American Pharaoh (3 page)
Daley created a city that, in the famous phrase, worked. The question was, for whom did it work? Daley championed working-class,
ethnic neighborhoods like his own beloved Bridgeport, and fought to preserve and expand Chicago’s now-thriving downtown. But
for every middle-class neighborhood he saved, there was a poor neighborhood in which living conditions worsened. For every
downtown skyscraper that kept jobs and tax dollars in the city, there was a housing project tower that confined poor people
in an overcrowded ghetto. Over time, the Daley-era housing projects turned into “vertical ghettos,” rife with crime and social
dysfunction. Today, Chicago is the nation’s most racially segregated large city: about 90 percent of black Chicagoans would
have to move for the city to be integrated. Chicago is one of America’s wealthiest cities but, remarkably, nine of the nation’s
ten poorest census tracts are in Chicago’s housing projects. Most of these are in the State Street Corridor.
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During the civil rights era, Chicago blacks often referred to Mayor Daley as “Pharaoh.” Civil rights activists saw Daley as
an oppressor and a taskmaster — as an unrelenting Ramses to Martin Luther King’s Moses. Daley was a pharaoh in this sense,
but also in others. He ruled over his empire with pharaonic power, the kind of absolute power that few American politicians
have ever wielded. His twenty-one-year reign over Chicago was of dynastic proportions. And like the pharaohs of old, Daley
built a city and filled it with awesome monuments — an imposing legacy that, for good and for bad, has survived long after
his death, and that will likely continue to carry out his will for generations to come.
R
ichard Joseph Daley was a product of the bloody world of the Chicago slaughterhouses. Chicagoans of his day, both Catholics
and non-Catholics, located themselves by referring to their local parish — they came from Saint Mary’s or Saint Nicholas’s.
Daley came from Nativity of Our Lord, the parish church of his childhood, where he would be eulogized seventy-four years later.
Nativity was founded in the mid-1800s to serve the poor Irish-Catholic laborers who were flooding the area to work in the
growing meat-packing industry. The church’s simple stone building stood at the corner of 37th and Union, on the fringes of
the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport and hard up against a vast expanse of cattle-slaughtering facilities. Standing on
the steps after Mass, young Daley could smell the fetid mixture of manure and blood that wafted over from the sprawling Union
Stock Yards to the south. The gurgling in the background was the cackle of “Bubbly Creek,” a torpid offshoot of the Chicago
River that got its name from the fermenting animal carcasses and offal in its slow-moving waters. If Nativity seemed like
an unlikely place for spiritual repose, it had once been worse. The church’s first home had actually been in the former J.
McPherson livery stables. The name “Nativity” was a reference to the fact that the church, like Christ, had been born in a
stable — an attempt to put a holy gloss on grim surroundings. Nativity’s new building had a pleasant interior, including ornate
stained-glass windows, but nothing could make up for the harsh reality of geography. Daley’s spiritual home was located just
a few hundred feet from what one parish history called “the greatest and bloodiest butcher shamble in the world.”
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The whole city of Chicago had a reputation for coarseness and for lacking the style and sophistication of older cities like
Philadelphia or Boston. “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again,” Rudyard Kipling wrote after visiting in
1889. “It is inhabited by savages.” Chicago was the industrial capital of the Midwest, a tough town dominated by factories
that belched black smoke. Theodore Dreiser, who roamed the city as a reporter, marveled in his book
Newspaper Days
at the “hard, constructive animality” of the rougher parts of Chicago. It was not uncommon, he found on his rounds, to come
across men standing outside ramshackle homes “tanning dog or cat hides.” The Chicago of this era was a town in which displaced
farmhands and struggling immigrants competed for space in ram-shackle tenements and rooming houses, and hooligans roamed the
streets. Block after block of “disorderly houses” did a brisk business corrupting hordes of guileless young girls, like Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie, who arrived daily from small towns in a desperate search for a better life. And it was Chicago saloonkeepers
who invented the Mickey Finn, a chloral hydrate–laced drink slipped to solitary patrons so they could be easily robbed. “The
New York Tenderloin,” journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote, “was a model of order and virtue compared with the badly regulated,
police-paid criminal lawlessness of the Chicago Loop and its spokes.” Chicago’s moral climate was shaped by Al Capone and
the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and by the ignominy of the 1919 Chicago White Sox — the team that shocked the nation by
fixing the World Series. “Chicago is unique,” journalist A. J. Liebling would conclude after visiting for a year to research
a book. “It is the only completely corrupt city in America.” Loving Chicago, Nelson Algren once said, was like loving a woman
with a broken nose.
