Signs of Life in 2021

[neil]

[neil]

some thoughts on profanity for no particular reason.

considering profanity generally, it is social signaling.
social signaling serves the purpose of tribal identification and distinction.
the layering, emphases, and accents used define the use as characteristic of a given tribe.
some tribes use no profanity. clearly this cannot be viewed as a lack; it is a feature.
artists will spice the dialog of their characters with profanity as it indicates the tribal milieu the author seeks to shape.

what is the social content of profanity?
what does it achieve in the broadest, ur-tribal milieu?
clearly it touches on sensibilities to the bizarre, the ugly; what is often technically termed the grotesque.

in the words of Joe Brody to Philip Marlowe, "You've got a funny sense of humor. Take it somewhere else."

[neil]

You should read more, bubi.
This I have tell you?
Oi!


THE BIG SLEEP

www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Big_Sleep.pdf


I AM JOE'S BRAIN

courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ap/chapter/the-cerebrum/


Eat your chicken soup
or you'll turn into a
schlemiel.
Or a goy.

[neil]

the thing about linking profanity to the grotesque:
the grotesque could easily be seen as atavistic ...
when tribes were not civilization.
or when civilization had not reached
beyond the self limiting
threshold of tribes.
seeing profanity as the vestige of a tail.
(In the sixth week of gestation, the human embryo
possesses a tail, complete with several vertebrae.)
hah
lizard brain
lizard breath
lizard speak
pardon me, your animal is showing.

[neil]

THE MARCH OF FOLLY
Barbara Tuchman
1989
excerpt (if you use Reader View in Mozilla Firefox, you can select audio reader & listen to this as a podcast ... i do)

Chapter Four

THE BRITISH LOSE AMERICA
1. Who’s In, Who’s Out: 1763–65
Britain’s self-interest as regards her empire on the American continent in the 18th century was clearly to maintain her sovereignty, and for every reason of trade, peace and profit to maintain it with the goodwill and by the voluntary desire of the colonies. Yet, through the fifteen years of deteriorating relations that led up to the shot heard round the world, successive British ministries, in the face of constant warnings by men and events, repeatedly took measures that injured the relationship. However justifiable in principle, these measures, insofar as they progressively destroyed goodwill and the voluntary connection, were demonstrably unwise in practice, besides being impossible to implement except by force. Since force could only mean enmity, the cost of the effort, even if successful, was clearly greater than the possible gain. In the end Britain made rebels where there had been none.

The major issue, as we all know, was the right of Parliament as the supreme legislative body of the state—but not of the empire, according to the colonists—to tax the colonies. The mother country claimed the right and the colonists denied it. Whether this “right” did or did not constitutionally exist defies, even now, a definitive answer, and for purposes of this inquiry is essentially irrelevant. What was at stake was a vast territorial empire planted by a vigorous productive people of British blood. As a contemporary Laocoon, the unavoidable Edmund Burke, perceived and said, “The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the Constitution.” In short, although possession was of greater value than principle, nevertheless the greater was thrown away for the less, the unworkable pursued at the sacrifice of the possible. This phenomenon is one of the commonest of governmental follies.

Trouble arose out of the British triumph in 1763 over the French and Indians in the Seven Years’ War. With the cession by France of Canada and its hinterlands, Britain became possessed of the great trans-Allegheny plains in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi populated by unruly Indian tribes and some 8000 or 9000 French-Canadian Catholics. Not entirely expelled from the continent, the French still held Louisiana and the mouth of the Mississippi, from where it was possible they might stage a comeback. Administration and defense of the new area would mean increased expense for the British over and above interest payments on the national debt, which the costs of the war had almost doubled from £72 to £130 million. At the same time, supply bills (the budget) had risen tenfold from £14.5 to £145 million.

The immediate necessity of victory was to establish an armed force, projected at 10,000 men, in North America for defense against Indian troubles and French resurgence and, at the same time, to raise revenue from the colonies to pay for it—for their own defense, as the British saw it. The mere whisper of a standing army, which carried in the 18th-century mind the worst connotations of tyranny, aroused the politically sensitive among the colonials to instant antagonized alert. They suspected the British of suspecting them, now that they were freed of threat from the French, of harboring intent to throw off the British yoke, and they thus believed the mother country was planning “to fix upon us a large number of Troops under pretense of our Defence but rather designed as a rod and check over us”; to keep them, as another colonial wrote, “in proper subjection.” While this thought was certainly not absent from some British minds, it does not seem to have been as primary or determining as the jumpy Americans believed. The attitude of the home government was not so much fear of colonial rebellion as a sense that colonial fractiousness and failure to give adequate support to defense must not be allowed to continue and that measures were needed to require the colonies to assume their share of the burden.

The prospect of taxation excited in the colonies even more pugnacity than the prospect of a standing army. Until now funds for local government in the several colonies had been voted and appropriated by their own assemblies. Except in the form of customs duties, which regulated trade for the benefit of Britain, America had not been subject to metropolitan taxation, and the fact that this had not been exercised gradually created the assumption that the “right” was lacking. Since they were not represented in Parliament, the colonials grounded their resistance on the principle of an Englishman’s right not to be taxed except by his own representatives, but the underpinning was the universal reaction to any new tax: we won’t pay. While acknowledging allegiance to the Crown, the colonies considered themselves independent of Parliament and their assemblies coequal with it. Rights and obligations of the relationship, however, were unformulated, and by dint of avoiding definition, the parties on either side of the ocean had managed to rumble along, though not always smoothly, without anyone being sure of the rules, but as soon as it was suggested, prospective taxation, like the standing army, was denounced in the colonies as a breach of their liberties, a creeping encroachment of tyranny. The ground for conflict was laid.

At this point, some notice of the limits, scope and hazards of this essay is required. What follows is not intended as yet another properly balanced account of developments precipitating the American Revolution, of which a superfluity already exists. My theme is narrower: a depiction of folly on the British side because it was on that side that policy contrary to self-interest was pursued. The Americans overreacted, blundered, quarreled, but were acting, if not always admirably, in their own interest and did not lose sight of it. If the folly we are concerned with is the contradiction of self-interest, we must in this case follow the British.

The first thing to be said about the British relation to America was that while the colonies were considered of vital importance to the prosperity and world status of Britain, very little thought or attention was paid to them. The American problem, even while it grew progressively more acute, was never, except during a brief turmoil over repeal of the Stamp Act, a primary concern of British politics until the actual outbreak of hostilities. The all-pervading, all-important problem that absorbed major attention was the game of faction, the obtaining of office, the manipulating of connections, the making and breaking of political alliances—in sum, the business, more urgent, more vital, more passionate than any other, of who’s in, who’s out. In the absence of fixed political parties, the forming of a government was more subject to personal maneuvering than at any time since. “The parliamentary cabals” which harassed the first twelve years of George III, wrote Lord Holland, nephew of Charles James Fox, “being mere struggles for favor and power, created more real blood and personal rancour between individuals than the great questions of policy and principle which arose on the American and French wars.”

The second interest was trade. Trade was felt to be the bloodstream of British prosperity. To an island nation it represented the wealth of the world, the factor that made the difference between rich and poor nations. The economic philosophy of the time (later to be termed mercantilism) held that the colonial role in trade was to serve as the source of raw materials and the market for British manufacture, and never never to usurp the manufacturing function. This symbiosis was regarded as unalterable. Transportation both ways in British bottoms and re-export of colonial produce by way of Britain to foreign markets were aspects of the system, which was regulated by some thirty Navigation Acts and by the Board of Trade, the most organized and professional arm of the British government. Enjoined under the Navigation Acts from exporting so much as a horseshoe nail as a manufacture and from trading with the enemy during Britain’s unending wars in the first half of the century, colonial merchants and ship captains resorted routinely to smuggling and privateering. Customs duties were evaded or ignored, producing barely £1800 a year for the British Treasury. A remedy for this situation offered hope of revenue to the depleted Treasury after the Peace of 1763.

Even before the end of the Seven Years’ War, an effort to augment revenue from the colonies evoked a cry of outrage that supplied the slogan of future resistance. To enforce the collection of customs duties, Britain issued Writs of Assistance, or search warrants, permitting customs officers to enter homes, shops and warehouses to search for smuggled goods. The merchants of Boston, who, like all of the eastern seaboard, lived by trade that evaded customs, challenged the Writs in court with James Otis as their advocate. His plea in a “torrent of impetuous eloquence” enunciated the basic colonial principle that “taxation without representation is tyranny.” The signal of trouble in America was plain from then on—to anyone who listened.

Otis did not invent it. Colonial governors—if not their principals at home, who did not suppose that provincials had or should have political opinions—knew well enough the strength of the American aversion to any taxes not imposed by themselves, and reported as far back as 1732 that “Parliament would find it no easy matter to put such an Act in Execution.” The indications were clear enough to Sir Robert Walpole, the presiding statesman of that time, who, when taxing America was suggested to him, replied, “No! it is too hazardous a measure for me; I shall leave it to my successors.” Proposed taxes grew more frequent during the Seven Years’ War in reaction to the stinginess of the colonies in providing men and funds to support the war, but none was adopted because the home government at that time could not risk alienating the testy provincials.

Six months after Otis’ plea, England took the first in what was to be her long train of counter-productive measures when the Attorney General in London ruled that the Writs of Assistance were legal to enforce the Navigation Acts. The resulting cost in alienation far outweighed the revenue collected from the ensuing duties and fines.

In the meantime the Peace Treaty of 1763 was divisive and fiercely opposed as too yielding by William Pitt, architect and national hero of Britain’s victories in the war. Under the celebrated thunders of his scorn, the House of Commons shook and ministers blanched, but nevertheless voted for the Peace Treaty by a majority of five to one, chiefly out of desire to return to peacetime expenditures and a reduced land tax. That proved illusory. Instead, Lord Bute, George Ill’s choice to replace Pitt, who had haughtily removed himself when overruled on the war issue, levied an excise tax in Britain on cider with calamitous effect. Like the Writs in America, the act empowered inspectors to visit premises, even live with owners of cider mills to keep count of the number of gallons produced. So loud was the English cry of tyranny at this invasion and so violent the protest that troops had to be called out in apple country, while at Westminster Pitt was inspired to his immortal statement of principle: “The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” This was the voice that but for tragic flaws in the man might have prevented all the wrong turnings.

No one having calculated the expected return from the cider tax, it was not clear how much of the deficit it could make up before resentment would bring down the Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was a prominent rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, shortly to succeed as 15th Baron Le Despencer. A founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, which was given to exercises of debauchery in a reconstructed monastery, he was not a competent financier: his knowledge of accounts, said a contemporary, “was confined to the reckoning of tavern bills,” and a sum of five figures was to him “an impenetrable secret.” He seems to have discerned that the cider tax would not bring him glory. “People will point at me,” he said, “and cry, ‘There goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared!’ ”

Consciousness of their inadequacy for the work of government commonly afflicted the noble lords who filled the offices, not least when rank was their only qualification. The extra importance of high rank was accepted by all classes in the 18th-century world from yeoman to King; the enlightenment of the age did not extend to egalitarianism. George III made it quite clear: “Lord North cannot seriously think that a private gentleman like Mr. Penton is to stand in the way of the eldest son of an Earl, undoubtedly if that idea holds good it is diametrically opposed to what I have known all my life.”

As a qualification for office, however, rank did not necessarily confer self-confidence. Regard for rank and riches propelled the Marquess of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton to the premiership and the Duke of Richmond to office as Secretary of State in the 1760s. Rockingham, even when First Minister (the title Premier, though describing the office in fact, was not used), had the greatest difficulty in speaking on his feet, and Grafton complained regularly of feeling unequal to his task. The Duke of Newcastle, who inherited estates in twelve counties and an income of £40,000 a year, who served several times as First Minister and controlled political patronage for forty years, was timorous, anxious, jealous and probably the only Duke on record who went about always expecting to be snubbed. Lord North, who headed the government throughout the crucial decade of the 1770s protesting most of the way, and George III himself bemoaned their responsibilities as being beyond their capacities.

The cider tax provided the final tumult in unseating the hated Earl of Bute, who was suspected of subverting the King by Tory advocacy of the royal “prerogative.” He resigned in 1763, to be succeeded by Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville. Although the cider tax had clearly failed and was repealed within two years, the Government in its search for revenue was to attempt the same method of taxation in America.

George Grenville, when he assumed the first office at 51, was a serious man, industrious among dilettantes, inflexibly honest among the venal, narrow-minded, self-righteous and pedantic. An economist by temperament, he made it a rule to live on his income and save his salary. Though ambitious, he lacked the graces that oil the way for ambition. Horace Walpole, the ultimate insider, considered him the “ablest man of business in the House of Commons.” Though not a peer or heir to a peerage, Grenville, through his background and family, was connected with the Whig ruling families who monopolized government office. His mother was a Temple, through whom his elder brother Richard inherited a title as Lord Temple; his maternal uncle Viscount Cobham was proprietor of Stowe, one of the most superb estates of the era. George followed the classic path through Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, studied law at the Inner Temple and was admitted to the Bar at 23, entered Parliament at 29 in 1741 for a family borough, which he represented until his death, pursued ministerial rank with the unusual intention of earning it by mastery of the business, served in most of the important offices under the aegis of Pitt, who had married his sister, while he himself had not neglected to marry a sister of the Earl of Egremont, a principal Secretary of State.

This was the pattern of the British minister. They came from some 200 families inclusive of 174 peerages in 1760, knew each other from school and university, were related through chains of cousins, in-laws, stepparents and siblings of second and third marriages, married each other’s sisters, daughters and widows and consistently exchanged mistresses (a Mrs. Armstead served in that role to Lord George Germain, to his nephew the Duke of Dorset, to Lord Derby, to the Prince of Wales and to Charles James Fox, whom she eventually married), appointed each other to office and secured for each other places and pensions. Of some 27 persons who filled high office in the period 1760–80, twenty had attended either Eton or Westminster, went on either to Christ Church or Trinity College at Oxford or to Trinity or Kings at Cambridge, followed in most cases by the Grand Tour in Europe. Two of the 27 were dukes, two marquises, ten earls, one a Scottish and one an Irish peer; six were younger sons of peers and only five were commoners, among them Pitt, the outstanding statesman of the time, and three who through the avenue of the law became Lords Chancellor. As the only professional education open to peers’ younger sons and gentlemen-commoners (the army and clergy could be entered without training) law was the path for the ambitious.

Peers and other landowners of comfortable estate enjoyed annual incomes of £15,000 or more from the rent-rolls, mines and resources of their properties. They managed great households, farms, stables, kennels, parks and gardens, entertained endless guests, employed armies of servants, grooms, gamekeepers, gardeners, field laborers, artisans. The Marquess of Rockingham, the wealthiest to hold high office in this period except for the dukes, received an income of about £20,000 a year from properties in Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Ireland, lived in one of the largest homes of England, married an heiress, disposed of three parliamentary boroughs, 23 clerical livings and five chaplaincies, served locally as Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire and of the city of York.

Why did possessors of wealth, privilege and great estate enter government? Partly because they felt government was their province and responsibility. Noblesse oblige had roots in the feudal obligation that originally obliged nobles to serve in the King’s council, and they had long governed as landlords and Justices of the Peace in their home counties. Governing went with territorial title; it was the employment of gentlemen, the duty of landed nobility. In the election of 1761, 23 eldest sons of peers entered the House of Commons at their first opportunity after reaching 21, all but two of them under the age of 26.

For another thing, high office offered the means of support for dependent relatives. Because estates were entailed by primogeniture on the eldest son, private wealth was rarely enough to support younger sons, nephews, poor cousins and deserving retainers. “Place” was necessary because these dependents had no other means of support. Except for law, there were no professions for which the gentry were trained. Through patronage and connections at court, a minister could take care of his own. Salaried sinecures of rather misty duties were limitlessly available. Sir Robert Walpole, dominant minister of the previous reign, distributed among his three sons, including Horace, the post of Auditor of the Exchange, Usher of the Exchange, and Clerk of the Pells, while two of the sons shared a Collectorship of Customs. George Selwyn, a fashionable libertine and connoisseur of public hangings, was appointed and served as Registrar to the Court of Chancery in Barbados without his ever gracing the island by his presence. One reason for the meager returns from American customs was that appointees to the Collectorships often remained comfortably at home in England, leaving their duties to poorly paid and easily bribed substitutes.

More than patronage, the lure of power and status has bewitched men of all times and conditions, in comfortable circumstances no less than in needy. The Earl of Shelburne, one of the more intelligent ministers of the time, stated it plainly: “The only pleasure I propose by employment is not the profit, but to act a part suitable to my rank and capacity, such as it is.” The aristocracy of 18th-century England succumbed to the lure like other men; even the Duke of Newcastle’s fear of office was surmounted, says Horace Walpole, by “his passion for the front rank of power.” They entered young, were rarely prepared or trained for the tasks, could become restless or bored under difficulties and usually retreated for half the year to the charms of their country homes, their racing stables, hunting fields and adventures in landscaping. Individual temperaments and capabilities differed as much as in any group: some were conscientious, some casual about their duties, some liberal in thought, some reactionary, some spoiled by gambling and drink, some more thoughtful, able, better educated than others, but on the whole, their attitude toward government was less than professional. Indeed the profession of government did not exist; the idea would have shocked those who practiced it. Social pleasures tended to come first; office was attended to in the time remaining. Cabinet meetings, unscheduled and haphazard affairs, were generally held at dinner in the First Minister’s London residence. Sense of commitment was not always strong. Lord Shelburne, in whom it was strong, once commiserated with a colleague on how provoking it was to have Lord Camden and the Duke of Grafton “come down [to London] with their lounging opinions to outvote you in the Cabinet.”

When gambling was the craze of the fashionable world, when ladies filled their homes with card parties which they advertised in the papers and men sat up until dawn at Brooks’ betting huge sums on the turn of a card or in meaningless wagers about tomorrow’s rain or next week’s opera singer, when fortunes were easily lost and debt was a normal condition, how did such men, as ministers, adapt themselves to the unforgiving figures of supply bills and tax rates and national debt?

Noble circumstances did not nurture realism in government. At home, a word or a nod to servitors accomplished any desired end. At the fiat of Capability Brown or another landscape designer, rolling contours were fashioned from level land; lakes, vistas, groves of trees created; sweeps of curving lawn laid from lake to house. When the village of Stowe interfered with the designer’s planned view, all the inhabitants were moved to new houses two miles away and the old village razed, plowed over and planted with trees. Lord George Germain, the minister responsible for conducting the military operations of the American Revolution, was born a Sackville and brought up at Knole, a family domain so extensive, with its seven courtyards and multiple roofs of different heights, that it looked from a distance like a town. In his boyhood his father planted in one grand sweep the seedlings of 200 pear trees, 300 crabapple, 200 cherry, 500 holly, 700 hazel, another 1000 holly to screen the kitchen garden and 2000 beeches for the park.

Tastes were not in all cases confined to the outdoors and the clubs. Education at school and university was supposed to have provided a respectable acquaintance with the Latin classics and some Greek, and the continental Grand Tour some acquaintance with the arts, embellished by the purchase of paintings and casts of classical sculpture to bring home. The Tour usually included Rome, which seems not to have greatly changed since the times of the Renaissance popes. Its government was “the worst possible,” wrote an English visitor. “Of the population a quarter are priests, a quarter are statues, a quarter are people who do nothing.”

Counsel from outside their narrow class was available to British rulers, if they wished, through the employment of outstanding intellectuals in advisory capacities. Rockingham, when thrust into the chief office following Grenville, and perhaps conscious of his shortcomings, had the wit to select the brilliant young Irish lawyer Edmund Burke as his private secretary. Lord Shelburne employed the scientist Joseph Priestley as his librarian and literary companion with a house for himself and an annuity for life. General Henry Seymour Conway, Secretary of State and a future Commander-in-Chief, appointed the political philosopher David Hume as his departmental under-secretary and, on Hume’s plea, secured a pension of £100 a year for Jean Jacques Rousseau, then in England. Conway himself, as an occasional author, wrote a comedy adapted from the French and produced at Drury Lane. The Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State in the ministry of his stepbrother Lord North, was principal benefactor of Eleazar Wheelock’s school for Indians, which became Dartmouth College. He sat for eighteen portraits, including one by Romney, and was a devoted patron of the poet William Cowper, whom he provided with a sinecure and a quiet home to shelter him in his bouts of insanity.

For all their cultivated tastes, the upper crust of the governing class produced during this period few of outstanding mind. Dr. Johnson declared he knew “but two men who had risen considerably above the common standard”: William Pitt and Edmund Burke, neither wholly of the upper crust. Pitt suggested a factor, doubtless subjective, in his remark that he hardly knew a boy “who was not cowed for life at Eton.” He kept his own children at home to be educated privately. The general state of mind was better understood by William Murray, the Scottish lawyer and, as Earl of Mansfield, future Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor. He had tried without much success to direct a course of study in history, oratory and the classics for his nephew, the future Marquis of Rockingham, and wrote to him when he turned 21, “You could not entertain me with a more uncommon sight than a man of your age, surrounded by all the baits and instruments of folly, daring to be wise; in a season of dissatisfaction, daring to think.” That was the condition of the period 1760–80; daring to be wise, daring to think was not its forte. But then, how often has it ever been of any period?

The young monarch presiding over this establishment was not widely admired in these years. On George Ill’s accession to the throne in 1760 at the age of 21, Horace Walpole found him tall, florid, dignified and “amiable,” but the amiability was painfully assumed. Fatherless since the age of twelve, George had been brought up in an atmosphere of the harshest rancor between his grandfather George II and his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales. While common among royalty, the paternal-filial hatred in this case was extreme, leaving young George inimical to all who had served his grandfather and persuaded that the world whose rule he inherited was deeply wicked and its moral improvement his duty. In the narrow family circle at Leicester House, he was poorly educated with no contacts with the outside world and grew up obstinate, limited, troubled and unsure of himself. He liked to retire to his study, reported his tutor, Lord Waldegrave, “to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humor.” He would seldom do wrong, “except when he mistakes wrong for right” and, when this happens, “it will be difficult to undeceive him because he is uncommonly indolent and has strong prejudices.”

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so. In a boyhood essay on King Alfred, George wrote that when Alfred came to the throne, “there was scarce a man in office that was not totally unfit for it and generally extremely corrupt in the execution of it.” Removing the incorrigibles, “reclaiming” the others, Alfred had “raised the glory and happiness of his country” with the help of the Almighty Power that “wrecks the cunning of proud, ambitious and deceitful men.” Such was George’s view of his ministers and such his own program. He must clean out the system, restore righteous rule—his own—and carry out his mother’s injunction, “George, be a King.” His efforts from the first day of his reign to unseat the Whig grandees who complacently ruled through a pervasive distribution of patronage, by acquiring control of the patronage in his own hands, not unnaturally convinced many of his intention to restore the royal absolutism defeated at such cost in the previous century.

In need of a father substitute, George had fixed on the Earl of Bute with a neurotic adoration that was bound to—and did—end in disillusion. Thereafter, until he found the comfortable Lord North, he either disliked or despised every First Minister, or swung over into dependence, and since he had power to appoint and dismiss within certain limits, his swings kept government unstable. Because Pitt had left the Prince of Wales’ circle to serve under George II, George called him “the blackest of hearts” and a “true snake in the grass,” and vowed to make other ministers “smart for their ingratitude.” Often confessing to Bute the torture of his self-distrust and irresolution, he was convinced at the same time of his own righteousness, which had as its basic assumption that because he wished nothing but good, everyone who did not agree with him was a scoundrel. This was not a sovereign likely to understand or try to understand insubordinate colonials.

A weakness of England’s government was lack of cohesion or of a concept of collective responsibility. Ministers were appointed by the Crown as individuals and pursued their own ideas of policy often without consulting their colleagues. Because government derived from the Crown, aspirants to office had to find favor and work in partnership with the King, which proved a more ticklish job under George III than it had been under the thick-witted, foreign-born first Hanoverians. The sovereign was, within limits, chief of the executive with the right to choose his own ministers although not on the basis of royal favor alone. The First Minister and his associates had to have the support of the electorate in the sense that, even without a political party, they had to muster a majority of Parliament and rely on it to enact and approve their policies. Even when this was achieved, George Ill’s erratic and emotional exercise of his right of choice made for extreme uncertainty of governments in his first decade, the brewing years of the American conflict, besides fostering personal rancor in the struggle of factions for favor and power.

The Cabinet was a fluid body constantly being reshuffled and not charged with a specific policy. Its chief was called simply First Minister; resistance to the title of Premier, which Grenville called “odious,” was a legacy from the twenty-year tenure of Sir Robert Walpole and the fear of renewed aggregation of power in one man. The function, insofar as it had to be exercised, inhered in the First Lord of the Treasury. The working Cabinet numbered five or six including, besides the First Lord, two Secretaries of State, for home and foreign affairs—oddly designated the Northern and Southern departments—the Lord Chancellor for law and the Lord President of the Council, meaning the Privy Council, a large floating group of ministers, former ministers and important officials of the realm. The First Lord of the Admiralty, representing the major service, was sometimes though not always a member of the inner Cabinet. The Army had a Secretary at War without a seat in the Cabinet and a Paymaster-General, who, through control of pay and supplies, held the most lucrative post in the government, but it had no representative in policy councils. Until 1768, no department was specifically charged with administration of the colonies or execution of measures pertaining to them. Pragmatically, colonial affairs became the business of the Board of Trade and Plantations; equally pragmatically, the Navy, which maintained contact across the ocean, served as policy’s instrument.

Junior Lords, Under-Secretaries, Commissioners of boards and customs, performed the daily business of government, suggested and drafted the bills for Parliament. These members of the civil service, as far down as clerks, were appointed through patronage and “connexions,” as were the colonial governors and their staffs and the Admiralty officials in the colonies. “Connexion” was the cement of the governing class and the operative word of the time, often to the detriment of the function. This did not go unrecognized. Asked by the Duke of Newcastle to appoint to his staff an unqualified M.P. for the sake of assuring his vote, Admiral George Anson, who became First Lord after his celebrated voyage around the world, bluntly stated the disservice to the Navy: “I must now beg your Grace will seriously consider what must be the condition of your Fleet if these burrough recommendations which must be frequent are to be complyed with”; the custom “has done more mischief to the publick than the loss of a vote in the House of Commons.”

Beyond ministers, beyond the Crown, Parliament held supremacy, bitterly won in the last century at the cost of revolution, civil war, regicide, restoration and a second royal ouster. In the calm that at last settled under the rule of the imported Hanoverians, the House of Commons was no longer the fiery tribunal of a great constitutional struggle. It had settled into a more or less satisfied, more or less static body of members who owed their seats to “connexions” and family-controlled “rotten” boroughs and bought elections, and gave their votes in return for government patronage in the form of positions, favors and direct money payments. In 1770, it has been calculated, 190 members of the House of Commons held remunerative positions in the gift of the Government. Though regularly denounced as corruption, the system was so ubiquitous and routine that it carried no aura of disgrace.

Members were associated in no organized political parties, and they were attached to no identifiable political principles. Their identity came from social or economic or even geographical groups: the country gentlemen, the business and mercantile classes of the cities, the 45 members from Scotland, a parcel of West Indian planters who lived on their island revenues in English homes—a total of 558 in the Commons. In theory, members were of two kinds: knights of the shire or county, of whom two were elected at large for each county, and burgesses representing the boroughs, that is, any town empowered by its charter to be represented in Parliament. Since the knights of the shire were qualified by holding land worth £600 a year, they belonged to the substantial gentry or were sons of peers. Combining with them in interest were the members from the smaller boroughs, who had so few voters that they could be bought or were so tiny that the local landlord held them in his pocket. They generally chose members belonging to the gentry who could further their interests at Westminster. Hence the landed gentry or country party were by far the largest group in the House of Commons and claimed to represent popular opinion, although in fact they were elected by only some 160,000 voters.

The larger urban boroughs had virtually democratic suffrage and held contested, often rowdy, elections. Their members were lawyers, merchants, contractors, shipowners, Army and Navy officers, government officials and nabobs of the India trade. Though influential in themselves, they represented an even smaller electorate, hardly more than 85,000, because the country party managed to keep the urban population largely disenfranchised.

About half the seats, it was estimated, could be bought and sold through patronage vividly portrayed in Lord North’s instructions to the Treasury Secretary at the time of the general election of 1774. He was to inform Lord Falmouth, who controlled six seats in Cornwall, that North agreed to terms of £2500 for each of three seats to fill by his own nomination; further that “Mr. Legge can only afford £400. If he comes in for Lostwithiel he will cost the public some 2000 guineas. Gascoign should have the refusal of Tregony if he will pay £1000”; further, “Let Cooper know whether you promised £2500 or £3000 for each of Lord Edgcumbe’s [five] seats. I was going to pay him £12,500 but he demanded £15,000.”

Political patrons controlled sometimes as many as seven or eight seats, often in family groups depending from a peer in the Lords, whose members acted together under direction from the patron, although when an issue took fire, dividing opinion, individuals sometimes voted their own convictions. The knights of the counties whose electorates were too large to be dominated by any patron, and thirty or forty independent boroughs not controlled by estates, considered themselves the country party. Here the Tory idea still existed, a residue of the Crown party of the 17th century, exiled from the central government, grown crusty. Long accustomed to local government, the counties resented interference from London and despised court and capital on principle, although this was not incompatible with supporting Whig ministeries. Attached to no faction, following no leaders, soliciting no titles or “place,” serving their constituency, the county members voted according to that interest and their own beliefs. A Yorkshire M.P. wrote in a letter that he had “sat twelve hours in the House of Commons without moving, with which I was well satisfied, as it gave me some power, from the various arguments on both sides, of determining clearly by my vote my opinion.” Men thinking for themselves will defeat the slush funds—if there are enough of them.

George Grenville’s primary concern when he took office was Britain’s financial solvency. With the Peace of Paris in hand, he was able to reduce the Army from 120,000 to 30,000 men; his economies at the expense of the Navy, involving a drastic cutting back of dockyard facilities and maintenance, was to have crippling consequences when the test of action came. At the same time, he prepared legislation for taxing American trade, in no ignorance of the sentiments likely to be aroused. Agents or lobbyists retained by the colonies to represent their interests in London, given their lack of representation in Parliament, were often M.P.s themselves or other persons with access to government. Richard Jackson, a prominent M.P., merchant and barrister, and agent at different times of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, was Grenville’s private secretary. “I have access to almost every place any friends of the Colonys wd wish to have access to,” he wrote to Franklin, “but I am not sensible of my making any impression proportional to my Endeavors.” He and his colleagues did what they could, against a cloud of indifference, to make colonial opinion known in the capital.

In addition to Jackson as a channel, Grenville was in correspondence with the colonial governors and the Surveyor General of Customs in the northern colonies, whose advice he asked before drafting a bill for enforcement of the customs. It was no secret that Americans would regard enforced collection, so long allowed to lapse, as a form of taxation they were prepared to resist. Grenville’s preliminary order of November 1763 instructing customs officers to collect existing duties to the full was reported by Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts to have caused “greater alarm” in America than had the French capture of Fort William Henry six years earlier. For the record, the Board of Trade was asked to advise by what method “least Burthensome and most Palatable to the Colonies” they would contribute to the costs of “Civil and Military Establishments.” Since there was no way that burden could be made palatable, and Grenville had already made up his mind, a reply was perhaps not seriously expected.

If prospects of trouble did not greatly disturb the ministry, it was because, as Grenville said reasonably enough, “All men wish not to be taxed,” and because he was determined in any event that America could and should contribute to the costs of its own government and defense. His two Secretaries of State, the Earl of Halifax and the Earl of Egremont, were not men to dissuade him. Lord Halifax had inherited his peerage at 23 and enriched it by the acquisition of a wife who brought him, from a father in textiles, a huge fortune of £ 110,000. With these qualifications, he served as Groom of the Bedchamber and Master of Buckhounds and in other ornamental court posts until the political roundabout dropped him in the Presidency of the Board of Trade, where his tenure at the time of the founding of Nova Scotia caused its capital to be named for him. Considered weak but amiable, he was a hard drinker and a victim of early senility, of which he was to die at 55 while serving in the first Cabinet of his nephew Lord North.

The heavy drinking of the age was often a diminisher of life, or ability. Even the universally admired Marquess of Granby, Commander-in-Chief of armed forces in England in 1766–70, a noble soldier of noble character, did not escape: according to Horace Walpole, “his constant excesses in wine hurried him out of the world at 49.” In the general election of 1774, Charles James Fox, no mean consumer himself, complained of the entertaining he had to do while canvassing. Eight guests came on one afternoon, stayed from three to ten, and drank “ten bottles of wine and sixteen bowls of punch, each of which would hold four bottles”—the equivalent of nine bottles per man.

Grenville’s other Secretary of State, the Earl of Egremont, his brother-in-law, was incompetent and arrogant in equal parts, taking after a ducal grandfather known as “the proud Duke of Somerset.” He was a composite, reports the always uncharitable Horace, “of pride, ill-nature and strict good breeding … [with] neither the knowledge of business nor the smallest share of parliamentary abilities,” and reputedly untrustworthy besides. He looked down on Americans but disappeared from their affairs when a stroke of apoplexy brought on by overeating (according to Walpole) carried him off while the Revenue Bill was still being drafted.

His successor, the Earl of Sandwich, a former and later First Lord of the Admiralty, was a change only in temperament. Hearty, good-humored and corrupt, he used his control of appointments and provisions for the Navy for private profit. Although not a dilettante but a hardworking enthusiast of the fleet, his inveterate jobbery left dockyards a scandal, provisioners defrauded and ships unseaworthy. The condition of the Navy, when revealed by the war with America, was to earn him a vote of censure by both Houses. Socially he was a crony of Dashwood’s Hellfire circle and so addicted to gambling that, sparing no time for meals, he would slap a slice of meat between two slices of bread to eat while gaming, thus bequeathing his name to the indispensable edible artifact of the Western world.

While under the aegis of these ministers the Revenue Bill was being prepared, a measure fertile in discord was taken without act of Parliament. The Boundaries Proclamation of 1763 prohibited white settlement west of the Alleghenies, reserving these lands to the Indians. Prompted by the ferocious Indian uprising called Pontiac’s Rebellion, which swept up the tribes from the Great Lakes to Pennsylvania and threatened at one stage to drive the British from the area, the Proclamation was intended to appease the Indians by keeping the colonists from invading their hunting grounds and provoking them to renewed war. Another Indian rising could be a stalking horse for the French besides requiring new expenditure to combat it that Britain could ill afford. Behind the stated motive was a desire to restrict the colonists to the Atlantic seaboard, where they would continue to import British goods, and to prevent debtors and adventurers from crossing the mountains and planting a settlement free of British sovereignty in the heart of America. Here, out of contact with the seaports, they would manufacture their own necessities, in the dire prediction of the Board of Trade, “to the infinite prejudice of Britain.”

The Proclamation was hardly welcome to colonists who were already forming stock companies to promote migration for profit or, like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, obtaining grants of land across the mountains for speculation. To the restless homesteader it was infuriating interference. A century and a half of winning the wilderness had not made Americans amenable to the idea that a faraway government of lords in silk knee-breeches had the right to prevent their taking possession of land they could conquer with axe and rifle. They saw in the Proclamation not protection of the Indians—whom their own volunteer forces had done more than the redcoats to combat in Pontiac’s Rebellion—but corrupt plans of Whitehall to grant great tracts of Crown lands to court favorites.

Getting acquainted is supposed to generate mutual understanding, and joining in the same fight to weld fellow-feeling, yet the reverse was the effect of contact between regulars and provincial forces in the Seven Years’ War. At the end of operations they liked, respected and understood each other less than before. Colonials naturally resented the British Army’s snobbery, the officers who disdained to accord equal rank to colonial officers, the rituals of spit and polish (British troops used 6500 tons of flour a year for whitening wigs and breeches), the extension of supreme command over provincial forces and superior airs in general. That could be expected.

On the other hand, British contempt for the colonial soldier, who was eventually (with French help) to take the British sword in surrender, was the oddest, deepest, most disserviceable misjudgment of the years leading to the conflict. How could General Wolfe, the hero who at 32 captured Quebec and died on the battlefield, call the rangers who fought with him “the worst soldiers in the universe”? He added in another letter, “The Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs you can conceive … rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.” Dirty the woodsmen-rangers certainly were in comparison with the white-wigged redcoats. Brilliant exterior had become so much the criterion of a European army that it determined judgment. Sir Jeffery Amherst had a “very poor opinion” of the rangers and Wolfe’s successor, General James Murray, declared the Americans “very unfit for and very impatient of war.” Others who saw service in the woods and camps of America alongside the rangers called them rabble, unsoldierly, cowardly. Such judgments swelled at home into fatuous boasts like that of General Thomas Clarke, aide-decamp to the King, who said in the presence of Benjamin Franklin that “with a thousand Grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the males partly by force and partly by a little coaxing.”

A possible cause for the fatal misjudgment has been found in the different nature of military service experienced on the one hand by British professionals and on the other by provincials, who were recruited by their local assemblies under contract for a specific mission, a limited time and prescribed conditions of pay and supply. When these failed, as in all wars they must, colonial troops balked, refused duty, and if the grievances were not met, simply marched off for home, not in solitary hidden desertions but openly in a body as a natural response to breach of contract. This was behavior quite incomprehensible to Hussars, Light Dragoons and Grenadier Guards steeped in regimental pride and tradition. British commanders tried to apply the Rules and Articles of War; the colonials, doggedly civilian soldiers and determined that nothing should transform them into regulars, stubbornly rejected them, to the point of group desertion if necessary. Hence their reputation as rabble.

Ill feeling found another source in the effort of the Anglican Church to establish an episcopate in New England. With religion’s peculiar capacity to stimulate enmity, the episcopal prospect aroused the fiercest suspicions in Americans. A bishop to them was a bridgehead of tyranny, an instrument for suppressing freedom of conscience (which no one practiced less than New Englanders), a hidden door to popery and a sure source of new taxes to support the hierarchy. In fact the British government, as distinct from the Church, had no intention whatever of sponsoring a separate American episcopate. Nevertheless, “No bishop!” continued to be a cry as potent as “No tax!” or later, “No tea!” Even masts for the British Navy were a source of friction through the White Pine Acts, which prohibited the felling of tall trees to preserve them for masting.

It is possible these multifarious quarrels might have been composed if an American Department to give steady attention and coherent management to the colonies had been created at the close of the Seven Years’ War when the need for a uniform reorganized administration was recognized. The moment was exigent; a large new territory had to be incorporated; the diverse charters of the colonies had already proved troublesome. But the need was not met. Lord Bute’s iniquities and the maneuvering of colleagues and rivals in his wake absorbed political activity. The fractious affairs of empire were left to the Board of Trade, which had three successive presidents in the year 1763 alone.

The Revenue Bill presented to Parliament in February 1764 contained provisions bound for trouble. It reduced the long-ignored duty on molasses, the fulcrum of New England commerce, but required that collection of a new duty of 3d. a gallon be enforced; it removed trials of suspected violators from common-law courts, with juries of fellow-citizens not inclined to convict, to a special non-jury Admiralty Court in Halifax, with judges not readily bribed by colonial merchants and where the accused would have to travel to defend his case. The Bill did not disguise but proclaimed that its purpose was “to raise a revenue in America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting and securing the same.” This was its red flag. Yet it was plain that while the Crown’s right to regulate trade was more or less fitfully acknowledged by the Americans, they were bent on denying the right of taxation for revenue except by themselves. More compelling was their fear of a ruined trade, profitable while customs duties had long been hardly more than a fiction, but with no margin of profit left under an enforced duty of 3d. a gallon.

The colonies’ agents in England had already made the point that a dwindling trade would be of no benefit to Britain and insisted that molasses could not tolerate a duty of more than a penny a gallon although merchants might “silently acquiesce” to 2d.* Locally, the assemblies of Massachusetts and New York were already growling about violation of their “natural rights” in the principle of taxation and urging Connecticut and Rhode Island to join in protesting a “Mortal Wound to the Peace of these Colonies.” They resisted the principle as strongly as the actual threat to the pocket because they believed that acceptance of a precedent in parliamentary taxation would open the way to future taxes and other impositions. Colonial opinion, however, was at this stage meagerly reported, or regarded, in London.

The Board of Trade fixed the duty at 3d. and the Revenue Bill (generally known afterward as the Sugar Act) was enacted by Parliament in April 1764 with only one negative vote, by a member named John Huske, who had been born in Boston.

The Act carried a sting in its tail—as yet only in embryo—in the announcement of a projected Stamp Tax to follow. This was no horrendous device to torture Americans but one of numerous ad hoc levies used in England, in this case, a tax on letters, wills, contracts, bills of sale and other mailed or legal documents. Grenville inserted the advance notice because he was indeed aware of a lurking question about Parliament’s right to tax unrepresented subjects, which he himself considered beyond question, and he hoped “in God’s name” that it would not be made an issue in Parliament. A premise of England’s government in an age tired of struggle was to maintain a wide base of acceptable policy that would awake no sleeping dogs, the eternal wish for “consensus.” Grenville was less concerned about colonial reaction than about disturbance of a nicely reliable Parliament. He embodied notice of the Stamp Tax in the Revenue Bill, perhaps hoping that enactment would establish without fuss the principle of Parliament’s right to impose a revenue tax, or he may have intended a hint to the colonies to tax themselves, though his subsequent actions do not bear this out. A more Machiavellian motive has been advanced in the suggestion that he knew the notice would incite such bellows of colonial protest as would unite Parliament in angry assertion of its sovereignty.

The cry was indeed loud and unrestrained, but by the time it was heard, England’s attention was absorbed in an issue that awoke every sleeping dog in the country—the Wilkes case. Not that John Wilkes diverted attention from America, because there was little as yet to divert. The measures of 1763–64 were not unreasonable, nor were they folly per se, except in failing to take into account the quality, the temperament and the vital local concerns of the people to whom they applied. But heeding local concerns is not in the nature of an imperial government. The colonists were not a primitive “fluttered folk and wild” but offspring of exceptionally strong-minded and enterprising dissidents of the British breed. Essentially, the problem was attitude. The British behaved—and what is more, thought—in imperial terms as governors to the governed. The colonials considered themselves equals, resented interference and sniffed tyranny in every breeze coming over the Atlantic.

Liberty was the most intense political sentiment of the time. Government was disliked; although the streets of London were beset by assault and robbery, resistance to a police force was strong, and when Lord Shelburne was to suggest, after the days of violence, flames and deaths during the Gordon riots of 1780, that the time had come for an organized police, he was regarded as advocating a thing only suitable to French absolutism. The idea of a census was considered an intolerable intrusion. Providing information to “place-men and taxmasters,” it was denounced by a Member of Parliament in 1753 as “totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty.” If any officer should demand information about his household and family he would refuse it and if the officer persisted he would have him thrown into the horsepond. It was sentiments such as these that animated the fervor with regard to taxation and Wilkes.

The Wilkes case, which blew up into a constitutional issue of alarming virulence, was important for America because it was to create allies in the cause of “liberty.” Because parliamentary rights, represented by Wilkes, and American rights were both seen as issues of liberty, those who became opponents of the government in the Wilkes affair became ipso facto friends of the American cause. John Wilkes himself was an M.P. and a coarse but witty man-about-town of the type that gains notoriety by being abusive. In 1763 in his journal, The North Briton, he published a ferocious attack on the terms of the settlement with France of the Seven Years’ War laced with insults to the King. He was arrested under a general warrant on a charge of seditious libel and imprisoned in the Tower. Chief Justice Pratt (the future Lord Camden) ordered his release on grounds of his parliamentary privilege. Expelled from the House of Commons by the government majority he fled to France, while in England he was tried in absentia for libel of the King and, irrelevantly, for obscenity for privately publishing a pornographic Essay on Women, which his erstwhile friend Lord Sandwich insisted on reading aloud word for word in the House of Lords.

These attentions secured Wilkes’ conviction and sentence of outlawry and succeeded in raising a crisis when parliamentary opposition, now free of defending the man, rallied around a resolution declaring his arrest by general warrant illegal. When it was barely defeated by a government majority that sank to fourteen, the vote revealed the weakness of patronage when the House scented abuse of its rights. The King angrily ordered Grenville to dismiss all the renegade voters who held positions in the royal household or in the ministry, thus creating a nucleus of opposition that was to grow. George III was not the most astute politician.

[neil]

2. “Asserting a Right You Know You Cannot Exert”: 1765
The Stamp Tax, introduced by Grenville in 1765, will be remembered “as long as the globe lasts.” So proclaimed Macaulay in one of his bugle calls to historical grandeur. It was the act, he wrote, destined to “produce a great revolution, the effects of which will long be felt by the whole human race,” and he blamed Grenville for not foreseeing the consequences. That is hindsight; even the colonies’ agents did not foresee them. But enough information was available to the English to forecast determined resistance by the Americans and prospects of serious trouble.

Reports were now being received and published in the London Chronicle and other journals of colonial resentment of the Sugar Act and indignation at the proposed Stamp Tax. Emphatic protests were delivered by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina, each affirming the “right” to tax itself and denying Parliament’s right. The fallacy inherent in the British Government’s position was laid bare by the ill-fated Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, who was to suffer so much worse from his colony than he deserved. He pointed out in a treatise, of which he sent copies to the government in London, that revenue was a fallacious goal because England’s natural profit from colonial trade, which would be endangered by ill-will, was greater than any prospective yield from the tax. A tragic figure, vilified by one side and ignored by the other, Hutchinson thus early identified England’s folly. It was evident also to others. Benjamin Franklin noted in a memorandum to himself that while Americans at present loved British modes, customs and manufactures, “A disgust of these will ensue. Trade will suffer more than the tax profits.” He added a thought that should have been a creed for the British government: “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” This in essence was to be the Burke thesis: that principle does not have to be demonstrated when the demonstration is inexpedient.

By the time the protests and petitions were received in London—the eastbound crossing took anywhere from four to six weeks, and it took longer the other way—Grenville was preparing the Stamp Act. Anxious to prevent it, four of the agents, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Jackson, Charles Garth, an M.P. agent for Maryland and South Carolina, and Jared Ingersoll, newly arrived from Connecticut, waited on him in a body. Discussion focused on the alternative of the colonies taxing themselves. Asked by Grenville if they could state how much each was prepared to raise, the agents, uninstructed on that point, could give no answer, and Grenville did not really want one. What he wanted was to establish Parliament’s right to tax for now and thereafter. He avoided pressing the question and remained deliberately vague in responding to the agents’ queries about the amounts needed.

Here at the very start was the feasible alternative. If revenue from the colonies to pay the cost of their defense was what Britain wanted—which was reasonable enough—she could and should have put it to the colonies to raise it themselves. They were prepared to respond. The Massachusetts Assembly petitioned Governor Francis Bernard in 1764 for a special session to enable the colony to tax itself rather than be taxed by Parliament, but the Governor, though he favored that procedure, refused because he thought it would be useless without specific requisitions from Grenville. Pennsylvania instructed its agent in London to signify its willingness to raise revenue if requested in a regular manner for a specific sum. “Most of the colonies,” according to the agent Charles Garth, “had signified their inclinations to assist their Mother Country upon proper requisitions from hence.”

The firmness of colonial objection was made equally explicit. When Thomas Whately, the Treasury Secretary and M.P. responsible for drafting the Stamp bill, asked the agents for likely American reactions, they told him the tax was neither “expedient” nor “prudent.” Ingersoll of Connecticut said the New England colonies were “filled with the most dreadful apprehensions of such a step’s taking place,” and if it did, many gentlemen of property had said they would “remove themselves with their families and fortunes into some foreign Kingdom.” Whately was unimpressed because, as he said indisputably, “some taxes are absolutely necessary.” He was to hear more. Britain’s own representative, the Royal Governor of Rhode Island, Stephen Hopkins, stated in a published pamphlet, The Rights of the Colonies Examined, the fixed opposition of His Majesty’s American subjects to taxation except “by their own representatives as Your Majesty’s other free subjects are.” The Rhode Island Assembly sent his pamphlet to their agent in London along with a petition to the King confirming its sentiments. The New York Assembly likewise, in petitions to the King and to both Houses of Parliament, expressed its “most earnest Supplication” that apart from necessary regulation of trade, Parliament should “leave it to the legislative power of the Colony to impose all other Burthens upon its own people which the publick Exigencies require.”

The evidence was ample that taxation by Parliament would meet adamant resistance in the colonies. It was ignored because the policymakers regarded Britain as sovereign and the colonials as subjects, because Americans were not taken too seriously, and because Grenville and his associates, having some doubts themselves as to the rights in the case, wanted to obtain the revenue in a way that would establish Parliament’s eminent domain. It was a classic and ultimately self-defeating case of proceeding against all negative indications. Grenville made no formal “requisitions from hence” upon the colonies to tax themselves and by rejecting this alternative opened the path to the Revolution.

In Parliament, the colonial petitions were rejected unheard on the ground that they concerned a money bill for which petitions were disallowed. Jackson and Garth spoke in the House denying Parliament’s right to tax “until or unless the Americans are allowed to send Members to Parliament.” Rising to answer, the President of the Board of Trade, Charles Townshend, soon to be a critical figure in the conflict, provoked the first moment of excitement in the American drama. Shall the Americans, he asked, “children planted by our Arms, shall they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden we lie under?”

Unable to contain himself, Colonel Isaac Barré, a fierce one-eyed former soldier who had fought with Wolfe and Amherst in America, sprang to his feet. “They planted by your Care? No! Your Oppressions planted ’em in America.… They nourished up by your Indulgence? They grew up by your neglect of ’em.… They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence.… And believe me, and remember that I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still.… They are a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated—but the Subject is too delicate and I will say no more.” These sentiments, recorded Ingersoll, were thrown out so spontaneously, “so forcibly and firmly, and the breaking off so beautifully abrupt, that the whole House sat awile as Amazed, intently looking and without answering a Word.” It may have been the first moment when perhaps a few realized what loomed ahead.

Barré, who looked on the world with a “savage glare” from a face scarred by the bullet that took out his eye at Quebec, was to become one of the leading defenders of America and orators of the Opposition. Of Huguenot ancestry, born in Dublin and educated at Dublin’s Trinity College (described by the father of Thomas Sheridan as “half bear garden and half brothel”), he had left the Army when his promotion was blocked by the King and was elected to Parliament through the influence of Lord Shelburne, Irish-born like himself. His staunch support of America, joined with that of another champion, of a sort, is commemorated in the town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

A more explicit warning was heard at the second reading, when General Conway warmly protested the exclusion of the colonial petitions and moved that they be heard. “From whom unless from themselves are we to learn the circumstances of the colonies,” he asked, “and the fatal consequences that may attend the imposing of this tax?” His motion was of course rejected by the well-schooled majority. A professional soldier, he seems to have been the first to glimpse a possibility of “fatal consequences.” He was a cousin and close friend of Horace Walpole, a handsome, likable, honorable man, who, having voted against the government in the Wilkes case, was one of those deprived by royal vindictiveness of a court post and also of command of his regiment, on which he depended for income. Nevertheless, he refused financial assistance from friends and joined with Barré, Richard Jackson and Lord Shelburne in the nucleus of those who were beginning to oppose the Government’s American policy and who met in association under Shelburne’s roof.

The Earl of Shelburne, 32 at this time, was the most able of Pitt’s disciples and after him the most independent-minded among the ministers, perhaps because he escaped schooling at Westminster or Eton, although his early education in Ireland, he said, was “neglected to the greatest degree.” Considered too clever and known as “the Jesuit,” he was disliked and mistrusted by colleagues. Needed for his talent, he was never to be long out of office and, despite mistrust, was to reach the premiership in 1782 in time to negotiate the treaty confirming American independence. The dislike he inspired may have sprung from fear of his ideas, which tended to be cynical about men and progressive in policy. He voted against the expulsion of Wilkes, favored Catholic emancipation, free trade and even, in contrast to Burke, the French Revolution when it came.

While owner of enormous rent-rolls in Ireland and England, and one of the richest absentee proprietors of Irish land, he was the only minister, according to Jeremy Bentham, who did not fear the people, and the first, according to Disraeli, to comprehend the rising importance of the middle class. He conformed to noble style in having his country estate landscaped by Capability Brown, his town house designed by Robert Adam and his portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds, several times. He went beyond it in amassing a vast library of books, maps and manuscripts, whose sale at auction after his death lasted 31 days, and a collection of historical documents bought for the nation by a special grant of Parliament. Like Pitt and Burke, he had no trouble discerning the inexpediency of coercing America, and no hesitation in warning against it.

At its third reading, the Stamp Tax, the first direct tax ever levied on America, was enacted by 249 to 49, the usual five-to-one majority, by whom, says Horace Walpole, it was “little understood … and less attended to.” The professionals understood it well enough. It was the “great measure” of the session, said Whately, because it established “the Right of Parliament to lay an internal tax upon the Colonies.” A colleague, Edward Sedgewick, Under-Secretary of State, acknowledged that it had been done deliberately, in the face of strong resolutions by the American assemblies, “because it was thought to establish the Right by a new execution of it.”

Americans reacted widely and strenuously. Because the Act not only required a stamp on all printed matter and legal and business documents, but extended to such things as ships’ papers, tavern licenses and even dice and playing cards, it touched every activity in every class in every colony, not only New England, and coming on top of the Sugar Act confirmed the suspicion of a deliberate plan by the British first to undermine the economy and then to enslave the colonies. The Virginia House of Burgesses, meeting to denounce the Act, heard Patrick Henry skirt treason in the famous words reminding George III of the fate of Caesar and Charles I. When Boston learned of the Virginia resolves, “the universal voice of all the people,” wrote Hutchinson, supported them in the conviction that “if the Stamp Act must take place, we are all slaves.” Sons of Liberty were organized in the towns to foment resistance. In response to a general movement to force stamp agents to resign, mobs rampaged and pillaged and wrecked their homes and paraded with the agents’ figures hanged in effigy. Heeding the warning, the agents in Boston and Newport resigned in August, and by November, when the Act took effect, not an agent remained in office to execute it.

Agitators and pamphleteers kept passions excited. Hardly a family from Canada to Florida had not heard of the Act though many had little idea what it threatened. A country gentleman whose servant was afraid to go out to the barn on a dark night asked him, “Afraid of what?”

“Of the Stamp Act,” the servant replied. In Connecticut, three out of four were ready to take up the sword, as reported by Ezra Stiles, preacher and future President of Yale. More astonishing and, to any Englishmen who took notice, ominous was the agreement of nine colonies at a Stamp Act Congress in October in New York. After a mere two and a half weeks of bickering, they united on a petition for repeal, and agreed also to abandon the troublesome distinction that figured so largely in the whole American dispute between acceptable “external” taxation in the form of duties on trade and unacceptable “internal” taxation on domestic processes.

Beyond all words and petitions, the effective protest was boycott, known as Non-Importation. Already set in motion in response to the Sugar Act, a program to cut off imports of English goods was now formally adopted by groups of merchants in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The call swept through the colonies on winds of enthusiasm. Women brought their spinning wheels to the minister’s parlor or to the courthouse to compete in the number of skeins they could turn out for homespun to replace English cloth. Flax was spun for shirts “fine enough for the best gentlemen in America.” By the end of the year, imports were £305,000 less than the year before out of a total of some £2 million.

What of the alternative available to the British? It was, as many thought, to give the Americans the representation in Parliament they claimed and let taxation follow. At one stroke, this would have invalidated American resistance. While other dynamics of conflict were present, nothing raises tempers like money, and taxation was the Americans’ most vibrant issue. They were ready enough to claim representation as a right but the fact was that they did not really want it in the flesh. The Stamp Act Congress agreed to declare it “impractical.”

In all discussions of representation, much was made of the 3000-mile distance, where “seas roll and months pass” between order and execution. Yet distance did not prevent Americans from ordering English furnishings, clothes and books, adopting English fashions, sending children to English schools, corresponding steadily with colleagues in Europe, sending botanical specimens, absorbing ideas and generally maintaining a close cultural relationship. It was not so much the “vast and hazardous ocean” that was the deterrent as a growing realization in the colonies that what they really wanted was less interference and greater home rule. Although separation, much less independence, was not contemplated, many did not want a closer connection for they shuddered at the corruption of English society. John Adams believed that England had reached the same stage as the Roman Republic, “a venal city, ripe for destruction.” Visiting Americans were shocked at the corrupt politics, the vice, the gap between the “Wealth, Magnificence and splendour” of the rich and the “extreme Misery and distresses of the Poor … amazing on the one hand and disgusting on the other.”

They viewed the patronage system as hostile and dangerous to liberty, for when government rested on purchased support, true political liberty was a dead letter. Englishmen were the only people to have gained that liberty; pervading American polemic in these years was a sense of America’s mission, as inheritor, to foster and preserve it for mankind. Colonial members in Parliament were believed likely to be corrupted by English decadence and in practice would be a helpless minority always outvoted. It was also clear that if the colonies gained representation, they would no longer have grounds for resisting Parliament’s right to tax. Americans recognized this ahead of the English, who, indeed, never seriously considered the advantage to themselves of admitting American representation.

Attitude was again the obstacle; the English could not visualize Americans in terms of equality. Should uncouth provincials, the “spawn of our [prisoners’] transports,” rabble-rousers “with manners no better than Mohawks,” be invited, asked the Gentleman’s Magazine, to occupy the “highest seats of our commonwealth?” To the Morning Post, Americans were “a mongrel breed of Irish, Scotch and Germans leavened with convicts and outcasts.” Deeper than social disdain was fear of the colonials as “levellers” of class, whose representation in Parliament would encourage unrepresented English towns and districts to demand seats, destroying property rights in the boroughs and overturning the system.

