American Pharaoh (31 page)

Daley’s response to the Trumbull Park delegation was to equivocate. He had learned from the mayoral election that South Side whites did not mind if he met with black leaders and offered vague expressions of sympathy. And that was precisely what he did. Daley assured the visitors that he was concerned about the unrest in their neighborhood, and that he would tolerate “no violence against any citizen because of race.” He would not, however, commit to any of the specific courses of action the delegation was advocating. Calling the Trumbull Park situation an “inherited mess,” Daley asked them to be patient. “I’ve been in office six weeks,” he said. “Give us a chance.” Daley then employed what would become a favorite tactic: buying time by setting up a distinguished committee. He named Chicago Bar Association president Augustine Bowe to head up the twenty-three-member group. The membership of the committee, which included
Chicago Defender
publisher John Sengstacke, was impressive, and Daley said all the right things, urging the members to conduct their inquiry “with broad and human sympathy.” But Trumbull Park blacks and their supporters recognized the committee as a stalling device. In August, when Daley had still done nothing, an interracial group of religious and civic leaders came forward calling on him to provide leadership “in this hour of crisis for our city.” In October 1955, five thousand NAACP protesters converged on City Hall, accusing Daley of letting down Chicago’s black community with his inaction on Trumbull Park. Two picket lines circled City Hall and marched around it in opposite directions. One demonstrator held a sign reading “Mr. Mayor: Trumbull Park — Chicago’s Little Mississippi.” Two years of “conferences and discussions with various city officials of the present and preceding administrations have produced promises, but no fruitful action,” charged Willoughby Abner, a United Auto Workers Union official and leader of the Chicago branch of the NAACP. “The time for action is now, the time for pleading is past.”
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It soon became clear, however, that Daley had no intention of taking action in Trumbull Park. The same week as the NAACP protest, Daley visited the neighborhood for a groundbreaking ceremony for a parsonage and recreation room for the South Deering Methodist Church. It would have been an ideal occasion for Daley to talk to neighborhood whites about racial equality and tolerance, but he instead stuck closely to theological topics. “The history of our nation is in many ways directly connected with our religious principles,” Daley told the crowd. “The laws of our land, the constitutions of the United States and the state of Illinois, are based on the great truths and moral principles of Christianity.” He made glancing reference to the need to “protect the rights of all our citizens,” but no one who heard it would have mistaken it for a strong endorsement of integration. More significant than what Daley said was what he did not. Hours before he arrived at the church, Mrs. Clara Page, a black resident of Trumbull Park, had been attacked while attending services across the street. The scene at Saint Kevin’s Catholic Church had been ugly, with a white parishioner yelling at Page, “Why did you come to our church? Go back to your kind.” Other worshippers joined in, until police had to escort Page and another woman to safety in a squad car. As it turned out, Page had been assaulted several other times since she moved into Trumbull Park a year earlier. In one attack, twenty women threw rocks at her, another woman, and their four children. Daley never mentioned Mrs. Page in his speech at the church across the street.
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It did not take long for white residents of Trumbull Park to realize their faith in Daley in the last election had been justified. The South Deering Improvement Association proclaimed happily, a few months into his mayoralty, that City Hall was at last “starting to see the light . . . and . . . South Deering’s side of this fight against forced integration and mongrelization.” Supporters of integration, who had been equally convinced during the campaign that Daley was on their side, were bitterly disappointed. The Catholic Interracial Council, many of whose members had backed Daley, complained that now that he was mayor they “were not able to get through” to City Hall.
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Though the Loop was in serious decline, it had a powerful ally on its side: Chicago’s business establishment. The Chicago area was home to fifty-four companies in the
Fortune
500, and many of these were based in and around State Street. These Loop businessmen had considerable clout. When John Gunther was in Chicago in the 1940s researching his classic book
Inside U.S.A.,
he asked a leading citizen who ran the city. The answer came back: “State Street and the Irish.” Along with its corporate headquarters, the Loop was home to hotels like the Palmer House, department stores like Marshall Field, and banks like the First National Bank of Chicago. Most of these businesses were firmly anchored in the Loop. In the case of the retailers, there was still no other location, certainly not in the still-fledgling suburbs, that could duplicate the customer traffic. The city’s major hotels were inextricably linked to their grand downtown buildings. And Chicago’s banks, because of antiquated rules against branch banking, had little choice but to keep their operations centered downtown. As long as they were stuck in the Loop, these institutions were all committed to improving it.
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As downtown businessmen considered how to turn around the Loop, they concluded that its biggest problem was that it was in danger of becoming what developer Arthur Rubloff called, in a speech to the city’s Building Managers Association, “The Central Business District Slum.” The Loop was hardly a model of racial integration at the time. Well into the 1950s, many Loop businesses still did not employ blacks; as late as 1958, the First National Bank was still not hiring black tellers. But Loop businessmen feared what the future might bring. The central business district bordered on ghettos to the south and west, and the Frances Cabrini Homes — later Cabrini-Green — and other housing projects were located nearby. The biggest concern was the Black Belt, which had spread to within blocks of the Loop, due South along State Street. Chicago’s black population was soaring at the time — rising from 14 percent of the city’s population to 23 percent during the 1950s — and these new black arrivals threatened to push the Black Belt further north into the Loop. Already, the street traffic downtown was becoming increasingly black, and after sunset whites were scarce. The fears of Chicago’s business establishment, as historian Arnold Hirsch has observed, were precisely the same as those of whites in working-class neighborhoods on the periphery of the ghetto: each was afraid of being engulfed in a tidal wave of poor blacks. “Unless something drastic is done, you will write off State Street in fifteen years,” one Realtor told a University of Chicago researcher. “And the minority groups will take over and then, no matter what the white people do, it can never be brought back, no matter what is done. And the whole goddam town will go to hell.”
