American Pharaoh (50 page)

Looking forward to the 1962 spring primary election season, Daley had some details to take care of. The district lines for
the city’s fifty wards had been redrawn since the last election, the first redistricting since 1947. Daley instructed the
ward committeemen that they were responsible for establishing precinct captains and ward operations in their new territories,
but that under no circumstances were any precinct captains to lose their patronage jobs simply because redistricting had pushed
them into another ward. Daley also had to fill the ward committeeman position for the 24th Ward, which had been vacant since
Sidney Deutsch, the legendary Jewish ward boss, died. Daley chose Benjamin Lewis, who was already the alderman, thereby giving
that black ward its first black ward committeeman. Lewis had proven his loyalty to the machine in the City Council, and the
bad blood between him and Dawson meant there was little danger of Lewis bringing the 24th Ward back into Dawson’s weakened
black submachine. “Lewis became Daley’s ‘house boy’ and took great pride in attacking Dawson publicly on signal,” notes historian
Dempsey Travis. “He constantly bragged about the fact that none of his precinct captains were ‘Dawson men’ and that his telephone
line ran directly to the fifth floor in City Hall and not to Dawson’s headquarters at 34th and Indiana Avenue.” Daley also
elevated Seymour Simon, a Keane ally, from 40th Ward alderman to president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. To some
machine-watchers, it appeared that Daley was promoting Simon to head the Jewish faction of the machine in order to further
diminish the role of his onetime friend Arvey.
¹³

Daley’s most pressing concern going into the election was selecting a U.S. Senate candidate to challenge Republican incumbent
Everett Dirksen. At a testimonial dinner in May, Daley had virtually endorsed Illinois House Speaker Paul Powell for the nomination.
Daley may have been carried away by the moment, but back in the sober environment of City Hall it would have occurred to him
that downstater Powell would do little to help the machine ticket win in Cook County. Word had it that Daley was trying to
persuade Stevenson to give up his job as United Nations ambassador to make the run, but Stevenson refused. Daley next turned
to Sidney Yates, a Chicago congressman. Yates would have a hard time winning the race, because his candidacy violated the
Illinois tradition of reserving one of the two Senate seats for a downstater. “You are not going to beat Dirksen starting
out by dropping at least 50,000 to 75,000 downstate votes,” a Democratic leader from Madison County warned the slating committee.
“The practice of sharing the two Senate seats is more than a tradition — it’s a rule of politics.” The warning proved to be
on the mark, but Daley was not all that concerned about sending another Democrat to the U.S. Senate. He was looking for a
candidate who would help the machine win its races in Cook County and hold on to the thousands of patronage positions that
came with those offices. If that meant nominating a candidate like Yates who was unlikely to put together enough votes statewide
to win his own race, Daley considered it a small price to pay.
¹⁴

Daley was still looking for new ways to raise money for his ambitious spending projects. He put together a $66 million package
of six bond initiatives, including a $22.5 million bond for urban renewal, $22.5 million for sewers, and $7 million for garbage
disposal and streetlighting. Daley’s plan was to put the bonds up for a vote in the upcoming April election. It was a favorite
technique to put new spending initiatives on the ballot in low-turnout elections that the machine could win by delivering
its faithful voters to the polls. Republican alderman Sperling charged Daley with playing politics and urged that the bonds
be put on the November general election ballot, when more people would be voting. Daley offered the unconvincing response
that if the bonds were on the ballot in November “some would attempt to make partisan politics out of what is strictly a municipal
government question.” Daley campaigned hard for his bonds. The week before the election, in good machine fashion, he invited
almost a thousand ward committeemen and precinct captains to a Morrison Hotel lunch and implored them to get their people
to vote yes. But when the votes were in, all six individual bond issues on the ballot had been defeated by margins of almost
3–2. The urban-renewal bond had lost by the largest margin of the six. Daley’s strategy of putting the bonds up for vote in
an off-election had been thwarted: turnout was an unusually high 44 percent. The results, which
Time
magazine called a “tax-time tantrum,” were widely interpreted as a taxpayer rebellion against the city’s fast-rising property
taxes. The Republicans argued that the vote had also been a referendum on the integrity of Daley and the machine. But there
also appeared to be a racial element lurking in the returns. The bonds had been labeled in some quarters as an urban-renewal
initiative, and to many white Chicagoans, urban renewal was becoming synonymous with uprooting blacks from the ghetto and
potentially dispersing them into white neighborhoods.
¹⁵

