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Mayor Richard J. Daley dominated Chicago’s public affairs from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, during these two decades substantially centralizing Cook County Democratic Party operations. This chapter examines Daley’s two-decade-long mayoralty. It discusses how Daley led Chicago against the context of evolving mayoral practice across the United States. It looks at contemporary Chicago’s self-promotion as a global city, in order to identify how this policy vision emerged, the salient features of the Daley administration’s engagement with globalization, and the local effects of implementing the policies that advance this vision. The discussion of Chicago particulars is further connected to a framework for interpreting mayoral initiatives across the field of US cities. While contemporary trends in Chicago cannot be understood without a healthy respect for the undead hand of the local past, the defining assumption of so much political commentary on this city—that Chicago is a machine city, and always will be—narrows understanding through its insistence that all Chicago politics is local, that the present is an undeviating, straight-line extrapolation from the local past.

This chapter focuses on Richard J. Daley, who was elected mayor of Chicago in 1955 and won re-election in the city's next five mayoral contests. It describes Daley as the undisputed boss of Chicago and the man who perfected the Cook County Democratic Party machine. It analyzes why Daley might have been the best in American history at doing what he did, in which he used a political machine to govern a large city. The chapter investigates how Daley was a scrupulously honest politician who steered clear of financial and moral improprieties but failed to adjust to the changing realities of Chicago, especially those relating to its growing black population. It also recounts Daley's death in 1976 that marked the passing of an era in Chicago history.

Chapter 1 documents how Chicago elites welcomed and promoted Michael Jordan and the Bulls of the 1990s as saviors of the city's global reputation. This process supplemented larger efforts by Mayor Richard M. Daley to restructure Chicago's economy around entertainment and cultural attractions. While the new growth model appears to have boosted local economic expansion, this conclusion requires several caveats. First, any impact attributable to the Bulls was miniscule at best. Second, this impact resulted not from investment in the United Center, but from the serendipitous arrival of Michael Jordan. Third, the city distributed the fruits of new, tourism-centered growth very unequally. Officials concentrated the public investment that buttressed this model in Chicago's downtown, leaving many outlying neighborhoods (especially non-white ones) to fend for themselves. Moreover, the new leisure opportunities proved inaccessible to most residents, as businesses increasingly targeted the affluent with luxury goods/services. Efforts to tout the Bulls as a form of civic glue papered over this increasingly unequal growth by replacing definitions of community based on class with definitions rooted in fandom. They also ignored viable forms of more racially and economically equitable urban revitalization pursued with marked success during the early 1980s by Mayor Harold Washington.

What was once a descriptor—Chicago as the last major American city government governed by a political machine—has become a trope, an all-purpose means of explaining public policy aims, achievements, and failures. The nearer-to-reality narrative that captures the essence of Chicago public policy trends in the last generation is neoliberalism. During the long tenure of Mayor Richard M. Daley Chicago’s demolition of high-rise public housing developments, public school restructuring, and long-term leasing of public assets both tracked broader neoliberal policy trends, and in some cases, represented the leading edge of such innovations. Nevertheless, many journalists and some scholars insist on interpreting Chicago politics and policy through the lens of personal corruption and partisan cronyism presumed to be the fundamental attributes of ward-based Democratic Party politics

This chapter focuses on the push for institutional change that accompanied the shift from the paradigm of privatism to that of public-private redevelopment partnerships in mid-twentieth century Chicago. The fragmentation of the city’s institutional arrangements posed an obstacle to the new slum clearance and redevelopment program, since execution of projects required centralized decision making and limited opportunities to delay and obstruct projects. The chapter describes the decade-long effort to consolidate the city’s various agencies involved with the city’s redevelopment program in one department, eliminating inefficiencies and making the obstruction of projects more difficult. The chapter findings support the argument that the prospects for new policy paradigms are determined in part by their fit with a city’s institutional arrangements.

This chapter looks into the Democratic National Convention that returned to Chicago in 1996. It describes the Convention as the first presidential-nominating convention to be held in Chicago since the infamous and nationally televised 1968 Democratic National Convention. The chapter mentions Michael Bilandic, a shy, careful, competent, and hardworking lawyer, who succeeded Richard J. Daley as mayor of Chicago in 1976. It investigates how Bilandic kept Chicago on a straight course, even if he did not provide dynamic leadership. It also recounts Bilandic's undoing due to the fabled Blizzard of 1979, in which record-breaking snowstorms hit Chicago and caused a cold spell that kept the snow on the ground for fifty days.

This chapter describes how Chicago’s slum clearance and redevelopment program was carried out during the 1950s and 1960s. The city’s urban renewal program was informed by the new policy paradigm of using public-private partnerships to clear and redevelop blighted areas. The goal of eliminating slums wherever they existed was carried forward from the privatist period of the early twentieth century, but the involvement of private developers in the program was accompanied by an additional objective: achieving the highest and best use of land. This chapter argues that these two goals proved to be irreconcilable. Efforts to achieve the highest and best use of land had the perverse effect of extending and reproducing slums, not eliminating them. As fast as slums were cleared in one location they reappeared somewhere else, leaving policymakers and housing advocates at a loss to identify a practicable course of action.

