American Pharaoh Read Online Free PDF Page B

but Daley did not. “I
     want to offer a prayer for those departed souls who could never get into the Conrad Hilton.” Daley’s childhood catechism of
     Irish deprivations left him convinced that no group had suffered as his kinsmen had suffered. In the 1960s, when Daley was
     turning a deaf ear to the civil rights movement, one liberal critic opined: “I think one of the real problems [Daley] has
     with Negroes is understanding that the Irish are no longer the out-ethnic group.” 16

    Daley spent his childhood in conditions a distinct notch above the world of his grandfathers. He was born just as Chicago’s
     Irish immigrants were making the hard transition from “shanty Irish” to the more respectable echelons of the lower middle
     class. Daley’s father, Michael, was a sheet-metal worker and a business agent for his union. The Daleys fit in well in a neighborhood
     whose beliefs were few but deeply cherished: the Catholic Church, family, labor unions, and the White Sox, who played at Comiskey
     Park, just a few blocks away from the Daley home.
    In the teeming Irish-Catholic world of Hamburg, Daley was a rarity: an only child. He and his parents were, perhaps because
     there were only three of them, an unusually closely knit family. Michael Daley, a wiry man who almost always sported a derby,
     was a man of few words. If Daley did not learn ambition or politics at his father’s knee, he did acquire one of the mannerisms
     that would serve him best in his career: speaking little and keeping his own counsel. “Part of the mystique of Richard Daley
     is that no one ever seems to know precisely what he thinks,” one observer has written. Daley’s taciturn ways may have been
     sheer political strategy, but they were also the prevailing character trait in the Daley household. “I think the reason he’s
     always had trouble talking,” an old Bridgeport neighbor recalled, “was that there weren’t any other children in his home,
     and his parents were quiet people.” Daley’s father also taught him respect for authority and reverence for the government.
     Years later, when his own mayoral authority was questioned by civil rights protesters, Daley would invoke a lesson he learned
     from his father at the funeral parade for Governor Edward Dunne. “There is the governor of Illinois, son,” Daley recalled
     his father saying to him. “Take off your hat.” 17
    Lillian Dunne Daley was eight years older than Daley’s father, and she had a far stronger personality. Students of Irish history
     contend that as families left the land and moved to cities, gender roles changed, and women began to play a more dominant
     role. Mrs. Daley was one of this new breed, the “powerful and autocratic Irish matron.” She was an active force in the church.
     Once, a young priest new to the parish wanted to start a bingo game, but was too shy to bring it up. Mrs. Daley advised him
     to raise it at an upcoming meeting of churchwomen. When the priest said in an uncertain voice that he wanted to start bingo,
     Mrs. Daley shouted out, “And we all do, too!” applauding, and carrying along the other women in the group. In addition to
     her work at Nativity of Our Lord, Mrs. Daley was a committed suffragist — not a usual cause for women in Bridgeport — and
     even took her son along to marches in support of the franchise for women. It is a measure of how formidable a force Lillian
     Daley was that a spectator would recall that as the Daley family walked by, a neighbor pronounced with dark Irish humor, “Here
     they come now, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!” Daley remained close to his mother her entire life, never moving
     more than a block away. Years later, as mayor, Daley would nod and wipe a tear from his eye when a women’s float at a Chicago
     Saint Patrick’s Day parade waved a banner saying, “The Mayor’s Mother Was a Suffragette!” 18
    Mrs. Daley had high hopes that her only son would end up somewhere