could defeat the wishes of the people as they did Feb. 22, it would be a catastrophe for Chicago.” Conventional
wisdom held that the machine would produce about 600,000 votes for Daley. If more than 1.2 million Chicagoans showed up at
the polls, Merriam believed, he would win. On election day, the early indications were that the turnout was exceeding all
predictions. Merriam attended a memorial service for
Chicago Tribune
publisher Colonel Robert McCormick at midday, and as he entered the Fourth Presbyterian Church he heard a city election official
predicting that the turnout would reach 1,500,000. “I spent the whole hour, when I should have been thinking about the soul
of Colonel McCormick, thinking about who I was going to appoint to my cabinet,” Merriam said later.
⁸⁷

Daley arrived at the Morrison Hotel at 5:00
P.M.
, and holed up in the private offices of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee to wait for the returns. With Arvey
at his side, he pored over precinct returns as they were called in by ward leaders. As the hours went by, the offices filled
up with Daley’s machine allies. Adhering to the machine’s rigid hierarchy, operatives below the rank of ward committeeman
were kept out of the office by a guard posted at the door. The numbers that were pouring in were good, and equally important,
turnout was not as robust as the machine had feared earlier in the day. By 8:30
P.M.
, Daley emerged from a side door and made his way to the hotel’s Madison Room for a victory statement. Daley declared to a
cluster of television cameras and radio microphones, “I promise no miracles — no bargains — but with unity, cooperation, and
teamwork, we will continue to build a better city for ourselves and our children.”
⁸⁸

Daley won the mayoralty with about 55 percent of the vote, a healthy victory but the narrowest margin in more than a decade.
Daley had received 708,222 votes, more than the Merriam forces had counted on, but not an insurmountable number. With a higher
turnout, Merriam might have prevailed, but since only 1.3 million votes were cast in the end, that left less than 600,000
for Merriam. The ward-by-ward results were remarkably similar to the primary. Daley and Merriam had run evenly in most of
the city. Again, it was the Automatic Eleven that had given Daley his victory — in this case, a margin of 125,179 votes, almost
all of Daley’s 126,967-vote citywide edge. And once again, the black vote proved critical. Dawson’s five wards gave Daley
81,910 votes to 32,547 votes for Merriam — more than a 49,000-vote margin. When other heavily black wards were added in, Daley’s
margin from predominantly black wards exceeded 103,000. If these black voters had voted Republican rather than Democratic,
Daley would almost certainly have lost. The syndicate performed even more impressively. Daley took close to 90 percent of
the 1st Ward vote, winning by 18,233 to 2,304. It may have been the mob’s work for his election that caused the
Chicago Daily News
to editorialize: “Some of the finest, high-principled men in the Democratic party worked for Daley in the election. So did
some of the most notorious rascals in politics anywhere. Both kinds helped to deliver the votes to the winner. Daley knows
which is which. We pray he has the strength to govern himself and the city accordingly.”
⁸⁹

The
Tribune
welcomed the new mayor cautiously. “We congratulate Richard J. Daley,” the paper wrote after the election. “We hope, for
his sake, as well as Chicago’s, that he will do nothing in the coming four years to sully his good name.” More prescient assessments
came from those who knew Daley better. Charlie Weber, alderman from the 45th Ward on the Northwest Side and a machine loyalist,
told reporters on election night: “Let me tell ya, this Daley — he’s gonna be one tough sonofabitch.” But it was Paddy Bauler
of the 43rd Ward, among the last of Chicago’s saloon-aldermen, who got off the line for the ages. The 245-pound Bauler danced
a little jig and declared that Daley’s election meant that “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!” Bauler also gave reporters another
less quoted, but equally perceptive, assessment. “Keane and them fellas — Jake Arvey, Joe Gill — they think they are gonna
run things,” Bauler said. “Well, you listen now to what I am sayin’: they’re gonna run nothing’. They ain’t found it out yet,
but Daley’s the dog with the big nuts, now that we got him elected. You wait and see; that’s how it is going to be.”
⁹⁰

CHAPTER

4

I Am the Mayor
and Don’t You Forget It

P
addy Bauler had good reason to dance a jig on election night: Daley’s victory had averted the most serious threat to the Chicago machine in decades. Machine politicians had long belittled reformers and their dreams of cleaning up city government. George Washington Plunkitt, the sachem of New York’s Tammany Hall, once dismissed reformers as “mornin’ glories — looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever like fine old oaks.” Chicago machine politicians were equally dismissive of their good-government opponents: Bauler described one reformer as “so dumb he probably thinks the forest preserve is some kind of jelly.” But by 1955, reformers were showing undeniable success in dismantling Democratic machines across the country. In Boston, another city with a long history of Irish-Catholic machine politics, reformers had seized City Hall in 1951. In New York, Tammany Hall had been badly wounded by the reform mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia. And in Chicago, as in the rest of the country, a combination of factors — including suburbanization, ethnic assimilation, and the rise of civil service — were cutting sharply into the machine’s base. The Cook County Democratic Organization’s power had already begun to wane under Mayor Kennelly. If Kennelly had been reelected, or if Merriam had won, the machine might well have faced extinction.
¹

Daley was too politic to join Bauler in publicly celebrating the defeat of political reform. To the contrary, he rushed to reassure the city’s voters and editorial writers of his good-government intentions. On election night, Daley called on the state legislature to come up with the money for two thousand new police officers he had pledged during the campaign. It was an indication that he intended to keep his campaign promises, but also a subtle rebuke to those who had labeled him the candidate of the “hoodlum element.” Daley also vowed on election night that his administration would keep civil service operating at its “present high standard.” He also declared, as he repeatedly had as a candidate, that he would resign as party chairman to “devote all of my time to the mayor’s office.” In fact, Daley had no intention of preserving civil service or of stepping down as boss, but his election-night pledges had the effect of breaking the bad news about his anti-reform intentions gently.
²