American Pharaoh (91 page)

Before 1972 ended, another federal investigation presented serious trouble. On December 15, former governor Otto Kerner, now
a Federal Appeals Court judge, was indicted for bribery, conspiracy, and tax evasion. He was charged with arranging favorable
horse-racing dates for a track in exchange for racetrack stock that he was permitted to buy far below its market value. Kerner
was eventually convicted, and sentenced to three years in federal prison.
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Kerner’s indictment had been brought by a zealous young Republican U.S. attorney, James Thompson, who was appointed by Nixon
and was working with Nixon attorney general John Mitchell to put the heat on the Democratic machine. If Thompson could bring
down a sitting federal judge like Kerner, there would be nothing to stop him from going after Daley’s allies in the machine,
and even Daley himself. During the Kerner trial, it appeared that Thompson might indeed have been planning to go after Daley
next. Thompson had a former Illinois Racing Board chairman testify that Daley had introduced him to Kerner in 1960 and “induced”
him to lend $100,000 to Kerner’s gubernatorial campaign. Daley insisted that he had done nothing wrong, and pointed out that,
unlike Kerner, he had never received any racetrack stock. “I never have and I never will,” Daley declared.
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The machine lost another federal case a few months later that would prove even more damaging. On April 19, 1971, the United
States Supreme Court refused to disturb a Federal Appeals Court ruling that struck down a key component of the machine’s patronage
operations. The lower court had held that, other than policymakers and other high-level officers, city workers could not be
dismissed based on their political affiliation. The suit had been brought by Michael Shakman, a Hyde Park lawyer who was an
independent candidate for delegate to the Illinois 1970 Constitutional Convention. Shakman lost his election to a machine
candidate by just 623 votes out of 24,000 cast, and as he noted in his court papers, considerably more than 623 patronage
employees lived in the district. Shakman charged that the patronage system was responsible for the fact that every Chicago
mayor elected since 1931 had the backing of the Democratic machine, and that the current composition of the City Council was
one Republican, three independent Democrats, and forty-six members of the regular Democratic machine. The Shakman case had
started out before U.S. District Court Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, through the same purportedly random process that had
assigned the 1968 Democratic convention rally case to William Lynch. Marovitz had been friends with Daley since their days
serving together in the Illinois legislature in the 1930s, and he maintained that he spoke with Daley by telephone almost
every evening. Shakman had asked Marovitz to disqualify himself, but Marovitz refused. “It’s an obvious fact of life,” he
said, “that men in high public positions know each other. I was and am a close friend of Mayor Richard J. Daley.” Marovitz
had initially dismissed Shakman’s case quickly. But on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reversed that
decision. Now that the Supreme Court had denied review, Marovitz would be forced to preside over the dismantling of the patronage
system.

After more than a year of negotiations, Shakman and the city reached a settlement. The consent decree, which Daley signed
in 1972, prohibited the firing of government workers on political grounds. It was a significant blow to the machine: without
the threat that they would be fired, patronage workers would not feel the same pressure to deliver on election day. Still,
the settlement did not entirely undo the patronage system, since it did not prohibit Daley from hiring government workers
on political grounds. Daley was also adept at finding loopholes in any restrictions he agreed to. During the settlement discussions,
he offered a resolution declaring it the “official policy” of the party to “condemn and oppose compulsory financial contributions
by public employees, contractors or suppliers, to any individual or organization.” But he explained to reporters: “This means
no dues. But the key word is compulsory. Voluntary contributions can be accepted.” It would take a second round of litigation,
known as Shakman II, to outlaw the hiring of government workers on political grounds. That decision, which proved far more
damaging to the machine, did not come until after Daley’s death.
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The machine was also seeing erosion on another important front: the black wards that had long been a critical part of its
electoral base. When Dawson stepped down in 1970, Daley had handed his congressional seat to Ralph Metcalfe. Metcalfe was
a heroic figure in the black community, a onetime track star who had finished second to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics.
