February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Two decades after his death, political scientists voted Richard J. Daley the single best American mayor in the latter part of the 20th century and listed him amongst the top 10 ever.
Last month, the 62 year-old Richard M. Daley was named one of the five best present-day American mayors by Time magazine, almost 50 years to the day that his father began his long reign as Chicago’s first citizen.
The newsweekly said that in his 16 years in power, Daley “has presided over the city’s transition from graying hub to vibrant boomtown, with a newly renovated football stadium, an ebbing murder rate, a new downtown park, a noticeable expansion of green space and a skyline thick with construction cranes.”
(The mayors weren’t listed in any order. The others were: Michael Bloomberg of New York, Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, John Hickenlooper of Denver and Martin O’Malley of Baltimore.)
Some columnists and politicians in Chicago thought the Time article a little too uncritical of Daley.
“Chicago stands above the rest of the cities, and the mayor has to take credit for that,” Alderman Joe Moore told the Chicago Sun-Times, but added that corruption “is a blot on his record, and probably should mention more than a passing glance.”
In the most recent scandal, 27 people have been charged in a federal investigation into the city’s Hired Truck Program (a County Galway immigrant among them, as reported in this newspaper), and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe is getting ever closer to the center of power.
There were remarkably similar controversies during the first Daley’s tenure. And now, as then, people say the mayor is not corrupt, but the system is and people close to him are.
After returning from a successful European trip in 1964 — which took in his grandparents’ counties of birth in Ireland – the elder Daley was greeted with reports of a new scandal.
In “American Pharoah,” their sympathetic, and critically praised, 2000 biography, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor write: “[T]he newspapers had discovered that city employees were making large amounts of money renting trucks to the city at inflated prices.”
On the night that Daley was elected in 1955, one of his closest allies famously announced: “Chicago is not ready for reform.”
The legendary columnist Mike Royco, one of Daely fiercest critics, wrote about how thousands depended on the “machine” for the their very livelihoods: “Like the marriage vows, the pact between the jobholder and the party ends only in either’s death, so long as the jobholder loves, honors, and obeys the party.”
The year after Daley’s election, Edwin O’Connor’s “The Last Hurrah,” a novel about the decline and fall of the political boss system, became a bestseller. But the system wasn’t quiet finished in Chicago, where Daley wielded near-absolute power for 21 years until the day he died in 1976.
Daley had patiently waited for his moment for more than 30 years. He was already 53, when first elected, and married with seven children — among them Rich, the future mayor, and Bill, who became President Clinton’s secretary of commerce.
The current Mayor Daley said recently: “Along with caring about his family, my dad found the time and energy to care about other families. He saw public service as an opportunity to help people – through programs that gave them opportunities, or through private actions. He believed that politics and government was a ‘people business.'”
Richard Daley was born on May 15, 1902, in Bridgeport, where he lived all of his 74 years. He was the only child of Michael Daley, a sheet metal worker and union business agent, and Lillian Dunne Daley, who brought her son to suffragette marches.
Cohen and Taylor write: “Hard as it may be to imagine now, one of the major forces driving Daley – born in a working-class Irish-Catholic neighborhood in a city run by wealthy Protestants – was something as basic as ‘an aspiration to first-class citizenship.'”
Daley’s high standing among academics like Cohen and Taylor is due to his transformation of Chicago into a thriving modern metropolis, when it could have gone the way of Detroit.
However, when Dick Daley is mentioned nowadays in the media, it’s usually in the context of the 1960 presidential election (historians disagree on whether and how much chicanery was involved) and the brutal treatment by Chicago police of antiwar protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention (though the mayor himself opposed the war).
The effort by the Rev. Martin Luther King to extend the struggle for civil rights to the north sometimes gets mentioned, too. Chicago, alas, proved itself unready and incapable of reform. Daley’s press secretary, Frank Sullivan, once said that his late boss’s idea of affirmative action was “nine Irishmen and a Swede.”
But the man Time calls the “near imperial” Richard II has done a lot better in that regard. A Chicago Tribune editorial last month said that the newsweekly had gotten it wrong.
“What truly distinguishes today’s Richard Daley from many big-city mayors is his remarkable if impossible-to-complete work to narrow racial chasms that, during the 1980s, threatened to swallow Chicago,” the paper argued. “He has done that not with anguished speeches or paeans to social justice, but by projecting, over 16 years, a strong sense of fairness in the way he does his job. As a result, he has persuaded many Chicagoans, of many hues, to pull in the same direction.”
The Tribune editorial said that many people have forgotten just ugly Chicago’s racial tensions were. It lauded Daley’s building upon the work started by the first Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, who had begun to turn things around – and had an approval rating of 67 percent – before his untimely death in 1987.
And Daley, who has hired skilled managers, has done better than his father in several other areas too.
Sure, some commentators agree, Chicago is hardly perfect; the politically connected still get the contracts. “But,” the Tribune editorial said, “it may well be Daley’s wisdom that Chicagoans care less about hired trucks than about the quality of their schools, [and] the razing of high-rise public housing to break up concentrations of poverty…”
The key to the family success, Joseph Epstein argued in the Wall Street Journal recently, is that neither Richard Daley “aspired to rise any higher than mayor of the city of Chicago.”
“This is not a job for him. It’s a calling,” political consultant Kevin Conlon told Time magazine about Daley (who got 79 percent of the votes in the last election). “He’s mayor as long as he wants to be.”