American Pharaoh (96 page)

Daley moved at a slower pace, and lost some public battles, but he continued to use his power to hurt those who crossed him.
In an old game of political chess, Daley tried to use reapportionment to increase the congressional seats for the machine
and decrease the influence of the Republican suburbs. As part of this scheme, Daley eliminated the seat held by Congressman
Abner Mikva, a liberal, Hyde Park independent who had endorsed Bill Singer in the 1975 election. Mikva’s South Side district
was redrawn to be over 90 percent black, forcing him north to Evanston. Mikva protested that the redistricting was being done
as punishment for his differences with Daley. Daley did not disagree, calling Mikva “a partisan narrow-minded bigot who thinks
he has a divine right to his congressional seat.” Daley also had special plans for Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, who had so
dramatically split with the machine. So far, Daley had merely inconvenienced Metcalfe by pulling back some of his patronage
jobs. But with the new reapportionment plan, Daley could shave off some precincts and possibly put his seat at risk. Even
worse, just as Daley had anointed Metcalfe over Dawson’s objections, in December he slated Erwin France, also black and head
of Chicago’s Model Cities and anti-poverty agencies, to challenge Metcalfe in the March 1976 primary.
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As 1976 began, there at last appeared to be a final resolution to the years of litigation over integration of the police department,
initiated in 1970 when the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League charged the department with discriminating against blacks. In
January 1976, Federal District Court Judge Prentice Marshall not only ordered the department to set up remedial racial quotas
in its hiring but also reaffirmed the court’s impoundment of $95 million in federal revenue-sharing funds until the police
department ended its discriminatory practices. The money had been withheld since December 1974 when the city first lost the
suit in federal court. Even after the court’s 1974 ruling, Daley had continued to insist that the Chicago Police Department
was among the most integrated in the country. Marshall disagreed, however, criticizing the city’s resistance to the suit and
emphasizing that the department was only 17 percent black and Hispanic when those minority groups represented 40 percent of
the city.
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This order was unacceptable to Daley. Even though resisting the order hurt the city financially, acceding to it would alienate
his political base of white city workers and their families. Indeed, one of the linchpins of white ethnic support for the
machine was the virtual exclusion of blacks from certain city and county jobs, along with its defense of white ethnic neighborhoods.
With the federal funding still impounded, in December Chicago was forced to borrow $55 million from local banks to pay its
policemen. To Daley, it was worth it to take a stand against hiring quotas. In defending his actions, Daley spoke out against
racial quotas in employment. “The quota system is totally un-American,” Daley insisted. “We’ll continue to fight this as long
as we’re around.”

Daley sent off a letter to Washington in an attempt to get the impounded bonds released. He suggested that the federal money
be made available for the city to spend on a “variety of other purposes, including social services.” In the days of Lyndon
Johnson, the White House would have jumped when Daley made his appeal. But the Republicans were less solicitous. Once again,
failure to elect a Democratic president in 1968 was continuing to haunt him.
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The upcoming Illinois Democratic primary election in March was very important to Daley. It was widely viewed as a test of
his hold on power — particularly races involving machine enemies like Metcalfe. Daley miscalculated the election disastrously.
Drawing on his own popularity, as well as growing voter discontent with Daley’s interference, Metcalfe handily beat Daley’s
congressional candidate, Earl France. Even in his race for committeeman, Metcalfe beat Daley’s handpicked candidate, machine
alderman Tyrone Kenner. He won by only eleven votes, but this victory was significant because the machine virtually never
lost a committeeman election. Conventional wisdom held that it was mainly machine voters who bothered with these party races
— but not this time. Metcalfe had even overcome the machine’s ultimate punishment: that it had taken the patronage it stripped
him of and given it to Kenner. The outcome was a humiliation for Daley, who had staked considerable political capital on ousting
Metcalfe from office. “The people have spoken. They want to be free,” said Metcalfe. “People did not like the idea of Daley
sending a puppet to destroy another man.”
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Metcalfe was not the only candidate Daley tried to force out of office. He also had his sights on defeating the incumbent
Democratic governor, Dan Walker. Walker had ridden the 1972 wave of voter anti-machine sentiment into office, but he had proven
to be an inept politician. He squabbled with Daley on minor issues and was unable to deal with state legislators, even Democrats,
most of whom were more loyal to Daley than to him. But the last straw for Daley was a bill to assist the perpetually financially
troubled Chicago public schools. Walker vetoed the bill, and in the fall of 1975, Daley made a rare journey to Springfield
to generate support for an override. He stood in the well of the state senate chamber and made an emotional appeal that so
drained him that he immediately had to take a rest afterward. Daley lost on the long-shot override, but after that, relations
between the two men were irreparably damaged.
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Daley selected secretary of state Michael Howlett to challenge Walker in the Democratic primary. Howlett, an affable Irishman,
born and raised on the West Side, had come up through the machine but was never in Daley’s inner circle. Nonetheless, he projected
the right image to Democratic primary voters for Daley’s purposes — getting Walker out of office. And Howlett knew what was
required. At a fund-raising dinner shortly before he announced his candidacy for governor, Howlett stressed the theme of “loyalty”
to the crowd of 3,500 people, repeating the word several times. Howlett was being touted as “Mr. Clean,” so when Republicans
charged him with a conflict of interest over his role as a consultant to a steel firm, Daley was furious. In characteristic
style, he attacked the reporters, not the Republican leader who made the charge. “They get a few drinks, and they get a little
high and they write a lot of things that are not true,” Daley said of the press. On election night, though, the machine prevailed,
as it generally did in primary elections. Daley got his revenge on Walker, as he watched him go down in defeat. The fact that
Daley had badly damaged the Democrats’ prospects through this intramural bloodletting — and made the hated James Thompson’s
election as governor all but certain — was apparently of little consequence to him.
⁴³

