For the Love of Chicago
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2000, at 11:42 AM ETEster,
I think we basically concur about the limitations of American Pharaoh, though you seem to admire the book a bit more than I do. We're also in accord about the more interesting matter of what you might call Chicago's relative non-demise vis-à-vis other big cities. As you point out, Chicago didn't suffer New York's devastating fiscal problems in the 1970s and has bounced back in the 1990s much more readily than many places with similar problems. I wonder, though, whether we fully agree about how much Daley has to do with that.
In your terrific book Mayors and Money, which I commend to anyone who wants to understand the fiscal problems of cities, you give Daley some credit. But you emphasize to a greater degree the structural and historical factors behind Chicago's health. If I might summarize (and I'm not doing your argument justice), New York took on greater social welfare obligations than Chicago did beginning during the Great Depression, making its municipal government inherently more expensive. And whereas Chicago was always able to share its major costs with county, state, and federal governments, New York had to bear more of the burden itself. You also make the fine point that long before Daley,
Chicago had a political machine that was able to centralize budgetary decisions, whereas New York since the 1930s has had no machine and so faces a process of interest-group haggling that undermines fiscal discipline.
Even in these matters, Daley's part was not negligible. After all, Daley kept alive an all-powerful machine that was capable of resisting interest group demands and making its claims stick in Springfield and Washington, long after similar power structures collapsed everywhere else. But I would give credit to Daley for protecting Chicago's well-being in a number of other ways as well.
First, I think you have to give Daley his due for recognizing that basic services are the lifeblood of municipal government. As Cohen and Taylor remind us, Daley took immense pride in running a clean, orderly city. Daley viewed his primary obligations as keeping the streets in good repair, picking up the trash, plowing the snow, maintaining the parks, and so on. By the 1960s, the primacy of such things was no longer taken for granted elsewhere. (Daley to Mayor Lindsay of New York: "John, you forget why you were elected--to collect the garbage.") When Rudy Giuliani focused attention on cleanliness and order in New York in the 1990s, he based his efforts on George Kelling's "broken windows" theory. Daley didn't need the Manhattan Institute to justify his obsession--which may be why, as you correctly note, neoconservatives have never really embraced him. In the war against dirt and disarray, the patronage system guaranteed a certain level of efficiency. A ward committeeman could get his second cousin a job with Streets and San. But that same committeeman had to be able to get a sidewalk fixed when a constituent complained.
A second place where I think Daley deserves some credit for Chicago's good shape today is in his ability to continue to develop the city by fiat. Daley decided that Chicago should have the world's biggest airport (the Second City Complex you refer to dictates that Chicago must have the biggest and best of everything). So he streamrolled opposition, annexed hundreds of acres in the suburbs, and built O'Hare Field. Daley decided Chicago needed the world's largest convention center. Up it went. When McCormick Place burned to the ground, up it went again, better than before. Perhaps Daley's greatest legacy in terms of planning was his effort to preserve the Loop, Chicago's central business district. When Fortune 500 companies were moving their headquarters to the suburbs, Daley donated a city street to help build the Sears Tower--the world's tallest building, naturally. Nowhere else were Pharaonic projects like these still happening in the 1970s simply because a mayor wanted them. Daley did some awful things with this power, such as leveling the old Harrison Street neighborhood south of the Loop to make way for a University of Illinois campus. But on balance, his development choices were intelligent. They not only meant jobs and dollars but also left the city with a sound infrastructure, especially for transportation. Again, you can draw a favorable comparison with New York, whose airports are horribly overcrowded and can't be accessed by rail.
A final contribution of Daley's is one you refer to: his determination to keep his city afloat through hard times. The clearest division in Daley's mind was between people who meant the city well and those he thought intended it harm. His powerful proprietary sense about Chicago explains a lot of his biggest disasters, such as his "shoot to kill" order during the 1968 riots. Daley didn't just tell the police to shoot arsonists. He said that if he were there and saw someone about to throw a Molotov cocktail into a building, he would shoot that person himself. The times Daley lost it were times when he thought people were out to hurt Chicago, either by causing it physical damage or by making it, like New York in his era, ungovernable. But all of Daley's mistakes--unlike, say, Rudy Giuliani's--were made out of love for the city. That's why the city was always willing to forgive him.
Best,
Jacob
For the Love of Chicago
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2000, at 11:42 AM ET
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). 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:
Today, Chicago is the nation's most racially segregated large city: about 90 percent of black Chicagoans would have to move for the city to be integrated. Chicago is one of America's wealthiest cities but, remarkably, nine out of the nation's ten poorest census tracts are in Chicago's housing projects.
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.)
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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.)