The English had contrived a convenient theory of “virtual representation” to cover the masses who lacked votes or members to represent them. Every member of the House, it was maintained, represented the whole body politic, not a particular constituency, and if Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham had no seats and London had only six while Devon and Cornwall had seventy, the former could take comfort in being “virtually represented” by the bluff gentlemen from the country. These gentlemen on the whole, bearing the main weight of the land tax, heartily favored taxing the colonies for their share of the burden and firmly believed in the assertion of parliamentary sovereignty.

An alternative to conflict that serious men gave thought to, and proposed, was colonial union followed by some form of federation with Britain, and with colonial representation in an imperial parliament. In 1754, a Plan of Union to meet the French and Indian threat had been proposed by Benjamin Franklin, with advice from Thomas Hutchinson, at the Albany Congress and found no takers. During the Stamp Act crisis the idea was revived by persons who held governing responsibility in the colonies and were worried by the growing alienation from the mother country. Franklin himself, Thomas Pownall, a former Governor of Massachusetts, now an M.P., Thomas Crowley, a Quaker merchant familiar with America, and Francis Bernard, the current Governor of Massachusetts, all proposed various plans for rationalization of the colonial government and definitive settlement through debate of reciprocal rights and obligations leading to federation. Pownall complained at a later crisis in 1775 that as no one in government paid any attention to his views, he would offer them no more. Francis Bernard, who formulated a detailed plan of 97 propositions which he sent to Lord Halifax and others, was told by Halifax that the plan was “the best thing of the kind by much that he had ever read,” and that was the last he heard.

Benjamin Franklin urged his British correspondents to recognize the inevitability of American growth and development and to make no laws intended to cramp its trade and manufacture, for natural expansion would sweep them aside, but rather to work toward an Atlantic world peopled by Americans and English possessing equal rights in which the colonists would enrich the mother country and extend its “empire round the whole globe and awe the world!” It was a splendid vision which had enthralled him since the Albany Plan of Union. “I am still of the opinion,” he wrote years later in his autobiography, “that the Plan of Union would have been happy for both Sides of the Water if it had been adopted. The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would have been no need of Troops from England; of course the subsequent Pretence for Taxing America, and the bloody Contest it occasioned would have been avoided.” Franklin ends with a sigh: “But such Mistakes are not new; History is full of the Errors of States and Princes.”

Repeal became an issue in England almost as soon as the Stamp Act became law. As Non-Importation emptied the ports, and shippers and handlers and factory workers lost employment and merchants lost money, Britain awoke to American sentiment. For the next six months the Stamp Act was a leading topic in the press. With the 18th century’s passion for political principle, all the issues—the rights of Parliament, the iniquity of taxation without representation, “virual representation,” external versus internal taxation—were debated in comments, columns and angry letters.

Great impact was made by a pamphlet published by Soame Jenyns, a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, who insisted that both the right to tax and the expediency of exerting it were “propositions so indisputably clear” that they needed no defense, were it not for arguments challenging them “with insolence equal to their absurdity.” The phrase “liberty of an Englishman,” snorted Mr. Jenyns, had lately been used “as a synonymous term for blasphemy, bawdry, treason, libels, strong beer and cyder,” and the American argument that people cannot be taxed without their consent was “the reverse of truth, for no man I know is taxed by his own consent.”

Lord Chesterfield, observing affairs, like Horace Walpole, from the sidelines, had a way of picking out the essence in contrast to the stilted etiquette he preached to his nephew. The “absurdity” of the Stamp Act, he wrote to Newcastle, equaled “the mischief of it by asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” Even if effective, he wrote, the tax should bring in no more than £80,000 a year (the government calculated on no more than £60,000), which could not compensate for the loss to Britain in trade worth at least a million a year (it was worth two million). A harder truth came from General Thomas Gage, commander of British forces in the colonies, who reported in November that resistance was widespread throughout the colonies, and that “Unless the Act from its own nature enforces itself, nothing but a very considerable military force can do it.” The gentlemen of England could not envisage this necessity vis-à-vis rabble.

By the time the crisis that Grenville’s Stamp Act had engendered was at hand, he had lost office. The King, long irritated and bored by Grenville’s habit of lecturing him on economic policy, became enraged when his mother’s name was eliminated by Grenville’s faction for devious political reasons from a Regency Bill drawn up in consequence of the King’s illness early in 1765.* George dismissed him, unfortunately before locating someone sufficiently master of the conflicts stirred up by the Regency Bill to form a ministry in his place. At a loss, George turned to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, a person of un-Hanoverian ability and considerable prestige. The Duke offered the premiership to Pitt, who obstinately refused for reasons not easily discerned in this complex and opaque character. He may have been already determined on repeal and not sure whether he could command it and too stiff-necked to compromise or, given that he had been absent from affairs for the past year, the physical and sometimes mental disturbances that afflicted him from time to time may have been active.

Historians have suggested that, had Pitt taken office in 1765, the course of the next decade might have been different, but that is a supposition dependent on his continuing to function, which, as events soon proved, he could not. Pitt’s intransigence and exaggerated demands for an autonomous hand unquestionably weakened the government during the conflict with America. With his immense popularity, reputation and influence, and his incomparable sway over the House of Commons, he was an epic figure who had won, and could not save, an empire.

Pitt owed his rise as a younger son of what Lord Chesterfield called “a very new family” to force of character and his own abilities. His grandfather, called “Diamond” Pitt, was a nabob of the East India Company, of brutal temperament and wild and tyrannical habits, who had made the family fortune in the Indian trade and held a share of command for a while as Governor of Madras. The diamond for which he was known was bought by the French Crown for more than two million livres. In England the family acquired the rotten borough of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, whose seat Pitt held from 1735. He took it over at 27 from his elder brother, who, having dissipated his fortune and alienated all friends in the process, retired abroad “in very bad circumstances” and intermittently mad, “though not confined but obliged to lead a very retired life.” The streak of madness in the blood, whether or not stemming from the grandfather, appeared also in Pitt’s sisters, one of whom was confined and two others more or less so.

Throughout his life Pitt suffered from incapacitating gout, which had afflicted him since schooldays at Eton. Rare in youth, gout at that age was evidence of a severe form. Its recurring pain caused the irritability common to gout-sufferers and required a gout-stool and huge boot to be built into the front of Pitt’s carriage and sedan chair.

His political career gained notoriety by a much publicized refusal as Paymaster of the Forces to take commissions or hold back for personal investment the sums assigned for pay, both customary perquisites of office. As Secretary of State during the Seven Years’ War, he was able to abide shared command with the Duke of Newcastle as premier because Newcastle stayed within his specialty, the handling of patronage, and left policy to Pitt.

Pitt was driven by conviction that England’s destiny was maritime supremacy and that her resources could prevail in the rivalry with France by destruction of French trade and trading bases. With passionate application of funds and forces to this object, and infusion of his own assurance, which once expressed itself in the statement “I know I can save this country and that I alone can,” he reconditioned and manned the fleet, recruited fellow-countrymen to replace foreign mercenaries, and turned feckless campaigning into a national war and tide of victory. Louisburg, on Cape Breton, Guadeloupe, Ticonderoga, Quebec, Minden in Europe, naval triumph in the Bay of Biscay—such a series of successes, wrote Horace Walpole, that “we are forced to ask every morning what victory there has been for fear of missing one.” Captured French flags were hung from St. Paul’s amid roars of the multitude. Supplies were voted without discussion. Pitt dominated his colleagues and, as the Great Commoner, was the idol of the public, who admired his absence of title and felt that in him they had a representative. This feeling carried as far as New England, where, according to Ezra Stiles, he was “idolized.” Fort Duquesne, captured from the French in 1758, was renamed Fort Pitt and its wooden village Pittsburgh.

Only when he wanted to carry the war to Spain, the other maritime rival, his dominance failed against the resistance to increased taxes and against the new King’s determination to turn out the Newcastle Whigs and take patronage into his own hands. When Pitt resigned in 1761, cheers followed his coach from the palace, ladies waved their handkerchiefs from windows, the populace “clung to the wheels, shook hands with the footmen and even kissed the horses.”

Thereafter Pitt was too unbending, too arrogant, too vain to enter into bargaining for place. He did not fit into the system, having no interest in groups and cabals. His interest was in policy commanded by himself. On leaving office in 1761 he told the House that he would not govern when his advice was not taken. “Being responsible, I will direct and will be responsible for nothing I do not direct.” A member thought this was “the most insolent declaration ever made by a Minister,” but it was Pitt to the core. He was of the rare type incapable of acting in association with others. “Unattached to any party, I am and wish to be entirely single,” he said, and more starkly on another occasion, “I cannot bear the least touch of command.” Perhaps what spoke here was a touch of megalomania. Pitt may have suffered from what in our time would be called delusions of grandeur and manic depression, but these had no names in his time and were not recognized as mental illness.

Tall, pale, thin-faced, with a hawk nose and piercing eye, ankles swollen with the gout that caused him to hobble, he was grand, proud, imposing, appearing always in full dress and full peruke, in manner “sage and awful as a Cato.” He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within. His glance of scorn or indignation could wither an opponent, his invective and sarcasm were “terrible”; he had the same quality of terribilità as Julius II. His gift for oratory at a time when political success resided in it was literally spellbinding though few could explain why. His eloquence, vehement, fiery, original, bold, could win the support of the independents in Parliament. Theatrical, even bombastic in language, spoken with an actor’s gestures and plays of tone, employing “very brilliant and striking phrases,” his most successful speeches were composed on his feet, although of a particularly striking phrase he told Shelburne that he had “tried it on paper three times” before deciding to use it. At a whisper his voice could be heard to the remotest benches, and when swelling like a great organ to its fullest register, the volume filled the House and could be heard in the lobbies and down the stairs. All fell silent to listen when Pitt stood up to speak.

Failing Pitt, the Duke of Cumberland put together a mixed ministry whose three principal offices were filled by personal acquaintances from the turf and the Army, none of whom had held ministerial office before. The chief was the young grandee, the Marquess of Rockingham, one of the wealthiest nobles of England, with baronies in three counties, wide estates in Ireland and Yorkshire, the lord-lieutenancy of his home county, an Irish peerage and suitable titles as Knight of the Garter and Lord of the Bedchamber to add to his status. At 35, he was a “new Whig” of the younger generation, untried and uncertain how to proceed. The Secretaries of State were General Conway, who had been the Duke’s aide-de-camp, and Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, a fellow-patron of the turf like Rockingham, known to Cumberland from the Jockey Club. A rather lax young man of thirty, Grafton had no great ambition to make a name in history and was more interested in racing than government, but he was ready from a sense of noblesse oblige to serve his country as well as he could. When rank won him unanimous election as Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1768, the poet Thomas Gray, author of “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” for whom Grafton had secured appointment as Regius Professor of History, wrote an ode that was set to music for the Duke’s installation. In government Grafton was less happy, uneasy in his duties and given to frequent proposals to resign.

Leading the King’s friends in the Cabinet as Lord Chancellor was the gouty, profane, boisterous Lord Northington, who though frequently the worse for drink had held all the various law posts over the last nine years and was willing to concede the effects of too much port, saying, “If I had known that these legs were one day to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken more care of them when I was a lad.” The Secretary at War, who accepted his post at the King’s express wish, was Viscount Barrington, an amiable man with one brother an Admiral and another a Bishop. He made it a principle, he said, to refuse no office on the theory that “some fortune may at last make me pope.” He remained at the War Office, still waiting, for the next thirteen years, one of the longest tenures of the period. The disunion permissible within a Cabinet is illustrated by his making it a condition of his accepting the post that he be permitted to vote against the ministry both on the Stamp Act and on General Warrants.

Divided and weak, the new ministry headed into the Stamp Act crisis, losing Cumberland by death after only four months, which left Rockingham unsheltered and without guidance. He tried to recruit Pitt without success and when he repeatedly asked what he should do about repeal, Pitt refused to communicate. Suffering from some debility, he was out of affairs throughout 1765.

Non-Importation was cutting into the economy, distressing merchants and labor. Alarming articles appeared in the press, inspired in many cases by an organized merchants’ campaign for repeal, reporting factory closings and an army of unemployed preparing to march on London to obtain repeal by threat of violence to the House of Commons. London’s merchants formed a committee to write to their fellows in thirty manufacturing and port towns urging them to petition Parliament for repeal. The Government was torn between “Stamp Men” and “No Stamp Men,” with Rockingham, Grafton and Conway and the old Duke of Newcastle in favor of repeal, against the Stamp Men, who wanted a demonstration of sovereignty and argued that repeal would destroy Britain’s authority and give the colonies impetus toward outright independence. Openly at odds with the Rockingham faction, Lord Northington announced he would attend no more Cabinet meetings, but rather than resigning, he remained to work through intrigue to bring the government down.

While not himself the possessor of forceful opinions, Rockingham acquired a policy by transfusion from his secretary, Edmund Burke. He became persuaded that the violent American reaction indicated that an attempt to enforce the Act would be inexpedient, that England would be poorly advised to lose her colonial trade through ill-will, and that if harmony could be restored by repeal, so much the better. Through conciliation, Burke explained, the two Whig principles of liberty of the subject and sovereignty of Parliament could be reconciled.

With a majority determined to teach the colonies a lesson in sovereignty and eager for a reduction in their own land tax in consequence of revenue from America, the hope of moving Parliament to vote for repeal was slight. Grenville fulminated about the “outrageous Tumults and Insurrections” in North America, and Lord Northington declared that to “give up the law” by repeal would mean for Britain to “be conquered in America and become a Province to her own Colonies.” Efforts to elicit an opinion from Pitt during the Christmas recess were unavailing and when Parliament reconvened on 14 January 1766, Rockingham, trying to maintain a government weakened by dissension, was uncertain what to do.

Pitt appeared. The benches hushed. He said to them that the subject before them was “of greater importance than ever engaged the attention of this House” since their own liberties were at stake in the revolution of the last century and that “the outcome will decide the judgment of posterity on the glory of this kingdom and the wisdom of government during the present reign.” Taxation was “no part of the governing or legislative power”; it was a “voluntary gift” of representative assemblies. The idea of “virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of man and it does not deserve a serious refutation.” Referring to remarks by Grenville denouncing those in England who encouraged colonial resistance, he retorted, “I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” A member cried out that the speaker should be sent to the Tower, evoking, according to a witness, “such shouts of applause as I never heard.” Shaken but not diverted, Pitt went on to announce that the Stamp Act must be repealed “absolutely, totally, immediately” and at the same time accompanied by a statement of “sovereign authority over the colonies … in as strong terms as can be devised and be made to extend to every point of legislation whatsoever—that we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent.”

Here was a fine obfuscation. Was not binding their trade by customs duties another way of taking money out of their pockets without their consent? If Parliament had supreme legislative power, how could taxation not be “part of that sovereign power”? Grenville, in making these points, refused to accept the distinction between external and internal taxation. Pitt was a firm mercantilist and his reply was unequivocal: “Let it be forever ascertained; taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours.” His distinction left others unconvinced. “If you understand the difference,” wrote Lord George Germain to a friend, “it is more than I do, but I assure you it was very fine when I heard it.”

It was enough for Rockingham; he had his signal. A declaration of parliamentary sovereignty, which it was hoped would satisfy the demand for assertiveness, was immediately drafted and introduced along with the bill for repeal. The King’s sullen consent was secured by informing him that the choice was either repeal or armed enforcement requiring additional military forces for which it would be hard to find funds. The House resumed debate. In the Lords the Duke of Bedford, leader of the Grenville faction, insisted that the Stamp Act “if suffered to be removed puts a final period to the British Empire in America.” Rockingham, however, had found allies. He encouraged the merchants’ campaign in order to shift emphasis from controversial “rights” to economic consequences. Provincial mayors and leading citizens from 35 cities arrived each day to present petitions from their cities for repeal. Letters from American traders to English shippers canceling orders were presented. More than a hundred merchants gathered in London to exert by their presence in the Visitors Gallery a silent pressure. Twenty riders were kept waiting to gallop with news of the vote.

Forty witnesses, including colonial agents, merchants and visiting Americans were called to testify on Non-Importation. Among them, Benjamin Franklin at his famous examination in February 1766 firmly told the House that Americans would never pay the Stamp duties “unless compelled by force of arms,” and armed forces would be useless because “they cannot compel a man to take stamps who chuses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.” That could stand as Britain’s epitaph for the decade, for at the time Franklin spoke, “an overwhelming majority” of his countrymen, as an English historian has stated, “had never contemplated the idea of severing the connection with the mother country.”

The dilemma was real. To leave the Act in place would be to assure, as the witnesses testified, lasting disaffection, even “total alienation” in the colonies, while to concede repeal would be to acknowledge loss of authority in America. Horace Walpole, in his memoirs written two years later, added another disturbing factor: enforcement which could “risk lighting up a rebellion” might be a cause of the colonies’ “flinging themselves into the arms of France and Spain.” On the other hand, repeal of a revenue bill was “setting a precedent of the most fatal complexion.”

The Declaratory Act, stating that “The Parliament of Great Britain had, hath, and by right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the Colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever,” won unanimous approval in the Commons and the votes in the Lords of all but five, who included, interestingly enough, Lord Cornwallis. Another was Lord Camden, formerly Chief Justice Pratt, the only minister to speak against the Declaratory Act, who insisted that the very ground of the objection was that taxation without representation was illegal and that “there are some things you cannot do.” The fact that the Act did not mention taxation, the whole point of the dispute, was questioned by the Attorney-General, Charles Yorke, who moved to insert “in cases of taxation” but was overruled by the assurance that “in all cases whatsoever” covered the necessity. That satisfied enough members to win a majority for repeal. But though convenient the Declaratory Act was rash because it locked Parliament into a statutory position that foreclosed compromise. It returned to haunt many who had voted for it when in the next decade the Rockingham party was trying to avert war. For the moment it accomplished its purpose. Repeal was enacted over 167 hold-outs. The Lords still resisted and gave their assent only when the King was induced to let it be known that he favored repeal.

The thing was done. General Conway’s face shone, reported Burke, “as it were the face of an angel.” The messengers galloped away with the glad news, bells rang in Bristol, ship captains raised their flags and fired salutes, huzzahs resounded in the seaports, and when the news reached America, rejoicing was double. John Hancock, a merchant-shipper himself, gave a great party with Madeira and fireworks, militias paraded with drum and fife, taverns burst with celebrators, gala balls were held, loyal thanks offered to King and Parliament and 500 sermons of thanksgiving preached throughout New England. Orders for English merchandise were renewed and itchy homespun garments given to the poor. Eight months later, John Adams wrote that the people were now “as quiet and submissive to Government as any people under the sun”; repeal had “composed every wave of popular disorder.” The Declaratory Act made no impression for the very reason that it contained no reference to taxation. The Americans may also have assumed that it was a gesture of hurt pride which would not be implemented.

How shall we assess the Stamp Act and its repeal? Although framed in the face of information assuring trouble, the policy behind the Act was not yet classic folly in the sense of mindless persistence in conduct clearly counter-productive. It was natural to want revenue from the colonies and natural to try to obtain it. Repeal likewise fell short of folly because it lacked a clearly available alternative. Enforcement was impossible; repeal unavoidable. It was inauspicious because Americans, no matter how joyful, could hardly escape the conclusion that parliamentary supremacy was vulnerable to riot, agitation and boycott. Yet the great majority at this time, apart from the few activists, had never contemplated rebellion or separation, and if no further British provocation had followed, combat might never have come to Lexington Common.

[neil]

3. Folly Under Full Sail: 1766–72
After a mistake so absolute as to require repeal, British policy-makers might well have stopped to reconsider the relationship with the colonies, and ask themselves what course they might follow to induce a beneficial allegiance on the one hand and ensure a secure sovereignty on the other. Many Englishmen outside government did consider this problem, and Pitt and Shelburne, who were shortly to come to power, entered office intending to calm the suspicions and restore the equanimity of the colonies. Fate, as we shall see, interfered.

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation, had the King over their heads and were at odds with one another. It did not occur to them that it might be wise to avoid provocative measures for long enough to reassure the colonies of Britain’s respect for their rights while leaving their agitators no excuse. The riotous reaction to the Stamp Act only confirmed the British in their belief that the colonies, led by “wicked and designing men” (as stated in a House of Lords resolution), were bent on rebellion. Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

A new provocation emerged in the annual Quartering Act of 1766 for the billeting, provisioning and discipline of British forces. It carried a clause requiring colonial assemblies to provide barracks and supplies such as candles, fuel, vinegar, beer and salt for the regulars. Little thought would have been needed for Parliament to recognize that this would be resented as another form of internal taxation, as it immediately was in New York, where the troops were mainly stationed. Colonists saw themselves soon being required to pay all the costs of the Army in America at the “dictate” of Parliament. The New York Assembly refused to appropriate the required funds, causing wrath in Britain at such new evidence of disobedience and ingratitude. “If we once lose the superintendency of the colonys, this nation is undone,” declared Charles Townshend to thunderous applause in the House. Parliament responded with the New York Suspending Act rendering acts of the Assembly null and void until it voted the funds. Mother country and colonies were off again in quarrel.

A political upheaval took place at this time when the King, having found cause to quarrel with Rockingham, obeyed the injunctions of Providence “to dismiss my ministry.” Immensely complicated negotiations brought in Pitt at the head of an ill-assorted ministry while the Rockinghams, insulted, moved into opposition. The new government contained more discordant opinions and characters than usual because Pitt, in a position to bargain hard for his terms and determined to command unfettered, deliberately put together a mixed group that he could dominate unbeholden to any “connexion.” The financial cost was high because holdovers had to be given handsome pensions to persuade them to make way for successors.

On the one hand, Shelburne was brought in as Secretary of State with responsibility for the colonies, Grafton and Conway were retained and Lord Camden, another of the Pitt circle, was named Lord Chancellor. On the other hand, the King’s agent, Lord Northington, was named Lord President of the Council, a place was found for Lord Bute’s brother, the unpredictable Charles Townshend became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Earl of Hillsborough, as unfriendly to the colonies as Shelburne was the opposite, was added as President of the Board of Trade. Hillsborough was a compound of “conceit, wrong-headedness, obstinacy and passion,” according to Benjamin Franklin, whom he had treated rudely. The private disconnections of these people, more apparent then than now, inspired Burke’s elaborate sarcasm about “a piece of diversified mosaic; a tesselated pavement … here a piece of black stone, there a piece of white.…” Burke was, of course, a disgruntled Rockingham follower.

What opened the way to folly was not the mosaic but Pitt’s collapse. With catastrophic effect on his popular standing, he accepted a peerage and left the House of Commons to enter the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham. His decision was owed in part to a desire to avoid, because of his inferior health, the First Minister’s extra task of leadership of the House of Commons. The public reacted as if Jesus Christ had joined the money-changers in the temple. Celebrations of the hero’s return to office were canceled, bunting taken down from the Guildhall and pamphlets and lampoons gave themselves up to abuse. The Great Commoner was seen as having abandoned the people, who felt him to be their representative; as having sold himself to the court for a coronet.

In the Lords, with a smaller, less responsive audience, the new Earl had diminished effect as a speaker and lost his customary base in the larger house. His gout attacked in force; he grew peevish and sullen; his treatment of colleagues became rude and tyrannical. “Such language as Lord Chatham’s,” said General Conway, “had never been heard west of Constantinople.” In chronic pain, hurt by public condemnation and a sense of lost greatness, frustrated by the negative turn of events in America, he sank into depression, attended no Cabinet meetings, remained inaccessible, though not beyond communicating in an unbridled letter his wrath at “the spirit of infatuation that has taken possession of New York.… Their spirit of disobedience will justly create a great ferment here.… The late Stamp Act has frightened those irritable and umbrageous people quite out of their senses.”

Without its master, the tesselated Government fell into disorder. “Continuous cabals, factions and intrigues among the ins and outs,” reported Benjamin Franklin, “keep everything in confusion.” The Duke of Grafton, who had unhappily accepted the Treasury, for which he knew himself unfit, in order to leave Pitt free of administrative office, now at age 32 had to take over as acting chief. Feeling more than ever at a loss in that role, he would come to London “but once a week or once a fortnight to sign papers at the Treasury, and as seldom to see the King.” He postponed a Cabinet Council to attend the races at Newmarket and a second time because of entertaining a large house party at his estate. The vessel of government was left virtually unsteered. Lord Shelburne, who had begun to work through the colonial agents to restore colonial goodwill, fell out with his colleagues. Lord Camden, who apart from the law was something of a dilettante in politics, failed to speak out. There was no one able to restrain the most brilliant, most irresponsible member of the Cabinet, Charles Townshend.

“The delight and ornament of the Commons and the charm of every private society,” according to Burke, Townshend could make a stunning speech even when inebriated and had the intelligence and capacity that might have made him, according to Horace Walpole, “the greatest man of this age,” if his faults had only been moderate. But they were not. He was arrogant, flippant, unscrupulous and unreliable, given to reversing himself by 180 degrees if expedience beckoned. “Will Charles Townshend do less harm in the War Office or in the Treasury?” the Duke of Newcastle once asked when considering him for office. Wanted for his abilities, he had filled various offices at the Board of Trade, the Admiralty and the War Office, interspersed with resignations and refusals to serve. “He studied nothing with accuracy or with attention,” wrote Walpole, “had parts that embraced all knowledge with such quickness that he seemed to create knowledge instead of searching for it” and with such abundant wit “that in him it seemed loss of time to think.” The dazzle of these talents concealed a meagerness of substance, as David Hume, for one, suggested in the phrase “He passes for the cleverest fellow in England.”

The spoiling fault was Townshend’s “immoderate passion for fame,” which may have had something to do with being a younger son and possibly with having notoriously scandalous parents who lived apart. The dissolute and eccentric father, 3rd Viscount Townshend, was in Walpole’s words to a friend, “not the least mad of your countrymen.” A further disability of the son was his being subject to falling fits, now thought to have been epilepsy, though described by Walpole rather casually: “he drops down in a fit, has a resurrection, thunders in the Capitol.…” Emulating Pitt without Pitt’s sense of direction, Townshend was determined “to have no party, to follow no leader, to be governed absolutely by my own judgment.” Judgment was unfortunately his weakest faculty.

While at the Board of Trade, where his several terms of service caused him to be regarded as the most knowledgeable on American affairs, he had been the first in 1763 to propose raising revenue from the colonies to pay for their defense and also to pay fixed salaries to colonial officials and judges, rendering them “no longer dependent upon the pleasure of any Assembly.” This was the bugbear of the colonies, seen as an unmistakable step toward suppression of their rights.

Townshend now revived both ideas, carelessly, almost without planning. When he introduced his budget in January 1767 calling for a continuance of the land tax at 4s., it raised great rumbles of discontent among the country members. Ever eager to be popular, he said the tax could go back to 3s. if the Government did not have to spend over £ 400,000 on the administration of the colonies. At this, Grenville, unmoved by the fate of his Stamp Tax, promptly suggested that the budget could be cut if the colonies were assessed the greater part of the cost of their defense and administration. As if to say “No problem,” Townshend, to the astonishment of his ministerial colleagues, jauntily “pledged himself to find a revenue in America sufficient for the purposes that were required.” He assured the House he could do it “without offense” to the Americans, meaning by external taxes, while at the same time saying that the distinction between external and internal was “ridiculous in everybody’s opinion except the Americans’.” By this time the Americans themselves had rejected the distinction at the Stamp Act Congress and in public discourse, but American opinion was not a factor on which Townshend bothered to inform himself.

Given the prospect of lightening their own taxes, the House blithely accepted Townshend’s assurance, the more willingly because they had been impressed by Benjamin Franklin’s curiously complacent testimony during the Stamp Act hearings that the colonies would not object to external taxes even for revenue. Prodded by the discarded Rockinghams and the Bedfords on the right,* who wished to embarrass the Government, the country members carried a motion to reduce the land tax from 4s. to 3s. in the pound, thus depriving the Government of about £500,000 a year and facing the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the necessity of making good on his pledge.

Without consulting his Cabinet colleagues or giving them any notice of his intention, Townshend proposed a series of customs duties on imports into America of glass, paint, lead, paper and all grades of tea for the stated purpose not of controlling trade but of raising revenue. The expected return according to his own calculations was £20,000 from the tea duty and a little less than £20,000 from the rest, altogether £40,000, amounting to a tenth of the total cost of governing the colonies and less than a tenth of the loss from the reduced land tax. For this pittance, which would barely reduce and would very likely add to the national deficit by costing more to collect than it would bring in, Townshend was ready to wreck what repeal of the Stamp Act had been intended to gain. As with most follies, personal self-interest paralyzed concern for the greater interest of the state. In Chatham’s absence, Townshend saw a way open to make himself First Minister and, toward that end, a way to enhance his stature in the House of Commons, fame’s “chosen temple,” as Burke called it.

His proposal seems to have dumbfounded his colleagues in the literal sense of striking them dumb. Although raising revenues from the colonies, Grafton admitted, was “contrary to the known decision of every member of the Cabinet,” and the Chancellor’s unilateral action “was such as no Cabinet will, I am confident, ever submit to,” the Cabinet in fact submitted. When Townshend threatened to resign unless allowed to carry out his pledge, the Cabinet, in the belief that his departure would bring down the Government, meekly acquiesced. As it has ever been, staying in office was the primary thought.

Parliament in its prevailing frame of mind was happy to teach the Americans another lesson, no matter that the last one had boomeranged. In May 1767 the Revenue Act embodying the Townshend Duties passed both Houses easily without a division, that is, without need to count votes. As if deliberately trying to be provocative, Townshend wakened America’s phobia in the preamble to the Act, which announced that the proceeds were to be used for raising revenue to help meet the cost of the colonies’ defense and “for defraying the cost of the administration of justice and support of the civil list.” Without this statement, his duties might well have raised no storm. Folly had now set sail.

How could it have happened? Townshend himself was a reckless self-aggrandizer; the real responsibility lay with Government and Parliament. The Duke of Grafton’s excuse in his memoirs that only Chatham had the authority to dismiss Townshend and that “nothing less could have stopped the measure” is frail. A united Cabinet with any sense of the responsibility of government could simply have accepted the threatened resignation and taken its chances of survival. The Parliament of England, Europe’s oldest representative assembly in national experience, could have given thought to possible consequences before rushing into enactment. Even the Rockinghams raised no voice to halt the measure. “The friends of America are too few,” wrote Charles Garth, agent for South Carolina, “to have any share in a struggle with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Irate articles in the press and indignant paipphlets were demanding that the ingrate colonies be made to recognize British sovereignty. Rather than conciliate the Americans, Government and Parliament were in a mood for a rap on the knuckles. The Townshend Duties fitted right in.

Their author did not live to witness the fate of his measure. He contracted what was called a “fever” that summer and after several false recoveries, the inconstant career of such short but momentous import for America ended in death in September 1767 at the age of 42. “Poor Charles Townshend is fixed at last,” commented a fellow-member.

Through these events the great Chatham was beyond reach. The distracted Duke of Grafton kept entreating to see him, to consult him just for half an hour, for ten minutes, and the King added his pleas in letter after letter, even proposing to visit the sick man himself. Replies came from Lady Chatham, the ailing man’s beloved wife and blessing of his tortured existence, who refused for him because of his “utter disability … increase of illness … unspeakable affliction.” Colleagues thought he might be malingering but when Grafton at last, after repeated pressure, was admitted for a few moments’ visit, he found a shattered man, “nerves and spirits affected to a dreadful degree … the great mind bowed down and thus weakened by disorder.”

Isolated at Pynsent, Chatham in a manic upswing ordered the gardener to have the bare hill that bounded the view covered by a planting of evergreens. Told that “all the nurseries in this county would not furnish a hundredth part” of what would be needed, he nonetheless ordered the man to obtain the trees from London, from where they were brought down by wagon. Pynsent was an estate willed to Pitt by its irascible owner, a kinsman of Lord North, who had been so enraged by North’s vote for the cider tax that he had him burnt in effigy and changed his will, leaving his estate to the national hero. To occupy it, Pitt had sold his own estate of Hayes, where he had spent great sums buying up nearby houses to “free himself from the neighborhood.” Now he was seized by an insistent desire to recover Hayes and could not rest until his wife, forced to beg the influence of her brothers, with whom Chatham had quarreled, was able to persuade the new owner to sell it back.

No happier at Hayes, in the grip of gout and despair, Chatham could bear no contact. He refused to see or communicate with anyone, could not suffer his own children in the house, would not speak to servants, sometimes not even to his wife. Meals had to be kept hot at all times to be wheeled in at irregular hours when he sounded his bell. His temper erupted at the slightest defect. For days at a time he sat staring vacantly out the window. No visitor was admitted, but Lord Camden, told of the condition, said, “Then he is mad.” Others called it “gout in the head.”

Gout in the days of heavy diet and heavy drinking of fortified wines played a role in the fate of nations. It was a cause of the abdication of Charles V, Emperor in the time of the Renaissance Popes. A leading physician of Chatham’s time, Dr. William Cadogan, maintained that the disease had three causes, “Indolence, Intemperance and Vexation” (in modern times ascertained to be an overproduction of uric acid in the blood, which, when not absorbed, causes the inflammation and pain), and that an active and frugal life was the best preventive and possible cure. That physical exercise and a vegetarian diet were remedial was known, but the theory of opposites, one of the least helpful precepts of 18th-century medicine, was preferred by Chatham’s physician, a Dr. Addington. A specialist in lunacy, or “mad-doctor,” he hoped to induce a violent fit of gout on the theory that this would drive out the mental disorder. He therefore prescribed two glasses of white wine and two of port every day, double his patient’s usual intake, over and above Madeira and port at other intervals. The patient was also to continue eating meat and avoid exercise in the open air, with the natural result that the affliction grew worse. Chatham took no part in government through 1767 and 1768. That he survived at all under Dr. Addington’s regimen and was, indeed, to recover his sanity represents one of man’s occasional triumphs over medicine.

While sometimes linked to gout, probably through pain, madness appeared not infrequently in the 18th-century governing class. Two central figures in the American crisis, Chatham during and George III afterward, showed symptoms of it, and in America, James Otis, who had been acting wildly for some time, went definitely insane in 1768. Walpole’s nephew, the Earl of Orford, from whom he was to inherit the title, was intermittently insane, as were Lord George Germain’s two brothers, one of whom, heir to the Sackville earldom, cut down all the trees at Knole and was declared mentally incompetent by his family and eventually died “in a fit.” The other, Lord John Sackville, a victim of melancholia, spent a wandering life in Europe in secluded poverty “fighting off madness.” The Duchess of Queensberry was “very clever, very whimsical and just not mad.” The poet William Cowper, as already noticed, was mad and so too was the minor poet Christopher Smart, whom Dr. Johnson visited in Bedlam. Lord George Gordon, who led the Gordon riots in 1780, was generally considered crazed. While occasional such cases mentioned in the memoirs may not represent a high incidence, they suggest the likelihood of others that are not mentioned. On the basis of such evidence one cannot say anything significant about madness in the governing class, but only that if Chatham had been healthy the history of America would have been different.

The Townshend Duties met a delayed reaction in America. Many citizens and future loyalists, disturbed by the mob action against lives and property during the Stamp Act crisis, had begun to fear the “patriotic” movement as the vanguard of class “levelling.” They were not anxious to provoke a break with Britain. The New York Assembly, rather than accept suspension, had soberly complied with the Quartering Act. Friction, however, developed soon through harassment by agents of the new American Customs Board, created along with the Townshend Act to administer the new duties. At the same time, Writs of Assistance to allow search of premises had been legalized. Eager to make their fortunes from the penalties they could impose, the Customs agents, with infuriating zeal, halted and inspected everything that floated, boarding ships in every port and on every waterway down to the farmer ferrying chickens across a river in his riverboat.

While tempers rose, America’s cause suddenly found a voice that made everybody listen. It was heard in the Farmer’s Letters, which began appearing in the Pennsylvania Chronicle in December 1767, written by John Dickinson, a Philadelphia lawyer of a prosperous farming family and a future delegate to the Continental Congress. The letters laid out the colonies’ case so cogently and convincingly that they joined the historic company of writings that persuade and move people to action. Newspapers throughout the colonies reprinted them and Governor Bernard of Massachusetts sent a complete set to the agent Richard Jackson in London, warning that unless refuted they could become “a Bill of Rights in the opinion of the Americans.”

Dickinson’s theme was the necessity for unity among the colonies to protest against the New York Suspending Act, which he called a “dreadful stroke,” and the Revenue Act. He asserted that any tax raised for revenue was unconstitutional and that therefore there was no difference between the Townshend Duties and the Stamp Tax. The colonies owed no contribution to governing costs since Britain already reaped profit from control of their trade. To apply the duties toward the civil list and judges’ salaries was the “worst stroke,” absolutely destructive of local control, potentially reducing the colonies to the status of poor Ireland. Dickinson’s most telling point was his suggestion that the reason the duties were so petty was that the British hoped to have them pass virtually unnoticed, thereby establishing a precedent for future taxation. Therefore they must be challenged at once.

Readers sprang to action even if Dickinson’s argument supplied Townshend with a more rational motive for his policy than he in fact had. Americans tended to see a conscious plan to enslave them in every British measure. They assumed the British were more rational, just as the British government assumed they were more rebellious, than was true in either case.

The effect of the Farmer’s Letters was to fire up resistance to the Revenue Act, set Sam Adams on the stump with his calls to the mob and elicit from the Massachusetts Assembly a circular letter summoning the other colonies to resist any tax revenue. Britain’s response came from a figure of new consequence, Lord Hillsborough, whom fate seems to have selected to ensure that Townshend’s death would not empty the cornucopia of mischief. Hillsborough had moved into control of American affairs in place of Lord Shelburne, whom the Duke of Grafton, under pressure from the King and from the Bedfords, whose alliance Grafton needed, had been forced to remove. Not a man for the axe, Grafton split Shelburne’s office to create a new office of Secretary for the Colonies, to which Hillsborough was named. Because he held an Irish peerage with large estate, Hillsborough opposed any softening toward the colonies in fear, shared by other Irish landowners, of his tenants’ migrating to America and emptying his rent-rolls. Though he had held many offices, he was not known for tact or reason; even George III, who shared the same deficiency, said he did not know “a man of less judgment than Lord Hillsborough.” This shortcoming promptly made itself felt.

In a peremptory letter, the new Secretary ordered the Massachusetts Assembly to rescind its circular letter under pain of dissolution if it refused and informed other governors that any other assembly that followed Massachusetts’ seditious example was likewise to be dissolved. The punitive tone of his letter and its implication that Americans were to be compelled to accept taxation or have their representative assemblies closed down ignited outrage where there had been little before. When Massachusetts refused loudly and passionately to rescind, Pennsylvania and other colonies that had refused her first call now adopted resolutions on the Massachusetts model in defiance of Hillsborough. Self-interest in preserving the empire was not doing well in his hands.

At the same time the Customs Board, growing nervous, appealed in February 1768 for a warship and troops for protection. The arrival of H.M.S. Romney in Boston harbor from Halifax emboldened the Customs Board to seize John Hancock’s ship Liberty, setting off such a riot that the Customs Commissioners fled aboard the Romney in fear for their lives. Fearful of the mounting disorder, General Gage ordered two regiments down from Halifax; two more arrived from the mother country in November. “To have a standing army! Good God!” wrote a Bostonian, after watching the redcoats parade through the city. “What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty!” It would “hasten that independency which at present the warmest among us deprecate.”

Without any plan or decision, the use of armed force for coercion had entered the conflict. The unwisdom of this procedure disturbed many Englishmen including the Duke of Newcastle, now 75, who had administered the colonies as Secretary of State for a quarter century in his early days and believed that “Measures of Power and Force” should be avoided in dealing with them. “The measure of conquering the colonies and obliging them to submit is now becoming more popular,” he wrote to Rockingham. “I must in conscience protest against it and I hope our friends will well consider before they give in to so destructive a measure.”

The weight of the Cabinet, gradually infused by Bedfords and the King’s friends, was tipping the other way. Conway, who alone had tried to check Townshend and curtail the New York Suspending Act, resigned as Secretary of State, though retaining a minor post. His place was filled by a port-loving lord of small account except as a Bedford “connexion,” Viscount Weymouth, whose specialty was gambling all night and losing so consistently that his house was filled with bailiffs. As Secretary of State, he continued in his habits, going to bed at 6:00 a.m. and rising after noon “to the total neglect of the affairs of his office, the business of which was managed as much as it could be by Mr. Wood, his under-secretary.” Townshend’s empty place as Chancellor of the Exchequer was taken over by Lord North, an equable, comfortable person with a good deal of common sense and few strong opinions, though belonging to the no-compromise side. Two other places were filled by peers of the Bedford faction: Earl Gower when Lord Northington died, and the Earl of Rochford, recently Ambassador to Spain, where in order to leave Madrid he had to pawn his silver plate and jewels for £6000 to pay his debts. He was now named Secretary of State when Shelburne, the only Cabinet member to oppose Hillsborough’s coercive measures, finally resigned—or was pushed—after holding on to the rump of his office for eight months. Informed of his departure, Chatham, on the way to recovery, sent in the Privy Seal, officially resigning his office.

What had once been Chatham’s government now belonged to the Bloomsbury Gang, so called from the Duke of Bedford’s residence in Bloomsbury Square. The Duke himself, aside from great wealth and the many offices he had held in the previous reign and aside from his powers, positions and titles in Bedfordshire, owed his influence to a supremely developed sense of status and self-assurance. He was said to be the only man who could speak openly against Pitt in his great days. He had served as Lord President of the Council and real head of the Grenville government, generally spoken of as the Bedford ministry, but now, afflicted by gout, he exerted his influence through his followers while spending most of his time at Woburn Abbey, his country home. Together with his brother-in-law Earl Gower and his son-in-law the 4th Duke of Marlborough, he controlled thirteen seats in the House of Commons. Though intelligent and warm-hearted, Bedford was hot-tempered, wrong-headed and obstinate. His entourage included masters of jobbing and electioneering and the strongest advocates of coercing the colonies. Six frigates and a brigade, they kept telling the King, would be enough to suppress American insolence.

King George had only one idea of policy with regard to the colonies: that “it was the indispensable duty of his subjects in America to obey the Acts of the Legislature of Great Britain,” and that the King “expects and requires a cheerful obedience to the same.” In the conduct of government, his influence was more pernicious because he was convinced of his royal duty to purify it after the model of his schoolboy idol, Alfred the Great. Through the Bedfords, he now interfered more than ever, appointing and dismissing ministers at will, controlling patronage, accepting no collective policy from the Cabinet but dealing with individual ministers in reference only to their own departments, even suggesting who was to speak in debates in the House of Commons. His choices for office tended to be courtiers of rank who had made themselves agreeable to him but whose talent or training for government was not likely to be greater than his own.

American eruptions at every tax and every measure proved to the Bedfords that the colonists were bent on breaking the mercantilist system and obtaining free trade and would raise the cry of “Tyranny!” at every act of Parliament. If given in to, their protest would soon leave not a shred of sovereignty remaining.

As regards trade, these apprehensions were not misplaced. Breaking the mercantilist yoke while developing home industries was indeed an idea that had taken hold of the Americans, prompted by the success of Non-Importation. By provoking the colonists’ turn to homemade cloth and other goods, Britain had brought upon herself the very impulse toward commercial independence she was most determined to prevent. Even to Pitt, mercantilist regulation had always been the essence of colonial policy. “Not a hobnail or a horseshoe,” he once declared, should the colonies be allowed to manufacture. Now the impulse was reinvigorated. In August and September 1768, the merchants of Boston and New York agreed to cease importing from Britain until the Townshend Duties were repealed. Philadelphia’s merchants joined the agreement a few months later, followed by most of the other colonies through the course of 1769. Home weaving by organized groups of “Daughters of Liberty” had in fact continued since the Stamp Act. The graduating class of Harvard College in 1768 and the first graduating class and President of Rhode Island College (now Brown) in 1769 all appeared in clothes of American homespun.

At home the return of Wilkes reawakened a furor of resentment against the Government when he was re-elected to Parliament from Middlesex, London’s county, and re-expelled by the government majority in the House. At once his cause rallied all opponents of the royal prerogative and invigorated the Radicals’ movement for parliamentary reform to replace the patronage system by genuine elections. All the causes of “Liberty,” including the friends of America opposed to coercion, coalesced, lending one another strength.

The cry “Wilkes and Liberty!” resounded as the protagonist stood again for Middlesex, was defiantly returned by its voters, again expelled, again elected and expelled a third time. He became both a constitutional symbol and a popular hero, focus of the commoners’ discontents. When the Government put up its own candidate for Middlesex and declared him elected by ruling out the votes for Wilkes, tumult and agitation convulsed London. The city “is a daily scene of lawless riots and confusion,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. “Mobs patrol the streets at noonday, some knocking down all that will not roar for Wilkes and liberty.” Coalers, sailors, watermen and all sorts of rioters overturned carriages, looted shops, broke into noble residences, while the ministry was “divided in their counsels” and apprehensive of what might come.

By its fatuous suppression of the Middlesex vote, the Government aroused the ever-ready cry of alarm about English liberties. The connection with American liberties, constantly propounded among the Wilkesites by the more active American agents, was confirmed. “The persons who wish to enslave America, would, if it lay in their power, enslave us,” said a linen draper and elector of London during the canvass for votes in 1768. The 236 elected councilmen and 26 aldermen, mainly shopkeepers and self-employed artisans, who made up the London Court of Common Council, condemned virtually every measure for coercion of the colonies.

At the head of the advocates was the Lord Mayor himself, the spirited merchant William Beckford, who, like most partisans of America, reached that position through his advocacy of Wilkes; to oppose the Government on one was to oppose it on both. As the scion of a wealthy Jamaica family of sugar planters and the island’s largest landowner, Beckford enlarged his fortune in English commerce, rose from alderman to sheriff to Lord Mayor and addressed to the King the protest of the city of London against the doctoring of the Middlesex election. Though snobbishly said by Walpole to act from “a confused heap of knowledge … so uncorrected by judgment that his absurdities were made but more conspicuous by his vanity,” he made a bold voice among the critics of American policy. English Radicals reflected the colonists’ view of a ministerial conspiracy to suppress their liberties. Josiah Wedgwood, a leading Radical, believed the Townshend Act was a deliberate effort toward that end, although he thought it would be counter-productive in that it would accelerate American independence by a century.

The London Magazine in August 1768 compared the authors and abettors of “the present impolitick measures against America” to the Crown and its “wretched ministers” of the 17th century. “From our own observations we will venture to say that nine persons in ten, even in this country, are friends to the Americans” and believe they “have right on their side.” Nine out of ten was certainly exaggerated; some journals estimated the proportions just in reverse. Ralph Izard, an American resident in London, judged that four out of five Britons were opposed to America and that Parliament’s support of the Government correctly reflected public opinion. When the opposition regularly produced no more than eighty votes, “you may depend on it, the measure is not thought a bad one, for corruption does not reach that deep.” Public opinion is hard to judge from the contemporary press because many of the pro-American articles were contributed anonymously or under pseudonyms by Americans in London. Nevertheless, English printers would not have given the fair amount of space they did to paragraphs and letters favorable to the colonies if an important section of public opinion had not opposed the Government’s policies.

It should be added that the political concerns of public opinion are often overestimated by posterity. The real interest in 1768 among the governing class was not the Americans or even Wilkes but the scandal caused by the Duke of Grafton in “defying all decency” by escorting his mistress, Nancy Parsons, to the opera in the presence of his divorced Duchess and the Queen. Grafton was at least divorced, which most men who kept mistresses were not, but this did not reduce the scandal. Daughter of a Bond Street tailor and former mistress of a West Indies merchant, Nancy was also known as Mrs. Hoghton, having acquired marital status along her way, but that too failed to palliate society’s scorn. The fact that Grafton “paraded” her in public and sat her at the head of his table excited a peculiar indignation. It was the sensation of the season. Nancy quite blanketed out the obstreperous colonists.

Indignant protests in Parliament from Virginia, Pennsylvania and other colonies showed that resistance to the Revenue Act was spreading and cold figures confirmed the fact. From 1768 to 1769, English exports to America dropped by a third, from £2,400,000 to £1,600,000. New York cut its imports to one-seventh of what they had been in 1764, from £482,000 in that year to £74,000 in 1769. Boston’s imports were cut in half, those of other colonies, where compliance with Non-Importation was uneven, by less. Receipts from the Townshend Duties in their first year amounted to £16,000, compared to military expenditures for America of £170,000. Even Hillsborough, as Secretary for the Colonies, had to admit that the Townshend Act was “so anti-commercial that he wished it had never existed,” while the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North, said the duties were “so preposterous that he was amazed that they had ever been passed by the British Parliament.” Both gentlemen had voted for the Act they now deplored.

Rather than conciliate for the sake of quickly terminating Non-Importation, the Government’s instinct was punitive. Having maneuvered itself into a situation of challenge from its subjects, it felt obliged to make a demonstration of authority, the more so as it was feared that American protest, if it succeeded, would inspire the spirit of emulation in English and Irish mobs. Hillsborough, like Rehoboam, believed effective demonstration lay in being as rough as possible. He resurrected from the autocratic era of Henry VIII an ancient statute providing for trial in England of persons accused of treason outside the kingdom and this was moved by the Duke of Bedford as a parliamentary resolution with reference to the offenses of Massachusetts. The Commons concurred, the Chathamites of Grafton’s group in the Government seem to have raised no objection and the order was duly transmitted to Governor Bernard in Boston. Reaction was naturally violent. Citizens to be snatched from home and delivered to trial in hostile surroundings 3000 miles from friends and defenders! Here was tyranny unconcealed!

At the same time in England the basic fear of the encouragement being given to American industry by the Non-Importation movement was taking effect. Having recklessly provoked the boycott, Government and Parliament now began to consider how to undo the damage by repeal. The Stamp Act experience was re-enacted as if the governing establishment of Britain were under a gambler’s compulsion to keep placing its chips on the same squares where they had lost before. The process of repealing the Townshend Act took more than a year, from March 1769 to May 1770, during which other measures taken to discipline the colonies were as counter-productive as the one undergoing cancellation.

By now accumulated folly was fully perceived and explicitly and derisively denounced in the year’s debates. Opposition speakers roused to outrage against the Government over the non-seating of Wilkes, which was considered a “violation of the sacred right of election” and an “overturn of the whole constitution,” felt free to castigate the Government equally severely on America. Burke launched his sarcasm, Colonel Barré his scorn; Lord Mayor Beckford observed “that it was a strange piece of policy to expend £500,000 a year to assist the Customs-House officers in collecting £295, which was the whole net produce of the taxes there.” The hero of the debates was none of these but former Governor Thomas Pownall speaking from seven years’ experience in America in the administration of four different colonies. In long, cogent, irrefutable argument and evidence, he was perhaps the only one to speak from genuine disinterest and genuine concern to restore good relations with America. Other critics, with scoffing invective and exaggerated sympathy for the oppressed colonists—whom Barré described as the “honest, faithful, loyal, and till that moment, as subjects, irreproachable people of Massachusetts”—were more concerned to bring down the Government than to reconcile it with America. The Government complacently ignored the criticism, secure in its large majority.

Pownall laid bare the follies. Instead of ordering the billeting and supply of troops by the Quartering Act, which instantly aroused colonial protest, the process should be left “to the people themselves to do it in their own way, and by their own modes of doing business” as they had done during the Seven Years’ War. The commanding officer of any body of soldiers should be empowered to treat with local magistrates to quarter the troops by mutual agreement. In moving repeal of the Townshend Act, he showed how the preamble in announcing the purpose to be revenue for civil government was a “total change” of the system by which the colonies had always controlled public servants by their own legislatures having the grant and disposal of funds for government. In changing that system, the Act was not only unnecessary, since the Declaratory Act already established Parliament’s sovereignty, but “unjust and a grievance in every degree.”

As regards trade, he showed how the Act was “directly contrary to all the principles of commerce respecting your own interests”: it served as a bounty to American manufactures, encouraged contraband and recourse to foreign markets, rendered the colonies “every day less beneficial and advantageous to us and will in the end break off their dependence on us.” If this occasion for rectifying the error were lost, “it is lost forever. If this session elapses with Parliament’s doing nothing, American affairs will perhaps be impracticable forever after. You may exert power over, but you can never govern an unwilling people.” Almost unintentionally, Pownall had formulated a principle worth the attention of all who rule at any time—that government must conduct itself with regard to the feelings of the governed, and ignores them at its peril.

Despite the fact that Pownall’s motion won general agreement (or perhaps because of it), the ministry complained that it was too late in the session to debate a matter of so much consequence for which they were not prepared, and carried a motion to put it off to the next session. This was a fumble because their own desire was to end Non-Importation as quickly as possible. The Cabinet took up the problem during the recess. Grafton and his group, who voted for total repeal, were outvoted by Hillsborough, North and the three Bedford ministers, who insisted on retaining the duty on tea in order to retain the preamble as token of the right to tax for revenue. A resolution of painful straddling was adopted: that no measure would be taken “to derogate in any way from the legislative authority of Great Britain over the colonies”; at the same time it was not the intention to lay “any further taxes” upon America for revenue, and it was the intention at the next session of Parliament “to take off the duties upon paper, glass and colours.” When Hillsborough informed the colonial governors of the intended repeal, he managed to vitiate its effect by omitting “the soothing and conciliatory expressions” which the Grafton group had won consent to introduce. Since the omission of tea indicated that the Act as a whole was not to be repealed, the colonies were not persuaded to call off Non-Importation.

“If you would be but steady in any scheme,” despairingly wrote Thomas Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, “we should come to some sort of settlement in the colonies.… Let me beseech you, repeal as many of the laws now in force as you please,” but implement those that remain effectively. “The longer you delay the more difficult it will be.” He was close to the evidence in Boston, where the press reported that 300 “mistresses of families,” aware that the consumption of tea supported the Customs Commissioners “and other tools of power,” agreed to abstain from tea “until those creatures, together with the Boston Standing Army, are removed and the Revenue Acts repealed.”

Hardly was Parliament reconvened and the debate on America renewed when a crisis emptied the ministry of Grafton, its nominal chief, and his associates. Chatham, returned from the shadows, had risen to express alarm over the Americans’ success in supplying themselves with their own manufactures, and to say, in echo of Pownall’s principle, that “the discontent of two millions* of people deserved consideration and the foundation of it ought to be removed.” That was the only way to stop the “combinations and manufactures” in America. Chatham’s major eloquence, however, was spent on the non-seating of Wilkes, and when he proposed a motion condemning it, Lord Chancellor Camden, with independent courage, voted for the motion, against the Government of which he was a member, and was accordingly dismissed from office. Perhaps he welcomed the result for he confessed in Parliament that often in the Cabinet he merely hung his head in silence to register disapproval of measures which he knew overt opposition could not prevent.

A tragedy was the result. When Charles Yorke, former Attorney-General and son of a former Lord Chancellor, was offered the post that was his life’s ambition in a government that he and his family and friends opposed, and was strongly pressed by the King with promise of a peerage, he accepted against his conscience. That evening, reproached by associates and tortured by ambivalence, he committed suicide. As the man who had offered Yorke the post, Grafton, shaken by the death and dispirited by inability to control policy, resigned, followed by the two generals, Conway and Granby.

The new First Minister, forever to be associated with the American Revolution, was the amiable Lord North, who during his years of increasingly distracted office was to gain a clear idea of what a chief minister’s qualifications should be—and was sure he did not have them. In one of his periodic letters to the King begging to be allowed to resign, he wrote that the office should be held by “a man of great abilities, and who is confident of his abilities, who can choose decisively, and carry his determination authoritatively into execution … and be capable of forming wise plans and of combining and connecting the whole force and operations of government.” It was an excellent prescription and it concluded, “I am certainly not such a man.”

Nevertheless, as the King’s personal choice, North was to last, however unwillingly, for twelve critical years in the office that had had five occupants in the last decade. Fat-cheeked and corpulent, with bulging eyes, he bore a startling resemblance to George III, which was often made the subject of ribald suggestion, referring to the close connection of North’s parents with the household of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. At the time of North’s birth his father, the Earl of Guilford, served the Prince as Lord of the Bedchamber. North was christened Frederick for the Prince, who was his godfather, if nothing closer. In addition to physical resemblance, both North and George III suffered blindness in their last years.

In temperament, Lord North happily escaped resemblance to the King, being known, in Gibbon’s words, for “the felicity of his incomparable temper.” It was said that only one man, a drunken stupid groom, had ever been known to make him angry; unimproved and always forgiven, the man died still in North’s service. Elected from the family-controlled pocket borough of Banbury with thirteen voters, North entered the House of Commons at 22 and represented the same borough for the rest of his life. When appointed chief minister, he was 38, awkward in movement with weak eyesight and a tongue too large for his mouth “which rendered his articulation somewhat thick though not at all indistinct.” One who profited from education at Eton, at Oxford and on a three-year Grand Tour, he was proficient in Greek and Latin, spoke French, German and Italian, and when wide enough awake, sprinkled his speeches with classical allusions, foreign phrases and flashes of wit and genial humor.

If he could not hide from the harassments of office, he took refuge from them by sleeping on the front bench during debates. Asking to be wakened when Grenville in the course of a ponderous and long-winded discourse should reach modern times, and nudged when the speaker was citing a precedent of 1688, he opened an eye, muttered “a hundred years too soon” and relapsed into somnolence. He carried the habit to Cabinet meetings, where, according to Charles James Fox, who later served with him, “he was so far from leading the opinions of other ministers that he seldom gave his own and generally slept the greater part of the time he was with them.” This did not conduce to firm collective policy.

