American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation

This book is filled with wonderful political anecdotes and is very informative on the racial polarity in Chicago. Especially fascinating are Chicago Housing Authority chief Elizabeth Wood's valiant attempt to integrate public housing and Martin Luther King's crusade for open housing, both defeated by horrifically violent white opposition. A book for anyone interested in politics or racial issues.

This is a spectacularly well put together book. Part biography and part public policy analysis with plenty of hindsight, it allows one to see a cross-section of the machines that used to dominate the big cities of the United States. Richard J. Daley exemplified this aspect of urban politics, rising as he did from the lowest ranks of the machine to hold the position of mayor for twenty-one years.Several things struck me about this book. First, the degree to which current mayor Richard M. Daley has followed through on his father's plans. The Chicago 21 urban renewal program has received a huge boost, albeit parsed out into smaller increments, and continues to keep the south side/State Street ghetto alive. He uses similar tactics in his bargaining with Springfield for state budget allowances; his anti-poverty programs tend to benefit the contractors instead of the poor.Second, with a few exceptions, the book is very objective. They never call the mayor a liar when he is being blatantly dishonest and I often wished that they would express at least a little outrage at his willingness to overlook police graft, racist lynchings, and corruption far surpassing that which is currently making waves in the Illinois political environment today. The man makes Betty Loren Maltese look practically civil! Yet the authors, who do highlight Daley's poor treatment of minorities and the impoverished, do so merely by enumerating the evidence against him, not with Royko-esque name-calling.A widespread criticism of this book is that the mayor's personal life is utterly absent and that the research involves mainly personal interviews and contemporary newspaper articles. It would have been nice to have had more information about his family, but Daley went to great pains to shield them from his public life until they were old enough to participate in it themselves. It also bears mentioning that the University of Illinois at Chicago has the complete archive of Daley's papers, but that the Daley family has blocked any public access to them whatsoever. Until this changes, this is simply the best book you will find on the subject.

Speaking as a former department head of the Chicago Housing Authority for ten years from 1945 to 1955 and as a long time professor of urban studies and social welfare at Loyola University of Chicago, may I say that American Pharaoh is the best and most faithful book to have been published about Mayor Daley that I have yet seen.Certainly from the point of view of those who believe that public housing was and can be a most worthwhile contribution to the US urban scene, this is an indispensable piece of history.It tells what public housing was in the twenty years when Elizabeth Wood administered the program, how it served working poor families - most of whom were mom and pop families. It shows how congregate housing could provide good shelter for families both on a separate and an integrated basis. Likewise it describes the machinations which relieved her of her job. But most important it tells of the twenty years of the Daley administration which because of its hostility to public housing put in charge of the Chicago Housing Authority a series of mediocre, incompetent, and most of all uninterested executive directors who allowed and virtually guided public housing to its present straits, where it is today the housing of last resort. Finally it does what is equally rare. It shows how the 1969 Gautreaux case, the US Supreme Court decision that was calculated to help public housing and racial integration, has actually had minimal results. Moreover, the case has resulted in a situation where virtually no more public housing has been built since 1969.Jim Fuerst, Chicago, IL

Cohen and Taylor have written both a masterful piece of investigative journalism and a captivating political biography. In many ways, this book should be required reading for anyone doing college or graduate level research in the fields of American urban or domestic political science or history. Almost like Finley Peter Dunne's MISTER DOOLEY--which it often quotes--this volume takes you inside the Chicago Democratic machine and shows just how omnipotent the organization was during Daley's tenure at the helm, not without an occasional touch of humor and irony. As its subtitle promises, the book also places Daley and his machine in the context of national (and Illionis) politics, over which they had such enormous influence, especially during the late 1950s and all through the 1960s. The authors paint a portrait of Daley that shows his enormous personal complexity--a devout Catholic and loyal family man who did not hesitate to engage in the most bare-fisted power politics or work to capitalize on the basest human instincts. While I tend to agree with other reviewers that the book focusses a bit heavily on racial matters during the Daley mayoralty, they played a major role during this period and Daley's attempt to balance the competing interests of white ethnics and black citizens ultimately undermined the absolute authority of the Chicago Democratic machine. I disagree with reviewers who say that the authors were too anti-Daley; I feel they made an honest effort to credit him for the considerable accomplishments of his tenure--including the preservation of Downtown Chicago as a going concern when so many other rust belt cities in the Midwest and Great Lakes area were going under (e.g., Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh). They make clear, however, the enormous price that was paid for his accomplishments, including the subversion of democracy and the exacerbation of racial tensions in Chicago.

I picked up this book after reading the very positive review in the Sunday New York Times. I knew little about Daley beyond the 1968 Convention. The authors succeed at telling the story not only of this one very intriguing man but also of how the modern city of Chicago emerged during his two decades in office. I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in biography or modern American history, or of course, Chicago. The book is heavily sourced, both to local news accounts -- something which has been inexplicably criticized by other reviewers in this column -- as well as over a hundred interviews conducted by the authors (e.g., William Daley, Daniel Rostenkowski). This is a praiseworthy and fascinating effort by the writers to tell the story as it happened, not as various political or religious viewpoints would like it to be told.