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PARTISAN REVIEW
know "nuttin'."
If
you wanted to judge a war, "you had to be there"
just like Archie had been there in "the big one, World War II." The
Lindsayites' sanctimony had not only effectively sealed them off from
learning from their failures, it had reduced them to the caricature they
had once mocked.
Still, in putting Lindsay in his proper place we ought not elevate
Daley beyond his . The Chicago mayor faced an impossible situation
inadequately. But he wasn't nearly as bad as the critics of his time sug–
gested, nor was he as good as nostalgists suggest. We can judge Daley
senior in part by what his son has done differently in a Chicago largely
shorn of both machine politics and patronage. Once the tough among
cities, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, Chicago has turned soft, so to
speak. Symbolically, the son has left the family's ancestral home in
working-class Bridgeport, which is now slowly gentrifying, for the more
cosmopolitan climes of downtown . And while Chicago still suffers from
police and government corruption, both Daleys paid inordinate atten–
tion to detail. Like his father, Richard M . Daley is planting trees at every
opportunity. But the son runs a far more inclusive regime.
Richard M . Daley has done far more than his father to Lindsay-like
bring African-Americans into government while improving the services
offered to the rapidly growing number of black homeowning neighbor–
hoods. In 1960s terms he has co-opted the black opposition more effec–
tively than his father ever did. Both father and son courted black
ministers but Richard M. has done far more to include blacks in city
pork, as when he cut African-American politicians in on the lucrative
food franchises at the city-owned O'Hare Airport. And black contrac–
tors were given a sizable chunk of the action when Daley built the new
police headquarters in the historically African-American neighborhood
of Bronzeville. Young Daley has supported affirmative action, criticized
police brutality, and subsidized church loans for social service corpora–
tions . He is now in the process of tearing down the high-rise projects his
father built and then generally neglected in favor of dispersing the wel–
fare population into low-rise walk-ups . In three terms as mayor, Daley
has gone from 3 percent of the black vote in 1989
to
45 percent last year
when he defeated Congressman and former Black Panther Bobby Rush
in a landslide even greater than those won by his father. In short, the
Daleys have adjusted to a powerful African-American political presence,
and most of the black leadership has adjusted to Chicago's one-party
political culture.
The "Boss's" mantra of emphasizing "loyalty, hard work, and play–
ing by the rules" was revived for Democrats by the centrist Democratic
