American Pharaoh
Dear Jacob,
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StumbleUponI, too, feel compelled to put my review in a personal context. As a journalist, you may be free to admit some "biases," but as I'm sure you know, social scientists have no biases! So my initial observations reflect only my years of research on American cities and my particular obsession with New York City and Chicago.
I confess to having been a parochial New Yorker for most of my early years. A brief stint in the Rocky Mountains and Providence, R.I., only reassured me that there was no place other than New York City to live and there was certainly no place with more fascinating politics. This all changed when I moved to Chicago in 1974 to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. I lived there for six years. I know, native Chicagoans will tell me that Hyde Park is to Chicago as the Upper West Side of Manhattan is to New York City. Hyde Park doesn't resemble the other Chicago neighborhoods. For one thing, it is racially integrated, and as Cohen and Taylor point out, Chicago is the most residentially segregated city in the country. As I'm sure you know, living in Hyde Park actually made me curious about the rest of the city. Not surprisingly, I became obsessed with Chicago politics, both academically and personally. I was struck by how much Chicagoans would compare their city to New York. It never occurred to any New Yorker I knew to compare their city to Chicago. Mostly my generation knew that Chicago was cold, windy, and the place where some out of touch mayor had his police department beat up students during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Chicagoans may have suffered from the "second city" syndrome, but at the same time there was an enormous pride in their city, even among your Lake Shore and Hyde Park liberals. "The city that works" wasn't just a catchy slogan; it was about a city government that actually had a mechanism for staying in touch with its citizens--the Democratic Party machine. While it was obvious that Daley was at the center of all Chicago's successes and failures, he had a vision for the city that most people accepted whether they liked him personally or not. What struck me as amazing about Chicago during the 1970s was a determination that it would not become another abandoned, economically depressed Rust Belt city. In fact, while New York was reeling from its fiscal crisis, Chicago, while suffering the same middle-class white flight and loss of its manufacturing base, had a city government that was humming along, with balanced budgets no less. It seemed to me that Daley must have been doing something right.
Yet, having grown up in John Lindsay's New York, I understood the importance of a mayor that supported the civil rights movement and reached out to the city's black communities. On the surface, New York seemed like a much better city for its minority residents. New York, the archetype liberal city, had a mayor that walked through its black ghettos to keep the peace, while Chicago, the capital city of Middle America's white ethnic working class, had a mayor who ordered his police officers to use their firearms while black communities burned to the ground. True, Chicago's streets were clean, while New York's Sanitation Department couldn't pick up the snow for a week in Queens, the outer borough where I grew up. In truth, neither city served the needs of its black community very well. Most early biographies of Mayor Daley and analytic work on Chicago public policy during the Daley years have focused primarily on his promotion of segregation and his autocratic control of the party machine to defeat his enemies and reward his friends. Ironically, while the neo-conservatives have managed to completely decimate John Lindsay's legacy in New York, they haven't really embraced Richard J. Daley as one of their own. This provides an interesting clue for those of us who are still thinking about Boss Daley's Chicago, who the man was, and more important, what his public policy legacy is. Here's where I share your disappointment with Cohen and Taylor's biography. While the narrative flows smoothly and the historical facts are carefully presented, there is no daring analysis of what Daley's life and work mean nearly a quarter of a century after his death.
I found the beginning of American Pharaoh a tease. Cohen and Taylor suggest that Daley was continuously underestimated by his political adversaries. I thought this would be the theme they carried through their book to explain Daley's successes and, more important, his vision for the city. Instead, it is Daley's motivation to accumulate and retain power that seems to be their insight. They imply that politics for Daley was all about power. That just leaves me cold. Sure politicians want to win, but to see Daley's reign as simply personal is to miss his enormous effort to institutionalize changes in Chicago's political system that continue to benefit the city. Cohen and Taylor offer no insight into why Chicago doesn't simply go the way of other Rust Belt cities after Daley dies. Chicago manages to survive the notorious mismanagement of Jane Byrne; Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, ran on a reform platform but was really the product of Daley's machine; and why does the great economic renaissance of the 1990s happen in Chicago and not Detroit? Could it be that Daley understood a lot more than how to amass power? He understood federalism (state and national government), the economic and political threat of the suburbs, the need to make the central city economically competitive. He understood the complexity of the city's fiscal policy process and the fact that budgets are political documents. He understood the importance of neighborhoods and a government that was accessible to its people, and the need for a politics of loyalty and reciprocity. Most important, he understood how to institutionalize changes in the political system that would continue to benefit the city long after he died. There was much that Daley did not understand, from the civil rights movement to the value of high-quality public schools. I think we can talk about that tomorrow. I do want to commend the authors for the rich historical detail offered in this volume. By expertly conveying the broad sweep of Daley's life, Cohen and Taylor make a great case for placing contemporary politics in historical context.
