#7 Vote Early, Vote Often, Vote Daley ✅
And why is Chicago's I-290 Expressway named after a Republican?
Molly and I are getting married Monday afternoon, 8/31.
I promise to put pictures in next week's newsletter :)
We’re looking forward to celebrating with you in a year or two. We’ll throw a big party once it’s safe to hold a big party.
From Warren Beatty’s attorney🖱️ who keeps encouraging me to write on Speaker Madigan:
How did Mayor Kennelly lose to Daley in the Democratic Primary? Why didn’t the Party allow him to try for a third term?
Chairman Daley allowed Mayor Kennelly to run for a third term. But, as you note, to represent the Democratic Party in the general election Kennelly needed to win the primary first.
From Anton Cermak’s election in 1931 to the day Richard J. Daley died in 1976, a Democratic candidate in Chicago lived or died by the Machine. If a candidate, even a two-term Mayor, didn’t have the Machine’s support then they were toast. That’s why the tall, handsome, two-term Mayor Kennelly lost by 100,000 votes to short, squat Chairman Daley.
In fact, Daley was so angered that Mayor Kennelly wouldn’t step aside that he decided to show Kennelly who’s boss. For example, Daley tried to get his name listed first on the primary ballot. In midcentury Chicago, the first-listed name on the ballot would go to the candidate who filed their petitions first with the city clerk. Mike Royko writes:
On the first day for filing petitions, Kennelly’s men were waiting outside the city clerk’s office before it opened, watching for the mail to arrive with his petitions. The mail bag came, a city employee opened the clerk’s office and carried the bag inside, stamped it “8:18 A.M.,” dumped the contents out, and there were Kennelly’s petitions. His men smiled.
Just then, somebody noticed another mail bag, outside the private office of the city clerk. It had been brought in the back door, while the front door was still locked, and was stamped “8:13 A.M.” In it were Daley’s petitions. Kennelly’s men protested, but there are no laws against mail coming in the back door. (87).
In sum, Mayor Kennelly couldn’t convince his own city clerk, a hand-selected appointee, to timestamp his petitions before Chairman Daley’s. Power.
The passage of power from Mayor Kennelly (double-breasted jacket) to Richard J. Daley. Oath administered by Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz.
From Hilary Sallerson who makes a fantastic panzanella but won’t share the recipe:
My question is about Col. Jacob Arvey. How did he become a power dealer? Was it charisma, brutality, money or bribery? In such a tough city like Chicago, how does a minority rise to such influence?
The second paragraph of Arvey’s New York Times’ obit 🖱️sums it up:
Colonel Arvey was the paradigm of the pragmatic, cigar‐chomping kingmaker, an unswerving party loyalist with a gift for organization, a knack for picking candidates and a tigerish belief that elections —even Presidential elections—are won in the wards by “keeping em satisfied.”
Notice the paragraph doesn’t mention Col. Arvey’s Judaism. The lesson he grasped is that all politics is local: Organize your ward, keep your ward happy, and the Party will provide.
The Helmut Jahn-designed James R. Thompson Center is an eyesore in a City that prides its architecture. Also terrible A/C!
P.S. “The Ike”
One of Mayor Kennelly’s accomplishments is that his Administration started construction of Chicago’s 90/94/I-290 highways.
In 1961, upon Kennelly's death, an Alderman proposed naming I-290 “Martin H. Kennelly Expressway.” Mayor Daley hated the idea so much that he decided to name it for a Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower.