Richard J. Daley
Richard Joseph Daley (May 15, 1902 – December 20, 1976) was an American politician who served as the mayor of Chicago from 1955, and the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee from 1953, until his death. He has been called "the last of the big city bosses" who controlled and mobilized American cities.[1] Daley was Chicago's third consecutive mayor from the working-class, heavily Irish American South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, where he lived his entire life. He was the patriarch of the Daley family, whose members include Richard M. Daley, another former mayor of Chicago; William M. Daley, a former United States Secretary of Commerce; John P. Daley, a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners; and Patrick Daley Thompson, a former alderman of the Chicago City Council.
This article is about the mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976. For his son, the mayor of Chicago from 1989 to 2011, see Richard M. Daley.
Richard J. Daley
Michael J. Flynn
Patrick J. Carroll
Thaddeus Adesko
David Shanahan
William Fucane
December 20, 1976 (aged 74)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Patrick R. Daley (grandson)
Patrick Daley Thompson (grandson)
Daley is remembered for doing much to save Chicago from the declines that other rust belt cities such as Cleveland, Buffalo, and Detroit experienced during the same period. He had a strong base of support in Chicago's Irish Catholic community and was treated by national politicians such as Lyndon B. Johnson as a pre-eminent Irish American, with special connections to the Kennedy family. Daley played a major role in the history of the Democratic Party, especially with his support of John F. Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960 and of Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election of 1968. He would be the longest-serving mayor in Chicago history until his record was broken by his son Richard M. Daley in 2011. A panel of 69 scholars in 1993 ranked him sixth among the ten best mayors in American history.[2]
On the other hand, Daley's legacy is complicated by criticisms of his response to the Chicago riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and his handling of the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention held in his city. He also had enemies within the Democratic Party. In addition, many members of Daley's administration were charged and convicted for corruption, although Daley himself was never charged with any crime.
Daley in 1970
Daley at the opening day parade for the Lakefront Festival, 1973
A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Daley ranked as the fifth best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.[42] The survey also saw Daley ranked the best big-city mayor to serve in office post-1960.[43] On the 50th anniversary of Daley's first 1955 swearing-in, several dozen Daley biographers and associates met at the Chicago Historical Society. Historian Michael Beschloss called Daley "the pre-eminent mayor of the 20th century". Robert Remini pointed out that while other cities were in fiscal crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, "Chicago always had a double-A bond rating." According to Chicago folksinger Steve Goodman, "no man could inspire more love, more hate". Daley's twenty-one-year tenure as mayor is memorialized in the following:
Journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor argue that Daley's politics may have saved Chicago from the same fate that cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Saint Louis and Cleveland endured, which suffered from suburbanization, crime and white flight. "But for every middle-class neighborhood he saved, there was a poor neighborhood in which living conditions worsened. For every downtown skyscraper that kept jobs and tax dollars in the city, there was a housing project tower that confined poor people in an overcrowded ghetto".[45]
Daley was known by many Chicagoans as "Da Mare" ("The Mayor"), "Hizzoner" ("His Honor"), and "The Man on Five" (his office was on the fifth floor of City Hall). Since Daley's death and the subsequent election of son Richard as mayor in 1989, the first Mayor Daley has become known as "Boss Daley",[46] "Old Man Daley", or "Daley Senior" to residents of Chicago.
During the civil rights era, some Black Chicagoans often referred to Daley as "Pharaoh", in the sense that he was as oppressive and unrelenting as Ramses was to Martin Luther King’s Moses.[47] These claims were supported by Daley's role in the assassination of Fred Hampton and his anti-MLK stance.[48]