If seldom voiced, North’s opinions were firmly on the Right. He voted for the cider tax, for the expulsion of Wilkes, for the Stamp Act and against its repeal. Although against compromise with America, he was in practice ready to proceed by conciliation toward a possible middle ground, and “heartily wished to repeal the whole of the [Townshend] law” if he could have done it without giving up “that just right which I shall ever wish the mother country to possess, the right of taxing the Americans.” Though not a member of the Bedford clique, he was acceptable to them or he could not have been named First Minister. His chief disability lay in the extended and tight-fisted life of his father, who lived to be 86, depriving his son of the inheritance of a considerable fortune until he was old and blind and within two years of his own death. The result was that with a large family to support and an important position to keep up, North was in financial straits throughout his political life, dependent on office and obligated to the King, who, however kindly and tactfully, gave his First Minister £ 20,000 to pay his debts. Under such circumstances, independence of mind or action was less than likely.

When debate was renewed from March to May 1770, opposition speakers unsparingly depicted the Government’s record in America since the Townshend Act as a series of infirm policies, contradictory measures, irresolute and in some cases unconstitutional action and judgments contrary to Britain’s interest—in short, as folly. The terrible Colonel Barré excoriated the Cabinet for taking it upon itself to inform the Americans of its intention to repeal the duties before Parliament had acted, thus inspiring them “with a most contemptible idea of the measures of Parliament and the imbecility of those by whom lawful government is administered.” He scolded them further for reviving the statute from “the tyrannical reign of Henry VIII” and yet, “with weakness no less conspicuous than their wickedness … they had not the resolution to execute it.”

Pownall explained that it was the preamble to the Act “which gives the offence and raises the alarm in America”; in order to remove it, the whole Townshend Act must be repealed and exclude tea, and he so moved. Grenville, acknowledging himself the originator of the controversy with America, offered the unhelpful opinion that partial repeal would not satisfy the colonies while total repeal would not “sufficiently provide for the dignity of the nation,” and therefore he would abstain from voting. An independent member, Sir William Meredith, found the Government “so perversely, so inflexibly persisting in error on every occasion” as to cause surprise, in Dryden’s phrase, “that ‘they never deviate into sense’ nor stumble upon propriety by downright accident.” Since the tea duty, he added, would never pay for the cost of collecting it and the deficiency would have to be made up from the “coffers of this kingdom,” the result would merely be “to plunder ourselves.” Although Government majority prevailed over common sense, defeating Pownall’s motion by 204 to 142, common sense made an impression, for the yeas were almost twice the regular number of pro-American votes.

Again Pownall returned to the offensive when the debate turned to American policy as a whole. He showed that the real apprehension of the colonies, apart from taxation, was of a British “design to alter their civil constitution.” They found it confirmed in Hillsborough’s order dissolving their assemblies and in the Townshend Act preamble, which they feared would “render all their assemblies useless.” By this time news had reached England of the so-called Boston Massacre, which had raised local emotions to such a pitch that to prevent further incident, the redcoats who had been sent to cow Boston had to be removed, with less than glory to British arms, to the safety of Castle William in Boston Harbor. The withdrawal gave opportunity for the “infinite wit and raillery” of Mr. Edmund Burke, who of all the speakers of his time is the best known to posterity.

Burke’s ideas had the great advantage of being housed in mastery and felicity of language. Had his ideas been fuzzy, verbal beauties would not have helped, but his political thinking was acute and incisive. Though often prolix and overstated, his remarks became epigrams because they were so well phrased. He had a way of “winding into his subject like a serpent,” said Oliver Goldsmith, who thought him in conversation the equal of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson agreed. “Burke talks because his mind is full.… No man of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England.” He often talked at such length as to empty the House and so vehemently that his friends had to hold him down by the skirts of his coat to restrain his passion, but his wit and intelligence prevailed. The bite of his speeches on America, wrote Horace Walpole, excited “continual bursts of laughter even from Lord North and the Ministers themselves.” His pathos “drew iron tears from Barré’s cheek”; his scorn would have excited strangers, if they had not been excluded from a certain debate, “to tear ministers to pieces as they went out of the House.”

Burke had no difficulty in making the Government look foolish with his list of its infirm chastisements of the colonies: how the Massachusetts Assembly, after being ordered to rescind its seditious resolution or suffer dissolution, was permitted to sit again without rescinding; how the other assemblies under the same threat defied the penalty and “treated the Secretary of State’s letter with contempt”; how the pains of the Henry VIII statute “never were, as it was known they never would be, carried into execution”; how a fleet and army sent to Boston to control the situation “are now withdrawn out of the town”; how in sum “the malignity of your will is abhorred and the debility of your power is condemned,” which has ever been the case of “government without wisdom.”

The majority, of course, defeated Burke’s eight resolutions of censure, and the same fate met a similar censure moved in the House of Lords by the young Duke of Richmond, a new and important, if rather too independent, recruit to the American cause who was to become an eminent opponent of Government policy.

Richmond was a glittering personage who personified in many ways the unreality of 18th-century English government. He was so heavily weighted with fortune’s goods that they hampered his thorough performance of any one task. A great-grandson of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, a brother of the lovely Lady Sarah Lennox, whom George III wanted to marry, he was dignified, courteous, strikingly handsome and together with his wife, also of a ducal family, made “the prettiest couple in England.” Duke at fifteen, colonel of his regiment at 23, Ambassador to France and briefly Secretary of State under Rockingham at 31, he had youth, beauty, great riches, highest rank, military valor, intelligence and capacity for hard work, a network of political connections and “all the blood of kings from Bruce to Charles II.” Not surprisingly, with these attributes, he was tactless, hot-tempered, unable to bend to other men or to political necessities, intolerant of inadequacies in others and given to quarreling with family, friends, subordinates and with the King in the first year of his reign so that he resigned from a post in the royal household and was pursued by royal animosity thereafter.

Intent on exposing abuses, Richmond harassed Army, Admiralty and Treasury with his searching questions, which did not make him popular. He could arrive in town on the morning of a debate, master the issues in a quick study and speak on them effectively the same afternoon. Defeat of his aims and purposes, however, turned him quickly sour, causing repeated threats to retire from politics altogether. He suffered periods of depression, one in 1769 of which he wrote to Rockingham, “I must for some time at least indulge myself in my present disposition which I will give no name to.” At home in Sussex he spent vast sums on new wings to Goodwood House, on dog kennels and race track, yacht, hunting and the local militia and, after inheriting a great estate worth £68,000 with an additional annual income of £20,000 from coal duties, found himself £95,000 in debt forty years later. His interest in government, like that of others of his kind, often slipped below other matters. It was unreasonable of Burke, Richmond once wrote to him, to want him to come down to London before Parliament convened. His opinion carried “little weight,” therefore for him to confer with political associates had no purpose. “No, let me enjoy myself here till the meeting, and then at your desire I will go to town and look about me for a few days.”

Unrestrained in the 1770 debate, he described ministerial conduct in America as that of either “artful knave or incorrigible fool” and either way, “the ministers are a disgrace to the very name of government.” He proposed eighteen resolutions of censure covering all acts and measures since 1768 and concluding that “these many and ill-judged proceedings have been a principal cause of the aforesaid disorders.” Goaded to reply, Hillsborough made the usual defense of the need to establish authority, and added a charge that “our patriots” of the opposition were stimulating colonial protest and “continually throwing obstacles in the way of reconciliation” out of “the patriotic wish of getting into place.… In fact, my lords, their whole patriotism is a despicable avarice of employment … so they can succeed to office.”

While obviously underrating the colonies’ native resistance, Hillsborough had a point about the motives of the opposition. Their “avarice” for office, however, was not as strong as their inertia of political organization. They were ineffectual because, owing to feuds and differences, they could not find common ground to form a solid front. “Dowdeswell [former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Rockingham] was devilish sulky at Lord Chatham,” wrote Richmond to Rockingham at this time, “and Burke is all combustible.” Burke could not take Chatham’s arrogance and Chatham could not endure a strong-minded intellectual equal as an ally. Although Rockingham tried to bring Chatham into a team that would work together under his captaincy, Chatham would accept only on conditions establishing his own dominion. Shelburne, disgusted with the helplessness of being in a perpetual minority, went abroad with Barré in 1771. Richmond and Rockingham were lured by their country acres and, as a contemporary satire put it,

With hound and horn her truant schoolboys roam
And for a fox-hunt quit St. Stephen’s dome*

In America, no heightened protest followed Parliament’s maintenance of the Townshend preamble and tea duty. As often happens, the logical course of events suffered quirks and diversions. Among the colonial propertied class, fear of mobs and social upheaval had begun to erode their support of the “patriotic” movement. Its impetus dwindled. Wearying of Non-Importation, New York proposed a conference of the northern seaports to decide on a common policy. Merchants of Boston and Philadelphia, also eager to resume trade, were prevented by the agitators. When the proposed conference fell through, New York, rather than be cheated while “starving on the slender Meals of patriotism,” abandoned Non-Importation and opened its port in 1772. Separately, at different times, the other colonies followed, agitation subsided and the absence of unity confirmed Britain in the assumption that the colonies would never join in a common front and that loyalist sentiment and economic self-interest would prevail over seditious impulse.

With feelings intense in Parliament over the Wilkes issue, Lord North’s policy was to keep American affairs out of the House of Commons, and for two years, owing to the lull in the colonies, he succeeded. This could have been a period of compromise and possible reunion if a positive effort had been made. The colonies were bent on redress of grievances and autonomy in their own affairs, not on independence. On the contrary, the Stamp Act Congress had asserted that they “most ardently” desired “perpetual continuance” of the ancient tie with Britain. Even the Massachusetts Assembly, the most aggressive in sentiment, had disavowed in 1768 “the most distant thought of independence,” claiming that the colonies “would refuse it if offered to them and would deem it the greatest misfortune to be obliged to accept it.” George III, Lord North, Hillsborough and the Bedfords, however, were not equipped for positive effort or creative government. In the lull, the sails of folly were furled for the moment—until the affair of the Gaspée in 1772.

[neil]

4. “Remember Rehoboam!”: 1772–76
The Gaspée was a British customs schooner under a bellicose commander, Lieutenant Dudington, who pursued his task as if he carried a personal warrant from the King to stamp out smuggling in the thousand isles and inlets of Narragansett Bay. Boarding and examining every ship he met, threatening to blow recalcitrant skippers out of the water, he aroused a lust for revenge in the Rhode Islanders that found its moment when his schooner ran aground below Providence. Within hours local seafarers organized eight boatloads of men who attacked the ship, wounded Lieutenant Dudington, put him and his crew ashore and burned the Gaspée.

As so often, Britain’s response started out sternly and ended feebly. The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General decided that the attack on the Gaspée was an act of war on the King and as such was treasonable, requiring the culprits to be sent to England for trial. First they had to be discovered. A Royal Proclamation offered a £500 reward and the King’s pardon to informants, and an imposing Commission of Inquiry consisting of the Governor of Rhode Island and the chief justices of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Boston was appointed to indict the suspects. This announcement revived every slumbering suspicion of a conspiracy against liberty. Rhode Island, together with Massachusetts the most intractable of the colonies, shook with cries of “Tyranny!” and “Slavery!” “Ten thousand deaths by the haltar and the ax” proclaimed the Newport Mercury in outraged italics, were preferable “to a miserable life of slavery in chains under a pack of worse than Egyptian tyrants.” No informants came forward; no suspects could be found although every neighbor knew who they were. After several hollow sessions in Newport, the Court of Inquiry in all their wigs and scarlet sheepishly adjourned, never to reconvene. One more chastisement went unexecuted, confirming the perception of Britain as both despotic in intent and ineffectual in execution.

The consequence was important because Rhode Island’s roars of protest caused a decisive step toward unity. Following a model created among the towns of Massachusetts, Virginia’s House of Burgesses invited the colonies to form Committees of Correspondence to consult on joint acts and methods of resistance. Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry served on Virginia’s Committee. This was the beginning of the development toward intercolonial union, which Britain remained confident could never occur and on whose non-occurrence her confidence rested. The Committees excited little attention—except in moments of confrontation, American affairs on the whole did not. The letters of Mrs. Delany, a well-connected lady and wife of an Anglican dean who corresponded actively throughout this period with friends and relatives in social and literary circles, do not notice America at all.

The two legal officers of the home government who were immediately responsible for the Gaspée order, Edward Thurlow, the Attorney-General, and Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, were an unpleasant pair. Unmanageable as a schoolboy, expelled from Cambridge University for insolence and misconduct, surly and assertive in the law, Thurlow had a savage temper and reputedly the foulest mouth in London. He was nevertheless an impressive figure, although according to Charles James Fox his deep voice and solemn aspect proved him dishonest “since no man could be as wise as he looked.” His treatment of defendants in court was often offensive. In policy he was inflexible on the demonstration of British sovereignty over America and, although Lord North was known to hate him, the King eventually rewarded his firm support with appointment as Lord Chancellor and a barony to go with it. Equally coercive as regards America, Wedderburn was a Scot of voracious ambition who would use any means, suck up to or betray any associate, to gain advancement. “There was something about him,” said an acquaintance, “that even treachery could not trust.” Although despised by the King, he too eventually became Lord Chancellor.

Yet it was the Cabinet, in which Thurlow and Wedderburn had no place, that ordered the Court of Inquiry and the summons for trial in England, and it was “the good Lord Dartmouth,” as Hillsborough’s successor, who signed the order. In response to an attack on the state, they acted with every conviction of righteousness, and if it was the proper response from the ruler’s point of view, it was utter folly as practical politics. Given the known outrage at the idea of transporting Americans to trial in England, and the obvious unreality of expecting Rhode Islanders to mark their fellows for that fate, the mischief once more lay “in asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” This became very openly apparent at Newport, the hub of coastal communication, from where the impression of the mother country as ineffectual quickly spread.

Lord Dartmouth, although a stepbrother of Lord North, with whom he had grown up and shared the Grand Tour, was an earnest friend of America, possibly as a result of his having joined the Methodists, whose missions and preaching in America were a major activity. Amiable and pious and said to be the model of the virtuous Sir Charles Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s novel of that name, Dartmouth was nicknamed the “psalm-singer.” He had served as President of the Board of Trade in the Rockingham ministry, though credited with very little administrative capacity. Lord North brought him in as Secretary of State for the Colonies when Hillsborough, as a result of an intrigue against him by the Bedfords for reasons of place, not policy, was forced to resign. Alone in the Cabinet as pro-American, Dartmouth “wishes sincerely a good understanding with the colonies,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “but does not have strength equal to his wishes” and while wishing “for the best measure is easily prevailed with to join in the worst.” Gradually, as American intransigence defeated his well-meant paternalism, he was to turn against conciliation in favor of repression.

At this point tea becomes the catalyst. The financial troubles and notorious abuses of the East India Company and its complex financial connections with the Crown had for years been a problem almost as intractable as Wilkes and are relevant here only because they precipitated the period of no return in the British-American quarrel. To evade the tea duty, Americans had been smuggling Dutch tea, reducing the sale of the Company’s tea by almost two-thirds. To rescue the Company, whose solvency was essential to London for an amount of £400,000 a year, Lord North devised a scheme by which the surplus tea piling up in Company warehouses could be sold directly to America, skipping England and the English customs duty. If the duty in America was reduced to 3d. a pound, the tea could be sold at 10s. instead of 20s. a pound. Considering the Americans’ known extraordinary fondness for tea, the lowered price was expected to overcome their patriotic resistance to paying duty. A million Americans reportedly drank tea twice a day, and according to one report from Philadelphia “the women are such slaves to it that they would rather go without their dinner than without a dish of tea.” Since the collapse of Non-Importation, restored trade, apart from tea, had mollified both sides and many people thought past troubles were now a bygone issue. The Tea Act of May 1773 accordingly passed by Parliament with no expectation of another American outburst.

That the British were invincibly uninformed—and stayed uninformed—about the people they insisted on ruling was a major problem of the imperial-colonial relationship. Only some fifteen years had elapsed, Colonel Barré told Josiah Quincy, agent of Massachusetts, since two-thirds of the people of Great Britain were of the opinion that Americans were Negroes. Americans in London like Arthur Lee of Virginia, who had been partly educated in England and lived there for ten years prior to hostilities, and Henry Laurens, a wealthy merchant-planter of Charleston and future President of the Continental Congress, and such other South Carolina planters as Ralph Izard and Charles Pinckney associated mostly with merchants and men of the City. Although friendly with Burke, Shelburne and other partisans, they had no entrée into aristocratic society, which in turn knew nothing of them.

Pamphlets and petitions, Dickinson’s Letters, Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America and many other polemics on issues and sentiments of the colonies were published in London, but the peers and country squires hardly read them. Special agents like Josiah Quincy were more often than not refused hearings in the Commons on one technical ground or another. “In all companies I have endeavored to give a true state of the affairs of the Continent and of the genuine sentiments of its inhabitants,” Quincy wrote home, but he added no assurance of a successful effort. Fixed in the preconception of “our inherent pre-eminence,” in Hillsborough’s phrase, Englishmen held to the view of Americans as uncouth obstreperous trouble-makers, regardless of the example in their midst, among others, of Benjamin Franklin, as variously talented and politically sophisticated as anyone in Europe, and thoroughly dedicated to the goal of reconciliation.

The attitude of America’s friends was also wide of the mark. Rockingham thought of Britain as the parent and the colonies as “the children [who] ought to be dutiful.” Chatham shared this view, although if either had visited America, attended the colonial assemblies, experienced the mood of the people, he might have come away with some remedial knowledge. It is an astonishing fact that, apart from Army and Navy officers, no minister of a British government from 1763 to 1775, much less before or after, ever visited the trans-Atlantic provinces upon which they felt the empire depended.

They were more determined to maintain a firm hold because they believed that the Americans were bent on rebellion and their independence would mean England’s ruin. Chatham’s insistence on conciliation was based on his fear that if America were driven to resistance by force and the empire were lost, France or Spain would acquire it and “if this happens, England is no more.” Losing that tremendous stake, she would be cut off from development as a world power. Murkily, the King had something of this in mind when he wrote, “We must get the Colonies in order before we engage our neighbors.”

In another sense, too, Chatham felt, as many did, that England’s fate was tied to the colonies, “for if liberty be not countenanced in America, it will sicken, fade and die in this country.” That was the argument of liberty. The argument of power held that if untaxed, the colonies would attract many English skilled workmen and manufacturers to settle there, would prosper and eventually dominate, leaving old England “A poor deserted deplorable Kingdom.” Letters to the press worried this theme, some predicting that America would soon surpass in population the mother country “and then how are we to rule them?” or even become the seat of empire after two centuries. If Americans outnumbered Englishmen, stated the St. James Chronicle on Christmas Eve 1772, then only natural interest and friendship in some form of commonwealth could keep America attached to Britain, so that united they might “defy the world in arms.”

The Tea Act proved a startling disappointment. Instead of happily acquiescing in cheap tea, Americans exploded in wrath not so much from popular feeling as from agitation inspired by the merchants, who saw themselves eliminated as wholesalers and their trade ruined through underselling by the East India Company. Ship owners and builders, captains and crews, whose livelihood was in smuggling, also felt threatened. Political agitators, delighted to have a cause again, accommodated them. They raised the horrid cry of “Monopoly” about to grip America by a company notorious for its “black, sordid and Cruel Avarice.” If established in tea, it would soon extend to spices, silks, chinaware and other commodities. Once India tea was accepted in America, the 3 d. duty would “enter the bulwark of our sacred liberties” and would accomplish Parliament’s purpose of taxation for revenue; nor would its authors desist “till they have made a conquest of the whole.”

Peace-makers in the colonies hoped to arrange return of the tea ships before any cargo was unloaded and duty paid. This was accomplished in ports other than Boston by raising the threat of mobs and frightening the Company’s consignees into resigning as purveyors to the retail grocers. In Boston, two of the consignees were sons of Governor Hutchinson, who had come to believe in a firm stand against the agitators. They stood ready to take delivery. The first tea ship docked at a Boston wharf on 1 December 1773, followed by two more. Because unloaded cargoes after a stated period were liable to seizure by customs commissioners for nonpayment of duty, the patriots suspected the commissioners would sell the confiscated cargo under the counter for revenue. To forestall them and perhaps also to intimidate any hopeful purchasers, they boarded the ships during the night of 16 December and in the enterprise to be known forever after as the Boston Tea Party, slashed open the tea chests and dumped the contents into the water.

News of this criminal attack on property, which reached London as early as 20 January, exasperated the British. It wrecked the plan for quiet establishment of a revenue tax, jeopardized the finances of the East India Company and proved the people of Massachusetts to be incorrigible insurrectionists. Britain’s interest might have suggested at this point a review of the series of increasingly negative results in the colonies with the aim of re-directing the by now alarming course of events. That would have required thought instead of mere reaction, and pause for serious thought is not a habit of governments. The ministers of George III were no exception.

They launched themselves instead upon that series of measures generally called the Coercive or Punitive Acts, and in America the Intolerable Acts, which served to advance antagonism in the direction it was already pointing and to pass the fork in the road at which another path might have led to another outcome.

As an act of war upon Crown property, the Tea Party was adjudged another case of treason. Judiciously deciding to avoid the embarrassment of the Gaspée procedure, the Cabinet chose instead to punish Boston as a whole by act of Parliament. Accordingly, a bill was presented to close the port of Boston to all commerce until indemnity had been paid to the East India Company and reparations to the customs commissioners for damages suffered, and until “peace and obedience to the Laws” was assured sufficiently that trade might be safely carried on and customs duly collected.

While preparing the bill, the Cabinet, having learned nothing from the ten years of angry protests since Grenville’s first tax, expected, as always, no trouble. Ministers believed the other colonies would condemn the Bostonians’ destruction of property, would not intervene on their behalf and might indeed be happy to absorb the tea diverted to their ports by the closing of Boston. Wooden-headedness enjoyed no finer hour. To respond angrily and positively to the grand larceny on the wharves was natural and lawful, but to suppose that the Boston Port Bill would contribute to control of the situation or to the stability of empire or be regarded with equanimity by Massachusetts’ neighbors was to let emotional reaction prevail over every indication of recent evidence.

Emotionalism is always a contributory source of folly. It showed itself at this time in the savage glee of which Benjamin Franklin was made a target at the hearings in the affair of the Hutchinson letters. These letters to Thomas Whately, the Treasury Secretary, advising more emphatic measures to suppress the rebelliousness of Massachusetts had been acquired by Franklin sub rosa and when published caused Massachusetts, in a fury against Hutchinson, to petition Parliament for his dismissal as Governor. Wedderburn conducted the examination of Franklin in hearings on the petition in a chamber aptly called the Cockpit before 35 members of the Privy Council, the largest number ever to attend such a hearing, and an eager audience of peers, M.P.S and other guests. They responded with snickering delight and open laughter as Wedderburn rose through sneers and jibes to heights of brilliant and malevolent invective depicting the most influential American in London as a thief and a traitor. Lord North was reported to be the only listener who did not laugh. Franklin was dismissed next day by the Crown from his post as Deputy Postmaster of the colonies, which did nothing to encourage the man who was the strongest advocate of accommodation, and Franklin did not forget. Four years later, when signing the Treaty of Alliance with France that confirmed the birth of his nation, he dressed himself in the same suit of Manchester velvet he had worn under Wedderburn’s torment.

Sentiment against Boston was so strongly with the Government that the Port Bill excited no disapproval at its first two readings; even Barré and Henry Conway spoke in favor of firm action. At the third reading, opposition speakers found their voice, pointing out that other ports had sent the tea back to England and urging that Boston be given a chance to pay the indemnity before her commerce was cut off. The most important statement was made by a person with experience on the spot, former Governor George Johnstone of West Florida, who warned “that the effect of the present Bill must be productive of a General Confederation, to resist the power of this country.” Few listened to his prophecy. Opposition speakers, admitted Burke, who was one of them, “made so little impression” that the House did not need to divide for the vote. In the Lords, Shelburne, Camden and the Duke of Richmond deplored the bill with no greater effect. The Boston Port Bill passed through Parliament like melted butter.

Three more Coercive Acts followed in rapid succession. First was the Massachusetts Regulatory Act, virtually annulling the charter of the Bay colony. Rights of election and appointment of officials, representatives, judges and juries and the basic right to summon town meetings, all that had been at “the sole disposal of her own internal government,” in Burke’s phrase, were taken over by the Crown acting through the Governor. Not unnaturally, this suggested to other colonies that what was done to Massachusetts could be done to them. The Administration of Justice Act followed, which allowed Crown officials accused of crime in Massachusetts who claimed they could not be assured a fair trial to be tried in England or in another colony. This was an insult considering that Boston had leaned over backward to give Captain Preston, commanding officer in the “Massacre,” a fair trial with defense by John Adams and had acquitted him. Next, the annual Quartering Act added a new provision authorizing, in case of any refusal to furnish barracks, the billeting of troops in citizens’ homes, taverns and other buildings. At the same time, General Gage was ordered to Boston to take over from Hutchinson as Governor.

The most furiously resented of the measures, though it was not one of the Coercive Acts, was the simultaneous Quebec Act extending Canada’s boundaries to the Ohio River, where Virginia and other colonies had territorial claims. The Act also formulated terms of civil government in Canada providing for the right of taxation by Parliament, for trial without jury according to the French manner and for toleration of the Catholic religion. Since 95 percent of Canadians were Catholic, this was a surprisingly sensible measure of toleration, but it gave the colonists and their friends in England a fiery issue. Roars of “Popery” thundered. The Inquisition was forecast for Pennsylvania, the “carnage of a St. Batholomew’s Day” foreseen in Philadelphia, the whore of Babylon invoked, a “Popish army” and “Popish hordes” pictured by Lord Camden as ready to subvert the liberties of the Protestant colonies. As for the elimination of trial by jury, it was declared by the St. James Chronicle “too scandalous a clause to have been framed by any Englishman.” A motive for this strangely ill-timed act granting favors to the Canadians may have been the hope of winning their loyalty in order that they might help to check any American outbreak. Yet if any intention remained of calming and eventually reconciling the colonies, passage of the Quebec Act on top of the Coercive Acts was a perfect model of how not to proceed.

How much of the Government’s ineptitude was ignorance and how much deliberate provocation, as the opposition firmly believed, is impossible to say. Governor Johnstone once remarked rather helplessly in the Commons that he noticed “a great disposition in this House to proceed in this business without knowing anything of the constitution of America.” Ignorance was certainly a factor.

The measures of March–June 1774 roused the opposition to real apprehension and to explicit warnings of dire consequences. Coming use of force could be sensed and the prospect of its use against people of English blood and tradition appalled many. John Dunning, a liberal-minded lawyer who had served as Solicitor-General in Grafton’s ministry and who would later summarize matters toward the end of the war in the memorable Dunning’s Resolution, saw in the Coercive Acts a trend toward “war, severe revenge and hatred against our own subjects.” It was the lack of chance of success that disturbed others. Major General William Howe, who had scaled the Heights of Abraham with Wolfe at Quebec, told his constituents while canvassing for the election of 1774 that the whole British Army together would not be enough to conquer America. General John Burgoyne, who also held a seat in Parliament, said he would like “to see America convinced by persuasion rather than the sword.”

Ministers too were warned. Henry Laurens, when consulted by Dartmouth as to the probable effect of the Coercive Acts, prophesied, as had Governor Johnstone in Parliament, that the people “from Georgia to New Hampshire would be animated to form such an Union and phalanx of resistance” as had hitherto been thought only a miracle could accomplish. But the fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes to believe otherwise. In formulating Cassandra’s curse—that she would tell the truth and not be believed—the ancient Greeks showed their remarkable early insight into the human psyche.

In the debate of 19 April 1774, on a motion by the opposition for repeal of the tea duty, Burke delivered the foundation speech of his views on the American question. It was an immense peroration on the successive acts and repeals, the vacillations and equivocations, the empty menaces, false assumptions and history of colonial policy all the way back to the Navigation Acts and forward to “the distempered vigor and insane alacrity with which you are rushing to your ruin.” Never, he said, “have the servants of the state looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view.… They never had any system of right or wrong but only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted.… By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils … they have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the globe.” Striking at the token assertion of authority—what today would be called credibility—he said, in words with a long echo, “They tell you that your dignity is tied to it.… This dignity is a terrible encumbrance to you for it has of late been ever at war with your interest, your equity and every idea of your policy.”

That “terrible encumbrance” has pursued policy-makers in every century. Benjamin Franklin, a wise man and one of the few who derived principles from political experience and were able to state them, wrote during the Stamp Act crisis that it should not be supposed that honor and dignity are better served “by persisting in a wrong measure once entered into than by rectifying an error as soon as it is discovered.”

In America, the Boston Port Bill ignited solidarity. In May, Rhode Island issued the first call for an intercolonial congress, while Connecticut towns held indignation meetings and took vows to rush aid in money and provisions to Boston and “to sprinkle American altars with our hearts’ blood” if occasion arose. The old Indian fighter and ranger of the Seven Years’ War, Colonel Israel Putnam, chairman of the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, personally drove 130 sheep 100 miles from his home in Pomfret to Boston. Baltimore sent 1000 bushels of corn and ultimately gifts were received from all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders demanded a complete denial of tea throughout the colonies, smuggling was stopped, the “hurtful trash” was burned on village greens and unappetizing herb potions called Liberty Tea substituted.

The summons to a congress was quickly supported by New York and Philadelphia and brought acceptances from twelve colonies during the summer. Many Americans had become convinced that, as Jefferson wrote in a draft of instructions to the Virginia delegates to the congress, Britain’s series of oppressions “pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”

This became an article of faith in America. George Washington endorsed it, speaking of “a regular systematic plan [to] fix the shackles of slavery upon us.” Tom Paine maintained “it was the fixed determination of the British Cabinet to quarrel with America at all events” in order to suppress her charters and control her progress in population and property. The accusation was convenient because it justified the ultimate rebellion, and indeed if Britain had really been pursuing a plan to goad the colonies to insurrection in order to subjugate them, then her conduct of policy becomes rational. Unhappily for reason, that version cannot be reconciled to the repeals, the backings and fillings, the haphazard or individual decisions. Rather than “deliberate and systematical,” English policy, its critics complained, was exactly the opposite. “What enforcing and what repealing,” cried Burke; “what bullying and what submitting; what doing and undoing; what straining and what relaxing.… Let us embrace some sort of system before we end this session.… Let us hold some sort of consistent conduct.”

Believing, on the contrary, that England’s policy was consistent, Americans moved toward the overt break. By uniting the colonies into a whole, the Coercive Acts accomplished the same cohesion in the adversary as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor accomplished two centuries later—and with ultimately the same result. The first Continental Congress of 56 members representing all colonies except Georgia convened at Philadelphia in September 1774. They declared all acts of Parliament respecting the colonies since 1763 to have violated American rights and pledged themselves to renew Non-Importation until all were repealed. If there were no redress of grievances within a year, they would move to Non-Intercourse, that is, cessation of exports as well as imports. They adopted ten resolutions on the rights of self-government, including self-taxation by their own legislatures, and under pressure by the radicals, endorsed the Resolves taken by Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which declared the Coercive Acts to be unconstitutional and invalid, authorized no obedience until they were repealed and advised citizens to arm and form militia for defense if attacked. While acknowledging allegiance to the Crown, they considered themselves a “dominion” not subject to Parliament. In order not to alienate the conservatives among them, they issued no call for independence, “a Hobgoblin of so frightful mien,” declared John Adams, “that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the face.”

Some were ready, however, for the alternative, as Jefferson phrased it in his instructions to the delegates of Virginia, of “union on a generous plan.” His conditions were that there must be no limitation of the colonies’ external trade and no taxation or regulation of their properties “by any power on earth except our own.” Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, leader of the conservatives at the Congress, officially presented a similar plan of “Proposed Union between Great Britain and her Colonies” but it found few delegates to support it. They were men who had no wish to combine with a Britain they thought of as corrupt, decadent and hostile to liberty. “When I consider,” wrote Franklin to Galloway, “the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state” with its “numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs [that] devour all revenue …” he would fear more mischief than benefit from closer union.

As the crisis in relations worsened, the idea of union found advocates among progressive thinkers in England. In 1776, Adam Smith was to propose it in The Wealth of Nations as the means “to the prosperity, to the splendour, and to the duration of the empire.” In the same year, Dr. Richard Price, intellectual leader of the Non-conformists, proposed Anglo-American union on a basis of equality in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty and War with America. Wrapped in Enlightenment, he based his case on the civil liberties that “reason and equity and the rights of humanity give.”

Here was the alternative to force on the one hand and rebellion on the other, although to say it was feasible at that time would be an overstatement. Majority opinion in Britain did not for a moment tolerate the idea of equality with the Americans, and federation could not have been reached in any case, for no one in power in England would have yielded the right to regulate trade. These were not, however, everyone’s conditions, and had there been desire and will on both sides to achieve it, some form of federation might have been slowly worked out. At that time it was too soon. Fixed ideas and biases were against it and the technology of overseas communication was a hundred years away.

England saw treason in the unpleasing unity of the Continental Congress. By now, resort to force had become an accepted idea. Increasingly alarming letters had been coming from General Gage, who reported that “the Flame of Sedition” was spreading rapidly, that it was not confined to a “faction” of agitators but shared by the generality of freeholders and farmers in Massachusetts and its neighbors, that they were assembling arms and ammunition and even artillery, and finally that all New England must be considered in open rebellion. In November the King acknowledged that “blows must decide” whether the colonies were to be subject or independent, and that he was “not sorry that the line of conduct seems now chalked out.”

The Cabinet reached a decision to send three warships with reinforcements, but with everyone busy canvassing for the election of that fall, action was postponed until the new Parliament should convene. Meanwhile within the Ministry, if not in the inner Cabinet, Viscount Barrington, the long-serving Secretary at War, entered a dissent. Although formerly in favor of a hard line toward America, he was one of the few in any group who allowed facts and developments to penetrate and influence their thinking. By 1774 he had come to believe that to coerce the colonies to the point of armed resistance would be disastrous. He had not turned pro-American or changed his political loyalties in any way; he had simply come to the professional conclusion, as he explained to Dartmouth in two letters of November and December 1774, that a land war in America would be useless, costly and impossible to win. Useless because it was plain that Britain could never successfully impose internal taxation; costly and impossible to win because conquered areas must be held by large armies and fortresses, “the expense of which would be ruinous and endless,” besides producing “the horrors and bloodshed of civil war.” Britain’s only war aim was proving supremacy without being able to use it; “I repeat, our contest is merely a point of honor” and “will cost us more than we can ever gain by success.”

Barrington proposed that rather than reinforcing the Army in Massachusetts, the troops should be withdrawn from Boston, leaving that city in its present “distracted state” until it should be better disposed to cooperate. Without small successes and the “violence of persecution” to animate the colonies, their rebelliousness would fade and they would eventually be ready to treat.

The earmark of so many follies—disproportion between effort and possible gain—and the “terrible encumbrance” of honor were here clearly expressed by Barrington, but since his office was not policy-making, merely administrative, his views had no effect. Required to implement a policy he did not believe in, he asked to resign, but the King and North held on to him, not wishing to reveal the doubters in their ranks.

In the City, popular opinion was strongly with the colonies to the extent that the freemen of London chose two Americans, Stephen Sayre of Long Island and William Lee of Virginia, as sheriffs. Candidates for the London seats were required to sign a pledge to support a bill giving America the right to elect its own Parliament and tax itself. With equal if opposite conviction a more notable Londoner, Dr. Samuel Johnson, expressed his view that the Americans were “a race of convicts and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” His thumping pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny delighted the country squires, the universities, the Anglican clergy and all the firmly anti-American community. Privately, however, he acknowledged to Boswell that “administration is feeble and timid” and, as the year went on, that “the character of our own government at present is imbecility.”

The last chance for Britain to guard her own interest, to grasp an alternative that was feasible, was offered when Parliament convened in January 1775 by the outstanding statesman of his time, Lord Chatham, now ill and failing. On 20 January he moved for the immediate withdrawal of British forces from Boston as evidence that England could afford to “make the first advances for concord.” He said the troops were provocative without being effective. They might march from town to town enforcing a temporary submission, “but how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you …?” Resistance to “your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen.” What forces now would be required to put it down? “What, my Lords, a few regiments in America and 17,000 or 18,000 men at home! The idea is ridiculous.” To subdue a region extending over 1800 miles, populous in numbers, valorous and infused with the spirit of liberty would be impossible. To “establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must.”

It was the masterful eloquence of the old Pitt, but arrogant in his mastery, he had ignored political necessities, failed to assemble supporters to vote for his motion, failed even to tell anyone except Shelburne that he was going to speak or make a motion. All he told Shelburne was that he was going to knock on the door of “this sleeping and confounded ministry.” His realism was hard, his foresight precisely on target, but the House did not want realities; it wanted to whip the Americans. Presented with Chatham’s unexpected motion, “the opposition stared and shrugged; the courtiers stared and laughed,” wrote Walpole, and the motion won only 18 votes against 68 nays.

Although his magic dominance was gone, Chatham had not lost the sense that “I know I can save this country and that I alone can.” After privately consulting with Benjamin Franklin and other Americans, he introduced on 1 February a bill for settlement of the American crisis which provided for repeal of the Coercive Acts, freedom from taxation for revenue without consent, recognition of the Continental Congress, which would then be responsible for assessing the colonies for self-taxation to raise revenue for the Crown in return for its expenses, and an independent judiciary with juries and no removal of accused for trial in England. The regulation of external trade and the right to deploy an army when necessary were to be retained by the Crown. Lord Gower, leader of the Bedfords since the Duke’s death, “rose in great heat” to condemn the bill as a betrayal of the rights of Parliament. “Every tie of interest, every motive of dignity, and every principle of good government,” he said, required the assertion of “legislative supremacy entire and undiminished.”

Thirty-two peers voted in favor of Chatham’s plan of settlement, although it was of course rejected by the majority. He could not save an empire for the unwilling. Embittered by sneers in the debate, he vented his frustration in a summary indictment as savage and unsparing as any government is ever likely to hear: “The whole of your political conduct has been one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, and notorious servility, incapacity and corruption.”

The next day the Government presented a bill declaring New England to be in rebellion and asking for augmented forces to reduce it to obedience. The nays in the Commons rose to 106, although the bill was quickly passed, together with a Restraining Act to bring economic pressure by excluding the New England colonies from the Newfoundland fisheries and prohibiting them from trade with any but British ports. The Cabinet nominated three general officers to serve in America: Major Generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton. That their future held recall and a surrender was then unimaginable.

At the same time, three regiments were sent to reinforce General Gage, and the King asked Sir Jeffery Amherst, former Commander-in-Chief during the Seven Years’ War, to take command again of the forces in America on the ambivalent theory that as someone known and trusted in the colonies he might bring the “deluded people to due obedience without putting a dagger to their throats.” Whether from doubts of the outcome or distaste of the policy, Amherst, though offered a peerage, declined to serve against the Americans, “to whom he had been so much obliged.” He was not the last to make that refusal.

Suddenly North too seemed to vacillate. Pushed by Dartmouth, who was still trying for a peaceful settlement, he presented his own Conciliatory Proposition, which offered to exempt from taxation any individual colony that raised its own revenue for administration and defense in amounts that the King and Parliament approved. “Uncertainty, surprise, and distraction were seated on every countenance” until it became apparent that the plan was designed to divide the colonies against each other and that, since it offered no repeal of the Coercive Acts, it would not be accepted anyway.

Burke prolonged the last chance in a major effort and another enormous outpouring—for he never spoke in less than a torrent. His main point was “the absolute necessity of keeping up a concord of this empire by a unity of spirit.” This could only be managed, he said, by possessing the sovereignty but not exercising it. Whether they liked it or not, the American spirit of liberty existed; their forebears emigrated because of it, and it remained stronger in the English colonists than probably in any other people on earth. “It cannot be removed, it cannot be suppressed, therefore the only way that remains is to comply with it, or if you please, to submit to it as a necessary evil.” Here he reached the great prescription: “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.” Let the Coercive Acts be repealed, let the Americans tax themselves “by grant and not by imposition.” Allow them freedom and opportunity to grow rich and they will supply all the more resources against France and Spain.

Large minds are needed for magnanimity. George III and his ministers and their majority in Parliament, heedless of reason and their ultimate interest, proceeded on their course toward suppression. It was plain that even if they should win, which experienced soldiers like Amherst and Howe thought doubtful, they would lose through the enmity created. This was not a hidden perception. “It is that kind of war in which even victory will ruin us,” wrote Walpole at this hour to his friend Horace Mann. Why were King and Cabinet blind to that outcome? Because they could think no further ahead than affirming supremacy and assumed without thinking about it that military victory over the “rabble” was a matter of course. They never doubted that Americans must succumb to British arms. This was the governing factor. A Colonel Grant, who said he had served in America and knew the Americans well, assured the House of Commons that “they would not fight. They would never dare to face an English army and did not possess any of the qualifications necessary to make a good soldier.” The House of Lords heard the same kind of thing. Lord Sandwich, replying to an opposition member who warned that the colonies would draw on unlimited numbers, said fatuously, “What does that signify? They are raw undisciplined cowardly men,” and the more the better because “if they did not run away, they would starve themselves into compliance with our measures.” He and his colleagues were glad to have the interminable quarrel with the colonies finally settled by force, which to those who feel themselves stronger always seems the easiest solution.

Further, they continued to believe, as Lord Gower put it, that the rebellious language of the Americans “was the language of the rabble and a few factional leaders,” and that the delegates to the Continental Congress, “far from expressing the true sense of the respectable part of their constituents,” had been chosen “by a kind of force in which people of consequence were afraid to interpose.” While there may have been a certain validity to his idea about the people of consequence, it was not as determining or as general as he supposed.

Lazy preparation was a product of these assumptions. Although the coming of hostilities was a predictable consequence of the Coercive Acts of the year before, no measures for military readiness had been undertaken in the interim. The swaggering Sandwich, long an advocate of forceful action, had done nothing as First Lord of the Admiralty to prepare the Navy, essential for transportation and blockade; in fact, he had reduced its strength by 4000 men, or a fifth of the total, as late as December 1774. “We took a step as decisive as the passage of the Rubicon,” General Burgoyne was to say some months later, “and now find ourselves plunged at once in a most serious war without a single requisition, gunpowder excepted, for carrying it on.”

In April 1775, General Gage, upon learning of a large quantity of rebel arms stored at Concord, twenty miles away, took the obvious decision to despatch a force to destroy the stores. Despite his attempted secrecy of movement, the warning signal lights flashed, the messengers rode, the Minute Men gathered at Lexington, exchanged fire and were scattered. While the redcoats marched on to Concord, the alerted countryside rose, men with their muskets poured in from every village and farm, and engaged the returning British troops in relentless pursuit with deadly accuracy of fire until the redcoats themselves had to be rescued by two regiments sent out from Boston. “The horrid Tragedy is commenced,” sadly acknowledged Stephen Sayre when news of the event reached London.

That actual war had commenced beyond retrieval seemed still uncertain in England, and the event inspired a last impassioned appeal to common sense from John Wesley, the Methodist leader. In a letter to Lord Dartmouth on 14 June, he wrote, “Waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask is it common sense to use force toward the Americans? Not 20,000 troops, not treble that number, fighting 3,000 miles away from home and supplies could hope to conquer a nation fighting for liberty.” From the reports of his preachers in America he knew that the colonists were not peasants ready to run at the sight of a redcoat or the sound of a musket, but hardy frontiersmen fit for war. They would not be easily defeated. “No, my Lord, they are terribly united.… For God’s sake,” Wesley concluded, “Remember Rehoboam! Remember Philip the Second! Remember King Charles the First!”

[neil]

Against the pressure of the Bedford Cabinet and the King, he had to give way. His Majesty’s Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition was issued on 23 August. In announcing the Americans’ “traitorous” levying of war upon the Crown, it clung to the view that the uprising was the work of a conspiracy of “dangerous and ill-designing men,” in spite of the stream of reports from General Gage and governors on the spot that it was inclusive of all kinds and classes. Insistence on a rooted notion regardless of contrary evidence is the source of the self-deception that characterizes folly. By hiding the reality, it underestimates the needed degree of effort.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia moderates of the Continental Congress succeeded in obtaining the Olive Branch Petition, which professed loyalty and allegiance to the Crown, appealed to the King to halt hostilities and repeal the oppressive measures enacted since 1763, and expressed the hope that a reconciliation might be worked out. George III’s refusal to receive the petition when it reached London in August and his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion, which followed within a few days, effectively terminated the American overture, for what it was worth. In Parliament, a motion by the opposition to consider the Olive Branch a basis for negotiation met with the usual rejection by the majority.

Following the Proclamation, the definitive act was the removal of Dartmouth to the office of Lord Privy Seal and his replacement as Secretary for the Colonies by a vigorous advocate of “bringing the rebels to their knees” by armed force, Lord George Germain. A Sackville of Knole by birth* and younger son of the 7th Earl and 1st Duke of Dorset, he had overcome a strange history of court-martial and ostracism to maneuver himself into favor with the King and, by plying him with the advice he wanted to hear, to gain the critical American post in the Cabinet.

As a Lieutenant-General and commander of the British cavalry at the battle of Minden in 1759, Lord George had inexplicably refused to obey the order of his superior, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, to lead a cavalry charge to finish off a victory over the French. Dismissed from the service, called a coward by society, tried for disobedience to orders, he was declared by verdict of the court-martial “unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatever,” the sentence being recorded in the order book of every British regiment. “I always told you,” wrote his poor half-mad brother Lord John, “that my brother George was no better than myself.”

Although the tag of cowardice fitted queerly with a strenuous military career of more than twenty years, Lord George never explained his conduct at Minden. Hard and arrogant, he stemmed from one ancestor who “lived in the greatest splendour of any nobleman in England,” from a grandfather who avoided a charge of murder only by the friendly intercession of Charles II, from a father created a Duke when George was four years old, whose house was so crowded with suitors and visitors on a Sunday as to give it the appearance of a royal levee. Not a likable man, Lord George had already made enemies by his criticisms of fellow-officers, yet he was able after some years, with Sackville support and an aggressive will, to rise above disgrace and retrieve the status owed to his rank and family. Made harder if not wiser by his experience, he was now to become the minister in active charge of the war.

Opposed like the rest of the Cabinet and the King’s friends to any effort at conciliation, Lord George resisted rigorously the plan of a peace commission to treat with the colonies. When Lord North carried this point, to which he was previously committed, Germain insisted on drafting the instructions. His terms required the colonies to acknowledge, prior to a parley, the “supreme authority of the legislature to make laws binding on the Colonies in all cases whatsoever.” Since their consistent rejection of this principle for ten years was what had led them to rebellion, it was fairly obvious, as Lord North pointed out, that this formula would condemn the peace commission to failure. Dartmouth said flatly he would resign as Privy Seal if the instructions stood; North hinted that he would go if his stepbrother did.

Interminable discussions of the terms followed: whether the phrase “in all cases whatsoever” should be in or out; whether colonial acceptance of the supremacy principle must precede or be part of negotiations; whether the commissioners should have discretionary powers; whether Admiral Howe should hold both the naval command and membership on the peace commission. Mingled with these disputes were intrigues about who should fill several court and sub-Cabinet posts from which opponents of the war had resigned, while Parliament, upon reconvening in January 1776, spent its time arguing over contested elections and the high prices charged by German princes for the hire of their troops. The peace proposals as finally settled went no further than North’s conciliation plan of the year before, already spurned by the Continental Congress. Neither King nor Cabinet had any thought of considering American terms for a form of autonomy under the Crown; the peace commission was intended mainly for public effect and the still persisting illusion of dividing the colonies. Under Germain’s domineering direction, wrote Franklin’s friend the scientist Dr. Joseph Priestley, “anything like reason and moderation” could not be expected. “Everything breathes rancor and desperation.”

By the time terms and appointments were settled in May 1776, events had made them obsolete. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, calling boldly for independence, had electrified the colonists, convinced thousands of the necessity of rebellion and brought them with their muskets to the recruiting centers. George Washington had been named Commander-in-Chief; Fort Ticonderoga had yielded to Ethan Allen’s company of 83 men; General William Howe, prompted by the Americans’ remarkable hauling of cannon from Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights, had been forced to evacuate Boston; British forces in full combat were gaining in the south and in Canada. In June the Continental Congress heard a resolution offered by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” On 2 July the formal Declaration of Independence was voted without dissent, with revisions added in a second vote on 4 July.

In September, after Howe’s victory in the battle of Long Island, his brother the Admiral arranged in his alternate capacity as peace commissioner a conference with Franklin and John Adams representing the Continental Congress, but as he had no authority to negotiate unless the colonies resumed allegiance and revoked the Declaration of Independence, the meeting was fruitless. So passed on both sides the attempt to forestall and then reverse the rupture.

Opponents of the war were vocal from the beginning although outnumbered by the war’s supporters. Following Amherst’s example, others in the Army and Navy refused to serve against the Americans. Admiral Augustus Keppel, who had fought throughout the Seven Years’ War, declared himself out of this one. The Earl of Effingham resigned his Army commission, unwilling to bear arms in what “is not so clear a cause.” Chatham’s oldest son, John, serving with a regiment in Canada, resigned and came home, while another officer who remained with the Army in America expressed the opinion that because “This is an unpopular war, men of ability do not choose to risk their reputations by taking an active part in it.” This freedom of action found its justifier in General Conway, who declared in Parliament that although a soldier owed unquestioning obedience in foreign war, in case of domestic conflict he must satisfy himself that the cause is just, and he personally “could never draw his sword” in the present conflict.

Animating these sentiments was the belief that the Americans were fighting for the liberties of England. Interdependent, both would either be “buried in one grave,” said the opposition speaker, Lord John Cavendish, or endure forever. London’s four members in Parliament and all its sheriffs and aldermen remained steadfast partisans of the colonies. Motions were made in both the Commons and the Lords opposing the hiring of foreign mercenaries without prior approval by Parliament. The Duke of Richmond moved in December 1776 for a settlement based on concessions to America, whose resistance he termed “perfectly justifiable in every political and moral sense.” A public subscription was raised for the widows and orphans and parents of Americans “inhumanly murdered by the King’s troops at or near Lexington and Concord.”

Recognizing the contradiction of self-interest in the American war, a political cartoon of 1776 pictured the British lion asleep while ministers were busily engaged in slaughtering the goose that lays the golden egg. Observers like Walpole saw the contradiction too. Whether America was conquered or lost, Britain could expect “no good issue,” for if governed by an army, the country, instead of inviting settlers and trade, “will be deserted and a burden to us as Peru or Mexico with all their mines have been to Spain.… Oh the folly, the madness, the guilt of having plunged us into this abyss!” Even Boswell in private thought the measures of the Government were “ill-digested and violent” and the ministry “mad in undertaking this desperate war.”

Governing opinion in support of the war was no less forward and more general. Not all would have joined in Dr. Johnson’s intemperate outburst, “I am willing to love all mankind except an American,” or gone to the extreme of absurdity of the Marquess of Carmarthen, one of the King’s friends, who demanded in a debate, “For what purpose were [the colonists] suffered to go to that country, unless the profit of their labor should return to their masters here?” But gradations of such sentiments were widely shared. (A notable factor in the British attitude was a bland ignorance of how and why the colonies had been settled.)

Business sentiment was expressed by Bristol, Burke’s constituency, which he addressed in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol with implacable logic and small effect, for the merchants, tradesmen and clergy of the busy port sent a loyal address to the King urging firm coercion. Landed gentry and fashionable society agreed. All motions of the opposition were routinely defeated in Parliament, where the majority sustained the Government faithfully, not merely from purchased loyalty but from the gruff conviction of the country party that supremacy must be made good and the colonies brought to submit.

The impotence of the opposition, which numbered about a hundred, was owed not only to the power of the incumbents but to their own lack of cohesion. Chatham, sunk in another period of debility, was out of combat from the spring of 1775 to the spring of 1777 but, like Hamlet, not so mad that when the wind was in the right quarter, he failed to know a hawk from a handsaw. After the American Declaration of Independence, he predicted to his physician, Dr. Addington, that unless England changed her policy, France would espouse the cause of the Americans. She was only waiting until England was more deeply engaged in this “ruinous war against herself” before taking an overt part.

Yet when active, Chatham always played his own hand, scorning association. His arrogance and his refusal to act as a functioning leader left the opposition subject to separation and to the vagaries of its chief figures. Richmond, who had emerged as the most aggressive and outspoken voice in the Lords, hated Chatham and was not temperamentally either a leader or a follower. Charles James Fox, rising young star of the opposition, glittered in the Commons with wit and invective, as Townshend once had, but he too played a solo role. Others were ambivalent. Though believing in the justice of the American cause, they could not help fearing that a victory for American democracy represented a threat to parliamentary supremacy and a dangerous stimulus to the Reform movement.

To feel dismayed by their own government and always to be outvoted were dispiriting. Richmond confessed it in replying to Rockingham, who was trying to maintain the opposition front and had summoned him to come to vote on a bill prohibiting trade with the thirteen colonies during the rebellion. “I confess I feel very languid about this American business,” he wrote. There was no use going on opposing this bill and that; “the whole system must be opposed.” He did not come down to London and later took himself off to France to deal with legalities regarding a French peerage he possessed. It might be “a happy thing to have,” he wrote to Burke, for the day might not be distant “when England will be reduced to a state of slavery,” and if he were “among the proscribed … and America not be open to us, France is some retreat, and a peerage here is something.” With the French Revolution coming in the next decade, probably no historical prophecy has ever been so upside down. “About English politics,” Richmond concluded, “I must freely confess to you that I am quite sick and wore out with the too melancholy state of them.”

Rockingham, as leader, grew so frustrated that in 1776 he proposed a “secession” by opponents of the war, that is, a deliberate absenting of themselves from Parliament as their most visible protest against ministerial policy. Solidarity on this issue too was unobtainable; only his own followers agreed. Dignified and stately, the Rockingham Whigs retired to their estates, but after a year of ineffectiveness drifted back. They were “amiable people,” wrote Charles Fox to Burke, but “unfit to storm a citadel.” Burke, making an essential point about these men as ministers, replied that their virtues were the result of “plentiful fortunes, assured rank and quiet homes.”

Submission of the rebels was no nearer. For all their disadvantage in shortage of arms and supplies and of trained and disciplined troops and in the short-term enlistments that were their most disabling factor, they had a cause to fight for, a commander of heroic stature and unflinching will and occasional stunning limited victories as at Trenton and Princeton to reinvigorate morale. Britain’s enemies abroad were supplying arms and British resort to deliberate wrecking and pillage of property and to recruitment of Indians for terrorist tactics stimulated American fighting spirit when it faded under hardship. British overestimation of the internal support to be expected from Loyalists and the failure—which owed something still to scorn of colonials even on their own side—to mobilize and organize a Loyalist fighting force left them dependent on the long trans-Atlantic haul of Europeans. Fear that France and Spain would take advantage of their trouble by a naval offensive or even invasion required maintenance of troops for home defense and hard-to-spare ships in home waters. The drain of the whole enterprise alarmed many. “The thinking friends of the Government are by no means sanguine,” wrote Edward Gibbon, who had been elected to Parliament in 1774 as a supporter of North.

In February 1777 General Burgoyne came home to plan with Germain a knockout campaign that by effecting a juncture on the Hudson of British forces coming down from Canada and others coming up from New York would cut off New England from the rest of the colonies and end the war before the next Christmas. Burgoyne returned to lead the northern force in a march pointed at Albany, but the pincer movement suffered from a fatal deficiency in having only one arm. The bulk of the southern arm under the Commander-in-Chief, Sir William Howe, who had designed his own campaign without reference to his colleague, was moving in the other direction, against Philadelphia. Sir Henry Clinton, in command of the remaining forces in New York, could not move up the Hudson without the main Army. Burgoyne had started in June. As the summer progressed, reports were disquieting: Burgoyne’s supplies were dwindling dangerously; a foray to capture stores at Bennington was sharply defeated; an American Army was gathering in strength. Howe was still occupying himself in Pennsylvania; Clinton, though given to fits of paralysis of will, made a lastminute move northward in desperation; no juncture had yet been made. Washington, engaged against Howe outside Philadelphia and discovering from his movements that there was no danger of Howe’s turning north, wrote to General Putnam on learning of the victory at Bennington that he hoped now “the whole force of New England will turn out and … intirely crush General Burgoyne.”

Less concerned with these events than with the threat of France, Lord Chatham rose to his feet on 20 November 1777 to demand an “immediate cessation of hostilities.” Speaking before news was known of the event that was to mark the watershed of the war and justify his argument, he said, “I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America.…” Defense of unalienable rights was not rebellion. The war was “unjust in its principles, impracticable in its means, and ruinous in its consequences.” The employment of “mercenary sons of rapine and plunder” had aroused incurable resentment. “If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms, never—never—never!” By insisting on submission, Britain would lose all benefit from the colonies through their trade and their support against the French and gain for herself only renewed war against France and Spain. The only remedy was to terminate hostilities and negotiate a treaty of settlement. Chatham did not call for recognition of American independence as a condition of settlement, for he believed to his dying day in the unalterable relationship of colony and Crown, and, in paraphrase of a successor, would have gladly declared that he had not served as First Minister to acquiesce in the liquidation of the British empire. His proposal of an end to hostilities made no appeal to the Lords, who rejected his motion by four to one.

In the Commons, Charles Fox pursued the same vein in a military analysis that was to be uncannily verified. Conquest of America, he said, was “in the nature of things absolutely impossible” because there was “a fundamental error in the proceedings which would forever prevent our generals from acting with success”—that they were placed too far apart to aid each other. Twelve days later a courier arrived with the awful report that General Burgoyne with all that was left of his battered, starving and outnumbered force had surrendered to the Continental Army at Saratoga near Albany on 17 October. General Clinton, who had advanced no farther than Kingston, fifty miles below Albany, had on the previous day turned back to New York for reinforcements.

