American Pharaoh (60 page)

The fight over Chicago’s anti-poverty programs was starting to heat up. The War on Poverty was being attacked on both sides:
Daley and his fellow mayors charged that it was being used to undermine elected city government, while poverty activists contended
that city governments had hijacked programs that were intended to be run by poor people. Chicago’s CAP was operating, its
critics said, with maximum feasible participation of the Democratic machine. At the central office, Deton Brooks and his staff
carefully screened funding applications to make sure that no anti-poverty money found its way to the machine’s enemies. And
at the community level, the advisory Organization protested that only seven of its nominees had been selected for the twenty-five-member
Woodlawn advisory council — not enough to have any real impact on its decisions. Daley responded by raising the number of
TWO members to twenty-one, but at the same time increasing the council’s total membership to seventy-five, maintaining machine
control. In making its funding decisions, the Woodlawn advisory council steered clear of projects that might possibly stir
up trouble. It rejected a $500,000 program by the Interreligious Council on Urban Affairs to develop leaders in West Side
neighborhoods, but accepted another proposal for choir singing. The Woodlawn Organization tried an end-run around the machine
by submitting two proposals — for a medical center and for a day-care center — directly to the OEO, but both were rejected.
The overall result of the Chicago Concept, its critics charged, was that poor people were shut out of the decision-making
process. “The poor are being pushed out of planning poverty programs by men who drive Cadillacs, eat three-inch steaks and
sip champagne at their luncheon meetings,” one minister complained.
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The allegations that Daley’s Chicago Concept was violating the CAP guidelines were heard in Washington. In January 1965, the
OEO notified Brooks that Chicago’s CAP was in danger of having councils were firmly in the grip of machine loyalists. The
Woodlawn its funding cut off. As it turned out, Chicago kept its funding but Robert D. Shackford, the acting head of the OEO’s
midwestern office who lodged the complaint, lost his job. His post was later filled by Theodore Jones, the same black machine
politician Daley and Dawson had installed as president of the Chicago branch of the NAACP in 1956, replacing the activist
Willoughby Abner. Though it seemed obvious that Daley had forced Shackford out and dictated Jones’s appointment, Shriver dismissed
the charges as “rumor-mongering.” Daley was one of “hundreds of people” who had been consulted before Jones’s selection, Shriver
conceded, “but under no stretch of the imagination did Daley suggest him or force such an appointment.” A year later, Governor
Kerner rewarded Jones for his work at the OEO by appointing him state revenue director. In April 1965, the House Committee
on Education and Labor’s subcommittee on the War on Poverty held hearings at which critics were given a national forum to
lash out against Daley’s management of CAP. “In Chicago, there is no war against poverty,” TWO president Lynward Stevenson
fumed. “There is only more of the ancient, galling war against the poor.” Stevenson attacked Chicago’s CAP for shutting out
neighborhood organizations. “We have asked Deton Brooks for funds for a day care center and for a medical center, but he cannot
talk sense,” he said. “He speaks the meaningless sociological drivel designed not to lift people but to keep them dependent.”
But for Stevenson, the real villain was Daley, whom he called “a plantation boss who thinks he knows what’s right for the
slaves.”
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Daley had his own concerns about CAP. He worried that poor people’s advocates would find a way to gain access to the program’s
funding, and use it to hurt the machine. And he believed that the OEO was too sympathetic to these insurgent forces. As the
Shack-ford firing showed, Daley’s political connections allowed him to have his way with the program. When necessary, he was
willing to take his complaints directly to the president. “What in the hell are you people doing?” Johnson aide Bill Moyers
recalls Daley asking. “Does the President know he’s putting
money
in the hands of subversives? To poor people that aren’t a part of the organization? Didn’t the President know they’d take
that money to bring him down?” Johnson, who did not want to risk losing Daley’s support over the issue of community participation
in CAP, would regularly take his side over the OEO. “We had problems with Daley on
everything,
” says CAP director of operations Frederick Hayes, “and he always went to the White House, and always won.” Other mayors
had more trouble fighting off the federal bureaucrats. Philadelphia mayor James Tate tried to create a city department to
run the War on Poverty, but when he asked for $13 million in federal funds, Sargent Shriver turned him down until the city
established an independent anti-poverty organization. Shriver was also openly feuding with Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty over
that city’s failure to establish a program that sufficiently included the poor. The OEO said the city’s Youth Opportunities
Board failed to meet federal guidelines because it did not represent all of the city’s constituencies. Yet despite its obvious
domination by City Hall and the machine, Shriver hailed Chicago’s CAP as “the model CAP in the country.”
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Daley eventually became the leader of a group of big-city mayors who shared his concerns about the uses to which CAP was being
put. In New York, Mayor Wagner was at war with Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell over control of New York’s anti-poverty
funds, which Powell charged were being used for “fiestas of political patronage.” In Los Angeles, Mayor Yorty was risking
$22 million in federal funds by refusing to appoint representatives of the poor to his board, insisting that it would be wrong
to allow nonelected private citizens to make decisions about spending public money. In San Francisco, Mayor John Shelley also
refused to allow representatives of the poor, asking, “What if they elect a Communist or a criminal?” And Syracuse’s Republican
mayor William Walsh charged that anti-poverty money in his city was going to political activists who seemed intent on removing
him from office. “These people go into a housing project and talk about setting up a ‘democratic organization’ — small ‘d’
— but it sounds just the same as Democratic — big ‘d,’” Walsh complained.
