For the Democratic Party, going back to Chicago for its convention is rather like the Rolling Stones deciding to return to Altamont and stage a free rock festival. Chicago 1968 and Altamont 1969 were the twin gravediggers of 1960s counterculture. The bad vibrations they generated shook asunder a certain kind of American optimism. Hovering over this week’s gathering is the question of whether that kind of hope can be born again in the place where it died.
There’s also something else that ended at the Chicago convention of 1968. It’s not entirely parochial to remember that it was the last hurrah for a phenomenon of huge importance in our own history: the Irish-American political machine. The 1968 convention was supposed to be its apotheosis. It turned out to be its nemesis. And this, too, has continuing consequences in US politics.
If you travelled to Chicago in 1968, you could not have avoided a famous name and a jowly face reminding you that you were entering a feudal fiefdom. From O’Hare airport onwards into the hotels and streetscapes, signs proclaimed “Mayor Daley Welcomes You to Chicago” and “You Have Arrived in Daley Country”.
The Kennedys – glamorous, eloquent, tragic, progressive – were the heroic side of Irish Catholic politics in the US. But Richard J Daley – squat, double-chinned, tongue-tied, meaner than a junkyard dog – was the side the Irish emigrant’s bread was buttered on. He was the last great operative of the Democratic Party’s urban machines that processed poor Paddies into respectable members of the American white working class. This was an immense force in the modern history of our people – Daley embodied something at least as significant for the Irish as Patrick Pearse or Éamon de Valera ever did.
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Daley was the world’s most successful Christian Brothers boy (even beyond Gay Byrne). He was educated at the De La Salle Institute, operated by the Christian Brothers, where 90 per cent of the pupils were Irish. His father, Michael, was a sheet-metal worker whose parents had come from Co Waterford. His mother, Lillian Dunne, was the child of parents from Limerick. He grew up in the southside Chicago enclave of Bridgeport, described by Mike Royko, in one of the classics of American political writing, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971), as an “ethnic state” – the ethnicity being of course Irish.
Daley became a protege of the Chicago politician Joe McDonough, whose campaign song remains a perfect encapsulation of the transactional nature of Irish machine politics: “Whenever ya wanted a favor,/ McDonough was ready to do. / Whataya gonna do for McDonough, / After what he done for you?”
Generations of Irish TDs relied (and still rely) on the same appeal. But in those vast American cities the systems of patronage were also appropriately vast. Daley controlled about 25,000 jobs directly and many more indirectly. Royko wrote of Daley’s in-laws that, when he married Eleanor Guilfoyle “they did not lose a daughter, they gained an employment agency”. The Guilfoyles, like many Irish immigrants, got jobs in the police department, the public school system and the city workforce.
This patronage system was grand for the Irish – and for members of other white immigrant groups with whom they learned to share the spoils. But its silent victims were the city’s Black communities. Daley and the machine were great integrators and great excluders – African Americans in Chicago were penned into ghettoes with insanitary housing, poor schools and very limited access to public jobs and resources.
Daley hated and feared Martin Luther King. His answer to complaints of discrimination was the one still heard among Trump-supporting white Americans: the Irish pulled themselves up by their bootstraps so why can’t the Blacks? One nun tried to explain to Daley the difference between being an Irish immigrant who got a job on the police force the same week he got to Chicago, and being a Black man thrown into a cell the same day he arrived in the city. Daley wasn’t having it.
The 1968 convention was meant to be Daley’s crowning glory, the ultimate exaltation of the Irish political machine. By then, Daley was, according to Royko, “the most powerful political leader in Illinois’ history, and, with the single exception of the president, the most powerful politician in the country”.
Yet this triumphal procession turned into a horror show. Inside the convention, there were literal fights as all the divisions over civil rights and the Vietnam War spilled on to the floor. Outside, Daley turned his (Irish-dominated) police on to a relatively small gathering of peaceful anti-war protesters, battering them, unfortunate passersby and journalists trying to record the violence, unmercifully and indiscriminately. An official inquiry subsequently called it a “police riot”.
But Daley celebrated his brutality as quintessentially Irish. In 1969 he said “Someone asked me a few days ago, would you do over what you did in August? And in the true tradition of the Gaelic spirit of the Daleys, I said: ‘You’re damn right I’d do the same thing, only with greater effort.’”
But the Gaelic spirit of the Daleys was in fact running out. The Chicago police riot marked the real end of the Irish machine as the heart of the Democratic Party. Daley rule did return to Chicago in the form of the Boss’s son and namesake who served as mayor even longer then his father did.
But it was clear after 1968 that the urban machines could no longer be the force that held the Democrats together. It is poignantly apt that this week’s convention will mark the reluctant passing of the last old-style Irish Catholic pol, Joe Biden.
The Democrats had to find something else, and in many ways the last 50 years have been about their faltering efforts to discover exactly what that is. What is the ghost of the machine giving way to? Hopefully to a genuinely inclusive politics in which women and people of colour do not have to depend on the moods of white men and systemic justice takes the place of patronage.