Clouter with Conscience

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There sits Buddha, face unfathomable, hooded eyes of blue ice, nose stubborn and strong. Lines like deep parentheses bracket his thin lips; beneath them is a small chin, and beneath that is a big chin. Five-and-a-half feet high, close to 200 lbs. wide, he is swathed in a cautious dark suit from which peeps an embroidered breast-pocket handkerchief with a monogram: R.J.D.

Buddha speaks--and his pronouncements are aphorisms. "Leadership," he says, "has to be formulated on the basis of what's good for Chicago. If something is in the public interest, then it is in the party's interest. Good government is good politics."

Buddha moves--but only to rub his fingers back and forth across the edge of his desk. That desk, clean of papers, may be the most important place in Chicago. For it is the desk of Mayor Richard Joseph Daley, 60. In Chicago, Daley is boss. Few others understand so well what the city is all about: its labyrinths of power, the pulsators of its machinery, the structure of its institutions, the yearnings of its people. Chicago's motto, I WILL, is Daley's personal and political charter. Buddha though he is, he gets things done. Says a leading businessman: "Nothing ever happens in Chicago without landing on Daley's desk for decision." Daley, with characteristic caution, agrees. "We participate in one way or another." he says, "in the important things that happen."

Making things happen is Daley's passion. "We"--meaning I--"are going to rebuild this city." he says, and he has gone a fair way during his eight years as mayor. Under Daley, Chicago has a new rhythm as exciting as any in the city's lusty past. A new fac,ade is rising in steel and zeal. New buildings loom high against the slate-grey winter waters of Lake Michigan. Bulldozers cut great swaths through slums; in their wake thousands of new dwellings are being planted. New classrooms keep pace with the growing school population, new expressways crosshatch the megalopolis, manufacturing and income are steadily climbing. Chicago--once described by home-grown Author Nelson Algren as a city on the make--is a city on the move (see color).

Some Things Old. Yet much of the old remains--the sights and sounds that make Chicago Chicago. In the Merchandise Mart (known locally as Fort Kennedy*), salesmen giantstep down corridors, order pads in hand. In the Palmer House ballroom, conventioneers stand at 50-yd.-long buffet tables and discuss medical, academic or mercantile business. On Rush Street, tourists dart in and out of the joints for peekaboos at the girls or for laughs at the comedy revues. In the pit at the Board of Trade, men scurry for the futures. The Chicago Club's doorman bows to a man who may be next in line to head International Harvester. At 63rd and Cottage Grove, the South Side's Times Square, a storefront church proclaims GOD'S CORNER. The Negro heartland swarms with police shuttle cars, dope pushers and pimps. An unwed mother of four cashes her welfare check and picks up three fifths of Four Roses. On the West Side, Mayor Daley attends the full-flowered funeral of murdered Negro Alderman Ben Lewis (TIME, March 8), makes a speech, stands by the open casket to shake hands. And Sheriff Richard Ogilvie the only Republican holding Cook County elective office of any consequence, complains of Daley's power. "Chicago," he sighs, "is the city of clout."

Clout is Chicago's word for power. And Daley has clout coming out of his ears. Daley's power is pyramidal. It is based on his position as captain of Chicago's Eleventh Ward Democratic Committee. That qualifies him to be a member of the Cook County Democratic Committee--of which he is chairman, making him the political boss of Democratic Chicago. As boss-mayor, he has almost absolute control over the party structure: he picks candidate slates, runs the patronage machinery, works his will on nearly all of the 50 submissive aldermen who comprise Chicago's city council.

Daley hand-picked and, to all intents and purposes, elected Illinois' Democratic Governor Otto Kerner, 54, who is almost pitiably responsive to Daley's wishes. Chicago's nine-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives acts on Daley's commands. "I don't even go to the bathroom without checking first," says one Chicago Congressman. Says a White House staffer: "If Daley told 'em to vote for the impeachment of President Kennedy tomorrow, they'd vote for the impeachment of President Kennedy tomorrow." That situation is not likely to occur; Daley is one of Kennedy's closest political allies, has a lightning-fast line to the White House.

