By Michael Miner
An ancient angry desire to “get Daley” is going to well up again in a lot of people as they read American Pharaoh, a big, meticulous new biography of the first Mayor Daley. These were the independents–mostly young, white, and educated–who until the day of his death in November 1976 despised him. It wasn’t simply the corruption of the government he presided over, or his brutal police, backward schools, and inhumane public housing that they found unforgivable. Back then, when the mayor looked at his city he didn’t see them, or he saw them only as the enemy.
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Martin Luther King Jr. might have been speaking for a generation of dissident Chicagoans in 1966 when he came to this city to crusade for decent housing for black people. His nine-month chess match with the mayor is the centerpiece of American Pharaoh. King and Daley attended a so-called summit, and King pleaded, “We want to be visible. We are not trying to overthrow you–we are trying to get in.” But Daley had locked the front door. He responded to King as he responded to any opponent too formidable to summarily destroy–with declarations of common purpose, vague promises, preemptive counterinitiatives, and outright lies. King finally pulled out of Chicago pretty much as the United States a few years later pulled out of Vietnam–outfoxed and outlasted, claiming spurious gains yet not having made a dent.
Did she ever manage to like Daley? I ask her.
Some events indelible in my own memory have been ignored by American Pharaoh, but perhaps these were matters of interest only to a journalist. Press coverage of Daley is cited just often enough in the book that readers can sense how feckless it was, but the emancipation isn’t recorded. As it happened, the ’68 convention week, when young reporters in the streets were clubbed along with everyone else and then discovered their bosses didn’t want to hear about it, led to the creation of the Chicago Journalism Review. Soon imitated in cities all over the country, CJR brought honorable radicalism to a calling starved for it, giving city reporters of the late 60s a way to practice their trade and still hold their heads up. Nor does American Pharaoh mention the insurrection of 1971, when the Field papers–the Sun-Times and Daily News–endorsed Daley for reelection, and the staffs of the papers took out full-page ads repudiating the endorsements.
“All of a sudden,” a Dawn Patroler remembers, “a green Pontiac, or whatever–a clunker–pulls up. It pulls up alone. There’s no entourage. He’s dressed in, like, suit pants, wing tips, a white shirt, and a tie. He’d come to play baseball. And he did. It was a scream. People were flabbergasted and deeply–it broke a lot of ice with a lot of people. ‘This guy’s got guts. And he also knows what he has to do if he has a future.’”
Elizabeth Taylor called Richard J. Daley fascinating, but then power usually is. I ask what sort of company she thinks he’d have been over a weekend in the country.