When a seventeen-year-old Girl Scout, Ann Graham, visited City Hall in May to serve as mayor for the day, Daley had some simple
advice for her: “Beware of the press, Mayor.” It was wisdom Daley had come by the hard way. The
Chicago Tribune
had just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for an exposé of corruption in the Sanitary District. When an alderman had introduced
a resolution in the City Council to congratulate the reporter who won, a furious Daley had ordered it buried in committee.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1962, the exposés kept coming. In June, the Better Government Association released a report
on loafing in the city’s patronage-heavy Forestry Division that it said was costing taxpayers “millions a year.” BGA investigators
had taken motion pictures and still photos of forestry crews sleeping, sunbathing, and wasting time during the workday. They
also caught forestry workers going into taverns and drinking during the workday. One worker actually went behind the bar to
serve a BGA investigator a drink. A forestry truck was observed delivering lumber to a private home, and another was driven
to Gary, Indiana. Confronted with this seemingly incontrovertible evidence of municipal waste, Daley responded angrily that
the BGA was “lock, stock and barrel an arm of the Republican Party.” At a City Hall press conference, he reminded reporters
that cutting down a tree is hard work, and asked the press corps if any of them had ever cut down a tree.
¹⁶
Daley insisted that it was wrong for the BGA to “blacken all city employees by use of a report dealing with 15 people,” but
by the end of June he grudgingly announced that four forestry workers had been suspended for periods ranging up to twenty-nine
days. The BGA director responded that the suspensions were a “very fine start,” but that his group’s investigation indicated
that the Forestry Division could cut its staff by one-third without appreciably affecting its work.
¹⁷

Increasingly, Daley’s critics tried to tie the use of patronage employees to the city’s soaring tax rates. Since Daley took
office seven years earlier, property taxes had climbed 86 percent. Daly bristled when the subject of tax increases came up.
At one press conference, he lectured the City Hall press corps that the cost of newspapers had doubled in the past ten years,
while the cost of government had not. But the
Chicago Tribune
did the math and then pointed out in its news pages the next day that while its price had increased from five cents to seven
cents in the past decade, the operating budget of the city had actually soared 114 percent.
¹⁸

The attacks over municipal waste and high taxes were beginning to take their toll on Daley. Reports were even circulating
that he was losing favor to Tom Keane, the second most influential force in the Democratic machine. Keane had demanded that
Daley let him name either the next Cook County board president or the next tax assessor,
Chicago Tribune
political columnist George Tagge reported, and Daley ended up slating Keane’s protégé, Seymour Simon, for Cook County board
president. As Tagge saw it, Daley gave in because, after losing on the spring bond issues, he was becoming more risk-averse
when it came to slating. Daley realized it would look bad if he turned Keane down and then his own candidates went on to lose.
Daley also did something odd in the way he slated the seventeen Superior Court judge candidates for the November 1962 elections.
He stole away six Republican candidates who had lost in the April judicial elections and put them on his own “good government”
ticket. Republican leaders were outraged by Daley’s effrontery, but once again some political observers interpreted it as
sign of weakness or at least risk-aversion. Rather than load up the ticket with a full slate of machine loyalists, Daley was
willing to give up some of the judgeships in the hope of luring Republican and independent voters.
¹⁹

Daley also forced the Sanitary District — which had been the subject of both a Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé and a federal
grand jury investigation — to clean up its operations. A blue-ribbon panel had selected a reform candidate, Vinton Bacon of
Tacoma, Washington, as the next superintendent, but the Sanitary District trustees balked. The trustees said it was because
they wanted to be given three candidates to choose from, but it seemed that they just were not ready for reform. In the middle
of the meeting to consider a new superintendent, the president of the board of trustees got up to take a phone call and returned
to say that he was now backing Bacon. It was widely suspected that it was Daley on the other end, although he later insisted
that the choice had always been the trustees’ to make.
²⁰
There were still more signs of trouble for the machine in the upcoming election. When William Dawson got up at a party rally
to introduce senatorial candidate Yates to machine workers, he put in an embarrassing performance, repeating a few sentences
over and over until a state representative led him off the stage. And the issue of machine voting improprieties loomed again
when Adamowski declared that he had come into possession of devices that could be used to prevent voters from casting a ballot
for certain candidates on a voting machine. He said he had gotten them from a well-connected political worker, and he charged
that they had been widely used in poor wards in the 1960 elections. Daley’s response to the wave of bad news was to focus
on energizing the machine to work its hardest for the Democratic slate. At the annual 11th Ward family circus at the International
Amphitheatre, in his own neighborhood of Bridgeport, Daley mingled with the precinct captains and told them that the Democratic
Party was “one family.” Daley also organized a traditional pre-election luncheon for one thousand at the Morrison Hotel’s
Terrace Casino, where precinct workers could hear in person from the full Democratic slate, from Yates on down to the three
candidates for Sanitary District trustee. As a final election ploy, Daley filed his 1963 budget early, so voters could see
it before the election. The new budget called for cutting spending by $44 million compared to the previous year, and it contained
a $7 million property-tax cut. Republican alderman Sperling attacked it as “a self-serving political document designed to
mislead the people,” but it clearly demonstrated that Daley understood the voters’ sour mood about rising taxes.
²¹