If the newspapers knew a lot about Richard J. Daley by 1955, few of the voters did. It is hard to imagine, after those three decades in which his name became synonymous with Chicago, that a Daley campaign ever had all the trappings of photo events and baby-kissing that lesser political figures engage in to make themselves known and adored.
The many later campaigns of Richard Daley were marked by a precision of orders: a half-million signatures filed promptly and without challenge for the nominating petitions, a half-million votes delivered promptly on primary election day, another half-million delivered in the general election, a few huge dinners in one of the downtown hotels, a few stops in the black churches and at some of the giant Polish banquet halls on Milwaukee Avenue, a feigned ignorance of any issues raised, a refusal to acknowledge any opponent by name, an occasional rapid denunciation of any criticisms, and certain victory an hour after the polls closed–or even before they closed.
But in 1955 Daley was only the county clerk, another Irish guy from bridgeport, a rather portly, neatly dressed, and most of the time soft-spoken fellow who talked about saving the taxpayers money.
Now there was a different Daley to behold as he campaigned in the primary. He was in the black wards, he was marching in parades, he was stopping shoppers and dropping in at bars and churches and rallies all over the city.
Certainly Daley saw places in 1955 that even he, the biggest booster and most ardent lover Chicago ever had, had never seen before. And he began the pattern of orchestrating endorsements that always overwhelmed his opponents. In early February, he got his most important endorsement. Adlai Stevenson, the titular national leader of the Democrats, surprised his many liberal and reform friends by abandoning the reform mayor and supporting Daley. But Stevenson knew that Daley was a superior administrator, far from the machine hack the newspapers were painting him. And Stevenson wanted another run at the presidency to vindicate himself. He knew Martin Kennelly, who was running for his third term as mayor, could not help him.
If Chicago was getting its first chance to see and hear Daley, he was getting his first taste of rough campaigning, personal campaigning.
In his previous election forays his opponents had limited their charges to accusing him of being a double dipper and a tool of the machine. Since he was both, Daley didn’t argue much. No one paid much attention and the rhetoric had no impact on the outcome of the election.
Now Kennelly was going on television charging that Daley would turn loose the worst kind of corrupt influences on the city, that he was backed by the “dark dictatorship” of South Side political boss William Dawson, and that the Democratic Party wanted to get control of the city’s schools and turn them into a patronage haven.
Daley, who would always wear the chip of personal integrity on his shoulder, fired back. “There are many false charges and malicious remarks being made about us,” he told a rally of committeemen on Jan. 28, exhorting them with a charge that would be his eternal refrain. “Where is the proof? Where are the facts behind the rumors? I have not heard of the facts, because there are no facts!”
Four thousand of his friends and neighbors in Bridgeport set off aerial bombs and marched up Halsted Street with the Daley family to a huge rally at the Lithuanian Hall. He laid out with remarkable prescience the program he would implement and keep running for 20 years. “Everyone wants his neighborhood to have good police protection, frequent garbage collection, adequate sewers, speedy public transportation.”
He also promised more housing, which ultimately proved to be a mixed blessing. But most of all he forecast the style that marked every decision, every plan, every dream he would ever have: “This is the spirit I will bring to the mayor’s office, a spirit of getting these things done for the people, not in the distant future, but right now!”
Kennelly’s miscalculation
Kennelly spent a lot of his radio and television time attacking Dawson. “Dawson’s leadership in the `dump Kennelly’ movement is a cover-up for his real motives, which are his interest in his purse, not his people.” Kennelly charged that Dawson wanted him out because Kennelly refused to permit open gambling in Dawson’s wards.
While Kennelly attacked Dawson, Daley was cultivating him. Dawson had been named vice chairman of the Democratic committee and Daley always referred to him as the “distinguished congressman.”
In 1955 Kennelly played the race card. He raised the specter of the machine taking over the school system and dealing with its problems in a way that would please Dawson–integration.
In the early 1950s the Chicago schools were vastly overcrowded. Ten thousand pupils went to classes in shifts. There were not enough classrooms, especially in the South Side wards where Dawson’s voters lived. And there were no integrated schools. Daley accused the Kennelly campaign of “raising the question of racial tension in the community, (spreading) a deliberate, fraudulent lie” about the plans for integration.
Uncertain of how much white backlash was out there, Daley reassured a 19th Ward white audience. “I’m a kid from the stockyards. I’d never do that,” he said.
Whether Kennelly’s tactic was the inadvertent stumbling of a political naif, which he was, or whether the shrewder Frank Keenan, Kennelly’s campaign manager, saw a possible wedge into the ethnic and racist strongholds of the organization, the bid to win white backlash votes failed. Only few of Chicago’s whites had begun to feel the threat of neighborhood blockbusting. The competition for jobs that always spurred nationalist and racial rivalries was diminished by a booming manufacturing economy that could employ everyone who wanted to work. And for the politically devoted, the organization had control of 30,000 jobs that were given, outside of Dawson’s bailiwick, exclusively to whites.
But there was a backlash. It came from the previously docile black community. Not all the black vote was deliverable to the machine. There was a middle-class and religion-based liberal element who saw the machine as just another form of plantation rule. There was also some lingering Republican sentiment among older black voters.
But these patches of resistance had no money to hustle precincts on election day or jobs to promise for corralling votes. Kennelly should have realized that the anti-machine vote did exist. He had narrowly carried four of the five black wards in his 1947 victory, winning big only in the 20th Ward.
By 1951, with Dawson already making snorting noises about him, Kennelly lost two of those wards, a clear indication that anyone opposing the Democratic organization’s candidate could find some relief among black voters. But Kennelly’s race-baiting killed any hope of that. The Chicago Defender editorialized on its front page a defense of Dawson and a repudiation of Kennelly, comparing his tactics to those of Hitler and Mussolini.
Daley was the beneficiary of this enormous miscalculation.
Kennelly clearly did not have the appreciation of his city’s black population that Daley did. Kennelly hobnobbed with the owners of the State Street stores, not with the people who shopped there or scrubbed the floors. He moved out of Bridgeport as fast as success could take him to a luxurious lakefront apartment. He undoubtedly thought of blacks as custodians or domestics and, unlike Daley, never regarded them as a threat, socially or economically. In many ways he was like many urban Northerners, content to nod sympathetically at the oppression of blacks in the South and smug in the belief that places like Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago were true havens of equality (despite a flareup of rioting every 20 years or so).
Daley could count
In 1954 America was bursting with new housing, new cars, new television sets, new jobs, new opportunities. There seemed to be enough to go around.
when the modern machine was created in 1930, fewer than 150,000 among Chicago’s more than 3 million residents were black. Most voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln, and their participation in local elections was Republican but not critical.
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In Anton Cermak’s 1931 mayoral victory, he got only 25 percent of the black vote, the same number Franklin Roosevelt gathered the following year. But the New Deal began to change black voting habits. In 1936, Roosevelt doubled his vote among Chicago blacks, and Ed Kelly won 57 percent of their vote in 1939. During the 1940s, blacks in Chicago still moved toward the Democratic Party nationally, but began to drift locally.
Chicago blacks, who could see what they were getting from the New Deal, could also see what they were not getting from the local organization. Kennelly got only 51 percent of their vote in 1947 and barely broke the 50 percent mark in 1951, losing two of the black wards. And the black population was doubling every decade.
In 1955 there were more than 900,000 black people living in Chicago, almost one-fourth of the population. Daley could count. He had spent most of his adult years counting. He counted jobs, salaries, revenues, taxes, expenditures, bills, amendments, ordinances, committees, commissions, delegates and votes. Above all he was a master at counting votes. And Bill Dawson had them.
As Feb. 22, 1955, approached, Daley had whipped the county loyalists to a frenzy. Another Kennelly term could only lead to more and more jobs placed in the dreaded civil service category, more backroom gambling operations closed, and more city contracts awarded on honest bidding, in the open.
Very few committeemen had a personal passion for electing Daley mayor. Some clearly did not twist many arms for him. And many of them, particularly on the North Side, would be hard-pressed to carry Daley. In light of the citywide landslides of his later years–losing only a liberal lakefront ward here and there–it is hard to grasp that in the 1955 primary, Daley, the greatest mayor Chicago ever had, the greatest kingmaker Chicago ever had, the greatest vote getter Chicago ever had, could win only five wards north of the river.
But that was enough.
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Next: Friend of the White House.
BEFORE HE WAS MAYOR
RICHARD J. DALEY’S EARLY POLITICAL CAREER
1936: Elected to Illinois state legislature at age 34; appointed deputy controller of Cook County
1938: Elected to Illinois state senate
1946: Lost election for Cook County sheriff
1947: Elected 11th Ward committeeman in Chicago
1948: Appointed state director of revenue
1950: Appointed County Clerk of Cook County to fill a vacancy; later that year he was elected to the position
1953: Named chairman of the Democratic Central Committee in Illinois
1955: Elected mayor of Chicago