Richard J. Daley - Early Life

Early Life

Richard J. Daley was born in Bridgeport, a working-class neighborhood of Chicago. He was the only child of Michael and Lillian (Dunne) Daley, whose families had both arrived from the Old Parish area, near Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland during the Great Famine.

Daley would later state that his wellsprings were his religion, his family, his neighborhood, the Democratic Party, and his love of the city. His father was a sheet metal worker with a reserved demeanor. Michael's father, James E. Daley, was a butcher born in New York, while his mother, Delia Gallagher Daley, was an Irish immigrant. Richard's mother was outgoing and outspoken. Before women obtained the right to vote in 1920, Lillian Daley was an active Suffragette, participating in marches. Mrs. Daley often brought her son to them. She hoped her son's life would be more professionally successful than that of his parents. Prior to his mother's death, Daley had won the Democratic nomination for Cook County sheriff. Lillian Daley wanted more than this for her son, telling a friend, "I didn't raise my son to be a policeman."

Daley attended the elementary school of his parish, Nativity of Our Lord, and De La Salle Institute (where he learned clerical skills) and took night classes at DePaul University College of Law to earn a Juris Doctor in 1933. As a young man, his jobs included selling newspapers and making deliveries for a door to door peddler; Daley worked in Chicago's Union stock yards (the conditions of which were made infamous in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle) to pay his law school expenses. He spent the free time he had at the Hamburg Athletic Club, a sports, social, and political organization near his home. Hamburg and similar clubs were funded, at least in part, by the Democratic machine politicians of the day. Daley made his mark there, not in sports, but in organization as the club manager. At age 22 he was elected president of the club and served in that office until 1939. Daley, though he practiced law with partner William J. Lynch, spent the majority of his time dedicated to his career in politics.