Despite troubles in the past year, Richard M. Daley holds most of the cards in his city.
14 / March 1998 Illinois Issues
THE STEALTH BOSS
If City Hall scandals represent a mayor in trouble,
it's hard to imagine what success would look like. In fact, one year out
from an expected third re-election campaign, Richard M. Daley
might exercise even tighter control over Chicago
than his legendary father did
Essay by lames L. Merriner Jr.
Illustration by Mike Cramer
If you want to make Chicago Mayor
Richard M. Daley mad, call him
"Boss." Daley's eyes will harden. His
mouth will curl. Because, as everyone
knows, the era of political bossism is
long dead. It was entombed by Mayor
Harold Washington in 1983, if not
by Mayor Jane M. Byrne in 1979.
And Daley is a modern, management-
oriented mayor who spurns
pretensions of bosshood.
Nonsense. Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, might even exercise
tighter control over more public
institutions than did his legendary
father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who
held the city's reins from 1955 to 1976.
The junior Daley has less raw power,
of course, than the senior Daley, who
could pick up the phone and dictate
events. Still, "Rich" Daley has consolidated power in ways that "Dick"
Daley, "last of the big-city bosses,"
never did. The current Daley's quiet
maneuvers to acquire power add up to
a kind of stealth bossism. It's a
suzerainty seldom examined as Daley
shakes up his administration and
prepares for a presumed run for
re-election in February 1999.
Last year's City Hall bribery and
ghost payrolling scandals came close
to knocking on Daley's fifth-floor
office door and pundits declared his
eight-year political honeymoon over.
But the negative publicity has tended
to obscure the facts: This Mayor Daley
controls the city's schools — something his father never dreamed of —
and he has nearly extinguished all
opposition in the City Council and the
Cook County Board. The Democratic
state's attorney is a close ally, whereas
his father had problems with Republican state's attorneys. Another close
Daley ally, John R. Schmidt, is making
a bid for governor. A brother is in
President Bill Clinton's Cabinet.
Another brother is in line for the Cook
County Board presidency.
Meanwhile, the current mayor's
performance has won over many
critics. "I remember growing up [in
Chicago] hearing that Richie Daley
was the dumb one and the one with the
fiery temper, and [his brother] Bill
Daley was the smart one," says Roger
Biles, author of Richard J. Daley:
Politics, Race, and the Governing of
Chicago, which was published in 1995
by Northern Illinois University Press.
Now, friends and family in Chicago
tell Biles they are "pleasantly surprised
and pretty well satisfied with the guy."
If this represents a mayor in trouble,
it's hard to imagine what success would
look like.
Still, handicapping is inevitable
as Daley begins an expected bid for a
fourth term. And most assessments
rest on comparisons between the
father and the son. Leon Despres, an
alderman from 1955 to 1975 and
parliamentarian under Mayors Byrne
and Washington, disagrees that Rich
Daley is a boss on a par with his
father. However, Despres notes that
"the long-range historical movement is
in concentrating power in the executive" in Chicago. Biles seconds that
notion. The trend began in 1955 when
the General Assembly passed a little-
noticed bill shifting budgetary control
from the City Council to the mayor —
"one of the sort of unsung achievements" of the senior Daley, says Biles,
who is history chairman at Eastern
Carolina University.
So, in the spirit of the political
season, we offer this review of the two
Daleys' institutional influences:
Public schools. A Republican-
controlled General Assembly in 1995
gave Daley direct personal power over
the disastrous city schools. "OK,"
they seemed to say, "they're yours.
See what you can do with them."
Far beyond a political event, this
was a historic experiment for
America's urban centers. Daley
promptly put associates Paul
Vallas and Gery Chico in charge.
They treated the school system as a
Illinois Issues March 1998 / 15
corporation that needed pruning of
deadwood and an infusion of the work
ethic. Their efforts have won national
acclaim and garnered improvement in
classroom achievement scores in a
system once dubbed worst in the
nation by a federal education czar.
Daley understood viscerally that the
sorry state of the schools spurred
middle-class whites and blacks alike to
flee the city. This social phenomenon
never was properly understood by his
father, who regarded the schools as a
political hiring hall.
John J. Hoellen, a former Republican alderman who in 1975 was the
senior Daley's last election opponent,
says, "Nobody got on the school board
unless the old man OK'd it. He had to
OK almost every principal, or at least
his henchmen did, and every engineer.
It was just a cesspool of political
activity. That's why it was teeming
with incompetence. He didn't give a
damn about [educational quality]. He
was parochial all the way. Rich has a
much broader sensitivity toward his
responsibility."