The issue of public housing — which had all but faded from view — reappeared briefly in April 1976 when part of the
Gautreaux
case was decided by the United States Supreme Court. Daley had, of course, long insisted that public housing required a metropolitan
solution that would take in the suburbs as well as the city. The
Gautreaux
plaintiffs agreed, and filed a separate lawsuit against the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that sought
just such a metropolitan-area-wide remedy. Judge Austin at first rejected this claim, but ultimately, on April 20, 1976, the
U.S. Supreme Court held that including the suburbs was appropriate. Daley hailed the decision, repeating his view that “the
only way to do something about housing is on a metropolitan basis.” Three months later, HUD and plaintiffs’ lawyer Alexander
Polikoff announced a joint plan to move 400 existing CHA tenants and people on the waiting list into private apartments in
integrated settings in Chicago and the suburbs, with rents subsidized by the federal government. This demonstration program,
administered by the Metropolitan Leadership Council for Open Housing, yielded impressive results. In addition to increasing
residential integration, studies of the families involved showed that they had greater educational and employment success
than those who remained behind in the ghetto. The demonstration program proved to be the lawsuit’s greatest legacy. In addition
to improving the lives of many of its participants, it has provided policymakers with strong empirical evidence that racial
and economic integration can make a difference in the lives of inner-city blacks. Unfortunately, the program had space for
only a small fraction of the tenants trapped in Chicago public housing and desperate to get out. The lives of those left behind
in Daley’s State Street Corridor remained as impoverished as ever. One researcher who interviewed blacks on the South Side
found that many were almost completely cut off from the rest of the city. Many had never been to the Loop, and a surprising
number had never even left their own neighborhoods.
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On the larger issue of new housing construction, Congressman Pucinski’s prediction — that the
Gautreaux
decision would spell the end of new public housing in Chicago — turned out to be prophetic.
Gautreaux
was not entirely to blame: the federal commitment to funding public housing declined rapidly in the late 1960s and early
1970s. But with
Gautreaux
’s requirement that new construction occur in white neighborhoods, the political will at the local level was all but eviscerated.
In the decade after Judge Austin’s decision, the CHA built only 117 units of new public housing. This later construction came
in the form of “scattered-site” housing — units spread across a wide geographical area — rather than the mammoth projects
of earlier days. But even after the court order, most of the scattered-site housing ended up being built in poor, minority
neighborhoods. Almost two-thirds of it was located in just ten wards, nine of which were overwhelmingly minority. Almost none
was built in wealthy white neighborhoods like Lincoln Park or Beverly, or white ethnic neighborhoods like Bridgeport.

A 1975 HUD investigation revealed one more part of Chicago public housing that was segregated: housing for the elderly. Racial
segregation was achieved not by actively directing blacks and whites to different projects, but by a clever procedure for
making assignments. The CHA put the names of applicants for elderly housing on a master list, and noted their preference for
particular buildings. The CHA permitted applicants to turn down buildings that came open first, to wait for those they preferred.
Because the wait list was substantially longer for the city’s predominantly white projects, blacks on the master list would
generally accept one of the predominantly black buildings when it came open. By the time a vacancy occurred in a primarily
white building, the applicants at the top of the wait list would be almost exclusively white. HUD found that as a result of
these CHA rules, eleven buildings for the elderly in black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides had fewer than five white
tenants. The situation in predominantly white elderly housing was the reverse: twelve CHA buildings on the North Side, with
between 116 and 450 apartments, had fewer than ten black residents each.
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