FRED SIEGEL
Mayors and Morality: Daley and Lindsay
Then and N ow
Chicago's traditional tribalism looks remarkably similar
to the modern multiculturalism of the Democratic Party.
-Paul McGrath, high-ranking advisor
to
former
Chicago mayor Jane Byrne
H
ISTORY SEEMS TO HAVE
come full circle for the Daleys of
Chicago. In 1960 Mayor Richard
J.
Daley, who had been
elected with black votes, temporarily made himself a hero to
liberal Democrats when he played a key role in electing John Kennedy
president. Forty years later his oldest son William Daley, working with
Jesse Jackson, ran the campaign to put Al Gore into the White House.
Over the past forty years of racial politics the Daleys have gone from
darlings to demons and back again.
Political archetypes sometimes play tricks on us. Consider John
Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. They were born just six years apart yet
JFK is frozen in our memory as forever youthful, while few can imagine
Reagan as anything but doddering. Mayors John Lindsay of New York
and Richard
J.
Daley of Chicago are remembered as the antithetical
embodiments of the 1960s urban crisis . Yet New York and Chicago are
anything but typical. "New York," notes Saul Bellow, "is a European
city though of no known nationality." While only a Bertolt Brecht could
imagine that Chicago, a city of Slavs governed by Irishmen along the
lines of European Christian Democracy, was typically American. Nei–
ther man's national reputation seemed to have survived the era's caul–
dron of racial politics. Both men reached their nadir in 1972: Lindsay in
his brief but disastrous run for the presidency; Daley when his delega–
tion was refused admittance to the Democratic convention only to be
replaced by a group led by Jesse Jackson.
