American Pharaoh (26 page)

At his April 22 inauguration, Daley gave a more honest indication of how he intended to operate. Mayoral inaugurations are usually bland ceremonial affairs — a hall filled with friends and political supporters, and an address setting forth lofty goals for improving civic life. Daley had no problem producing the admirers. From the moment the vote totals were in, he had been inundated with congratulatory telegrams and letters from what seemed to be almost everyone he had ever known in his fifty-three years, and many more he did not know at all. His desk at the county clerk’s office had quickly been buried under a scrapbook-collection of old names and familiar signatures. “Joe would have been as proud of you as I am,” read one telegram, sent by Mae McDonough, widow of Daley’s old political patron. Many of these well-wishers were among the capacity crowd of two thousand who jammed into the seats and standing room of the ornate and historic City Council Chambers. Hundreds more mobbed the corridors, or listened to the proceedings through loudspeakers outside on the street. Sis and six of the seven Daley children were proudly seated in the front row, while the remaining daughter watched on television from the Sisters of Mercy novitiate. Daley was sworn in by his old friend Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, who was now a county judge.
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What made Daley’s inauguration unusual was the bluntness of his address. Dressed simply in a blue suit, blue tie, and white shirt, he began with the usual words of appreciation for Mayor Kennelly, Democrats, Republicans, the City Council, and “all the people of Chicago.” He also delivered his customary warm words about Bridgeport. “I have lived all my life in a neighborhood of Chicago,” Daley said. “All that I am I owe to the influences of my family, church, our neighborhood and our city.” But as he spoke, Daley’s tone became more serious. He told the City Council he had no intention of interfering with their “proper functions.” But it would be his duty, he said, to exercise his veto power “against measures which would be harmful to the people.” More significant, he said that he would work to implement proposals made by the Chicago Home Rule Commission to strip the City Council of its executive and budgetary functions and transfer them to City Hall. His goal was “to relieve the council of administrative and technical duties ... and permit the aldermen to devote most of their time to legislation.” What Daley was saying to the City Council, in words that disguised his power grab as a favor, was that he had every intention of turning them into a rubber stamp.
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True to his word, Daley went to work to change the balance of power between the mayor and the City Council. A few months before his election, he had arranged for the Chicago Home Rule Commission to recommend shifting responsibility for preparing the city budget from the City Council to the mayor. The commission also called for ending the long-standing requirement that the City Council approve all city contracts over $2,500. When these recommendations became law, Daley could afford to treat the City Council as little more than an advisory body. Equally important, his dual role as mayor and machine boss made the vast majority of the council his political supplicants. With a few words at a slate-making meeting, Daley could end the political careers of most of them. The result was that, except for a few Republicans and independents, the council quickly became a Daley cheering section. In October, Daley submitted three new appointments to the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium Board. After voting 36–11 to suspend its own rules requiring that the nominees be evaluated in committee, the council approved the appointees by voice vote less than an hour after Daley presented it with the names. Daley had taken Chicago’s aldermen far from the day when their independent and rapacious ways earned them the nickname “the Gray Wolves.” By the time the tuberculosis sanitarium nominees flew through the council, Republicans aldermen were lamenting that Daley had reduced them and their colleagues to mere “puppets.” That is how the council would function for the next two decades under Daley. “In the years he was here, we were useful to fill chairs and vote the way we were told to vote,” recalls machine alderman Edward Burke. “That was the extent of it.”
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Daley also went after the City Council’s informal powers. The city’s fifty aldermen had long had the ability to dispense a wide variety of favors within their wards. A businessman seeking a zoning variance or a driveway permit would ask his alderman to intercede with the appropriate unit of city government to make it happen. One of Daley’s first acts in office was to centralize more of this power in City Hall. Under the new rules, all requests for favors of any significant size were channeled to “the fifth floor,” the location of the mayor’s office in City Hall, and usually to “the Man on Five” — Daley himself. The city council was not happy about the change — some aldermen were charging as much as $20,000 for a driveway permit. But Daley understood the importance of the power to grant these routine favors for a machine politician. “Let me put it in a crude way,” Daley’s mentor Jake Arvey used to advise young men starting out in politics. “Put people under obligation to you.”
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Daley spent hours each day seeing visitors who wanted things from him. They moved through his office quickly, often given no more than five minutes to plead their case. Daley’s office was spare and his desk was empty, except for a pen or pencil and a small box, about six inches by four inches, with paper in it of slightly smaller size. When supplicants made their pitch, Daley usually absorbed it impassively. “He was not aggressive of speech,” says his human relations commissioner, Edward Marciniak. “He listened and asked questions.” Meetings often ended with Daley saying, cryptically, “I’ll look into it.” But Daley operated according to a routine that few of his visitors knew: if the matter was something Daley intended to act on, he generally took a piece of paper out of the box and scribbled a note to himself. “If he doesn’t make a note of it, you can forget it,” said one Chicago politician. “If he opens his drawer, takes out a pencil and starts making notes and asks a few questions, it’s just as good as done.”
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If it was done, Daley wanted the credit. John Johnson, head of the Chicago-based black media empire that bears his name, wanted permission to build a private basement parking lot for the new corporate headquarters he was building in the Loop. His plan called for a driveway to be constructed directly on Michigan Avenue, something the city had not permitted in half a century. When Johnson made inquiries, the response was that he had to see Daley personally. The two men had a cordial meeting at City Hall, and the following day an official from the Buildings Department called to say that Johnson’s request had been approved. Johnson called Daley to thank him — precisely the result Daley wanted when he wrested this power away from the aldermen. “It was impossible to do business in Chicago at that time without dealing with Mayor Daley,” Johnson recalled later. “You couldn’t cut a deal with underlings; you had to see him personally. Which meant that you were personally obligated to him.”
