American Pharaoh (74 page)

As part of the summit agreement, King had pledged to call off the planned march on Cicero, but some civil rights activists
broke rank and announced they would press forward. “We respect Dr. King and leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement,” Chester
Robinson declared. But he maintained that “too little was secured to call off the Cicero march.” Robinson wanted to stick
to the original August 28 date, but King managed to get it put off a week, and he was hoping to get it canceled entirely.
“Martin understood that a march in Cicero was more effective as a threat than as a reality,” Young says. “He wanted to continue
to hold out the march . . . as leverage over implementation of the agreement.” On September 1, King and Young met with Robinson
and tried to talk him into abandoning the Cicero march. In exchange for King’s agreement to promote The Woodlawn Organization’s
public housing and welfare reform agenda, Robinson agreed to cancel his plans. Some members of the black community saw a conspiracy
at work in the cancellation, and suspected Daley was behind it. When King spoke at a rally at Liberty Baptist Church on the
South Side, SNCC activists handed out leaflets saying “Daley blew the whistle and King stopped the marches.”
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There were still activists in the Freedom Movement who wanted a march on Cicero, and Chicago CORE leader Robert Lucas said
he would lead one. On September 4, Lucas paraded into Cicero with a ragtag, largely black contingent of about two hundred
protesters. Despite the low turnout, the march had its moments of drama. Hundreds of Cicero residents lined the march route
shouting insults, and one major fight broke out. But the thousands of police and National Guardsmen were largely able to keep
the peace. A few days later, Lucas announced plans to march on an all-white South Side neighborhood. Daley was enraged that
after the summit agreement had put an end to Freedom Movement marches, a rogue element was still marching. The open-housing
marches were continuing only because the media were covering them, Daley charged. “All these people are looking for is publicity.”
By now, Daley was through negotiating. He put an end to Lucas’s plans by having him jailed for failing to pay fines for civil
disobedience that he committed a year earlier.
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In late September, the Metropolitan Chicago Leadership Council for Open Housing was formed to implement the summit agreement.
Daley attended the Palmer House press conference where James Cook, president of Illinois Bell Telephone, was named president
of the new organization. “We’re fortunate indeed to have such a fine man to head up such an important council,” Daley declared.
“Chicago is leading the way for the entire nation.” That was not an opinion widely shared among supporters of open housing.
Cook’s organization faced some significant obstacles, including the fact that it had no office, no staff, and no budget. The
financial problems were solved when Chicago’s corporate leaders responded to Cook’s solicitations for contributions. And within
a month, Cook persuaded Edward Holmgren, Elizabeth Wood’s venerable onetime assistant, to serve as executive director. The
Leadership Council went on to become an influential force for open housing in Chicago and the suburbs. It organized conferences,
disseminated information, and filed hundreds of lawsuits challenging housing segregation, including two that went up to the
U.S. Supreme Court. “I say the freedom movement won because we got the Leadership Council . . . out of it,” says Marciniak.
“We have the business community and other civic leaders espousing fair housing, so they were on our side.” Well-meaning as
the Leadership Council was, there were limits to how much change a single advocacy organization could bring about. The real
test of the summit agreement, as Bevel insisted all along, was whether it was enforced and whether it changed the lives of
Chicago’s black citizens.
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Daley’s advisers already knew for certain what the leaders of the Freedom Movement only suspected: that Daley had no intention
of keeping the promises he made at the summit. He could not say it outright, since he needed the civil rights marches to stop
and for King to go home, but this was always Daley’s plan. “I remember my father saying he was at a meeting with Martin Luther
King, talking about King marching through the South Side,” says Anthony Downs, son of James Downs, Daley’s top housing adviser.
“My father came home and said, ‘I could just see the mayor decide at that moment how he was going to handle King, that he
was going to lie to him. I could just see the moment in which he decided the only way he could get rid of the guy was to tell
him a whole lot of lies.’” Daley made some gestures, in addition to creating the Leadership Council, that suggested he was
committed to reform. William Robinson, former treasurer of the CCCO, was named to head the Cook County Public Aid Department.
It was an important job, and one the civil rights community cared about deeply, but Robinson would not have the power to integrate
the white neighborhoods Daley was concerned about protecting. Despite all of the talk at the summit, the city was less than
aggressive about suspending the licenses of Realtors who continued to discriminate. The changes at the Chicago Housing Authority
were largely cosmetic. The agency did not start assigning black families to white projects, or otherwise try to integrate
its existing housing stock. When it opened two new elderly projects in white neighborhoods in the months after the summit,
it did not assign a single black tenant to either one. Swibel did announce, with great pride, the installation of $18,000
in new door locks, and plans to send 500 housing project children to one week of summer camp.
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With King gone from Chicago and the marches over, Daley’s attention shifted back to downtown. In September, he proposed a
major urban-renewal project for a 156-acre area adjacent to the University of Illinois campus on the New West Side. It would
be the biggest slum-clearance project yet, surpassing the 100 acres razed to build the Lake Meadows development. Daley wanted
to add about 50 additional acres to the campus, and use the remainder of the cleared land for commercial purposes. Perhaps
as a lingering response to the Freedom Movement and the housing summit, Daley also announced that the city and the University
of Chicago were jointly seeking a federal grant to build a social service center to serve the Woodlawn neighborhood. The center,
which would be operated by the university’s School of Social Service Administration, was badly needed in Woodlawn, and it
would connect the university to a neighboring community upon which it had turned its back. But Daley’s support for the project
cost him little. It was aimed at improving living conditions in the ghetto, not at helping ghetto residents to move out. The
university would take responsibility for running it, and the federal government would be paying the bills.
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In the fall of 1966, with the Chicago Freedom Movement only an unpleasant memory, Daley was worried about the November elections.
The stakes for the machine were high. Senator Paul Douglas, the Hyde Park liberal who had stood by Daley over the years, was
facing a tough challenge from Republican Charles Percy. The boyishly appealing Percy had come within 179,000 votes of defeating
Kerner for governor in 1964, even as Goldwater was losing Illinois by almost 900,000. This time he did not have the burden
of running with Goldwater at the top of the ticket, and he was waging an aggressive campaign that portrayed the seventy-four-year-old
Douglas as a relic from another age. Daley also had a full slate of statewide and Cook County candidates to worry about, and
a delegation of Chicago congressmen who were taking heat from their constituents over civil rights. According to the polls,
the civil rights issue was actually hurting Democrats with both black and white voters. In working-class white wards, voters
blamed the Democrats for appeasing the Freedom Movement at the housing summit and for being too soft on open-housing demonstrators.
In Cicero, which deeply resented becoming a backdrop for the open-housing marchers, polls showed Douglas’s support down by
as much as 30 percent from 1954 and 1960. At the same time, civil rights activists were urging black voters to abandon the
machine’s candidates to protest that more was not being done. “It is a myth that the Negro is in any way indebted to or obligated
to vote for the Democratic party,” James Bevel proclaimed.”
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The Republicans were eager to exploit the trouble civil rights was causing the Democrats. Percy formed an alliance with David
Reed, a twenty-five-year-old “independent Republican” who was challenging Congressman Dawson. Percy, who sponsored six “Reed-Percy”
campaign headquarters in Dawson’s district, hoped to benefit from Reed’s message that “for too long the people of the First
District have lived on Mayor Daley’s Plantation.” The polls showed that Douglas was in trouble, but Daley remained optimistic
in his public pronouncements. “We still have work to do and we’re going to do it,” he said. Daley, who was predicting Douglas
would win by 200,000 votes, said the press was wrong when it said “white backlash” would be a significant factor in the voting.
“I hate to think that anyone would cast a ballot on the basis of hate,” he said. To minimize defections on both sides of the
color line, Daley tried to frame the election as being about anything but race. “It is the Democratic Party that has given
the people Medicare and expanded social security; federal aid to schools, including expanded opportunities for attending college;
the minimum wage and increases in minimum wage; and measures to rebuild cities that provide decent housing, end air and water
pollution, and improve transportation,” he wrote in a pre-election statement in the
Chicago Tribune
. Daley reached out to the machine’s white ethnic base with unusual vigor this time. In a four-day period, he marched with
250,000 Poles in the Pulaski Day parade and 300,000 Italians in the Columbus Day parade. Daley also brought Douglas around
to the Plumbers Hall, and urged the 4,000 union leaders and members in the audience to get the labor vote out on election
day. “We are not on the ropes,” Daley said. “But we have to get the people out to vote.” Daley hoped Johnson would come to
Chicago for an election-eve rally, but the president pleaded health problems and did not attend. Still, the machine held a
lunchtime pre-election parade through the Loop, complete with bands, one hundred floats, and a telegram from Johnson. It was,
Daley declared “another great day for a great city.”
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Daley’s public good cheer masked his worries that the machine ticket would lose badly. He called in the ward committeemen
from all fifty wards and gave them an unusually tough talk about coming through on election day, threatening sanctions for
those who failed to deliver. Hundreds of precinct captains and patronage workers were also called down to machine headquarters
and admonished to redouble their efforts. The machine also resorted to another of its traditional tactics: dirty tricks. Percy
leaflets began to appear in working-class white neighborhoods with pictures of the candidate with blacks and declarations
of his support for open housing. Percy threatened to file a complaint with the largely ineffective Fair Campaign Practices
Committee, but the machine insisted it did not know who was behind the leafleting. Daley had one more clever idea for finessing
the race issue. On the eve of the election, he announced that King had come to Chicago for the first time since the housing
summit to urge blacks not to vote Democratic. He also complained that Bevel had urged blacks to abandon the Democratic Party.
Daley’s charges about King were untrue. King had actually been coming to Chicago almost weekly since the summit ended, and
had scrupulously avoided taking any partisan political stands. But it was clear what Daley was up to: he was telling white
voters not to worry that the Democratic Party had become the party of civil rights. Speaking from Atlanta, King called Daley’s
accusations that he had come out against the Democratic ticket “totally unfounded” but “shrewd and timely . . . for his purposes.”
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In the end, Daley’s shrewd tactics were not enough. Douglas carried Chicago by only 184,000 votes, and lost Illinois by 400,000.
The news was not much better in the Cook County races. Sheriff Richard Ogilvie was elected president of the Cook County Board,
the first time a Republican had won the office in decades, robbing the machine of 18,000 patronage jobs. Republicans were
also elected county treasurer and sheriff. County assessor P. J. “Parky” Cullerton and county clerk Edward Barrett were among
the few Democrats to survive the Republican sweep. It was the Republicans’ best off-year election performance since 1950.
One of the few bright spots was that thirty-six-year-old Adlai Stevenson III, Daley’s handpicked candidate for state treasurer,
won his race. Daley also managed to return all of his incumbent congressmen, but the margins in some of the races were uncomfortably
close.
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It was, all things considered, a disastrous election for the Democrats. The results were particularly ominous for Daley, who
would be running for election the following year. Douglas had won only 57 percent of the vote in Chicago, and ward-by-ward
tallies showed that the Republicans had indeed made deep inroads throughout the Bungalow Belt. Congressman Pucinski, whose
district had been the site of open-housing demonstrations over the summer, was reelected by only 4,700 votes. Two years earlier,
he had won by 31,000. “I’ve been the guy who was claiming there was no backlash,” Pucinski said afterward, “but I’m the first
to admit now I was dead wrong.” Just as troubling, the Democratic vote had fallen sharply in the black wards, where it seemed
that many voters had simply decided to stay home. Daley tried to put the result in the best possible light. “The city of Chicago
went overwhelmingly for every Democratic candidate,” he said on election night. “I think the good people of Chicago are still
Democratic.” But Percy, in a burst of victory-night enthusiasm, hailed the “Republican resurgence” and predicted that Daley
would be defeated if he ran for reelection.
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