“[Mayor Richard M.] Daley is an unreconstructed old-school pol: rarely glimpsed without a suit jacket, fluent in the ancient political rituals. He is especially good at going to wakes. ‘He has a style—he goes in a little early,’ John Schmidt, his former chief of staff, said. ‘It lets you get in and out, because no one else is there.’ ”—Evan Osnos, “Letter From Chicago: The Daley Show—Dynastic Rule in Obama’s Political Birthplace,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2010 (subscription required)
I was half tempted to use this quote yesterday, but I thought better of it when I asked myself: Which picture accompanying it would appeal more to readers: an aging, fleshy Midwestern pol or a screen goddess whose flaming hair was the best argument ever made for Technicolor?
Maureen O’Hara is beloved in a way that Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago (known dismissively in his younger days as “Richie,” though “Richard II” might be more appropriate now) can never hope to be. But the Windy City’s current hizzoner-for-life is, in his own way, as steeped in Irish tradition as the leading lady of that St. Patrick’s Day perennial, The Quiet Man.
Forget all the last-of-the-bosses, last-hurray hooey you read 33 Christmas seasons ago when Daley’s father—the big-city boss sputtering and gesticulating at the 1968 Democratic Convention held in his city—went to his eternal reward. It took a little while, and the son had to add to his coalition some groups (e.g., African-Americans, gays) that the old man would never dream of courting.
But now, the young (or, shall we say, not-quite-so-young anymore) Daley bestrides his city almost as powerfully as his father ever did.
Some practices from long ago remain enduring. “I figure, what’s wrong with a little nepotism?” a suburban bed-and-breakfast owner asked me when I was in the area five years ago. “As long as the city works, who cares?”
Those two sentences explain the enduring power of the Machine, despite decades of reformers’ efforts to change matters. Somewhere, the first Mayor Daley is smiling.
Adding skin and bones to this skeletal explanation for the Daley family’s continued success is Evan Osnos’ fine profile in The New Yorker from a few weeks ago. As with Ryan Lizza’s deeply perceptive 2008 background piece on the political roots of candidate Obama, it shows how politics works in Chicago. If you’re an idealist, you’ll approach it the same way a meat-eater 100 years ago would have regarded Upton Sinclair’s description of the legendary stockyards in The Jungle.
In certain ways, Osnos’ vivid piece goes rather easy on the mayor and his family (including airily dismissing the longtime claim that Richard I helped steal votes for JFK in the 1960 Presidential election). But there’s much of political and personal interest here, from the younger Daley’s early awkward entrance into the political arena to his wary relationship with the English language.
(Daley fils, a communications professor hired for his first mayoral campaign concluded, tended “to misstate the obvious, invent words never imagined by linguistic researchers, introduce irrelevant material, and demonstrate anger at seemingly uneventful moments.” The late essayist Michael Kelly was only slightly less devastating in an August 1990 GQ profile: “The more he feels attacked, the more disjointed his speech becomes, a collection of fits and starts punctuated by an idiosyncratic use of the word ‘fine.’” Hmmm—a bigtime pol with a father who also managed to mangle the English language…who does that sound like? At least on the linguistic front, it appears that Richard II and Bush II might have a common evolutionary forebear.)
Still, I wish Osnos might have explored a bit more Daley’s penchant for early arrivals at services for the departed, which will remind many of the hilarious section in Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah when Mayor Frank Skeffington appears at the wake of “Knocko” Minihan--and upstages the corpse.
(By the way, before we go any further: Can we all please tip our tweed caps to how the Irish have enriched popular lore with wonderful nicknames in the political realm?
O’Connor used so many in his novel—not just “Knocko,” but “Ditto” and “Footsie”—that he could have had a second career as a headline writer for the sports pages. Caught up in a minor-league scandal involving Chicago’s Richard II was John “Quarters” Boyle, a campaign operative convicted of pilfering $4 million in change (yes, including quarters) from toll booths. And nobody should forget Al Smith lieutenant John “Fishhooks” McCarthy, who has earned a large place in any short book on political prayer with this--perhaps apocryphal--supplication: “O Lord, give me health and strength. We’ll steal the rest.”)
Many readers, like Adam in O’Connor’s marvelous novel about the urban political machine (inspired by Boston’s mayor, James Michael Curley), might be a bit stunned by the seemingly irreverent attitude of the mayor and his cronies at what is supposed to be a solemn religious service. But Thomas J. O’Gorman’s “Sorry for Your Troubles,” a consideration of the wake in the Winter 1998 issue of The World of Hibernia, notes that for the Irish, it is “an intimate expression of national character, a curious blend of religious devotion, social support, and cultural cohesion--the linchpin in the pantheon of Irish loyalties.” (In certain Hibernian quarters, the obituaries are known variously as “the Irish funnies,” “the Irish racing form,” or “the Irish sports pages.” You know—the first thing you read when you get up in the morning.)
Those impulses—devotion, support, cohesion, loyalty—are at the heart of machine politics, too. They’ll excuse a lot—and in the context of the O’Connor novel, that very much includes the deceased as well as his gabby, sometimes oblivious mourners.
Knocko, you see, was not a man of sterling character in life: “A little runt of a man….Thin as a snake…and mean as a panther.” These ways did not win people to his side: indeed, “If friendship with Knocko were to be the basis for attendance at his wake, it could have been held in a phone booth."
But Knocko’s wife—a “grand woman” who had been good friends with Skeffington’s own wife—belonged to the mayor’s social circle. And so, the mayor came to the service of a man he had no use for—and, along the way, he and his men cemented allegiances and exchanged information essential to any cohesive unit such as theirs.