Best Regards,
Ester
This week, a discussion of American Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor (click here to buy the book). Jacob Weisberg is Slate's chief political correspondent. Ester Fuchs is director of the Center for Urban Research and Policy at Columbia University and teaches at Barnard College. She is the author of Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago (click here to buy it). 
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Response from the authors:
We are the authors of American Pharaoh. We've been reading "The Book Club", and we have to say: the book Jacob Weisberg describes bears little relation to the one that we wrote.
The authors "never really tell us," Weisberg asserts, what they think of Daley. Jeez. The book is entitled "American Pharaoh," and we state plainly in the introduction why we call Daley that. We say that he did a tremendous amount to build Chicago up into the successful city it is today (Pharaoh as builder). And we say that he did it at the expense of blacks, by building racial segregation into the very concrete of the city (Pharaoh as oppressor). That seems like a pretty clear take on Daley. And, ultimately, a deeply critical one.
Race is at the center of our book--and it pains us that the two (white) writers in this exchange fail to see its centrality. We make a very serious accusation against Daley: that he was one of the greatest racial segregators in U.S. history. And, again in the introduction, we lay a very disturbing legacy at Daley's feet. We write:
The blacks we know who have read our book have had no trouble seeing the utter importance of race to the Daley story, or of appreciating what American Pharaoh adds to the debate. William Julius Wilson--Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, and perhaps the nation's foremost scholar of race and class in Chicago--saw just what we were up to. He called the book "a tour de force" and said that he had never read a more compelling biography than our "brilliant" one of Daley.
Weisberg dismisses the book's important discussion of racial segregation in Chicago as "oft-told." But that's nonsense. Far too few Americans know this story. That white mobs of more than 5,000 turned out regularly on the South Side of Chicago to stop a few blacks from moving into their neighborhoods? That the U.S. Secretary of Education impounded millions of dollars in school aid to Chicago because Daley was segregating the public schools as intentionally as Gov. Wallace or Gov. Faubus? That Daley used his clout to get the money freed up--and forced President Johnson to fire the poor Secretary of Education? And that Martin Luther King brought the civil rights movement north to Chicago in 1966 and was utterly defeated by a devious Daley? Weisberg may know a lot of this because he's written a book that touches on it. But we can assure you that most intelligent, educated people we've talked to in the years we've worked on this book know little of this important chapter in America's racial history. And keep your eyes and ears open next Martin Luther King Day: the talk is all of Montgomery, Alabama and Albany, Georgia. The "oft-told" story of Chicago is rarely told.
It's unfortunate for your readers that this Book Club is a discussion between two people who both seem to take a dim view of our book. It would not have been hard to find greater diversity of opinion, since the overall reaction to American Pharaoh has been gratifyingly positive. (The four trade journals--Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist--all praised it highly in starred reviews. The Wall Street Journal picked it as an Editor's Choice last week. And David Broder, reviewing it in the Chicago Tribune, called it "splendid.") It would also have been nice, in a book about race in Chicago, to have had at least one black person in on the discussion.
And a final point. Weisberg admits from the outset of this discussion that he comes to it with some biases. He mentions a few that really aren't (ancient history about his views about Daley and his family's). And he buries down below one that really is: his mother is now serving in the current Mayor Daley's cabinet. Weisberg seems to subscribe to the fashionable but wrong view that if you disclose a conflict it isn't a conflict. In fact, that his mother is closely aligned with Richard M. Daley--and draws a paycheck from him--is the sort of thing that might well affect his take on our book. American Pharaoh is very tough on Mrs Weisberg's boss's father--and on her boss himself. (We recount, for example, how Daley, Jr benefited from questionable court appointments handed out by machine judges.) Does Slate have any rules at all about conflict of interest? And was there really no-one without a parent working in Chicago City Hall available to participate in this discussion?
Weisberg promises us some "thoughts about the ways in which Daley was good for Chicago" in his next missive. Fine. Chicago is nearly half racial minorities these days. We sure hope Weisberg will endeavor to include blacks--and especially the tens of thousands of poor blacks living in Daley era high-rise projects--in the Chicago that Daley was "good for."
--Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
(To reply, click here.)
To the authors of the book:
When Richard Daley ascended to Mayor's Office in the middle 50's he was faced with a horrendous situation of spreading urban blight, a non existent black middle class (this wasn't Baltimore), and increasing black poverty and social pathology that threatened to drive every white family out of the Chicago with the exception of those living along the Gold Coast. And it continued to get worse. He had to take actions that would at least temporarily stabilize the growing turmoil. I wonder what Cohen and Taylor would have done 40 years ago without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight they enjoy today. So here's the central question. Would these ever so enlightened writers have toughed it out at 34th and Indiana or 63rd and Woodlawn? Maybe they tell us in the book.