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Daley and the other mayors insisted that more control over the program be given to city government. The mayors made it clear
that unless CAP yielded to them, they would withdraw their political support. Daley warned that the “irresponsible, scurrilous
charges” being lodged by organizations like TWO threatened the very survival of the War on Poverty. Congressman Roman Pucinski,
following his boss’s lead, warned that as a result of the “fantastic power struggle going on all over America” for control
of CAP, “the poverty program has never been in graver danger.” At a June 1965 meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in
Saint Louis, Daley was chosen to chair a new War on Poverty Committee. The mayors were prepared to adopt a resolution accusing
federal anti-poverty programs of “fostering class struggle” against city government, and urging the OEO to work through city
halls in administering CAP projects. But they agreed that rather than embarrass the president by doing so, they would work
with the administration to change its anti-poverty policy. Later in the month, Daley and a group of his fellow mayors had
a productive meeting on the subject with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. “It was agreed that the success of the program depends
on very extensive leadership by local government and that’s what they are going to get,” said Conference of Mayors executive
director John J. Gunther. “The local government is to be the principal organizer at the local level.” The Johnson administration,
true to its word, began to exert pressure on the OEO to address the mayors’ concerns. A front-page article in the
New York Times
on November 5, 1965, reported that the Budget Bureau, the fiscal arm of the White House, had informed the OEO that in its
view maximum feasible participation “means primarily using the poor to carry out the program, not to design it.” Reports leaking
out of the OEO also indicated that controversial programs would no longer be permitted to bypass city government and appeal
for funds directly to Washington.
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In another sign of warming relations between the OEO and the nations’ mayors, Shriver went to Chicago on December 6 for a
Daley-sponsored conference on the War on Poverty. Daley used the conference to promote his idea of having politicians control
anti-poverty efforts. “What’s wrong ... if the politician is conducting his office in a proper manner with integrity and with
honor?” Daley asked. In his remarks, Shriver echoed Daley’s views by praising the positive role “the establishment” was playing
in the War on Poverty. “Let’s not prejudge the establishment,” Shriver said. “The establishment is not a bunch of guys in
black hats against good guys in white hats.” Shriver was warmly received inside the hall. But the two hundred demonstrators
gathered outside, holding placards with slogans like “The war on poverty is a big fraud,” were less impressed. And The Woodlawn
Organization was circulating an eleven-page “black paper” attacking the War on Poverty as a war against the poor. “We are
sick unto despair of having rich whites and their carefully chosen black flunkies tell us what our problems are, make decisions
for us, and set our children’s future,” the black paper declared. Shriver’s new stand on maximum feasible participation seemed
to reflect the current thinking of the Johnson administration, but some critics also suspected a more personal motivation.
Shriver reportedly wanted to run for governor or senator from Illinois, and his new views on CAP seemed like a blatant appeal
for Daley’s support.
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What was being lost in the rush to capitulate to Daley was the fact that his CAP continued to flout federal law. There was
still, as Republican congressman Charles Goodell insisted, an “almost total lack of involvement of the poor in the Chicago
program.” There was also evidence that much of the money was not making its way to poor people: a study of Chicago’s Head
Start program found that more than 27 percent of the enrolled children came from families with incomes above the legal limit,
including some “very affluent” children. Federal investigators had also determined that more than 70 percent of all anti-poverty
funds spent in the city was going to pay salaries of anti-poverty workers, which seemed to support critics’ charges that money
for poor people was being used for patronage. A bipartisan delegation headed by New York Democrat Hugh Carey came to Chicago
on February 16, 1965, to investigate Chicago’s anti-poverty programs firsthand. But no one had made Daley comply with the
law so far, and it seemed unlikely a few critics in Congress would have any more success.
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Martin Luther King, who was by now leaning strongly toward bringing his movement north to Chicago, had his mind made up for
him one sweltering summer night in Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, a California highway patrolman pulled over a black man
for what should have been a routine driving-while-intoxicated stop. But Watts, a northern-style ghetto set down among the
palm trees of Southern California, responded by erupting in rioting. As false rumors spread — among them, that the officers
had attacked a pregnant woman with a billy club — a crowd showed up at the scene and began throwing rocks at the police. A
mob of 2,000 was soon roaming the area, vandalizing cars, looting stores, and assaulting strangers. It grew to 5,000, many
armed with guns and Molotov cocktails, and spread out over a 150-block area. Arsonists set hundreds of fires, and snipers
shot at the 14,000 National Guardsmen who had been called in to put down the disturbance. After six days of rioting, the death
toll stood at 34, with another 898 injured, and more than 4,000 arrested. Economic losses were estimated at $45 million.
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