The result of Saratoga was a matchless encouragement to American morale that warmed the thin blood of survival through the snows and miseries of that winter at Valley Forge. Saratoga lost the British, through casualties and the terms of surrender, which required Burgoyne’s men to lay down their arms and be shipped back to Britain under pledge not to serve again in the war against America, an entire army of almost 8000. Above all, it realized Britain’s greatest dread, the entry of the French into the war in alliance with America. Within two weeks of the news of the surrender, the French, in fear that the British might now offer acceptable peace terms to their former colonies, hastened to inform the American envoys of their decision to recognize the newborn United States, and three weeks later of their readiness to enter into alliance. The treaty, which for its share in bringing into existence a new nation was one of the most momentous in history, was negotiated in less than a month. Besides recognizing American independence and including the usual articles of amity and commerce, it provided that in the event of war between Britain and France, neither of the treaty partners would make a separate peace.

Chatham’s prediction of French entry was now confirmed, but even before this was known he rose in the House of Lords on 11 December 1777 to declare again his view that England had engaged herself in a “ruinous” war. The nation had been betrayed into it, he said in a devastating summary that could apply to wars and follies of many ages before and since, “by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.”

In England, the incredible fact of a British Army surrendering to colonials stunned government and public and awoke many who had hardly concerned themselves about the war until then. “You have no idea what effect this news has had on the minds of people in town,” wrote a friend to George Selwyn. “Those who never felt before, feel now. Those who were almost indifferent to American affairs are now awakened out of their lethargy and see to what a dreadful situation we are reduced.” Stocks fell, “universal dejection” ruled the City, people murmured of a “disgraced nation” and talked of a change of government. Gibbon wrote that although the majority held in Parliament, “if it had not been for shame there were not 20 men in the House but were ready to vote for peace,” even “on the humblest conditions.”

The opposition bounded into virulent attack, castigating every minister individually and the Government collectively for mismanagement of the war and the measures that had led to it. Burke accused Germain of having lost America through “wilful blindness”; Fox called for Germain’s dismissal; Wedderburn, who came to Germain’s defense, challenged Burke to a duel; Barré said the plan of campaign was “unworthy of a British minister and rather too absurd for an Indian chief.” Even Germain himself was flustered but survived the onslaught with the King’s and North’s support. They could see that if they let responsibility be brought home to Germain, it would be carried next to his superiors—themselves.

The Government too survived on its carefully carpentered structure of votes. Although uneasy about the war, the country party were uneasier about change, and though burdened with a war that was costing them money instead of bringing in revenue, they sat tight. Only the King, encased in his armor of righteousness, was impervious to the general anxiety. “I know that I am doing my duty and therefore can never wish to retreat,” he had told North at the beginning of the war, and that was all he needed to know. No actualities could dent the armor. The King was convinced of the rectitude and therefore the necessary triumph of his actions. Later, as fortunes faded, he believed that a victory for American independence would mean the dissolution of the empire under his sovereignty and he prayed Heaven “to guide me so to act that posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable empire at my door.” The prospect of defeat under “my” command pleases no ruler, and rather than face it, George tried obstinately to prolong the war long after it held any hope of success.

Howe’s resignation, Burgoyne’s return, Clinton’s mistrust and disillusion, recriminations and official inquiries followed in the wake of Saratoga. The generals, who blamed their failures on the ineptitude of the ministry, were treated with forbearance not only because of the general feeling that the fault indeed lay with Germain, but also because they held seats in Parliament and the Government had no wish to drive them into opposition. Germain’s failure to coordinate Howe’s campaign at Philadelphia with Burgoyne’s on the Hudson was clearly the hinge of the disaster and like his strange conduct at Minden seemed to have no explanation—other than a languid attitude.

Afterward, to feed the general dislike of Germain, a story was advanced that during the initial planning, Germain on his way to his country estate had stopped at his office to sign despatches. His Under-Secretary, William Knox, had pointed out to him that no letter had been written to Howe acquainting him with the plan and what was expected of him in consequence. “His Lordship started, and D’Oyley stared,” and then hurriedly offered to write the despatch for his lordship’s signature. Having “a particular aversion to being put out of his way on any occasion,” Lord George brusquely refused because it would mean that “my poor horses must stand in the street all the time and I shan’t be to my time anywhere.” He instructed D’Oyley to write the letter to Howe enclosing Burgoyne’s instructions, “which would tell him all that he would want to know.” Expected to go by the same ship as the despatches, the letter missed it and did not reach Howe until much later.

It would be tempting to claim that the comfort of carriage horses lost America, but distance, time, uncertain planning and incoherent generalship were the greater faults. Lord George’s nonchalant way with despatches was only a symptom of a larger carelessness. It would be tempting, too, to say that this carelessness might be traced to the overprivileged lives of Georgian ministers, but then, what of another famous failure of communications: when American commanders were not warned of probable attack on Pearl Harbor? Failure of communications appears to be endemic to the human condition.

•    •    •

The immediate necessity was to relieve Britain of a profitless war in order that she might be free to meet the French challenge, and the only way was settlement with the colonies. With rumors buzzing of a coming Franco-American treaty, North, who had lost hope of victory after Saratoga, was trying to put together another peace commission against the resistance of Germain, Sandwich, Thurlow and other diehards whose minds were set against any parley with the rebels. While North agonized over what terms could be offered—not so mortifying as to be rejected by Parliament yet sufficiently attractive to be accepted by the Americans—word was received through secret intelligence that the alliance of France and America had been signed.

Ten days later North presented to Parliament a set of proposals for the peace commission so extensive in concessions that had they been ceded before the war they could well have averted it altogether. They were virtually the same as Chatham’s bill of settlement that Parliament had rejected the year before. They renounced the right to tax for revenue, agreed to treat with Congress as a constitutional body, to suspend the Coercive Acts, the Tea Act, and other objectionable measures passed since 1763, to discuss seating American representatives in the House of Commons and to appoint peace commissioners with full powers “to act, discuss and conclude upon every point whatever.” They did not yield, as Chatham had not yielded, independence or control of trade; the intention was to reattach the colonies, not to give them up.

A “full melancholy silence” fell upon the House as it heard North’s long explanation, which lasted two hours. He seemed to have abandoned the principles the Government had been maintaining for the past ten years. “Such a bundle of imbecility never disgraced a nation,” commented Dr. Johnson acidly. Friends were confounded, opponents staggered, and Walpole, the Greek chorus, sobered. He called it an “ignominious” day for government and an admission “that the Opposition had been right from beginning to end.” He thought the concessions were such as the Americans could accept, “and yet, my friend,” he wrote to Mann, “such accommodating facility had one defect—it came too late.” The French treaty had already been signed; instead of peace there would be greater war. The House was ready to approve the plan “with a rapidity that will do everything but overtake time past.” He was right; historical mistakes are often irretrievable.

To abandon a policy that is turning sour is more laudable than ignominious, if the change is genuine and carried out purposefully. The peace commission was something less. North, ever amiable but uncertain, was anything but firm. Under the turmoil of debate and the wrath of the diehards in his Cabinet, he wavered, modified terms, withdrew the discretionary powers of the commissioners and promised there would be no discussion of independence; the Americans would have to treat “as subjects or not at all.” He set twelve months from June (it was then March) as the time limit for the mission, which suggested no great anxiety to succeed. Indeed, the fortunes of war were sufficiently changeable and the American situation sufficiently uncertain as to allow the King and the diehards to persuade themselves they might still prevail.

Many suspected, as was said by John Wilkes (seated in Parliament at last), that the peace commission was only meant “to keep the minds of the people quiet here … not to regain the colonies.” A show was needed to keep the Government’s supporters from fading away. Fall of the Bedfords seemed possible and might have been forced if the opposition’s political action had been as vigorous as their words. In debate they were magnificent, in effect, weak because incurably divided over the issue of independence. Chatham, followed by Shelburne and others, remained utterly and unalterably opposed to dismembering the empire he had brought to triumph in the Seven Years’ War. Rockingham and Richmond had come to believe that the colonies were lost forever and that the only course was to acknowledge their independence “instantly and publicly” in order to win them away from France and concentrate all forces against the major opponent.

On 7 April 1778, Richmond moved in a speech of passion and urgency to request the King to dismiss the incumbent ministry, withdraw the troops from the colonies, recognize their independence and negotiate to “recover their friendship at heart if not their allegiance.”

Chatham should have concurred because concentration against France was always his object and because it was obvious that the colonies’ Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation that had followed could not be annulled except by a military defeat, which Chatham himself had declared to be impossible. Yet personal outrage extinguished logic; the break-up of empire was to him intolerable. Informed by Richmond that he was going to move the recognition of independence, Chatham summoned all his flickering strength, invested all the remnants of his once great authority in a sad offensive against his own side and against history.

Supported by his nineteen-year-old son, soon to make the name of William Pitt again the awe of Europe, and by a son-in-law, he limped to his seat, as always in full dress, with his legs wrapped in flannel. Beneath a huge peruke, the piercing glance still gleamed from eyes sunk in an emaciated face. When the Duke of Richmond closed, Chatham rose, but his voice was at first inaudible and when the words became distinct, they were confused. He spoke of “ignominious surrender” of the nation’s “rights and fairest possessions” and of falling “prostrate before the House of Bourbon.” Then he lost track, repeated phrases, mumbled, while around him the embarrassed peers, whether in pity or respect, sat in silence so profound it seemed tangible. Richmond replied courteously. Unyielding, Chatham rose again, opened his mouth soundlessly, flung a hand to his chest, collapsed and fell to the floor. Carried to a nearby residence, he recovered enough to be taken to his country home at Hayes, where in the next three weeks he sank slowly toward death. At the end, he asked his son to read to him from the Iliad about the death of Hector.

Forgetting the great statesman’s decline and failings, the country felt a sense of ominous loss. Parliament voted unanimously for a state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey. “He is dead,” wrote the unknown author of the Letters of Junius, for once forgoing his usual venom, “and the sense and honor and character and understanding of the nation are dead with him.” Dr. Addington thought his death was the mercy of Providence, “that he might not be a spectator of the total ruin of a country which he was not permitted to save.”

It is striking how often the prospect of losing America inspired predictions of ruin, and how mistaken they were, for Britain was to survive the loss well enough and go on to world domination and the apogee of imperial power in the next century. “We shall no longer be a powerful or respectable people,” declared Shelburne, if American independence were recognized. On that day, “the sun of Great Britain is set.” Richmond foresaw the Franco-American alliance as “a Measure which must be our ruin.” Walpole scattered his letters with gloomy prognoses, predicting, “whatever way this war ends it will be fatal for this country,” or just before the end, foreseeing dire consequences of defeat: “We shall be reduced to a miserable little island, and from a mighty empire sink into as insignificant a country as Denmark or Sardinia!” With her trade and marine gone, Britain would lose the East Indies next, and “then France will dictate to us more imperiously than ever we did to Ireland.”

These dark expectations derived from two assumptions of the age: that the trade with colonies was essential to the prosperity of Britain, and that the Bourbon monarchies of France and Spain were a dangerous threat. Though only eleven years ahead, the French Revolution was as yet unimaginable; rather, Englishmen felt themselves to be in a stage of decline. Complaining of public apathy in a letter to Rockingham, Burke wrote that without a great change in national character and leadership, the nation could slide down “from the highest point of grandeur and prosperity to the lowest state of imbecility and meanness.… I am certain that if great and immediate pains are not taken to prevent it, such must be the fate of this country.” Since no conscious effort can arrest a national slide if it is indeed taking place, Burke in this instance was talking nonsense as, given his enormous outpouring of words, he frequently did.

Chatham’s death in May opened an opportunity for Rockingham to assert leadership, unite factions, win over adherents of the Government who were growing doubtful of the war and its expenses. The King had been advised that some changes were necessary, and this was Rockingham’s chance to press for office on a policy of ending hostilities and recognizing the inevitable independence of the colonies. Fox tried to persuade the hesitant Marquess of this course, suggesting that he propose a partial replacement of ministers to the King so as not to upset him and to retain his support. To refuse office if offered “in a manner consistent with his private honor,” Fox said, “was irreconcilable with the duty of a public man.” Burke too tried to argue the theme of consistent responsibility, but in both Rockingham and Richmond, although they saw the issues clearly and perceived the remedies, the sense of public duty tended to fade when the outlook was depressing or the political necessities distasteful. Rockingham’s followers were unready, and his own principles and conditions for accepting office precluded his obtaining it. The opposition “have been too inert,” wrote Walpole. The opportunity passed and the King’s ministers, “though despised everywhere and by everybody,” according to Fox, “will still continue ministers.”

A peace commission was duly appointed headed by Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, a young man of wealth and fashion, owner of the splendid Castle Howard and otherwise qualified only as the son-in-law of Lord Gower. He was to be assisted by two more experienced and hardheaded men: former Governor Johnstone, who sided with the opposition, and William Eden, an accomplished politician and under-secretary, manager of secret intelligence in the war, former secretary of the Board of Trade, an old school companion of Carlisle and a friend of Wedderburn, Germain and North. The combined procedures of this group and of the Government that sent them confirm the impression that a pervasive and peculiar folly was controlling events.

When, on reaching Philadelphia, the Commissioners requested a conference with representatives of the Continental Congress, they were told that the only terms to be discussed were withdrawal of British forces and recognition of American independence. Governor Johnstone thereafter attempted to bribe two leading figures of the Congress, Joseph Reed and Robert Morris, to persuade Congress to accept British conditions of negotiation. This insult, on being exposed, deepened American distaste for the British Government and created a scandal that caused Johnstone to resign from the Commission. In the meantime, without informing the Commissioners, Germain had issued secret orders to Sir Henry Clinton, Howe’s successor, to send 8000 troops to strengthen the West Indies against France, thereby reducing his forces in Philadelphia from 14,000 to 6000, rendering the city no longer defensible, and requiring him in consequence to evacuate it.

Forced to move to New York, Carlisle was infuriated by the embarrassment and at not having been informed of Germain’s intention in advance. The only instrument that could make the Americans come to a settlement was the prospect of forceful military action if they refused, and this sanction being now withdrawn, he was a toothless tiger. His little daughter Caroline, he wrote privately, could have told the Government that under such conditions the Peace Commission was a farce. “Our offers of peace,” he wrote later, “were too much the appearance of supplications for mercy from a vanquished and exhausted state.” It was not the last case of the peculiar foolishness of withdrawing forces while trying to make an enemy come to terms. In one of history’s malicious ironies, the United States that was born of this folly repeated it against an enemy two hundred years later with the same result.

Carlisle and his colleagues put as good a face on their mission as possible, pointing out that the causes of the war were now canceled—the tea duty and other punitive acts repealed, “exemption from any tax by the Parliament of Great Britain” declared, representation in Parliament open for discussion and Congress itself recognized as a legitimate body. Short of recognition of independence, however, the Congress maintained its refusal to treat or even confer. In last resort, the Commissioners appealed to the colonies over the head of Congress to deal separately, in the belief that most Americans really wanted to return to their former allegiance. They issued a public proclamation on 3 October 1778, which, after reiterating the removal of the original grievances and promising pardon for all treasons committed before that date, tried to revive the threat of punitive action: for, when a country “mortgages herself and her resources to our enemies … Britain may by every means in her power destroy or render useless a connexion contrived for her ruin.”

The real intention behind this threat was expressed in Carlisle’s first draft of the proclamation, proposing that as a result of America’s “malice and perfidy” in contracting with France and obstinacy in persevering in rebellion, Britain had no choice but to employ the “extremity of distress … by a scheme of universal devastation” and to apply “this dreadful system” to the greatest extent to which her armies and fleet could carry it. This argument, he believed, “will have effect,” but he was evidently advised to moderate the language. So that the proclamation should be widely known, copies were sent to all members of the Continental Congress, to George Washington and all generals, to all provincial governors and assemblies, to ministers of the gospel and to commanders of the British forces and prison camps.

Since every colony had already suffered the deliberate pillage and destruction of homes and properties by British and Hessians, the burning of villages and the laying waste of farms, fields and timberlands, the threat from a weakened force carried no great terror. Rather, Congress recommended to state authorities that the British text should be published in local gazettes “more fully to convince the good people of these states of the insidious designs of the Commissioners.” Having reached fiasco in six months, whether by design or blunder, the Peace Commission returned home in November.

Possibly the mission really was intended to fail. Yet Eden wrote to his brother that if “my wishes and cares” could accomplish it, “this noble country … would soon belong once more to Great Britain.” He regretted “most heartily that our Rulers instead of making the Tour of Europe did not finish their education round the Coast and Rivers of the Western Side of the Atlantic.” Privately he wrote to Wedderburn the astonishing confession that “It is impossible to see what I can see of this Magnificent Country and not go nearly mad at the long Train of Misconducts and Mistakes by which we have lost it.”

It is a significant letter. Here is a member of inner government circles not only recognizing that the colonies were already lost, but that his government’s mistakes had lost them. Eden’s admission reveals the tragic side of folly: that its perpetrators sometimes realize that they are engaged in it and cannot break the pattern. The unavailing war was to continue at a cost of more lives, devastation and deepening hatred for four more years. During these years, George III simply could not conceive that he might preside over defeat. While Parliament and public grew increasingly sour on the war, the King persisted in its continuance partly because he believed the loss of empire would bring shame and ruin, and more because he could not live with the thought that it would be his reign that would forever bear the stigma of the loss.

In persisting, he could take heart from the fact that the Americans were often beset by trouble. Without central funds, Congress could not keep the armies in pay or supplies, which meant deserting soldiers and another winter of deprivation worse than Valley Forge, with rations at one-eighth normal and mutinies on more than one occasion. Washington was harassed by political cabals, betrayed by Benedict Arnold, disobeyed by General Charles Lee, subjected to scattered but savage warfare by Loyalist and Indian groups, disappointed by the failure of the attempt in combination with the French fleet to regain Newport and by British success in the Carolinas including the capture of Charleston. On the other hand, he had the immense accretion of French naval and land forces, which altered the balance of the war, and he had been joined by Baron von Steuben and other European professionals who drilled the ragged Americans into disciplined formations. In 1779 Congress appointed John Adams to negotiate peace on a basis of independence and total British withdrawal, but to the King and the hard-line ministers this was still unthinkable.

The English, under a First Minister who hated his position and longed only to be released and have nothing more to do with the war, and with a War Minister, Germain, whom he disliked and distrusted and who was still under a cloud of investigation, were not well equipped to win. They were incapable of forming an overall strategy for the war and could think only in terms of saving some colonies for the Crown, perhaps in the south, and of continuing a war of harassment and disruption of trade until the colonists were made to yield. Commanders and ministers alike, everyone but the King, knew this was illusion; that to subdue the country was beyond their power. Meanwhile, the French had appeared in the Channel. Though Lord Sandwich had boasted that he had 35 ships ready and manned and fit for war, Admiral Keppel was to find no more than six “fit to meet a seaman’s eye” and dockyards empty of stores when the French entered the war. The battle off Ushant in June 1778 ended in a draw although the British took some encouragement in claiming it as a victory.

Worse than the war were political developments in England. Fueled by the American revolt, the movement for political reform spread through the country with demands for annual Parliaments, manhood suffrage, elimination of rotten boroughs, abolition of sinecures and contracts awarded to members of Parliament. The election of 1779 created bitter feeling between parties. Government majorities shrank. Protest reached a climax in the Yorkshire Petition of February 1780, which demanded a halt in appropriations and pensions until reforms were enacted. Petitions like Yorkshire’s flooded Westminster from 28 other counties and many cities. Permanent reform associations were formed. The King was seen, as he had been since the days of Bute, as the promoter of absolutism. Dunning’s bold resolution on the power of the Crown, that it “has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished,” was actually carried by a narrow majority with many country members among the ayes. In June, in response to the repeal of certain penal laws against the Catholics and the mad agitation of Lord George Gordon, the mobs gathered and burst in frightening riot. To cries of “No Popery!” and demands for repeal of the Quebec Act, they attacked ministers, tore their wigs, raided and robbed their houses, burned Catholic chapels, rushed the Bank of England and for three days held the city in terror until the troops gained control.

The unpopularity of the Government and the war grew with these events while other troubles mounted. Spain declared war on Britain, Holland was helping the rebels, Russia was disputing the British blockade of the colonies and the war in America itself was dragging along vainly.

In May 1781, Lord Cornwallis, commander in the south, set out to consolidate his front by abandoning South Carolina for Virginia, where he established a base at Yorktown on the coast at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. From here he could maintain contact by sea with Clinton’s forces in New York. Reinforced by other British troops in the area, his strength was 7500. Washington, stationed on the Hudson at this time, was joined by the Comte de Rochambeau with French troops from Rhode Island for a planned attack on New York. At this moment a communication from Admiral de Grasse in the West Indies informed them that he was sailing with 3000 French troops for Chesapeake Bay and could reach there by the end of August. Washington and Rochambeau turned and marched for Virginia, which they reached early in September, hemming in Cornwallis by land.

In the meantime, a British fleet met de Grasse in action off Chesapeake Bay and after some mutual damage returned to New York for repairs, leaving the French in command of the waters off Yorktown. Cornwallis was now blocked by land and sea. A desperate effort to break out in rowboats across the York River was frustrated by a storm. His only hope was return of the British fleet with help from New York. The fleet did not come. The allied army of some 9000 Americans and nearly 8000 French moved forward against the York-town redcoats. Waiting for rescue, Cornwallis progressively drew in his lines while the besiegers advanced theirs. After three weeks the British situation was hopeless. On 17 October 1781, four years to the day after Saratoga, Cornwallis opened parley for surrender and two days later, in a historic ceremony, his army laid down its arms while the band played, as everybody knows, a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” The fleet bringing Clinton’s forces from New York arrived five days later, when it was too late.

“Oh God, it is all over!” cried Lord North when the news was brought to him on 25 November. Doubtless it was a cry of relief. That it was all over was not realized everywhere at once, but weariness of a losing struggle and the demand to make an end of it began to lap at the King. A barrage of motions by the opposition to terminate hostilities slowly gained votes as the country gentlemen, fearing more and more taxes, deserted the Government. In December a motion against the war gained 178 votes. In February 1782 the issue was brought to finality by the independent-minded Generàl Conway. As he had been the first at the time of the Stamp Act to foresee “fatal consequences” lying in wait for the Government along the path it was taking, so he was now to sound their knell. He moved “That the war on the continent of North America might no longer be pursued for the impracticable purpose of reducing the inhabitants of that country to obedience.” In a supporting speech as eloquent and effective as any heard in the House within living memory, he roused members to a fervor that swept them to within one vote of the majority: the tally was 194 to 193. The opposition, uniting at last behind the powerful scent of office, threw itself against the Government’s fingerhold. Votes of censure followed one upon another, but after the peak reached by Conway’s motion, the Government recovered just enough to hold on.

When Lord North, still held in office by the King, asked Parliament for a further large war loan, the House finally balked, the Government’s majority broke and the King in his misery drafted, though he did not deliver, a message of abdication. In it he said that the change in sentiment in the Commons incapacitated him from conducting the war effectively and from making a peace that was not destructive “to the commerce as well as the essential rights of the British nation.” At the same time he expressed his fidelity to the constitution, overlooking the fact that unless he abdicated, the constitution required him to obey the opinion of Parliament.

In March, the Government’s fingerhold was pried loose. A bill authorizing the Crown to make peace passed on 4 March without a division. On 8 March the Government survived a vote of censure by only ten votes. On 15 March, on a motion expressing no confidence in ministers who had spent £100,000,000 to lose thirteen colonies, the margin was reduced to nine. Notice was given of two more motions of no confidence to follow. Earlier, Lord North had at last informed the King resolutely and definitively that he must go, and on 20 March, forestalling another test of confidence, his resignation and that of his Cabinet took effect. On 27 March a new government, headed by Rockingham, took office, with Shelburne and Fox as Secretaries of State, Camden, Richmond, Grafton, Dunning and Admiral Keppel in other posts, General Conway as Commander-in-Chief, and Burke and Barré as Paymasters of the Army and Navy, respectively.

Even with such partisans of America—as they had been when in opposition—now in office, Britain’s acknowledgment of the nationhood of her former colonies was ungracious in the extreme. No minister, peer or even M.P. or Under-Secretary was named to conduct the peace negotiations. The single envoy sent to open preliminary talks with Franklin in Paris was a successful merchant and contractor for the British Army named Richard Oswald. A friend of Adam Smith, who had recommended him to Shelburne, he was to remain, unsupported by any formal delegation, the lone negotiator throughout.

Rockingham died suddenly in July 1782, to be succeeded as First Minister by Shelburne, who shrank from irrevocably and explicitly recognizing independence. He thought now of federation, but it was too late for statesmanship that Britain might earlier have used. The Americans insisted that their independent status was the sine qua non to be recognized in the preamble, and so it had to be. With some stalling, formal negotiations with Franklin, Adams, Laurens and John Jay began in September and the Treaty of Paris was concluded in November, to take effect in January 1783. The King’s final comment gained nothing in graciousness. He felt less unhappy, he wrote to Lord Shelburne, about the “dismemberment of America from this Empire,” in the knowledge “that knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not be in the end an evil that they become aliens to this Kingdom.”

In summary, Britain’s follies were not so perverse as the Popes’. Ministers were not deaf to rising discontent, because they had no chance to be; expressed by their equals, it rang in their ears in every debate and rudely impinged on them in the action of riots and mobs. They remained unresponsive by virtue of their majority in Parliament, but they worried about losing it, worked hard and spent heavily to hold it and could not enjoy the popes’ illusion of invulnerability. Nor was private avarice their besetting sin although they were as subject as most men to the stings of ambition. Being accustomed to wealth, property and privilege and most of them born to it, they were not so driven by desire for gain as to make it a primary obsession.

Given the intention to retain sovereignty, insistence on the right to tax was justifiable per se; but it was insistence on a right “you know you cannot exert,” and in the face of evidence that the attempt would be fatal to the voluntary allegiance of the colonies, that was folly. Furthermore, method rather than motivation was at fault. Implementation of policy grew progressively more inept, ineffective and profoundly provocative. Finally, it came down to attitude.

The attitude was a sense of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable. A feeling of this kind leads to ignorance of the world and of others because it suppresses curiosity. The Grenville, Rockingham, Chatham-Grafton and North ministries went through a full decade of mounting conflict with the colonies without any of them sending a representative, much less a minister, across the Atlantic to make acquaintance, to discuss, to find out what was spoiling, even endangering, the relationship and how it might be better managed. They were not interested in the Americans because they considered them rabble or at best children whom it was inconceivable to treat—or even fight—as equals. In all their communications, the British could not bring themselves to refer to the opposite Commander-in-Chief as General Washington but only as Mister. In his wistful regret that “our rulers” had not toured America instead of Europe to finish their education, William Eden was supposing that a view of the magnificence of the country would have made them more anxious to retain it, but nothing suggests that it would have improved their dealings with the people.

Americans were the settlers and colonizers of a territory deemed so essential that its loss would spell ruin, but the British wall of superiority precluded knowledge and promoted fatal underestimation. Meeting it during the peace negotiations, John Adams wrote, “The pride and vanity of that nation is a disease; it is a delirium; it has been flattered and inflamed so long by themselves and others that it perverts everything.”

Unsuitability for government, while an unwilled folly, was a folly of the system, which was peculiarly vulnerable to the lack of an effective head. At his dynamic best, Pitt had engineered England’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War, and his son was to hold the controls effectively against Napoleon. In between, a hapless government shuffled and blundered. Dukes and noble lords in the reign of George III did not take well to official responsibility. Grafton, in his reluctance and sense of unfitness and once-a-week attendance, Townshend in his recklessness, Hillsborough in his arrogant obtuseness, Sandwich, Northington, Weymouth and others in their gambling and drinking, Germain in his haughty incapacity, Richmond and Rockingham in their moods of aloofness and devotion to their country pursuits, poor Lord North in his intense dislike of his job, made a mess of a situation that would have been difficult even for the wisest. One cannot escape the impression that the level of British intelligence and competence in both civil and military positions in the period 1763–83 was, on the whole, though not in every case, low. Whether that was bad luck or was owing to the almost exclusive hold of the ultraprivileged on decisionmaking positions is not clear beyond question. The underprivileged and the middle class often do no better. What is clear is that when incapacity is joined by complacency, the result is the worst possible combination.

Finally there is the “terrible encumbrance” of dignity and honor; of putting false value on these and mistaking them for self-interest; of sacrificing the possible to principle, when the principle represents “a right you know you cannot exert.” If Lord Chesterfield could remark this in 1765 and Burke and others repeatedly plead for expediency rather than token display of authority, the government’s refusal to see it for themselves must be designated folly. They persisted in first pursuing, then fighting for an aim whose result would be harmful whether they won or lost. Self-interest lay in retaining the colonies in goodwill, and if this was considered the hinge of British prosperity and yet incompatible with legislative supremacy, then supremacy should have remained, as so many advised, unexercised. Conciliation, Rockingham once said, could be brought about by “tacit compact” and much remaining “unascertained.”

Although the war and the humiliation poisoned Anglo-American relations for a long time, Britain learned from the experience. Fifty years later, after a period of troubled relations with Canada, Commonwealth status began to emerge from the Durham Report, which resulted from England’s recognition that any other course would lead to a repetition of the American rebellion. The haunting question that remains is whether, if the ministers of George III had been other than they were, some such status or form of union between Britain and America might have been attainable and in that case might have created a preponderance of trans-Atlantic power that would have deterred challengers and perhaps spared the world the Great War of 1914–18 and its unending sequels.

It has been said that if the protagonists of Hamlet and Othello were reversed, there would have been no tragedy: Hamlet would have seen through Iago in no time and Othello would not have hesitated to kill King Claudius. If the British actors before and after 1775 had been other than they were, there might have been statesmanship instead of folly, with a train of altered consequences reaching to the present. The hypothetical has charm, but the actuality of government makes history.

* It has been suggested that the merchants’ objections were muted because at that stage the leading colonial agent, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, kept in mind that his position as Deputy Postmaster General in America and his son’s as Governor of New Jersey were held at the pleasure of the Crown.

* Much has been written on whether this was or was not an early manifestation of the King’s later insanity. Since no other attack occurred until the definite onset of his mental illness in 1788, more than twenty years later, the King may be taken as sane throughout the period of the American conflict.

* This is an unhistorical term not then in use, but because it carries an exact connotation to the modern reader that no other word equals, I have decided with an uneasy conscience to use it.

* The discrepancy between this figure and the three million of Chatham’s speech of January 1766 may reflect inexact knowledge of the facts or inexact parliamentary reporting, both of which were features of the time. The actual population is estimated to have been approximately 2.5 million.

* St. Stephen’s represents the Houses of Parliament.

* The surname Germain was adopted in 1770 upon an inheritance from a family- friend by that name.

[neil]

excerpt from
AMERICAN PHARAOH: Mayor Richard J. Daley- His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor - 2000

As the city’s black population soared, blacks were increasingly concentrated in a distinct ghetto — the South Side’s Black Belt. Many of the southern migrants pouring into the Illinois Central Railroad Station clutched the addresses of friends and family who lived in the Black Belt, and those who arrived with no plans were generally steered in that direction. By 1920, the Black Belt — an area roughly bounded by 26th Street to the north, 55th Street to the south, State Street to the west, and Lake Michigan to the east — was home to about 85 percent of the city’s blacks. “Segregation has been increasing,” Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote of Chicago in An American Dilemma, his classic survey of American race relations. “[E]ven the upper class Negroes whose ancestors lived in Chicago on terms of almost complete social equality with their white neighbors are now forced into Negro ghettos and are hardly differentiated from the impoverished Negro just arrived from the South.” The upside of this racial segregation was that a remarkable African-American world began to take shape on the South Side. The stone-front houses and apartment buildings along once-white avenues like South Parkway and Michigan Boulevard now housed black teachers, lawyers, and other pillars of the black middle class. And the Black Belt’s business districts were filled with black-owned stores and black doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. “Why should Negro doctors and dentists give a damn that most white folks would rather die than let skilled black fingers repair their vital organs?” St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in Black Metropolis, their 1945 study of Chicago’s “Bronzeville.” “The Negro masses were gradually learning to trust their own professional men and would some day scorn to enrich white physicians at the expense of their own. Why beg white stores and offices to rescue educated colored girls from service in the white folks’ kitchens and factories? Negroes were learning to support their own businesses, and some day colored entrepreneurs would own all the stores and offices in the Black Belt; cash registers and comptometers and typewriters would click merrily under lithe brown fingers.” The Black Belt provided Chicago’s blacks with a measure of control over their own lives, and some refuge against the unfriendly white city outside its borders. But the sad reality was that it remained badly overcrowded and desperately poor, with high illness and mortality rates; a high percentage of residents on relief; a high crime rate; inadequate recreational facilities; lack of building repairs; accumulated garbage and dirty streets; overcrowded schools; and high rates of police brutality. 34

In white Chicago, the Great Migration produced a response that ranged from wariness to undisguised panic. The Chicago newspapers ran inflammatory headlines such as “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm to the North to Better Themselves” and “Negroes Arrive by Thousands — Peril to Health.” Articles in the city’s three leading papers — the Tribune, the Daily News, and the Herald Examiner — generally overstated the size of the migration, and focused on the new arrivals’ purported sickness, criminality, and vice. White Chicagoans worked to prevent the migrants from moving into white neighborhoods. One South Side neighborhood association captured the exclusionary spirit sweeping white Chicago when it declared that “there is nothing in the make-up of a Negro, physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor.” In April 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board met and — concerned about what officials described as the “invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes” — appointed a Special Committee on Negro Housing to make recommendations. On this committee’s recommendation, the board adopted a policy of block-by-block racial segregation, carefully controlled so that “each block shall be filled solidly and . . . further expansion shall be confined to contiguous blocks.” Three years later, the board took the further step of voting unanimously to punish by “immediate expulsion” any member who sold property to a black on a block where there were only white owners. 35

If white Chicago as a whole turned a cold shoulder to the new black arrivals, Daley’s Irish kinsmen were particularly unwelcoming. The Irish and blacks had much in common. Ireland’s many years of domination at the hands of the British resembled, if not slavery, then certainly southern sharecropping — with Irish farmers working the land and sending rent to absentee landlords in England. The Irish were dominated, like southern blacks, through violence, and lost many of the same civil rights: to vote, to serve on juries, and to marry outside their group. Indeed, after Cromwell’s bloody invasion in the mid-1600s, not only were Irish-Catholics massacred in large numbers, but several thousand were sent in chains to the West Indies, where they were sold into slavery. But these similar histories of oppression did not bring Chicago’s Irish and blacks together. Much of the early difficulty stemmed from rivalry between two groups relegated to the lowest levels of the social order. As early as 1864, a mob of four hundred Irish dockworkers went on a bloody rampage against a dozen blacks they regarded as taking jobs from unemployed Irishmen. The Chicago Tribune — whose WASP management had little affection for Irish-Catholics — argued that this kind of anti-black violence was particularly the province of Irish-Americans. “The Germans never mob colored men from working for whoever may employ them,” the Tribune declared. “The English, the Scotch, the French, the Scandinavians, never molest peaceable black people. Americans never think of doing such a thing. No other nationality consider themselves ‘degraded’ by seeing blacks earning their own living by labor.” 36

Nor was the Catholic Church a force for racial tolerance during these tense times. The Church had more reason to fear the black influx than other white institutions. Unlike some faiths, Catholicism is firmly rooted in geography: Catholics’ relationship to their Church is determined by the parish in which they reside. Catholics “ascribe sacramental qualities to the neighborhood,” one historian has explained, “with the cross on top of the church and the bells ringing each day before Mass as visual and aural reminders of the sacred.” Protestants and Jews who saw blacks moving into their neighborhoods could move to the suburbs, taking their houses of worship with them or joining new ones when they settled in. But for Catholics, the ties to the land were greater, and the threat of losing their parish more deeply felt. “[E]verything they have been taught to value, as Catholics and Americans, is perceived as at risk,” wrote a reporter in Cicero, describing the racial siege felt by a parish there. “The churches and schools they built would become empty, the neighborhood priests, if any were left, would become missionaries. . . .” In 1917, the same year the Chicago Real Estate Board endorsed new steps to preserve racial segregation, Chicago’s Archbishop George Mundelein declared that Saint Monica’s Parish would henceforth be reserved for the city’s black Catholics. Since Mundelein had in the past opposed “national” parishes on principle, it seemed clear that his intention was to keep the races separate within the Church. 37

The demographic pressures kept mounting as trainload after train-load of blacks arrived from the South — and it was not clear how much longer these new migrants could be squeezed into the borders of the overcrowded Black Belt. The end of World War I had brought the return of black soldiers, many of whom were less willing to accept racial discrimination back home after they had risked their lives for their country. And Chicago had just reelected William Thompson, a mayor many whites felt they could not trust to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. Republican Thompson’s close ties to the black community, and his record number of black appointees, had led resentful whites to dub his City Hall “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The racial backlash growing in white neighborhoods was palpable, and word began to spread in the black community that whites were plotting some kind of bloody attack to re-assert their control of the city — perhaps even an invasion of the Black Belt designed to drive blacks out of Chicago. 38

On July 27, 1919, these tensions exploded when six black teenagers went swimming in the wrong part of Lake Michigan. Young Eugene Williams drifted too close to a “white” beach on the South Side, and drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a white man standing on the shore. False rumors spread rapidly through both the white and black communities. Blacks reported that a policeman had held a gun on a black crowd while whites threw stones; whites spread word that it was a white swimmer who had drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a black. Five days of bloody riots ensued, from July 27 to July 31, followed by another week of intermittent violence. White gangs roamed the South Side, attacking blacks indiscriminately, and whites drove through the Black Belt shooting at blacks out of car windows. Black gangs wandered through black neighborhoods, beating up white merchants. In the end, it took the state militia and a driving rainstorm to bring about a tense peace. But before the hostilities had died down, 23 blacks and 15 whites had been killed, and another 537 injured, two-thirds of them black. 39

The seventeen-year-old Daley was, at the very least, extremely close to the violence. Bridgeport was a major center of riot activity: by one estimate, 41 percent of all the encounters occurred in and around Daley’s neighborhood. South Side youth gangs, including the Hamburg Athletic Club, were later found to have been among the primary instigators of the racial violence. “For weeks, in the spring and summer of 1919, they had been anticipating, even eagerly awaiting, a race riot,” one study found. “On several occasions, they themselves had endeavored to precipitate one, and now that racial violence threatened to become generalized and unrestrained throughout Chicago, they were set to exploit the chaos.” The Chicago Commission on Human Relations eventually concluded that without these gangs “it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash.” It is also clear that Joseph McDonough, patron of the Hamburg Athletic Club and later Daley’s political mentor, actively incited the white community at the time of the riots. McDonough was quoted in the press saying that blacks had “enough ammunition . . . to last for years of guerrilla warfare,” and that he had seen police captains warning white South Side residents: “For God’s sake, arm. They are coming; we cannot hold them.” At the City Council, McDonough told police chief John J. Garrity that “unless something is done at once I am going to advise my people to arm themselves for protection.” 40

Was Daley himself involved in the bloody work of the 1919 race riots? His defenders have always insisted he was not, arguing that it would have been more in character for him to be attending to “his studies” or “family affairs” while much of the Irish-Catholic youth of Bridgeport were out bashing heads. But Daley’s critics have long “pictur[ed] him in the pose of a brick-throwing thug.” It strains credulity, they say, for Daley to have played no part in the riots when the Hamburg Athletic Club was so heavily involved — particularly when he was only a few years away from being chosen as the group’s president. Daley’s close ties to McDonough, who played an inflammatory role, also argue for involvement. Adding to the suspicions, Daley always remained secretive about the riots, and declined to respond to direct questions on the subject. It was a convenient political response that allowed Daley to play both sides of the city’s racial divide: whites from the ethnic neighborhoods could believe that Daley was a youthful defender of the South Side color line, while blacks could choose to believe the opposite. Daley’s role, or lack of role, is likely lost to history, in part because the police and prosecutors never pursued the white gang members who instigated the violence. At the least, it can be said that Daley was an integral member of a youth gang that played an active role in one of the bloodiest antiblack riots in the nation’s history — and that within a few years’ time, this same gang would think enough of Daley to select him as its leader.41



After graduating from De La Salle in 1919, Daley took a job with Dolan, Ludeman, and Company, a stockyards commission house. Daley once said that as children he and his friends were always drawn to the slaughterhouses, “being city kids fascinated with farm animals.” Daley woke at 4:00 A.M. each day to walk from his parents’ house to the yards. In the mornings, he moved cattle off trucks and weighed them. In the afternoons, he put his De La Salle skills to work in the firm’s offices, writing letters, taking dictation, and handling the books. Later in his career, Daley would regale political audiences with tales of his days as a stockyards “cowboy.” He presented himself as something of a South Side John Wayne, probably overstating the amount of derring-do his job required, and certainly omitting the grim brutality of the work. 42
Bridgeport’s traditional employment trinity consisted of the stock-yards, government work, and politics — with a select few going off to the priesthood. Daley once said that his ambition early in life had been to become “another P. D. Armour,” but it must soon have become clear to him that a career in the stockyards would likely have been low-paying and unsatisfying. Daley could have joined the many Bridgeporters who took patronage jobs with government bodies like the Park District or signed on as police officers. But that route also held little promise and fell far short of the accomplishments his mother had been grooming him for. Politics was another matter entirely. A young man with political ambitions could hardly have started out better than being born in Bridgeport. Bridgeport lay in the heart of the Irish South Side, in the powerful 11th Ward. The 11th was one of Chicago’s famous “river wards,” the bloc of working-class and slum wards along the Chicago River that were the mainstay of Chicago’s Democratic machine. These wards — which were at odds with Chicago’s Protestant Republican establishment — regularly produced the machine’s margins of victory, and their leaders controlled the Cook County Democratic Organization’s Central Committee. Of all the river ward neighborhoods, Bridgeport was in a class of its own: it would soon come to be known as the “mother of mayors.” Starting in 1933, this small South Side neighborhood would send three successive residents to City Hall — Edward Kelly, Martin Kennelly, and Daley — who would rule the city for forty-three years. Daley was coming of age just as Bridgeport’s machine politicians were rising to new heights of power.

In addition to being lucky in his place of birth, Daley had the right ethnic background for a career in Chicago politics. An old Chicago adage holds that “the Jews own it, the Irish run it, and the blacks live in it.” It was an exaggeration on all three counts. But if the Irish did not run Chicago — most of the businesses, banks, and newspapers were in Protestant hands — they did dominate the Democratic machine out of all proportion to their numbers. Chicago was far from the only city to fall under the sway of Irish politicians. As early as 1894, Yankees were decrying the “Irish conquest of our cities,” and listing the Irish Democratic party bosses who had seized the reins of municipal power from Boston to San Francisco. It is one of the great puzzles of American political life that almost all of the great political bosses — including New York’s William “Boss” Tweed, Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast, Boston’s James Michael Curley, and, of course, Daley — have been Irish. The Irish had an advantage of timing: they arrived in the United States in one of the earliest migrations, making them one of the most established ethnic groups. They also spoke English and were familiar with America’s British-style political system. And unlike Central European and Eastern European immigrants who often carried ethnic rivalries with them from the old country, the Irish had no enemies among their fellow immigrants. “A Lithuanian won’t vote for a Pole, and a Pole won’t vote for a Lithuanian,” said one old-time Chicago politician. “A German won’t vote for either of them — but all three will vote for [an Irishman].” 43

It has also been suggested that the Irish have a particular aptitude for machine politics. Edward Levine, in his classic study The Irish and Irish Politicians, argued that the Irish were naturally “given to politics.” 44 Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in Beyond the Melting Pot that the structure of the political machine, with its rigid hierarchies and respect for seniority, in many ways paralleled “[t]he Irish village ... a place of stable, predictable social relations in which almost everyone had a role to play, under the surveillance of a stern oligarchy of elders, and in which, on the whole, a person’s position was likely to improve with time. Transferred to Manhattan, these were the essentials of Tammany Hall.” The Irish disposition toward political machines may also derive from a traditional need for unofficial forms of government. In eighteenth-century Ireland, the penal laws made Catholicism illegal. In response, the Irish created their own informal mechanisms for taking care of their own. It was an outlook that translated easily to America’s Protestant-dominated cities. This new land might be filled with employers whose hiring policies bore the hated words “No Irish Need Apply,” charity workers who looked down their noses at the Irish poor, and judges who regarded the Irish as an incorrigible race. But the political machine would provide. Moynihan has also argued that disreputable machine practices like vote theft, patronage hiring, and kickbacks — he lumps them together under the rubric of “indifference to Yankee proprieties” — were commonplace in eighteenth-century Ireland. Irish landed aristocrats sold the votes of their tenants and bought seats in Parliament long before the Tweeds and Daleys of the New World. “The great and the wealthy ran Ireland politically like Tammany Hall in its worst days,” noted one scholar. “Had they not sold their own country for money and titles in the Act of Union with England and, as one rogue said, thanked God they had a country to sell?” 45

By the time of Daley’s birth, the Irish political ascendancy was already well under way. As early as the 1830s, complaints were being heard that the city’s Irish population wielded too much political power. Irish influence grew over the next few decades, as immigration from Ireland surged. The Irish suffered a setback in the municipal elections of 1855, when Know-Nothing Party candidate Levi D. Boone, grandson of frontiersman Daniel Boone, was elected mayor and his fellow Nativists took control of the City Council. During its brief reign, Boone’s regime passed a law barring immigrants from city jobs. But Irish political influence soon resumed its steady rise. After the City Council elections of 1869, the Irish held 15 of the 40 seats. And Irish politicians had an influence beyond their numbers. In the 1890s, by one estimate, 24 of the 28 most influential aldermen of the decade were Irish. In 1905, when Daley was three, Chicago elected Edward Dunne, its first Irish-Catholic mayor. The first mayoral candidate to break through the WASP stranglehold on city government, Dunne was a populist hero in neighborhoods like Daley’s. “It was taking your life in your hands to campaign against Dunne in Bridgeport or Back of the Yards,” a turn-of-the-century mayor once said.46



Daley’s route into the Democratic machine was through a Hamburg Athletic Club connection: the club’s sponsor, Bridgeport alderman Joseph (“Big Joe”) McDonough. McDonough was elected alderman in 1917 at the age of twenty-eight, and ward committeeman the following year. With the two most important ward positions his, Mc-Donough was indisputably the most powerful Democrat in the 11th Ward. McDonough, a three-hundred-pound former Villanova University football hero, was a colorful neighborhood institution, known for eating an entire chicken for lunch. McDonough ran a saloon, owned a real estate firm, and served as vice president of an automobile sales company. The clout he held as a result of his political offices contributed to the bottom lines of each business. But he was beloved in the 11th Ward for taking care of his people: one depression-era Christmas, McDonough single-handedly passed out 5,600 baskets of food for the needy. Bridgeport was filled with young men who would have jumped at the chance to apprentice themselves to the powerful McDonough. No doubt some of these men were more intelligent, better educated, and more charismatic than Daley. But these were not the important qualities for a budding machine politician. Daley was a plain-speaking, Irish-Catholic son of Bridgeport, who had proven through his presidency of the Hamburg Athletic Club that he could earn the respect of his peers. He also benefited from the premium the machine placed on the traditional virtues: discretion, sobriety, plodding hard work, fitting in, and a willingness to follow orders. McDonough selected Daley to be his personal assistant, appointed him to serve as a precinct captain, and invited him to work in the 11th Ward Organization. Daley worked as a precinct captain in the mayoral election of 1919 and the presidential election of 1920. 47

The Chicago machine that Daley signed on with was a remarkable political organization. It was formally the Cook County Democratic Organization, reflecting its true sphere of influence — beyond the Chicago city limits and into the surrounding suburban ring, which made up the rest of Cook County. At the top of the machine was the county chairman, or party boss, who was elected by ward committeemen from the city’s fifty wards, along with a smaller number of committeemen from the suburban townships. The machine was as rigidly hierarchical as the Catholic Church that most of its members belonged to. The county chairman presided like a secular cardinal, and beneath him were ward committeemen — the political equivalent of parish priests — who controlled their own geographical realms. Each of the fifty wards had its own Democratic ward organization, with its own headquarters, budget, slate of candidates, and army of workers. Daley was one of more than three thousand precinct captains, spread out across the fifty city wards, who were responsible for the machine’s performance at the block level. Like the Catholic Church, the machine offered its members not just a structure, but a worldview and a moral code. One academic who studied the Chicago machine concluded that it was guided by what he called the “regular ethic.” Among the tenets of the regular Democrat’s creed: (1) Be faithful to those above you in the hierarchy, and repay those who are faithful to you; (2) Back the whole machine slate, not individual candidates or programs; (3) Be respectful of elected officials and party leaders; (4) Never be ashamed of the party, and defend it proudly; (5) Don’t ask questions; (6) Stay on your own turf, and keep out of conflicts that don’t concern you; (7) Never be first, since innovation brings with it risk; and (8) Don’t get caught. Another scholar of Chicago politics summed up the machine ethic more concisely in a book title: Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers. 48

The chairman of the Cook County Central Committee held the ultimate power, but it was ward committeemen like McDonough who did most of the machine’s day-to-day work. Ward committeemen slated, or picked, candidates for ward offices from alderman down — and like McDonough, they not infrequently ended up as both ward committeeman and alderman. They were also in charge of distributing patronage to precinct captains and other ward workers, a difficult, sensitive, and time-consuming task. “A committeeman gets a phone call and is told, ‘I’ve got three crossing guards, one sanitation worker,’” said a committeeman with the Cook County Democratic Organization. “‘Do you want them?’ ‘How soon do you have to know?’ he asks. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ You call back and say, ‘I want two crossing guards. I can’t use three. The sanitation worker — yes, I want that. Here are the names.’ The girl says, ‘Send them in to get their yellow slips,’ and they go in to get their yellow slips.” Being ward committeeman could be lucrative work, particularly for those who had law firms or insurance agencies on the side. Benjamin Lewis, a 24th Ward committeeman who was shot to death in the early 1960s under mysterious circumstances, once boasted that the post was worth $50,000 a year in insurance work alone. In exchange for his power and opportunity for enrichment, a committeeman was responsible for ensuring that his ward met the vote totals that the machine boss expected. Ward committeemen who failed to deliver on election day risked being “vised,” as the machine lingo put it, or fired, and replaced by someone who would do better. 49

[neil]

AMERICAN PHARAOH continued
Daley’s new position of precinct captain made him a soldier in Mc-Donough’s 11th Ward army, and put him in charge of a unit of about four hundred to five hundred voters. Precinct captains were the prime practitioners of the retail politics that was the stock in trade of the old urban machines. A precinct captain was expected to form a close personal relationship with every voter in his territory; the machine relied on these personal contacts — rather than the strength of its candidates in a given year — to win. “I never take leaflets or mention issues or conduct rallies in my precinct,” a Chicago precinct captain once explained. “After all, this is a question of personal friendship between me and my neighbors.” To forge these connections, precinct captains were expected to be out in their neighborhoods virtually every night, attending community meetings, putting in hours in the ward office, or visiting voters in their homes. “I found that those who related to people and were sincere in trying to help their neighbors in the community turned out to be the best captains,” one ward committeeman once said. Jake Arvey, committeeman from the heavily Jewish 24th Ward, required his precinct captains to belong to a synagogue or church, and to fraternal organizations like the Knights of Columbus or B’Nai Brith. “Sure, I was looking for votes,” Arvey says. “But, in the process, I made them charity-minded, civic-minded, culture-minded, and sensitive to the needs of other people.” In his last mayoral campaign in 1975, Daley delivered a tribute to the underappreciated precinct captain. He “is as honest as the rest of us and he’s a better neighbor than most of us, for partisan reasons,” Daley said. “He has solicitude for the welfare of the family on his block, especially if they are a large family with dependable political loyalties. He gets your broken-down uncle into the county hospital. . . . He’s always available when you’re in trouble.” 50

As a young precinct captain, Daley spent countless hours each week in one of Bridgeport’s great institutions: the 11th Ward headquarters. Daley’s new world had the feel of a Hibernian social club. One non-Irish Bridgeport native recalled how he felt when he stopped by for a political event. “In a short time the office was packed with precinct captains and workers — all Irish,” he says. “Outside of one Italian and myself, I saw nothing but red hair, freckles, and green eyes. I met an old high school chum who is now a helper in a precinct and who works at City Hall. I asked him how one can get into the organization. He smiled and said, ‘The first thing you have to do is be Irish!’” During election season, the 11th Ward was a campaign war room, where strategy was mapped out, precinct canvasses were analyzed, and campaign literature was handed out for distribution throughout the ward. The rest of the year, it functioned as a combination of constituent-service office and community center. 51

In the 11th Ward offices, and every other ward office across the city, the machine dispensed favors systematically in exchange for political support. Priority treatment went to political and financial backers of the machine, and to those who came with a referral from their precinct captain — the kind of solid citizen that ward workers referred to as “one of our people.” But since the granting of favors was a form of outreach to the community, any ward resident not known to be actively hostile to the machine was eligible for help. Complaints about city services, like missing stop signs or irregular garbage pickups, were easily handled. If a constituent had his water cut off, a single phone call from the ward office to the water department could get it restored. The ward organization had volunteer lawyers available in the evenings to provide free legal advice on everything from immigration paperwork to criminal law problems. Precinct captains like Daley could find summer jobs for neighborhood youth, arrange scholarships to the University of Illinois, and even get constituents hospital care or glass eyes. “Everybody needs a favor sometimes, but some people are too dumb to ask for it,” a saloonkeeper-alderman from the 43rd Ward once reflected. “So I say to my captains, ‘If you notice a hole on the sidewalk in front of a fellow’s house, call him a week before election and ask him if he would like it fixed. It could never do any harm to find out.’” 52

Machine politicians were adept at taking credit for every favor they dispensed — so voters would remember on election day. When machine aldermen contacted city agencies for their constituents, they requested written responses. Letters agreeing to take the requested action were sent to the alderman, so he could in turn pass the good news on to the voter. Letters of refusal went directly from the agency to the constituent. Machine officials often took more than their share of credit. When one alderman got a stop sign installed at a dangerous intersection, he sent a letter to every registered voter in his ward claiming that it was the machine’s doing — even though it began with local block associations, who had conducted a petition drive for the sign. Sometimes the machine took credit less formally. If the organization succeeded in intervening with the water department and getting a voter’s water restored, one machine operative says, “on election day the precinct captain would ask you about your water.” 53

Working as a precinct captain in the 11th Ward organization, Daley got an ideal introduction to the craft of machine politics. In the weeks before an election, the precinct captains were expected to canvass each home in their precinct at least twice to find out which way every voter was leaning — an early forerunner of the opinion poll. A captain was expected to be able to predict his vote almost exactly; missing by more than ten or so votes could result in a reprimand. A few days before the election, the precinct captain reported the results of the canvass to his ward committeeman. The committeeman, in turn, delivered the aggregated numbers for his ward to the machine boss. In addition to giving the machine a preview of how things looked for the election, the precinct-by-precinct canvass allowed captains to familiarize themselves with the individual circumstances of every voter. A captain could find out which of his voters were wavering and needed further persuasion, which needed transportation to the polls, and which would need to be reminded to vote. He could also learn which voters were determined to vote Republican, and therefore should not be encouraged to vote. A captain’s machinations to maximize the Democratic vote in his precinct could be quite elaborate. Just before the 1939 mayoral election, an Italian family with six voting-age members moved into Arvey’s 24th Ward. The precinct captain paid them regular visits, discussing over red wine how they planned to vote. “Six votes is an awful lot,” noted Arvey. But the captain soon realized that the head of the household was related to a leading Chicago Republican. When the captain asked him to vote in the Democratic primary, he refused. “I can’t do that!” he said. “My cousin is a Republican committeeman. How would it be if I voted in the Democratic primary?” After the captain pursued the family for a month, a compromise was arrived at. The man and his wife, who shared a last name with the cousin, could vote Republican. The man’s two daughters and sons-in-law, who had different names, would vote the straight Democratic ticket. 54

On election day, precinct workers often turned to more blatant forms of persuasion. Precinct captains handed out turkeys, nylons, and cash in exchange for votes. A captain from the poor West Side 27th Ward was once convicted of buying votes for one dollar a head. In the South Side 4th Ward, a newspaper reporter observing the voting caught a precinct worker handing out bags of groceries. “We gotta get these voters out any way we can,” the worker explained. On skid row, precinct captains often lured winos with free liquor. The fact that bars were legally closed on election day worked in the machine’s favor: many alcoholics considered the few minutes it took to vote a small price to pay to make the shakes go away. Clory Bryant, who ran for alderman in the early 1960s against the machine’s candidate, saw the effect of the machine’s generosity toward voters first-hand. “I had asked a neighbor of mine was she going to vote for me,” Bryant says. “As a matter of fact, I says, ‘I know you’ll vote for me.’ And she said, ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t, because my alderman always gives me a Christmas tree for my vote. And I know you can’t afford to go around buying these many trees.’” Bryant did not get her neighbor’s vote. The machine also did favors for neighborhood organizations that could help it win votes. The West Side 25th Ward Organization used to give regular donations to the thirty-five churches in the ward. One election day, the ward boss arrived at a polling place located in the basement of St. Roman’s Church. The priest was handing out coffee and doughnuts. Asked what he was doing, the priest responded, “What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to get some Democratic votes.” Ward organizations also wielded the stick in order to round up votes. Captains in black precincts frequently told voters they would lose their government benefits if they failed to vote a straight Democratic ticket. “Every welfare recipient is afraid to oppose the wishes of the precinct captain,” the pastor of a Mennonite church once complained. “Everyone living in public housing is afraid. They have been told that the machine alderman is the one who ensures them living quarters.” It was not an idle threat. Welfare programs were so rule-bound at the time, and enforcement was so arbitrary, that a determined precinct captain often could get a voter’s benefits cut off if he really wanted to. Saying hello to the precinct captain at the polls every year also came in handy when a public-housing recipient’s refrigerator or stove broke down. 55



In addition to his position as precinct captain, Daley was now working for McDonough in his City Council office. The job of “secretary” to an alderman was not glamorous. Daley was one of a corps of glorified gofers. But McDonough was a garrulous, old-style politician who liked to spend most of the workday at the saloon or the racetrack. He was more than willing to have the hardworking and detail-oriented Daley plow through the draft bills and proposed budgets that regularly crossed his desk. Working at the City Council, particularly for such a lackadaisical alderman, gave Daley a chance to observe city government up close. It also put Daley in the political mix, letting him make personal connections with machine politicians from across the city. Daley’s work for McDonough fit a pattern he followed throughout his career: he apprenticed himself to powerful men and made himself indispensable by taking on dull but necessary jobs. “I’ll tell you how he made it,” Daley’s friend-turned-rival Benjamin Adamowski once said. “He made it through sheer luck and by attaching himself to one guy after another and then stepping over them.” 56

In 1923, Daley began taking pre-law and law school classes four nights a week at DePaul University. Getting a law degree while juggling work and political responsibilities would ultimately take Daley more than a decade. “Daley was a nice fellow, very quiet, a hard worker, and always neatly dressed,” a fellow student, who would later be appointed a judge by Daley, recalled. “He never missed a class and always got there on time. But there was nothing about him that would make him stand out, as far as becoming something special in life. Even then, he misused the language so that you noticed it. He had trouble expressing himself and his grammar wasn’t good.” But Daley succeeded in law school by the same plodding persistence he brought to every task he undertook. “I always went out dancing every night, but Dick went home to study his law books,” recalled a friend from youth who later went on to head the plumbers’ union. “He would never stop in the saloon and have a drink.” 57

Daley’s career progressed as his patron, McDonough, moved up through the political ranks. In 1930, the machine slated McDonough for county treasurer, and when he was elected he brought Daley along as his deputy. As county treasurer, McDonough was even less conscientious than he had been as an alderman. The dry financial work of the county treasurer’s office offered McDonough even less reason than the City Council had to remain at his desk. While his boss frequented racetracks and speakeasies, Daley applied the skills he had acquired in the De La Salle counting rooms to the county treasury. In his new job, Daley learned the intricacies of local government law and municipal finance, and how to work a budget. And he saw firsthand how a government office operates when it is inextricably tied to a political machine. He learned how the machine larded the county treasurer’s office with patronage appointees who were hired for their political work. And he saw how it ensured that county funds were deposited with bankers who contributed to the campaigns of machine candidates. 58

While Daley was toiling away at night law school, he met Eleanor Guilfoyle at a neighborhood ball game. Her brother Lloyd, a friend of Daley’s, made the introduction. “Sis,” as she would always be known, came from a large Irish-Catholic family in the neighboring Southwest Side community of Canaryville. She had graduated from Saint Mary High School and was working as a secretary at a paint company and caring for an invalid mother when Daley asked her out on their first date, to a White Sox game. “We had a very happy courtship,” Sis once recalled. “I used to meet him after law school and go to the opera.” “Of course I knew Dick was bound to succeed — even when I first met him,” she would say later. “Anyone who would work in the stockyards all day long, then go to school at night was determined to get ahead.” Daley pursued marriage as he pursued everything else in his life — carefully, even ploddingly. Their courtship lasted for six years, until he had finished law school and had begun to establish himself professionally. The couple married on June 17, 1936, when Daley was thirty-four and Eleanor was twenty-eight. It was three years after his graduation, and the same year that he entered into a law partnership with an old friend, William Lynch, the politically minded son of a Bridgeport precinct captain. 59

[neil]

2666: A Novel

Roberto Bolaño ~ 1953 Chile - 2003 Spain

an excerpt from Section 1 The Part About the Critics (Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, Norton and their search for the reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi):

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border. Espinoza and Pelletier saw him as a failed man, failed above all because he had lived and taught in Europe, who tried to protect himself with a veneer of toughness but whose innate gentleness gave him away in the act. But Norton's impression was of a sad man whose life was ebbing swiftly away and who would rather do anything than serve them as guide to Santa Teresa.
That night the three critics went to bed on the early side. Pelletier dreamed of his toilet. A muffled noise woke him and he got up naked and saw from under the door that someone had turned on the bathroom light. At first he thought it was Norton, even Espinoza, but as he came closer he knew it couldn't be either of them. When he opened the door the bathroom was empty. On the floor he saw big smears of blood. The bathtub and the shower curtain were crusted with a substance that wasn't entirely dry yet and that Pelletier at first thought was mud or vomit, but which he soon discovered was shit. He was much more revolted by the shit than frightened by the blood. As he began to retch he woke up.
Espinoza dreamed about the painting of the desert. In the dream Espinoza sat up in bed, and from there, as if watching TV on a screen more than five feet square, he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements—the movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched the painting from losing his mind. And then there were the voices. Espinoza listened to them. Barely audible voices, at first only syllables, brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert and the framed space of the hotel room and the dream. He recognized a few stray words. Quickness, urgency, speed, agility. The words tunneled through the rarefied air of the room like virulent roots through dead flesh. Our culture, said a voice. Our freedom. The word freedom sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom. He woke up in a sweat.
In Norton's dream she saw herself reflected in both mirrors. From the front in one and from the back in the other. Her body was slightly aslant. It was impossible to say for sure whether she was about to move forward or backward. The light in the room was dim and uncertain, like the light of an English dusk. No lamp was lit. Her image in the mirrors was dressed to go out, in a tailored gray suit and, oddly, since Norton hardly ever wore such things, a little gray hat that brought to mind the fashion pages of the fifties. She was probably wearing black pumps, although they weren't visible. The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia and also of defenselessness, made her wonder, nevertheless, what she was waiting for to leave, what signal she was waiting for before she stepped out of the field between the watching mirrors and opened the door and disappeared. Had she heard a noise in the hall? Had someone passing by tried to open her door? A confused hotel guest? A worker, someone sent up by reception, a chambermaid? And yet the silence was total, and there was a certain calm about it, the calm of long early-evening silences. All at once Norton realized that the woman reflected in the mirror wasn't her. She felt afraid and curious, and she didn't move, watching the figure in the mirror even more carefully, if possible. Objectively, she said to herself, she looks just like me and there's no reason why I should think otherwise. She's me. But then she looked at the woman's neck: a vein, swollen as if to bursting, ran down from her ear and vanished at the shoulder blade. A vein that didn't seem real, that seemed drawn on. Then Norton thought: I have to get out of here. And she scanned the room, trying to pinpoint the exact spot where the woman was, but it was impossible to see her. In order for her to be reflected in both mirrors, she said to herself, she must be just between the little entryway and the room. But she couldn't see her. When she watched her in the mirrors she noticed a change. The woman's head was turning almost imperceptibly. I'm being reflected in the mirrors too, Norton said to herself. And if she keeps moving, in the end we'll see each other. Each of us will see the other's face. Norton clenched her fists and waited. The woman in the mirror clenched her fists too, as if she were making a superhuman effort. The light coming into the room was ashen. Norton had the impression that outside, in the streets, a fire was raging. She began to sweat. She lowered her head and closed her eyes. When she looked in the mirrors again, the woman's swollen vein had grown and her profile was beginning to appear. I have to escape, she thought. She also thought: where are Jean-Claude and Manuel? She thought about Morini. All she saw was an empty wheelchair and behind it an enormous, impenetrable forest, so dark green it was almost black, which it took her a while to recognize as Hyde Park. When she opened her eyes, the gaze of the woman in the mirror and her own gaze intersected at some indeterminate point in the room. The woman's eyes were just like her eyes. The cheekbones, the lips, the forehead, the nose. Norton started to cry in sorrow or fear, or thought she was crying. She's just like me, she said to herself, but she's dead. The woman smiled tentatively and then, almost without transition, a grimace of fear twisted her face. Startled, Norton looked behind her, but there was no one there, just the wall. The woman smiled at her again. This time the smile grew not out of a grimace but out of a look of despair. And then the woman smiled at her again and her face became anxious, then blank, then nervous, then resigned, and then all the expressions of madness passed over it and after each she always smiled. Meanwhile, Norton, regaining her composure, had taken out a small notebook and was rapidly taking notes about everything as it happened, as if her fate or her share of happiness on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up.

