In this context of machine politics, family ties held together households, but also wards, neighborhoods, and political relationships. Alderman Vito Marzullo, one of Daley’s closest allies on the city council, later described his loyalty to the mayor in terms that illustrate how deeply heterosexuality was built into local political culture: “He’s a great family man…. I got six married children. He came to every one of their weddings. He invited me to the weddings of every one of his kids. You don’t go back on people like that.” Heterosexual marriages were also interlaced with the dynamics of patronage hiring, thus helping form the glue of the local political culture.52
Daley was elected in 1955 partly because black voters rebelled against a reform mayor who seemed to crack down only on policy gambling and jitney cabs in their areas while leaving white criminal entrepreneurs untouched. Kennelly, the city’s mayor at the time of the Kefauver hearings, had been slated by the Democratic machine in 1947 as a “reformer,” to replace Edward J. Kelly, who had consolidated Cermak’s party organization since Cermak’s death in 1933.53 Testifying during the Kefauver hearings, Kennelly awkwardly defended the city. The episode increased the pressure on him to crack down on corruption and syndicate businesses, and he responded by cracking down on the illegal policy-gambling racket in black neighborhoods, as well as the illicit, unregulated jitney-cab regime there.54 This crackdown, in turn, displeased black voters, who had been only recently converted to vote Democratic in local elections. In the process, Kennelly garnered the public enmity of U.S. Representative William L. Dawson, boss of the black “submachine,” as well as the antipathy of many Italian and other white-ethnic voters in the city’s poor, machine-dominated “river wards.” Many working-class white voters, too, were more loyal to their machine precinct captains than to the mayor’s downtown allies, and they had little interest in Kennelly’s drive against illegal gambling.
By December 1954, Kennelly seemed so weak that the machine ousted him from the ballot, slating Richard J. Daley to run as the machine’s candidate. The bitter, expensive primary contest that followed was the first local race featuring television commercials. Though a Catholic himself, Kennelly’s strongest backers were the Protestant business elite. In a city with one of the most densely concentrated Catholic populations in the country, Daley, the ward heeler who had served for two years as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Organization, benefited from the perception of Kennelly as elitist and out of touch.55 Indeed, the Chicago Tribune had long taunted Kennelly for his failure to marry, and his opponent exploited the opening.56 Daley’s children were featured in campaign materials labeled “A Family Man for a Family City” (see Figure 1).57 The Tribune had reported on Daley’s “happy family life with his wife … and their seven children” just before his primary win.58
FIGURE 1. Primary campaign placard for Richard J. Daley, February 1955. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
In the equally hard-fought 1955 general election for mayor that followed, organized crime—with its corollary, vice—was a central issue. Daley’s Republican general-election opponent, Robert Merriam, charged that Daley would end Kennelly’s crackdown on policy gambling, and the city would become “wide open.” He quoted Variety as saying that “strip tease joints have started to reopen in anticipation of a Daley victory and wide open conditions,” according to one journalist.59 In a veiled reference to Daley’s evident willingness to tolerate policy gambling in black neighborhoods, Merriam charged, “There’s no such thing as limiting the evils of a wide open city to one section.”60 Faced with these charges, Daley claimed he would wage “an all-out war on crime in every form” to make “our neighborhood streets safe for women and children” and to ensure that “the syndicate will be driven out of Chicago.”61 Daley’s election as mayor made him unusually powerful because he had served as chairman of the Cook County party organization, a post he continued to hold as mayor. Moving rapidly, he centralized control of the city he would govern for two decades. Ominously for gays and lesbians, however, Daley had campaigned on a promise to fight crime and protect women and children—and the pressure for more aggressive policing would soon escalate.
“To Round Up Sex Deviates Is the Best Procedure”
Bar raids were accompanied by another, more complex but equally pernicious form of police harassment. Chicago’s four daily newspapers, which competed for a readership increasingly dominated by young parents, devoted sensational coverage to violent sexual crimes against children, in a society notably obsessed with families, children, and child rearing, and at a time when men and women married at younger ages than ever before or since. Experts in psychiatry and criminology fielded questions from journalists and offered authoritative comments about sexual degenerates, sexual psychopaths, and sex fiends, as well as the broader and more loosely defined category of deviates, conflating consensual and forced acts.62
The occasion for Chicago’s worst such panic was a triple murder in the fall of 1955. Three teenage boys disappeared and their bodies were soon found abandoned in a wooded area in a forest preserve on the city’s northwestern outskirts. Police began combing the areas near where the bodies were found, as well as areas that had been condemned by eminent domain for the construction of the Northwest (later Kennedy) Expressway. Newspapers repeatedly speculated on several possible theories—was it a teenage gang or a crazed sex degenerate?—that implicated bowling alleys, schools, movie theaters, and bars as potential sites of abduction. A psychiatrist who worked frequently with the criminal courts quickly declared they “were killed by a member of Chicago’s colony of sex degenerates,” even though the autopsy “disclosed no signs of sexual molestation.” This expert publicly called on police to “round up every known sex offender and moron,” further advising police that “there are several Chicago areas where persons with abnormal sex attitudes tend to congregate.”63
The extremely brutal nature of this crime (the Schuessler-Peterson murders), the lack of solid leads, and the dispersion of potential clues across the disparate landscape of the North Side all helped to unleash the imaginations of millions. The boys’ bodies were found naked, strangled, and mutilated, not far from horse stables.64 In the absence of leads, police sought out “sex degenerates,” who, one representative expert told a reporter, “often seek their prey in movie theaters.” Journalists reported that some of the county forest preserves had long “been frequented by sex degenerates.” Perhaps, one expert suggested, the killer could be found if his “previous sex deviations” happened to be already “known to police.” Within just a few days, city and sheriff’s police were “rounding up persons whose recent actions indicated sex degeneracy or sadism.”65 Police combed through lists of paroled sex offenders, interviewed more than 300 “sex deviates” in six months, and several times released the names of suspects who were later dropped from the inquiry. In one case, police released a suspect’s name with the “incriminating” fact that he had on his person, at the time of his arrest, a business card from a “gathering place for sexual degenerates.”66
Gay men were not the only ones the police questioned—at one point, the employees of eighteen Northwest Side packing plants were interviewed—but gay men were the group to which the police kept circling back.67 One columnist claimed that, according to “a friend of mine who is an experienced and successful policeman,” it is best “to round up sex deviates” and that “in a high percentage of cases, this procedure leads to the discovery of the murderer.” This, of course, implied that harsher punishment of those showing signs of “deviation” could have prevented the crime.68 Ordinary