Today they can live in an integrated neighborhood, in large part because of the Daley policies.
--Epicuria
(To reply, click here.)
To the authors of the book:
What interests me is the extent to which Chicago seems to have done better than other cities. For one, they had a way of assembling a long-lasting governing coalition. Mega-projects were one result; fiscal discipline another. Were those amongst the reason for Chicago's better survival in the face of change? I would like to know if the dynasty has lasted because Chicago was doing fairly well for other reasons (retail & transportation base vs manufacturing, or whatever), making the Daleys an anachronism surviving because the forces of change were much weaker. Or if the dynasty itself helped Chicago cope with change and hence gave benefit as well as the clear harms. On the practical level of considering what lessons to draw for other times & places, did the Daleys in short do much good? Or did they survive only because Chicago in some other way was advantaged?
On the moral level, I never heard of anyone defending a "machine" as a good thing in itself. I would be surprised if anyone did. The racial discrimination is certainly a sufficient charge to tar the machine morally, but it is not necessary: there are many other charges available. The 1968 police riots are nearly enough by themselves. So I don't see the use in morally debunking that which has so little moral stature to begin with. But it would be interesting to learn if any of the machine's basic strategies had useful results, and if so, which ones and why. If you care to write a book about that, I may buy it.
--John Wernecken
(To reply, click here.)
Further Response from The Fray:
Though Daley played a factor in his city's survival, Chicago avoided decline because it was far more economically diverse than other "rust belt" cities. Unlike Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland, Chicago grew on the strength of transportation (Great Lakes portage and the railroad) and commerce (retail, wholesale, and finance) rather than heavy manufacturing alone. Certainly, the city produced many goods--meat, steel, and harvesters are the best known. And it was the populations that worked in these industries that suffered most during the downturn of the seventies. This is why the South Side is so downcast today; the good times left when the steel mills closed.
--Andrew W. Cohen
(To reply, click here.)
I was born and raised in Mayor Daley's neighborhood of Bridgeport in Chicago during most of Richard J. Daley's term in office. It is my opinion that if an analyst does not investigate and understand the inner workings of the forces within that environment, the tenor of the times and the will of the vast majority of people in the city, there is no room to critique how and why certain decisions had been made and why certain actions had been taken.
The seventies radicals clamored for government 'by the people'. Upon reflection, one might notice that the working class world that Mayor Daley represented was the vast majority of 'the people' as first or second generation immigrants with little or no formal education. He represented a city run by the blue collar working man and woman in the ethnic (nationality as well as race) neighborhoods and not the minority of 'elites' on the north shore or intellectuals in Hyde Park who assailed his pragmatic meat and potatoes philosophy. He was in office because the vast majority of the city's population wanted him there--for one reason or another. And like it or not, the city worked and still does.
The Mayor did the best he could within the context of the circumstances. I did not understand that until I grew up. Perhaps the Mayor's critics would do well to do the same--grow up that is.
--Helen Marie Guditis
(To reply, click here.)
I recommend future Daley biographers focus on his background as an accountant and what impact having an Accountant-Mayor has on a city. So many of the political moves made by Mayor Daley are rooted in a mastery of budgeting and decision-making based on budgeting. When viewed with this in mind, his mystery and manipulation often become logical and sensible budgeting decisions. What other mayor had such a firm grasp on this vital political function?
Political biographers have painted a portrait of Daley using their skills and knowledge as political historians and journalists. But Daley's story is more than a story about a politician. It is also the story about how power is attained when one fully understands big city budgeting and uses it to advantage. Chicago's success has a lot to do with smart budgeting. The political turf battles often occurred when Daley spun the costs of maintaining big city government off to the surrounding governments in Cook County and Illinois, while keeping the decision-making within the city. Smart. Very Smart. Unlike New York, Chicago no longer has the costs of prisons, hospitals, transportation systems or housing, yet the city has the final word on all these expensive public budget-busters. This is only one example where Daley's accounting expertise and position as Chicago's mayor created a new political landscape.
--Al
(To reply, click here.)
Now that we've seen a smattering of commentary from apologists for the corrupt and racist Daley regime I guess we can stop being mystified at people in other countries who don't get rid of their corrupt and autocratic governments, disregarding the high ideals of people in the U.S. I guess we can expect new reassessments of Mussolini, the Shah of Iran, and Robert Moses in the same vein.
--Jack McCullough
(To reply, click here.)