The Day the Daley Machine Died

For decades, Chicago has been synonymous with the Daley family — their political machine, brash personalities, and overwhelming effectiveness. On Tuesday, that machine suffered a fatal blow as the city elected a new mayor who represents the liberal wing of the party and the empowerment of the teachers union. The mayor-elect, Brandon Johnson, is a Cook County commissioner, union organizer, and former public school teacher. He has been an elected official for just more than four years, and by harnessing the frustrations of a city beleaguered by crime, poor educational performance, and high costs of housing, he was able to narrowly win the top job at city hall. His story is different from those of the Daley dynasty. The famous patriarch, Richard J. Daley, climbed his way through the ranks of Illinois Democratic politics. Elected to the state legislature at 34, he spent 20 years in various public offices before his ascension as mayor of Chicago in 1955. He would serve in that position until his death in 1976. His eldest son, Richard M. Daley, served as mayor between 1989 and 2011. In the last 68 years, a Daley has sat in the mayor’s office for nearly 44. During his more than two decades in office, the elder Daley was famous for his distribution of patronage jobs to close friends and associates, granting them “temporary status” so they could avoid the necessary civil service exams for employment. Those old loopholes are long gone, with some lamenting that fact. Alderman Dick Mell, a 38-year veteran of the board, told Chicago Tribune that Daley’s use of such positions was a “great thing.” Now the focus turns toward the teachers union, which is likely to see very favorable treatment from the mayor’s office in the coming years. The two previous mayors — the recently defeated incumbent, Lori Lightfoot, and the current ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emmanuel — had acrimonious relationships with the teachers, to say the least. Mr. Emmanuel saw the educators go on strike in 2012, the first since 1987. The teachers did not go on strike for even a moment during the younger Mr. Daley’s 22 years in office. In 2019, Chicago’s teachers picketed for 15 days, the longest protest in decades. When their favorite son emerged as a mayoral candidate for 2023, the CTU was sure to hit the pavement for him and remove Ms. Lightfoot from office.A former Chicago teachers union president, Jesse Sharkey, told the Chicago Sun-Times that she wants to build a new coalition of voters, something that would replace the old Daley machine. “Our people are gonna have to form connections with people in the neighborhoods, make popular demands in order to make the changes that we want to see happen,” Ms. Sharkey said. Mirroring the teachers union, law enforcement was sure to get involved in this year’s election after four years of low morale, poor officer retention, and lack of support from city hall. Over the course of Ms. Lightfoot’s tenure, the Chicago police department lost more than 10 percent of its officers, and she often derided them in the press as bigots. Compare that to Daley’s reaction to the 1968 Democratic convention in his city. Over the course of days, Chicago law enforcement clashed with anti-Vietnam War protesters who were in the city to push the Democratic Party to the left. Daley was ardent in defending his officers, even while lacking the typical politician’s eloquence. “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all — the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder,” he said at a press conference, plagued by his famous verbal maladies. Following his death in 1976, Chicago police established the Richard J. Daley medal of honor that would be awarded yearly to outstanding citizens of Chicago, which speaks to the admiration police leadership and the rank-and-file members had for the gruff mayor. Mr. Johnson is unlikely to find similar love among beat cops or union leadership. He was criticized during the campaign for endorsing the defund the police movement in 2020. Before the election, the police union’s president, John Cataranza, warned that up to 1,000 officers could leave should Mr. Johnson win.The elder Daley’s reliance on immigrants and first-generation Americans who came from Ireland, Poland, Russia, and other European countries — combined with majority support in the Black community — gave him near complete control over one of America’s largest cities. Mr. Johnson built something of a new coalition that crossed racial lines. His opponent in Tuesday’s election, Paul Vallas, swept white communities on the northwest and southwest sides of the city, where most middle-class white voters and law enforcement officers live. Mr. Johnson did incredibly well on the heavily Black south side and the upper-middle class, waterfront communities to the north. Mr. Johnson may be a mayor for a cross-racial coalition, but he could come to lack the support of the same class of political and economic elites who loved the Daley family. He was just elected on a platform of tax increases on businesses, high-earners, and homeowners. His ambitious plan includes taxing home sales and airlines that fly through O’Hare International Airport, and placing a levy on financial transactions. That last proposal — which would affect the 10,000-member financial services sector in the city — has already been shot down by Governor Pritzker, who would need to sign off on the mayor-elect’s plan. “I think it would be easy for those companies’ servers to move out of the state,” Mr. Pritzker said of the financial transaction tax after Mr. Johnson’s election. Many Chicago mayors have had their hopes and dreams dashed when confronted with the reality of ward politics, but the Daley family managed to survive and thrive for decades in the Windy City. Now that their machine is gone, it is up to Mr. Johnson to prove he can build something new from the ashes.

The Day the Daley Machine Died

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