CHICAGO DURING THE DALEY YEARS
Rise of suburbia and the political convention seen around the world
It was a tumultuous week, that first week of April in 1955.
On April 1 Col. Robert R. McCormick, in failing health since an attack of pneumonia following a trip to Europe in April 1953, died in the early morning.
His end came, he might have appreciated, in time to make the late editions of that day’s paper, informing readers that “his death came peacefully.” Services were held three days later and he was buried in his WWI uniform at his Cantigny estate in Wheaton.
Four days later, on April 5, Richard J. Daley was elected the 48th mayor of Chicago. That night, at his tavern on North Avenue, not an unfamiliar place to newspaper reporters, 43rd Ward Ald. Mathias “Paddy” Bauler, a famous City Council clown since the 1930s when he used to amuse Mayor Anton Cermak by rolling around on the floor in wrestling matches with his 275-pound self, uttered a phrase that would echo for decades: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
He may have been right, politically speaking, but Chicago was ready for something. Those in the know would have told you that there were revolutions brewing: social, cultural, racial and sexual, and some things no one could have imagined.
The Tribune, which had not endorsed Daley, did offer muted congratulations on his election, hoping “for his sake, as well as for Chicago’s, that he will do nothing … to sully his good name.”
He would bring both praise and condemnation to himself and the city in his lengthy stay on the fifth floor of City Hall, but when first elected things looked hopeful.
You could feel that standing at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. You would see the gray-suited masses pouring off the buses and up from the train station, but you would also see unruly-looking youths in bluejeans and T-shirts. And while most women were still at home, wives and moms, they were also becoming a more visible part of the workforce, up to 29 % that year.
You would look to the east and see the Prudential Building, which had just opened, the first skyscraper to go up here since the Field Building on LaSalle Street in 1934. It shimmered in the sunlight.
This was just the sort of thing, this bold “We’re back in business!” symbol, that prompted a reporter for Fortune magazine to write, “The most exciting city in the U.S. is Chicago, Illinois . ... All over the city there is a flurry of blasting and leveling. And, as the girders go up for the new overpasses, office buildings, factories, apartments, stores and hospitals, even the most skeptical Chicagoan, hardened
against mere rhetoric during the decades of tub-thumping, must now concede that the city means business.”
To catalog what transpired over the next two decades would fill this entire edition. Many of you were here during these years and reading the Tribune, as hundreds of thousands did every day.
Much of the news would be due to Daley. He was a builder, and many projects that arose — O’Hare International Airport, Sears Tower, McCormick Place (named in honor of the late McCormick), the University of Illinois-Chicago campus — would, for good and ill, pepper his years in office.
He would also build many expressways, a network of roads radiating from the central city and reaching into suburban regions that had been little more than farms and drowsy villages. Many welcomed these roads, but some railed that this expressway system was fracturing the city’s neighborhoods, drawing more people to the suburbs and dividing the city along racial lines.
That was happening in other ways too. The Chicago Housing Authority would build dozens of high-rises at the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side, Cabrini-Green on the Near North Side and in other areas. Optimists saw public housing as a way station on the American Dream train. Others were filled with uncertainty, as Ron Grossman details in today’s vintage Chicago Tribune offering.
The news of the world came at us in all its horrors. The Vietnam War dragging on and on; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy came … and so much more tragedy. But then, on July 20, 1969, “we”
landed on the moon, with the paper editorializing, “No great outpouring of words is necessary to express the feeling of most Americans … ‘Well done’ and ‘Thank God’ will suffice for now.”
The city, as ever, offered its wild mix.
There was bad news: Our Lady of Angels Fire (1958);
Richard Speck rampage (1966); blizzard of 1967; and the closing of Riverview Park (1967). There was good news: White Sox in the World Series (1959); opening of The Second City (1959); debut of “Bozo’s Circus” (1961); Bears NFL championship (1963); and unveiling of the Picasso statue (1967).
If there was any year that would come to symbolize the Daley era, it was 1968.
In the wake of the April 4 assassination of King, riots swept across the West Side with fires and looting, compelling Daley to issue his unfortunate order to police: “Shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand ... shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.”
A Tribune editorial would blame “Black power groups” for the trouble and it was Black people, not the war protesters and other long-haired agitators coming to town, whom Daley feared before the Democratic Convention that August. With the convention weeks away, he orchestrated the renaming of South Park Way to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the first of what are now 1,000-some such streets across the globe.
And then the convention came to town and turned into a violent confrontation between the police and protesters and even involved the press in the fight, much of it caught on television. The sight of police wielding billy clubs at protesters and journalists tarnished the city’s reputation, leading television commentators to dub the city “Fortress Chicago” (CBS correspondent Dan Rather was punched in the stomach trying to interview a delegate). But Daley would weather the criticism, leading Chicago for another eight years until his death.
Through it all the Tribune was shaking free of the Colonel’s influence and competing against television, which had become a medium of mass entertainment and mass communication, trying to capture readers in a society becoming more fluid, more questioning and self-obsessed.
The newspaper created new sections in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Perspective and Tempo, designed to answer readers’ taste for opinion pieces or information on new trends and leisure activities. New subjects such as environmental concerns found their way into the news pages. In 1967 the paper’s “Save Our Lake” campaign called attention to pollution in Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes.
A dramatic sign that the paper had entered a new era came in the spring of 1974.
In an effort that echoed the paper’s publication of the revised New Testament in 1881, the Tribune published the transcripts of the Watergate tapes recorded by President Richard Nixon in the White House.
It was the only newspaper in the country to print the entire, 246,000-word transcript. This was, of course, before the widespread use of computers, so hundreds of Tribune employees were involved in producing a 44-page special section that was added to the 80-page Wednesday paper.
Soon to come was an editorial written primarily by editor Clayton Kirkpatrick, long an admirer of Nixon. It began, “Listen, Mr. Nixon ...” and called for him to be impeached or to resign.
In a harbinger of tough times ahead, death came to two of the city’s newspapers, both afternoon publications.
Chicago Today, which evolved from the Chicago American that the Tribune had owned since 1956, was the first to go. Its last issue was Sept. 13, 1974. The death of the Daily News came March 4, 1978. Both were done in by the fact that people were relying more on evening television to get their afternoon news.
On Dec. 20, 1976, Daley suffered a massive heart attack in his doctor’s office, a mile north of Tribune Tower. The newspaper had endorsed Daley in four of his six campaigns but not in the first or last.
In the wake of this death, the paper editorialized, “Chicago is also known, and with considerable reason as ‘the city that works.’ Before cheering the end of the Daley machine, it is worth pausing to ask to what extent it has been the city that worked, and to what extent it was the Daley machine that worked.”