Metcalfe also had a perfect machine résumé. He began as a protégé of Dawson’s, and won election as 3rd Ward alderman in 1955,
when Daley was first elected mayor. In the late 1950s, when Daley crushed the Dawson submachine, Metcalfe had switched his
loyalty to Daley. Metcalfe had been a member in good standing of Daley’s “silent six,” the compliant black aldermen who spoke
little and uniformly supported him on civil rights issues. And he had negotiated for Daley with King in 1966, encouraging
the civil rights leader to moderate his demands. Metcalfe won his congressional seat by running against Alderman A. A. “Sammy”
Rayner, an independent who had earlier challenged Dawson for the same seat — on a platform of ending Dawson’s “plantation–Uncle
Tom politics”— and lost.

In the span of a year, Metcalfe went from being one of the machine’s most subservient followers to one of its harshest critics.
There were many factors involved in Metcalfe’s break with the machine. As a congressman, he had a stronger political base
than he had as an alderman, meaning there was less the machine could do to punish him if he went his own way. Metcalfe’s political
supporters and constitutents were also becoming more ambivalent about the machine, and some of them — notably his own son,
Ralph — were urging him to sever his ties. But the issue that drove a wedge between Metcalfe and Daley was the police, a source
of great bitterness in the black community. As Renault Robinson, executive director of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League,
explained: “You were as afraid of the police as you were of burglars and robbers because if you ran into a white police officer,
he would rather kick your teeth in than help you.” Metcalfe had long remained silent about police misconduct, but he became
sensitized to the problem in March 1971 when Dr. Herbert Odom, a South Side dentist and a friend, was stopped in his Cadillac
one night because his license plate light was out. The police ticketed him, and the dentist and the officers got into an argument.
Odom was taken away in handcuffs and jailed for several hours. A furious Metcalfe called Police Superintendent Conlisk and
asked him to a meeting in the ward. Conlisk would not come.
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Then a second black dentist, Daniel Claiborne, ran into trouble with the police. Claiborne had suffered a stroke and was unconscious
in his car, but the police assumed he was drunk and took him off to jail rather than getting him medical attention. After
this second incident involving another of his leading constituents, Metcalfe stormed into Conlisk’s office with a list of
demands, including recruitment of more black officers and establishment of a citizens review board. Conlisk refused to meet
with Metcalfe, and Daley declined an invitation to a meeting in the ward about police brutality, saying he had set up his
own conference on the subject. Daley’s refusal to come to his district to discuss the problem was the final straw. When Metcalfe
broke with the machine, he broke completely, and quickly became one of its harshest critics. As he put it at a PUSH rally
several years later, “It’s never too late to be black.”
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Metcalfe’s political conversion was a milestone in Chicago politics. “No one ever broke away until Metcalfe did,” independent
5th Ward alderman Leon Despres wrote in a memo discussing how the machine used its black elected officials. Black machine
politicians traditionally held their offices as part of an implicit deal. In exchange for their power and perquisites, they
had to follow the machine’s line on racial issues, from housing segregation to police brutality. Metcalfe, the city’s leading
black political figure and heir to Congressman Dawson, had now declared that this long-standing arrangement was no longer
satisfactory. Daley was furious at the betrayal, and was quick to retaliate against his wayward protégé. The city dispatched
building inspectors to Metcalfe’s 3rd Ward offices and cited him for code violations. His police guard was taken away, and
Daley inflicted the oldest form of machine revenge: Metcalfe was stripped of his patronage, including ten summer Park District
jobs he had been getting for decades. Three staff members working in his year-round ward athletic program — a program the
machine had been especially proud of in an earlier day — were terminated.
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Daley’s retribution was not merely to even the score, but to send a message. “No alderman dared take Daley on for fear that
he would punish them,” William Singer said later. “The clearest case was Metcalfe.”