[neil]

2666: A Novel
an excerpt:
"Isn't that the main concern of all Latin American intellectuals?" asked Pelletier.

"I wouldn't say that. Some of them are more interested in writing, for example," said Amalfitano.

"Tell us what you mean," said Espinoza.

"I don't really know how to explain it," said Amalfitano. "It's an old story, the relationship of Mexican intellectuals with power. I'm not saying they're all the same. There are some notable exceptions. Nor am I saying that those who surrender do so in bad faith. Or even that they surrender completely. You could say it's just a job. But they're working for the state. In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they're laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this might be true across Latin America, except in Argentina, intellectuals work for the state. It was like that under the PRI and it'll be the same under the PAN. The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic of the state. The state doesn't care. The state feeds him and watches over him in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or at least tries to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one knows for sure. Not that it's always this way, of course. An intellectual can work at the university, or, better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn't mean they won't get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. This mechanism somehow crops the ears off Mexican writers. It drives them insane. Some, for example, will set out to translate Japanese poetry without knowing Japanese and others just spend their time drinking. Take Almendro—as far as I know he does both. Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me. The weather is good, it's sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valery possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend's house and talk. And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they're incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. This shrinking of the stage doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller too, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage there are others, of course. New stages that have sprung up over time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant, for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humor, but it still stinks. This humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language, can't even enrich it themselves. Their best words are borrowings that they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They're sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends the theaters are closed and they cover the openings of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night. The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. Songs can be heard in some bars, the notes reaching the street. Sometimes an intellectual wanders off course and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal. Then he thinks what would happen if one day he. But no. He doesn't think anything. He just drinks and sings. Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer. But all he's really seen is a shadow, sometimes all he's seen is his own shadow, which comes home every night so that the intellectual won't burst or hang himself from the lintel. But he swears he's seen a German writer and his own happiness, his sense of order, his bustle, his spirit of revelry rest on that conviction. The next morning it's nice out. The sun shoots sparks but doesn't burn. A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, and stop in a park and read a few pages of Valery. And so on until the end."

"I don't understand a word you've said," said Norton.

"Really I've just been talking nonsense," said Amalfitano.

[neil]

2666: A Novel
Roberto Bolaño
an excerpt from "Section 2: THE PART ABOUT AMALFITANO"
Shortly after the episode at Los Zancudos, Amalfitano saw Dean Guerra's son again. This time he was dressed like a cowboy, although he had shaved and he smelled of Calvin Klein cologne. Even so, all he lacked to look like a real cowboy was the hat. There was something mysterious about the way he accosted Amalfitano. It was late in the day, and as Amalfitano walked along a ridiculously long corridor at the university, deserted and dark at that hour, Marco Antonio Guerra burst out from a corner like someone playing a bad joke or about to attack him. Amalfitano jumped, then struck out automatically with his fist. It's me, Marco Antonio, said the dean's son, after he was hit again. Then they recognized each other and relaxed and set off together toward the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway, which reminded Marco Antonio of the stories of people who'd been in comas or declared clinically dead and who claimed to have seen a dark tunnel with a white or dazzling brightness at the end, and sometimes these people even testified to the presence of loved ones who had passed away, who took their hands or soothed them or urged them to turn back because the hour or micro-fraction of a second in which the change took effect hadn't yet arrived. What do you think, Professor? Do people on the verge of death make this shit up, or is it real? Is it all just a dream, or is it within the realm of possibility? I don't know, said Amalfitano curtly, since he still hadn't gotten over his fright, and he wasn't in the mood for a repeat of their last meeting. Well, said Marco Antonio Guerra, if you want to know what I think, I don't believe it. People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.

Despite what he had hoped (to get rid of Marco Antonio Guerra as soon as they emerged from the hallway with its aura of life after death), Amalfitano had to follow him without complaint because the dean's son was the bearer of an invitation to dinner that very evening at the house of the rector of the University of Santa Teresa, the august Dr. Pablo Negrete. So he climbed in Marco Antonio's car, and Marco Antonio drove him home, then chose, in an unwonted display of shyness, to wait for him outside, watching the car, as if there were thieves in Colonia Lindavista, while Amalfitano cleaned up and changed clothes, and his daughter, who of course was invited too, did the same, or not, since his daughter could go dressed as she liked, but he, Amalfitano, had better show up at Dr. Negrete's house in a jacket and tie at the very least. The dinner, as it happened, was nothing to worry about. Dr. Negrete simply wanted to meet him and had assumed, or been advised, that a first meeting in his office at the administration building would be much chillier than a first meeting in the comfort of his own home, a grand old two-story house surrounded by a lush garden with plants from all over Mexico and plenty of shady nooks where guests could gather in petit comité. Dr. Negrete was a man of silence and reserve who was happier listening to others than leading the conversation himself. He asked about Barcelona, recollected that in his youth he had attended a conference in Prague, mentioned a former professor at the University of Santa Teresa, an Argentinian who now taught at one of the branches of the University of California, and the rest of the time he was quiet. His wife, who carried herself with a distinction that the rector lacked, though to judge by her features she had never been a beauty, was much nicer to Amalfitano and especially to Rosa, who reminded her of her youngest daughter, whose name was Clara, like her mother's, and who had been living in Phoenix for years. At some point during the dinner Amalfitano thought he noticed a rather murky exchange of glances between the rector and his wife. In her eyes he glimpsed something that might have been hatred. At the same time, a sudden fear flitted as swiftly as a butterfly across the rector's face. But Amalfitano noticed it and for a moment (the second flutter of wings) the rector's fear nearly brushed his own skin. When he recovered and looked at the other dinner guests he realized that no one had noticed the slight shadow, like a hastily dug pit that gives off an alarming stench.

But he was wrong. Young Marco Antonio Guerra had noticed. And he had also noticed that Amalfitano had noticed. Life is worthless, he said into Amalfitano's ear when they went out into the garden. Rosa sat with the rector's wife and Professor Perez. The rector sat in the gazebo's only rocking chair. Dean Guerra and two philosophy professors took seats near the rector's wife. A third professor, a bachelor, remained standing, next to Amalfitano and Marco Antonio Guerra. A servant, an almost elderly woman, came in after a while carrying an enormous tray of glasses that she set on a marble table. Amalfitano considered helping her, but then he thought it might be seen as disrespectful if he did. When the old woman reappeared, carrying more than seven bottles in precarious equilibrium, Amalfitano couldn't stop himself and went to help her. When she saw him, the old woman's eyes widened and the tray began to slip from her hands. Amalfitano heard a shriek, the ridiculous little shriek of one of the professors' wives, and at that same moment, as the tray was falling, he glimpsed the shadow of young Guerra setting everything right again. Don't worry, Chachita, he heard the rector's wife say.

Then he heard young Guerra, after he had set the bottles on the table, ask Dona Clara whether she kept any Los Suicidas mezcal in her liquor cabinet. And he heard Dean Guerra saying: pay no attention to my son and his foolish notions. And he heard Rosa say: Los Suicidas mezcal, what a pretty name. And he heard a professor's wife say: it certainly is unusual. And he heard Professor Perez: what a fright, I thought she was going to drop them. And he heard a philosophy professor talking about norteno music, to change the subject. And he heard Dean Guerra say that the difference between norteno groups and groups from anywhere else in the country was that norteno groups were always made up of an accordion and a guitar, with the accompaniment of a bajo sexto, the twelve-string guitar, and some kind of brinco. And he heard the same philosophy professor asking what a brinco was. And he heard the dean answer that a brinco could be drums, for example, like a rock group's drum kit, or kettledrums, and in norteno music a proper brinco might be the redova, a hollow wooden block, or more commonly a pair of sticks. And he heard Rector Negrete saying: that's right. And then he accepted a glass of whiskey and sought the face of the person who had put it in his hand and found the face of young Guerra, pale in the moonlight.

Proof number 2, by far the most interesting to Amalfitano, was called He was born to an Araucanian -woman and it began like this: "Upon the arrival of the Spaniards, the Araucanians established two channels for communication from Santiago: telepathy and Adkintuwe.55 Lautaro,56 because of his notable telepathic skills, was taken north with his mother when he was still a child to enter the service of the Spaniards. It was in this way that Lautaro contributed to the defeat of the Spaniards. Since telepaths could be eliminated and communications cut, Adkintuwe was created. Only after 1700 did the Spaniards become aware of this method of sending messages by the movement of branches. They were puzzled by the fact that the Araucanians knew everything that happened in the city of Concepcion. Although they managed to discover Adkintuwe, they were never able to decipher it. They never suspected that the Araucanians were telepathic, believing instead that they had 'traffic with the devil,' who informed them of events in Santiago. There were three lines of Adkintuwe from the capital: one along the buttresses of the Andes, another along the coast, and a third along the central valley. Primitive man was ignorant of language; he communicated by brainwaves, as animals and plants do. When he resorted to sounds and gestures and hand signals to communicate, he began to lose the gift of telepathy, and this loss was accelerated when he went to live in cities, distancing himself from nature. Although the Araucanians had two kinds of writing— the rope knotting known as Prom,57 and the triangle writing known as Adentunemul58—they never gave up telecommunication; on the contrary, some Kügas whose families were scattered all over America, the Pacific Islands, and the deepest south specialized in it so that no enemy would ever take them by surprise. By means of telepathy they kept in permanent contact with the Chilean migrants who first settled in the north of India, where they were called Aryans, then headed to the fields of ancient Germania and later descended to the Peloponnese, traveling from there to Chile along the traditional route to India and across the Pacific Ocean." Immediately following this and apropos of nothing, Kilapan wrote: "Killenkusi was a Machi59 priestess. Her daughter Kinturay had to choose between succeeding her or becoming a spy; she chose the latter and her love for the Irishman; this opportunity afforded her the hope of having a child who, like Lautaro and mixed-race Alejo, would be raised among the Spaniards, and like them might one day lead the hosts of those who wished to push the conquistadors back beyond the Maule River, because Admapu law prohibited the Araucanians from fighting outside of Yekmonchi. Her hope was realized and in the spring60 of the year 1777, in the place called Palpal, an Araucanian woman endured the pain of childbirth in a standing position because tradition decreed that a strong child could not be born of a weak mother. The son arrived and became the Liberator of Chile."

The footnotes made it very clear in what kind of drunken ship Kilapan had set sail, if it wasn't clear already. Note 55, Adkintmve, read: "After many years the Spaniards became aware of its existence, but they were never able to decipher it." Note 56: "Lautaro, swift noise (taws in Greek means swift)." Note 57: "Prom, word handed down from the Greek by way of Prometheus, the Titan who stole writing from the gods to give to man." Note 58: "Adentunemul, secret writing consisting of triangles." Note 59: "Machi, seer. From the Greek verb mantis, which means to divine." Note 60: "Spring, Admapu law ordered that children should be conceived in summer, when all fruits were ripe; thus they would be born in spring when the land awakens in the fullness of its strength; when all the animals and birds are born."

From this one could conclude that: (1) all Araucanians or most of them were telepathic, (2) the Araucanian language was closely linked to the language of Homer, (3) Araucanians had traveled all over the globe, especially to India, ancient Germania, and the Peloponnese, (4) Araucanians were amazing sailors, (5) Araucanians had two kinds of writing, one based on knots and the other on triangles, the latter secret, (6) the exact nature of the mode of communication that Kilapan called Adkintuwe (and that had been discovered by the Spaniards, although they were unable to decipher it) wasn't very clear. Maybe it was the sending of messages by the movement of tree branches located in strategic places, like at the tops of hills? Something like the smoke signals of the Plains Indians of America? (7) in contrast, telepathic communication was never discovered and if at some point it stopped working this was because the Spaniards killed the telepaths, (8) telepathy also permitted the Araucanians of Chile to remain in permanent contact with Chilean migrants scattered in places as far-flung as populous India or green Germany, (9) should one deduce from this that Bernardo O'Higgins was also a telepath? Should one deduce that the author himself, Lonko Kilapan, was a telepath? Yes, in fact, one should.

One could also deduce (and, with a little effort, see) other things, thought Amalfitano as he diligently gauged his mood, watching Dieste's book hanging in the dark in the backyard. One could see, for example, the date that Kilapan's book was published, 1978, in other words during the military dictatorship, and deduce the atmosphere of triumph, loneliness, and fear in which it was published. One could see, for example, a gentleman of Indian appearance, half out of his head but hiding it well, dealing with the printers of the prestigious Editorial Universitaria, located on Calle San Francisco, number 454, in Santiago. One could see the sum that the publication of the little book would cost the Historian of the Race, the President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and the Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language, a sum that Mr. Kilapan tries to bargain down more wishfully than effectively, although the manager of the print shop knows that they aren't exactly overrun with work and that he could very well give this Mr. Kilapan a little discount, especially since the man swears he has two more books already finished and edited (Araucanian Legends and Greek Legends and Origins of the American Man and Kinship Between Araucanians, Aryans, Early Germans, and Greeks) and he swears up and down that he'll bring them here, because, gentlemen, a book published by the Editorial Universitaria is a book distinguished at first glance, a book of distinction, and it's this final argument that convinces the printer, the manager, the office drudge who handles these matters, to let him have his little discount. The word distinguished. The word distinction. Ah, ah, ah, ah, pants Amalfitano, struggling for breath as if he's having a sudden asthma attack. Ah, Chile.

Although it was possible to imagine other scenarios, of course, or it was possible to see the same sad picture from different angles. And just as the book began with a jab to the jaw ("the Yekmonchi, called Chile, was geographically and politically identical to the Greek state"), the active reader—the reader as envisioned by Cortazar—could begin his reading with a kick to the author's testicles, viewing him from the start as a straw man, a factotum in the service of some colonel in the intelligence services, or maybe of some general who fancied himself an intellectual, which wouldn't be so strange either, this being Chile, in fact the reverse would be stranger, in Chile military men behaved like writers, and writers, so as not to be outdone, behaved like military men, and politicians (of every stripe) behaved like writers and like military men, and diplomats behaved like cretinous cherubim, and doctors and lawyers behaved like thieves, and so on ad nauseam, impervious to discouragement. But picking up the thread where he had left off, it seemed possible that Kilapan hadn't been the one who wrote the book. And if Kilapan hadn't written the book, it might be that Kilapan didn't exist, in other words that there was no President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, among other reasons because perhaps the Indigenous Confederation didn't exist, nor was there any Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language, among other reasons because perhaps said Academy of the Araucanian Language never existed. All fake. All nonexistent. Kilapan, from that perspective, thought Amalfitano, moving his head in time to the (very slight) swaying of Dieste's book outside the window, might easily be a nom de plume for Pinochet, representing Pinochet's long sleepless nights or his productive mornings, when he got up at six or five-thirty and after he showered and performed a few calisthenics he shut himself in his library to review international slights, to meditate on Chile's negative reputation abroad. But there was no reason to get too excited. Kilapan's prose could be Pinochet's, certainly. But it could also be Aylwin's or Lagos's. Kilapan's prose could be Frei's (which was saying something) or the prose of any right-wing neo-Fascist. Not only did Lonko Kilapan's prose encapsulate all of Chile's styles, it also represented all of its political factions, from the conservatives to the Communists, from the new liberals to the old survivors of the MIR. Kilapan was the high-grade Spanish spoken and written in Chile, its cadences revealing not only the leathery nose of Abate Molina, but also the butchery of Patricio Lynch, the endless shipwrecks of the Esmeralda, the Atacama desert and cattle grazing, the Guggenheim Fellowships, the Socialist politicians praising the economic policy of the junta, the corners where pumpkin fritters were sold, the mote con huesillos*, the ghost of the Berlin Wall rippling on motionless red flags, the domestic abuse, the good-hearted whores, the cheap housing, what in Chile they called grudge holding and Amalfitano called madness.

But what he was really looking for was a name. The name of O'Higgins's telepathic mother. According to Kilapan: Kinturay Treulen, daughter of Killenkusi and Waramanke Treulen. According to the official story: Dona Isabel Riquelme. Having reached this point, Amalfitano decided to stop watching Dieste's book swaying (ever so slightly) in the darkness and sit down and think about his own mother's name: Dona Eugenia Riquelme (actually Dona Filia Maria Eugenia Riquelme Grana). He was briefly startled. For five seconds, his hair stood on end. He tried to laugh but he couldn't.

*viz. ref.
Mote con huesillo is a traditional Chilean summer-time drink often sold in street stands or vendor carts. It is a non-alcoholic beverage consisting of a sweet clear nectar-like liquid made with dried peaches cooked in sugar, water and cinnamon, and then once cooled, mixed with fresh cooked husked wheat.

[neil]

in deference to the semiotics of the ghost

Semiotic Phantoms (also called Semiotic Ghosts) - As conceived by William Gibson, semiotic phantoms are fragments of the Gernsback Continuum* that invoke passage to alternative notions of public life. These phantoms manifest themselves in signs and artifacts (comic books, postcards, films, wallpaper second-hand clothing, abandoned buildings) that don't completely fit** in contemporary life. Alone, they may be defined as trash or detritus. However, in various clusters or constellations, they can push the unprepared through the Gernsback Continuum and toward an outsider's view of public life.
Comm 149
Rhetoric and Public Life
Dr. Andrew Wood
sjsu.edu
San José State University

*"The Gernsback Continuum" is a 1981 science fiction short story by American-Canadian author William Gibson
**chaotic, possibly arbitrary, and potentially catalytic artifact

Making Sense of the Gernsback Continuum
www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/149/149syllabus2gerns.html

o·rog·ra·phy
/ôˈräɡrəfē/
Learn to pronounce
noun
noun: orography
the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains.

The Araucanía Region of central Chile encompasses terrain ranging from the west's Pacific coastline to volcanoes and the Andes mountains in the east. Its southeast, with many freshwater lakes and temperate rainforest, forms part of the Chilean Lake District. Nature reserves, including Huerquehue National Park and Conguillío National Park, protect ecosystems with lakes, rivers and forests of monkey puzzle conifers.

Araucaria (monkey puzzle) trees, Conguillío(water with pine kernels) National Park, Chilean Lake District

[neil]

AMERICAN PHARAOH
The rise of Edward Kelly at first looked like a significant setback to Daley’s own political hopes. Daley’s political standing depended on his ward committeeman and boss, McDonough, but McDonough’s best connections had died along with Cermak. It was unclear where Mc-Donough, and therefore Daley, would fit into the new Kelly-Nash regime that now controlled the city. McDonough was despondent about the recent turn of events, and began to wonder if he had a future in politics. But thirty-one-year-old Daley kept up his hard work for McDonough and continued to plug away at his law school studies.

Kelly turned out to be a surprise as mayor. Nash had selected him because of his willingness to hand out sweetheart deals and patronage jobs, and he more than lived up to Nash’s expectations in this regard. But Kelly was also a progressive political force during troubled times. His fourteen years in office included some of the worst years of the Great Depression. The national economic crisis caused thousands of people to board the railroad cars that passed through devastated industrial towns and dust bowl farm regions, heading to Chicago in search of a livelihood. In the face of this influx, the city’s relief expenditures soared from $11 million in 1931 to $35 million in 1932, and Chicago began to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. A “Hooverville” sat on the edge of the Loop, with streets named “Prosperity Road” and “Hard Times Avenue.” Kelly responded by passionately embracing the New Deal. “Roosevelt,” he liked to say, “is my religion.” Kelly forged a strong relationship with the White House, and worked with Washington bureaucrats to bring desperately needed federal jobs to Chicago. Of course, Kelly and Nash gained as well: the federal jobs added considerably to the supply of patronage positions available for the machine faithful. The nation’s economic hard times ended up being good for the Chicago machine. “They had more to work with,” longtime Republican committeeman Bunnie East recalled. “They had more jobs, more money, and they had a Democratic president . . . [who] was very kind to them as far as government jobs and government contracts were concerned.” 12

Chicago’s Democratic machine was now at a crossroads. With Kelly and Nash in charge, it seemed that Cermak’s “house for all peoples” might revert to an old-style Irish political machine. But Kelly and Nash decided instead to continue in the Cermak tradition, making a point of filling important offices with Poles, Germans, and Jews. Kelly was also succeeding in one area where Cermak had done poorly: integrating black Chicagoans into the machine. While Cermak had relied primarily on sticks, Kelly held out an array of carrots. Kelly made a point of going to Soldier Field for the annual Wilberforce– Tuskegee football game — a red-letter day on black Chicago’s calendar — and he banned the movie Birth of a Nation, a glorification of the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. Kelly also spoke to blacks in terms they could identify with: the millionaire mayor received enthusiastic responses from South Side audiences when he recalled the days when his mother scrubbed floors in the mansions of Hyde Park. 13

Mayor Kelly’s appeal to Chicago blacks was based on substance as well as symbolism. In 1943, he established Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations, and three years later he set up a civil rights unit in the corporation counsel’s office. Kelly also took pioneering stands in favor of equal opportunity in housing and education. When Kelly learned that branch schools had been set up to separate white and black pupils in Morgan Park, a Far South Side neighborhood, he ordered the Board of Education to end the segregation. He stood his ground even after white students staged a walk-out. The Chicago Defender lauded Kelly for his stand in favor of school integration, declaring that the mayor had earned “the respect and confidence of every citizen of every color and creed whose mind is not blinded by hate, prejudice, and bigotry.” At the same time, Kelly offered an olive branch to the black gambling operations that had been Cermak’s special target. The same police that had conducted aggressive raids under the previous mayoral administration now had firm orders to hold back. The new, warmer relations between gambling operations and City Hall were reflected in a 1934 Chicago Daily News report that the machine was now taking in $1 million a month from illicit vice, and that precinct captains, particularly in the black wards, were running gambling houses. 14

Kelly’s outreach to Chicago’s black community came against the backdrop of a major party realignment occurring in black America. The Great Depression pushed many Americans into the Democratic camp: Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 with roughly 60 percent of the vote, and he swept Democrats into office with him at every level. Although blacks were among the nation’s worst off citizens, many were reluctant to abandon the party of Lincoln for a Democratic Party in which the segregationist Dixiecrat wing was so strong. In Roosevelt’s landslide 1932 victory, blacks gave him only 32 percent of their votes. Once in office, though, Roosevelt quickly began to win black voters over with his evident compassion for the victims of hard times. His New Deal initiatives — the NRA, the CCC, the WPA, and other programs designed to get Americans working again — earned him considerable gratitude in the black community. Roosevelt was regarded as a kind of secular savior by many blacks — “Let Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you!” was one black preacher’s rallying cry. In 1936, Roosevelt took 49 percent of the black vote, and four years later he won 52 percent. This black movement toward the Democratic Party was helped along by the fact that the party was beginning to break with its southern wing and express greater support for civil rights. In 1944, after Roosevelt endorsed equal opportunity for all races and an end to the poll tax, his national share of the black vote jumped to 64 percent. In 1948, after Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights platform was adopted at the Democratic National Convention and President Truman issued his order integrating the armed forces, 75 percent of black America voted Democratic at the presidential level. 15

In large part because of Mayor Kelly’s efforts, Chicago blacks began to defect to the Democratic Party slightly ahead of the national trend. In 1934, the Democratic machine embarked on a mission of virtual lèse majesté, challenging the South Side’s legendary three-term Republican congressman, Oscar DePriest. The first black elected to Congress since 1901, DePriest was a heroic figure to blacks across the country. He battled tirelessly against segregation and in support of black institutions such as Howard University. But for all of DePriest’s popularity and good works, it was becoming increasingly hard to be a black Republican. It also hurt him that he was a loyal party man, who regularly voted against the New Deal programs that were so popular with his constituents. In an outcome that marked a sea change in the city’s politics, a black Democrat, Arthur Mitchell, took DePriest’s seat. Any doubts that the movement toward the Democrats was real were dispelled the following year when Kelly ran for reelection. Days before the voting, black Republicans turned out for a massive pro-Kelly rally in Congressional Hall. “Lincoln is dead,” a former Republican alderman told the crowd. “You don’t need no ghost from the grave to tell you what to do when you go to the polls Tuesday.” The Democratic ticket, with Kelly at the top, swept the black South Side, taking more than 80 percent of the vote. 16

[neil]

[neil]

www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/dawson-william-l-1886-1970/

[neil]

AMERICAN PHARAOH
In selecting a tenement for King to move into, the Chicago Freedom Movement made a deliberate choice to put him on the West Side rather than the South Side. Chicago’s South Side, home to more than 400,000 blacks, was the traditional center of the city’s black life. It was the Chicago’s historic “Bronzeville,” home to great black institutions like the Chicago Defender and thriving black businesses, insurance companies, and funeral homes. The West Side was a newer ghetto of roughly 250,000 blacks, many of them recent arrivals from the rural South. Though living conditions in the South Side ghetto were bad, they were far worse on the West Side. West Side blacks were poorer, job opportunities were fewer, youth gangs were more active, and more of the residents lived in the kind of dilapidated, below-code apartments the anti-slum campaign was targeting. West Side blacks were also likely to be easier to organize. Many South Side blacks were more conservative, with strong ties to old-line black churches and the black submachine, two of the forces in the black community most skeptical of the civil rights cause. The West Side had fewer community institutions, and those tended to be the kind of grassroots organizations that backed the CCCO. And not least, West Side blacks were on the whole more culturally similar to the SCLC staff. More of them had been born in the Deep South, and many of them shared the worldview of the church-inspired southern civil rights movement. “We had a lot of experience dealing with black Mississippians,” Bernard Lafayette would say later, “and here they were transported north.” 1

But if parts of Chicago reminded them of home, King and the SCLC staff quickly realized just how different this sprawling urban metropolis was from the South. It was far larger than the other cities they had organized campaigns in before — 10 times as large as Birmingham, and 100 times as large as Selma. Ralph Abernathy recalls how astonished he was the first time Jesse Jackson took him on a driving tour of Chicago. “As we drove through the South Side, where a large segment of the black population lived, we kept waiting for the slum tenements to give way to warehouses, vacant lots, and then country stores and open fields where cows were grazing,” he recalls. “Instead we saw more slum blocks. And more. And more. We had a feeling that if we drove much farther south we were going to see the Gulf of Mexico. ‘That’s nothing,’ said Jesse. ‘Wait till you see the West Side.’” And to southerners used to a region where almost everyone fell into the simple category of “black” or “white,” Chicago was a confusing array of Irish, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, and other ethnic groups. 2

Another thing the SCLC was unprepared for when it arrived in Chicago was the opposition it would face from significant parts of the black community. “Chicago was the first city that we ever went to as members of the SCLC staff where the black ministers and black politicians told us to go back where we came from,” says Dorothy Tillman, then a young SCLC staff member from Alabama. “Dr. King would frequently say to me, ‘You ain’t never seen no Negroes like this, have you Dorothy?’ I would reply, ‘No, Reverend.’ He said, ‘Boy if we could crack these Chicago Negroes we can crack anything.’” Some Chicago blacks professed to be as offended as Daley that outsiders were coming and telling them what to do. “Dr. King can move into Alabama and say, ‘This is it,’” said the Reverend W.H. Nichols, a West Side minister, “but here in Chicago each man stands on his own two feet.” To some on the SCLC staff, the black opposition seemed to be rooted in years of oppression by whites. “The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than I’ve ever seen,” says SCLC staff member Hosea Williams. “They don’t participate in the governmental process because they are beaten down psychologically. We are used to working with people who want to be free.” But the truth was, much of the opposition came not because Chicago blacks were powerless, but because they had more power than blacks in the rural South. Daley, who needed black votes in a way that southern politicians did not, had handed out elected offices, patronage jobs, and money in the black community, and had singled out a few Dawsons and Metcalfes to represent blacks on a citywide level. These black leaders, and their armies of patronage workers, had a personal stake in the status quo, in a way that few blacks in Selma or Birmingham did. 3

One of the most prominent of the machine’s black allies was the Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, the Olivet Baptist Church pastor who had been booed off the stage with Daley at the NAACP’s July 4, 1963, rally in Grant Park. “When the white establishment wanted to find out what was going on,” says civil rights activist John McDermott, “they consulted J.H.” Jackson, who had been a strong supporter of Willis, bitterly opposed the Chicago Freedom Movement. He was particularly outspoken in his attacks against King, whom he viewed as a rival, accusing him of waging a “militant campaign against his own denomination and his own race.” Jackson never relented in his views of the Nobel Prize–winning civil rights leader. After King’s assassination, Jackson moved the front entrance of his church from South Park Way to a side street so its official address would not bear the boulevard’s new name, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. King and the SCLC were not prepared for these anti–civil rights black ministers, but they were also disappointed to see how reluctant even ostensibly sympathetic black clergy were to stand up for civil rights. “Many ministers who were with us had to back off because they didn’t want their buildings to be condemned or given citations for electrical work, faulty plumbing, or fire code violations,” says the Reverend Clay Evans of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church. Mattie Hopkins of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, who had worked with King in Selma and Montgomery, says she never saw King as depressed as he was after meeting with a group of black ministers in Chicago. The ministers told King that they supported him, but could not speak out from their pulpits because they had already come under pressure from mortgage holders, city building inspectors, and others with ties to the Democratic machine. “He got his first real picture of the way Daley ran this town,” Hopkins says. The SCLC located its headquarters in the Warren Avenue Congregational Church, which had a white minister, because they could not find a black minister who would give the group space. The other religious group the SCLC was not prepared for was the Chicago-based Nation of Islam, which did not share the Chicago Freedom Movement’s goal of racial integration. “If anything they were more zealous in support of segregation than Mayor Daley, since the mayor paid lip service to racial tolerance and the Muslims were black supremacists,” says Abernathy. “They would probably have joined us if we had proposed killing all the white people, but they certainly didn’t want to listen to anyone preach the gospel of brotherly love.” 4

As political theater, the decision to move King into a tenement apartment was a masterstroke. The Chicago Defender was delighted with the plan, declaring that “[w]hile there he will eat, sleep, and absorb the full meaning of what it is to call a hovel ‘home.’” The Freedom Movement’s initial efforts to secure an apartment for him failed, as landlords declined to rent when they learned who the tenant would be. But eventually, organizers found a four-room, third-floor walk-up apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in the West Side’s Lawndale neighborhood — often called “Slumdale” — and rented it in the name of an SCLC staff member. The $90-a-month apartment was to house King and his wife, Coretta, although the couple planned to make weekly trips to Atlanta so King could conduct Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist Church. An adjoining apartment was rented for the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the SCLC vice president. Furniture was brought in from a secondhand furniture dealer. When King moved in on January 26, 1966, more than three hundred people were on hand to greet him and Coretta. The apartment was not nearly as bad as most slum apartments in the area, and when the landlord realized who would be moving in he sent work crews out to improve it. “[T]he entire place had been painted, re-papered, and redecorated,” Abernathy says. “It didn’t look like an apartment in House Beautiful, but it was clean and bright — probably the best looking quarters within fifty blocks of that location.” The joke in Chicago civil rights circles was that the best way to end the slums would be to have King move from apartment to apartment and watch each one get fixed up. Still, even after white paint had been thrown on the living room walls, and yellow and gray paint slapped on in the other rooms, the apartment was undeniably a tenement. The building that housed it was still in poor shape, with a strong smell of urine wafting through the stairwells, impervious to all efforts to clean it out with disinfectant. “There were no lights in the hall, and only one dim light at the head of the stairs,” Coretta Scott King said after spending one night in the apartment. “There was not even a lock on the door. I had never seen anything like it.” And the neighborhood was tough enough to cause many of the new southern transplants to fear for their lives. “I was truly frightened that some junkie was going to knife me for twenty dollars,” says Young. “When walking up those four dark, creaky flights of stairs at night, my heart would pound and wouldn’t slow for some time after I was within our apartment with the door securely bolted.” In a matter of days, King saw the effect of the environment on his own children. “Their tempers flared and they sometimes reverted to almost infantile behavior,” he wrote later. The South Hamlin Avenue tenement apartment was “just too hot, too crowded, too devoid of forms of recreation.” Life in Lawndale, King said, “was about to produce an emotional explosion in my own family.” 5

The new tenants were not particularly conscientious about tenement-living. King often stayed at a friend’s more inviting home, and Abernathy, after spending a night or two on South Hamlin, checked into a hotel in a black part of town. But they spent enough time in Lawndale to get an education in northern ghetto life. King used the apartment to hold educational sessions and strategy meetings. He invited activists to talk with him about conditions across the city and ideas for action, and let each of his guests give a presentation on his area of expertise. “After each one talked, King said something to relate it to what had come before,” says Meyer Weinberg, who was there as an education expert. “You could see how brilliant he was, how he was putting it all together tactically.” King and other SCLC staff ventured out on neighborhood tours, which let them witness Chicago slum life up close. On one walking tour, Raby took King to a twelve-unit apartment building, originally built as a six-flat, where two families shared a bathroom that had been burned out in a fire and was no longer fit to be used. “We are here in Chicago,” King told the residents, “to say to ourselves and to the Negro community that we can do something about our condition if we organize a union to end slums.” Another time, King and Abernathy toured a building not far from their own that was without heat, hot water, and electricity, and where mothers said they had to keep a candlelight vigil through the night to protect their children from “rats as large as cats.” Louise Mitchell, a mother of ten children including a ten-week-old baby, showed the visitors her run-down third-floor apartment, where boards and bottles were used to plug up large holes in the walls. Another tenant pointed to an area behind his kitchen stove and told King, “That’s where I usually catch all of the rats.” King and Abernathy asked the tenants if they had considered holding a rent strike. 6

Another aspect of northern life that was unfamiliar to the SCLC staff was Chicago’s gang culture. Atlanta and Montgomery had nothing like the Blackstone Rangers, the Vice Lords, and the Cobras, which had divided up poor neighborhoods on the South and West sides. James Bevel had been working with gang members, and the Freedom Movement leaders hoped they could be brought into the movement. In his first night at the South Hamlin Avenue apartment, King met with six members of the Vice Lords, who stopped by to “meet the leader.” On his tours of the neighborhood, King always made a point of engaging gang members. He listened to the young men’s complaints about the bleakness of ghetto life, and their constant run-ins with other gangs, white mobsters, and abusive Chicago police. The answer, King told them, was not arming themselves with switchblades and handguns, but joining in nonviolent struggle to change the conditions they were living in. “Power in Chicago,” King told them, “means getting the largest political machine in the nation to say yes when it wants to say no.” 7



Rather than accept the role of villain in King’s drama about the Chicago slums, Daley decided to begin his own campaign against substandard living conditions in the ghetto. Coming back from an eight-day vacation with Sis and four of the children to the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico, Daley declared at the San Juan airport that there were “no slums” in Chicago, only “bad housing.” In a January 26, 1966, taped television appearance, he predicted that all of the city’s blighted buildings would be eliminated in the next two years. 8 Daley insisted that he was working as hard as anyone to improve conditions in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” he said. “Elimination of slums is the No. 1 program of this administration, and we feel we have done more in this field than any other city.” Daley argued that federal and state government also had to be part of the solution, and he traveled to Washington on February 3 to lobby President Johnson for a proposed $2.3 billion nationwide anti-slum program. When he returned to Chicago, he held a joint city-county press conference on February 10, 1966, at which he committed “the full power and resources of the city to be used in an unlimited way to erase the slum blight.” Daley’s timetable was speeding up: now he said his goal was to wipe out all slum housing in the city by 1967. 9

Daley’s office gave him some advantages over the civil rights protesters when it came to waging a war on slums. King could try to organize tenants to withhold rent, but Daley could engage in a rent strike of his own, since the county welfare department paid for private housing for many poor families. To drive the point home, he held a joint press conference with the Cook County public aid director, who threatened to withhold monthly rent payments for 1,600 welfare recipients unless their landlords cured building code violations immediately. “I believe we now have in sight the complete wiping out of slums in Chicago,” the public aid director declared. “Slums have been winning the battle up to now, but this changes the tide.” Daley also announced a new drive to inspect living conditions in slum buildings. The city had assigned as many as fifty housing consultants and aides to conduct the inspections, Daley said, and the city’s legal office was considering putting various slum buildings across the city into receivership by the Chicago Dwellings Association, a quasi-public agency, which could collect rent and then arrange for repairs to be made. To show he was serious, Daley made public a list of eight specific landlords who had been ordered to make repairs, most of whom, he said, “have been in and out of court.” 10

It was obvious that his anti-slum campaign was an effort to co-opt King and the SCLC, but Daley denied it. “We have been doing much code enforcement and placing many buildings in receivership long before Dr. King arrived in Chicago,” he said. If the city seemed to be stepping up its efforts, it was only because new laws were now available for use against landlords, Daley said. But the Republican sponsor of a law making it a felony for landlords to violate the building code, state senator Arthur Swanson, said Daley had never bothered to use his substantial legal authority to take on slum conditions until King arrived in town. “It does little good for legislators to act on vital public needs if elected officials will not make efficient use of the new laws,” Swanson complained. Now that Daley had adopted the anti-slum cause, he pursued it aggressively. On March 1, he announced an ambitious new program of door-to-door inspections for code violations in 15,000 buildings in three poor West Side neighborhoods including, as it happened, the one King now lived in. At the same time, Daley was sending emissaries out on a more surreptitious mission: going to community leaders in the neighborhoods the Chicago Freedom Movement was trying to organize and buying them off with offers of city money for their programs. “As fast as they would organize a neighborhood,” recalls Andrew Young, “the Daley forces would come in and offer a preacher a contract for subsidized day care in his church.” 11

The biggest blunder southern officials had made in dealing with the civil rights movement was their angry and poorly planned use of law enforcement. When Alabama state troopers beat up voting rights marchers, it had been a public relations disaster, and when Birmingham police arrested King, he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Daley was resolved not to turn the Chicago Freedom Movement leadership into martyrs. Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson invited King and his wife, Coretta, for a personal tour of the Chicago Police Department. In an informal meeting between King and top police officials, a warmly complimentary Wilson told the civil rights leader that he understood that King had some Irish ancestors. Daley proudly told reporters that King’s visit with the Chicago Police Department was the first meeting of its kind anywhere in the country. Though King never asked for a police guard, Daley arranged for him to have full-time protection every time he came to the city. But Daley’s hospitality had its limits. When Alderman Leon Despres introduced a resolution inviting King to address the City Council, Daley’s floor manager, Tom Keane, immediately shouted out “subcommittee,” sending the resolution to oblivion. 12

King received a more sincere welcome from Chicago’s Catholic Archdiocese. On February 2, King and Chicago Archbishop John Cody met for an hour at Cody’s North Side mansion to discuss the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Catholic Church in Chicago had a mixed record on civil rights, particularly at the parish level. In some parts of the Bungalow Belt, Catholic priests were known to share the anti-integrationist feelings of their flocks, and many worried that racial transition would rob their parishes of their white bases. Cody’s predecessor, Albert Meyer, had spoken out on racial matters, testifying before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and ordering parish priests to give at least three sermons a year on improving race relations. Cody had come to Chicago in August 1965 from New Orleans, where he had overseen the desegregation of the city’s parochial school system in the face of stiff opposition from white Catholics. In the controversy that followed, three segregationists were excommunicated, and Cody was bitterly attacked for promoting integration so forcefully. King was pleased by his meeting with Cody, declaring afterward that it had been “a very friendly and I might say fruitful discussion.” 13

On February 23, King and his followers took the bold step of seizing control of a tenement. The building, located just blocks from King’s apartment at 1550 South Hamlin, lacked heat, and the Chicago Freedom Movement had learned that there was a sick baby living in it. King, Raby, and other members of the SCLC and CCCO dressed in work clothes and personally began cleaning it up. The Chicago Freedom Movement declared that it had assumed trusteeship over the building, and that henceforth rent collected from the tenants would be paid into a fund that would be used to make needed repairs. Asked about the lawfulness of the action, King appealed to a higher law. “I won’t say that this is illegal, but I would call it superlegal,” he said. “The moral question is far more important than the legal one.” The “superlegal” seizure of 1321 South Homan would have been a natural point for Daley’s policy of tolerance to end. Many Chicagoans believed that by seizing a privately owned building the civil rights movement had crossed the line from political protest to lawlessness. James Parson, a respected black judge and chairman of the National Conference on Religion and Race, called the seizure “theft” and “a revolutionary tactic.” But Daley, sticking to his script of agreeable accommodation, said, “The situation at 1321 South Homan is a matter between the lawful owner and those who attempt to assume ownership. We all recognize that what is being done is good for our city — the improvement of housing and living conditions.” 14 Far from defending the landlord at 1321 South Homan, Daley filed his own suit in Chicago Municipal Court the next day charging that the building had twenty-three code violations. What happened next was a powerful illustration of the difficulty of transporting the civil rights movement north. King’s staff had failed to research the ownership of 1321 South Homan. After they took trusteeship, they found out that the cruel landlord they had cast in their morality tale was a sickly octogenarian who was only too happy to let the civil rights activists have the building. “I think King is right,” the old man declared. “I think his intentions are right, and in his place I’d do the same thing.” The Chicago Freedom Movement’s selection of 1321 had unwittingly supported the argument of some of its opponents: that slum conditions were a product of complicated economic forces, and that it was too simplistic to put all the blame on landlords. 15

In early March, Al Raby announced that the CCCO was starting to build a political organization that would take on Daley and the machine if the Chicago Freedom Movement’s demands were not met. Raby said that the CCCO’s efforts to improve black schools had failed because they had been organized on a “civic” rather than a “political” basis. “Instead of organizing wards, amorphous political groups were formed,” said Raby. “The Democratic party could thus justifiably predict that Negro defection would not reach the danger point.” With the help of the SCLC, Raby said, “cohesive organizations are now being formed in the ghetto communities that can become politically active if necessary.” Turning the CCCO into a political organization would not be easy. It was a coalition of disparate groups, some of which were prohibited by their charters from engaging in partisan political activity. But the biggest obstacle to Raby’s plan was King’s reluctance to use civil rights to organize a political movement. Throughout his career, King had always worked outside the political system, hoping to draw people of all political persuasions to the cause of civil rights. He still had not given up hope that Daley could eventually become an ally of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Still, Raby was not alone in seeking to shift the movement toward electoral politics. Dick Gregory, the comedian and protest leader, had already announced plans to challenge Daley for mayor in 1967. It was unlikely Gregory would win, but a strong third-party candidacy could conceivably take enough black votes away from the machine to put a Republican in City Hall. 16

On March 10, Daley held a slate-making meeting at the Sherman Hotel to select the machine’s candidates for the 1966 elections. Daley’s primary interest was in the political assassination of a wayward officeholder. Seymour Simon, the bright and ambitious president of the Cook County Board, had been placed on the board as a protégé of Thomas Keane. He was widely regarded as a rising star on the Chicago political scene, and the talk was that he would run for mayor if Daley stepped down in 1967, or perhaps for governor. But first, he had to be renominated as Cook County board president. The first indication that there might be trouble was on the day before the 1966 slate-making meeting, when Daley called Simon and told him, “Seymour, be humble when you go before the slate-makers. Some of them say you are arrogant. So take my advice and be humble.” Simon took the advice as an indication that Daley was on his side. But when Simon showed up before the slating committee, an enemy of his, Irwin “Izzy” Horwitz, was there. Horwitz was not a member of the Central Committee, from which members of the slate-making committee were usually drawn, but he came with the proxy of the 24th Ward committeeman. When the proceedings began, Horwitz launched into a bitter attack on his foe, and Simon was denied renomination. 17

The abrasive Simon was brought down by a number of missteps, including a feud with another member of the board who was close to Daley. But the critical factor was that Keane, his onetime patron, now wanted him out of the presidency and off the board. Simon would later explain that their falling-out had come about one day when Keane showed up in Simon’s office and asked him to reverse a decision of the county zoning board. A developer friend of Keane’s had applied to turn a piece of land into a garbage dump. The board had sided with neighborhood residents, who were bitterly opposed to the plan. 18 Simon later explained that he was against the landfill both because of the neighborhood opposition, and because the commander of a nearby naval air station had said that seagulls attracted to the dump would pose a danger to his aircraft. When Simon refused to support the developer’s plan, he said, his friendship with Keane was over. Keane was apparently mad enough to go to Daley and demand that Simon be removed from the board in the next election. After he was dumped, the newspapers were filled with headlines like “Simon Names Old Pal Keane as Ax Man in His Party Execution” and “Simon Dumped by a Dump?” When word of Simon’s unslating got out, the machine nomination for Cook County board president was hardly worth having. Simon’s replacement, postmaster Harry Semrow, lost badly to his Republican opponent. Although Daley lost the position, he was able to send a clear message to everyone in the machine about the cost of independence. “People in the organization realized that if he could knock me out, he could knock them out if they didn’t toe the line,” says Simon. 19

On March 12, the Chicago Freedom Movement held a major fund-raiser at the International Amphitheatre. Organizers, who had been planning the event for months, sold 12,000 tickets and lured some of the leading black stars of the day, including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, and Mahalia Jackson. “Never before in the history of the civil rights movement has an action campaign been launched in such splendor,” King told the enthusiastic crowd. “Never has a community responded more splendidly to the call for support than you have in Chicago.” The rally demonstrated the broadest support yet in the black community for the Chicago Campaign, and brought in a much-needed $80,000. But a few days later, Daley had his own effusive public gathering that demonstrated how popular he remained with other segments of the city. On March 17, Daley presided over the city’s massive Saint Patrick’s Day parade. As was his custom, Daley personally led the throng of 70,000 marchers down State Street, while a crowd of 350,000 cheered from the sidelines. The parade was the usual exuberant mix: the Shannon Rovers Bagpipe Kilty band, Daley’s favorite, played a medley of Gaelic airs; the University of Notre Dame’s marching band played “McNamara’s Band”; and a float with thirty members of the Illinois Toll Highway Commission sang “Hello, Dolly.” An array of machine politicians, ranging from Senator Paul Douglas to local precinct captains, jammed the reviewing stand on Madison Street. Ireland’s secretary of commerce and industry, who had flown in for the festivities, declared that “Chicago was more Irish than Ireland — I cannot say the isle has anything to compare with this.” 20

[neil]

