Cities: Clouter with Conscience

• Share

(2 of 9)

Some Things Old. Yet much of the old remains—the sights and sounds that make Chicago Chicago. In the Merchandise Mart (known locally as Fort Kennedy*), salesmen giantstep down corridors, order pads in hand. In the Palmer House ballroom, conventioneers stand at 50-yd.-long buffet tables and discuss medical, academic or mercantile business. On Rush Street, tourists dart in and out of the joints for peekaboos at the girls or for laughs at the comedy revues. In the pit at the Board of Trade, men scurry for the futures. The Chicago Club's doorman bows to a man who may be next in line to head International Harvester. At 63rd and Cottage Grove, the South Side's Times Square, a storefront church proclaims GOD'S CORNER. The Negro heartland swarms with police shuttle cars, dope pushers and pimps. An unwed mother of four cashes her welfare check and picks up three fifths of Four Roses. On the West Side, Mayor Daley attends the full-flowered funeral of murdered Negro Alderman Ben Lewis (TIME, March 8), makes a speech, stands by the open casket to shake hands. And Sheriff Richard Ogilvie the only Republican holding Cook County elective office of any consequence, complains of Daley's power. "Chicago," he sighs, "is the city of clout."

Clout is Chicago's word for power. And Daley has clout coming out of his ears. Daley's power is pyramidal. It is based on his position as captain of Chicago's Eleventh Ward Democratic Committee. That qualifies him to be a member of the Cook County Democratic Committee—of which he is chairman, making him the political boss of Democratic Chicago. As boss-mayor, he has almost absolute control over the party structure: he picks candidate slates, runs the patronage machinery, works his will on nearly all of the 50 submissive aldermen who comprise Chicago's city council.

Daley hand-picked and, to all intents and purposes, elected Illinois' Democratic Governor Otto Kerner, 54, who is almost pitiably responsive to Daley's wishes. Chicago's nine-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives acts on Daley's commands. "I don't even go to the bathroom without checking first," says one Chicago Congressman. Says a White House staffer: "If Daley told 'em to vote for the impeachment of President Kennedy tomorrow, they'd vote for the impeachment of President Kennedy tomorrow." That situation is not likely to occur; Daley is one of Kennedy's closest political allies, has a lightning-fast line to the White House.

The Use of Power. But it is not Daley's political power that counts so much in modern Chicago as the way he uses it. Chicago has had boss-mayors with clout before. There was "Big Bill" Thompson (1915-23, 1927-31), a Republican who left a safe-deposit box stuffed with a million and a half dollars in cash when he died. Then there was Democrat Ed Kelly (1933-47), who used his power mostly to throw public projects to his personal and political pal, Contractor Pat Nash. Chicago has also had do-good mayors who had no clout. One of these was Democrat Martin Kennelley (1947-55), whose good intentions were all frustrated by his total lack of political acumen, and who was unseated by Daley in 1955.