American Pharaoh (54 page)

Daley, however, was hearing none of it. Rose Simpson, chairman of the Parents Council for Integrated Schools, met with Daley
in August and urged him to remove Willis. He “is not concerned about Negro education and he fosters segregation in the schools,”
she said. Daley responded curtly that Willis was doing a fine job and that he continued to support him. It was Willis’s contentiousness,
not Daley’s lack of support, that got him in trouble. In the fall, Willis took several white high schools off a list to receive
student transfers under a new school board plan. It seemed clear that he had done it to stop those schools from being integrated.
The school board ordered him to restore the schools to the list, and they backed it up with a court order. Willis responded
by announcing on October 4 that he was stepping down. If Willis’s resignation was a tactical ploy to rally whites behind him,
it worked. White community groups like the Southwest Council of Civic Organizations and the Property Owners Coordinating Committee
threatened a march on City Hall unless Willis was convinced to stay on. Twenty-three of Chicago’s top business leaders wired
the Board of Education to register the business community’s strong support for Willis. The machine’s allies in the black community
also stepped forward to defend the man others were branding an enemy of black schoolchildren. The attacks on Willis were “mass
hysteria,” the Reverend J. H. Jackson said, and it would be tragic if they were allowed to bring down a man of his “professional
caliber.” Daley had, of course, previously told black parents that he could not intervene in educational matters. But now
that Willis was threatening to leave, Daley had no qualms about publicly rushing to his defense. “I think it’s pretty much
hoped by everyone that he comes back,” Daley said in a television interview. Within days, a school board committee had prevailed
upon Willis to rescind his resignation.
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Outraged that Willis was back, civil rights leaders announced a boycott of the public schools. Support for the boycott grew
rapidly, with thousands of black parents promising to keep their children out of school on the appointed day. It was a sign
of just how strong the pro-boycott sentiment was in the black wards that Daley, in a break with tradition, freed members of
the black machine to support it if they wanted. He was not going soft on civil rights, historian Dempsey Travis notes. He
just wanted his black allies “to run as fast as hell and catch up with the majority of their constituents.” With this clearance
from the Morrison Hotel, Dawson’s 2nd Ward Organization and several of the “silent six” black aldermen issued statements expressing
their support for the boycott. On October 22, the day of the boycott, the response from black parents and children was overwhelming.
About 225,000 students stayed out of school, far more than even the organizers expected. Activists set up “freedom schools”
in churches, meeting halls, and community rooms, providing alternative instruction. They offered an improvised curriculum
of civil rights songs and lessons on freedom and equality. In one exercise, black children were asked to analyze the word
“equal” from a variety of perspectives, starting with arithmetic and moving on to current events. The idea, they were taught,
was that equality meant not being the same, but being worth the same. At the same time, about ten thousand demonstrators marched
on City Hall and the Board of Education. Despite the success of the boycott, activists were still having trouble translating
their protests into new educational policy. Weeks of meetings between the CCCO and school officials ended in deadlock. Frustrated
by the lack of progress, the CCCO called a second boycott for the following February.
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One month after the first school boycott, on November 22, 1963, Daley was having lunch with aides at the machine offices at
the Morrison Hotel. His secretary, Mary Mullen, arrived with news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was near
death. Daley burst into tears and then dictated a statement before heading home for the rest of the day. “I cannot express
my deep grief and sorrow over the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy,” Daley said. “He was a great President — a great
leader.” Daley’s friend William Lee called Kennedy’s death “the most terrible moment in our history.” The following day, Daley
led a memorial service in the City Council chambers. Speaking from a rostrum decorated with a large picture of the slain president,
American and Chicago flags, and white chrysanthemums, Daley declared that Kennedy “lived and died in accordance with his own
words, ‘And so, my fellow Americans: “Ask not what your country will do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”’”
At the end, Daley added, “I have lost a great friend.” One week later, the City Council voted unanimously to rename the Northwest
Expressway in Kennedy’s honor.
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The whole nation was stunned and saddened, but Daley had reason to feel Kennedy’s death more than most. The two men had remained
close since the 1960 election, and just a few months earlier Daley had stopped by the White House while he was in Washington
to testify before Congress. He had said at the time that he had no urgent business but that he “just dropped in to say hello.”
Their relationship was no doubt driven to a large extent by political calculation on both sides, but Kennedy had at least
been a reliable political ally, whether it meant approving an urban renewal grant Daley wanted or putting in an appearance
the week before Daley’s closest mayoral election. Just a few months earlier, Kennedy had nominated Daley’s old friend Abraham
Lincoln Marovitz to a Federal District Court judgeship at Daley’s urging. Daley’s relationship with Lyndon Johnson was not
as warm. The new president likely knew that Daley had pushed Kennedy at the 1960 convention to keep him off the ticket. Johnson
and Daley did not share an ethnic bond, and Johnson did not have the ties to Chicago that the Kennedys did through the Merchandise
Mart. Still, the 1964 election was coming up, and Johnson was a shrewd enough politician to understand Daley’s importance.
