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prominent Democrats in the sixties who empathized with the middle
class, Lindsay was the product of a New York political culture which
mixed bohemianism, upper-class pretension, and leftist ideology into a
coalition of contempt for the homeowning petty bourgeoisie. Lindsay
had nothing but disdain for what his administration described, and I
quote, as "the ticky-tacky" homes of Archie Bunker's Queens. The first–
generation homeowners of the outer boroughs, fearful that their newly
acquired middle class status might be stripped from them, returned the
hostility. Lindsay seemed comfortable only with those too wealthy to
need to work or those unable or unwilling to work. Daley, who had
emerged from the ranks of the lower middle class, always understood
the importance of homeownership for those newly arrived in positions
of relative prosperity. He was the favorite of those white Chicagoans
who owned modest homes in the "Bungalow Belt."
The hidden issue of homeownership produced an often unexamined
clash between the two American ideals-the rights of private property
and the right to equality of opportunity, both essential to the American
creed. Lindsay honored the American ideal of equal opportunity by
using city hiring to expand black employment opportunities. But his
attempts to build housing for poor, racially oppressed black families
with high rates of criminality in the midst of lower middle class white
neighborhoods was a threat to American ideals of private property, par–
ticularly a home safe from government depredations . Lindsay was too
arrogant, too sure that his was necessarily the path of righteousness, to
be a hypocrite on these matters.
But Daley, like most effective politicians, was a practiced hypocrite.
He protected the property rights of white homeowners at the cost of
containing even black middle class families in the festering conditions of
the inner city. Daley dragged his feet on expanding homeowning oppor–
tunities for African-Americans on political grounds. There was an
intense and violent opposition when a black family moved into his own
neighborhood of Bridgeport in
1955;
the house was dismantled almost
brick by brick. And the only time he was challenged politically came in
1963
from white critics who, shortly after the Robert Taylor homes had
been constructed, said he had done too much for blacks. At the time, the
Robert Taylor homes were seen as a big improvement, and they were
built in black congressman Will iam Dawson's district at his request and
as his reward for service to the machine. Daley won re-election that year
with overwhelming black support, while losing a majority of white vot–
ers .