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To the downtown business establishment, the logical solution to the problem was urban renewal. The Housing Act of 1949, which allocated millions of federal dollars to localities to buy and reclaim slum properties, is often credited with starting the national urban renewal movement. But by 1949, urban renewal was already well under way in Chicago. The city’s showcase project involved the Illinois Institute of Technology on the Near South Side. When IIT was built in the 1890s as the Armour Institute of Technology, the neighborhood was affluent, but it eventually fell on hard times. By the mid-1940s, the school found itself on the “wrong” side of Wentworth Avenue and the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, surrounded by slums. IIT had trouble finding middle-class housing for students and staff, there was little room for expansion, and fear of crime was hurting the school’s reputation. “It eventually became clear,” IIT president Henry Heald said later, “that we really had only two choices — to run away from the blight or to stand and fight.” Adopting the rallying cry “Stand and Fight,” Heald campaigned to upgrade the area around the institute. Heald’s masterstroke was appealing to Chicago’s business leaders by convincing them that the battle IIT was fighting would soon be their own battle: the urban blight assailing his school would, he argued, soon spread to the rest of the city. Before long, some of Chicago’s most prominent citizens had signed on to help IIT reclaim its neighborhood.
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Heading up the IIT campaign were three of the city’s most influential businessmen: Holman Pettibone, president of Chicago Title & Trust Company; Milton Mumford, vice president of Marshall Field & Company; and Ferd Kramer, president of the Draper & Kramer real estate firm. All three men were members of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, a group of prominent Chicagoans dedicated to fighting slums. Urban renewal, they soon realized, was not easy. IIT would need to assemble parcels of land, raise money to buy the land, and develop mechanisms for relocating displaced residents. Pettibone, an influential Republican, lobbied Governor Dwight Green in July 1946 for help in enacting state urban renewal legislation. When Kennelly took office in 1947, Democratic business leaders lobbied him as well. The result was the passage of the Redevelopment and Relocation Acts of 1947. This landmark state legislation gave Illinois cities the power to condemn slum land by eminent domain, which solved the problem of assembling land parcels, and kept costs down by prohibiting owners from charging extortionate prices. The new law also established a Chicago Land Clearance Commission, which was vested with the power to acquire property and convey it to private developers. To liberals, the CLCC seemed like a deliberate attempt to keep urban renewal out of the hands of Elizabeth Wood and the CHA. If these powers had been given to the CHA instead of the CLCC, Wood could have required any new housing built on condemned sites to be racially integrated.
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With these broad new urban renewal powers now in place, IIT and its allies looked for a developer who would be willing to build on the condemned land. Pettibone and Mumford convinced New York Life Insurance Company to invest in apartment buildings near the IIT campus. After the Land Clearance Commission razed 100 acres of slums, New York Life built Lake Meadows apartments, a middle-class complex of 2,000 units of housing in ten apartment buildings, which cover only 9 percent of the land.
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The new development was racially integrated, and Pettibone would later call it “Chicago’s outstanding demonstration that whites and non-whites can live comfortably as neighbors, not only in the same neighborhood but in the same apartment building.” Still, the project substantially increased the white population of the area. With rents that were from 300 percent to 600 percent of what had been charged previously, Lake Meadows also changed the economic profile of the area from poor to middle-class. A second institution in the area, Michael Reese Hospital, undertook a similar urban renewal project, which produced Prairie Shores, another middle-income housing complex. Prairie Shores’ developers worked to attract white tenants by giving priority to the largely white hospital staff, rather than area residents, and holding a special advance open house for hospital employees. Prairie Shores started out with 80 percent white occupancy. When they were complete, Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores were hailed as resounding triumphs for urban renewal.
Fortune
magazine credited them with creating “an island of decency” amid “the South Side’s oceanic slums.”
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The Loop businessmen had IIT and Michael Reese in mind when they set out to upgrade their own neighborhood. The key to each of these projects was having a strong institution guiding the urban renewal, and the downtown business community decided to create one of its own. The Chicago Central Area Committee was founded in 1956, shortly after Daley’s election and with his active cooperation. The CAC grew out of the State Street Council, an association of businesses located on and near the Loop’s leading thoroughfare. The CAC’s membership was a Who’s Who of Chicago’s wealthy and powerful. Its chairman was Pettibone, of Chicago Title and Trust Company, and its treasurer was the president of Harris Trust and Savings Bank, one of a handful of big downtown banks. The group’s board included the heads of Illinois Central Railroad, Marshall Field & Company, and United Air Lines. The CAC saw itself as a physician working to heal the Loop’s urban ills. “The strength of each city will always be marked by the strength and vigor of its central area — the heart of a whole region,” the group declared in an early statement of purpose. The CAC developed an ambitious agenda of attracting more corporate headquarters to the Loop, improving traffic and parking, and beautifying the downtown area. But its core mission was doing what IIT and Reese had done: remove blight from the target area, making it wealthier and whiter in the process. “The central area is not a slum, but it has some disgraceful areas,” Pettibone said shortly after the CAC’s founding. “The only thing to do is to tear them down.”
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