Richard J. Daley

Daley was Chicago's third mayor in a row from Bridgeport. He served in that position longer than any other person. According to Chicago folksinger Steve Goodman, no man "could inspire more love, more hate." Known to the world as a Democrat, Daley's first elected position was as a Republican member of the Illinois legislature. When Republican David Shanahan died, Daley switched parties long enough to be elected to serve out his term and, immediately after the election, returned to the Democratic party. Daley suffered his only political defeat in 1946 when he lost a bid to become Cook County sheriff.

First elected in 1955, he served six terms as mayor, dying in office in 1976. Known for party politics, Daley was the prototypical "machine" politician, and his political machine has been considered by some to have been instrumental in helping to electing John F. Kennedy in 1960. Although the boss of a machine, Daley was not inaccessible, meeting each morning in a news conference, taking all questions, if not answering all of them.

Daley had limited opposition among the 50 aldermen of the Chicago City Council. Except for three Republicans from the prosperous wards on northwest side of the city and one independent Democrat representing the ward around the University of Chicago, all the aldermen voted his way consistently.

It was often alleged that his administration used questionable tactics to acquire votes, with the ironic phrase "vote early and vote often" frequently used to describe to his method of delivering votes. Any Democratic vote fraud in Cook County was easily matched statewide by Republican practices downstate, which included voting by telephone, and bulk voting by political leaders.

In fact, the main method used by Daley was the precinct captain, who marshalled and delivered votes on a neighborhood basis. Many of these precinct captains held patronage jobs with the city, mostly minor posts at low pay. Each ward had a ward leader in charge of the precinct captains. Some of these were corrupt. A few wards were tied to the local mafia or crime syndicate, but Daley's own ward was clean and his personal honesty was never questioned successfully.

Major construction during his terms in office resulted in O'Hare International Airport, the Sears Tower, McCormick Place and other Chicago landmarks. O'Hare was a particular point of pride with Daley and his staff regularly devised occasions to celebrate its "opening".

Nineteen sixty-eight was a bad year for Daley, between his order to shoot-to-kill rioters in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr's assassination and the riots which occurred during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At the time, many Chicagoans supported Daley's actions during the DNC; however, a federal commission investigating the events later described them as a "police riot", blaming Daley for inciting the police to commit violence. One of Daley's most memorable malapropisms was uttered in 1968: "Gentlemen, get the thing straight, once and for all: the policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder."

Daley was known for his tangled tongue. He often said he was exhilarating a program, rather than accelerating it, and called a bicycle built for two a tantrum bicycle, for instance. Reporters gathered after his press conferences to work out just what it was that he had said.

At his death in 1976, the public's perception of Daley was the image painted by Mike Royko in Boss—corrupt, racist, cruel, brutish. In light of the discrediting of liberalism and New York City's fiscal crisis, Daley's reputation has risen considerably, as has the reputation of the political machine.

Analysts shifting through the wreckage of New York City's budget in the late 1970s concluded that NYC had two basic problems of fiscal management. The first problem was that New York had to pay a higher share of redistributional services than any other city in the nation. It had a higher share of welfare costs, and had to pay half of non-federal Medicaid costs. The second problem was that NYC mayors were incapable of turning down the demands of public sector unions.

Daley's position as boss enabled him to force either Cook County or the State of Illinois to assume the burdens of costly redistributional services. Daley, the "Master of the functional divestment," was singularly successful in making sure that middle class Chicagoans did not have to pay a disproportionate share of Illinois' social problems.

The basic fiscal problem all American cities have is that they have concentrated poverty. Because of their poverty, cities have greater needs than suburbs, but have less revenue to deal with their needs. The result is a vicious spiral of higher taxes, declining services, and middle-class flight. The higher taxes go, the more middle class people leave. The more middle class people leave, the higher taxes on those remaining must be. Unless the city has amenities that the suburbs do not have, the more trouble it will be in. This model accounts for the fact that the majority of northern American cities are reservations of poverty.

All city mayors are aware of this downward spiral of decline, but very few can do anything about it other than beg. Richard J. Daley, because of his unique power over the Illinois Democratic party, actually did have the political strength to defeat suburban interests and alleviate Chicago's fiscal problems. Over his twenty years as mayor, Daley was singularly successful in getting other political entities, Cook County, the State of Illinois, and various city controlled, but nominally independent, authorities, to assume the burdens of providing for the poor. During his reign, for mass transit, Daley forged a Regional Transportation Authority, with subsidies originally coming from regional sales and gasoline taxes. Daley had merged the city prisons with Cook county prisons, in later years the costs of which would be assumed by the state. Daley had the State assume court costs, and finally, in perhaps his greatest triumph, had in 1970 had the State assume the costs of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. For Cook County, Chicago leans on over two million suburbanites to great benefit, to the amount of a net inflow of $128 million (1970 dollars) per year by 1970.

Academics are not the only ones to notice that Chicago benefited from having a machine. In the conclusion of his biography, Coleman Young, mayor of Detroit from 1973 to 1993, himself expresses frank admiration of Daley:

Detroit's non-partisan system of electing councilmen-at-large—designed in reaction to the Democratic machines that Richard Daley and other city bosses built around ward systems by which municipal voting patterns can be localized and manipulated through the partisan efforts of city employees—has come to mean, in effect we have an extra nine would-be g-ddam mayors sitting up there in the City-County Building. Some of our councilpeople feel so empowered that they even draw up and present personalized city budgets ... we do not and cannot have a spoils system in this city, and consequently cannot put together a political machine on any scale comparable to the old one in Chicago. I don't control tens of thousands of jobs as Daley did, and don't have the power to reward and punish as he did. I wish I did. Although it may not have been the purest form of local government, I'm not reluctant to say that I envied Daley's machine. He had the ability to do whatever he thought was necessary for his city. When Chicago needed him, he was there. No mayor can ask for a better epitaph.

Yes, Daley presided over a wasteful machine, but few cities truly are governed efficiently. In reality, cities are jungles of interest groups, ignorance, and chronic poverty. A machine mayor may owe his strength to wasteful patronage, but patronage-bought strength actually comes cheaper to a city's treasury than strength derived from public sector unions, which is where the mayors of the nation's two highest tax major cities, Philadelphia and New York, usually derive their support. That machines are actually less costly surprises many people, but Ester Fuchs' case in Mayors and Money is very compelling in its case that a machine is, in the big picture, less a drain on a treasury than unions, and a machine mayor can accomplish much more in his state's capital than a non-machine mayor can. For the relative benefits of a machine, compare Chicago and New York. Chicago's workforce peaked in 1971 with just over 50,000 employees. New York's workforce peaked in 1974 with 450,000. New York's unions have had collective bargaining since the 1950s and New York has suffered numerous strikes over the decades. Chicago's unions have only had collective bargaining since the 1980s, and Chicago has only had a few strikes in 40 years, all but one by teachers, who were granted collective bargaining long before other Chicago unions were. In states other than Illinois where unions are a significant force, when city unions cannot get from the mayor or city council what they want, they go around the mayor to the state legislature, which grants them their wish in the form of unfunded mandates. This is how Detroit unions originally won collective bargaining. In Chicago, the mayors traditionally controlled the Springfield delegation, so Chicago unions and other interest groups were essentially blocked from getting what the mayor did not want them to have, including collective bargaining. By 1970, when only 28% of government employees nationally were formally unionized, none were in Chicago, but in Detroit the number was 93%.

Daley's son, Richard M. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago in 1989.

The definitive biography of Daley is American Pharoah, by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor.

Quotations

• "I'm not the last of the old bosses. I'm the first of the new leaders." -- Richard J. Daley