In mid-March, Daley held an open meeting at City Hall to report on his administration’s progress in improving conditions in the ghetto. Deton Brooks, head of the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, announced that the city was operating seven urban progress centers with a staff of 928, and had already conducted visits to 96,761 poor families. Kenneth Plummer, director of information for the City Board of Health, reported that a federally funded rodent-control program had found that 85 percent of housing in poor neighborhoods was rodent-infested, with an estimated ten rats for every citizen. The city had already visited 4,461 buildings, Plummer reported, to fill 27,301 rat holes, and an estimated 1,675,941 rats had been killed. Daley outlined four major goals for the future: improvements in education; increased employment opportunities; better access to health care; and elimination of slums by December 31, 1967. Daley continued his publicity campaign by holding a joint press conference on March 18 with John Boyle, chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, to announce that the city’s Housing Court was being expanded from four to six full-time judges, to handle the extra work being created by the new door-to-door inspections on the West Side, and the city’s other anti-slum initiatives. “Mayor Daley has made an all-out effort to eliminate slums and blight and the courts will cooperate 100 per cent,” Judge Boyle told reporters. Daley’s image as a slum-buster, which he was working so hard to burnish, was set back two weeks later when it was revealed that building code violations had been found in two buildings run by Marks & Co., the real estate firm headed by Charles Swibel, Daley’s Chicago Housing Authority chairman. City buildings inspectors discovered twenty-eight code violations, and evidence that apartments in the buildings had been unlawfully converted to smaller units. Daley asked for a report on the charges, saying, “I’m sure the law should be applied equally and strongly to everyone, and that will be the case here.” 21
While the Chicago Freedom Movement focused on its anti-slum campaign, SCLC staff member Jesse Jackson pursued a different tack. Jackson was heading up Operation Breadbasket, an economic self-help initiative that was being tried in a number of cities across the country. Operation Breadbasket took its name from boycotts of Atlanta bread companies in 1962, and its inspiration from the selective buying campaigns of Reverend Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia. Its goal was to convince white-owned businesses working in and near black neighborhoods to hire more blacks and make greater investments in the black community. Operation Breadbasket’s strategy combined moral appeals, negotiations, and threats of boycotts. It focused its efforts on businesses that sold directly to the public, and which were therefore particularly vulnerable to consumer boycotts. Operation Breadbasket started its work in Chicago in February 1966, and in its first months scored some impressive victories. Hawthorne-Melody Farms, a Chicago dairy whose workforce was more than 90 percent white, agreed to hire an additional 55 blacks. Hi-Lo grocery stores agreed, after ten days of picketing, to hire an additional 183 blacks. And after fourteen weeks of protests, A&P committed itself to hire 970 blacks in its Chicago stores, and to hire a black firm to collect its garbage. Operation Breadbasket also negotiated increased work for the city’s black exterminators. “We have a monopoly on rats in the ghetto, and we’re gonna have a monopoly on killing ’em,” Jackson said. Some civil rights activists dismissed Operation Breadbasket’s work as less than significant — one commentator, writing in The Nation, dubbed it “Operation Drop-in-the-Bucket.” But it was attracting enough attention that Daley decided to unveil a similar program of his own. Daley’s version was called Operation Lite — an acronym for Leaders Information on Training and Employment — and it was aptly named. Daley’s version was, in every sense, an Operation Breadbasket light. It recruited 160 businessmen, clergy, and social service professionals to distribute job information folders. As part of the program, Daley and John Gray, the city’s merit employment chairman, announced that ministers and volunteers would make 800 calls to businessmen and others in a position to counsel blacks about job opportunities. They also planned to distribute a directory of job training and placement opportunities. Operation Lite did little for Chicago’s disadvantaged, but it succeeded in its real purpose: making it appear that Daley was concerned about black employment opportunities. 22
Daley invited King to join him at a summit with Chicago clergy to discuss the city’s efforts to combat slums. The invitation was yet another illustration of how different the civil rights struggle was in Chicago than it had been in the South — Governor George Wallace of Alabama and Selma mayor Joe Smitherman had not looked to King for advice on how to govern. But Daley was shrewd enough to try to have his first meeting with King occur at a meeting of clergymen, so it would seem less like a showdown between the civil rights movement and City Hall, and more like a group inquiry into how to work toward change. King turned down Daley’s invitation to the clergy summit, pleading a “long standing prior engagement” in Texas. But the summit went forward, and many of the city’s leading clergymen did attend, including Archbishop Cody, Episcopal Bishop Gerald Francis Burrill, and the omnipresent Reverend Joseph H. Jackson. Daley discussed his work combating poverty and racial discrimination, and delivered updates on the city’s progress. And he asked the clergymen to return for a second summit the following week, bringing along recommendations for how the city should proceed. King did come to this second meeting, on March 25, making it the first time the two men had met since the civil rights leader had arrived in Chicago. King listened attentively as city officials reeled off what the Daley administration was doing on a variety of fronts, and outlined areas where help was needed. Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson said there were more than 100,000 unauthorized firearms in the city, and asked the clergymen to encourage their parishioners to turn them in to the police. Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn told the audience that accumulated garbage was the biggest cause of fires, and asked for help in reducing the amount of refuse in their neighborhoods. Charles Swibel, chairman of the CHA board, said his agency planned to build an additional six thousand units in the next two years, and then asked the clergymen to deliver messages from their pulpits on the importance of cleanliness and being good neighbors. But the greatest drama in the three-hour meeting came when King and Daley engaged in a thirty-minute colloquy about the city’s problems. King told the meeting that Chicago “has a long way to go,” and described some of the problems he had seen firsthand since arriving in the city. 23 Daley responded that “these problems were created thousands of miles away from here in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. This deprivation of education can’t be laid to the people of Chicago. They had nothing to do with it.” After the closed-door meeting ended, King and Daley spoke about each other in respectful terms. “I believe the mayor is concerned in his search for answers...” King said. And Daley pronounced King “a religious leader who feels intently the causes he espouses.” The next day King settled an important question when he told a reporter, “I’m not leading any campaign against Mayor Daley. I’m leading a campaign against slums.” Without King’s support, the prospect of a strong black independent mayoral campaign diminished considerably. 24
Daley continued his high-profile work as a champion of Chicago’s slum residents. The same day as the clergy summit, he spoke to the opening session of the First International Conference on Freedom of Residence at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Daley told an audience of labor, religious, and civil rights leaders that “opportunity for freedom of residence for everyone can only be achieved if thousands of people become greatly concerned.” On March 27, he convened a meeting of one hundred business leaders in the City Council chambers and urged them to increase job opportunities for minorities. John D. deButts, president of Illinois Bell Telephone, reported that through the work of the Chicago Association of Commerce 312 companies had agreed not to discriminate in employment and had pledged to work for equal opportunity in hiring and agreed to offer in-house skills training for employees who needed it. The following day, Daley announced that he was stepping up the city’s war on rats, promising that an additional $250,000 would be spent to treat all 20,427 blocks of alleys in the city over the next two months. 25
Daley was finding it increasingly hard to keep his real feelings about the civil rights movement in check. Even as he spoke about his commitment to improving slum housing, he began to argue that the Chicago Freedom Movement was overstating the extent of the problem. “Look at 35th and State Street,” he said, referring to a once-run-down area that had been razed to build public housing. “I lived there and went to school there. It was one of the worst areas in the city, but what do you see now?” In fact, most people still thought it looked pretty bad. In private, Daley was even less restrained in his attack on King and his followers. At a closed-door meeting of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee in mid-April, Daley told machine leaders that King and his followers were simply trying to “grab” power. “We have no need to apologize to the civil rights leaders who have come to Chicago to tell us what to do,” Daley said. “We’ll match our integrity against their independence.” 26
The spring of 1966 was not all run-ins over slums and civil rights. Daley’s work in building up the city was increasingly being recognized, and was bringing him accolades. The National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix-Up Bureau honored Chicago as the cleanest large city in the nation at a luncheon at the Bismarck Hotel. It was the fifth time in seven years that Chicago had taken the prize. The Loop, in particular, was thriving. The clearest illustration of downtown Chicago’s impressive upswing was the rapid transformation of North Michigan Avenue. North Michigan, the upscale retailing strip jutting out of the northeast corner of the Loop, had undergone one of the most dramatic transformations of any part of the Chicago landscape. It had begun life as narrow and dowdy Pine Street. Burnham’s 1909 plan called for widening it into a grand European-style boulevard, and that process began in 1920, with the building of the Michigan Avenue Bridge across the Chicago River. In the next few years, several architecturally significant buildings went up along the avenue, including the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. In 1947, developer Arthur Rubloff dubbed North Michigan the “Magnificent Mile,” but it was at that point still wishful thinking. It was only during the mid-1960s that it was truly beginning to approach magnificence. In 1965, the thirty-five-story Equitable Building opened, adjacent to the Tribune Tower, and in the next few years the march of development continued northward up the avenue. A decade later, the avenue would be capped off by Water Tower Place, a sixty-two-story hotel and condominium that included eight floors of luxury stores, contained in the nation’s first vertical shopping mall. In time, Michigan Avenue would become so overrun with swank stores and high-rent office towers that one critic would lament that it had become “alas, the Manhattanized Mile.” 27
Chicago’s was not the only American downtown to boom in the post-war years, but it was one of the few in the northern Rust Belt whose fortunes were rising. What prevented Chicago from going the way of Cleveland and Buffalo? Much of the credit lies with Daley’s aggressive program for downtown redevelopment. Beginning with the 1958 plan, Daley declared his intention to put the full power of his office behind Loop redevelopment. And he did a masterful job of keeping all of the key constituencies in place. His strong working relationships with the city’s business leaders kept them invested in the city, and helped persuade them to build and expand in the Loop. His close ties to the city’s major unions were a key factor in the years of labor peace that prevailed in the city. And his influence in Washington and Springfield brought in millions of dollars to fund urban renewal projects that benefited the central business district. Edward Logelin, vice president of U.S. Steel and chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, said the renaissance of Chicago’s downtown was in large part due to Daley’s ability to bring together “the best of labor, politics, religion, education, and business.” 28
Another critical factor in Chicago’s downtown development was the way in which Daley professionalized the city’s planning and development bureaucracy. The Department of City Planning that he formed in 1957 with twenty-four employees had grown to eighty-four by 1964, and its budget had soared from $149,500 to $914,500. Daley also assembled an unusually talented group of workers, who would come to be known as the “whiz kids,” to fill these positions. Hired on the basis of ability rather than patronage, they were highly qualified — most had trained as engineers — and committed to the nuts-and-bolts work of improving the city. “It was a very well-educated, professional group of people,” recalls David Stahl, who started with Daley at age thirty-two and would eventually become a deputy mayor. “That group could have run any company in the United States of that size.” Typical of the whiz kids was John Duba, forty-three, whom Daley appointed in June 1965 to head the city’s new Department of Development and Planning. Duba, who taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology before joining city government, was a hands-on technocrat. 29 When he supervised the construction of the Kennedy Expressway, he often walked its entire length to check on progress. “It really wasn’t so bad,” Duba said. “It would take only about three hours and it was the way to get to see the problems and what could be done about them.” Duba’s deputy, Louis Westmore, had been head of the Department of City Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois. 30 Daley also named Lewis Hill, thirty-nine, an engineer with degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota, as commissioner of the Department of Urban Renewal. Brooklyn-born Milton Pikarsky, Daley’s commissioner of public works, was also an engineer. Although Daley cared enough about development issues to make merit appointment to these positions, the whiz kids worked alongside many city workers who were still hired the old-fashioned way. John J. Gunther, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, recalls attending a budget meeting of Daley’s and being impressed with the caliber of his planning staff. “As we were going over to the Sherman Hotel for lunch I asked him where the hell is all this patronage I keep hearing about, because I had met his people and they were very able,” Gunther recalls. “We got off the elevator and were walking across the lobby and there was an old fella there that was showing you which elevator to get on, and another old fella running the elevator. Daley said, ‘That’s the patronage.’” 31
Daley held a press conference on March 31 to announce plans for a new bond issue. He had been stung badly by the defeat of the 1962 bonds, and this time he was leaving nothing to chance. He had an all-star lineup of civic leaders on hand to speak out in favor of the additional debt for the city, including Continental Illinois National Bank chairman David Kennedy and Chicago Federation of Labor president William Lee. The $200 million package of bonds covered an assortment of new projects, from rapid-rail lines on the Kennedy and Dan Ryan expressways to more mundane undertakings like $45 to $100 million for sewer modernization. To avoid the racial backlash that had hurt the 1962 bonds in white wards, Daley had decided not to use the words “urban renewal” anywhere in the text of the initiative this time. After the initial press conference, Daley continued to round up endorsements. The Civic Federation, a good-government watchdog that had backed only one of the 1962 bond issues, this time endorsed the whole package. And in a flourish of bipartisan-ship, Daley even won the support of Republican state treasurer William Scott. 32 It was a measure of just how important the bonds were to Daley that he testified for them before the City Council Finance Committee, a first in his eleven years in office, and took questions for an hour. Daley promised, in his testimony, that the bonds would not raise taxes, but his critics in the economy bloc remained skeptical. “This familiar promise was expressed with each package of bond issues since 1955, and each package that passed brought an increase,” Alderman Despres argued. “The only bond issues that ever failed to increase taxes were the 1962 bond issues, which were defeated.” 33
In early April 1966, the General Services Administration announced that construction of the forty-five-story federal office building that Daley had worked so hard to bring to the Loop was being delayed indefinitely. The decision appeared to be an economy measure by the regional GSA chief, coming as it did after President Johnson made an appeal to cut federal spending wherever possible. Daley was outraged by the move, and made it clear that he would not tolerate a delay. “We want that building,” he declared. “We are going to urge the federal government to go ahead immediately with the construction.” In a lower-key repeat of the showdown with Francis Keppel over school funding, Daley made a direct appeal to Washington, and the GSA quickly backed down. Within two days the agency said that its announced “indefinite delay” had been a misunderstanding. The agency said it would be seeking bids for construction of the foundation of the $45.5 million project in June. 34
On May 2, Daley presided over the dedication of the Civic Center, a major component of his restoration of the Loop. Daley had been laying the groundwork for a new complex to house state and local governments as far back as his 1958 plan, and he had done a brilliant job of making it a reality. The Civic Center was constructed by the Public Building Commission, a public authority that Daley had created in 1956. The PBC was invested with sweeping powers to condemn property through eminent domain, and to issue revenue bonds to finance its projects without going to the voters with a referendum or going to Springfield. It was Chicago’s version of the public authorities Robert Moses was quietly using in New York to fund and build projects without approval from the voters or the political branches. “He used the Public Building Commission to achieve things he might not have achieved if he had gone to the legislature,” says former Chicago Plan Commission chairman Miles Berger. “If you have the bonds, you can build whatever you want to build.” Daley himself was chairman of the PBC, and his planning commissioner Ira Bach was secretary. Daley used his position with the PBC to oversee every aspect of the project, from the financing to the choice of architects. The $87-million glass-and-steel Civic Center, which would later be renamed the Richard J. Daley Center, substantially improved the facilities available to local government. It provided 111 courtrooms and eight hearing rooms for the Cook County Circuit Court, as well as space for the Illinois Appellate Court, the Illinois Supreme Court, the state’s attorney, the sheriff, and other government personnel. A vibrant city block, filled with stores and restaurants, was bulldozed to make room for the Civic Center and a large open-air plaza surrounding it. But most critics, including the authors of the American Institute of Architect’s Guide to Chicago, found that the trade-off was well worth it. “Something wonderful was gained; the plaza has become Chicago’s forum,” the Guide concluded. “As the locus of activities as diverse as concerts, farmers’ markets, and peace rallies, the Daley Center fulfills a civic purpose consistent with its architectural dignity.” 35
Although the war on slums had been grabbing the headlines since King came to town, the battle over the schools had still not been resolved. On March 21, Daley announced his new appointments to the School Board Nominating Commission. In a concession to the black community, he added a representative of the Chicago Urban League, declaring that “the commission should be a cross-section of our city.” But at the same time, he also added a representative of the Teamsters Joint Council, who could be counted on to cancel out the Urban League’s vote on any sensitive racial issues. On March 31, Daley held a third closed-door meeting with the city’s clergy to discuss racial matters. King, who was on a European fund-raising tour, did not attend. Daley pronounced the session “amicable, friendly and highly informative,” but Chicago Freedom Movement representatives were disappointed that Board of Education chairman Whiston, who was supposed to attend to discuss the school situation, did not show up. 36
The school controversy heated up again when Willis, who was scheduled to retire on December 23, his sixty-fifth birthday, announced plans to push his departure date up to August 31. The Chicago Freedom Movement was overjoyed. Willis’s departure would remove “a major stumbling block [to] quality integrated education in Chicago,” Raby declared. A committee of the school board had been actively looking for a successor. By late April, they had interviewed six candidates, and Daley said that a decision on a successor was imminent. When Willis left office, the board hired James Redmond, superintendent of the Syosset, New York, schools, who had a reputation as a racial progressive when he served as New Orleans school superintendent in the 1950s. That Daley was willing to go along with the selection of a racial moderate at this point was not surprising. By the end of his career, Willis had become a polarizing figure, who had only helped the Chicago Freedom Movement to win converts in the black community. Redmond would fit in well with Daley’s current policy of co-opting the civil rights movement by appearing to share its concerns. At the same time, Daley’s control over the Chicago school board would ensure that Redmond would not take any steps extreme enough to scare voters in the white wards. And Daley was not ceding any power on the school board to the black community. Three positions on the school board had recently become vacant. Although his nominating committee forwarded two blacks among its seven nominees, Daley passed over the two black women — one of whom was a Yale graduate, doctor’s wife, and mother of three — to choose three white men. The departure of Willis did not appear to have made much difference. “Mayor Daley has tightened his grip of direct political control over the schools,” one critic observed a few years into Redmond’s term as superintendent. “The school board, with the pretense of independence, performs a puppet show for public consumption. Redmond does what he is told.” 37
King and the Chicago Freedom Movement were continuing their efforts to reach out to Chicago’s youth gangs. On May 9, movement staff screened a documentary on the Watts uprising for about four hundred Blackstone Rangers. The civil rights activists were trying to demonstrate the futility of violence, but the screening would later be seen by some whites as an attempt to encourage young blacks to riot. Two days later, King himself spoke to a meeting of gang members, urging them to turn away from violence and toward voter registration and other civil rights work. These efforts to bring gang members into the movement suffered a setback on May 13, when fighting and gunfire broke out at an SCLC meeting at a South Side YMCA to which both the Blackstone Rangers and their rivals, the East Side Disciples, were invited. Some fissures were emerging in the Chicago Freedom Movement, particularly around the issue of nonviolence. Moderate members of the movement, including organizations such as the Chicago Catholic Interracial Council, worried that the campaign was becoming more accepting of violence and “spreading hate.” But King insisted that the Chicago Freedom Movement’s commitment to nonviolence was as strong as ever. “Chicago will have a long hot summer, but not a summer of racial violence,” King said. “Rather it will be a long hot summer of peaceful non-violence.” 38
The long hot summer erupted earlier than expected, and in an unexpected quarter. While all of Chicago wondered whether blacks would rise up, on June 10 it was the city’s small Puerto Rican enclave on the Near Northwest Side that broke out in rioting. Chicago’s Puerto Ricans were as poor and discriminated against as blacks, but because of their small numbers and the language barrier, they were even more marginalized. Daley “manages to attend many wakes in his part of town,” Mike Royko wrote. “But when the Puerto Ricans invited him to a banquet last week — their biggest social event of the year, except for the riot — he couldn’t make it.” But the Puerto Rican community’s invisibility ended when a police officer shot and killed twenty-one-year-old Arceilis Cruz while he allegedly tried to pull out a revolver. More than a thousand neighborhood residents, many of them women, threw bricks and bottles at the hundred policemen sent to restore order. The crowd set fire to police cars, pulled fire hoses away from firemen trying to put them out, and looted stores along Division Street, the neighborhood’s main shopping area. The unrest continued for two days, and before it was over several dozen were injured. King cautioned that the Near Northwest Side riots reflected the broad disaffection that prevailed in all of the city’s poor neighborhoods, but Daley blamed them on instigation by “outsiders.” 39
In 1966, the national civil rights movement was entering a new and more difficult era. What civil rights theoretician Bayard Rustin called its “classical” period of destroying the “legal foundations of racism in America” had drawn to a close. What would follow was uncertain. To a growing number of activists, the answer was “black power,” a militant strain that promoted nationalism and was skeptical of the role of whites in the movement. On May 14, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee held a watershed election at its annual meeting in a camp outside Nashville. Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic Black Power champion, was elected chairman over moderate John Lewis by a single vote. Carmichael and his followers mocked the integrationist ideals and Gandhian tactics of King and his followers. “To ask Negroes to get in the Democratic Party,” Carmichael declared acerbically, “is like asking Jews to join the Nazi Party.” Under the new regime, SNCC stopped using integrated field work teams. The organization would “not fire any of our white organizers, but if they want to organize, they can organize white people,” Carmichael said. “Negroes will organize Negroes.” Many whites, believing they were not welcome, resigned from the organization. In June, Carmichael delivered a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, that has been credited with bringing the integrationist era of the movement to a close. Forget the goal of “freedom,” he told a large crowd gathered in a schoolyard. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.” 40
The rising tide of black nationalism was in evidence from July 1 to July 4, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held its national convention in Baltimore. The traditionally integrationist and interracial group invited Black Muslims and other black nationalists to share the platform for the first time in its history. The NAACP, the National Urban League, and the SCLC all boycotted the meeting. King, who had been expected to speak, announced on the first day of the convention that his “duties as a pastor in Atlanta” prevented him from attending. Giving the keynote address, Carmichael declared that “[t]his is not a movement being run by the liberal white establishment or by Uncle Toms.” Other speakers attacked the black middle class as “handkerchief heads” and “Dr. Thomases,” and moderate ministers like King as “chicken-eating preachers.” Although CORE had been 50 percent white only five years earlier, few whites attended the Baltimore meeting. One of the few who did, a nun, complained to the press that “[t]his is the Congress for Racial Superiority.” On July 5, white author Lillian Smith, author of the haunting novel Strange Fruit, resigned from CORE’s advisory committee. “CORE has been infiltrated by adventurers and by nihilists, black nationalists and plain old-fashioned haters, who have finally taken over,” she said. From July 5 to July 9, the NAACP held its own national convention in Los Angeles, where delegates distanced themselves from the Black Power movement. Vice President Hubert Humphrey told fifteen hundred delegates on July 6, “We must reject calls for racism whether they come from a throat that is white or one that is black.” The convention passed a resolution stating that the NAACP would not cooperate with civil rights groups that were headed in a more radical direction. “In view of the sharp differences,” said assistant executive director John Morsell, “unified action just seems unlikely.” 41
The Chicago Freedom Movement was itself at a crossroads. It was nowhere near adopting the rallying cry of Black Power. The Chicago movement had always been resolutely interracial, and its guiding force remained King, the nation’s leading voice for integration and racial cooperation. And at a time when Carmichael and his followers were rejecting campaigns aimed at mere “freedom,” the goals of the Chicago Freedom Movement — such as integrated education in regular classrooms — remained strikingly mainstream. But Chicago’s black community was feeling the radical tides that were sweeping across the country, and King worried that Daley’s intransigence could force the movement in a more radical direction. “[H]e fails to understand that if gains are not made and made in a hurry through responsible civil rights organizations, it will open the door to militant groups to gain a foothold,” King told the New York Times. The more immediate issue confronting the Chicago Freedom Movement, though, was the need for a new issue to rally around. Willis’s departure had been a great victory, but it had also removed the single best organizing tool Chicago activists had ever had. It was hard to keep up the demonstrations and school boycotts when a racially moderate new superintendent was just taking office. The inclination among most fair-minded people was to give him time to make improvements first. At the same time, Daley had been doing a brilliant job of stealing away the issue of slums. The power of the anti-slum cause had receded since Daley began holding almost daily press conferences announcing stepped-up code enforcement, tenements put in receivership, and sweeping new anti-rat campaigns. King and the other members of the Chicago Freedom Movement debated how to proceed, and at a steering committee in late June 1966 decided to focus the movement on a new issue — open housing. 42
Racial discrimination in housing had theoretically been illegal in Chicago since the City Council passed the Fair Housing Ordinance of 1963, but the reality was that blacks remained trapped in a few ghetto neighborhoods. When they tried to move to other parts of the city, they found that real estate brokers steered them back to the ghetto. Landlords in white neighborhoods generally would not rent to blacks, and white homeowners would not sell to them. The rigid color bar in Chicago not only prevented blacks from living where they wanted, it also kept them in overpriced, low-quality apartments. A study of the Chicago housing market by the American Friends Service Committee found that white and black families in the city on average paid the same amount in rent, $78 a month, even though white families’ incomes were 50 percent higher. But whites got more value for their rent money, because they had more neighborhoods to choose among. The report found that black families lived in an average of only 3.35 rooms, compared to 3.95 for whites. “Negroes pay the same for slums that whites pay for good conditions,” the AFSC concluded. “The role of supply and demand will always hold true and Negroes will continue to pay a color tax for housing until the entire housing market is open.” 43
Open housing was also a cause that made good strategic sense. It carried some of the same moral force as the anti–Jim Crow battles in the South. Assigning blame for slums was difficult, and remedies often involved complicated interventions in how people used and maintained private property. But the principle that a family should be able to live anywhere it could afford to was clear-cut, and com-ported with the most fundamental American ideals. Open housing also seemed a worthy goal because if it could be achieved, many other benefits would follow. If blacks moved into middle-class white neighborhoods, their housing conditions would improve, their children’s schools would become better, and they would have greater access to jobs. Housing discrimination also seemed easier to solve than some of the movement’s other targets. There were limits to how much city government could do about joblessness and poverty, or even bringing the housing in poor neighborhoods up to code. But the mayor could end discrimination by enacting a single ordinance, and the city had the power to take away the licenses of real estate brokers who failed to obey it. 44
Not least among its virtues, an open-housing focus paved the way for the Chigaco Freedom Movement to begin a direct-action phase. By taking the movement directly into white neighborhoods, it had a more confrontational feel, which was satisfying to those who believed that the movement was too accommodationist. It also promised to trigger the kind of dramatic clashes between civil rights demonstrators and white resisters that had been critical to success in the South. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” King wrote in Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” If the Chicago Freedom Movement started to march into working-class white neighborhoods, it might end up with its own version of Selma — Alabama’s Bloody Sunday — ugly racial violence that played badly on television. Open housing was probably the best option the Chicago Freedom Movement had, but King was becoming increasingly pessimistic about his chances of prevailing. Daley’s response so far had been “to play tricks with us — to say he’s going to end slums but not do any concrete things,” King complained to the New York Times in July. “He’s just trying to stay ahead of us just enough to take the steam out of the movement.” 45
The Chicago Freedom Movement’s big event of the summer of 1966 was a rally at Soldier Field on Sunday, July 10. Daley worked hard to steal the rally’s thunder. On July 8, he announced publicly that he and King would be conferring the following Monday, as King had requested, “to discuss the many problems affecting our city.” The day before the Soldier Field rally, Daley told reporters that in the previous eighteen months, 9,226 buildings with 102,847 units had been brought into full or partial code compliance. The Chicago Dwelling Association had been named receiver of 151 buildings, and fines imposed by the Housing Court were running at more than twice the rate of the previous year. And 332,000 rooms had been inspected in the city’s rodent control program, and 140,000 rat holes were closed. It was, Daley declared “the most massive and comprehensive rodent eradication program ever undertaken in this country.” 46
The rally’s organizers had hoped to attract 100,000 people, but they fell short. Whether it was due to Daley’s efforts at dampening enthusiasm, lukewarm support for King and the movement, or the day’s scorching high-90s temperatures, the crowd that showed up in Soldier Field was somewhere between the city’s estimate of 23,000 and the 60,000 rally organizers claimed. The organizers did do an impressive job of attracting performers, ranging from gospel legend Mahalia Jackson to folk singers Peter, Paul, and Mary to a young Stevie Wonder. “Mahalia Jackson sang that day as if the heavens were coming down on Soldier Field,” recalls a community organizer from the West Side. “You can’t explain that feeling, but you knew then that things are going to change, it must change. You felt that God was with us.” Archbishop Cody, who was unable to attend, sent a greeting that was read to the audience. The Black Power movement was not officially part of the program, but they showed up anyway, revealing a growing schism in the black community. About two hundred young people, some members of the Blackstone Rangers youth gang, marched on the field carrying a banner reading “Black Power,” and signs saying “We Shall Overcome,” with a drawing of a machine gun. 47
King arrived in a white Cadillac to a hero’s welcome. When the thunderous applause died down and the standing ovation ended, he launched into a powerful oration about the hard struggle that lay ahead. “We will be sadly mistaken if we think freedom is some lavish dish that the federal government and the white man will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite,” King said. “Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.” King called for an end to the slums, and said that black Chicagoans must be willing “to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary” to make it happen. He also launched into the movement’s newest cause, an open housing campaign that would free blacks to live anywhere they wanted. “We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97.00 a month in Lawndale for four rooms, while whites in South Deering pay $73.00 a month for five rooms,” King declared. Although he had insisted since he first arrived in Chicago that his enemy was the slums and not individual elected officials, King’s Soldier Field address contained his most pointed challenges yet to Daley and the Democratic machine. “This day, we must decide to register every Negro in Chicago of voting age before the [1967] municipal election,” he said. “This day, we must decide that our votes will determine who will be the mayor of Chicago next year.... [W]e must make it clear that we will purge Chicago of every politician, whether he be Negro or white, who feels that he owns the Negro vote rather than earns the Negro vote.” 48
The rally ended with King leading a march from the stadium to City Hall to present Daley with a list of demands. A crowd estimated at anywhere from 5,000 to 38,000 followed King, whose aides had by now dubbed him the Pied Piper of Hamlin Avenue, and watched as he affixed the movement’s demands to the LaSalle Street door of City Hall. King was harking back to his namesake Martin Luther, who began the Protestant Reformation by nailing his ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517, though on this occasion King used cellophane tape. A crowd of demonstrators filled State Street from curb to curb and stretching back for blocks. They sang civil rights songs, chanted “Daley Must Go!” and held up banners with slogans like “End Modern Slavery — Destroy Daley Machine.” The document King attached to City Hall included what it billed as “14 basic goals aimed at making Chicago a racially open city.” Some of the items were addressed to the business community, like demands that real estate brokers show listings on a nondiscriminatory basis, and that companies conduct racial head counts and integrate their workforces. Others were aimed at City Hall: that the CHA improve conditions in public housing and increase the supply of scattered-site housing, and that the city create a citizen’s review board for police brutality and misconduct. One demand was addressed directly to the machine: that it require precinct captains to be residents of their precincts, which would end the practice of absentee white captains remaining in charge of West Side precincts that had long since turned black. Jack Reilly, Daley’s special events director, removed the demands after King and Raby taped them up, and said he would deliver them to Daley. 49
The day after the rally and the march on City Hall, Daley met with King and ten members of the Chicago Freedom Movement. He heard his visitors out with his usual impassive demeanor. Then, reading from a forty-page memo, he launched into a recitation of the “massive programs” he had overseen to improve the lot of the city’s poor blacks. “What would you have us do that we haven’t done?” he asked. 50 Daley refused to get drawn into a discussion of the specific demands King had posted on the door of City Hall. Police superintendent Wilson rejected the demand for a civil complaint review board of the kind New York City had recently introduced, declaring that it would interfere with the department’s efforts to reform itself. But with that single exception, Daley was as careful not to reject any of King’s demands as he was not to accept them. “The Freedom Movement wanted to get a no out of the mayor on each of the demands and he refused .... he’d say, ‘Well, we could look at it from this perspective, and maybe we could do something over here,’” one civil rights observer noted. Daley argued that the problems the Chicago Freedom Movement was taking on were complicated ones, and that the city would need time to work on them. But King insisted that continued delay was unacceptable. “We cannot wait,” King said in his closing statement. “Young people are not going to wait.” 51
King was more frustrated than ever. When he emerged from the three-hour meeting, he told reporters gathered outside that Daley simply failed to grasp “the depth and dimensions of the problem” facing the city. “We are demanding these things, not requesting them,” King said, because the “seething desperation” among the city’s blacks was “inviting social disaster.” In the face of Daley’s resistance, King said, the movement had no choice but to “escalate” its efforts and engage in “many more marches.” Daley, for his part, came away from the meeting indignant that King was using their impasse for publicity purposes. A furious Daley, so irate that he stumbled over his words, insisted to reporters that the problems they were discussing “cannot be resolved overnight.” There was a need for “massive action,” Daley conceded. “We will continue it. I am not proud of the slums. No one is. We will expand our programs.” 52 But Daley insisted that King was deliberately making the city look bad for his own political purposes. Chicago had “the best record of any city in the country,” Daley said, and even King “admitted himself they have the same problems in Atlanta.” Asked about King’s promise in his Soldier Field address to begin a direct-action campaign that would “fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary,” Daley was firm. “There is no reason for violation of the law,” he said. “This will not be tolerated as long as I am mayor.” 53
The peace in Chicago was shattered the following day. The city was going through a massive heat wave on July 12, with temperatures lodged above 90 degrees for the fifth consecutive day. To preserve the city’s water pressure, fire commissioner Robert Quinn ordered that the city’s fire hydrants be kept closed. Two police officers, called to the Near West Side to rescue an ice cream truck caught in a hole in the street, noticed some black teenagers on Roosevelt Road cooling themselves in the water of a fire hydrant. Open hydrants were illegal, but they were also an entrenched Chicago tradition. They were one of the few ways for poor people, and particularly poor blacks, to cool off in the summer heat. There were four Chicago Park District swimming pools within walking distance of this Near West Side neighborhood, but three of them were restricted to whites. When the police turned off this open hydrant, it struck many as yet another abuse at the hands of city government, and it was inevitably fraught with racial implications. “The seething anger over the fire hydrants on the near west side was a mental throwback for older blacks who remembered vividly their inability to eat hamburgers in white restaurants in Chicago,” civil rights historian Dempsey Travis has written. Neighborhood resident Donald Henry defiantly reopened the hydrant, and the police took him into custody. As he was being led away, Henry made an appeal to the crowd forming around him. “You are not going to let these policemen arrest me,” Henry implored. “Why don’t you do something about it?” 54
The crowd began to resist, and clashes broke out between the police and neighborhood residents. The police called for backup, and thirty squad cars appeared on the scene. Five or six youths were beaten with police clubs, and police began manhandling members of the crowd. The issue quickly shifted from fire hydrants to police brutality, and before long guerrilla-style warfare broke out between residents and police over a several-mile area. At the Liberty Shopping Center on Racine Avenue, most of the windows in the eight stores were smashed. King and other civil rights activists hurried to the area and tried to calm the rioters. At a late-night mass meeting at the West Side’s Shiloh Baptist Church, King pleaded with the community to reject violence. But much of the audience, believing that the principles of nonviolence had already been breached by the actions of the police, walked out in the middle of King’s presentation and headed back onto the streets. By the end of the first night of rioting, ten people were injured, twenty-four were arrested, blocks of store windows were smashed, and some of the stores were looted. On Wednesday morning, King called the incident a “riot,” and put the blame for it on the brutal actions of the police. Daley, seeking to minimize the events of the previous evening, refused to call it a riot, referring to it instead as a “juvenile incident.” The area where the uprising had occurred was quiet throughout the day on Wednesday, but violence broke out again that evening. Rioting spread to new neighborhoods, stores were firebombed and looted, and snipers were shooting down from rooftops. Firemen sent to put out burning stores were stoned. Hundreds of police working until past midnight were needed to put down the rioting. Eleven people, including six police, were injured. 55
Daley met with key staff members on Thursday to plan a response. He told the group — which included police superintendent Wilson, fire commissioner Quinn, human relations commissioner Marciniak, and Chicago Housing Authority head Charles Swibel — that he would call in the National Guard if necessary to restore calm. Wilson argued that the real problem was that a few agitators in the community were using charges of police brutality to stir up the mob. The violence that followed on Thursday was the worst yet. Rioting spread into the West Side neighborhoods of Lawndale and East and West Garfield Park. Thousands of young blacks roamed the streets looting stores, throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails, and attacking passenger cars seemingly at random. Some black-owned businesses put signs in their windows saying “Soul Brother” or “Blood Brother” to discourage looters from attacking. The police and snipers engaged in furious gunfighting across the West Side. At one point, police identified rounds of gunfire coming from a tenth-floor apartment in the Henry Horner Homes. They turned floodlights on the apartment and sprayed it with bullets. In the end, two blacks were killed, including a twenty-eight-year-old man who police said had been looting, and a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl who was caught in crossfire. Many more people were injured by gunfire, including six policemen. Daley placed police on twelve-hour shifts, and deployed 900 officers in the affected area. He sealed the region off from the rest of the city, and declared that Chicago’s curfew for youth under seventeen would be strictly enforced. By Friday morning, Daley had asked Governor Otto Kerner to mobilize the National Guard. 56
Daley blamed the Chicago Campaign for the outbreak of violence. “[Y]ou cannot charge it to Martin Luther King directly,” he told a press conference. “But surely some of the people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence. They’re on his staff and they’re responsible....” The “showing pictures” seemed to refer to the film of the Watts rioting that civil rights activists had shown to youth on the West Side. Daley also insisted there were “certain elements” working in the city “training, actually training” young people how to engage in violence. “[W]ho makes a Molotov cocktail?” he asked. “Someone has to train the youngsters.” Daley claimed he had “tapes and documentation” proving the involvement of King’s followers, but he would not make them public or further elaborate on his charges. Police superintendent Wilson argued that the police brutality was the fault of the rioters. “Brutality grows out of arrest incidents where a person resists an officer,” Wilson said. “But some people think they can resist arrest.” The machine’s black allies echoed Daley’s charges. “I believe our young people are not vicious enough to attack a whole city,” the Reverend J. H. Jackson told a press conference. “Some other forces are using these people.” 57
King was indignant about Daley’s accusations. “It is very unfortunate that the mayor . . . could perpetuate such an impression,” King said. “My staff has preached nonviolence. We have not veered away from that at any point.” The films of Watts that had upset Daley so much were shown “to demonstrate the negative effects of the riots,” King said. The truth was that the civil rights activists had played a critical role in defusing the violence, King insisted, by traveling across the riot-torn neighborhoods and pleading with rioters to desist. “If we [had not been] on the scene,” King told a reporter, “it would have been worse than Watts.” The real cause of the riots, according to King, was Daley’s poor record of dealing with “the problems we face in the Negro community,” and the latest round of rioting was a wake-up call. If Daley continued to resist the reasonable demands of the civil rights movement, King warned, Chicago was headed toward “social disaster.” 58
While the two men were publicly trading charges, King was trying to schedule a meeting with Daley at City Hall. When he was unable to secure an appointment, a contingent from the Chicago Freedom Movement simply showed up. Daley was out, but King and his group settled in and waited for the mayor to return. While they waited, Archbishop Cody and six other clergymen showed up, also seeking to talk with Daley about the unrest. When he returned to his office, Daley sat down and talked to his visitors. Face-to-face, Daley was more accommodating toward King than he had been in his comments to reporters. “Doctor,” Daley said to King, who was seated just to his right, “you know you are not responsible for these unfortunate happenings.” After an hour and a half of discussion, Daley announced that the group had agreed to take a number of steps, including directing precinct workers in the riot area to encourage residents to stay home, appointing a citizens committee to advise City Hall on relations between police and the community, and building more swimming pools in the affected areas. Daley’s course of action struck King and his followers as paltry — King said they failed to meet the “basic needs” of Chicago’s ghetto residents. Civil rights leaders had called on Daley to put more swimming pools in poor neighborhoods, but when he agreed to build them, the plan was easily mocked. Columnist Mike Royko scoffed that City Hall was on a campaign “to make Chicago’s blacks the wettest in the country.” Daley’s more substantive reforms also struck the Chicago Freedom Movement as unimportant. His citizens committee on police relations was merely advisory, and fell short of the independent civilian complaint review board that activists were seeking. Still, King called Daley’s proposals a “step in the right direction,” and said he would be “going back to the people saying some positive things are being done, that changes are being made.” 59
The unrest on the West Side was now over. More than 2,000 members of the National Guard, armed with rifles and bayonets, were patrolling on foot and in jeeps, while another 2,200 were on reserve at five armories spread out across the city. The Park District had purchased ten portable swimming pools, and on July 17 installed the first one at a playground near where the fire hydrant riots had begun. A day later, when the streets were still quiet, Major General Francis P. Kane, commander of the 33rd National Guard Infantry Division, withdrew his men. The final toll from the fire hydrant riots stood at two dead, more than eighty injuries, and more than five hundred arrests. Property damage was estimated at more than $2 million, and many commercial streets in the affected areas were devastated. Roosevelt Avenue, by one account, “looked like a tornado had churned through.” 60
Each side drew its own lessons from the rioting. To Daley, the uprisings were getting too much attention, and were detracting from the many things that were going right in the city. “I would like to see demonstrations by the thousands of Chicagoans who have obtained jobs, returned to school, and worked together as tenants and landlords as a result of anti-poverty programs on the federal, state, and local levels,” Daley told a convention of the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers at the Palmer House. But King and his followers continued to insist that unless something was done, worse violence would follow. The Freedom Movement staff set out to work with young people in the ghetto and convince them to adopt a policy of nonviolence. They held a five-hour meeting at King’s apartment on July 16 with leaders of the major West Side gangs, who by the end of the session agreed to renounce violence. “This puts us over the hump,” Andrew Young declared. “This was a real breakthrough.” The movement staff promised one leader of the Roman Saints, who had what one staff member called “almost a religious conversion to non-violence,” that he would be given a chance to meet with Daley personally to express his views. But the Freedom Movement staff had failed to check with City Hall first, and when they tried to set up the meeting they soon learned that Daley favored a tougher approach. “They live in a fantasy world,” one Daley staff member said. “They expect to walk into the Mayor’s office and say they’re responsible for those killings, for shooting policemen, for looting stores and throwing Molotov cocktails and then make a planned pitch that society made them that way. Why, the first thing we’d do is throw them in the jug.” 61

[neil]

The Chicago Freedom Movement opened a new chapter when it began leading a series of peaceful open-housing marches into the working-class white neighborhoods of Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, and Marquette Park. These Southwest Side neighborhoods were located near the black ghetto, and had housing stock that was within the financial reach of the city’s growing black middle class. But according to the 1960 census, only seven of the 100,000 residents of the Gage Park–Chicago Lawn–Marquette Park area were nonwhite. Blacks who tried to buy or rent in the area quickly encountered a white wall of resistance, starting at neighborhood real estate offices. The Freedom Movement had been sending testers into Gage Park, and had already documented 121 cases of racial discrimination. The marches began uneventfully. On Saturday, July 16, an integrated group of 120 demonstrators marched from an “action center” in the black neighborhood of Englewood into nearby Marquette Park for a picnic. The next day, 200 marchers held a prayer vigil near a Catholic church in Gage Park, where they were taunted by neighborhood white youths. To ensure that there was no confusion about what was at stake, a protest leader declared that the marchers “had come to take a look at the community because this is where they plan to send their children to school and to live.” 62

The peace finally gave out on July 29, when protesters held an all-night vigil at F. H. Halvorsen Realty in Gage Park. The Freedom Movement had selected Halvorsen because, according to recent testing, it repeatedly discriminated against black applicants. Movement staff had also done research into the various white neighborhoods and “determined that this was the area that we were going to [get the] greatest resistance,” says civil rights activist Gloria Palmer. “And the researchers and analysts were correct—we almost got destroyed.” Not long after the open-housing protesters arrived at Halvorsen, white counter demonstrators showed up and the atmosphere turned tense. “The police protecting [the protesters] were getting more edgy,” recalls the Freedom Movement’s press officer. “Jesse Jackson and Jim Bevel made an agreement to get the crowd out in paddy wagons.” The protesters left under police guard but, worried that their departure would be seen as a giving in, a crowd of about 250 movement demonstrators returned the next day to continue the vigil. Once again, they were met by a hostile white crowd that pelted them with rocks and bottles. This time, the marchers were forced to turn back even before they reached Halvorsen. Fortunately, the protesters could always escape from the white mobs by running over the racial dividing line and back into the ghetto. “The really stunning thing about Chicago segregation was that there was this war going on — rocks being thrown, bottles — but as soon as we got to the color line,” says activist Don Rose, “it was just peace.” 63

A larger crowd of demonstrators returned on Sunday, July 31. This time, 500 neighborhood residents met them, hurling cherry bombs, rocks, and bottles. It was the meanest crowd yet. When Sister Mary Angelica, a first-grade teacher marching with the open-housing demonstrators, was hit in the head and fell to the ground, the counterdemonstrators cheered and shouted, “We’ve got another one!” Others yelled “White power!” “Polish power!” and “Burn them like Jews!” Before it was over the white mob, which had grown to 4,000, injured more than 50 people, including a Catholic priest, burned a dozen of the protesters’ cars, overturned a dozen more, and pushed two into a lagoon. “I’d never seen whites like these in the South,” says Dorothy Tillman, who left Alabama to join the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Gage Park counterdemonstrators were “up in trees like monkeys throwing bricks and bottles and stuff,” Tillman says. “I mean racism, you could almost cut it.” To make clear that they were not singling out any one part of the city, the open-housing demonstrators next shifted their focus to the Northwest Side. The reception they received in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood, though hostile, was more subdued than what they had seen on the Southwest Side. 64

Daley finally entered the fray on August 2, when he met with political, community, and religious leaders from Gage Park and adjoining Chicago Lawn. The white residents of these neighborhoods had assumed Daley would come to their aid, but he had been remarkably silent. Making matters worse, the police on the scene were widely seen as taking the side of the civil rights demonstrators, since they generally tried to prevent the white mobs from attacking. The community leaders who met with Daley represented some of the most conservative organizations in Gage Park and Chicago Lawn, including the infamous homeowners’ associations, whose primary interest was in stopping integration. They wanted to hear specific plans from Daley for how demonstrators would be kept out of their neighborhoods. But Daley spoke only about the need for all sides to observe the law. “We are in agreement that this is a reflection on the city and that recognizing law and order is necessary,” Daley said afterward. “I appeal to all people in all communities to cooperate with the Police Department.” The white residents felt Daley had betrayed them. “[T]he Mayor’s only answer was ‘They have a right to march,’” one complained afterward. 65

In fact, Daley was just as eager as the white neighborhood delegations to see the marches stop. But he understood that issuing an order, or having the police stop them forcibly, would only advance the protesters’ cause. What Daley wanted to do was negotiate. He approached the Chicago Freedom Movement through CHA board chairman Charles Swibel. Swibel argued that since King had “gotten in over his head and needed a ‘victory,’” the movement and the city would both benefit by working out some kind of deal. Swibel was a canny negotiator, and he opened with a lowball offer. The city would install elevator guards in public housing, establish a committee to investigate integration issues, and build or restore about 400 units of housing. In exchange, Swibel asked King to issue a statement lauding Daley’s “wise leadership” and promising his “cooperation to Mayor Daley in implementing the positive programs the city has underway.” When King rejected Swibel’s offer, Daley and Swibel announced they would implement the improvements anyway. Next, Daley dispatched a delegation of black machine politicians to negotiate with King and Raby. The aldermen and state legislators, who met with the civil rights leaders for three hours, said they shared many of the movement’s goals, including tougher open-housing legislation, stricter building standards, more bank loans for blacks, and a racial head count of employees. These were strange words, certainly, coming from men who regularly opposed civil rights measures in the City Council. But the machine delegation insisted that the city and the Freedom Movement should be able to work out some kind of agreement. As it happened, this attempt to begin negotiating with King and his followers was well timed. After seven months in Chicago, King had grown increasingly discouraged, and was looking for a way of ending his campaign gracefully. “He told us they just couldn’t go any further, but they had to have some kind of victory so they could withdraw without loss of prestige and that they wanted our help in achieving that,” said Alderman Despres, the one white elected official present. “King was really announcing a surrender, and they worked out a formula for King to leave town.” The gathering ended with Metcalfe, the leading black machine alderman, putting his arm around King’s shoulder. 66 The whole scene made Despres “very sad,” he said later. “Metcalfe could hardly conceal his pleasure with the thought that King was ready to leave town.” 67

While both sides worked toward some process for entering into negotiations, the marches continued, and the violence in the neighborhoods grew worse. On August 5, Raby and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson led more than five hundred demonstrators — the biggest contingent yet — back to Marquette Park. White residents had been gathering for hours in the park, a grassy expanse with a golf course and a lagoon. The crowd waved Confederate flags and held banners supporting Alabama governor George Wallace for president, and a few wore Nazi helmets. When the civil rights marchers began to arrive in the late afternoon, the white counterdemonstrators called out, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate,” and yelled, “We want Martin Luther Coon” and “Kill those niggers.” A gray-haired woman shouted, “God, I hate niggers and nigger-lovers.” Other whites screamed out “nigger-loving cops” at the police who were trying to keep the two sides apart. “About ten thousand screaming people showed up to harass, curse, and throw debris on us,” Andrew Young recalled. “Bottles were flying and cherry bombs were going off. We felt like we were walking through a war zone.” 68

King arrived by car and joined the demonstration. While he was marching, he was struck above the right ear by a rock “as big as a fist.” The nation’s foremost advocate of nonviolent protest fell to the ground. “When we saw Dr. King go down in that line I didn’t realize that I could be so mad at the world,” said civil rights activist Nancy Jefferson. “I think everybody in that line wanted to kill everybody that was on the other side of the line.” King got up and continued marching. As the marchers continued to make their way toward Halvorsen Realty, another heckler threw a knife at King. It missed him and hit a young white man in the neck. Members of the crowd yelled, “Kill him, kill him,” as King walked by. Demonstrators held up signs with such slogans as “Reds, race mixers, queers, junkies, winos, muggers, rapists ... you are all persona non grata here,” and “King would look good with a knife in his back.” King escaped without further harm, but the scene only got more tense. As the marchers prepared to board buses, a crowd of about 2,500 whites threw bottles, smashed bus windows, and clashed with the police. White women ran down the street with bags of sugar, which they poured into the gasoline tanks of protesters’ cars. Other cars were set on fire. A mob descended on Father George Clements, a black Catholic priest, and police had to escort him to safety. Even after the marchers left, the clashes between the white mob and almost 1,000 police went on for another five hours. In the end, forty-four people were arrested, and thirty-one were injured enough to require hospitalization. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the south, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago,” King said afterward. “I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” 69



With the open-housing campaign under way, Chicago blacks were starting to resist the CHA’s plans to build more public housing in the ghetto. On July 6, the City Council voted down a ten-story building the CHA proposed to build in Woodlawn — one of twelve new sites the CHA had submitted — after an outpouring of neighborhood opposition. The Reverend Arthur Brazier, chairman of The Woodlawn Organization, testified against the building, saying it would overcrowd the neighborhood. Mrs. Tarlease Bell, one of more than one hundred Woodlawn residents who showed up to oppose it, told the City Council that “high-rise housing is a monument to segregation.” A few weeks later, residents of Kenwood-Oakland, another ghetto on the South Side, turned out for a hearing at CHA headquarters to oppose plans to build more public housing in their neighborhood. A pastor from Kenwood United Church of Chicago charged that the CHA was “intensifying the ghetto.” Swibel, however, continued to defend the CHA’s plans. “I am taken aback that you seem to object to the poor and say they ought to live elsewhere,” said Swibel, who himself lived in suburban Winnetka. “Everybody wants public housing to be somewhere else. I wish you would join us in making public housing so good that it will be accepted everywhere.” 70

Meanwhile, the clashes between open-housing marchers and angry neighborhood mobs showed no signs of letting up. Two days after the latest confrontation at Marquette Park, 1,100 demonstrators, 500 police, and 5,000 white residents faced off on the streets of the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on the Northwest Side. Business and civic leaders from the Chicago Lawn neighborhood asked Daley to join them in petitioning the U.S. attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to investigate Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement. The Chicago Tribune called on the black community to shake off King and his fellow civil rights agitators. “Why not a great petition, or a huge rally, to signify to King and his imported troublemakers that Chicago Negroes want an end to this campaign to stir up the antipathy of white people and want to give the races a chance to live in harmony?” the Republican paper asked. But harmony was not what the city seemed to be moving toward. 71

Jesse Jackson had been talking for some time about leading a march into the all-white suburb of Cicero. Cicero was so hostile to integration — and its response to civil rights marchers was likely to be so violent — that Jackson’s talk struck most observers as an idle threat. But at an August 8 rally, Jackson announced that he would lead a march into Cicero in the next few days. “We expect violence,” Jackson said, “but it wouldn’t be any more violent than the demonstrations last week.” In fact, such a march was likely to be incendiary. Cicero, population 70,000, was perhaps the largest municipality in the country without a single black resident. A working-class town made up predominantly of Poles, Italians, and Bohemians living in simple brick bungalows, Cicero had cemented its reputation for racial hatred in 1951, when black bus driver Harvey E. Clark Jr. rented an apartment there. A crowd of 5,000 whites surrounded the building and threw bricks, rocks, and bottles through the windows. Members of the white mob eventually got inside the building, smashing stoves and refrigerators, and burning Clark’s furniture. After Governor Adlai Stevenson called in the National Guard to restore order, and Clark left town, there were no further attempts to integrate Cicero.Only a few months before Jackson’s announcement, a black teenager named Jerome Huey had been killed by white teenagers when he went to Cicero looking for a job. When a network TV reporter said Cicero had a reputation for hating Negroes “deserved or not,” one native scoffed. “The people of Cicero would be the first to say that the reputation was deserved,” he insisted. 72

On August 9, the day after Jackson’s ominous announcement, Daley called on both sides to stop marching and start negotiating. Archbishop Cody echoed Daley’s appeal, saying a moratorium on marches was needed to “avert serious injury to many persons and even the loss of life.” Daley lobbied influential Chicagoans to support his efforts to bring a halt to the marches. On August 11, he sat down with seventeen of the city’s top labor leaders, including his old friends William McFetridge and William Lee, at a meeting called by United Auto Workers midwestern regional director Robert Johnston. The Freedom Movement’s “demonstrations on the streets” were the city’s “number one problem,” Daley said. Daley’s proposal for ending them was to convene a summit meeting at which all the necessary parties could hammer out an agreement on open housing. He directed his Commission on Human Relations to begin laying the groundwork. The commission would have been the logical choice to host the summit, but Daley was intent on not being put in the position of negotiating against the Chicago Freedom Movement. He preferred to frame the summit as a meeting between the Freedom Movement on one side, and the Chicago real estate industry on the other. Daley asked the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, a respected group with known civil rights sympathies, to convene the summit. It was a clever arrangement, and one that, human relations commissioner Marciniak noted, “took the focus” off Daley. 73

The Freedom Movement was divided about whether to attend Daley’s summit. Many of the younger, more militant members distrusted Daley and favored continuing to engage in direct action. They noted that the civil rights movement had tried negotiating with him in the past, and it had always gone badly. Daley always had his mind made up going in, and simply used the meeting for publicity purposes. That was, in fact, Daley’s record in dealing with the movement. Meyer Weinberg recalls the time he and other CCCO representatives met with the mayor to discuss Willis and conditions in black schools. The CCCO delegation made their case with passion, but it elicited almost no response from Daley. “He was very bored with us,” Weinberg recalls. “He just seemed like he couldn’t wait to go home. We went away just feeling terrible.” But King and the movement’s more moderate leaders wanted to participate in the summit. King argued his position with what seemed to be an almost naive belief in the possibility that Daley could be converted to the cause. Daley “is no bigot,” he told other members of the Freedom Movement, but he “is about my son’s age in understanding the race problem.” The decisive factor, though, was that the Chicago Campaign was stalled, and the movement was eager for any kind of victory, even a negotiated one. “The most significant event of this year is the spread of the Negro revolution from the sprawling plantations of Mississippi and Alabama to the desolate slums and ghettos of the North,” King said in his report to the annual meeting of the SCLC in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 10. Chicago was the “test case,” King declared, for whether the civil rights movement could succeed in the North. Daley’s summit seemed to offer at least a chance that the northern civil rights movement would not end in total failure. After considerable debate, the Chicago Freedom Movement agreed to negotiate. 74

[neil]