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The inner circle Daley assembled in City Hall was filled with men like him: working-class Irish-Catholics from Bridgeport and similar neighborhoods, with roots in the Democratic machine. A classic academic study,
The Irish and Irish Politicians,
speaks of Irish politicians’ tendency toward “clannishness,” but Daley press secretary Frank Sullivan put it more simply: Daley’s “idea of affirmative action was nine Irishmen and a Swede.” The man Daley looked to above all others to help him run the city was his old friend and political ally Tom Keane. Keane shared Daley’s conspiratorial approach to machine politics. The two men had spent years plotting together at meetings of the Cook County Democratic Organization, and Mayor Kennelly always suspected Keane had been the main strategist of the machine coup d’état that took the Democratic nomination away from him and gave it to Daley. The
Chicago Daily News
once observed that Keane’s rise was evidence of how far a man can go if he has “a little tin in the pot to start with; an I.Q. that goes into the stratosphere; a talent for mischief that would excite the envy of Boss Tweed; and no more scruples than the law requires.” The
Daily News
misjudged Keane in one respect: prosecutors would prove, before his career drew to a close, that he had fewer scruples than the law required.
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Keane looked like an amiable leprechaun, but his looks were deceiving. He was a tough-talking street politician who had worked his way up the ranks of the 31st Ward Democratic Organization at the same time Daley was rising in the 11th. But Keane’s ascent had been eased by the fact that he was heir to an aldermanic seat that had previously been held by his father, an uncle, and his maternal grandfather. Keane shared Daley’s talent for acquiring power and using it imperiously. Shortly before Daley’s election as mayor, a newspaper matter-of-factly described Keane’s ruthless leadership style as chair of the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety. On the day a reporter observed him, Keane took up the first item of business, telling the committee secretary that two of the other aldermen on the committee seconded it, though neither had spoken. Keane then declared the motion carried. He did the same thing with six more pending matters, although in each case he was the only one to speak. “Then he put 107 items into one bundle for passage, and 172 more into another for rejection, again without a voice other than his own having been heard,” the reporter noted. “Having disposed of this mountain of details in exactly ten minutes, Ald. Keane walked out.”
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Daley made Keane his City Council floor leader, and it proved to be a good fit. The Chicago City Council was a motley collection of rogues and mercenaries. They were men like Paddy Bauler, the legendary 43rd Ward alderman who was known as the “clown prince” of Chicago. Bauler, who ran a saloon when he was not making city laws, handled ward business and met with constituents over rounds of beers. Bauler once shot a police officer in a barroom altercation. He later explained that the policeman “swore at me and called me a fat Dutch pig.” Keane was just the man to keep a chamber full of Paddy Baulers in line. “Keane runs the City Council like a circus ringmaster,” a newsman who covered him wrote. “He designates who is to speak on what issue with the flick of a finger.” Keane had no trouble beating wayward aldermen into submission, sometimes by shouting “Sit down or I’ll knock you down.” It was little wonder that under Daley and Keane, the Chicago City Council became a notoriously pliable body — a quintessential rubber stamp. One alderman was famous for doing little but getting out of his seat from time to time to shout: “God bless Mayor Daley!” The Chicago City Council had a reputation for corruption that long pre-dated Keane. As early as 1894, one well-connected lawyer had declared, “There are 68 aldermen in the City Council, and 66 of them can be bought; this I know because I bought them myself.” Keane cherished this tradition, and was ever on the lookout for new ways to exploit his legislative office. Like many aldermen, he had real-estate and insurance businesses on the side, and he used them to translate political influence into personal fortune. “You can’t view him principally as an alderman,” independent alderman Leon Despres once said. “He’s in the business of making a living off of politics.” Years later, Keane would distill the difference between himself and Daley to a simple choice: Daley had spent his career pursuing power, Keane said, while he had always pursued money.
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Daley’s leading staff were struck from a similar mold. He named Matthew Danaher, a twenty-eight-year-old Bridgeport neighbor, as his administrative assistant. Danaher had held the same position for Daley in the county clerk’s office. One of Danaher’s chief duties was maintaining his boss’s voluminous patronage records. Fire commissioner Robert Quinn was another classic Daley man. He had grown up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, and had been a friend for decades. Four days after Daley moved into City Hall, he elevated Quinn from the lower ranks of the department to assistant fire commissioner. Before long, Daley had pushed out longtime fire commissioner Anthony Mullaney to give his old friend the top job. Mullaney started the Daley administration off on a sour note when he stated publicly that Daley had fired him and then lied about it. “That’s the type of man he is,” Mullaney charged. In time, Daley worked more of his old cronies into top positions. His former law partner, William Lynch, would eventually become general counsel to the Chicago Transit Authority. And when he created the position of commissioner of conservation, Daley named his childhood friend Jeremiah Holland, a retired army brigadier general whose brother had been a politically connected Municipal Court judge. Daley was not deterred by the fact that, in the opinion of the president of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, there was “nothing in the record that demonstrates that he is a qualified expert for this job.” Daley eventually appointed Ed Quigley, an Irish ward boss from the West Side’s 27th Ward, as sewer commissioner. Quigley readily admitted that he knew almost nothing about sanitation. Asked once if he had ever worked in the sewers, Quigley responded, “No, but many’s the time I lifted a lid to see if they were flowing.” Daley’s top city officials would soon be tagged with a nickname: “the Irish Neanderthals.”
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