The Use of Power. But it is not Daley's political power that counts so much in modern Chicago as the way he uses it. Chicago has had boss-mayors with clout before. There was "Big Bill" Thompson (1915-23, 1927-31), a Republican who left a safe-deposit box stuffed with a million and a half dollars in cash when he died. Then there was Democrat Ed Kelly (1933-47), who used his power mostly to throw public projects to his personal and political pal, Contractor Pat Nash. Chicago has also had do-good mayors who had no clout. One of these was Democrat Martin Kennelley (1947-55), whose good intentions were all frustrated by his total lack of political acumen, and who was unseated by Daley in 1955.

Daley differs from his predecessors in that he is a boss-mayor whose power seems to be dedicated to making Chicago a better place. Says he: "The old bosses were not interested in what was good for the public welfare. They were interested only in what was good for themselves. The new objective of leadership is not what you can do for yourself, but what you can do for the people. We're the first of the new bosses--that is, the first of the new leaders."

Blue Ribbons. The self-styled new leader is presently enjoying one of the fruits of his power. He is running for a third term (election day: April 2), against Benjamin Adamowski, 56, a Democrat turned Republican, who served as state's attorney from 1956 to 1960 and distinguished himself by never successfully prosecuting a major case. If there is such a thing as a cinch in U.S. politics, Daley is it.

Chicago's four daily papers--all of which are Republican-owned--are either overtly or covertly for Daley. Many leading Republican businessmen also support him. Says David Kennedy, chairman of the Continental Bank and head of one of Daley's dozen-odd blue-ribbon civic improvement committees: "The mayor's done a good job. Some people might say his weakness is his political ties, but it's really his strength. He's very strong, and he couldn't operate the way he does if he weren't strong politically."

A Man's Town. Chicago was practically invented for strongmen. Wrote Rudyard Kipling after visiting Chicago in 1889: "Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.'' The hell-raising town that Kipling saw was a burning fuse tossed into the junction of East and West--a brawling, bawdy town of unflagging spirit and adventure. If a city has sex, Chicago is surely male--in its smell of sweat, its feel of muscle, its unceasing masculine drive for power. "There are no ladies in Chicago," an old saying went. "Only widows, wives and girls." Men made the city: Field, Carson, Pirie, Palmer, Altgeld, Sears, Pullman, Armour, McCormick, Swift, Medill.

There was beef on the hoof, grain in the bins, plows and machinery clanking into the prairies beyond. When the Great Fire leveled the city in 1871, men built it again, and so built monuments to themselves. To the railyards. the stockyards and the factories came swarms of immigrants. To the street corners, the slums and the pleasure palaces streamed the sin merchants. The Everleigh girls, two sisters from Kentucky, established the world's most elegant bordello. Reformers and anarchists, empire builders and Pinkertons, clashed in the streets, while hot-eyed sin-slayers sought new souls in their tents.

John D. Rockefeller helped found the University of Chicago, and Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright and Carl Sandburg became the first of many creators to honor the city in stone and song. As the town stretched out and up. City Planner Daniel Burnham commanded: "Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty."

Blues, booze, broads, beer, boodle and bums put heat into the city's blood, and a wave of Sicilian mobsters arrived to cool the blood with bullets. The theme of Chicago's World Fair in 1933 was "A Century of Progress"--but its symbol became Sally Rand, who played Lady Godiva while riding bareback (and front).

Kid with a Hanky. There can be no understanding of Dick Daley without the realization that he is a product of his city. He was born in 1902. His father Mike was a sheet-metal worker, the son of an Irish immigrant. His mother Lillian was a vigorous woman who divided her energies between raising her only child and working for her neighborhood Roman Catholic Church. The Daleys lived in the impoverished Bridgeport district near the stockyards. "His family was a little better off than the rest of us," recalls an old friend. "Dick was the only kid in the neighborhood who had a handkerchief."

Dick sold newspapers, worked for a vegetable peddler on Saturdays, quit high school to take his first fulltime job as a stockyards cowboy. Often on horseback, he yarded and penned cattle. Having studied shorthand, Daley finally began working regularly in the stockyards office, went nights to law school at De Paul University. Appointed a secretary to the city council at 25, he has been on the public payroll ever since. After graduation, he set up a law office with a partner--but devoted himself almost exclusively to politics. In 1936 Daley married an Irish girl, Eleanor Guilfoyle, settled down in a small house in his old neighborhood, where his seven children were born. The Daleys still live in Bridgeport.