CHAPTER
11
The Outcome Was
Bitterly Disappointing
In the days leading up to Daley’s housing summit, the Chicago Freedom Movement continued taking its fight to the streets. On August 12, the same day the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race sent out formal invitations, James Bevel led 600 protesters on a march to a high school on the Southwest Side. Two days later, Bevel, Jackson, and Raby led simultaneous marches on Bogan, Gage Park, and the Northwest Side. And on August 16, the day before the summit started, civil rights protesters held another round of demonstrations. There were vigils in Jefferson Park on the Northwest Side, and pickets at City Hall, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the Cook County Department of Public Aid. The Chicago Freedom Movement was sending a clear message that although they were willing to negotiate, they intended to keep up the “creative tension” until a satisfactory agreement was reached. The movement also embarked on a pre-summit campaign of real estate–agent testing. As expected, blacks were lied to about the availability of housing in white neighborhoods and turned away. King and Raby collected enough evidence to file seventy-four discrimination complaints against sixteen real estate brokers. Equally important, the testing gave them fresh evidence going into the summit that the problem of housing discrimination was real, and that the city’s Fair Housing Ordinance of 1963 was not being enforced. 1
The leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement, stretched thin by the need to keep their campaign of direct action going, found little time to plan for the upcoming negotiations. The night before the summit began, they quickly cobbled together a set of proposed reforms. True to his character, Daley plotted his course of action more carefully. He assembled a team of experts who would be able to go head-to-head with the civil rights delegation on any subject they were likely to raise. Edward Marciniak and Ely Aaron, executive director and chairman, respectively, of the city’s Human Relations Commission, would be on hand at the summit to speak to the overall racial situation in the city. And Daley called on city administrators such as Charles Livermore, executive director of the city’s Commission on Youth Welfare, and Charles Swibel of the CHA, to be prepared to discuss their areas of expertise. Daley wanted Swibel at the summit for more than just his knowledge of housing. He was, in an odd way, Daley’s ambassador to parts of the city’s progressive community. Swibel, who was a slumlord by trade and ran the much-criticized public housing authority, was no great liberal. But he had managed to cultivate ties with some leading civil rights activists, including Chicago Urban League executive director Edwin Berry. Berry hosted many parties, and Swibel showed up frequently, usually the only person in attendance who was not part of Chicago’s progressive community. Berry was likely to be a key player on the Freedom Movement side of the table. He was well regarded in civil rights circles, and had a good relationship with King, whom he helped to convince to come to Chicago. There was a chance that the most difficult issues at the summit could be resolved between Swibel and his friend Berry. 2
To prepare for the negotiations, Daley and his team drew up an eleven-point proposal for resolving the conflict. Daley’s approach, as it had been with the 1963 open-housing ordinance he drafted, was to blame the lack of fair housing in Chicago on the real estate industry rather than city government. Once again, it was a formulation that made Realtors and the civil rights movement the combatants, and avoided placing Daley in a showdown with King. As Daley envisioned the summit, he would act as a mediator between the two parties to the conflict: King and his followers on one side and the Chicago Real Estate Board on the other. It was a clever strategy, and once the summit began the civil rights contingent would become convinced that Daley had always viewed the summit in purely tactical terms. “It never seemed to me that Daley was trying to figure out how to deal with the broader race and housing problems in Chicago,” says John McKnight, who attended the summit as a U.S. Civil Rights Commission observer. “It was about stopping the marches, which were tearing at the heart of the Democratic Party.” 3
The summit began at 10:00 A.M. on Wednesday, August 17, in a parish meeting hall of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James. Almost seventy men gathered around three tables shaped in a U configuration. The room was hot and stuffy, cooled only by a single floor fan. 4 After sending out the invitations, the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race had decided that it did not want to preside, so its members would be free to speak out in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement. The gavel passed to Ben Heineman, chairman of the board of Chicago North Western Railway. Heineman was sympathetic to open housing, and had presided in June at a White House conference on civil rights for President Johnson. But he was above all a member of the city’s business establishment and a friend of Daley’s. Flanking him at the center table were some of the city’s most important religious leaders, among them Archbishop Cody and Robert Marx, a prominent rabbi. Daley sat on the left-hand branch of the U, with some of the city’s leading business and political figures. Thomas Ayers, president of Commonwealth Edison and head of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, represented downtown business. Two of the city’s leading bankers came, David Kennedy, president of the Commerce Club, and Chicago Mortgage Association president Clark Stayman. The Chicago Real Estate Board, whose role would be critical, was represented by its board president, Ross Beatty, and past board president Arthur Mohl. On the right-hand branch of the U was the Chicago Freedom Movement delegation. It was led by King, recently back from a trip south, and Raby, and included James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Arthur Brazier of The Woodlawn Organization. 5
It had been agreed that King would speak first, followed by Daley, and that King would then issue the Freedom Movement’s demands. But Heineman let Daley start off. His opening remarks were characteristically vague. “We have to do something to resolve the problems of the past few weeks,” Daley said by way of introduction. When King’s turn came, he delivered a more lofty oration, describing Chicago in the same terms he had used in the past to depict the South. Chicago’s problem, according to King, was one of “dualism.” It had “a dual school system, a dual economy, a dual housing market,” King said, “and we seek to transform this duality into a oneness.” Raby followed, and assumed the bad-cop role he would maintain throughout the summit. “I am very pessimistic about the negotiations today because my experience with negotiating has indicated that our success has always been very limited,” he said. The only reason the summit was occurring, Raby contended, was because of the open-housing marches. “We will not end the marches with a verbal commitment,” Raby said. 6
Despite the agreement that King would be allowed to present the Freedom Movement’s demands first, Heineman called on Aaron to present Daley’s eleven-point proposal. The city’s position was that the real estate industry would have to take firmer steps to ensure that it was not discriminating in the sale and rental of housing, and that the civil rights movement had to promise to halt its marches into the neighborhoods. If Daley’s plan had been to deflect attention from the city by pitting these two groups against each other, it worked. The Real Estate Board, both in Chicago and nationally, strongly opposed government-imposed fair-housing policies. The Chicago Real Estate Board had lobbied against state and city fair-housing laws, and it had filed a lawsuit challenging the Chicago fair housing ordinance. Real estate agents saw open housing as bad for business, but with the whole housing summit focused on them, it was not a good time to make a full-blown philosophical argument against it. Instead, they argued that open-housing mandates directed at real-estate agents were impractical. Realtors were mere agents of the sellers and landlords they represented, the Chicago Real Estate Board’s Mohl said, and these were the people the civil rights movement needed to focus on. “We need a cooperative venture here, not bullying, but a program to sell people in the neighborhoods on the idea that the world won’t end if a Negro moves in,” he argued. King had little sympathy for the Real Estate Board’s predicament. “All over the South I heard the same thing we’ve just heard from Mr. Mohl from restaurant owners and hotel owners,” said King. “They said that they were just the agents, that they were just responding to the people’s unwillingness to eat with Negroes in the same restaurant or stay with Negroes in the same hotel. But we got a comprehensive civil rights bill and the so-called agents then provided service to everybody and nothing happened and the same thing can happen here.” The civil rights delegates were no happier than the Real Estate Board with what Daley’s presentation called for. They did not want to agree to give up their right to march until they could be assured that they would get what they wanted at the summit. At this early juncture, that was not looking likely. Daley’s proposal fell far short of what the movement was hoping for with regard to open housing, and King reminded Daley that the movement had demands “in the areas of education and employment and you are hearing here only our demands in the area of housing.” 7
The Chicago Freedom Movement finally got its turn to lay out its position. The movement’s nine-point proposal focused on Daley and the city, not the Realtors. It called for the city to step up enforcement of fair-housing laws, through a program of real estate–office testing and filing complaints against violators. The civil rights delegates also wanted a commitment that the CHA would stop building high-rises in the ghetto, and a promise that urban-renewal programs would in the future be used to decrease segregation. When King asked Daley if he would agree to the demands aimed at the city, he quickly said he would. Once again, King’s efforts to engage Daley in combat were defeated by the mayor’s unwillingness to disagree. The movement delegates would have little choice but to aim most of their fire at the parties at the table who continued to resist. Not long after Daley agreed to King’s demands, Swibel began to chip away at the terms. It would be hard, he said, for the CHA to agree to a total moratorium on high-rises in the ghetto, since the agency intended to build some high-rises for the elderly, and might not be able to get land elsewhere. Rather than suggest that an exception be made for elderly housing, Swibel instead substantially restated the public housing demand, saying that he was agreeing “that we will build non-ghetto low-rises as much as feasible.” For good measure, Swibel also asked the civil rights movement delegates to have the American Civil Liberties Union’s recently filed Gautreaux lawsuit, which challenged racial discrimination by the CHA, withdrawn.
Marciniak made one of Daley’s favorite points: that the open-housing problem was a “metropolitan” one, and that the Chicago Freedom Movement needed to spend more time working on opening up the suburbs. It was true that the suburbs were every bit as exclusionary as the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods, and that opening them up would give Chicago blacks a broader range of choices about where to live. The problem was, there was little civil rights activists could do to open the white suburban ring. The Freedom Movement had leverage with Daley because it posed a two-pronged threat to the Democratic machine’s hold on power. Its activism in black neighborhoods had the potential to radicalize black voters and drive them away from the machine. And its rallies in ethnic neighborhoods threatened to push the machine’s white base to move to the suburbs. It was in Daley’s interest to reach a compromise with the movement before it started to erode his hold on power. But the Freedom Movement had nothing to threaten the Republican suburbs with. It also had few legal weapons at its disposal, since the Illinois legislature had refused to pass an open-housing law that applied to the suburbs, and suburban governments were not about to pass their own civil rights laws. Daley may have been right that Chicago was being singled out, but as a practical matter the Freedom Movement had little choice. 8
The original plan was for the summit to last no more than two hours, but Daley told Heineman he wanted to work through to an agreement. Heineman went along. “We’re going to stay here,” he told the crowded parish meeting room. “I have no plans to recess except for lunch.” At this point, Thomas Ayers gave the first indication of where the business community stood. “I think we support all the points in the proposals of the Chicago Freedom Movement,” he said, following Daley’s lead and further isolating the Realtors. It was now virtually everyone in the room against the real estate industry. “The key problem, the core problem, is that Realtors refuse to serve Negroes in their offices,” Bevel said. “And that must change.” The Real Estate Board representatives in the room insisted that they could not speak for all Chicago real estate agents. But King tried to lift the real estate delegates to a higher moral plane. “I appeal to the rightness of our position and to your decency,” he told them. “I see nothing in this world more dangerous than Negro cities ringed with white suburbs. Look at it in terms of grappling with righteousness. People will adjust to changes but the leadership has got to say that the time for change has come. The problem is not the people in Gage Park. The problem is that their leaders and institutions have taught them to be what they are.” 9
Daley had been sitting back for some time now — in a pose one participant described as “Buddha-like” — watching contentedly as the Freedom Movement focused its discontent on the real estate industry. When Raby suggested that the meeting be adjourned, Daley spoke up to urge that the proceedings continue. What was needed, he said, was for the Real Estate Board to “get on the phone to their members and do something about these demands now.” Daley’s comments came as a surprise, and they put considerable pressure on the real estate representatives to modify their uncompromising position. One member of the real estate contingent tried to stall for time, saying, “We cannot possibly deal on the phone — we cannot possibly work out a resolution to these things today.” But Daley’s allies in the room followed his lead. In the guise of “summarizing” what had transpired, Heineman told the Real Estate Board that “the monkey, gentlemen, is right on your back, and whether you see it as fair or not, everyone sees that the monkey is there.” The question now, Heineman told them, was “how are you going to deal with the demands placed on you?” Swibel had been acting throughout the negotiations, according to one participant, as “the chief cheerleader for Mayor Daley,” and at this point he launched into an impromptu pep rally. “We need a victory for Mayor Daley, a victory for the City of Chicago.” At the mention of a victory for Daley, a groan went up from the Freedom Movement side of the room. 10
The decision was made to break off the summit until 4:00 P.M., to give the real estate representatives time to talk with their board. During the break, King and the Freedom Movement had lunch at the Catholic Interracial Council, and negotiated further over whether to agree to a moratorium on marches. The consensus was that they should accept a moratorium only in exchange for significant concessions on open housing. Daley telephoned Real Estate Board chairman Ross Beatty during the break and made it clear he expected the board to change its stand. “In the interest of the city of Chicago, you cannot come back here this afternoon with a negative answer,” Daley told him. The pressure worked, and Beatty announced that his organization was modifying its position. The Real Estate Board made a general commitment to freedom of choice in housing as the right of every citizen, and promised to withdraw its opposition to state-level open occupancy legislation. It also agreed that the board would remind its members of their duty to obey the Chicago fair housing ordinance. At the same time, the board warned that further marches would “harden bigotry and slow down progress,” and that “if demonstrations do not terminate promptly, we may lose control of our membership, and be unable to fulfill the commitments we have here undertaken.” 11
The board’s new position was an improvement over its earlier intransigence, but it was unclear how much of an improvement. To some observers, it appeared to be a “complete reversal” and “the most significant result” of the summit. But it was obvious that the board’s concessions had been carefully crafted. Withdrawing opposition to a state open housing law, for example, was an empty gesture. Even if the Chicago Real Estate Board went along, the Illinois Association of Real Estate Boards would ensure that these bills did not become law. Some of the other positions were drawn so fine that they were hard to follow. “We’ve heard your statement,” Raby told Beatty, but “we’re not sure what you’re saying.” After some time spent trying to determine exactly what the board was offering, Bevel said that the real issue was not complicated. “The question is whether Negroes are going to be served at your office tomorrow morning,” he told the Realtors. Several speakers said that concern was already addressed in the city’s existing fair-housing ordinance, but Bevel kept pressing for concrete changes. “Gentlemen, in Memphis, in 1960, we had a series of marches to try to open up the restaurants, and finally, we had a meeting like this and what was agreed was not that they were going to pass a law or anything like that,” Bevel said, now standing up. “The power structure said that they were going to see to it that we could eat in Memphis and one week later we went out and we ate and we have been eating in Memphis ever since. Now that’s what we want here today. I want to re-emphasize that we need Negroes to be served in real estate offices. And you people here can see that will happen.” 12
To some on the civil rights side, the Chicago Real Estate Board’s new position was still inadequate. King had whispered, “This is nothing” when Beatty finished talking. Perhaps sensing that it had been a mistake to let Daley get out of the negotiations early simply because he had said yes to everything, Raby tried to pull Daley back in from the sidelines. “Now, I want to know when the mayor will see that an ordinance is enacted to require that all real estate dealers post in their windows the open-occupancy law and a statement of policy on nondiscrimination,” Raby demanded. But Daley had no interest in being drawn back in. “I said already this morning that I would do that,” Daley responded testily, “and I keep my word.” Daley once again underscored the need for a regional solution. What was needed was a fair-housing law that covered the whole metropolitan area, he said, and such a law would have to be passed at the state level. “The Democrats have always supported a state open-occupancy law,” he said, again trying to shift the focus away from himself. “The Republicans have fought it.” Edwin Berry, branding the Realtors’ offer “totally unacceptable,” also pressed Daley to be part of the solution. “I want to ask Mayor Daley, if the Chicago Real Estate Board can’t do something about our demands, can you?” Daley made a vague statement about how the city would “act as an agency through the Human Relations Commission” and again shifted the focus to the Real Estate Board. “I think they’ve done a lot,” Daley said. “It shows a real change that they’ve come in here indicating that they will no longer oppose open occupancy.” In light of the concessions from the Realtors, Daley insisted that it was now time for the Chicago Freedom Movement to settle. “We have agreed to virtually all the points here and everyone says that they are going to move ahead,” he said. “Now let’s not quibble over words; the intent is the important thing. We’re here in good faith and the city is asking for your help.” Heineman again lined up with Daley in pushing the Freedom Movement toward an agreement. “Bill, now you said the statement is worthless,” Heineman said to Berry, whom he knew well. “But isn’t point three, the willingness of the board to stop opposing the state open-occupancy law, a significant change?” Under continuing pressure from Heineman, Berry began to back down. “Well, on fourth reading I would have to concede that the third statement is something.” Yes, Heineman said, “It is a concession.” 13
The talk turned next to whether to institute a moratorium on open-housing marches. Heineman expressed his view that since the negotiators appeared to be “well on our way to realization” of an agreement acceptable to all sides,” it would be appropriate for the demonstrations to “cease until we see if these agreements are working out.” But the Freedom Movement was less certain about how much progress had really been made. “I don’t think we’re nearly so clear on all of these things as Mr. Heineman thinks,” Raby said. Andrew Young spoke of the critical importance of desegregating the city, which he believed was getting lost in all the talk about stopping the marches. The violence surrounding the open-housing marches had prompted this summit, Young argued, but everyday life in the ghetto was more violent than the marches. “It is more dangerous in Lawndale with those jammed-up, neurotic, psychotic Negroes than it is in Gage Park,” Young said. “To white people who don’t face the violence which is created by the degradation of the ghetto, this violence that you see in Gage Park may seem like a terrible thing. But I live in Lawndale and it is safer for me in Gage Park than it is in Lawndale. For the Negro in the ghetto, violence is the rule. So, when you say, cease these demonstrations, you’re saying to us, go back to a place where there is more violence than where you see violence taking place outside the ghetto.” It was an eloquent statement, but Daley missed its point. “Did I hear you say that we are going to have more violence in this city?” he asked. No, Young said, he was just saying that the ghetto was inherently a breeding ground for violence. “The city didn’t create this frustration, or this situation,” Daley said. “We want to try to do what you say.” 14
The discussion was threatening to move away from open housing to the larger, and far more complicated, issue of general conditions in the ghetto. Raby asked whether the Cook County Department of Public Aid would place the families in its charge in housing outside of poor, black neighborhoods. And he wanted to talk about the CHA’s policy of building high-rises in the ghetto. Heineman tried to steer the negotiations back to the question of open housing, saying, “We understood that your proposals were on these two pages.” But Young insisted that the real issue was “a plan to implement what is on these two pages.” Swibel said the marches should be stopped immediately, for a period of twelve months, a suggestion that elicited groans from across the table. Charles Hayes, a black representative of the Packinghouse Workers Union, warned that empty promises were not enough, and that the civil rights negotiators had to have something concrete to take back to black people outside the closed doors of the summit. “I think that you need to be a Negro to really understand what the situation is here,” Hayes said. “[W]e can’t go out after these negotiations and tell the guy on the street that what we got was an agreement from the Chicago Real Estate Board that they philosophically agree with open occupancy. The people want to hear what we’re going to do for them now. If I as a union negotiator ever came back to my men and said, ‘I got the company to agree that philosophically they were in support of seniority,’ I’d be laughed out of court.” 15
The summit broke for a fifteen-minute recess, at Raby’s request, so the Freedom Movement could discuss how to proceed. The civil rights delegates were well aware, Ralph Abernathy says, of Daley’s habit of “mak[ing] vague promises about an unspecified future, while refusing to be pinned down about any specific goals and timetables.” None of them favored a moratorium based on what had been offered so far. “In your mind the question may be a moratorium,” Raby told the summit after the recess, “but we would have to say that we would have a moratorium on demonstrations if we had a moratorium on housing segregation.” Under questioning from Heineman, Raby said the demonstrations would continue. At this, Daley leaped up:
I thought we were meeting to see if we couldn’t, if there couldn’t be a halt to what is happening in our neighborhoods because of the use of all the police and the crime rate rising throughout our city,” he said. “I repeat, as far as the city is concerned, we are prepared to do what is asked for. I appeal to you to understand that we are trying. I ask you why you picked Chicago? I make no apologies for our city. In the name of all our citizens I ask for a moratorium and that we set up a committee.
It was classic Daley vagueness, a style one summit participant described as “many words, but they have so little content, they’re so general, that you are not sure that anything has been said when [he] is done.” Raby tried once more to move the discussion to specific remedies. “[L]et me give you an example,” Raby said. “Is the mayor going to ask for the legislation to require brokers to post the ordinance in their windows? Will he ask for that legislation next Tuesday and will he get it? Will that actually be implemented?” But Daley responded that the Freedom Movement first had to show the City Council it was doing something. It was the first time Daley had expressly made a halt in the marches a quid pro quo for progress on fair housing. Raby was irate. “If I come before the Mayor of Chicago some day, I hope I can come . . . with what is just and that he will implement it because it is right rather than trading it politically for a moratorium.” Heineman jumped to Daley’s defense. “In a cooler moment, I think you’ll realize that the Mayor cannot help but want fewer demonstrations, he’s concerned about the safety of the people. And the Mayor is accustomed to having his word taken.” 16
With Raby and Daley at loggerheads, the prospects for a summit agreement were beginning to look grim. It was King who broke the tension by delivering a moving, but ultimately conciliatory, explanation of why Raby and the others were so reluctant to give in on the moratorium issue. “This has been a constructive and creative beginning,” King said. And if Daley was tired of demonstrations, he should realize that the Chicago Freedom Movement was equally tired of demonstrating. But the marches were necessary, King contended, in order to change conditions. “Now, gentlemen, you know we don’t have much,” King said. “We don’t have much money. We don’t really have much education, and we don’t have political power. We have only our bodies and you are asking us to give up the one thing that we have when you say, ‘Don’t march.’ We want to be visible. We are not trying to overthrow you; we are trying to get in.” By the time King was done, the tension in the room had broken considerably. 17
Young suggested that a working committee be appointed to consider the kind of specific measures that Raby and the other members of the Freedom Movement were demanding. Heineman, who had been pushing the two sides to keep talking, agreed. He named a committee that included representatives from the Freedom Movement, the Chicago Real Estate Board, business, labor, and City Hall. Heineman directed them to return after a nine-day recess with “proposals designed to provide an open city.” Before the summit could adjourn, an issue had to be resolved: What would be said to the reporters massed outside about the day’s progress? Heineman hoped to say something about the marches. If he could not announce a moratorium on the protests, he at least wanted to say that “the movement would proceed with great restraint” and with “the overall interests of the city” in mind. Swibel pressed the issue further, trying one last time to extract an agreement that there would be no marches at all, but Raby snapped, “[T]hat question has already been answered.” Eventually, Daley stood up and said, “I think everybody should be allowed to say anything they want to, that it be made clear this is a continuing meeting, and that this has been a beginning.” It was almost 9:00 P.M. when the summit participants filed out of the meeting room. 18
Both King and Daley were skeptical after the first day of the summit meeting. King was not convinced that the Real Estate Board would be willing or able to deliver on its promise to change its members’ ways. The following day, he announced plans for a sweeping new program of racial testing. The Chicago Freedom Movement was going to send 250 testers to 100 realty firms on the Northwest and Southwest sides to see if anything had changed as a result of the summit. “The real estate people indicated in our meeting on Wednesday that they wanted to do something about open housing in Chicago,” King told an overflow crowd of 1,000 at the Greater Mount Hope Baptist Church. “We want to see if they are serious. Some people have high blood pressure when it comes to words and anemia when it comes to action.” The Freedom Movement also resolved the moratorium issue by announcing that it was resuming its open-housing marches. In a public utterance clearly designed to get under Daley’s skin, Bevel declared, “We will demonstrate in the communities, until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.” 19
Daley, for his part, was also unhappy with how things were going with the summit. He was angry that King and Raby had still not agreed to a march moratorium, which he regarded as an affront to his control over the city. He was also furious at the damage the Freedom Movement was doing to the machine’s political base. The white neighborhoods that King and Raby were targeting with the latest round of marches had already started drifting toward the Republicans in the 1963 elections. And ward committeemen and precinct captains were reporting that the civil rights activity since then had done even more damage to the machine. “We lose white votes every time there’s an outburst like this,” one precinct captain complained after a march came to his neighborhood. At the same time, the civil rights movement was tearing loyal black voters away from the black machine. Every successful open-housing march increased the standing of the Al Rabys of the black community, and hurt the Dawsons and the Metcalfes. Daley had agreed to the summit to get a moratorium on marches, and now he had no confidence he would get one from the negotiations. 20
Tired of waiting for the civil rights movement to agree to a moratorium, Daley decided to go to court. On August 19, 1966, city lawyers showed up in Cook County Circuit Court Chancery Division seeking a court order stopping the fair-housing marches. Daley was in friendly territory when he went into the county court system. Most of the judges had made it to the bench by performing years of service for the machine, and Daley had slated many of them. Daley did not hesitate to tell judges how to rule in the cases before them. Senator Paul Simon recalls visiting Daley at City Hall and hearing him ask a judge, in a telephone call, to rule in favor of a party in a pending case. Weeks later, Simon saw a newspaper article reporting that the judge had done as Daley asked. Daley was known to punish judges who ruled against him, just as he retaliated against officeholders who failed to toe the machine line. Daley had approached one judge, Daniel Covelli, early in his career, about a case. Daley asked Covelli if he was not inclined to rule the machine’s way to give the case up to a judge who would. Covelli refused to give up the case and ended up ruling against the machine. Daley unslated him in the next election. 21
The march moratorium case went more smoothly. Cases filed in the Chancery Court went to Chief Justice Cornelius J. Harrington for assignment. Harrington was a product of the same world as Daley. He was a director of Catholic Charities, vice president of the Catholic Lawyers Guild, a trustee of DePaul University, and a member of the Knights of Columbus. As a young soldier, he vowed that if he survived World War I he would go to church every day, which he did for the next fifty years of his life. He graduated from Daley’s alma mater, DePaul University’s law school. Most important, he was strongly aligned with the machine. Cornelius was a “political animal,” recalls Jerome Torshen, a lawyer with close ties to Tom Keane, and a frequent litigant before the Chancery Division. “In order to have that position you had to be extremely tied in, and they had to be able to rely on you in cases like that.” Harrington decided to assign the march moratorium case to himself. Daley’s lawyers told Harrington the marchers were a threat to the “order, peace, and quiet, health, safety, morals, and welfare of the city.” The Freedom Movement would have responded that it was the white counterdemonstrators who posed the real threat, but they never got a chance to make the argument. Hours after Daley’s motion was filed, before Raby and the others could even be located, Harrington granted the injunction. Depriving the Chicago Campaign of their constitutional right to demonstrate without even allowing them to state their case was an outrageous way for the court to proceed, but it prompted little reaction from the Chicago press or white Chicago. 22
Daley’s lawyers chose not to ask for a complete prohibition on open-housing marches, which would have been hard to defend constitutionally. Instead, Harrington’s injunction imposed onerous conditions on future marches. There could be no more than one civil rights march a day within the city limits. No more than 500 marchers could participate. Marches had to be held during daylight hours, but not during rush hours, which the order defined as 7:30 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. and 4:30 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. And written notice of the time and route had to be given to Police Superintendent Wilson twenty-four hours in advance. “The Negroes assert the right to full-fledged participation in society,” city corporation counsel Raymond Simon said after the injunction was issued. “We must make sure there is a society to participate in.” After Harrington issued the order, Daley requested ten minutes of evening television time on the city’s three main stations to explain why it was necessary. “There is no desire on anyone’s part to interfere with these orderly civil rights demonstrations,” Daley said. The real issue, he insisted, was that the marches “diverted too many police who were needed in other parts of the city particularly at those areas where there are the most families—the most children.” 23
When King and the rest of the Freedom Movement learned that Daley had gone to court to achieve what he had not been able to win from them at the bargaining table, they felt betrayed. “The city’s move is unjust, illegal, and unconstitutional,” King told reporters at the Greater Mount Hope Baptist Church. “I deem it a very bad act of faith on the part of the city in view of the fact that we are negotiating.” It was particularly galling to King and his followers that Daley had gotten a court order that even Governor George Wallace of Alabama, at the height of the Selma voting rights campaign, had been unable to obtain. Wallace had tried to stop King’s planned march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. He had argued, much like Daley, that King’s voting rights campaign in Selma had already disrupted “the normal function of government.” But U.S. District Court judge Frank Johnson ruled that Wallace’s attempt to stop the march was a violation of the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights. The burden was on the state to “preserve peace and order,” Johnson ruled. Days later, 25,000 supporters of black voting rights marched to Montgomery and demonstrated outside the Alabama State Capitol. The streets of Alabama, it turned out, were freer for civil rights demonstrations than the streets of Chicago. The City Council, not surprisingly, sided with Daley. A resolution introduced by Alderman Keane, and adopted 45–1, lauded him for his handling of the marches and his decision to obtain an injunction. All seven black aldermen voted for the resolution, with Metcalfe declaring that “people of good intent should realize we lose our gains through actions such as Watts and several things that have happened here.” Another black alderman called King “a great man whose intentions are right, but who is surrounded by a lot of people who are not right.” Alderman Despres cast the single negative vote, but his dissent was not allowed to spoil the sentiment. Keane declared that he could not remember “any such unanimity in commendation” in his forty years in political life. 24
The day Judge Harrington issued his injunction, the summit subcommittee was holding its first meeting. Some of the Freedom Movement delegates expressed unhappiness with the mayor’s action, but no one suggested ending the discussions. “The issue is still justice in housing,” Raby said. Outside the negotiation room, Jesse Jackson and some others argued for defying the court order, but King urged a more temperate response. He did not see what would be accomplished by violating the injunction, and he worried the movement would lose its moral high ground if it broke the law. King argued that the civil rights forces could make their point just as effectively by organizing marches that fell within the limits set out by the court. On Sunday, August 21, a group of demonstrators did just that. King personally participated in a march on the far Southeast Side, while others led marches in Chicago Heights and Evergreen Park, two nearby suburbs that, because they were outside the city limits, were not covered by the injunction. American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell chose the same Sunday to come to Marquette Park and deliver an anti-integration diatribe from a swastika-bedecked stage. Representatives of the National States Rights Party and the Ku Klux Klan also showed up to preach white resistance. There was a troubling symbolism to the fact that King’s followers had been pushed out to the suburbs while Nazis were happily holding forth in Marquette Park. The following day, at his first press conference in two weeks, Daley announced that he had received thousands of phone calls, letters, and telegrams supporting the city’s decision to obtain an injunction. He was asked if he would declare the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan unwelcome in Chicago. “We don’t want any people who come into our city for the purpose of agitation regardless of who they are,” Daley responded. “This includes the list you mentioned and a lot more who have been spreading words of discord and inciting violence and everything else in our city.” It seemed that he was putting King and his followers in the same category as the Nazis and the KKK. When a reporter asked, “Do you include some civil rights leaders in that?” Daley turned toward his private office and shouted back, “You can answer that.” 25
With tensions already running high, as black and white Chicagoans waited to see how the housing summit would turn out, King announced plans for a march on Cicero on August 28. “Not only are we going to walk in Cicero,” King declared, “we’re going to work in Cicero, and we’re going to live in Cicero.” There was no telling how much blood would be shed. If King’s goal was to generate a little fear about what would happen if the summit negotiations ended badly, it worked. Cook County sheriff Richard Ogilvie, a Republican who wanted to be governor, promptly called for the National Guard to be on hand at the march, and lamented that “marching in Cicero comes awfully close to a suicidal act.” Jesse Jackson said that if an agreement was reached at the summit, it was possible the Cicero march would be called off. But if no agreement were reached he warned that there would be further “escalation” of the protests. 26
Meanwhile, the summit subcommittee was still meeting, trying to reach a settlement. The group had begun its work on Friday, August 19, two days after the initial summit meeting, and it had met for long days of negotiations on the following Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The discussion started with the Freedom Movement’s nine demands, but Raby and the other civil rights delegates were hoping to expand on them. The nine demands centered on open housing, but the Chicago Freedom Movement saw its mission as including education, employment, and living conditions in the slums. When Raby and the other delegates tried to bring up these broader topics, Marciniak and subcommittee chair Ayers complained they were negotiating in bad faith. The Freedom Movement delegates were also interested in adding specifics about how the nine demands would be enforced. The subcommittee agreed to establish a supervisory body to monitor implementation, but the precise structure and powers of the body were left vague. On the whole, the settlement that was emerging was far less than the Freedom Movement delegates wanted. But they were coming around to the idea of accepting it. There were reports that Daley and Swibel were playing a major behind-the-scenes role, arguing to Berry that the deal was good, and that it was the best the Freedom Movement was likely to get. Daley may also have spoken to Senator Paul Douglas, and gotten him to call Berry — a friend and Hyde Park neighbor — to put more pressure on him to promote acceptance of the settlement. “Berry was a great guy, but he was a realistic, pragmatic person,” says McKnight. “I guess the ultimate decision was what Bill thought was the best they could do.” 27
The final agreement that the subcommittee arrived at had ten provisions, most of them drawn from the Chicago Freedom Movement’s initial proposal. The provisions seemed to address the movement’s core concerns. The city would promise to do more to enforce the 1963 open-housing ordinance, and Daley would agree to work for state open-housing legislation over the next year. The Chicago Housing Authority would seek out scattered sites for future public housing, and would limit new buildings to no more than eight stories. The Department of Urban Renewal and banks that offered mortgages would ensure that the mortgages did not encourage segregation. And the Chicago Real Estate Board would drop its opposition to fair housing and encourage its members to obey the law. Still, the language remained aspirational and unspecified, and the agreement lacked significant mechanisms for enforcement. Still, it did not address any of the issues beyond housing that many in the Freedom Movement hoped it would. “Our starting point became their ending point,” one negotiator said ruefully. 28
On Friday, August 26, the full housing summit reassembled in the Palmer House Hotel. The meeting opened with a prayer and then, at Heineman’s request, Ayers read the subcommittee’s report. When he was done, Heineman turned to Daley and asked for his reaction. The report proved, Daley said, that “[w]hen men of good faith sit down and talk they can solve problems.” Without waiting for anyone else to comment, he called for a vote on the subcommittee’s recommendation. “Just a minute here,” Raby called out. The report still lacked specific timetables for when white neighborhoods and suburbs would be integrated, he protested, and it did not answer Bevel’s critical question: “When do we foresee the time when a Negro can go into a real estate office in Chicago and be served?” As Raby said the words “in Chicago,” Daley broke in and added “and in the suburbs,” reiterating Marciniak’s earlier point about public housing being a “metropolitan problem.” But no one addressed the substance of Raby’s objections. Archbishop Cody, Episcopal Bishop Montgomery, and some of the other delegates spoke in general terms about their commitment to ensuring open housing. And Beatty promised the Realtors would do all they could, although the more he talked the more he appeared to be reverting to his old position that it would be difficult for the beleaguered Realtor — who is “usually a small businessman in a small office” — to live up to the conditions being placed on him. The more the Real Estate Board representatives seemed to be backing off from the agreement, the more visibly nervous Daley became. The Freedom Movement also appeared to be wavering. Raby started talking about making any vote “an indication of sentiment” and not “binding.” Heineman responded that he would have thought the Freedom Movement would want the agreement to be unanimous and binding. Raby asked for one last recess for the movement delegates to caucus. 29
King spoke for the group when they returned. He was still unhappy about the injunction, which he regarded as “unjust and unconstitutional.” And he was troubled that the newly created monitoring body was not better defined, and that there was no answer to Bevel’s question about whether blacks would now be served when they showed up at real estate offices. “[W]e are very concerned about implementation,” King said. “Maybe we are oversensitive, but there have been so many promises that haven’t materialized, that this is a great thing in our minds.” Daley struck a conciliatory tone in response. “I want you to know that I was raised in a workingman’s community in a workingman’s home,” Daley said. “My father was a union organizer and we did not like injunctions. I know the injustice of injunctions. But I also faced the decision of what to do with three and a half million people.” Daley claimed that the city’s crime rate was soaring, due to diversion of police to the sites of the marches. And police superintendent Wilson complained that the Freedom Movement was not giving him the advance notice about march times and routes that he needed. “The course I took was the only one I could take,” Daley said. Ultimately, he assured King, the injunction was about to become a moot point. “If this agreement is made and everybody keeps to it, you will have no worry about the injunction because you won’t need to march.” When King continued to object, Heineman brokered a peace between the two men. Would the city be willing to sit down with the Freedom Movement to negotiate modifications that would allow them broader demonstration rights? “The city will sit down and talk over anything with anybody,” Daley responded. “Speaking specifically, we can amend our injunction, I know, as a lawyer, and we would be glad to sit down and discuss it.” When the vote was taken, it was unanimous in favor of accepting the subcommittee’s recommendations. 30
The summit ended with King standing up and speaking about his hopes and fears about Chicago’s future. “We read in the scripture, ‘Come, let us sit down and reason together,’ and everyone here has met the scriptural mandate,” King said. “We seek only to make possible a city where men can live as brothers. I know this has been said many times today, but I want to reiterate again, that we must make this agreement work. Our people’s hopes have been shattered too many times, and an additional disillusionment will only spell catastrophe.” In their public statements outside the summit, the parties all tried to be upbeat. Daley called it a “great day” for Chicago, and promised that “we will go ahead to eliminate slums, provide better schools, and more jobs in our city.” Heineman concurred, saying that “the city of Chicago, through all elements of society represented here, the city government, the freedom movement, religious leaders, business, and labor took a giant step forward.” Even King put aside his private reservations to declare that “never before have such far-reaching and creative commitments been made and programs adopted and pledged to achieve open housing in a community.” 31

[neil]

The reaction of the rest of Chicago was less enthusiastic. White working-class residents of the Bungalow Belt, accepting the open-housing language of the agreement at face value, were convinced Daley had handed their neighborhoods over to blacks. The Kilbourn Organization, a community group on the Northwest Side, voted to go down to City Hall for a meeting with Daley to protest the agreement. “The races spoke, religion spoke, but who spoke for the taxpayers of Chicago?” one member asked. “We demand an equal voice and equal rights for the people who pay for these promises.” In all, twelve neighborhood organizations notified Daley they would be arriving at City Hall the following Monday to register their objections to the summit agreement. Daley never responded to their requests for a meeting. On Monday, a small group of demonstrators gathered at the LaSalle Street entrance to City Hall carrying signs saying “Daley Sold Out Chicago,” and “The Summit Another Munich.” A member of the Kilbourn Organization tried to get in to the mayor’s office, but he was told Daley was not in. When the housing chairman of the Clearing Civic League, representing the Far Southwest Side neighborhood of Clearing was turned away, she asked bitterly: “Who had the right to give our city away, as the mayor did?” 32
Black activists were just as convinced it was their side that had been betrayed. Chester Robinson, leader of the West Side Organization, charged the negotiators with “selling out Negro interests” in exchange for “empty promises.” And the head of Chicago’s CORE chapter, Robert Lucas, denounced the settlement as “nothing but another promise on a piece of paper.” When King spoke about the summit to an open-housing rally, SNCC was there circulating a leaflet urging the crowd to “WAKE UP” and oppose the agreement. “King says we should celebrate a ‘significant victory’ tonight because he got some concessions from the city,” the flyer said. “These concessions were just more empty promises from Daley, a man who has lied and lied to the black man in this city for years. Many people are calling it a sellout. . . .” Critics of the agreement charged that it was just another example of King yielding too readily to government authority — one biographer has called this tendency on King’s part the “Selma bridge syndrome,” after his willingness to delay the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march in response to federal pressure. Some Freedom Movement activists believed he had simply found the Chicago Campaign too difficult, and had decided to give up. King never explicitly said this to the movement’s rank and file, but some of them suspected it when he and Raby failed to report back to the CCCO’s regular Saturday morning meetings during the summit. They seemed to be saying that there was little left to talk about. Despite the criticism, King continued to defend the summit agreement. Preaching back at his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King declared it to be perhaps the most “far-reaching victory that has ever come about in a Northern community on the whole question of open housing.” But it was weak praise, since the North had few other open-housing victories, and this one had absorbed eight months of the movement’s time and effort. 33
As part of the summit agreement, King had pledged to call off the planned march on Cicero, but some civil rights activists broke rank and announced they would press forward. “We respect Dr. King and leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement,” Chester Robinson declared. But he maintained that “too little was secured to call off the Cicero march.” Robinson wanted to stick to the original August 28 date, but King managed to get it put off a week, and he was hoping to get it canceled entirely. “Martin understood that a march in Cicero was more effective as a threat than as a reality,” Young says. “He wanted to continue to hold out the march . . . as leverage over implementation of the agreement.” On September 1, King and Young met with Robinson and tried to talk him into abandoning the Cicero march. In exchange for King’s agreement to promote The Woodlawn Organization’s public housing and welfare reform agenda, Robinson agreed to cancel his plans. Some members of the black community saw a conspiracy at work in the cancellation, and suspected Daley was behind it. When King spoke at a rally at Liberty Baptist Church on the South Side, SNCC activists handed out leaflets saying “Daley blew the whistle and King stopped the marches.” 34
There were still activists in the Freedom Movement who wanted a march on Cicero, and Chicago CORE leader Robert Lucas said he would lead one. On September 4, Lucas paraded into Cicero with a ragtag, largely black contingent of about two hundred protesters. Despite the low turnout, the march had its moments of drama. Hundreds of Cicero residents lined the march route shouting insults, and one major fight broke out. But the thousands of police and National Guardsmen were largely able to keep the peace. A few days later, Lucas announced plans to march on an all-white South Side neighborhood. Daley was enraged that after the summit agreement had put an end to Freedom Movement marches, a rogue element was still marching. The open-housing marches were continuing only because the media were covering them, Daley charged. “All these people are looking for is publicity.” By now, Daley was through negotiating. He put an end to Lucas’s plans by having him jailed for failing to pay fines for civil disobedience that he committed a year earlier. 35
In late September, the Metropolitan Chicago Leadership Council for Open Housing was formed to implement the summit agreement. Daley attended the Palmer House press conference where James Cook, president of Illinois Bell Telephone, was named president of the new organization. “We’re fortunate indeed to have such a fine man to head up such an important council,” Daley declared. “Chicago is leading the way for the entire nation.” That was not an opinion widely shared among supporters of open housing. Cook’s organization faced some significant obstacles, including the fact that it had no office, no staff, and no budget. The financial problems were solved when Chicago’s corporate leaders responded to Cook’s solicitations for contributions. And within a month, Cook persuaded Edward Holmgren, Elizabeth Wood’s venerable onetime assistant, to serve as executive director. The Leadership Council went on to become an influential force for open housing in Chicago and the suburbs. It organized conferences, disseminated information, and filed hundreds of lawsuits challenging housing segregation, including two that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I say the freedom movement won because we got the Leadership Council . . . out of it,” says Marciniak. “We have the business community and other civic leaders espousing fair housing, so they were on our side.” Well-meaning as the Leadership Council was, there were limits to how much change a single advocacy organization could bring about. The real test of the summit agreement, as Bevel insisted all along, was whether it was enforced and whether it changed the lives of Chicago’s black citizens. 36
Daley’s advisers already knew for certain what the leaders of the Freedom Movement only suspected: that Daley had no intention of keeping the promises he made at the summit. He could not say it outright, since he needed the civil rights marches to stop and for King to go home, but this was always Daley’s plan. “I remember my father saying he was at a meeting with Martin Luther King, talking about King marching through the South Side,” says Anthony Downs, son of James Downs, Daley’s top housing adviser. “My father came home and said, ‘I could just see the mayor decide at that moment how he was going to handle King, that he was going to lie to him. I could just see the moment in which he decided the only way he could get rid of the guy was to tell him a whole lot of lies.’” Daley made some gestures, in addition to creating the Leadership Council, that suggested he was committed to reform. William Robinson, former treasurer of the CCCO, was named to head the Cook County Public Aid Department. It was an important job, and one the civil rights community cared about deeply, but Robinson would not have the power to integrate the white neighborhoods Daley was concerned about protecting. Despite all of the talk at the summit, the city was less than aggressive about suspending the licenses of Realtors who continued to discriminate. The changes at the Chicago Housing Authority were largely cosmetic. The agency did not start assigning black families to white projects, or otherwise try to integrate its existing housing stock. When it opened two new elderly projects in white neighborhoods in the months after the summit, it did not assign a single black tenant to either one. Swibel did announce, with great pride, the installation of $18,000 in new door locks, and plans to send 500 housing project children to one week of summer camp. 37
With King gone from Chicago and the marches over, Daley’s attention shifted back to downtown. In September, he proposed a major urban-renewal project for a 156-acre area adjacent to the University of Illinois campus on the New West Side. It would be the biggest slum-clearance project yet, surpassing the 100 acres razed to build the Lake Meadows development. Daley wanted to add about 50 additional acres to the campus, and use the remainder of the cleared land for commercial purposes. Perhaps as a lingering response to the Freedom Movement and the housing summit, Daley also announced that the city and the University of Chicago were jointly seeking a federal grant to build a social service center to serve the Woodlawn neighborhood. The center, which would be operated by the university’s School of Social Service Administration, was badly needed in Woodlawn, and it would connect the university to a neighboring community upon which it had turned its back. But Daley’s support for the project cost him little. It was aimed at improving living conditions in the ghetto, not at helping ghetto residents to move out. The university would take responsibility for running it, and the federal government would be paying the bills. 38
In the fall of 1966, with the Chicago Freedom Movement only an unpleasant memory, Daley was worried about the November elections. The stakes for the machine were high. Senator Paul Douglas, the Hyde Park liberal who had stood by Daley over the years, was facing a tough challenge from Republican Charles Percy. The boyishly appealing Percy had come within 179,000 votes of defeating Kerner for governor in 1964, even as Goldwater was losing Illinois by almost 900,000. This time he did not have the burden of running with Goldwater at the top of the ticket, and he was waging an aggressive campaign that portrayed the seventy-four-year-old Douglas as a relic from another age. Daley also had a full slate of statewide and Cook County candidates to worry about, and a delegation of Chicago congressmen who were taking heat from their constituents over civil rights. According to the polls, the civil rights issue was actually hurting Democrats with both black and white voters. In working-class white wards, voters blamed the Democrats for appeasing the Freedom Movement at the housing summit and for being too soft on open-housing demonstrators. In Cicero, which deeply resented becoming a backdrop for the open-housing marchers, polls showed Douglas’s support down by as much as 30 percent from 1954 and 1960. At the same time, civil rights activists were urging black voters to abandon the machine’s candidates to protest that more was not being done. “It is a myth that the Negro is in any way indebted to or obligated to vote for the Democratic party,” James Bevel proclaimed.” 39
The Republicans were eager to exploit the trouble civil rights was causing the Democrats. Percy formed an alliance with David Reed, a twenty-five-year-old “independent Republican” who was challenging Congressman Dawson. Percy, who sponsored six “Reed-Percy” campaign headquarters in Dawson’s district, hoped to benefit from Reed’s message that “for too long the people of the First District have lived on Mayor Daley’s Plantation.” The polls showed that Douglas was in trouble, but Daley remained optimistic in his public pronouncements. “We still have work to do and we’re going to do it,” he said. Daley, who was predicting Douglas would win by 200,000 votes, said the press was wrong when it said “white backlash” would be a significant factor in the voting. “I hate to think that anyone would cast a ballot on the basis of hate,” he said. To minimize defections on both sides of the color line, Daley tried to frame the election as being about anything but race. “It is the Democratic Party that has given the people Medicare and expanded social security; federal aid to schools, including expanded opportunities for attending college; the minimum wage and increases in minimum wage; and measures to rebuild cities that provide decent housing, end air and water pollution, and improve transportation,” he wrote in a pre-election statement in the Chicago Tribune. Daley reached out to the machine’s white ethnic base with unusual vigor this time. In a four-day period, he marched with 250,000 Poles in the Pulaski Day parade and 300,000 Italians in the Columbus Day parade. Daley also brought Douglas around to the Plumbers Hall, and urged the 4,000 union leaders and members in the audience to get the labor vote out on election day. “We are not on the ropes,” Daley said. “But we have to get the people out to vote.” Daley hoped Johnson would come to Chicago for an election-eve rally, but the president pleaded health problems and did not attend. Still, the machine held a lunchtime pre-election parade through the Loop, complete with bands, one hundred floats, and a telegram from Johnson. It was, Daley declared “another great day for a great city.” 40
Daley’s public good cheer masked his worries that the machine ticket would lose badly. He called in the ward committeemen from all fifty wards and gave them an unusually tough talk about coming through on election day, threatening sanctions for those who failed to deliver. Hundreds of precinct captains and patronage workers were also called down to machine headquarters and admonished to redouble their efforts. The machine also resorted to another of its traditional tactics: dirty tricks. Percy leaflets began to appear in working-class white neighborhoods with pictures of the candidate with blacks and declarations of his support for open housing. Percy threatened to file a complaint with the largely ineffective Fair Campaign Practices Committee, but the machine insisted it did not know who was behind the leafleting. Daley had one more clever idea for finessing the race issue. On the eve of the election, he announced that King had come to Chicago for the first time since the housing summit to urge blacks not to vote Democratic. He also complained that Bevel had urged blacks to abandon the Democratic Party. Daley’s charges about King were untrue. King had actually been coming to Chicago almost weekly since the summit ended, and had scrupulously avoided taking any partisan political stands. But it was clear what Daley was up to: he was telling white voters not to worry that the Democratic Party had become the party of civil rights. Speaking from Atlanta, King called Daley’s accusations that he had come out against the Democratic ticket “totally unfounded” but “shrewd and timely . . . for his purposes.” 41
In the end, Daley’s shrewd tactics were not enough. Douglas carried Chicago by only 184,000 votes, and lost Illinois by 400,000. The news was not much better in the Cook County races. Sheriff Richard Ogilvie was elected president of the Cook County Board, the first time a Republican had won the office in decades, robbing the machine of 18,000 patronage jobs. Republicans were also elected county treasurer and sheriff. County assessor P. J. “Parky” Cullerton and county clerk Edward Barrett were among the few Democrats to survive the Republican sweep. It was the Republicans’ best off-year election performance since 1950. One of the few bright spots was that thirty-six-year-old Adlai Stevenson III, Daley’s handpicked candidate for state treasurer, won his race. Daley also managed to return all of his incumbent congressmen, but the margins in some of the races were uncomfortably close. 42
It was, all things considered, a disastrous election for the Democrats. The results were particularly ominous for Daley, who would be running for election the following year. Douglas had won only 57 percent of the vote in Chicago, and ward-by-ward tallies showed that the Republicans had indeed made deep inroads throughout the Bungalow Belt. Congressman Pucinski, whose district had been the site of open-housing demonstrations over the summer, was reelected by only 4,700 votes. Two years earlier, he had won by 31,000. “I’ve been the guy who was claiming there was no backlash,” Pucinski said afterward, “but I’m the first to admit now I was dead wrong.” Just as troubling, the Democratic vote had fallen sharply in the black wards, where it seemed that many voters had simply decided to stay home. Daley tried to put the result in the best possible light. “The city of Chicago went overwhelmingly for every Democratic candidate,” he said on election night. “I think the good people of Chicago are still Democratic.” But Percy, in a burst of victory-night enthusiasm, hailed the “Republican resurgence” and predicted that Daley would be defeated if he ran for reelection. 43
With the election safely over, the truth about the housing summit agreement came out. Keane, the number-two man in city government and Daley’s co-negotiator at the summit, declared on the floor of the City Council that there was no open-housing agreement. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” he said during finance committee hearings on the city’s 1967 budget. When word of Keane’s statement reached King, he was outraged. “Hundreds of thousands of Chicago citizens live in slums today awaiting the severities of winter,” King said. “Last summer they were given the hope that their hardship would come to an end, that the slums could be eliminated, and that decent homes would be made available to all families in all neighborhoods. Any attempt to destroy that hope is an act of cruelty and a betrayal of trust.” King insisted Daley now had an obligation to speak out. “Because Mr. Keane so often seems disposed to speak for the entire city government, I think that Mayor Daley himself should clarify his own position,” King said. “After all, the mayor praised the open housing agreement when it was reached last August.” 44
Daley did take a stand, but not the one the Chicago Freedom Movement had in mind. He agreed with Keane that the housing summit had produced no enforceable agreement, although he did concede that there was a “gentleman’s agreement under a moral banner” to address the concerns that were raised there. Once again, Daley was engaging in shrewd racial politics. By backing up Keane, he was sending a clear signal to the white wards that they did not need to worry that the summit agreement would cause their neighborhoods to be integrated. At the same time, his talk of a “gentlemen’s agreement” and a “moral banner” offered blacks just enough that they could probably be convinced to continue to vote for the machine. Civil rights leaders were not impressed by Daley’s carefully parsed expressions of support. In December, Raby complained publicly that nothing had changed since August 26, the day the agreement was reached. That would become a common refrain in the days ahead.
In the end, there were many reasons the Chicago Freedom Movement failed where the southern civil rights movement had succeeded. Chicago was certainly more difficult terrain. It was harder to fight complex social ills like slum conditions than to challenge the segregated buses and closed voter rolls blacks faced in the South. But much of the credit for defeating the Chicago Campaign — and for taking the steam out of the civil rights movement as it tried to move north — belongs to Daley. His response to King and his followers was shrewd: he co-opted their goals; he dispatched black leaders like Dawson and the Reverend J. H. Jackson to speak out against them; and he refused to allow them to cast him as the villain in the drama. The housing summit was Daley’s masterstroke, a way of ending the protests and driving the movement out of town in exchange for vague and unenforceable commitments. “Like Herod, Richard Daley was a fox, too smart for us, too smart for the press, . . . too smart for his own good, and for the good of Chicago,” Ralph Abernathy would write in his memoirs. “Did we make a mistake in taking his word and leaving Chicago with our signed agreement and our high hopes? I believe we did the right thing, even though the outcome was bitterly disappointing.” 45
The Chicago Campaign was nominally about open housing and slums, but it was also about something larger: a battle between two very different visions of what kind of city Chicago should be. The Freedom Movement’s goal was what it called an “open city,” in which residents would be free to live wherever they wanted without regard to race. When it came to development, the civil rights activists wanted the emphasis to be on improving living conditions in the city’s worst neighborhoods. At the same time, Daley was working to build a wealthier and more powerful Chicago, anchored by a revitalized Loop. Racial integration was not necessarily inconsistent with Daley’s vision, but he saw it as a threat because it had the potential to drive middle-class whites to the suburbs, and to discourage businesses from investing in and locating downtown. The defeat of the Freedom Movement was a victory for Daley’s city of stable, middle-class, white ethnic neighborhoods, and a booming downtown. With King and his followers out of the way, Daley could return to his work in building his city.