Hoellen and other critics contend
the senior Daley didn't care about
public schools because his voter base
of white ethnic Catholics sent their
children to parochial schools. Neither
the elder nor the younger Daley or
their children attended public schools.
But the junior Daley has taken upon
himself accountability for the competence of instruction in the public
school classroom. His place in history
may well rest on this innovation.
City Council. Under the senior
Daley, the Republican opposition was
always a small and feeble minority,
but at least it existed. Then the GOP
aldermen were whittled away one by
one until Hoellen in 1975 was the last
man standing.
The current mayor likewise has one
Republican alderman, Brian G.
Doherty (41st), but he is not an important figure in the party and Republicans have all but abandoned city politics, meaning, among other things, that
Democrats control the election judges.
The mayor is lord over the City
Council if for no other reason than
that he has appointed so many of its
The younger Daley
understood viscerally that
the sorry state of the city's
schools spurred middle-class
whites and blacks alike
to flee the city,
50 members. Daley has named aldermen to fill 22 vacancies, 17 of whom
are still sitting. Another vacancy is
pending. Early in Rich Daley's tenure,
Aid. Dorothy Tillman (3rd), a former
civil rights firebrand, was a fierce
critic. Now she hugs the mayor in the
anteroom behind the Council
chambers after he leaves the dais.
Steadily, the mayor has trimmed the
Council's influence by privatizing city
services, grabbing tighter control over
contract awards, neutralizing objections to his budgets and transferring
supervision of Navy Pier to a city-state
authority. This Council is probably
more toothless than his father's.
Cook County Board, Patronage
was controlled by a Republican Board
president, Richard Ogilvie, from 1966
to 1969. The present-day Mayor Daley
has had no such annoyance. Democratic County Board President John
Stroger is a major ally and favored to
win re-election this year. A County
Board district was gerrymandered for
the mayor's brother, John P. Daley,
who is chairman of the Board's
Finance Committee and by tradition
in line to succeed Stroger in 2002.
State's attorney. Republican
State's Attorney Benjamin J. Adamowski (1956-60) gave Richard J. Daley
and his Democratic Machine fits. By
custom, the state's attorney ignores
political corruption, but Adamowski
took to issuing subpoenas and
indictments. It's alleged Daley stole
Illinois for John F. Kennedy in the
1960 presidential election. If he did,
Kennedy's margin in Chicago was
mostly a byproduct of Daley's determination to unseat Adamowski. Daley
later was inconvenienced by another
Republican state's attorney, Bernard
Carey (1972-80), though Carey
resumed the tradition of leaving the
Machine alone.
Richard M. Daley was himself the
state's attorney when elected mayor in
1989. He tried to name his associate,
Democrat Richard Devine, as
successor, but the County Board
selected Democrat Cecil A. Partee
instead. When Partee ran for election
in 1990, the Daley organization did
not overexert itself on his behalf.
Partee was defeated by a Republican,
Jack O'Malley Daley and O'Malley
honored custom by keeping hands off
each other's domain.
A GOP star, O'Malley was favored
to defeat Devine in the 1996 election.
Larry P. Horist, a Republican public
affairs consultant and a close student
of the Chicago Machine, warned
O'Malley during the campaign, "Jack,
they're going to take you out."
O'Malley scoffed, but sure enough, the
Daley organization quietly helped to
put Devine in office.
Devine recently announced he will
investigate ethical charges against
former Aid. Patrick Huels (11th), a
Daley friend and spearcarrier, and
Aid. Edward M. Burke (14th), chairman of the Council's Finance
Committee. "It's the first time that's
ever happened," Despres says, "and
people are very skeptical that anything
will come of it."
General Assembly. Here the first
Mayor Daley definitely has the edge.
In his heyday he could deliver as
many as 20 of the 59 votes in the
Illinois Senate with a single phone call.
Daley also colluded with Republican
governors when necessary.
With reapportionment reflecting the
growth of suburbs, and with the
general decay of Chicago Democratic
dominance, the current Mayor Daley
wields less legislative clout. Nor has he
forged a political alliance with Gov.
Jim Edgar as his father did with GOP
Govs. William G. Stratton (1953-61)
and Ogilvie (1969-73). Springfield has
thwarted Daley's plans for casino
gambling in the city and a regional
16 / March 1998 Illinois Issues
airport at Lake Calumet in the southeast corner of the city. But Daley won
local tax increases to expand
McCormick Place Convention Center.
And again, it was a Republican legislature that handed Daley the schools.