The Rewards. Chicago's bosses in those days were Mayor Kelly and the 24th Ward's leader, Jake Arvey. In 1936, when a state legislator from Daley's district died, Democratic leaders put Daley's name on the ballot, and Daley won easily. Moving later to the state senate, Daley honed his inborn political instincts, became a valued legman for Kelly and Arvey.

The rewards for faithfulness followed rapidly. In 1949, after helping Arvey to boost Adlai Stevenson into the governorship, Daley was made state revenue director. Fourteen months later, he was appointed, and later elected, county clerk. This was a big job: in effect, Daley was the organization's secretary of state in charge of Cook County patronage and voting machinery. In that job, he could and did build his own political organization.

Dick Daley now made a significant decision. He determined to become mayor of Chicago. To Jake Arvey, this was unthinkable. A behind-the-scenes operator, Arvey devoutly believed that the mayor and the political boss should be two different people; the boss should rule from behind closed doors, and the mayor should stand out front cutting ceremonial ribbons. Arvey had picked Reformer Kennelley to follow Ed Kelly, helped Kennelley get reelected, and now he wanted a third term for Kennelley. Daley protested. "People told me," he says, "that if you're a leader you can't be mayor. That's when I decided to lead my party and be mayor."

Marshmallow & Mother. Defying Arvey, Daley jumped into a Democratic primary fight against Kennelley and beat him. Then, in the general election campaign, he turned on Republican Candidate Robert Merriam. Merriam charged scandal and corruption in Chicago's Democratic government. Daley, realizing that beneath the brazen Chicagoan exterior beats a heart of marshmallow, watered the citizens' eyes with sentimentality.

"I would not unleash the forces of evil," he cried. "It's a lie. I will follow the training my good Irish mother gave me--and Dad. If I am elected, I will embrace mercy, love, charity, and walk humbly with my God." Not even Daley's best friends really believed him. And on the night of his victory, the freewheeling old politicians fairly danced in the streets. Across Chicagoland flew the jubilant cry of a colorful saloonkeeper and alderman named Paddy Bauler. "Chicago," he roared, "ain't ready for reform!"

Perhaps not. But Daley has certainly not been the sort of mayor that Bauler, or anyone else, expected. Says Jake Arvey today: "I've served under five mayors, and I think I know my men. When Daley first became county chairman and then mayor. I did not think it would work out. I felt his work as mayor would be colored by his political obligations, and on that ground I opposed him. I think now I was wrong." The Republican Chicago Tribune (which has backed Democrats on infrequent occasions) agrees. When Daley was running for his second term, the Trib editorialized: "He is just about the most effective leader of a political party that this city has seen in living memory."

Cementing an Alliance. Hardly had he taken office than Daley showed just how much a real politician could accomplish. For years, the Democratic city of Chicago and the generally Republican state of Illinois had been at a financial impasse: each needed more sales-tax revenue, but neither could get it without mutual support in the state legislature. Daley paid a call on Republican Governor William Stratton and came to an agreement--a half-cent for the state, a half-cent for Chicago. In one hour's work in Stratton's office, Daley picked up additional revenue for Chicago that now runs about $24 million a year. Stratton also agreed to help push through long-needed legislation to give Chicago home rule. With this power in his pocket, Daley could extract from the ward dukes of his city council a large measure of subservience; he had control over contracts, budgets and jobs. After a series of battles in the council, Daley succeeded in transforming the aldermen into a civic chowder-and-marching society.

Now unchallenged king of Illinois Democrats, he was ready to turn his hand to national prince-making. Although cool toward Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956, Daley could not really go against his fellow IIlinoisan. But he could fight against Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver, that intrepid fellow whose crime investigations had caused all sorts of trouble in Daley's Democratic Chicago. Having lost out to Adlai for the top spot, Keef was now after the nomination for Vice President. Daley set out to block him--and he selected as his own candidate Senator John Kennedy, whose shrewd, cool, political acumen he had come to like. Daley's delegation was the first to announce a major break to Kennedy's candidacy. The tension that followed the first and indecisive balloting at the convention was the most electric political moment of the year: at one point Kennedy stood within 38 1/2 votes of the nomination, only to teeter and fall back. A breath-taking near miss it was for Kennedy, but one of the byproducts of the experience was a Kennedy-Daley alliance that still exists.

