American Pharaoh (4 page)

Daley was born in a simple two-flat at 3502 South Lowe on May 15, 1902. Daley’s father, Michael, was the second of nine children
born to James E. Daley, a New York–born butcher, and Delia Gallagher, an immigrant from Ireland. Like most Irish-American
immigrants, Daley’s forebears came to the country as part of the Great Potato Famine migration, which caused more than two
million Irish to expatriate between 1845 and 1850. Though not brought over in chains, these Irishmen and Irishwomen were torn
from their land and forced to emigrate by extraordinarily cruel circumstances. Before the famine ended, perhaps one-quarter
of Ireland’s population of eight million had died of starvation and disease. Many survivors headed for America. Their journey
across the ocean, made in aptly named “coffin ships,” was perilous. Passengers often succumbed to “ship fever,” a kind of
typhus, along the way. It was a migration of refugees fleeing a country they held dear, often forced to leave loved ones behind.
Family legend has it that Daley’s grandfather began his own journey when he went to market in Cork with his brother to sell
pigs and, with the few shillings he made on the sale, boarded the next ship for America.
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Growing up in Bridgeport, Daley could not have avoided hearing about the horrors of the “Great Starvation.” Adults in the
neighborhood, some of whom had seen the suffering firsthand, passed on to the children lurid tales of skeletons walking the
countryside, and peasant women dying in the fields. These famine stories were invariably laced with bitter accounts of how
the hated British had exported wheat and oats out of the country while the Irish starved. In the course of his childhood,
Daley learned the whole tragic history of his people — the centuries of rule as a conquered territory, the rebellions brutally
put down, the absentee landlordism that drove farmers into poverty, and the language all but obliterated.
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The America Daley’s grandparents immigrated to rescued them from famine, but it was far from welcoming. The flood of Irish
arriving in the nation’s large cities produced a feverish outpouring of anti-Catholic sentiment. Protestant ministers preached
about the threat posed by a Catholic Church they referred to by epithets like “The Scarlet Lady of Babylon” and “The Whore
of Rome.” And the American reading public devoured incendiary anti-Catholic books like the infamous novel
Artful Disclosures,
an “exposé” of convent life in which a nun describes forced sexual relations with priests, frequent orgies, and the murder
of nuns who refused to submit.
¹³

This anti-Catholic fervor found political expression in the Know-Nothing Party, which in the elections of 1854/55 won seventy-five
seats in Congress. In newspapers and popular magazines, a stereotype soon emerged of Irish immigrants as shiftless and prone
to drink, with a dangerous propensity for brawling, gambling, and other lowlife pastimes. “Who does not know that the most
depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?” the
Chicago Tribune
asked in 1855. The Irish were regarded as particularly disposed to crime. “Scratch a convict or a pauper,” the
Chicago Post
declared in 1898, and “the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic at the same time — an Irish Catholic
made a criminal or a pauper by the priest and politicians who have deceived him and kept him in ignorance, in a word, a savage,
as he was born.”
¹⁴

America reserved some of the lowest rungs on the economic and social ladder for the new Irish immigrants. Signs proclaiming
“No Irish Need Apply” were common. Advertisements for housekeepers often specified “Protestant girls” only, because young
Irish-Catholic women, as one account had it, were “the daughters of laborers, or needy tradesmen, or persecuted, rack-rented
cotters, they are ignorant of the common duties of servants in respectable positions.” Irish men, for their part, were largely
relegated to the jobs native-born whites would not take. They were the laborers who carved out the canals, laid the railroad
tracks, and dug the ditches — often at great personal cost. As one Irish-American lamented at the time: “How often do we see
such paragraphs in the paper as an Irishman drowned — an Irishman crushed by a beam — an Irishman suffocated in a pit — an
Irishman blown to atoms by a steam engine — ten, twenty Irishmen buried alive by the sinking of a bank — and other like casualties
and perils to which honest Pat is constantly exposed in the hard toils for his daily bread.”
¹⁵

Coming of age in Bridgeport, Daley absorbed a keen understanding of Ireland’s long years of “misery, suffering, oppression,
violence, exploitation, atrocity, and genocide.” And he felt deeply the discrimination that, even in America, his countrymen
experienced. Hard as it may be to imagine now, one of the major forces driving Daley — born in a working-class Irish-Catholic
neighborhood in a city run by wealthy Protestants — was something as basic as “an aspiration for full-class citizenship.”
Later in life, after he had taken control of the Chicago Democratic machine and been elected mayor, Daley spoke at an Irish-American
dinner at Chicago’s venerable Conrad Hilton Hotel. “I can’t help thinking of your mothers and fathers and grandparents who
would never have been allowed in this hotel,” Daley declared. The lace-curtain Irish crowd laughed, but Daley did not. “I
want to offer a prayer for those departed souls who could never get into the Conrad Hilton.” Daley’s childhood catechism of
Irish deprivations left him convinced that no group had suffered as his kinsmen had suffered. In the 1960s, when Daley was
turning a deaf ear to the civil rights movement, one liberal critic opined: “I think one of the real problems [Daley] has
with Negroes is understanding that the Irish are no longer the out-ethnic group.”
¹⁶

Daley spent his childhood in conditions a distinct notch above the world of his grandfathers. He was born just as Chicago’s
Irish immigrants were making the hard transition from “shanty Irish” to the more respectable echelons of the lower middle
class. Daley’s father, Michael, was a sheet-metal worker and a business agent for his union. The Daleys fit in well in a neighborhood
whose beliefs were few but deeply cherished: the Catholic Church, family, labor unions, and the White Sox, who played at Comiskey
Park, just a few blocks away from the Daley home.

