Richard Joseph Daley (May 15, 1902 – December 20, 1976) was an American politician who served as the mayor of Chicago from 1955, and the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party from 1953, until his death. He has been called "the last of the big city bosses" who controlled and mobilized American cities. He was the patriarch of a powerful Chicago political family. His son Richard M. Daley went on to serve as mayor of Chicago, and another son, William M. Daley, served as United States Secretary of Commerce and White House Chief of Staff.
As mayor, Daley is remembered for doing much to save Chicago from the declines that other Rust Belt cities, such as Cleveland and Detroit, experienced during the same period. He lived his entire life in the working-class, heavily Irish American neighborhood of Bridgeport on Chicago's South Side. Daley had a strong base of support in Chicago's Irish Catholic community and was treated by national politicians such as Lyndon B. Johnson as a pre-eminent Irish American, with special connections to the Kennedy family. Daley played a major role in the history of the Democratic Party, especially with his support of John F. Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960 and of Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election of 1968. He was the longest-serving mayor in Chicago history until his record was broken by his son Richard M. Daley in 2011. He has been ranked by some historians as among the ten best mayors in American history.
Daley's legacy is complicated by criticisms of machine politics or Chicago-style politics. His response to the Chicago riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and his handling of the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention held in his city are seen as failures. During his tenure, he also had enemies within the Democratic Party. In addition, many members of Daley's administration were charged with and convicted of corruption, although Daley himself was never charged with any crime.
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. Richard's father was a sheet metal worker with a reserved demeanor. Michael's father, James E. Daley, was a butcher born in New York City, 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 and often bringing her son to them. She hoped her son's life would be more professionally successful than that of his parents. Before his mother's death, Daley had won the Democratic nomination for Cook County sheriff. Lillian wanted more than this for her son, telling a friend, "I didn't raise my son to be a policeman." Daley would later state that his wellsprings were his religion, his family, his neighborhood, the Democratic Party, and his love of the city.
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 Bachelor of Laws in 1933. As a young man, Daley's jobs included selling newspapers and making deliveries for a door-to-door peddler; he worked in Chicago's Union stock yards to pay his law school expenses. He spent his free time as a member of the Hamburg Athletic Club, an athletic, social, and political organization - which was also a street gang - near his home. Hamburg and similar clubs were funded, at least in part, by local Democratic politicians. 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. Although he practiced law with partner William J. Lynch, he dedicated the majority of his time to his political career.
Daley's career in politics began when he became a Democratic precinct captain. Having served as secretary for previous County Treasurers Joseph B. McDonough, Thomas D. Nash, Robert M. Sweitzer, and Joseph L. Gill, he was appointed the Chief Deputy Comptroller of Cook County on December 17, 1936, to replace Michael J. O'Connor, who had died on December 9.
Daley's first elective office was in the Illinois House of Representatives, to which he was elected for the 9th district on November 3, 1936, alongside Democratic incumbents William J. Gormley and Peter P. Jezierny. Despite being a lifelong Democrat, he was elected to the office as a Republican. This was a matter of political opportunism and the peculiar setup for legislative elections in Illinois at the time, which allowed Daley to take the place on the ballot of the recently deceased Republican candidate David Shanahan. Daley's name was not printed on the ballot due to the closeness of Shanahan's death to the election, but he was able to defeat Shanahan's friend Robert E. Rodgers.
After his election, Daley quickly moved back to the Democratic side of the aisle. After the death of incumbent Democratic Senator Patrick J. Carroll in 1938, Daley was elected to the Illinois Senate. That year Gormley and Jezierny were reelected with Republican William S. Finucane taking the third spot. In 1939, Illinois State Senator William "Botchy" Connors remarked of Daley: "You couldn't give that guy a nickel, that's how honest he is." Daley served as Minority Leader of the Illinois Senate from 1941 through 1946. He suffered his only political defeat in 1946, when he lost a bid to become Cook County sheriff.
In the late 1940s, Daley became Democratic Ward Committeeman of the 11th Ward, a post he retained until his death. He was appointed by Governor Adlai Stevenson II as head of the Illinois Department of Finance, serving in that role from 1949 through 1950, the year he made a successful run for Cook County Clerk. Daley held that position until being elected Chicago's mayor.
Daley became chairman of the Central Committee of the Cook County Democratic Party, i.e., boss of the political machine, in 1953. Holding this position along with the mayoralty in later years enhanced Daley's power. A recorded phone conversation that Daley had with President Lyndon Johnson on January 27, 1968, revealed that despite his Irish Catholic background, Daley also privately had at times tense relations with the Kennedy family and that he had declined an offer to vote against President Harry Truman when he was serving as a delegate at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Daley noted how he hurt the Kennedy effort against Truman by "buying" Ed Kelly and getting him off the Democratic National Committee.
Daley was first elected mayor, Chicago's 48th, in 1955. He was reelected to that office five times and had been mayor for 21 years at the time of his death. During his administration, Daley dominated the political arena of the city and, to a lesser extent, that of the entire state. Officially, Chicago has a "weak-mayor" system, in which most of the power is vested in the city council. However, Daley's post as de facto leader of the Chicago Democratic Party allowed him to rule the city with an iron hand and gave him great influence over the city's ward organizations, which in turn allowed him a considerable voice in Democratic primary contests—in most cases, the real contest in the Democratic stronghold of Chicago.
In 1959 and 1960, Daley served as president of the United States Conference of Mayors.
Daley contributed to John F. Kennedy's narrow, 8,000 vote victory in Illinois in 1960.
Major construction during Daley's terms in office resulted in O'Hare International Airport, the Sears Tower, McCormick Place, the University of Illinois at Chicago, numerous expressways and subway construction projects, and other major Chicago landmarks. O'Hare was a particular point of pride for Daley, with he and his staff regularly devising occasions to celebrate it. It occasioned one of Daley's numerous clashes with community organizer Saul Alinsky. His black-neighborhood Woodlawn Organization threatened a mass "piss in" at the airport (a crowding of its toilets) to press demands for open employment.