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The March 1972 primary results held more bad news for Daley. Edward Hanrahan, whom Daley had removed from the ticket, had
defeated Daley’s choice, Raymond Berg. That meant that the next state’s attorney — who had the power to prosecute malfeasance
in city government — would be either a renegade Democrat whom Daley had formally dumped from the ticket or a Republican. Making
matters worse, Daley’s candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, had suffered an upset at the hands of Daniel
Walker, the Chicago lawyer known for being the author of the Walker Report and popularizing the phrase “police riot.” Walker
had made his candidacy a referendum on the Chicago machine. “Across the nation the Democratic Party has been opening its doors,
reforming its organization, modernizing its rules,” Walker had declared. “But not in Illinois. The party here is still controlled
by an antiquated machine dedicated to special privilege politics and performing a discredited function: the exchange of jobs
for blocs of votes. The voters deserve better.”
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But Daley’s biggest grief arose from the presidential delegate election that was also on the ballot. Lost in the commotion
over peace protests and police riots at the 1968 Democratic convention was a significant change in party policy. The delegates
had adopted a new set of rules governing the selection of convention delegates. The McGovern Commission, as the Commission
on Party Structure and Delegate Selection was known, had traveled around the country soliciting views about the party and
its operations. Alderman Despres spoke for many of the witnesses that appeared before the commission when he condemned the
local Democratic Party as an “autocratic, authoritarian organization” that “leads to shameful exploitation of the voter.”
What the McGovern Commission recommended, and the delegates adopted, was a plan to require that at the next convention blacks,
women, Spanish-speakers, and people between the ages of eighteen and thirty had to be represented as delegate candidates in
proportion to their population in each congressional district. The new rules also required that delegate selection be done
in public, with the time and place of the sessions publicized in advance.
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Daley argued that the McGovern Rules had no validity under Illinois law. In the March 1972 primary, in which fifty-nine Chicago
delegates were to be selected, the slate put up by the machine looked like a cross-section of the inner sanctum of the Sherman
House on election night, heavy with older white men like Tom Keane and Matt Danaher. When Chicago’s delegation fell short
of the party’s new equal-representation rules, independent alderman William Singer teamed up with the Reverend Jesse Jackson
to question the validity of the slate. They held caucuses throughout the city, and elected their own slate of delegates in
informal voice-vote elections, where voting was conducted over the heckling of machine representatives who had infiltrated
the meetings. The Daley slate and the Singer-Jackson slate represented two extremes of the cultural chasm that had split the
Democratic Party four years earlier. “They laughed at us because we wore suits and ties,” said Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, a
Daley delegate and one of the lawyers who represented the group before the Credentials Committee. “Some of them weren’t even
wearing shoes.”
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Daley filed suit in Circuit Court seeking an injunction to prevent the seating of the Singer-Jackson group. Not surprisingly,
given the machine’s record in the local courts, Daley prevailed. But the Singer-Jackson group got the case moved to federal
court, where they won. As the legal skirmishes continued, the matter moved toward the Convention Credentials Committee in
Washington just ten days before the convention was to meet. Daley was confident he would prevail there. Asked if this party
organ might rule against him, Daley replied: “You know they wouldn’t do that to me.” But in a sign of how much the party had
changed in just four years, the Credentials Committee voted 71–61 to seat the Singer-Jackson slate, because the Daley slate
had not complied with the delegate selection rules. The Daley camp was outraged that delegates duly elected at the ballot
box were being replaced by delegates chosen by a handful of people voting in community rooms and church basements. “It is
an insult to Chicago voters,” said former Chicago Corporation counsel Raymond Simon, who was working for the Daley slate,
“to tell them that their spokesmen at the convention are to be the people they voted to defeat at the primary March 21.” Daley
insisted that it was anti-Democratic. “How can they be told they must have so many delegates who are women, who are black,
and who are Spanish-speaking?” he asked. “Where are the rights of the people to elect who they want as delegates?”
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