Between 1956 and 1960. Daley was a key supporter and consultant in Kennedy's race for the presidential nomination. At the party convention in Los Angeles. Daley sat Buddha-like while a Stevenson demonstration enveloped the floor. He exhibited emotion only once: when a Stevensonite grabbed the Illinois standard out of his hands, Daley boiled up a black rage.

For Election Day 1960, Daley had predicted a Chicago plurality of 450,000 votes for Kennedy. The margin was actually 456,000--giving Kennedy a statewide edge of 8,858. Daley was unworried by the fact that investigators later turned up voting irregularities involving no fewer than 677 election judges in 133 Chicago precincts. So, obviously, was Kennedy.* On the day after his inauguration, he posed in the White House for pictures with the Daley family, autographed one for the mayor. "Do you know," says Daley with great pride, "that we were the first family the President received?"

Robber Cops. Turning once again to his city, Daley resumed his campaign to rebuild Chicago's fac,ade and to weed the jungle behind it. There was, for example, the Chicago police department. It was almost legend that Chicago's cops were the best that money could buy--and they could be bought easily. Public respect for the police had never been high, but it hit its nadir in 1960, when a two-bit thief blew the whistle on eight cops who were part of a burglary ring. The policemen had even used their patrol cars to haul away the loot, which over a two-year period amounted to about $100,000 in TV sets and electrical appliances.

In his inimitably bland fashion, Daley vowed a cleanup, sent off to the University of California for Criminology Professor Orlando W. Wilson. He named Wilson superintendent of police, pledged him a free hand, saw to it that the department got more than $15 million in extra funds and more than 2,000 additional men. Wilson's reorganization gives Chicagoans better police service than they have ever had before. He has raised department morale, giving the city's citizens reasonable assurance that their cops will not turn out to be robbers. With such achievements, it makes little difference that Wilson has yet to catch a real live mobster; he finds only dead people on office floors, like Alderman Lewis, or dead in car trunks or sewers.

"It Took Guts." Much of Daley's time is consumed by Chicago's explosive race problem. The city's Negro population, always sizable, began to mushroom in the early '50s. From the South came waves of Negro families seeking jobs, housing or welfare handouts. They flooded the South and West Sides like the waters from a broken dam. White families hast ily moved away--usually to the suburbs--leaving the Negro tide to lap up neighborhood after neighborhood.

The effect of the Negro migration on Chicago has been overwhelming. In 1950 Negroes comprised 13.6% of the city's population; they now make up 25.8% of the total.* The Negro segment of the school population has swelled to 48% of the elementary school pupils, 34% of the high schoolers. Negroes represent 65% of Chicago's jail inmates, 42% of the unemployed, 90% of those getting aid to dependent children, 50% of the school dropouts. Against such staggering statistics, Mayor Daley has made urban renewal and slum clearance his priority program. On the Near North Side, on the West, on the South Side, the city has built, or is planning, 27 housing projects covering 19 sq. mi. of blight. So far, $900 million has been committed to the program; 40,000 dilapidated buildings have been torn down or refurbished, leaving 24,000 more for Daley's bulldozers.

In his massive effort, Daley has encountered formidable opposition. Many Negroes who refer to urban renewal as "Negro removal," mutter that "Dick Daley may be the last white Mayor of Chicago." Daley's own Roman Catholic Church mounted campaigns against many of his projects. The apparent reason: Daley's programs remove Negroes from their ghettos, send them into white neighborhoods, send white residents fleeing, and leave Catholic parish houses and churches bereft of their congregations--and contributions. Nonetheless, Daley has continued to fight for his program. Recalls Banker David Kennedy of Daley's difficulties in promoting the Hyde Park-Kenwood Project near the University of Chicago campus: "There was tremendous political opposition, and very strong opposition from the Catholic Church. The church attacked the whole thing. But Daley hand-carried the proposal through the commissioners and pushed it through." Agrees University of Chicago Chancellor George Beadle: "It took guts."

Fall & Rise. Whatever it took, it was worth it. For the University of Chicago, once a renowned haven for brilliant teachers and bright scholars, had fallen into sad estate. The South Side area around the 125-acre campus had become Chicago's worst slum. The university was losing many of those brilliant teachers, and was becoming the school that no bright scholar should really want to go to.

