American Pharaoh
Dear Jacob,
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StumbleUponAfter reading your most recent letter, I clicked onto Slate and couldn't help noticing that Cohen and Taylor have already expressed their extreme dissatisfaction with our correspondence (scroll down to read it). As I mentioned earlier, I actually enjoyed reading their book. I also had no intention of comparing it to the many other books written on Chicago or Mayor Daley. However, the unbelievably defensive nature of their reply made me jump to my bookshelves and start pulling down some titles. The fact that educated friends of Cohen and Taylor do not know the story of Chicago's racist politics during the Daley years speaks volumes about their friends. I offer this list of some of my favorites (some are in Cohen and Taylor's bibliography): Mike Royko, Boss; Len O'Connor, Clout; Milt Rakove, Don't Make No Waves. Don't Back No Losers; Len O'Connor, Requiem: The Decline and Demise of Mayor Daley and His Era; Bill Gleason, Daley of Chicago; Ross Miller, Here's the Deal: The Buying and Selling of a Great American City; Bill Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931-1991; Bill and Lori Granger, Lords of the Last Machine: The Story of Politics in Chicago; and George Rosen, Decision-Making Chicago Style: The Genesis of a University of Illinois Campus.
In truth, any book that pretends to be about Daley and doesn't tell the race story would be both worthless and selective history. However, the race story is certainly not the whole story, as we all agree. Neither is Daley the Builder of Great Monuments the whole story. What is most troubling about the Cohen and Taylor argument (yes, I do think they have an argument) is the failure to place Daley and the city of Chicago in historical context. It is obvious that many of Daley's policies were racist, but was Daley significantly different from other mayors of big cities during this period? There are many ways to answer that question. New York's Lindsay had better rhetoric than Daley, but what about the conditions of blacks in the city? What about public policies and how they affected the black population? Some little-known facts--during the 1960s, more blacks were working for city government (per capita) and more blacks were elected to public office in Chicago than in New York. Cohen and Taylor might tell us that blacks were in the less desirable city jobs, but in this period Chicago blacks who supported the machine received a piece of the patronage action. In New York, blacks had a black commissioner of parks. If you use today's standard to evaluate how Chicago's blacks did under Daley, of course we would say the city's policies were discriminatory. The sad truth is that during this period, blacks as a group were not doing particularly well anywhere in the country. If Daley had transcended the racism of his time, that would have been a great story. We certainly agree that he didn't. How can Taylor and Cohen make the claim that "Daley was one of the greatest racial segregators in U.S. history" without having presented the comparative data? As far as the racist legacy--residential segregation is only one measure. How about the percentage of blacks in the municipal workforce and ability of a city to elect a black mayor? I would argue that the machine experience actually gave blacks an advantage in Chicago for the post-civil-rights movement period, because they had experience in organizing and had already broken into the city's bureaucracy.
One other irony. When David Dinkins was elected the first black mayor of New York and started a minority set-aside program for city contracts, he had to find firms from Chicago and Atlanta for construction contracts because we had almost none in New York. Another important place where Cohen and Taylor miss the boat is in their discussion of the Community Action Program (CAP). They chose simply to discuss Daley's opposition to "maximum feasible participation" without considering what kinds of goods and services he actually brought to black communities with these federal funds. There is a wonderful book by J. David Greenstone and Paul Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics, which was a study of CAP in several cities including New York and Chicago. It is true that Daley wanted to control the federal funds at City Hall--that's what strong mayors do. It would not have mattered whom the funds were earmarked for, Daley understood the power that is derived from controlling the budget (a point that Cohen and Taylor allude to in the early part of their book but never pick up again). In contrast, Lindsay supported the participatory requirements of the program. If we look carefully at outcomes, the story unravels. Daley funneled his CAP money into black neighborhoods through his ward organization and provided important social services and jobs programs. In New York, the money was distributed all over the city and mostly used for a complaint referral service. It was common knowledge that Lindsay was trying to set up a neighborhood-based political organization that could deliver votes during elections. Some people have called it Lindsay's effort to create a machine! The story is more complicated than Cohen and Taylor would have us believe.
One other aspect of Cohen and Taylor's letter troubles me. Its personal tone and ad hominem attacks are simply outrageous. I found myself amazed that they would find it necessary and appropriate to "out" us as white! Do they really believe that my race has anything to do with my thoughts about their book? I guess I must just be a naïve academic at heart. For years, whenever the New York Times would quote me in a story on Giuliani, it would identify me as "former adviser to the Dinkins campaign." The stories might have been about the city budget, economic development policy, or social policy--topics I have worked on for 20 years as an academic. Everyone knew that this was simply a way for the Times to weaken my legitimacy as an expert. It was a way of saying, "Oh, Fuchs is just one of those white Upper West Side liberals who always sides with blacks and Hispanics." What a disappointment to find myself once again being typecast. I must admit to some real amusement, however. This time I'm one of those narrow-minded "whites" who doesn't understand the centrality of race in American politics. Of course I have an identity that affects my worldview. In our first set of correspondences, I thought we both did a pretty good job of outlining what part of our experiences would be most important to disclose for the purposes of doing this review. Cohen and Taylor seem to think that someone who is black and knows nothing of the rich literature on Chicago politics would have been Slate's best choice. I can only suggest that if they looked at book reviews in academic journals, they would consider themselves lucky to have us!
I really want to address your point about Daley's understanding the centrality of basic services and his skills both as a politician and manager, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.
Warmest 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.)