Daley Boss

New York, E. P. Dutton, 1971, 215 pp., index, $5.95.

YOU ARE driving along Lake Shore Drive. You happen to be going over the speed limit. A policeman stops you, you give him your license with a ten-dollar bill wrapped around it, he gives you a lecture and you drive away. That's machine corruption.

An average Republican is running against an average machine Democrat. The machine poll workers throw the election judges out of the precinct house, and the Democrat carries the precinct 9-1 in a surprising show of strength. This happens all over town and the Democrat wins the election. That's machine corruption.

The city is building a new police station. A contractor who gave $10,000 to the Non-Partisan Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Daley gets to do the building. There is no competitive bidding. That's machine corruption.

It was common and fashionable once upon a time for earnest reformers to cite such examples as proof of the "outrageous corruption" which goes on under machine government. These arguments were usually countered by machine advocates and apologists who would point out that the machine often served as a means of upward mobility for poor, recently arrived ethnic groups. They might also suggest that corruption is simply another means of "interest articulation."

Today, many of the old critics of the Chicago machine are members of the Non-Partisan Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Daley. They argue that somehow, Mayor Daley manages to govern a big city, which is a lot more than flashy reformers like John Lindsay seem to be doing. They also cite the many achievements of the Daley administration and all the buildings he's erected. When he won re-election earlier this month, editorial writers all over the country sighed and spent a lot of ink marveling at his ability to rally popular support.

Mike Royko's Boss isn't such a waste of ink. It is something of a hatchet job, but it explains something that few of the editorial writers bothered to touch upon, namely, that in the process of building downtown, Daley has ignored the neighborhoods. Royko, who is a Chicago Daily News columnist, attacks the old forms of corruption: the election fraud, the kickbacks, the small rackets. Indeed, he describes many cases of old-fashioned corruption in the matter-of-fact way which is his strength as a reporter.

He goes beyond this, however, by explaining why so many suburbanites and Republicans join the Non-Partisan Daley Committee. Daley is good for business. When he was first elected, he went on a building spree downtown:

He put big bond issue referendums on the ballot to raise funds for public works projects. The banks were delighted at the prospect of bidding on the profitable bonds. He announced that high-rise apartments were the administration's official answer to the suburban exodus, and that the lake front and the central city would someday bristle with residential skyscrapers. The banks and real estate interests were enthralled. Planned expressways, all of them leading to the downtown business section, would be put on a hurry-up, round-the-clock schedule, and more parking garages would be built to accommodate the motorized shoppers, and the downtown stores were ecstatle.

He also built up O'Hare Airport and erected convention hall on the Chicago lakefront despite the protests of conservationists. He floated a $113 million bond issue, of which only $20 million we ?? to slum clearance. "But since the civil leade?? downtown merchants, and newspaper editors?? not live in the slums," says Royko, "it was not ?? sort of inequity that would bother them."

Daley caters to the downtown interests, ?? suburbanites and the Republicans. So why d?? he keep winning? One might argue that mo?? talks louder in politics than in most places ?? this is partly true. The downtown interest b?? couldn't work alone, but wedded to the mach?? they seem invincible.

Royko shows that there's a lot more to D?? than that. While machines were collapsing all over the country, Daley's was sticking together. Boss doesn't explain why this is so, but it suggests ?? lot of contributing factors. The most obvious ?? Daley's mastery of timing. When Chicago was hi?? with a police scandal, Daley was not at all relu??tant to fire his police commissioner and appoint?? blue-ribbon candidate, a nationally recognized e?? pert on criminology. This removed the police from his control and even improved the force. But?? saved Daley and the machine: better to take o?? step back than to lose your legs. Wilson eventua?? retired, and Daley appointed a more pliable ch??

ANOTHER reason for the machine's succes?? Daley's ability to manipulate white fears. His famous shoot-to-kill order is one example of this. His criticisms of Martin Luther King (before his death, of course) are another. Moreover, Daley firmly believes in the American ethic of upward mobility. When a nun who did social work on the West Side visited Daley to tell him of the poverty she had seen, Daley, in a long-winded reply, pointed out to the nun that their "grandparents can?? here with nothing," The blacks, he said, "should lift themselves up by their bootstraps like our grandparents did," Daley eventually went to the West Side, Royko tells us, in a helicopter during the riots, "to see what people do when they have no boots."

Royko said a few weeks ago in a TV interview that Daley represents the wave of the future, that cities want strong leadership of the sort that Daley has given Chicago. This seems doubtful, if for no other reason than that blacks, who are rebelling against the machine, are also becoming a majority in Chicago and most other big cities. Still Boss stands as a monument to what can be done through a clever mix of self-interest, hate, fear, good timing, clever PR and strong leadership. If Boss is still relevant in the 1980's, it will be because the 1970's ignored its message.