White House. The nation may
never again see a mayoral-presidential
partnership like that of Dick Daley
and President Lyndon B. Johnson
(1963-69). The Chicago mayor visited
LBJ's White House so often he was
practically a staffer there.
Daley secured a presidential
appointment for Edward V. Hanrahan
as U.S. attorney with this argument:
"He's a great Democrat. He ran for
Congress. He was defeated. He's a
graduate of Notre Dame. But more
than that, Mr. President, let me say
with great honor and pride, he's a
precinct captain!"
And there was money to be gotten.
Under Johnson's Great Society
programs, federal aid to Chicago
increased by 169 percent in four years.
Rich Daley has far fewer federal
dollars to chase. And it's worth noting
that, while he did win his $3-a-ticket
airport development tax, it came under
a Republican president, George Bush.
Initially, his clout with President
Clinton was shaky, though Daley
campaign aides were crucial in
Clinton's winning the 1992 Democratic nomination. Daley wanted the
new president to name Devine as
U.S. attorney, but Clinton picked
Jim Burns. Clinton also publicly
embarrassed the Daleys by seeming
to promise Bill Daley the post of
transportation secretary, then
reneging.
But the Daleys rebounded and no
other mayor comes close to having
Rich Daley's presence in the White
House. Today, Bill Daley is the U.S.
secretary of commerce. And there is
talk that he might become the president's chief of staff when the current
chief leaves.
Patronage and politics. RJD's
power rested on his twin seats as
mayor and Cook County Democratic
chairman. None of his five successors
dared to attempt this dual coup. RMD
Comparing the relative
power of two different
mayors from two different
eras is an indoor sport
with no rules and no
clear-cut winner.
is not even a committeeman, having
bequeathed his 11th Ward seat to
John Daley. The senior Daley
controlled some 35,000 city patronage
jobs. A court ruling known as the
Shakman decree and several follow-up
rulings have so severely limited
patronage that the current mayor
effectively fills, by Despres' estimate,
only 2,000 positions for top policy-
makers and their underlings.
But this constraint might be
deceptive because Daley's critics
argue that he has supplanted
working-class patronage with
"pinstripe patronage," especially in
nonbid professional services
contracts for public works projects.
For instance, a proposed Downtown
Circulator trolley system generated
$70 million in contracts, even though
the plan eventually died for lack of
federal aid.
In addition, the mayor decrees the
membership, as his father did, of
nominally independent agencies such
as the parks, schools, libraries and, in
most cases, the local judiciary. (The
housing authority, though, has been
taken over by the federal government.)
As for electoral politics, writers of
obituaries of the Machine never tire of
declaring that "television is the new
precinct captain" and that only six or
seven wards still have old-fashioned
ward bosses who can determine voter
turnout and ballot punches. The
modern mayor, as part of his public
relations program to eschew bossism,
seldom formally endorses or openly
backs particular candidates, which his
father routinely did.
Often overlooked in this scenario is
that those several Machine wards still
can swing close elections. In the 1994
primary, for example, Daley forces
ended the gubernatorial candidacy of
then-Attorney General Roland W.
Burris and renominated then-U.S.
Rep. Dan Rostenkowski over lakefront
challenger Dick Simpson. And Jack
O'Malley is back in private law
practice where he might reflect on the
endurance of vestiges of the Machine.
Boss vs. Son of Boss. Comparing
the relative power of two different
mayors from two different eras is an
indoor sport with no rules and no
clear-cut winner. Nonetheless, Richard
M. Daley certainly surpasses his father
in running the city's schools and
probably in controlling the City
Council, the County Board and the
state's attorney's office. The senior
Daley had more power in patronage,
the Democratic organization and state
government. The junior Daley at least
approaches his father's influence in the
White House.
Additionally, a significant dimension
of the Daley satrapy is their relations
with black constituents. Three-fifths of
RJD's winning margin in 1955 came
from black wards and he never lost a
majority of the black vote until his last
primary in 1975. RMD has defeated
six black opponents in primary and
general elections, but he might never
gain a majority of black primary
voters. However, he has annexed
middle-class black clergy and
businesspeople to his organization.
Moreover, he has soldered an
alliance with Hispanic voters that
has effectively marginalized black
opposition.
These are the moves of a master
politician. But the final word will be
granted to venerable Chicago author
and radio personality Studs Terkel:
"He's not the politician his old man
was. But no one is."
James L. Merriner, former political
writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and a
frequent contributor to Illinois Issues,
reports for The Associated Press in Chicago
and Springfield. His book, Mr. Chairman:
Power in Dan Rostenkowski's America,
will be published this fall by Southern
Illinois University Press at Carbondale.
Illinois Issues March 1998 / 17