The problem was plain--but immensely difficult to correct. Well-meaning Mayor Kennelley had announced plans for a 900-acre renewal program, but was never able to translate those plans into substantive action. It remained for Daley, using every instrument of his political power, to make the project really move. He teamed up with Julian Levi, the university's own slum-clearance leader, adopted and reinforced Levi's organized community assaults on greedy landlords and local crime. Today, the area's deterioration has been stemmed with the construction of nearly 2,000 housing units, as well as shopping facilities and new university additions.

Second City. Thanks largely to its improved surroundings, the university has begun again to play its proper part in Chicago's vibrant cultural climate. In the past, that climate had nurtured the talents of such innovators as Sullivan, Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Frank Norris (The Octopus), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), Carl Sandburg, James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan), and the "Chicago School" of jazz. Today, Chicago is characteristically self-conscious about its "second city'' creativity, even though young people like Shelley Berman. Negro Dick Gregory, Bob Newhart and Nichols & May have all sparked new trends in comedy entertainment and other theatrical forms--notably the cerebral cabaret satire of the highly acclaimed Second City players. Negro Playwright (Raisin in the Sun) Lorraine Hansberry has great promise, and Negro Poetess Gwendolyn Brooks has won a Pulitzer Prize. The Chicago Symphony, once in a sorry state, now ranks among the nation's best. The nine-year-old Lyric Opera and scores of smaller music groups have faithful followings, while attendance at indoor art exhibitions has increased by more than 30% in the past few years; the Art Institute alone is visited by one million people annually.

Credit to Boot. The counterpoint to all this is played by Chicago's economic activity. Its geography, from the city's birth, made Chicago a key factor in trade. As rail lines marked it like tracer bullets, it became a Goliath, took on even more muscle when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened still another economic channel.

Though Sandburg's "hog butcher for the world'' is no more (many of the slaughterhouses have moved out), Chicago remains a mercantile and industrial center for the nation. Its wholesale and retail trade runs better than $33 billion a year. The city handles more freight cars daily--26,000--than New York and St. Louis combined, boasts terminals for 20 rail lines. Its motor arteries are clogged by 800,000 truck trips daily. Its McCormick Place is the nation's biggest convention hall, plays host to organizations that spend more than $200 million a year in Chicago. Its share of the gross national product is $28.7 billion. Its steadily climbing industrial capacity has reached total gross sales of $23.2 billion; now the leading steel producer in the nation, Chicago turned out one-fifth of the nation's steel in 1962. Chicago's per capita debt is only $206, and the city has a prime credit rating to boot.

Imperishable. Despite that record, Chicago's Mayor Daley plows indefatigably on, seeking still further improvement. He works an 18-hour day, carries pencil and paper on which he jots streams of ideas in shorthand, commands instantaneous action from his political underlings. "He keeps prodding you all the time," says one. He has thousands of friends, but few close ones. "He's like a post office clerk sorting mail," says one associate. "He keeps men in slots. In a general human sense of trusting somebody, the only person really close to him is his wife." Daley's entire attention is devoted to Chicago and to every facet of the city's life. "Ever been to a ball game with Daley?" asks Real Estate Man James Downs. "If the White Sox are losing 10 to 1, he thinks in the next inning they're going to tie it up. He never lets up."

Daley's stubborn resolve to rebuild his city has given Chicago a new stature. At the same time, its old vitality happily continues to beat out the jazzy cacophony that gives Chicago its rowdy rhythm and its imperishable lustiness. Chicago can no more do without its bawdy peep shows or its cackling Paddy Baulers than it can do without its Fields, its Swifts--and its Dick Daleys. In its own broad-shouldered way, in its anatomy and in the art of its clout, in its indestructible zest for life, Chicago is a man among cities.

* Fort, because it is massive in size--two city blocks, 24 stories high; Kennedy, because old Joe bought it in 1945 for $12.5 million; it is now worth more than $75 million.

*Democrats have since pointed out that no accusations have been proved in court, and that the difference in votes would not have affected Kennedy's Illinois victory anyway.

* Negroes account for 14% of New York City's population, 26.4% of Philadelphia's, 13.5% of Los Angeles, 28.6% of St. Louis', 28.9% of Detroit's, 53.9% of Washington's.

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