Democratic Party Machine Politics
| This section does not cite any references or sources. |
Known for shrewd party politics, Daley was a stereotypical machine politician, and his Chicago Democratic Machine, based on control of thousands of patronage positions, was instrumental in bringing a narrow 8,000 vote victory in Illinois for John F. Kennedy in 1960. A PBS documentary entitled "Daley" explained that Mayor Daley and JFK potentially stole the 1960 election by stuffing ballot boxes and rigging the vote in Chicago. In addition, it reveals, Daley withheld many votes from certain wards when the race seemed close.
Daley was usually open with the news media, meeting with them for frequent news conferences, and taking all questions — if not answering all of them. According to columnist and biographer Mike Royko, Daley got along better with editors and publishers than with reporters. From Royko:
"...in general, he views the papers as his enemy. The reporters, specifically. They want to know things that are none of their business, because they are little men. Editors, at least, have power, but he doesn't understand why they let reporters exercise it."
Daley had limited opposition among the 50 aldermen of the Chicago City Council. For the most part, the aldermen supported Daley and the official party position consistently, except for a small number of Republicans from the German wards on the northwest side of the city and a small number of independents (a group that grew during Daley's mayoralty to represent groups that felt disenfranchised by Daley's policies).
Daley's chief means of attaining electoral success was his reliance on local precinct captains, who marshaled and delivered votes on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Many of these precinct captains held patronage jobs with the city, mostly minor posts at low pay. Each ward had a ward leader in charge of the precinct captains, some of whom were corrupt. The notorious First Ward (encompassing downtown, which had many businesses but few residents) was tied to the local mafia or crime syndicate, but Daley's own ward was supposedly clean and his personal honesty was never questioned successfully.
Read more about this topic: Richard J. Daley
Famous quotes containing the words democratic party, democratic, party, machine and/or politics:
“The Democratic Party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.”
—Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901)
“People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“A stiff apology is a second insult.... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist’s hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959)
“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)