By Tuesday’s end, there will be a new Chicago mayor. She will be the first African-American female mayor in the city’s long and raucous history and so, hungry for historical perspective and eager for enlightenment, I decided to commune as best I could with a former mayor who was most assuredly not female or African-American.
That is what I was doing one afternoon last week on the third floor of a building on the sprawling University of Illinois at Chicago campus, staring at an Illinois license plate with the number 708-222. It was encased in a plastic box and is one of the thousands of items that comprise the Richard J. Daley Collection housed inside, appropriately enough, the Richard J. Daley Library.
“In many ways it is not what you expect,” says Dan Harper, special collections assistant archivist. “Yes, there is a great deal of material about the man himself but also lot of things that help give perspective to and understanding of the time in which he lived and worked.”
At the moment, we do not know how many people will vote in Tuesday’s mayoral election. Since 553,180 votes were cast for the 14 candidates in the Feb. 26 primary it seems highly unlikely that either candidate will top 708,222, which was the total number of votes Daley received when first elected mayor in 1955, defeating Republican Robert E. Merriam. Those numbers were affixed to Daley’s license plate until his death a few days before Christmas in 1976.
There are all manner of fascinating, enlightening and, frankly, weird and wonderful items in this Daley collection, which came to UIC in 2005 and which has been meticulously organized by Harper, who is originally from Denver, and his boss, Peggy Glowacki, a lifelong Northwest Sider and the special collections librarian.
Harper and Glowacki played for me an old film of Daley’s 1955 inaugural speech. Among its 2,716 words were these, “As mayor I feel that one of my greatest responsibilities is to present a true picture of our great city — and to erase the unreal notion that many people have of Chicago and its people. The mayor’s office is no ivory tower. Its problems cannot be solved with a slide rule. There are no miracles — there are no bargains in government as in anything else. But if work, and sincerity, and the highest dedication to the city and its people can bring programs into reality — If effort, intelligent approach and courage can solve problems — If humility, patience, and vision can surmount obstacles — then Chicago will go forward.
“To this end I will dedicate myself — to a sincere, honest and vigorous administration, to maintain the fabric of civil life in Chicago and lay a concrete foundation for a renewal of faith in our City’s dignity and future. “
Daley’s papers and other materials — paintings, campaign buttons, newspaper clippings, speeches, reports, photographs, tape recordings, artifacts and on and on — are the most prominent part of the Special Collection & University Archives of UIC, which also contains the papers of other politicians, judges, Illinois public officials and other important sorts.
Anyone can visit and see the collections and over the years Daley has attracted some serious academics and scholars. But others have come seeking information of a personal sort, such as more than one person who came asking something along the lines of, “My grandfather walked with Daley in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1962 and I was wondering if you might have a photo of that?”
“We try to help, no matter the request,” says Harper.
We all tend to think, in this internet age, that everything we want or need can be had on a screen after a couple of keystrokes. But less than one percent of Daley’s material has been digitized and that is the way it should be. There is a palpable punch to seeing the real things.
That is why it was a mild thrill to hold in my hands a typewritten letter sent to Daley by Joseph P. Kennedy. Dated October 21, 1960, weeks before John F. Kennedy was elected president, it reads, in part, “Again, with all my sincere gratitude to you for your great help and cooperation at all times, and with my warmest regard to you and your family.”
Such an item, with its “great help and cooperation at all times,” might give fuel to those conspiracy theorists who believe, wrongly, that Daley helped stuff ballot boxes for JFK.
“Being surrounded by all of this material, I look at Mayor Daley differently than I once did,” says Glowacki. “I have come to appreciate the conditions he was dealing with, the pressures, the financial obligations and how really difficult the job of mayor is.”
It would be easy to spend hours, if not days or weeks, plowing through the Daley collection, touching history. It will be even more time-consuming to tackle the collection of Mayor Richard M. Daley, which arrived at UIC in 2016 and is in the process of being cataloged and organized. “It contains twice, maybe three times as much material as his father’s,” says Glowacki. “And so many gifts given to him over the years, such as …” She holds up a baseball autographed by former White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski.
Leaving the library and walking across the hard concrete edges of the campus it was eerily quiet. Students and teachers were away on spring break and though there was some construction work peppering the area it was easy to recall the controversy and anger that ensued in the early 1960s when Daley decided that the building of this UIC campus would cause the razing of a proud and predominantly Italian neighborhood.
In “Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago,” Mike Royko wrote that residents were “stunned.” “The neighborhood’s sense of betrayal was heightened by the fact that they had been a loyal Machine ward. They poured out more Democratic votes than Daley’s own neighborhood,” Royko wrote.
It was easy to remember the energetic but ultimately unsuccessful protests and lawsuits, the protest march signs proclaiming “Daley is a dictator,” and the City Hall sit-ins, many led by that impassioned community activist Florence Scala.
The struggle ended in 1963 and the campus started to rise and Daley would come to consider it one of his proudest accomplishments. In a pointed irony, Scala’s papers are also housed at UIC.
Later in the day, night falling, I found myself standing at the corner of North Avenue and Sedgwick Street near the apartment in which I grew up and near the site of the former tavern/office of 43rd Ward Alderman Mathias “Paddy” Bauler. Lest we forget, there are also 15 aldermanic races taking place Tuesday and, lest we forget, it was Bauler who, on the night Daley was first elected mayor in 1955, held a drunken party during which he uttered five words that are etched in our political history. He said, gleefully, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
Good luck to the new mayor.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
@rickkogan
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