The 1968 convention was the last hurrah for a phenomenon of huge importance in our own history: the Irish-American political machine. How apt that this week’s convention will mark the reluctant end of the career of Joe Biden
The 1968 convention was the last hurrah for a phenomenon of huge importance in our own history: the Irish-American political machine. This week’s convention will mark the reluctant end of the career of Joe Biden
If you travelled to Chicago in 1968, you could not have avoided a famous name and a jowly face reminding you that you were entering a feudal fiefdom. From O’Hare airport onwards into the hotels and streetscapes, signs proclaimed “Mayor Daley Welcomes You to Chicago” and “You Have Arrived in Daley Country”.
Daley became a protege of the Chicago politician Joe McDonough, whose campaign song remains a perfect encapsulation of the transactional nature of Irish machine politics: “Whenever ya wanted a favor,/ McDonough was ready to do. / Whataya gonna do for McDonough, / After what he done for you?” Daley hated and feared Martin Luther King. His answer to complaints of discrimination was the one still heard among Trump-supporting white Americans: the Irish pulled themselves up by their bootstraps so why can’t the Blacks? One nun tried to explain to Daley the difference between being an Irish immigrant who got a job on the police force the same week he got to Chicago, and being a Black man thrown into a cell the same day he arrived in the city. Daley wasn’t having it.
But Daley celebrated his brutality as quintessentially Irish. In 1969 he said “Someone asked me a few days ago, would you do over what you did in August? And in the true tradition of the Gaelic spirit of the Daleys, I said: ‘You’re damn right I’d do the same thing, only with greater effort.’”
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