Union Stockyards.. Chicago 1899
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
from “Chicago” by
Carl Sandburg 1916
I moved to Chicago in 1971 at the age of 27 at a point in my life where I was becoming aware that thirty was rapidly approaching on my personal horizon and beginning to have serious doubts about the ’60s adage “Never trust anyone over thirty.”
The city and the country were winding down from the riots of the late sixties, and winding up for more escalation in Vietnam, and, in the resultant protest movement. America had suffered enormous trauma since the assassination of John Kennedy and was ramping up for more to come in the Watergate scandal and the first resignation of a US President in history.
Richard J Daley was in the sixteenth year of his twenty one year reign as Mayor of the “City of the Big Shoulders.” This was the man or at least, one of them about whom the paranoid adage “Never trust anyone over thirty” had been written.
This was “The Man,” “Hizzoner da Mayor,” or the as he was dubbed by Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Royko in his 1971 best seller, simply, “Boss.”
This was the Mayor we loved to hate.
I had left San Francisco after four years during which I had grown weary of what I felt at the time was that city’s insufferable provincialism. Chicago turned out to be a much larger provence than the “City by the Bay” but a province nonetheless and one long ruled by the “Boss.”
“Even the Lord had skeptical members of His party”
Richard J Daley
Richard Daley was born and raised on Chicago’s sprawling south side in 1902 . He became Mayor in 1955 of a city that in the words of one ward heeler “ain’t ready for reform yet” and in the closing words of Roykos’ book “And in 1970, like it or not, it wasn’t getting any.” Daley was perhaps, the last of the big time “machine politicians.”
During his long tenure as Mayor, Daley ruled with a heavy hand which was never more evident than during the Democratic convention and police riots in 1968 and the ensuing investigations and trials to follow. After the city was chosen as the site of the convention Daley put the city’s more than 10,000 police on 12 hour shifts and called up nealy 15,000 troops from the Army and National guard.
One wag noted at the time that Daley fielded more troops for the convention than Washington had commanded in wresting the Colonies from British control.
“The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder. Richard J Daley
During the ensuing riots hundreds were beaten and injured by police during what was termed the “Battle of Michigan Avenue” while the whole spectacle was filmed by an eager press as “the whole world” watched on live television. A government study would later place blame on the police but Daley vehemently disagreed and in a gesture so typical of Hizzoner gave the police a pay raise.
By most accounts Daley was personally honest but enormously forgiving of venality and corruption in those who ran the city and Chicago Democratic politics for him in his city on the take.
As anyone who lived there at the time can attest, myself included, traffic and other minor offences were more often than not settled with a ten or twenty dollar gratuity for the officer at the scene rather than a trip downtown. The corruption was widespread and operated at all levels including many of the city’s aldermen, police officials and judges.
Daley who died in office in 1976 remained defiant and unapologetic to the end. As Mike Royko described in a 1973 column:
Several theories have arisen as to what Mayor Daley really meant a few days ago when he said:
“If they don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.”
On the surface, it appeared that the mayor was merely admonishing those who would dare question the royal favors he has bestowed upon his sons, Prince Curly, Prince Larry, and Prince Moe.
But it can be a mistake to accept the superficial meaning of anything the mayor says.
The mayor can be a subtle man. And as Earl Bush, his press secretary, once put it after the mayor was quoted correctly:
“Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”
So many observers believe the true meaning of the mayor’s remarkable kissing invitation may be more than skin deep.
One theory is that he would like to become sort of the Blarney Stone of Chicago.
As the stone’s legend goes, if a person kisses Ireland’s famous Blarney Stone, which actually exists, he will be endowed with the gift of oratory.
And City Hall insiders have long known that the kind of kiss Daley suggested can result in the gift of wealth.
from What’s Behind Daley’s Words?
by Mike Royko February 16, 1973
If Richard Daley were alive today he’d be 104 years old and I’m sure just as unapolojetic about himself and his city as he was thirty years ago at the time of his death.
Or as Sandburg put it ninety years ago:
……so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
For many of us at the time Hizzoner was the Mayor we loved to hate, but from this vantage point he was also one of the most memorable characters of an incredible era and all I can say now is, Happy Birthday Boss.
Bob Higgins