[neil]

CHAPTER

12

Shoot to Kill

In late 1966, Daley was hard at work planning his reelection campaign. As usual, his allies weighed in early. On December 6, the Chicago Federation of Labor, headed by his friend William Lee, endorsed Daley, pronouncing him “the greatest mayor in American history.” Two days later, the machine slate-makers drafted him to run again. On December 29, Daley formally announced that he would seek an unprecedented fourth term. Adamowski wanted the Republican nomination again, but Cook County Board president Richard Ogilvie and the rest of the Republican leadership were against it. The party leaders were looking for a candidate in the mold of John Lindsay, the dashing Republican-Liberal elected mayor of New York in 1965. They made overtures to a young, charismatic bank executive, but when he turned them down, they offered the nomination to 23rd Ward Republican committeeman John Waner. Waner, a wealthy heating and air-conditioning contractor, did not have much in common with New York’s WASP prince. The son of Polish immigrants, Waner — who was born Jan Ludwig Wojanarski — did not learn English until the age of nine. But Waner was a fresh face, he could make an ethnic appeal to the city’s large Polish population, and he had the resources to finance his own campaign. 1

The same day Daley announced that he was seeking reelection, Alderman James Murray announced he was not. Murray, who had served in the City Council since 1954, was convinced he could not win again. Murray’s 18th Ward on the Southwest Side had become a hotbed of white-backlash sentiment. His constituents had never forgiven him for sponsoring Daley’s 1963 open-housing ordinance. The law was political window dressing, Daley’s effort to convince black voters that he was on their side when he was not. But even that toothless law was too much fair housing for 18th Ward whites. And this year, passions on the issue of race were running higher than ever: one Bungalow Belt alderman was campaigning as Casimir “I voted against the fair-housing ordinance” Laskowski. Murray says he knew he was in trouble when he went to a civic association meeting in the ward to discuss mundane neighborhood improvements. “A guy got up and said, ‘This guy would be a great alderman if he wasn’t such a nigger lover,’” Murray recalls. 2

Daley unveiled a new master plan for the city to coincide with his reelection campaign. The $6 billion plan, which had been in development for five years, was the first comprehensive plan for Chicago since Burnham’s in 1909. It called for clearing 1,850 acres of slums, building 35,000 new units of public housing, adding 50 more acres to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, and building a controversial Crosstown Expressway. Unlike Daley’s 1958 plan, this one contemplated development outside the Loop. It called for the city to draw up sixteen distinct development plans for neighborhoods across the city. At the time of the announcement, though, only two of those plans had yet been drafted, for the University of Illinois area and the Near West Side — both, as it happened, neighborhoods on the fringes of the Loop. Daley’s 1967 plan demonstrated how much the racial climate in Chicago had changed since 1958. In the four years since his near-defeat by Adamowski, Daley had been sending clear messages to white voters that he would protect them from black encroachment. That sensibility was reflected throughout the 1967 plan. Where the 1958 plan had spoken in code language about removing “blight” from the central area and moving in more affluent families, the 1967 plan boldly stated its racial intentions on its first page. The city wanted to have a “diverse, harmonious population,” the drafters wrote. But it was also seeking to make the changes necessary to “reduce future losses of white families.” 3

Daley kicked off his campaign with a flourish. On January 4, he appeared in person at the city clerk’s office wheeling a handcart with nominating petitions stacked ten feet high. According to his aides, the pile contained the signatures of 500,000 Chicagoans. Waner, who was at the clerk’s office at the same time, had only 11,000 signatures. It was more than enough to qualify, but the discrepancy was daunting. Waner said Daley had benefited from the tens of thousands of patronage workers and their families who were pressured to sign and carry the machine’s petitions. In the privacy of the voting booth, he insisted, they would vote Republican. In the end, Dick Gregory did not even try to get his name placed on the ballot. The word in political circles was that this was just as well — that no matter how many signatures he had submitted, Daley would have made sure that the machine-dominated board did not certify him to run for mayor. 4

Once again, Daley had to engage in a difficult racial balancing act. In his public comments on civil rights, he tried to appeal to white and black voters at the same time, which often left him speaking in meaningless platitudes. “There are some who say that we have gone too far with our community improvement programs, while there are others who say we have gone too slow,” Daley said in a speech kicking off his campaign. “There are some who say that we have done too much for minority groups, while there are those who say we have not done enough. It is important that we keep pace with the times.” In fact, Daley had good reason to worry about his standing with both groups. For all of his success in defeating King and the civil rights movement, it was not clear how white ethnic voters were feeling about him or the machine. If James Murray was now widely hated in the 18th Ward, Daley himself might not be much more popular. At the same time, Daley had to worry about defections in the black wards. The most recent sign of trouble was that King had returned to Chicago on December 2 to announce that he would be sending sixteen civil rights activists to town to staff a “massive” new drive to register black voters. King insisted that the drive was non-partisan. “We do not endorse candidates,” he said. “We feel the people will be intelligent enough to vote for the right candidates when they know the issues.” Still, the machine, which once had a lock on black voters, was nervous enough that Daley refused to help with the drive. When civil rights activist Hosea Williams asked city officials to set up neighborhood registration centers, he was turned down. “They said it would be too expensive,” said Williams. “They wouldn’t even give us what we got in Birmingham!” 5

Daley was counting on the black machine to keep its voters in line, and most of Daley’s black supporters seemed eager to do their part. On January 7, twenty-two black clergymen wearing Daley campaign buttons stopped by City Hall to endorse Daley. The Reverend Clarence Cob, pastor of the First Church of Deliverance, said many blacks were confused about Daley’s record, and that he and his colleagues would educate them. The truth was, despite the civil rights insurgency of the past year, there was still a lot of life left in the old black submachine. A key factor in its staying power was its knack for co-opting anti-machine candidates. In the 29th Ward, an undertaker named Robert Biggs had almost defeated the machine candidate in 1963. Ward committeeman Bernard Neistein made Biggs the machine candidate in 1967, and Biggs was elected as a pro-machine alderman. Charles Chew, who had been elected 17th Ward alderman in 1963 and then state senator on an anti-machine platform, had come around to the view that his future would be brighter if he made peace with the machine. Chew was now a supporter of Daley and a critic of the Freedom Movement — and he drove around the ghetto in a white Rolls-Royce. 6

On January 16, McCormick Place was destroyed by fire in the middle of a National Housewares Manufacturers Association exhibition. The roof of the main exhibition center, which was as large as six football fields, collapsed. It was unclear how such a new building could have burned so easily, and why it was built with no sprinkler system or fire walls. Daley said that the most important thing was to ensure that the facility, which he credited with making Chicago “the convention capital of the United States,” was rebuilt as quickly as possible. Within a day, he gathered the chairman, the general manager, and virtually the entire board of the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority, at City Hall to announce plans to build a new McCormick Place twice as large as the old one. Daley kept up his flurry of pre-election development work, personally presenting the city’s proposal for fifteen miles of transit lines along the Kennedy and Ryan expressways to the Chicago Plan Commission, which immediately approved them. Daley also announced some well-timed federal grants. Almost $1.3 million in federal funds had come through for the social services center that the city and the University of Chicago had been planning for Woodlawn. And HUD approved $15.5 million for five urban renewal projects, including the one Daley had been planning near the University of Illinois campus. 7

As they did every four years, downtown business leaders came together to form a Non-Partisan Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Daley. The business leaders had the usual reasons for supporting him. Some wanted him to keep up his urban renewal efforts in the Loop, and others wanted help with development projects of their own. Committee cochairman C. Virgil Martin was president of the company that held the lucrative restaurant concession at O’Hare. The city’s business titans made large contributions to Daley’s campaign, but the machine was also skilled at extracting money from small contributors who wanted specific favors, ranging from lowered tax assessments to the kind of minor perks the machine specialized in. “There are lots of goofs out there,” Waner said later. “Here’s a guy that is maybe cum laude from some college and has a very successful business, but he is obsessed with the idea that he has got to have a three-letter license number, which is a very simple thing for a politician to do. He sends him a three-letter license number, then someone will come around and say, ‘So and so is running for office. Would you care to make a little contribution?’ He takes out a checkbook and sends a few thousand dollars.” 8

The machine’s dominance left Waner with few places to raise money for his own campaign. When he tried to put together his own committee of businessmen, he found that even die-hard Republicans had already committed themselves to Daley. He held a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner, the kind of event Republican candidates were usually able to pack with wealthy contributors, and it lost money. Waner did manage to convince one prominent Republican, John T. Pirie Jr., chairman of a downtown department store, to raise funds for him. But shortly after Pirie signed on he backed out, hailing Daley for his “truly remarkable achievements.” Waner commented bitterly that Daley’s camp “probably told him they’d tear up the sidewalk in front of his store.” In the end, Waner’s total campaign budget was about $175,000, much of it his own money. John Lindsay, the man whose candidacy the Republicans were using as a model, had spent $3 million to be elected in New York two years earlier. 9

Some of Waner’s supporters were urging him to make a bid for white-backlash voters, but he ran a campaign that was more pro– civil rights than Daley’s. Waner hammered away at Daley for being “more interested in maintaining plantation politics in public housing” than in solving the problems of those who lived there. At the same time, he was not prepared to write off his Republican base by backing open housing. Waner argued that other issues, such as jobs and urban renewal policies, were ultimately of greater importance to the black community. “Since 1960, the city has displaced over 50,000 people, and after the new buildings went up, no one could afford to move back into the new neighborhood,” he said. “There was no attempt made to provide decent low-cost homes for rent or for purchase.” Democrats preferred to have blacks trapped in public housing, Waner charged, “because it enables the Democratic precinct captain to corral votes for the machine.” 10

As he always did, Daley got to work energizing the machine to turn out a large vote. The second important stage in the campaign, after the filing of petitions, was the February 28 primary. Daley called a secret meeting of the machine inner circle — including county assessor Parky Cullerton, city clerk John Marcin, 5th Ward committeeman and city treasurer candidate Marshall Korshak, 29th Ward state senator Bernard Neistein, and Democratic state chairman James Ronan — and told them he wanted to win with 400,000 votes, up from the 396,473 he received four years earlier. When the votes were counted, the machine more than met this benchmark, pulling out 420,000 votes for him, far ahead of the 72,000 Waner attracted in the Republican primary. Daley could also take comfort in the fact that he outpolled Marcin and Marshall Korshak. Waner tried to put a positive spin on the results. “With 50,000 employees and their families, Mayor Daley can produce 400,000 votes at will in a primary,” he said. “But when the voters turn out and don’t have to reveal their party, they will defeat the last big city machine in the country, April 4.” 11

After the primary, Daley gathered his ward committeemen for a meeting at party headquarters at the Sherman House Hotel. He informed the ward committeemen who had not produced 8,000 votes — their one-fiftieth share of his 400,000-vote goal — that they had to do better in the general election. On March 14, Daley announced that the federal government had approved almost $46 million in federal grants for his planned transit lines along the Dan Ryan and Kennedy expressways. The timing was obviously political — yet another favor Daley managed to extract from the Johnson administration — but Daley denied it. “It is a customary program for a dynamic city,” he said. “It had nothing to do with the election.” Daley also had city employees working overtime to clean up the city before the election. Sanitation workers were putting in six-day weeks filling potholes, and Bureau of Electricity employees were working nine-hour days, six days a week rushing to finish installation of lighting in all 2,300 alleys in Chicago. 12

Martin Luther King ended up helping Daley’s reelection campaign in a backhanded way. King was in Chicago March 24 to speak to an anti–Vietnam War rally at Liberty Baptist Church. Asked about housing, he lamented the city’s “failure to live up to last summer’s open-housing agreement.” After reviewing a report prepared by the Chicago Freedom Movement’s evaluation committee, King said it might be necessary to hold even bigger open-housing marches over the upcoming summer. Daley immediately struck back, charging King with making “political” statements designed to hurt him in the election. No matter what King said, Daley promised, he would not permit civil rights marchers to disrupt the city. It was the second year in a row Daley attacked King on the eve of an election, and Republicans were convinced it was a bald attempt to win the white backlash vote. In fact, Daley had spent the last four years using the race issue to appeal to white voters. In 1963, he was a politician with a strong black base, whose urban-renewal programs appeared to be destabilizing the city’s black community — and, the fear was, driving them into white neighborhoods. By 1967, he had a strong record of racial resistance: standing up for Willis; forcing the federal government to release the school funding Francis Keppel had withheld; going to court to enjoin civil rights marches in white neighborhoods; moving blacks into housing projects in the ghetto and keeping them out of white projects; and presiding over the housing summit that ended the Chicago Freedom Movement and sent King home to Atlanta. Daley’s political realignment seemed to be working. Polls showed him running far more strongly in the Bungalow Belt than he had against Adamowski four years earlier. The Chicago Tribune reported that its interviews with voters showed that those who had been “grumbling about Daley’s concessions to Negroes” were now backing him because “they decided Daley was a seasoned veteran of such problems.” 13

Daley won in a landslide, taking 73 percent of the vote and winning all fifty wards. His 792,238 votes surpassed his previous record of 778,612 votes in 1959. Dick Gregory, who in the end ran as a write-in candidate, took less than 1 percent of the vote. The polls that detected the white ethnic neighborhoods shifting back toward Daley turned out to be correct. In 1963, his support in nonreform white wards had fallen to 44 percent; this time, he took 69 percent of the vote in these same wards. In the race against Adamowski, Daley had won 66 percent of the vote in Tom Keane’s 31st Ward, a weak performance in one of the machine’s strongest wards; this time he took almost 84 percent. It was a testament to Daley’s skill in handling the race issue — and to the hold the machine still had on black voters — that his support in the black wards had eroded only slightly in four years, from 84.1 percent to 83.8 percent. Daley defeated Waner in the heavily black West Side 24th Ward 15,336 to 918, with 351 write-in votes cast for Dick Gregory, compared to 17,429 to 968 against Adamowski in 1963. There is no single answer to the intriguing question of why Daley, who had spent the last year at logger-heads with Martin Luther King Jr., fared so well among black voters. In part, it was due to his careful expressions of support for equal opportunity and improving conditions in the slums, even while he co-opted the Freedom Movement’s attempts to take on those issues. It helped, certainly, that the Republican Waner was not a particularly appealing candidate for black voters, and that Gregory was not officially listed on the ballot. But Daley’s success in the black wards was at least in part a quiet rebuke to the Chicago Freedom Movement, and a reminder of the power of a political spoils system to deliver the votes of the poor. The goals of the Freedom Movement did not always speak to the immediate needs of poor blacks. Many did not aspire to move into hostile all-white neighborhoods, or to put their children onto buses to attend schools in white neighborhoods. Daley’s precinct captains, in contrast, offered things that did make a difference in their daily lives: help in getting welfare and public housing; assistance in navigating a confusing government bureaucracy; and, most of all, patronage jobs. Daley had relied on machine politics to overcome idealism among black voters, and the election returns showed that, at least this time, his strategy had worked. 14

On election night, Daley promised that he would continue his hard line on disruptions of the peace. “No one is going to take the law into his own hands,” he said in his victory statement at Democratic headquarters in the Sherman House. “There will be law and order in this city as long as I am mayor.” The following day, he expanded on his pledge. “There will be no demonstrations that close off traffic or interfere with people’s rights,” he said. “We won’t prohibit demonstrations and marches, but we say they cannot conflict with your rights as a private citizen. If you are driving home or on a bus, no one has the right to hold you up.” Daley also promised that there would be more development in the next four years than in the previous four. Among his plans were replacing the elevated tracks that circle the Loop with a subway, and building a third Chicago airport on a man-made island in the middle of Lake Michigan. On May 9, President Johnson and the Democratic leadership in Congress honored Daley as Democrat of the Year for 1967. The award gave Daley a national platform to speak out about his encounters with political demonstrators, and the importance of standing up to them firmly. “I believe in civil rights, but with law and order in our streets, and not with disorder,” Daley said. “Today we have many faint hearts in our party.” 15

[neil]

The War on Poverty — and particularly Chicago’s self-styled version of it — remained as controversial as ever. On May 18, a Senate subcommittee came to town to investigate the Chicago program once again. New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits repeated the standard line about machine domination of the Chicago program. When his questioning of Daley failed to produce any damaging admissions, Javits moved on to Deton Brooks, challenging him about his work in the reelection campaign of Roman Pucinski while he was director of the Chicago anti-poverty program. Javits had brought along a memorandum that quoted Brooks as saying, when asked about his political work for the machine, “I’ll do what I darn please.” When the hearing ended, Javits expressed his suspicions that Daley had hijacked the program. “It is not easy to find proof, but there is a heavy overtone that it is being politically run,” he said. “I’m not persuaded that the Chicago system gives the poor representation on community boards.” But the Democratic senators on the committee — including New York’s Robert Kennedy and chairman Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania — came to Daley’s defense. Chicago’s program was no worse, they said, than programs in many other cities. 16 Civil rights activists also continued to speak out against the way the War on Poverty was being run both in Chicago and nationally. Chester Robinson, director of the West Side Organization, charged that War on Poverty programs were still failing to address the greatest forms of deprivation in poor people’s lives. “What good does it do a poor person if the Great Society takes his child for a tour of the art museum?” Robinson asked. “The child still has to come back to the same rat-infested, overcrowded, underheated slum tenement, go back down to the same overcrowded, understaffed slum school and bear the same burden of his father’s inability to get a good-paying job.” 17

But by the spring of 1967, more of the criticism of the War on Poverty was coming from conservatives. The growing Black Power movement had by now reached new heights of militancy. Stokely Carmichael resigned as chairman of SNCC in May to travel to Cuba and Vietnam. He left behind a successor, H. Rap Brown, who was even more confrontational. “If you give me a gun I might just shoot Lady Bird,” Brown declared. The violent rhetoric coming out of the black liberation movement was contributing to a phenomenon that the national media had seemingly fallen in love with: white backlash. Some of the backlash was aimed at CAP, which was increasingly identified in the minds of white America with radical black politics. In Houston, the mayor accused anti-poverty program employees of contributing to racial unrest that culminated in a gun battle at Texas Southern University, the state’s largest historically black college. In Alabama, Governor Wallace charged that $500,000 in grants to programs in Wilcox and Lowndes counties amounted to funding the Black Panthers, which began as a black political party in Lowndes County. Even in Chicago, where Daley and Brooks were keeping a close eye on CAP, there were charges that War on Poverty money was being diverted to fund civil rights protests. Washington handed critics a new argument for opposing the program when The Woodlawn Organization was given a $927,000 grant to hire gang members to provide job training to other gang members. The money went directly from Washington to TWO, bypassing the local Daley-controlled board, the CCUO. By the end of the year, it would come out that eight of the staff hired by TWO had been charged with or convicted of serious crimes, including a twenty-one-year-old “center chief ” who had been charged with murdering a thirteen-year-old boy. 18 “This is the only program not included under the jurisdiction of the city of Chicago,” Daley fumed when the staff’s brushes with the criminal justice system came to light. “People say we should have participation by outside agencies and we are for this,” he said. “But we feel it has to be under some direction.” Daley eventually convinced the OEO to cut off funding to the group. 19

On June 5, the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities held a luncheon for 1,300 at the Hilton Hotel to kick off Project: Good Neighbor. Daley told the crowd that the one-week project had the potential to “do much to erase prejudices which long ago should have been thrust aside.” Other speakers talked about the importance of open housing. And Robert Ingersoll, board chairman of Borg-Warner Corporation and chairman of the project, urged everyone in attendance to sign a “Good Neighbor Declaration.” But the event had a hollow feeling, since Daley and the others did not seem to be taking many practical steps to advance the cause of open housing. In late April, six progressive aldermen had introduced an amendment to strengthen the city’s open-housing law. They proposed to extend the law, which applied only to brokers, to cover all sellers and renters of housing, including owners of single-family homes. The machine did not back the measure, and Daley’s corporation counsel, Ray Simon, weighed in with his opinion that the city did not have the authority to pass such a law. Meanwhile, Daley’s development plans for the city were proceeding impressively. On July 12, he announced that McCormick Place would be rebuilt in no more than eighteen months. It was a quick schedule, he conceded, for such a mammoth project, but “with crews working 24 hours a day if necessary, it can be done,” he said. “Where there is a will there is always a way.” The following day, Daley stood at the corner of Dearborn and Madison to preside over the cornerstone ceremony for the First National Bank of Chicago Building. 20

This municipal tranquillity was soon threatened, when a rash of urban rioting swept the nation. It started on July 12 in Newark, New Jersey, with an altercation between a black cabdriver and two policemen. A day later, protesters clashed with the Newark police and began looting stores. Then, the unrest escalated. Rioters and looters seized control of roughly half of Newark’s twenty-four square miles. Snipers took positions on rooftops, and arsonists set buildings on fire across the city. It took five days, 1,400 Newark police, and 300 New Jersey police to restore the peace. Before it was over, twenty-seven people were dead, and there was $10 million in property damage. Days later, rioting began in Detroit, and the devastation was even worse. Large sections of the city were set on fire, forty-three people were killed, and a staggering 7,000 people were arrested. To restore the order in Detroit, 4,700 army paratroopers and 5,000 National Guardsmen had to be called in to back up the local police. When the rioting ended in one city, it began in another — Milwaukee; New Haven, Connecticut; Wilmington, Delaware; and Flint, Michigan. 21

Daley was adamant that Chicago would not go the way of Newark or Detroit. He called a press conference on July 27 and delivered a grim-faced warning that rioting would not be tolerated. The National Guard was on alert, he said, and it would be on the streets in an hour with live ammunition. “As long as I am mayor of Chicago, law and order will prevail,” Daley insisted. When a reporter pointed out that King had warned that Chicago had the kind of problems that had led to riots in other cities, Daley lashed out at the man he had once gone to great lengths to embrace. “We don’t need him to tell us what to do,” Daley said of King. “He has been asked to join in our constructive programs and he has refused. He only comes here for one purpose — or to any other city he has visited — and that is to cause trouble.” The next day, Daley addressed an enthusiastic audience at the 49th annual Illinois American Legion at the Palmer House and repeated the promise he made at the press conference: “Law and order must prevail; it will prevail.” In fact, this time law and order did prevail. In the summer of 1967, when more than 128 American cities erupted in rioting, Chicago somehow escaped unscathed. 22

[neil]

Daley’s admirers were happy to give him the credit. It was his tough talk, many of them said, that let potential rioters know they would be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Others said it was the antipoverty money Daley had attracted to the city. “Chicago is in on every conceivable program the Federal Government has to offer,” one reporter noted. Some attributed the absence of rioting to the Democratic machine, which reached into every block of the ghetto, and made even the city’s poorest blacks feel they had some stake in the system. “The trained and loyal members of the Democrats’ campaign army are armed with the promise of food and favors,” said Joseph Meeks, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. “They will be effective in influencing almost anyone who has a modicum of reason.” But rioting, and the absence of rioting, is not so easily explained. Less than a year later, the machine would still be handing out food and favors, and Daley would be talking even tougher. But the response in Chicago’s ghettos would be very different. 23

Every headline about a city erupting in looting and arson drove another nail into the coffin of CAP. The program’s defenders argued that the unrest only illustrated more vividly that the nation’s urban poor were desperately in need of intervention, but that was not the majority view. The uprisings “not only raised the question whether the poor should be ‘rewarded’ after engaging in violence,” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker observed, “it also brought wild but unsubstantiated charges that O.E.O. employees had helped foment the riots.” The War on Poverty was rapidly losing the support of the two groups that dominated the Democratic majority in Congress: urban liberals from the North, and rural conservatives from the South. Southern Democrats increasingly identified Washington’s anti-poverty programs with black militancy and voter registration drives that threatened the white power structure in some regions. Northern Democrats had also become convinced that federal anti-poverty money was being used to fund political protests and acts of insurrection, like a Cleveland demonstration in which angry poor people marched on City Hall and dropped rats on the steps. Even many urban liberals were finally coming around to Daley’s long-held view that a poverty program not under the control of the political establishment was worse than none at all. 24

The reform being proposed was an amendment to the Economic Act of 1967 that would reshape the entire CAP program along the lines of Daley’s Chicago Concept. It was a measure Congressman Pucinski, Daley’s point man on the issue, had been promoting for some time, but the actual amendment was introduced by House Committee on Education and Labor chair Edith Green (D-Oregon). Republican congressman Charles Goodell attacked the proposed modification as a “bosses and boll weevil amendment,” a joint effort by machine politicians from the North and legislators from the rural South to take control over the federal poverty program. It soon became clear, however, that CAP was not going to be reauthorized without it. Green’s amendment passed, finally closing the chapter on the contentious idea of “maximum feasible participation.” A few months later, Shriver left the War on Poverty to become ambassador to France. In the end, Daley was the victor in the War on Poverty. His Chicago Concept, once attacked as illegal and corrupt, was now law nationwide. 25



On August 15, 1967, Daley unveiled a new rust-colored Picasso sculpture to stand in front of the Civic Center. The 162-ton statue, which would come to be known simply as the Chicago Picasso, had already endured weeks of abuse. Amateur art critics were comparing Picasso’s abstract creation to everything from a dodo bird to a giant cheese slicer. The Chicago Daily News had called it Chicago’s “greatest conversation piece since Mrs. O’Leary’s lantern.” The Chicago Tribune, seemingly straining to find the right words, hailed the sculpture’s “off-beat attractiveness — not the attractiveness of a marble nymph in a glade but of a great monumental something which turned aside questions and pulled the mind in a strange direction.” Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks composed a poem that she read at the unveiling. It captured Chicago’s awkward relationship with its new masterpiece: “Art hurts,” Brooks declared. “Art urges voyages — and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready.” Republican alderman John Hoellen, happy to have found another issue on which to bait Daley, introduced a resolution in the city council to send the sculpture back to France and replace it with a likeness of Cubs first baseman Ernie Banks. (City Hall was not amused. Told that Hoellen was objecting that no one knew what the statue was, Tom Keane responded: “It’s a baboon, and its name is John Hoellen.”) Daley, with his ingrained Bridgeport sensibility, did not care for the artwork he was unveiling. “He was disturbed,” recalls his speechwriter Earl Bush. “He said, ‘Picasso’s art is not what’s appreciated.’ I said, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter that you like it or not. Picasso brings credibility, no matter how grotesque it is.’” Daley appreciated the credibility and went ahead with the unveiling, even though his heart was with the demonstrators who were gathered at the scene holding signs reading “Give It Back,” and “Colossal Boo Boo.” 26

Over Labor Day weekend, 2,000 delegates representing 200 leftist organizations gathered at the Palmer House in Chicago for a convention of the National Conference for New Politics. The chaos that ensued was one of the clearest indications yet that the Black Power movement was tearing the left apart. When Martin Luther King gave the keynote address, black militants drowned him out with chants of “Kill whitey.” Black delegates, who were only 10 percent to 15 percent of the convention, demanded and were given 50 percent of the votes on all resolutions. The delegates then went on to adopt a series of radical resolutions, including a condemnation of Israel’s Six Day War as an “imperialist Zionist war” in the Middle East, which many Jewish delegates viewed as anti-Semitic, and an injunction to do work among white Americans to humanize their “savage and beast-like” character. The disastrous gathering deepened a divide that already existed on the left between Vietnam War–focused whites and civil rights– and Black Power–focused blacks. “We are a movement of people with radically different needs,” white radical Rennie Davis said afterward. “A super-coalition makes no sense.” 27

That fall, Daley traveled to Washington to attend a $500-a-plate dinner for the Democratic National Committee. Daley and his congressional stalwarts Dan Rostenkowski and John Kluczynski listened politely as Johnson told a black-tie audience of thousands that he would not back down over Vietnam. By now, popular opinion was turning against “Johnson’s War.” The number of dead and injured Americans had been growing at an alarming rate — from 2,500 in 1965 to 33,000 in 1966, to 80,000 so far in 1967 — and the United States seemed no closer to winning. Liberal media had been fulminating against the war for years, but now moderate-to-conservative publications like the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine were beginning to express doubt or outright opposition. On September 20, the Christian Science Monitor had reported that of 205 congressmen interviewed, 43 said they had recently dropped their support for Johnson’s policies. Daley had been silent on the great issue that was tearing the nation apart. “He was very much domestic in focus,” says his son William Daley. “His focus was never international in anything except promoting Chicago.” 28

Though he would later go down in history as one of the great enemies of the anti-war movement, Daley did not in fact support the Vietnam War. In the early years, he paid little attention to the far-off hostilities. “He probably thought, like most Americans in 1961 and 1963, that it was no big deal,” says William Daley. He grew to like the war less as young men, particularly young Chicagoans from neighborhoods like Bridgeport, started coming back with horrible injuries or in pine boxes. Daley’s son John had gone to grammar school with a young man who went off to serve. “His mother came pounding on the door one night,” William Daley recalls. “The poor kid ended up stepping on a mine. He survived and had hundreds of operations, and died a few years later.” With the casualties mounting, and America accomplishing so little, Daley began to form more definite views. An important consideration for Daley, of course, was the effect that the war could have on the Chicago Democratic machine. Like the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War had become a deeply divisive issue that threatened to drive a wedge through the machine’s electorate. Independent anti-war candidates might begin to make inroads among some machine voters, just as pro–civil rights candidates had begun to. Before the 1966 elections, Johnson aide Lawrence O’Brien went on a trip around the country. “There was a conversation I had with Mayor Daley, initiated by him, where he expressed great concern about Vietnam,” says O’Brien. “He said this was a growing disaster and this was going to be devastating to the Democratic party. I sent the President a memo, ‘If Richard Daley has become concerned about Vietnam, you’ve got to realize that it is not some passing cloud.’” Daley had an opportunity that same year, 1966, to tell Johnson personally how he felt about the war. Daley was at the White House lobbying for federal aid for various Chicago projects. As he began to leave, Johnson stopped him. “Listen, Dick, I’ve got a lot of trouble over there in Vietnam,” the president said. “What do you think about it?” Daley thought for a moment and answered. “Well, Mr. President, when you’ve got a losing hand in poker you just throw in your cards,” he said. “But what about American prestige?” Johnson asked. “You put your prestige in your back pocket and walk away.” 29

Daley’s opposition to the Vietnam War may have been largely political. But he also had a more personal reason to feel that it was time for the hostilities to end. In May 1967, one of Bridgeport’s most beloved young men enlisted and was killed in Vietnam. Joseph Mc-Keon was a star — one of the few Bridgeporters or De La Salle graduates to attend Harvard — and a friend of Michael Daley’s. “We used to socialize with him,” recalls Alderman Edward Burke. “There was nothing in his background that would have ever indicated he wanted to be a Marine and go to Vietnam.” McKeon’s parents were friendly with Daley, and owned a funeral home that was a neighborhood institution. “He was the neighborhood’s bright guy,” says William Daley. “He goes into the Marine Corps, had a great future ahead of him and he’s there three weeks and boom.” The loss of young McKeon hit Bridgeport hard, and considerably dampened the neighborhood’s enthusiasm for the war. 30

Daley did not have Vietnam on his mind the night of the October 1967 Democratic Party fund-raiser. He had gone to Washington for a specific reason: to make a pitch to host the upcoming Democratic convention. Chicago had not hosted a Democratic convention since 1956, when Stevenson was nominated. Daley had a dozen years of building and redevelopment he wanted to share with the world, and the national media glare of a major political convention was one of the best ways to do it. He also saw a Chicago convention as a means of boosting the machine ticket in the November election. The Democrats were likely to have a tough fight for governor on their hands, whether Otto Kerner ran for a third time or not, and the excitement of a convention in Chicago could make the difference in a close race. National Democrats were also contemplating a Texas location, since President Johnson was still considered likely to run for reelection. But intraparty fighting in the state, as well as the long shadow of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, made Texas an unlikely choice. The television networks wanted the Democrats to join the Republicans in Miami Beach, since it would reduce their costs of covering the conventions. But Daley buttonholed Johnson and made the argument that he found worked best with presidents. Johnson might lose Illinois and its twenty-six electoral votes, he warned, if the convention were held anywhere but Chicago. 31

[neil]

On October 8, the day after Daley’s appearance at the black-tie dinner, Chicago was selected to host the convention. New Jersey attorney general David Wilentz, chairman of the site selection committee, declared that the committee was favorably impressed by Chicago’s central geographic location and its experience in holding conventions. But DNC chairman John Bailey said the financial incentives Chicago offered had played an important role in the final decision. The proposal put together by Daley and his business allies had been generous: $750,000 in cash and another $150,000 worth of services. Daley had accentuated Chicago’s positives through an aggressive marketing campaign. He mailed “A New Platform for Chicago,” a paean to the city’s many fine points, to members of the site selection committee, and had it printed in the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times. Daley made his own personal pitch through his statements to the media. “It has great hotel facilities,” Daley said of Chicago. “It has great newspaper and TV facilities. And it’s in a good time zone for viewing on TV.” 32 Daley also promised that Johnson’s vote in Chicago would exceed the 65 percent he got in 1964, and that law and order would prevail during convention week. “No thousands will come to our city and take over our streets, our city, and our convention,” he said. 33

The Democrats certainly were not coming to Chicago for its convention infrastructure. The McCormick Place fire had robbed the city of its best convention site. What Daley had to offer was the International Amphitheatre in the stockyard district, just a few blocks from his home. The Amphitheatre was built in 1934, after a massive fire destroyed an eight-block section of the stockyard district and razed the area’s exposition hall. It was a rush job: the exhibition hall had burned down in May, and contractors had a new one in place for the annual livestock show in December. The building that went up was far more modest than the old McCormick Place. The International Amphitheatre had been the site of the 1956 Democratic and 1960 Republican conventions, and of a 1964 Beatles concert. But it was also a popular site for cattle shows and rodeos. Two mountains of manure, seventy feet wide and ten feet high, were just a few blocks away. The Democrats would later decide, after assessing the situation more closely before the start of the convention, that speakers who appeared at the podium should be sprayed first with bug repellent. 34

Daley called the selection of Chicago a “great honor,” but not an unexpected one, since Chicago was the “number one convention city.” Reporters asked if Daley had gotten the convention because of his promise to keep control over events inside and outside the Amphitheatre. “Let someone else say it,” Daley said. “We talk about our location, our accommodations, our great newspapers and radio and TV stations. We talk of our experience in handling conventions.” But in fact, others were saying that Daley had won over Johnson by his promise to keep order. The unrest in Newark, Detroit, and other cities over the summer had raised fears that the convention would be held in the middle of another long, hot, and riot-filled summer. Chicago, on the other hand, had remained peaceful all summer. Johnson also had to be worried about disruptions aimed at him. The peace movement was gaining force across the country, especially on college campuses, and it was likely that thousands of anti-war demonstrators would make an appearance wherever the Democratic convention was held. “Daley and Johnson are close politically,” Cook County Republican chairman Timothy Sheehan reasoned in explaining the choice of Chicago. “And the Democratic organization is well-versed in controlling crowds. They’ll make sure that no strange outsiders... pack the gallery. They’ll pack them themselves.” 35

Daley assured the Democratic Party and the nation that Chicago would provide a peaceful and hospitable setting for the convention. “Our people realize that we are working in a positive direction to solve their problems,” he said. But 1967 ended on an ominous note. In the last few days of December, two aldermen were attacked and a charity worker was killed. Independent 5th Ward alderman Leon Despres was shot twice in the leg while walking home from his office, and 14th Ward alderman Joseph Burke foiled burglars in his home. Mary Virginia Tunney, a forty-two-year-old bookkeeper for Goodwill Industries, was found shot to death on the sidewalk outside her South Side apartment building. Daley vowed to put five thousand more police on the street if necessary. “There is no excuse for violence anywhere,” he said. 36



As the Democratic primaries began, it was clear that President Johnson was in trouble. Four years earlier, when he won the White House in a landslide, a second term seemed almost inevitable. But the Vietnam War had changed everything. In early 1968, Johnson’s chances of being reelected were looking increasingly remote. The Tet Offensive in late January had driven even more Americans into the anti-war camp. The Viet Cong’s bloody assault on South Vietnam, waged by some 60,000 troops, was the most persuasive evidence yet that, despite the optimistic assessments emanating from Washington, the Vietnam quagmire was nowhere near an end. In the six weeks after the start of the Tet Offensive, Johnson’s approval ratings sank from 48 percent to 36 percent, and approval of his handling of Vietnam plunged from 40 percent to 26 percent. Anti-war activists had transformed themselves into a political force — the “Dump Johnson” movement — that initially coalesced around Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. But with McCarthy’s once quixotic-seeming anti-war candidacy gaining strength, Robert Kennedy was considering launching his own anti-war candidacy. Kennedy had early support from California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh. To become a candidate, Kennedy said, he would need to be urged to run by “one more politician of the national stature of Unruh.” It was widely interpreted as a direct appeal for Daley’s support. 37

But Daley was not rushing to jump on board. He was still a Johnson loyalist, and was uncomfortable with the idea of McCarthy and Kennedy seeking to depose an incumbent Democratic president. Daley was also close to organized labor, an important component of the machine, and would not lightly break with the major unions, which had started out in Johnson’s camp and then, after he withdrew, moved on to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Daley also had specific reservations about Kennedy. He had not shown himself to be an organization man so far in his political career. Daley had been put off during the 1960 presidential election when, after the Chicago machine came through for John Kennedy and helped him win the Democratic nomination, Bobby showed up in Illinois to set up a campaign organization for his brother, independent of the machine. Nor could Daley rely on Bobby’s political instincts. As attorney general, he had been unduly eager to investigate corruption and take on organized crime. As a candidate, he seemed too sympathetic toward black militants. With someone like Johnson or Humphrey, Daley knew exactly what he was getting. Bobby Kennedy was complex and constantly evolving, two qualities Daley did not particularly admire in a politician. 38

Still torn about whether to run, Kennedy came to Chicago for a breakfast meeting with Daley on February 8. The more Kennedy talked about his differences with President Johnson over the Vietnam War, the more his candidacy appeared to Daley to be just another variant of the municipal conflicts that ended up in his office on a regular basis. Daley, ever the believer in working out compromises among competing constituencies, then presented Kennedy with a truly bizarre proposal. Rather than go through the divisiveness of a primary challenge to a sitting president, Kennedy should get Johnson to agree to submit the future of the Vietnam War to binding arbitration. It must have seemed odd to Kennedy that his presidential candidacy, viewed by his supporters as a moral crusade, was being reduced to the level of a truckers’ strike. But Kennedy promised to think it over, and Daley said he would mention arbitration to President Johnson, which he did by telephone not long afterward. 39

With Daley still resolutely on the sidelines, Kennedy announced his candidacy on March 16. He continued to see Daley’s support as critical, and Daley received a steady stream of phone calls from the Kennedy camp lobbying him to come around. In late March, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin asked Kennedy where Daley stood in the race. “He’s been very nice to me and doesn’t like the war,” Kennedy said. “You see, there are so many dead starting to come back it bothers him.” But at the same time, Kennedy said, Daley was a party loyalist, which pulled him toward Johnson. When Breslin asked where he stood if Daley endorsed him, Kennedy responded, “Daley means the ballgame.” These were flattering words, but Daley liked to make his slating decisions behind closed doors, not in the newspapers. He remained cool toward Kennedy’s candidacy. Asked about Kennedy’s “ballgame” comment, Daley responded: “He means I’m a great White Sox fan.” Daley spoke with Johnson by phone in March, and Johnson asked what chance he had of carrying Chicago if he ran again. “Well, Mr. President, there are good years and bad years and I don’t think this will be a good year for the national ticket in Chicago,” Daley said. “But I’m backing you all the way, Mr. President. It doesn’t matter that you can’t win here.” 40

Not long after he delivered his gloomy assessment of Johnson’s prospects, Daley got a phone call from White House aide Marvin Watson. The March 31 call, which Daley took at home on a private line upstairs, was to give him advance word that Johnson was withdrawing from the race. When he came down and joined his family in the den, they saw Johnson on television announcing that he was not seeking reelection. Daley’s was the first call Johnson accepted at the Executive Mansion. Daley called to offer to draft Johnson at the convention if he wanted to be drafted, but Johnson said he did not. Johnson told Daley he was flying to Chicago the next morning to give a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. Daley met Johnson at the airport, with Rostenkowski and Chicago’s new U.S. attorney in tow. Daley spent the day, including the ride back to the airport, trying to persuade Johnson to reconsider his decision. With Daley now truly uncommitted in the presidential race, he had no shortage of suitors. Johnson made a pitch for Humphrey. Daley also began talking with mayors Joseph Barr of Pittsburgh, James Tate of Philadelphia, and Jerome Cavanaugh of Detroit about sitting on the sidelines rather than rushing to endorse a presidential candidate. It appeared to be an attempt to slow the momentum that was building around Robert Kennedy’s candidacy. 41

[neil]

On March 2, 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders — widely known as the Kerner Commission — issued its report on the riots of the summer of 1967. President Johnson had appointed a blue-ribbon panel on July 27, 1967, with Democratic governor Otto Kerner as chairman and liberal Republican New York City mayor John Lindsay as vice chairman, to investigate the causes of the riots and to explore “the conditions that breed despair and violence.” Johnson’s commission was moderate in composition — he was criticized for not appointing more progressive voices like Martin Luther King, Tom Hayden, or even Stokely Carmichael — but its report was far from restrained. The Kerner Commission’s arresting conclusion was that the urban unrest had been caused by the fact that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The commission’s dense report backed up that assertion with a wealth of detail, and called for a substantial new round of social programs to address ghetto conditions. The commission found that there was a great need for additional public housing, but that it was critical that the State Street Corridor model be abandoned once and for all. “[W]e believe that the emphasis of the program should be changed from the traditional publicly-built, slum-based high-rise project to smaller units on scattered sites,” it said. “Where traditional high-rise projects are constructed, facilities for social services should be included in the design, and a broad range of such services provided for tenants.” Johnson declared the commission’s work a “good report by good men of good will,” but he also complained that “they always print that we don’t do enough. They don’t print what we do.” He showed no interest in following up on its extensive policy recommendations. 42

Daley was at home eating with his sons John and Bill on Thursday, April 4, 1968, when his aide Jack Reilly called to say that Martin Luther King had been shot by a sniper on the balcony of a motel in Memphis. Daley ordered the flags at City Hall lowered to half staff. Now that King was dead, Daley spoke of him as a fallen comrade. “Chicago joins in mourning the tragic death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Daley said in a prepared statement. “Dr. King was a dedicated and courageous American who commanded the respect of the people of the world.” Jesse Jackson, who was still heading up Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, was among those who would not let Daley off so easily. “The blood is on the chest and hands of those that would not have welcomed him here yesterday,” Jackson said. 43

President Johnson appeared on television and appealed for calm and order. “I ask every American to reject the blind violence that has struck down Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence,” Johnson implored. Nevertheless, black America erupted in a spasm of sorrow and rage. In the wake of King’s assassination, 168 cities and towns were struck by rioting, arson, and looting. The national statistics were staggering: before it was over, there were 2,600 fires, and 21,270 injuries. This time, it was Washington, D.C., that got the worst of it. Arsonists set 711 fires, including some just blocks from the White House. Black Power leaders took advantage of the situation to incite the sort of violent actions that it would have pained King to watch. “Go home and get your guns,” Stokely Carmichael advised young people. “When the white man comes, he is coming to kill you.” It was, of course, a minority view in the black community. But the press was filled with Black Power rhetoric and vivid accounts of the violence. Whatever force of man or nature had prevented Chicago from becoming embroiled in the 1967 riots did not work this time. By mid-morning on Friday, the day after King’s murder, black students were walking out of class, and by the afternoon schools in black neighborhoods had emptied. Young people gathered in Garfield Park, where speakers exhorted them to direct their frustration toward local businesses. The disorder began with smashed store windows and looting; arson and sniper attacks came soon afterward. By 2:00 P.M., Daley asked Acting Governor Samuel Shapiro, who was filling in for Governor Kerner, to send in the National Guard. Daley addressed the city on radio and television at 4:20 P.M. “Stand up tonight and protect the city,” he urged. “I ask this very sincerely, very personally. Let’s show the United States and the world what Chicago’s citizens are made of.” 44

Shapiro sent 600 National Guardsmen while Daley dispatched the entire Chicago fire department, and the borrowed departments of eight suburbs, to put out the fires that were engulfing black neighborhoods. Daley spent Friday night at City Hall, with a radio tuned to police calls and a television set broadcasting the spreading unrest. He went to the Sherman House for a seventy-five-minute break, to eat and take a short nap, and then returned to City Hall. Power lines on the West Side were now dead, leaving much of that part of the city in darkness, and giving encouragement and cover to the looters. As the looting entered its second day, 1,500 more National Guards-men were deployed on the Chicago streets. On Saturday afternoon, Daley imposed a curfew from 7:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. for all youth under twenty-one. He directed James Conlisk, the police commissioner who had taken over when O. W. Wilson retired a year earlier, to ban liquor sales in areas where there was “serious disorder.” With military deployments guarding every intersection on the West Side, Saturday night was quieter but far from tranquil. Molotov cocktails were still being tossed, buildings were being torched, and firemen were being shot at by snipers. Troops patrolled the West and Near Northwest sides in jeeps. After two nights of rioting, black neighborhoods lay in ruins and at least eleven people were dead. Stores along West Madison Street, a modest boulevard of small shops with simple apartments in the upper floors, were charred for a twenty-eight-block stretch. By early Saturday, 300 people had been arrested for looting and scores were jammed into the lockup at police headquarters at 11th and State streets. Thousands were homeless. In many parts of the city, power and phone lines were dead. 45

The following morning, Palm Sunday, Daley and fire commissioner Robert Quinn spent forty-five minutes surveying the West Side by helicopter. They hovered over the smoldering wreckage of buildings on West Madison and saw devastation spreading down two miles south to Roosevelt Road. Daley was visibly shaken when he exited the helicopter. “It was a shocking and tragic picture of the city,” he said afterward. “I never believed that this would happen here. I hope it will not happen again.” After the tour, Daley returned to City Hall, where he met with school superintendent James Redmond, health commissioner Samuel Adelman, and streets and sanitation commissioner James Fitzpatrick. On Monday, April 8, Daley appointed a committee to investigate the riot and named federal judge Richard Austin to head it. 46

That same day, Daley attempted to explain the devastation that had struck the city. He had looked haggard and depressed since the riots broke out, and his unrehearsed comments turned into a bizarre rant. Thrashing around to make sense of the disorder, Daley insisted that the riots had been caused by the violent conditions that prevailed in Chicago’s public schools. “The conditions of April 5 in the schools were indescribable,” he said. “The beating of girls, the slashing of teachers and the general turmoil and the payoffs and the extortions. We have to face up to this situation with discipline. Principals tell us what’s happening and they are told to forget it.” 47 School superintendent James Redmond expressed puzzlement the next day over the charges leveled by Daley. “I do not know of any beatings of girls,” Redmond said. Nor could he understand Daley’s reference to April 5. He knew of no incident in which a teacher had been slashed that day — the only school day during the riots — and he was not aware of anyone giving principals instructions to “forget it.” But Redmond nevertheless launched an investigation. “We are concerned and we are reviewing all activities which led up to Friday,” he said. Daley’s anger over the rioting seemed to have pushed him over the edge. 48

Daley’s reaction to the rioting became more coherent, but no less inflammatory, as the days passed. The police bore some of the blame as well, he said on April 15, because of the restraint they showed. “I have conferred with the Superintendent of Police this morning and I gave him the following instructions,” Daley said, “which I thought were instructions on the night of the fifth that were not carried out: I said to him very emphatically and very definitely that [he should issue an order] immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand in Chicago because they’re potential murderers, and to issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple any arsonists and looters — arson-ists to kill and looters to maim and detain.” Daley said he had thought these instructions would not even need to be conveyed. “I assumed any superintendent would issue instructions to shoot arson-ists on sight and to maim the looters, but I found out this morning this wasn’t so and therefore gave him specific instructions,” he said. 49

Many cities had been torn by rioting in the wake of King’s assassination, but Daley was alone in advocating that his citizens be fatally shot. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay had responded to riots in Harlem by walking the streets of black neighborhoods, doing call-in shows, and assuring blacks that he empathized with their frustration. “I think I understand,” Lindsay said. “I understand the temptation to strike back.” Daley’s “shoot to kill” comments set off an impassioned debate. His supporters rushed to back him up. “I don’t know why we are disturbed about the mayor’s statements,” Alderman Keane said. “Instead of criticizing actions of police, I feel it’s time to use brass knuckles and get down to telling those committing crimes to stop.” But U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark called Daley’s statements a “dangerous escalation” of racial violence. Independent aldermen also took issue with Daley. A. A. “Sammy” Rayner charged that Daley was “apparently going to great lengths to save the Democratic national convention.” Even Wilson Frost, one of the machine’s heretofore silent black aldermen, called Daley’s comments inflammatory. In the face of the criticism, Daley backpedaled. He called a press conference the day afterward and insisted: “There wasn’t any shoot-to-kill order.” 50

[neil]

The Daley camp also began to resort to one of its favorite tactics: blaming the press. Earl Bush, Daley’s press secretary, had an ingenious explanation for why the whole “shoot-to-kill” controversy was reporters’ fault. “They should have printed what he meant not what he said,” Bush insisted. Daley also lashed out at reporters. “They said that I gave orders to shoot down children,” Daley complained. “I said to the superintendent, if a man has a Molotov cocktail in his hand and throws it into a building with children and women up above, he should be shot right there and if I was there I would shoot him. Everybody knows it was twisted around and they said Daley gave orders to shoot children. That wasn’t true.” It was not what Daley had said originally, but Daley’s policy on the use of force was getting better in the retelling. His own investigative committee would later note that Illinois General Order 67-14 actually prohibited the police from using the kind of “deadly force” Daley had called for. But Daley found ultimate vindication by having Jack Reilly announce that he had been getting letters of support for his policy from all fifty states, and that the mail was supporting his position by 15 to 1. 51

After calm was restored, Daley lifted the curfew and, playing to his strengths, assembled a package of state and federal aid to rebuild the West Side. His analysis of what set off the riots never went any deeper than his wild stories about the school system and his flailing at the police for exercising too much restraint. The truth was, of course, more complicated. One of the most notable aspects of the riots was that they were concentrated on the West Side. The West Side was the newer of Chicago’s two ghettos, comprised of neighborhoods that had been white not long ago. Compared to the South Side, it had fewer community organizations, less-established churches, and fewer black-run businesses and institutions. Its residents were also different from blacks on the South Side. More of them had personally made the Great Migration from the rural South. They were more likely to be poor and undereducated, to have loose ties to the city, and to still be experiencing the disappointment of the gap between what they expected when they moved north to Chicago and what they found there. Another large group of West Side residents were uprooted migrants from closer by. West Side neighborhoods were home to many blacks forcibly displaced by Daley’s urban-renewal programs — a Chicago Urban League report called them “dumping grounds for relocated families.” In a 1958 series on urban renewal, the Chicago Daily News compared “Chicago’s DP”— for the most part poor blacks pushed out by urban renewal — to European “displaced persons” uprooted by world war. Chicago’s DPs were “made homeless not by war or communism or disaster but by wreckers,” the Daily News reported, and were “refugees of the relocation that inevitably accompanies redevelopment. They are people, angry, indifferent, resentful, resigned.” It was the kind of alienation, the Chicago Urban League’s report concluded, that made an area a likely site for civil unrest. 52



Not long after the race riots ended, a new group arrived on the scene to challenge Daley’s control over the city. The Chicago Peace Council, gearing up for the Democratic National Convention, organized 6,000 anti-war protesters to march from Grant Park to Civic Center Plaza on April 27. Stung by Daley’s rebuke that they had been insufficiently forceful during the April riots, the police were intent this time on preserving order at all costs. The marchers were moving peacefully along their route, straggling a bit more than police expected, when the trouble started. At the march’s midway point, policemen in riot gear tried to disperse them, yelling, “Move, move, get out of the Loop, move, move, get out of the Loop.” In minutes, the police began attacking. They clubbed some demonstrators and pushed others into the Civic Center fountain. Shoppers and other bystanders who happened upon the scene were also beaten. The police arrested more than sixty demonstrators. Clark Kissinger, coordinator of the march, complained that “by making a non-violent protest impossible, they made a violent one inevitable.” 53

A citizens panel, headed by Dr. Edward J. Sparling, president emeritus of Roosevelt University, was appointed to investigate. The Sparling Commission issued a sixty-two-page report, entitled “Dissent and Disorder,” on August 1 that placed full blame on the police. Their treatment of the protesters, it found, had been “inept as well as hostile.” The commission also rejected the notion that the clashes were the work of rogue officers. “The evidence seemed to indicate it could not have happened without the collaboration of the Mayor’s office and the Superintendent of Police and his lieutenants,” Sparling said at a press conference announcing the commission’s findings. Monsignor John Egan, pastor of Presentation Catholic Church, agreed: “Supt. Conlisk was present, saw what happened, and allowed [the police] to continue to operate in that manner.” Years later, a former Chicago policeman was quoted saying: “Each one of us was told that we had to make an arrest. I couldn’t believe it. There was nobody bad there.” 54

The April 27 clash could have saved Chicago from the violence and ignominy that were to come in August. The Sparling Commission put the entire city on notice that the Chicago police had a propensity for attacking peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders. If Daley had used the Sparling report to rein in his police and to train them in appropriate methods of dealing with demonstrators, convention week would have gone differently, and much less blood would have been shed. Instead, Daley denounced the report as “not true,” and placed the blame for the clashes squarely on “the constant efforts of [the peace marchers] to confront the Police Department.” To Daley, it was the marchers’ missteps — including small deviations like failing to march in twos on the sidewalk — that made the violence inevitable. “The Police Department is always being attacked on marches such as this one,” he complained. “The police didn’t cause the problem. They only tried to enforce the law.” 55

[neil]

CHAPTER

13

Preserving Disorder

What’s happening to our society?” Daley asked ruefully. He had just gotten word that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles, at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the June 4, 1968, California primary. “This was a shocking and stunning incident,” Daley told the City Hall press corps the following day, “and it proves again there is great hatred, violence and bitterness in all the things that are happening in our country.” The previous two months, between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, had dramatically illustrated Daley’s point. In addition to the rioting that swept through the nation’s cities, university campuses were in turmoil. There were massive demonstrations, student strikes, and bitter face-offs between undergraduates and administrators. The most widely noted of these showdowns occurred at Columbia University, where students seized buildings to protest plans to build a university gymnasium in Morningside Park, which was primarily used by blacks. There was no pretense of civility: before the occupation, student leader Mark Rudd sent a letter to university president Grayson Kirk that ended with a quote from black radical LeRoi Jones: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.” Then the students, under the battle cry “Gym Crow Must Go,” occupied Kirk’s office, drinking his sherry and smoking his cigars. After eight days of negotiating, university officials called the police, who beat and kicked students and threw some down concrete stairwells, before arresting 692. 1

Many of the same student anti-war groups that had taken over campus buildings that spring would be coming to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. The planning had been under way for months — anti-war leaders David Dellinger and Rennie Davis talked about a convention protest as early as October 1967, during a march on the Pentagon. In January 1968, twenty-five anti-war organizers met in a New York apartment to hammer out strategy. To the anti-war movement, the Democratic convention was a tempting target. As the party of Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats seemed to be an appropriate focus of the movement’s rage over the Vietnam War. Chicago was also the culmination of Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign: it was on the convention floor that his supporters would make their final stand. And to a movement that was media savvy, if not media obsessed, the sheer number of television cameras and reporters who would be on hand made the convention almost irresistible.

Another key factor attracting the protesters to Chicago was Daley himself. Nothing rallies a political movement like an appealing enemy, and Daley seemed to be the perfect embodiment of the establishment that the anti-war movement was fighting. Though Daley did not actually favor Johnson’s Vietnam policies, his unwillingness to break with the president over the war put him on the wrong side of the issue they cared about most passionately. As boss of a machine that thrived on patronage, corruption, and vote theft, he stood for everything they disdained about the old political order. And Daley’s authoritarianism was the antithesis of the libertarian spirit that animated the anti-war movement. To young people who believed in all-night political debates and free-wheeling “be-ins,” Daley’s penchant for telling his followers how to vote and punishing them when they stepped out of line seemed antiquated and oppressive. Just as important, Daley was sixty-six at the time of the convention, which seemed ancient to a movement whose rallying cry was “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

Rennie Davis, field director of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War — commonly known as MOBE — was calling for a “massive confrontation” between anti-war demonstrators and Democratic leaders at the convention. But much of the press attention focused on the more whimsical Youth International Party, or Yippies, who were making outlandish claims about what they would do when they got to Chicago. The Yippies called themselves “revolutionary artists” and boasted that, in the words of founder Abbie Hoffman, “our concept of revolution is that it’s fun.” They talked gleefully about dispatching an elite group of 230 sexy male Yippies to seduce the delegates’ wives, daughters, and girlfriends. And they promised to drop LSD into the Chicago water supply to “turn on” the entire city. The Yippies said they would disguise themselves as chefs and drug the delegates’ food, and paint their cars to look like taxis and drive delegates to Wisconsin. Abbie Hoffman said he was plotting to pull down Hubert Humphrey’s pants on the podium. Much of it was ludicrous stuff, but Hoffman and fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin reveled in the humorless reaction they got from Daley and the stodgy Chicago newspapers. When Hoffman goofily told city negotiators he would call off all his plans for a payment of $100,000, an indignant Chicago Tribune reported: “Yippies Demand Cash from City.” 2

Daley was hard at work on his own convention plans. He had taken personal charge of the preparations, and was spending a half-million dollars to get Chicago into shape. He created a Cook County version of a Potemkin Village by erecting a “redwood forest” of wooden fences to obscure the blight that visitors would pass as they traveled by bus from the Loop to the International Amphitheatre. 3 On the expressway leading to the Amphitheatre, workmen painted a new coat of silver on the mud-spattered dividing rail. Streets surrounding the hall — many of them barred to all but VIP traffic — were painted kelly green. No detail was too small to escape Daley’s attention. Ten days before the convention was scheduled to begin, he led reporters on a fifteen-minute tour of the International Amphitheatre. He asked Jack Reilly if the silver-blue metal folding chairs for the delegates would be fastened together. Daley enlisted the ward organizations and machine politicians to help put on a good show. “If you have particular points of interest in your wards, arrange for tours of those places,” Daley told a luncheon at Democratic headquarters at the Sherman House. Reilly reminded the machine crowd “to impress on the delegates that they are not just visiting Chicago, but Mayor Daley’s Chicago.” 4

There were a rash of labor problems on the eve of the convention that complicated preparations. For a time, it looked as if Daley’s wellrun city was on the brink of falling apart. In early July, a group called Concerned Transit Workers had staged a wildcat strike that snarled public transportation for four days. The dissident organization was now threatening to hold another strike starting on August 25, the day before the convention began. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had been striking against Illinois Bell for over one hundred days, and Daley was running out of time to convince them to put down their picket signs and wire the convention for television service. Chicago was also in the midst of a taxi strike. Daley scrambled to make it all work. He negotiated a temporary arrangement that allowed for 3,200 telephones and 200 teletypes to be installed at the Amphitheatre. He tried his best to win over the taxi drivers by sympathizing with their demand for more money. Prices were rising everywhere, Daley told them. Gesturing to the reporters at a press conference, he added that “I’d like to see you fellows get a pay raise, too.” But he was not able to settle the taxi strike. The Democratic National Committee rented buses to transport 5,244 delegates and alternates between the twenty-one hotels where they were housed and the Amphitheatre. And three hundred cars donated by auto manufacturers and driven by young Democrats were made available to transport VIPs. 5

Daley’s most meticulous preparations involved security — turning the convention facilities into what the press dubbed “Fort Daley.” A seven-foot-high chain-link fence, topped with more than two thousand feet of barbed wire, appeared suddenly around the International Amphitheatre. Firemen stood by to deter bomb throwers, and a catwalk was built into the convention hall so Secret Service and police could look down on the proceedings below. Manhole covers in the area were sealed with tar. Daley put the city’s 11,900 police on twelve-hour shifts, with battle plans, command posts, and mobile tactical forces all carefully plotted out on charts. Five schools were readied to house the thousands of Illinois National Guard who were waiting in reserve. A thousand FBI and Secret Service agents were deployed from Washington, and 7,500 army troops trained in riot control were airlifted from Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. Though the Water and Sewers Department dismissed the Yippies’ threat to dump LSD into the water supply — they estimated five tons of LSD would be required — Daley deployed police to guard the city’s water filtration plants. The measures were, he said, “an ounce of prevention.” 6 The Chicago police also assembled “Daley dozers,” jeeps with barbed wire attached to the front, to clear the streets of demonstrators. A “macabre atmosphere pervades the convention” and “Daley’s chambered fortress,” Russell Baker of the New York Times reported. 7

Daley was also, it would be revealed years later, infiltrating anti-war groups. The Chicago Department of Investigation, Daley’s personal investigative body, sent undercover agents to New York to disrupt an anti-war group that was making plans for the convention. The activities were detailed in a thirty-eight-page statement, written by department member John Clarke after the convention and released a decade later in response to a lawsuit. Daley’s agents sabotaged the Radical Organizing Committee’s plans to charter buses and raise money. “As a result of our activities in New York, instead of 200 busloads of demonstrators coming to Chicago, they ended up with eight carloads, totaling 60 people,” Clarke wrote. Other Department of Investigation agents infiltrated peace groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland “in an attempt to sabotage the movement with great success.” The department also sent an agent to pose as a volunteer in the MOBE headquarters in Chicago who, when no one was listening, discouraged callers from coming to Chicago for the convention. 8

The Chicago police were also infiltrating peace groups. The Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad,” formally known as the Security Section of the department’s Intelligence Division, had about 850 informants spying on groups like the National Lawyers Guild and the League of Women Voters. Red Squad agents also engaged in disruptive behavior and worked to set different anti-war groups against each other. In an incident in late 1967, an undercover Chicago police officer who had joined the Chicago Peace Council broke into the group’s offices — to which he had obtained a key — stealing money and equipment and spray-painting slogans purporting to come from the Students for a Democratic Society. “The police have a perfect right to spy on private citizens,” Daley insisted. “How else are they going to detect possible trouble before it happens?” 9



Despite the attention the anti-war movement was getting, Daley was at least as concerned about black uprisings during the convention. Any illusions he once held that Chicago’s ghettos were not susceptible to rioting had been put to rest with the chaos after Martin Luther King’s assassination. There were also several specific rumors about gang activity that was being planned to coincide with the convention. City officials were worried about the Blackstone Rangers, a large South Side gang, and a militant black group called the Black Turks that had come to Chicago from Cincinnati and Cleveland in August. They had reportedly been holding meetings that included dry runs for guerrilla warfare. The 7,500 soldiers who had been airlifted to Chicago were put through an exercise dubbed “Operation Jackson Park,” in which they acted out how to respond to rioting. The Jackson Park of the title is located on the South Side, near poor black neighborhoods like Woodlawn — an indication of where the threat was perceived to be coming from. Daley was particularly worried that blacks would disrupt the convention by firing guns from the housing projects along State Street, which lay just across the Dan Ryan Expressway from the International Amphitheatre. Throughout the convention, he had two police helicopters flying up and down the area, patrolling for snipers. 10

Daley used carrots as well as sticks to keep the city’s black neighborhoods in line. The months leading up to the convention were a time of extraordinary generosity from City Hall. Daley’s office arranged for Gale Sayers, the immensely popular Chicago Bears running back, to direct a touch football program in twenty playgrounds and parks across the city. “To be blunt about it, it grew out of the riots following the assassination of Dr. King,” concedes Deputy Mayor David Stahl. “We said we’ve got to do something in the predominantly black part of the city where there was a huge degree of social disorganization.” 11 In May, Daley ordered up a $27.5 million program to modernize older public housing buildings and install more social centers. He personally addressed hundreds of public housing residents in the City Council chambers, telling them that the goal was “to upgrade Chicago public housing developments and to improve the quality of life for residents.” And Daley ordered housing officials to rush to build sixteen prefabricated houses for low-income tenants, which he wanted ready before the convention began. 12

Daley also drew on his influence in Washington. In another of Daley’s well-timed grants, it was shortly before the convention that the federal government found $500,000 to fund a three-year program to help blacks find housing in the suburbs. Ten days before the convention started, machine congressman John Kluczynski scheduled hearings for the House Small Business Committee at the Stock-yard Inn, just blocks from the International Amphitheatre. Daley showed up to testify in favor of building a 77-acre industrial park for the impoverished neighborhoods of East Garfield Park and Lawn-dale. Daley’s concerns about having a peaceful convention also led him to do something he had resisted for years: expand the city’s fair housing law. On June 19, Daley proposed a change in the law that would finally extend it beyond brokers to include owners, renters, and other parties to real estate transactions. Daley was determined to get all the credit for the change. Alderman William Cousins, an independent who had tried to introduce a similar bill a year earlier, asked if he could be put down as a cosponsor. “No,” Daley’s floor leader said bluntly. “We are the sponsors.” 13

Most disingenuous of all, Daley began to wrap himself in the mantle of his old foe Martin Luther King. Daley introduced a City Council resolution to rename South Parkway, a major South Side thoroughfare that ran only through black neighborhoods, in honor of King. He took the occasion to indicate that King, who was talking about returning to Chicago to lead protests shortly before he died, would be delighted by the state of race relations in Chicago if he were only still alive. “He told me Chicago had made more progress than his own Atlanta or other cities,” said Daley. “He visited projects on the South Side. He visited hospital developments. And he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the entire city was like this?’” Daley advised that the important thing for blacks to do now was to let go of their bad feelings. “We could talk of the persecution of the past of the Jews and the Irish,” he said. “When I was in Ireland a few years ago, I was told they had no feelings against the English because that was all behind them. That’s how it should be here.” Independents on the council grumbled about Daley’s insincerity — and the fact that the street being dedicated to the integrationist King went through only the black ghetto. (Independent alderman Leon Despres proposed naming a street in the Loop after King — a suggestion that went nowhere.) In the end, the resolution to rename South Parkway for King passed unanimously. A week before the start of the convention, Daley spoke at ceremonies dedicating “Martin Luther King Drive.” He invoked King’s devotion to nonviolence in a verbal formulation that made it sound as if Daley had the idea first. “I once told him, and he agreed, ‘Doctor, we will never do it in conflict and violence.’” 14