In the teeming Irish-Catholic world of Hamburg, Daley was a rarity: an only child. He and his parents were, perhaps because
there were only three of them, an unusually closely knit family. Michael Daley, a wiry man who almost always sported a derby,
was a man of few words. If Daley did not learn ambition or politics at his father’s knee, he did acquire one of the mannerisms
that would serve him best in his career: speaking little and keeping his own counsel. “Part of the mystique of Richard Daley
is that no one ever seems to know precisely what he thinks,” one observer has written. Daley’s taciturn ways may have been
sheer political strategy, but they were also the prevailing character trait in the Daley household. “I think the reason he’s
always had trouble talking,” an old Bridgeport neighbor recalled, “was that there weren’t any other children in his home,
and his parents were quiet people.” Daley’s father also taught him respect for authority and reverence for the government.
Years later, when his own mayoral authority was questioned by civil rights protesters, Daley would invoke a lesson he learned
from his father at the funeral parade for Governor Edward Dunne. “There is the governor of Illinois, son,” Daley recalled
his father saying to him. “Take off your hat.”
¹⁷

Lillian Dunne Daley was eight years older than Daley’s father, and she had a far stronger personality. Students of Irish history
contend that as families left the land and moved to cities, gender roles changed, and women began to play a more dominant
role. Mrs. Daley was one of this new breed, the “powerful and autocratic Irish matron.” She was an active force in the church.
Once, a young priest new to the parish wanted to start a bingo game, but was too shy to bring it up. Mrs. Daley advised him
to raise it at an upcoming meeting of churchwomen. When the priest said in an uncertain voice that he wanted to start bingo,
Mrs. Daley shouted out, “And we all do, too!” applauding, and carrying along the other women in the group. In addition to
her work at Nativity of Our Lord, Mrs. Daley was a committed suffragist — not a usual cause for women in Bridgeport — and
even took her son along to marches in support of the franchise for women. It is a measure of how formidable a force Lillian
Daley was that a spectator would recall that as the Daley family walked by, a neighbor pronounced with dark Irish humor, “Here
they come now, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!” Daley remained close to his mother her entire life, never moving
more than a block away. Years later, as mayor, Daley would nod and wipe a tear from his eye when a women’s float at a Chicago
Saint Patrick’s Day parade waved a banner saying, “The Mayor’s Mother Was a Suffragette!”
¹⁸

Mrs. Daley had high hopes that her only son would end up somewhere better than the stockyards or a South Side sheet-metal
union hall. She always dressed Daley more formally than his contemporaries, in suits with neckties, which made him look like
a little adult — an extravagance made easier by the fact that the family had only one child to clothe. Young Daley often sported
a handkerchief and he was, according to one family friend, the only child in Bridgeport at the time who owned pajamas. Whether
it came from his parents or from somewhere within, Daley had a strong work ethic from a very young age. His first childhood
job was selling newspapers at the corner of 35th and Wallace. Daley also made the rounds of the city’s streetcars, riding
to the end of the line as he walked up and down the aisle selling papers. These early jobs provided Daley with spending money,
but they also trained him for his future career. “I think selling newspapers is a good thing for kids,” Daley would say later.
“They learn how to handle themselves with people.” Daley also worked Saturday mornings, starting at 7:00, running up and down
stairs to make deliveries for a peddler who sold vegetables door-to-door from a horse-drawn wagon. Bridgeport was a neighborhood
in which many parents expected nothing more of their children than for them to match their own modest achievements. Lillian
Daley, however, always made it clear she wanted more. This pressure to succeed was a constant in Daley’s life as long as his
mother lived. Shortly before her death, after Daley won the Democratic nomination for the powerful post of Cook County sheriff,
Lillian Daley made it clear that she was unimpressed. “I didn’t raise my son to be a policeman,” she told a friend. She also
had another reason for opposing his run for sheriff. Gilbert Graham, a priest and a friend of the family, recalls that she
complained to her son: “You’re going to have to put people to death.” Earl Bush, Daley’s longtime press secretary, suspects
Mrs. Daley had an entirely different career path in mind for her only child. “I don’t think [Mrs. Daley] naturally thought
of her son as being a politician,” says Bush. “I think she would have preferred him to become a priest.”
¹⁹

Daley attended parochial school at Nativity, where he became an altar boy and stayed through graduation. In that era, the
Catholic Church expected its parishioners to send their children to parochial school, and most complied. By one estimate,
as many as 90 percent of Bridgeport’s Catholic children attended church schools. The Daleys, like many Catholic parents, probably
feared the non-Catholic world around them. The Catholic press of this era was filled with cautionary tales of Catholic parents
who had entrusted their children to Protestant-dominated public schools. An article in the
Irish World and American Industrial Liberator,
extreme but not entirely atypical, told the tale of a ten-year-old child whipped “black and blue” in a Boston public school
“for refusing to read the King James Version” of the Bible. The story all but omitted the fact that the incident had occurred
fifty years earlier, but it reflected the deep mistrust many Irish-Catholic parents held for the public school system.
²⁰