The late 19th and 20th century Great Migration of southern Black Americans permanently changed Chicago, with Mayors RJ and RM Daley overseeing its segregated neighborhoods. The dual Daley dynasty spanned more than four decades, including ML King’s 1960s housing marches and activist Fred Hampton’s assassination. With RM Daley’s apparent knowledge, a “midnight crew” led by detective Jon Burge tortured more than one hundred Black suspects during the 1970s–1990s. Burge’s tenure included the 1982 tortured confession of a police killer, Andrew Wilson, which coincided with RM Daley’s first unsuccessful effort to win a nomination for Mayor. The suspicion that Daley was awarene of the torture lasted throughout his career. With Daley’s acquiescence, Burge eluded criminal conviction until 2010. A police code of silence covered up Burge’s torture and his racist criminality, masquerading behind badges of law and legality. The failure to prosecute Burge for torture crimes showed how a naive belief in the rule of law could devastate the hyper-segregated neighborhoods of a quintessential American city.

This chapter describes the development of Dearborn Park, a new housing development built in the South Loop during the 1970s and early 1980s. Dearborn Park, sponsored and financed by a group of downtown business leaders associated with the Chicago Central Area Committee, was an effort to initiate the transformation of the near-downtown area into middle-class residential communities. The project was intended to increase the presence of middle-class whites in the downtown area, an objective viewed as central to the protection of downtown property values. Yet the project’s sponsors also sought to achieve some racial diversity in the new development. Concerned that the city’s growing black population would intensify white flight, the sponsors of Dearborn Park viewed the development as a model community that would disrupt rigid patterns of thinking about race and housing and persuade whites that integrated neighborhoods could work.

This chapter argues that old Chicago School with its paradigms of concentric rings of development, radial racial expansion, black/white segregation, and the political machine model of former Major Richard J. Daley is inadequate in the twenty-first century, even in Chicago. The old ecological image of cities is better replaced with the metaphor of the human body or the body politic. The heart and brain are in the political machine downtown and the public-private partnership called the “growth machine” or regime. The rest of the body politic is made up of networks stretching throughout the metropolitan region. Since 2001, urban scholars from a number of colleges and universities have banded together to found a new Chicago school of urbanism. Its premise is that globalization has changed Chicago, but that Chicago has not automatically copied other global cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, or Paris. The new Daley machine is also a central focus of the new paradigms developed by the new Chicago School.

This chapter describes the process through which city officials and the city’s leading downtown business group, the Chicago Central Area Committee, came together around a program for revitalizing downtown. By the early 1970s, business leaders had lost faith in the slum clearance program and had become increasingly focused on a new objective: redeveloping the near downtown area for middle-class housing that would provide a nearby workforce for downtown businesses, along with patrons for downtown retail establishments, restaurants, and places of entertainment. New housing developments would insulate the Loop from economically distressed areas on the city’s South and West Sides, places that were now considered largely irredeemable. The policy paradigm for engaging with the city’s blighted areas was once again in transition. The goal of eliminating slums altogether, an objective held by city officials and civic leaders since the early twentieth century, was largely abandoned, replaced by a more one-dimensional focus on achieving the highest and best use of land. These goals were embodied in a new plan for the central area called Chicago 21: A Plan for the Central Area Communities, prepared by the Central Area Committee and adopted by the city as its plan for the central area.

This chapter discusses the conflicted history behind the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC). During the 1950s, Mayor Richard J. Daley opted to construct a school in an act meant to modernize the city, however, the ideal site for the new university was on Halsted Street, in an area known as the Hull-House Social Settlement—a campus representing the old neighborhood-based traditions of higher education. The dispute over the Hull-House property illustrates the tension between the old and new forms of pedagogical projects, as well as the pressing need for the mass production of higher education that can keep pace with the city’s progress. Despite protests, however, the UICC was eventually installed over Hull-House land, albeit the original Hull House itself remains intact, now integrated into the UI campus.

This chapter focuses on the diverse members of the Rainbow Coalition and how they not only served their immediate communities but also envisioned a larger sea shift in Chicago politics from the conservative Democratic machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley to “all power to the people.” At the coalition's height in mid-1969, more than a dozen Panther sites on the West and South sides fed about four thousand children daily—solely through donations. The programming of the Young Patriots and Young Lords echoed that of the Panthers, from serving their own free breakfasts and running free health clinics to building “people's parks” and just being advocates for regular folks. In addition, all three groups, sometimes together, sometimes apart, intensified their critique of police harassment of poor people.

This chapter frames the subsequent analyses with a vignette of a congressional debate between urban and rural constituencies. In this exchange, city politician par excellence Richard J. Daley articulates the priorities of cities and explains their pursuit of allies, while rural representatives cite the formidable unity of urban legislators as a reason for maintaining cities’ historic underrepresentation. But the very premise of this rural position—that cities are sites of political unity—demands scrutiny. After all, cities are the sites of all kinds of continual and recurrent contention, both violent and subtle. From where did the political unity of urban representation, constructed from deeply divided “pre-political” building blocks, come? This is the key question of the book. The chapter also describes the original data gathered for the project and situates the analysis within the study of the effects of local institutions on national politics.