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Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Daley’s neighborhood was a grim place. It was Chicago’s first slum,
known in its early days by the evocative name Hardscrabble. It was settled in the 1830s and 1840s by the Irish “shovelmen”
who built the nearby Illinois & Michigan Canal, many working for whiskey and a dollar a day. The area was renamed Bridgeport
in the 1840s, when a low bridge was built across the Chicago River at Ashland Avenue, forcing barges to unload on one side
and reload on the other. When the canals were completed, Bridgeport’s dirty work of canal-building gave way to the even less
savory trade of animal slaughter. Chicago killed and prepared for market much of the livestock raised in the farm states surrounding
it. Leading the nation in slaughterhouses, it was truly — as Carl Sandburg observed — “hog butcher for the world.” In the
mid-1800s, Chicago slaughterhouses were being forced out of the congested downtown, and they found the vast expanses south
of Bridgeport an ideal place to relocate. The area had sweeping tracts of open land, and a steady supply of water from the
Chicago River available to use in the slaughtering and treatment processes. It was also near railroad tracks, which meant
that once the cattle arrived from the countryside, they would not need to be led through the city streets on their way to
the slaughter. In 1865, several slaughterhouses that once operated in downtown Chicago combined to form the Union Stock Yards,
an enormous collection of meat-processing plants that dominated the area just south of Bridgeport.
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Upton Sinclair, whose novel
The Jungle
exposed the horrific world of the Chicago slaughterhouses, captured the unsavory surroundings in which Daley grew up. There
were “so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world,” Sinclair wrote. “The sound of them here was as of all
the barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them — it would have taken all day simply to count the pens.” Young Daley
used to watch as the animals were driven down Archer Avenue to their demise, and he and his friends would gawk at the remnants
that showed up in Bubbly Creek. Thousands of Daley’s neighbors labored in the slaughterhouses, their workdays an uninterrupted
assembly line of killing. Pigs with chains around their hind legs were hooked to a spokeless wheel, which hoisted the squealing
animals into the air and carried them by overhead rail across the length of the building, where a man covered in blood cut
their throats by hand. The blood that drained out was collected for use as fertilizer. Then the hog, often still squirming
with life, was dropped into a vat of boiling water. Cattle were treated no better. It was hard, dispiriting work. Daley’s
neighbors were the workers Sinclair told of, those who fell prey to the chemicals used to pickle the meats, which caused “all
the joints” of their fingers to “be eaten by the acid, one by one.” Coming of age in this violent world, Daley was robbed
of any illusions early.
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As its original name suggested, Bridgeport was a hardscrabble place. The neighborhood’s earliest residents had lived in wooden
shanties along the Chicago River that sank into the muddy soil of the riverbank. It was a wild region, where wolves ran free
in the early years of Daley’s childhood. The predominant form of housing, after residents gained the wherewithal to move beyond
wooden shanties, was the humble “bungalow,” a staple of working-class Chicago architecture. These long and narrow houses,
or “shotgun-shacks,” were a big step up from the squalid accommodations along the river, but they were still cheap housing
for people who could not afford better. These small bungalows, on not-much-larger lots, were usually home to large immigrant
families that would have been crowded in twice the space. Years after Daley was elected mayor, his wife would recall the cramped
conditions of her childhood bungalow, in a neighborhood adjoining Bridgeport. “There were 10 children in our family and we
only had one bathroom but somehow we all managed,” Sis Daley told a newspaper reporter cheerfully.
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Bridgeport was, as much as any neighborhood in Chicago, a world apart. It lay on the geographical fringes of the city, five
miles from downtown, on land that had only recently been incorporated. And it was separated on all sides by imposing barriers:
the Chicago River to the north, the stockyards to the south, Bubbly Creek to the west, and wide railroad tracks — and then
a black ghetto — to the east. Ethnic groups had divided Chicago according to an unwritten peace treaty. Germans settled on
the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest
Side, and blacks in the South Side Black Belt. Bridgeport was more diverse than most Chicago neighborhoods: it was home to
several different white Catholic immigrant groups. But this only meant that Bridgeport was itself divided into ethnic enclaves.
