Mayor daley the asshole

Daley turned his town into a fortress. He installed a fence topped with barbed wire around the Chicago International Amphitheater. He put the entire police force of 12, men on hour shifts and called in over 5, National Guardsmen. About 1, Secret Service and FBI agents were also on duty, as the city braced for the 10, protesters who would soon arrive, wound up by a year of political assassinations, urban riots and the raging Vietnam War.

You are now logged in. Forgot your password? It's been said that no man is a hero to his valet. Continuous, up-close exposure can eventually render anyone stale. After nearly 22 years as mayor, Richard M. Daley has definitely worn out much of his appeal to Chicagoans. He's won six straight elections, the last two with more than 70 percent of the vote.

Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe. During the mayoral campaign, I kept hearing a refrain from voters, especially relatively well-to-do north-siders: a tough town needs a tough guy for its mayor. Well, Chicago, considering Mayor Emanuel's antics of the last week—bulldozing a field house and then an alderman—I'd say mission accomplished! Let's consider the case of the little field house at Whittier school in Pilsen—which the mayor had destroyed on August 17—in the larger context of the mayor's first two years of educational policy. He took away a promised teachers' pay hike, lengthened the school day without providing much in the way of new resources, cussed out the head of the teachers' union, instigated a teachers' strike, all but eliminated teacher tenure, closed 50 schools, and then, having promised a fresh new start, implemented a new round of budget cuts that cut 1, jobs and left principals scrambling.

W hen future historians of twentieth-century American politics go looking for a single scene with which to encapsulate the Great Reaction against Sixties radicalism and reform—now mercilessly barreling toward its fourth decade—they might do well to examine the harshly lit and windswept corner of South Michigan Avenue and the Congress Parkway in Chicago as it appeared on the chilly, forbidding night of November 3, I happened to be there, shivering in line outside the magnificent old Auditorium Theater with a couple of high school classmates and our history teacher, hoping to get into the big Democratic Party rally scheduled for that evening. The atmosphere was one of electric doom: Even the most optimistic among us knew deep down that this only-in-Chicago, machine-orchestrated campaign event signaled the death throes of the party reform movement that had begun in the late Sixties. Fighting in those years against the party oligarchy that had steered the country into the Vietnam War, anti-war leader Allard Lowenstein and Senator Eugene McCarthy had, incredibly, driven an incumbent president from office—and for a time it seemed they might overthrow the entire structure presided over by LBJ and Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago.