Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,985

This is the grave of Richard Daley.

Born in 1902 in Chicago, Daley grew up in the working class Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport. The family didn’t have a lot of money but his mother was deeply involved in suffrage politics, unusual for an Irish woman of that time and place. He went to the Catholic schools in his neighborhood and eventually got to DePaul for a bachelors of law degree in 1933, while working the stockyards to pay for it. But his real interest was the Democratic Party machine of Chicago. And no one would play in that machine as effective as Richard Daley, pretty much forever.

Daley started to rise in Chicago politics in the mid-30s, after he got that law degree. Already an active machine man, he was named Chief Deputy Comptroller of Cook County in 1936, the same time he was elected to the state legislature. He held both jobs. The trick here was that the Republican candidate for that office had died, so Daley registered as a Republican so he could take that line and also be the favorite of the Democratic machine. He didn’t miss a trick. He moved up to the state senate in 1938 and became the minority leader there from 1941-46. He ran to become Cook County sheriff in 1946 and lost. He would never lose another race.

Stung from his defeat, Daley became Democratic Ward Committeeman for the 11th District, which would become his true power base in Chicago. Adlai Stevenson, then governor of the state, appointed him head of the Illinois Department of Finance in 1949, though he only stayed in the job for about a year, because in 1950, he ran and won a position as Cook County Clerk. He then became chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party in 1953, meaning he ran things in Chicago and would until he died.

So when Daley ran for mayor in 1955, there wasn’t much doubt about him winning. Chicago does not have a strong mayor, or at least didn’t then, can’t speak to it now. So just being mayor didn’t mean that much for most mayors. After all, Daley was easily the stronger figure as chairman of the party than the previous mayor was as mayor. What made Daley unique is that he controlled the party so tightly that the powerful members of the city council were afraid to do anything without his approval. That meant that while the mayoral office was technically weak, he in fact was extremely strong. He basically got to choose who would win the primaries of most races. He made sure that JFK won Illinois in 1960, through means that may well have been dubious in legality. Interestingly, he and Kennedy did not like each other at all, despite or perhaps because of being the two most powerful Irish-Americans in the Democratic Party at that time.

What Daley was really committed to as mayor was racial segregation. He built his political power on the ethnic enclaves of Chicago and while most of the Black population of the city also voted for Democrats, he would not only hold them at arm’s length but also make sure to isolate them physically as much as possible. So he used his power to make sure that the city’s interstates would be driven to isolate Black neighborhoods, providing physical divides between them and white neighborhoods. That’s of course not so different than other cities around the country, but Daley played a more direct hand in this than other mayors. He was fine with public housing holding the Black population if the federal government wanted to do that but he wasn’t going to lift one finger to make those neighborhoods safer, cleaner, or better policed. The Chicago Police Department would exist under Daley to oppress Black neighborhoods and make whites happy about it.

In 1966, Martin Luther King came to Chicago to desegregate the city’s housing. After the Voting Rights Act, King knew the civil rights movement was nowhere near over. But for northern voters, civil rights were a southern thing. To ask them to send their kids to schools with those people? These parents were (are) just doing the right thing for their children and who could ask them to do anything different. If this means reinforcing racism for another generation, well so be it, little Jason and Linda (Connor and Maddie) need to be in schools that serve their interests. Well, King saw that anyone who makes these claims are racists, even they couch them in alternative language about doing the right thing for their children. So he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came north to fight for housing desegregation and real school desegregation. Daley was absolutely 100% hostile. He couldn’t send have the cops beat him or turn on the fire hoses like Bull Connor in Birmingham. But he would tacitly support the white riots against King, who famously said he had never seen hate like he saw in Chicago in 66, including in Alabama. But hey, gotta keep our children safe. Daley would defeat King that year, teaching the latter a lesson about how northern whites are at least as racist as southern whites.

By the 60s, Daley was a massive player in the Democratic Party nationally, the type of guy who not only ran a major city with an iron fist, but who also was seen as a conduit between politicians with national ambitions and the Irish-American community that made up such a major core of the party. And if the Irish were racist, well, what were Blacks going to do, vote for Republicans again. So Daley got the 1968 DNC in Chicago.

I hardly need to tell the story of the disaster of that convention, where Daley set his cops to beat the living shit out of protestors. My favorite part of it though is when Abraham Ribicoff gave a speech on the floor denouncing the horrors of Daley’s thug cops outside and you can see Daley mouth “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home” at Ribicoff. Nice guy!

Of course none of this hurt Daley at home and he was reelected for a fifth term in 1971 and a sixth in 1975. George McGovern got some revenge by forcing Daley out of the DNC in 1972, but then McGovern ran the worst campaign in modern history so regardless of the beliefs of now old hippies who worked on that campaign and saw losing as just trying to live out their dreams and wishes, it was an unmitigated awful disaster and it’s hard to argue that a better Democratic Party has resulted from the McGovern movement than what existed before. Even if Daley was a scumbag.

Daley would have stayed in office forever, but he had a heart attack in 1976 and died. He was 74 years old.

Richard Daley is buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Alsip, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other Democrats involved in the 1968 DNC, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Daniel Inouye, who was the keynote speaker (did anyone know this, I didn’t) is in Honolulu and Carl Stokes, who seconded Hubert Humphrey’s nomination but which no one saw because the media was showing the CPD beating up antiwar protestors, is in Cleveland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.