American Pharaoh (65 page)

While the Chicago Freedom Movement focused on its anti-slum campaign, SCLC staff member Jesse Jackson pursued a different
tack. Jackson was heading up Operation Breadbasket, an economic self-help initiative that was being tried in a number of cities
across the country. Operation Breadbasket took its name from boycotts of Atlanta bread companies in 1962, and its inspiration
from the selective buying campaigns of Reverend Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia. Its goal was to convince white-owned businesses
working in and near black neighborhoods to hire more blacks and make greater investments in the black community. Operation
Breadbasket’s strategy combined moral appeals, negotiations, and threats of boycotts. It focused its efforts on businesses
that sold directly to the public, and which were therefore particularly vulnerable to consumer boycotts. Operation Breadbasket
started its work in Chicago in February 1966, and in its first months scored some impressive victories. Hawthorne-Melody Farms,
a Chicago dairy whose workforce was more than 90 percent white, agreed to hire an additional 55 blacks. Hi-Lo grocery stores
agreed, after ten days of picketing, to hire an additional 183 blacks. And after fourteen weeks of protests, A&P committed
itself to hire 970 blacks in its Chicago stores, and to hire a black firm to collect its garbage. Operation Breadbasket also
negotiated increased work for the city’s black exterminators. “We have a monopoly on rats in the ghetto, and we’re gonna have
a monopoly on killing ’em,” Jackson said. Some civil rights activists dismissed Operation Breadbasket’s work as less than
significant — one commentator, writing in
The Nation,
dubbed it “Operation Drop-in-the-Bucket.” But it was attracting enough attention that Daley decided to unveil a similar program
of his own. Daley’s version was called Operation Lite — an acronym for Leaders Information on Training and Employment — and
it was aptly named. Daley’s version was, in every sense, an Operation Breadbasket light. It recruited 160 businessmen, clergy,
and social service professionals to distribute job information folders. As part of the program, Daley and John Gray, the city’s
merit employment chairman, announced that ministers and volunteers would make 800 calls to businessmen and others in a position
to counsel blacks about job opportunities. They also planned to distribute a directory of job training and placement opportunities.
Operation Lite did little for Chicago’s disadvantaged, but it succeeded in its real purpose: making it appear that Daley was
concerned about black employment opportunities.
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Daley invited King to join him at a summit with Chicago clergy to discuss the city’s efforts to combat slums. The invitation
was yet another illustration of how different the civil rights struggle was in Chicago than it had been in the South — Governor
George Wallace of Alabama and Selma mayor Joe Smitherman had not looked to King for advice on how to govern. But Daley was
shrewd enough to try to have his first meeting with King occur at a meeting of clergymen, so it would seem less like a showdown
between the civil rights movement and City Hall, and more like a group inquiry into how to work toward change. King turned
down Daley’s invitation to the clergy summit, pleading a “long standing prior engagement” in Texas. But the summit went forward,
and many of the city’s leading clergymen did attend, including Archbishop Cody, Episcopal Bishop Gerald Francis Burrill, and
the omnipresent Reverend Joseph H. Jackson. Daley discussed his work combating poverty and racial discrimination, and delivered
updates on the city’s progress. And he asked the clergymen to return for a second summit the following week, bringing along
recommendations for how the city should proceed. King did come to this second meeting, on March 25, making it the first time
the two men had met since the civil rights leader had arrived in Chicago. King listened attentively as city officials reeled
off what the Daley administration was doing on a variety of fronts, and outlined areas where help was needed. Police Superintendent
O. W. Wilson said there were more than 100,000 unauthorized firearms in the city, and asked the clergymen to encourage their
parishioners to turn them in to the police. Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn told the audience that accumulated garbage was
the biggest cause of fires, and asked for help in reducing the amount of refuse in their neighborhoods. Charles Swibel, chairman
of the CHA board, said his agency planned to build an additional six thousand units in the next two years, and then asked
the clergymen to deliver messages from their pulpits on the importance of cleanliness and being good neighbors. But the greatest
drama in the three-hour meeting came when King and Daley engaged in a thirty-minute colloquy about the city’s problems. King
told the meeting that Chicago “has a long way to go,” and described some of the problems he had seen firsthand since arriving
in the city.
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Daley responded that “these problems were created thousands of miles away from here in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.
This deprivation of education can’t be laid to the people of Chicago. They had nothing to do with it.” After the closed-door
meeting ended, King and Daley spoke about each other in respectful terms. “I believe the mayor is concerned in his search
for answers...” King said. And Daley pronounced King “a religious leader who feels intently the causes he espouses.” The next
day King settled an important question when he told a reporter, “I’m not leading any campaign against Mayor Daley. I’m leading
a campaign against slums.” Without King’s support, the prospect of a strong black independent mayoral campaign diminished
considerably.
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Daley continued his high-profile work as a champion of Chicago’s slum residents. The same day as the clergy summit, he spoke
to the opening session of the First International Conference on Freedom of Residence at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Daley told
an audience of labor, religious, and civil rights leaders that “opportunity for freedom of residence for everyone can only
be achieved if thousands of people become greatly concerned.” On March 27, he convened a meeting of one hundred business leaders
in the City Council chambers and urged them to increase job opportunities for minorities. John D. deButts, president of Illinois
Bell Telephone, reported that through the work of the Chicago Association of Commerce 312 companies had agreed not to discriminate
in employment and had pledged to work for equal opportunity in hiring and agreed to offer in-house skills training for employees
who needed it. The following day, Daley announced that he was stepping up the city’s war on rats, promising that an additional
$250,000 would be spent to treat all 20,427 blocks of alleys in the city over the next two months.
