Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ and “machine” Democrats, even though these were not neatly separable camps.⁴³ Except for a few diehard “goo-goos” who wielded little power, nearly all Chicago politicians accepted that the lifeblood of urban governance was the exchange of patronage for votes.⁴⁴ Most, too, at various moments in their political careers, found it advantageous to advocate reforms or to wrap themselves in reform’s mantle. Precisely to tamp down the perception that his election in 1955 meant a triumph of machine patronage, for example, Daley quickly centralized the former aldermanic control over driveway permits—an especially lucrative form of graft—and other favors that city council members could do for their constituents.⁴⁵ Tacking back and forth between the politics of the machine and of reform was a well-worn path to success.

      In Chicago at midcentury, the New Deal coalition embodied the aspirations of sons and daughters of the Depression for material prosperity, combined with the expectation for men to labor remuneratively outside the home and women to labor inside the home to create a comfortable home and rear children. Ordinary men in the 1950s wanted and were expected to become family men. A young man from a middle-class, predominantly white North Side neighborhood wrote that at his age, “Most Lake View guys are married, have a few kids, know a good trade and have a car.”⁴⁶ A few miles to the west, social-service workers who engaged with poor and working-class young black and Latino men were making similar observations: “It is okay to remain single until around age twenty-eight, but if you have not married and settled down by that time, the male is considered ‘queer.’”⁴⁷ Women were expected to marry at an even younger age.

      Gays and lesbians in postwar America lived at least partly outside this framework, which the historian Robert Self has labeled “breadwinner liberalism.”⁴⁸ At once provincial and self-consciously modern, the powerful men who ran Chicago’s political machine embraced a welfare state whose provisions were as generous as they were narrowly premised on a white, straight, nuclear-family formation. The high tide of Daley’s mayoral administration coincided with the peak of breadwinner liberalism’s status in American politics. Advertisements for his first campaign, in 1955, featured his wife and seven children; “Let’s elect a Family Man to represent the families of Chicago,” said one.”⁴⁹ For Daley, a spotlight on his large family helped focus media coverage on his blue-collar Irish Catholic parish life, rather than his ties to downtown business interests or his connections to men with syndicate ties. “Smoke filled room?” asked the caption of a photo of the Daleys at the breakfast table in one print advertisement for his campaign. “Yes, filled with the smoke of bacon and eggs frying in the pan.”⁵⁰ Upon his sudden death during his sixth term in office, in 1976, the Chicago Tribune obituary said, “He prided himself on being a ‘family man’ in a city of family men.”⁵¹

      In this context of machine politics, family ties held together households, but also wards, neighborhoods, and political relationships. Alderman Vito Marzullo, one of Daley’s closest allies on the city council, later described his loyalty to the mayor in terms that illustrate how deeply heterosexuality was built into local political culture: “He’s a great family man…. I got six married children. He came to every one of their weddings. He invited me to the weddings of every one of his kids. You don’t go back on people like that.” Heterosexual marriages were also interlaced with the dynamics of patronage hiring, thus helping form the glue of the local political culture.⁵²

      Daley was elected in 1955 partly because black voters rebelled against a reform mayor who seemed to crack down only on policy gambling and jitney cabs in their areas while leaving white criminal entrepreneurs untouched. Kennelly, the city’s mayor at the time of the Kefauver hearings, had been slated by the Democratic machine in 1947 as a “reformer,” to replace Edward J. Kelly, who had consolidated Cermak’s party organization since Cermak’s death in 1933.⁵³ Testifying during the Kefauver hearings, Kennelly awkwardly defended the city. The episode increased the pressure on him to crack down on corruption and syndicate businesses, and he responded by cracking down on the illegal policy-gambling racket in black neighborhoods, as well as the illicit, unregulated jitney-cab regime there.⁵⁴ This crackdown, in turn, displeased black voters, who had been only recently converted to vote Democratic in local elections. In the process, Kennelly garnered the public enmity of U.S. Representative William L. Dawson, boss of the black “submachine,” as well as the antipathy of many Italian and other white-ethnic voters in the city’s poor, machine-dominated “river wards.” Many working-class white voters, too, were more loyal to their machine precinct captains than to the mayor’s downtown allies, and they had little interest in Kennelly’s drive against illegal gambling.

      By December 1954, Kennelly seemed so weak that the machine ousted him from the ballot, slating Richard J. Daley to run as the machine’s candidate. The bitter, expensive primary contest that followed was the first local race featuring television commercials. Though a Catholic himself, Kennelly’s strongest backers were the Protestant business elite. In a city with one of the most densely concentrated Catholic populations in the country, Daley, the ward heeler who had served for two years as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Organization, benefited from the perception of Kennelly as elitist and out of touch.⁵⁵ Indeed, the Chicago Tribune had long taunted Kennelly for his failure to marry, and his opponent exploited the opening.⁵⁶ Daley’s children were featured in campaign materials labeled “A Family Man for a Family City” (see Figure 1).⁵⁷ The Tribune had reported on Daley’s “happy family life with his wife … and their seven children” just before his primary win.⁵⁸

FIGURE 1. Primary campaign placard for Richard J. Daley, February 1955. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.

      In the equally hard-fought 1955 general election for mayor that followed, organized crime—with its corollary, vice—was a central issue. Daley’s Republican general-election opponent, Robert Merriam, charged that Daley would end Kennelly’s crackdown on policy gambling, and the city would become “wide open.” He quoted Variety as saying that “strip tease joints have started to reopen in anticipation of a Daley victory and wide open conditions,” according to one journalist.⁵⁹ In a veiled reference to Daley’s evident willingness to tolerate policy gambling in black neighborhoods, Merriam charged, “There’s no such thing as limiting the evils of a wide open city to one section.”⁶⁰ Faced with these charges, Daley claimed he would wage “an all-out war on crime in every form” to make “our neighborhood streets safe for women and children” and to ensure that “the syndicate will be driven out of Chicago.”⁶¹ Daley’s election as mayor made him unusually powerful because he had served as chairman of the Cook County party organization, a post he continued to hold as mayor. Moving rapidly, he centralized control of the city he would govern for two decades. Ominously for gays and lesbians, however, Daley had campaigned on a promise to fight crime and protect women and children—and the pressure for more aggressive policing would soon escalate.

       “To Round Up Sex Deviates Is the Best Procedure”

      Bar raids were accompanied by another, more complex but equally pernicious form of police harassment. Chicago’s four daily newspapers, which competed for a readership increasingly dominated by young parents, devoted sensational coverage to violent sexual crimes against children, in a society notably obsessed with families, children, and child rearing, and at a time when men and women married at younger ages than ever before or since. Experts in psychiatry and criminology fielded questions from journalists and offered authoritative comments about sexual degenerates, sexual psychopaths, and sex fiends, as well as the broader and more loosely defined category of deviates, conflating consensual and forced acts.⁶²

      The occasion for Chicago’s worst such panic was a triple murder in the fall of 1955. Three teenage boys disappeared and their bodies were soon found abandoned in a wooded area in a forest preserve on the СКАЧАТЬ