Richard J. Daley
Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago
Roger Biles
Northern Illinois University Press
$18.00 Paperback
From "The City that Works" to the city that works maybe a little, from 2-4pm, and only on alternate Tuesdays.
Richard J. Daley was the last of the Windy City's big-city bosses, running the city with an iron fist and a damn tight grip. It may have been a morass of racial conflict and carefully concealed poverty-but Daley sure made sure the buses ran ok. [When one is stuck on the #4 Cottage Grove headed south at 2 am, one really misses the old man.]
From his first election in 1955 until he kicked it in '76, Daley symbolized Chicago. He dominated the city's political landscape, and was better-known, at times, than even Al Capone. During years when all of America's cities were falling apart at the seams, flailing as they tried to deal with post-war population explosions, civil rights, fiscal crises, suburban flight, urban renewal, and more, Daley kept his town together. Maybe not always happy, maybe not always prosperous. But together.
He got a lot a flak (most of it deserved) for his traditionalist, stoic, hamhandedly paternalistic methods. His steadfast resolve to resist any and all of the changes that threatened to take over the city won him a number of enemies, particularly in his reactionary work against most civil rights work going on in the city at the time. But change happened nonetheless, and Daley's refusal to let his city slip through his hands slowed the pace of change enough that Chicago was able to grapple with it, in its thoroughly Midwestern way.
In Richard J. Daley, Roger Biles charts Daley's rise to prominence, his years as the Kennedy family's Midwestern support, and the development of his national image as the poster child for a Chicago that could survive anything. Biles also marks the paces of his emergence as the law-and-order mayor, his crumbling image and health as the years went on, and his eventual decline and death.
No matter what you think of the man and his politics, his is an important story to know. During Daley's heyday, in the middle and late '60s, Chicago dug its heels in to become the town it is today. Biles's mostly unbiased political history offers one side of the way things were. And I don't think I'd want to go back to the days of Weathermen setting fire to city blocks-but it sure would have been nice if Daley, Jr. could have learned a little something from dear old dad about making this a city that operates even remotely effectively.
--Temple Lentz