How did Richard I of Chicago employ the wake as a political intelligence activity--in much the same way as his son (something Osnos’ article clearly implies)? How does it differ from Skeffington’s method? I wish Osnos had delved into this at least a bit. The anecdote lingers, endlessly suggestive on the ways, far less obvious than money exchanges, by which a well-oiled political operation works…
I was half tempted to use this quote yesterday, but I thought better of it when I asked myself: Which picture accompanying it would appeal more to readers: an aging, fleshy Midwestern pol or a screen goddess whose flaming hair was the best argument ever made for Technicolor?
Maureen O’Hara is beloved in a way that Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago (known dismissively in his younger days as “Richie,” though “Richard II” might be more appropriate now) can never hope to be. But the Windy City’s current hizzoner-for-life is, in his own way, as steeped in Irish tradition as the leading lady of that St. Patrick’s Day perennial, The Quiet Man.
Forget all the last-of-the-bosses, last-hurray hooey you read 33 Christmas seasons ago when Daley’s father—the big-city boss sputtering and gesticulating at the 1968 Democratic Convention held in his city—went to his eternal reward. It took a little while, and the son had to add to his coalition some groups (e.g., African-Americans, gays) that the old man would never dream of courting.
But now, the young (or, shall we say, not-quite-so-young anymore) Daley bestrides his city almost as powerfully as his father ever did.
Some practices from long ago remain enduring. “I figure, what’s wrong with a little nepotism?” a suburban bed-and-breakfast owner asked me when I was in the area five years ago. “As long as the city works, who cares?”
Those two sentences explain the enduring power of the Machine, despite decades of reformers’ efforts to change matters. Somewhere, the first Mayor Daley is smiling.
Adding skin and bones to this skeletal explanation for the Daley family’s continued success is Evan Osnos’ fine profile in The New Yorker from a few weeks ago. As with Ryan Lizza’s deeply perceptive 2008 background piece on the political roots of candidate Obama, it shows how politics works in Chicago. If you’re an idealist, you’ll approach it the same way a meat-eater 100 years ago would have regarded Upton Sinclair’s description of the legendary stockyards in The Jungle.
In certain ways, Osnos’ vivid piece goes rather easy on the mayor and his family (including airily dismissing the longtime claim that Richard I helped steal votes for JFK in the 1960 Presidential election). But there’s much of political and personal interest here, from the younger Daley’s early awkward entrance into the political arena to his wary relationship with the English language.
(Daley fils, a communications professor hired for his first mayoral campaign concluded, tended “to misstate the obvious, invent words never imagined by linguistic researchers, introduce irrelevant material, and demonstrate anger at seemingly uneventful moments.” The late essayist Michael Kelly was only slightly less devastating in an August 1990 GQ profile: “The more he feels attacked, the more disjointed his speech becomes, a collection of fits and starts punctuated by an idiosyncratic use of the word ‘fine.’” Hmmm—a bigtime pol with a father who also managed to mangle the English language…who does that sound like? At least on the linguistic front, it appears that Richard II and Bush II might have a common evolutionary forebear.)
Still, I wish Osnos might have explored a bit more Daley’s penchant for early arrivals at services for the departed, which will remind many of the hilarious section in Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah when Mayor Frank Skeffington appears at the wake of “Knocko” Minihan--and upstages the corpse.
(By the way, before we go any further: Can we all please tip our tweed caps to how the Irish have enriched popular lore with wonderful nicknames in the political realm?
O’Connor used so many in his novel—not just “Knocko,” but “Ditto” and “Footsie”—that he could have had a second career as a headline writer for the sports pages. Caught up in a minor-league scandal involving Chicago’s Richard II was John “Quarters” Boyle, a campaign operative convicted of pilfering $4 million in change (yes, including quarters) from toll booths. And nobody should forget Al Smith lieutenant John “Fishhooks” McCarthy, who has earned a large place in any short book on political prayer with this--perhaps apocryphal--supplication: “O Lord, give me health and strength. We’ll steal the rest.”)
Many readers, like Adam in O’Connor’s marvelous novel about the urban political machine (inspired by Boston’s mayor, James Michael Curley), might be a bit stunned by the seemingly irreverent attitude of the mayor and his cronies at what is supposed to be a solemn religious service. But Thomas J. O’Gorman’s “Sorry for Your Troubles,” a consideration of the wake in the Winter 1998 issue of The World of Hibernia, notes that for the Irish, it is “an intimate expression of national character, a curious blend of religious devotion, social support, and cultural cohesion--the linchpin in the pantheon of Irish loyalties.” (In certain Hibernian quarters, the obituaries are known variously as “the Irish funnies,” “the Irish racing form,” or “the Irish sports pages.” You know—the first thing you read when you get up in the morning.)
Those impulses—devotion, support, cohesion, loyalty—are at the heart of machine politics, too. They’ll excuse a lot—and in the context of the O’Connor novel, that very much includes the deceased as well as his gabby, sometimes oblivious mourners.
Knocko, you see, was not a man of sterling character in life: “A little runt of a man….Thin as a snake…and mean as a panther.” These ways did not win people to his side: indeed, “If friendship with Knocko were to be the basis for attendance at his wake, it could have been held in a phone booth."
But Knocko’s wife—a “grand woman” who had been good friends with Skeffington’s own wife—belonged to the mayor’s social circle. And so, the mayor came to the service of a man he had no use for—and, along the way, he and his men cemented allegiances and exchanged information essential to any cohesive unit such as theirs.
How did Richard I of Chicago employ the wake as a political intelligence activity--in much the same way as his son (something Osnos’ article clearly implies)? How does it differ from Skeffington’s method? I wish Osnos had delved into this at least a bit. The anecdote lingers, endlessly suggestive on the ways, far less obvious than money exchanges, by which a well-oiled political operation works…
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