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Daley was finding it increasingly hard to keep his real feelings about the civil rights movement in check. Even as he spoke
about his commitment to improving slum housing, he began to argue that the Chicago Freedom Movement was overstating the extent
of the problem. “Look at 35th and State Street,” he said, referring to a once-run-down area that had been razed to build public
housing. “I lived there and went to school there. It was one of the worst areas in the city, but what do you see now?” In
fact, most people still thought it looked pretty bad. In private, Daley was even less restrained in his attack on King and
his followers. At a closed-door meeting of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee in mid-April, Daley told machine leaders
that King and his followers were simply trying to “grab” power. “We have no need to apologize to the civil rights leaders
who have come to Chicago to tell us what to do,” Daley said. “We’ll match our integrity against their independence.”
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The spring of 1966 was not all run-ins over slums and civil rights. Daley’s work in building up the city was increasingly
being recognized, and was bringing him accolades. The National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix-Up Bureau honored Chicago as the cleanest
large city in the nation at a luncheon at the Bismarck Hotel. It was the fifth time in seven years that Chicago had taken
the prize. The Loop, in particular, was thriving. The clearest illustration of downtown Chicago’s impressive upswing was the
rapid transformation of North Michigan Avenue. North Michigan, the upscale retailing strip jutting out of the northeast corner
of the Loop, had undergone one of the most dramatic transformations of any part of the Chicago landscape. It had begun life
as narrow and dowdy Pine Street. Burnham’s 1909 plan called for widening it into a grand European-style boulevard, and that
process began in 1920, with the building of the Michigan Avenue Bridge across the Chicago River. In the next few years, several
architecturally significant buildings went up along the avenue, including the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. In 1947,
developer Arthur Rubloff dubbed North Michigan the “Magnificent Mile,” but it was at that point still wishful thinking. It
was only during the mid-1960s that it was truly beginning to approach magnificence. In 1965, the thirty-five-story Equitable
Building opened, adjacent to the Tribune Tower, and in the next few years the march of development continued northward up
the avenue. A decade later, the avenue would be capped off by Water Tower Place, a sixty-two-story hotel and condominium that
included eight floors of luxury stores, contained in the nation’s first vertical shopping mall. In time, Michigan Avenue would
become so overrun with swank stores and high-rent office towers that one critic would lament that it had become “alas, the
Manhattanized Mile.”
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Chicago’s was not the only American downtown to boom in the post-war years, but it was one of the few in the northern Rust
Belt whose fortunes were rising. What prevented Chicago from going the way of Cleveland and Buffalo? Much of the credit lies
with Daley’s aggressive program for downtown redevelopment. Beginning with the 1958 plan, Daley declared his intention to
put the full power of his office behind Loop redevelopment. And he did a masterful job of keeping all of the key constituencies
in place. His strong working relationships with the city’s business leaders kept them invested in the city, and helped persuade
them to build and expand in the Loop. His close ties to the city’s major unions were a key factor in the years of labor peace
that prevailed in the city. And his influence in Washington and Springfield brought in millions of dollars to fund urban renewal
projects that benefited the central business district. Edward Logelin, vice president of U.S. Steel and chairman of the Chicago
Plan Commission, said the renaissance of Chicago’s downtown was in large part due to Daley’s ability to bring together “the
best of labor, politics, religion, education, and business.”
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Another critical factor in Chicago’s downtown development was the way in which Daley professionalized the city’s planning
and development bureaucracy. The Department of City Planning that he formed in 1957 with twenty-four employees had grown to
eighty-four by 1964, and its budget had soared from $149,500 to $914,500. Daley also assembled an unusually talented group
of workers, who would come to be known as the “whiz kids,” to fill these positions. Hired on the basis of ability rather than
patronage, they were highly qualified — most had trained as engineers — and committed to the nuts-and-bolts work of improving
the city. “It was a very well-educated, professional group of people,” recalls David Stahl, who started with Daley at age
thirty-two and would eventually become a deputy mayor. “That group could have run any company in the United States of that
size.” Typical of the whiz kids was John Duba, forty-three, whom Daley appointed in June 1965 to head the city’s new Department
of Development and Planning. Duba, who taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology before joining city government, was
a hands-on technocrat.
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When he supervised the construction of the Kennedy Expressway, he often walked its entire length to check on progress. “It
really wasn’t so bad,” Duba said. “It would take only about three hours and it was the way to get to see the problems and
what could be done about them.” Duba’s deputy, Louis Westmore, had been head of the Department of City Planning and Landscape
Architecture at the University of Illinois.
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Daley also named Lewis Hill, thirty-nine, an engineer with degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University
of Minnesota, as commissioner of the Department of Urban Renewal. Brooklyn-born Milton Pikarsky, Daley’s commissioner of public
works, was also an engineer. Although Daley cared enough about development issues to make merit appointment to these positions,
the whiz kids worked alongside many city workers who were still hired the old-fashioned way. John J. Gunther, executive director
of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, recalls attending a budget meeting of Daley’s and being impressed with the caliber of his
planning staff. “As we were going over to the Sherman Hotel for lunch I asked him where the hell is all this patronage I keep
hearing about, because I had met his people and they were very able,” Gunther recalls. “We got off the elevator and were walking
across the lobby and there was an old fella there that was showing you which elevator to get on, and another old fella running
the elevator. Daley said, ‘That’s the patronage.’”
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