He called Daley shortly after he was sworn in, and kept calling, writing, and visiting. And Daley was one of only four guests
invited to sit with Johnson’s wife and daughters during his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Daley and Johnson
would in time become close, particularly over their common interest in Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Daley was able
to deliver the votes of the Chicago congressional delegation for the social programs Johnson wanted passed. Johnson, in turn,
“was very much into doing programs [that brought] money to cities, trying to solve problems in cities,” says William Daley.
In the end, he says, his father had “a different, but in some ways a better relationship” with Johnson than he had with Kennedy.
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Daley’s difficult year ended with a round of criticism over his latest municipal budget. The $532 million he was proposing
to spend in 1964 was a record, and taxes would once again have to be raised. Daley’s critics charged, as usual, that the money
would be used to fund the machine’s patronage operations. The Civic Federation, a nonpartisan taxpayers’ organization, examined
Daley’s 1964 budget and concluded that it was riddled with wasteful spending. Among its findings was that the city was routinely
paying exorbitant wages to employees who did clerical work. The city was also paying 28 percent more than the going rate for
carpenters when, according to the Building Employers Association, because of the advantages of working for the city it should
have been paying 20 percent less. According to another study, the number of temporary workers — most of them patronage hires
— had now tripled since Daley took over from Kennelly. Two of Daley’s leading critics on the City Council issued a joint statement
charging that it was “almost impossible to overstate the loss” to the city from employing the 8,493 temporary workers now
on the payroll. Daley once again argued that the spending was needed to deliver the high level of municipal services Chicago
enjoyed. But a new study cast doubt on Daley’s constant assertions about the quality of city services. The National Board
of Fire Underwriters issued its national evaluations of fire-preparedness. The group gave Chicago 1,235 deficiency points
for shortcomings in fire protection, giving the city a rank of 3 on a scale from 1 to 5. No city had a 1 rating, but seven
large cities received 2’s, ranking them ahead of Chicago. The insurance industry used the NBFU’s ratings to calculate risk,
which meant that Chicagoans had to pay higher premiums as a result of the city’s mediocre standing. Despite the charges of
waste and patronage, Daley’s 1964 budget sailed through the machine-controlled City Council in early December. One critic
warned, however, that “Mr. Daley’s policies are driving homeowners out of the city and destroying neighborhoods.”
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Daley began the year’s first cabinet meeting by declaring that “our aim in 1964 is to give the best service in the most economical
manner.” But he was soon hit with yet another study documenting the large number of patronage employees being supported by
Chicago taxpayers. The Better Government Association charged that more than twenty thousand — or almost 30 percent — of the
employees of Chicago’s six main local government units were outside civil service, and that the vast majority of these were
patronage hires. Many more patronage workers were tucked away in state government, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago
Housing Authority, and other payrolls the machine had access to. The BGA charged that Daley’s Civil Service Commission was
contributing to the problem by conducting few civil-service examinations, making it easier to make non-civil-service patronage
hires. In the previous year, exams were held for only forty-four of the city’s 1,656 job titles. The BGA also found other
instances of corruption, including a widespread practice in the Sanitation Department of supervisors taking bribes to let
their crews work overtime, for which crew members were paid time-and-a-half on Saturday and double-time on Sunday. Days later,
the State, County, and Municipal Employees Union joined in, charging that Daley was ignoring a list it had compiled of two
thousand workers who were being overpaid as a result of phony job titles. Victor Gotbaum, district director of the union,
said patronage workers were routinely being promoted to jobs that should have gone to the civil-service workers he represented.
Daley responded, as usual, that the attacks on him were partisan. He charged that the BGA was “an arm of the Republican Party,”
despite the fact that it had a bipartisan board of directors and had previously endorsed him for mayor.
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The new year brought Daley no relief on the school front. He was asked at an early January press conference whether he still
supported Willis. With a second school boycott looming, he sounded less than enthusiastic. “I have great confidence in the
entire membership of the school board,” he responded. If Daley wanted to weaken Willis’s position, he would soon have the
chance. There were two vacancies coming up on the school board, and Daley was about to fill them. The CCCO sent a twenty-member
delegation to urge Daley to select members who would work for integration — one of whom they hoped would be black. Daley heard
his visitors out but, true to form, told them he could not commit himself “to any positive course.” Before long, the single
black member of the nominating committee broke the news to the civil rights activists that Daley was unlikely to appoint the
sort of members they were hoping for. “The Southwest Side is more active and influential than we are,” he told them. In fact,
Daley was not about to yield any ground to the integrationist forces. Dr. Eric Oldberg, the politically moderate suburban
doctor who chaired the nominating committee, said that he and other moderates had been urging Daley not to continue to appoint
pro-Willis board members. “I told him, ‘Goddamn it, Dick, it won’t work — maintaining a school board that is polarized.’ ...
But he was obdurate; he bluntly told me that nobody was going to tell him who he could appoint, to the school board or anything
else.” Daley ended up appointing two whites with no known civil rights sympathies: Cyrus Hall Adams, a downtown merchant,
and Mrs. Lydon Wild, a South Shore socialite and friend of the Daley family.
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