Most of its Poles were concentrated in northwest Bridgeport, west of Halsted Street, the traditional boundary line between
Irish and non-Irish Bridgeport. Lithuanians also lived predominantly in the northwest, with Morgan Street separating them
from the Poles. Germans and Bohemians were more spread out, but they too stayed mainly on the non-Irish side of Halsted. It
is a reflection of how ethnically divided Bridgeport was that in 1868 the “index of dissimilarity” — the most commonly used
measure of residential segregation — between its Lithuanians and Irish was .96, indicating almost complete separation. In
turn-of-the-century Bridgeport, a block or two meant a world of difference. Tom Donovan, who would later become Daley’s patronage
chief, grew up at 39th and Lowe Avenue, only a few blocks from Daley’s home at 35th and Lowe. But it was one parish over —
Saint Anthony’s, rather than Nativity of Our Lord — so, Donovan insisted, “I didn’t grow up in his neighborhood.” Even Bridgeport’s
Irish were divided up into sub-neighborhoods: the northwest Bridgeport Irish; the Dashed Irish, who lived along upper Union
Avenue, once named Dashed Avenue; the Canaryville Irish, who lived in the marshy far-south end of the neighborhood; and, just
north of Canaryville, the little rectangle of land around Nativity of Our Lord Church known as Hamburg.
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Daley’s deepest loyalties were to this small Irish-Catholic village-within-a-village. Hamburg was no more than a few square
blocks, stretching from 35th Street down to the stockyards at 39th Street, and bounded by Halsted Avenue on the west and the
railroad tracks along Wentworth Avenue on the east. Its major institution was Nativity, which like all Catholic churches of
the time was as much a center of communal life as a place of worship. Archbishop James Quigley, who led the Chicago Archdiocese
from 1903 to 1915, had decreed that “a parish should be of such a size that the pastor can know personally every man, woman,
and child in it,”
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and this was certainly the case in tiny Nativity Parish. The annual parish fair — which featured gambling games, booths selling
oyster stew, and a Hibernian band playing in the corner — was almost a family gathering.
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Hamburg also had an array of secular institutions tying its residents together. The 11th Ward offices, headquarters of one
of the most important units of the city’s powerful Democratic machine, were located on Halsted Avenue at 37th Street. Directly
across Halsted was the neighborhood saloon, Schaller’s Pump, which many said was the real headquarters of the 11th Ward Democrats.
Young residents had an institution of their own, the Hamburg Athletic Club, a combination of sports club, adjunct to the political
machine, and youth gang. Hamburg was a tight little world inhabited by people who shared a religion, an ethnicity, and a common
set of values, and who were mistrustful of those who lacked these bonds. Though it was in the middle of a large city, Hamburg
was “not only a separate neighborhood, but ... a separate world — a small town on a compact . . . scale.”
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By one well-established formulation, a neighborhood is a “place to be defended.” For all its seeming solidity, Irish-Catholic
Hamburg was already in decline even at the time of Daley’s birth. Nativity Parish was losing congregants, declining from 2,800
to 1,200 in the early years of the century, and beginning to encounter financial troubles. Throughout Daley’s childhood, other
ethnic groups were growing in size and drawing closer to Hamburg: formerly Irish Lawler Avenue, a mere four blocks west of
Daley’s childhood home, was renamed “Lithuanica” as the Lithuanian population around it grew. Mr. Dooley, the fictional creation
of the great Irish-American journalist Finley Peter Dunne, expressed Bridgeport’s fears of being engulfed by fast-encroaching
ethnic rivals. In Dunne’s columns in the
Chicago Daily News,
Mr. Dooley was the Irish-born keeper of a Bridgeport saloon. In 1897, five years before Daley’s birth, Mr. Dooley was already
bemoaning the fact that “th’ Hannigans an’ Leonidases an’ Caseys” were moving out to greener pastures, “havin’ made their
pile,” and “Polish Jews an’ Swedes an’ Germans an’ Hollanders” had “swarmed in, settlin’ on th’ sacred sites.” The most telling
sign of Bridgeport’s “change an’ decay,” Mr. Dooley said, was the selection of “a Polacker” to tend the famous “red bridge,”
which joined Bridgeport to the rest of the city, thereby placing control of the neighborhood in the hands of a non-Hibernian.
It was the rising tide of black immigration, though, that Bridgeporters found most worrisome. Daley’s youth coincided with
the start of an unprecedented migration, as southern blacks moved north to take industrial jobs in the Northeast and Midwest.
Most of the blacks flooding into Chicago were settling in the South Side Black Belt, just a few blocks east of Bridgeport,
and the ghetto was always threatening to move closer. By the time Daley was born, many Bridgeporters had decided that their
tough little neighborhood, with its workaday bungalows and slaughterhouse ambience, was best left to the new ethnic groups
that were engulfing it on all sides. Irish residents of Hamburg who had the money — like Mr. Dooley’s Hannigans, Leonidases,
and Caseys — were already moving out to more attractive and prestigious neighborhoods where the lawns were larger and the
air did not smell of blood. But despite all sense and logic, Daley’s family, and later Daley himself, remained intensely loyal
to their small Irish-Catholic village. Daley never moved out and, it might be said, he spent a lifetime defending it.
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