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.

Daley was Chicago's third consecutive mayor from the working-class, heavily Irish American South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, where he lived his entire life.

He is remembered for doing much to save Chicago from the declines that other Rust Belt cities, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, and Detroit, experienced during the same period.

[2] On the other hand, Daley's legacy is complicated by criticisms of 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.

[3] 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.

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.

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.

[8] 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.

[11] 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.

He was appointed by Governor Adlai Stevenson II as head of the Illinois Department of Finance, serving in that role from 1949 through 1950,[6][14] the year he made a successful run for Cook County Clerk.

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.

His black-neighborhood Woodlawn Organization threatened a mass "piss in" at the airport (a crowding of its toilets) to press demands for open employment.

To revitalize downtown Chicago Daley worked together with business leaders to push out poor black residents and replace them with middle class whites.

[24] From late 1965 to early 1967 Mayor Daley was confronted by the Chicago Freedom Movement to improve conditions in the black ghettos.

The campaign, that became known as the Chicago Freedom Movement, was led by Martin Luther King Jr., who tried to employ the tactics of peaceful marches like he had in the South.

[26] Daley discouraged motion picture and television filming on location in Chicago, after an episode of M Squad (aired on January 30, 1959) depicted an officer of CPD taking bribes.

This policy lasted until the end of his term and would be reversed under later mayor Jane Byrne, when The Blues Brothers was filmed in Chicago.

On January 27, Daley informed President Johnson that Robert Kennedy had met him and asked for his support in the upcoming Democratic primaries, which he declined.

Displeased with what he saw as an over-cautious police response to the rioting, Daley chastised police superintendent James B. Conlisk and subsequently related that conversation at a City Hall press conference as follows:[27] I said to him very emphatically and very definitely that an order be issued by him immediately to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand, because they're potential murderers, and to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting.This statement generated significant controversy.

That was a fabrication.Robert Kennedy was also assassinated in June 1968, thus hurting Daley's earlier plan to make Johnson, who withdrew his re-election bid in March, Vice President.

With the nation divided by the Vietnam War and with the assassinations of King and Kennedy earlier that year serving as backdrop, the city became a battleground for anti-war protesters who vowed to shut down the convention.

As television cameras focused on Daley, lip-readers later said they observed him shouting, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home!

"[28][29] Defenders of the mayor later stated that he was calling Ribicoff a faker,[30][31] a charge denied by Daley and refuted by Mike Royko's reporting.

[32] A federal commission, led by local attorney and party activist Dan Walker, investigated the events surrounding the convention and described them as a "police riot".

They were married on June 17, 1936, and lived in a modest brick bungalow at 3536 South Lowe Avenue in the heavily Irish and Polish neighborhood of Bridgeport, a few blocks from his birthplace.

"[42] A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Daley ranked as the fifth best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.

Daley's twenty-one-year tenure as mayor is memorialized in the following public buildings: Journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor argue that Daley's politics may have saved Chicago from the same fate that cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Saint Louis and Cleveland endured, which suffered from suburbanization, crime and white flight.

For every downtown skyscraper that kept jobs and tax dollars in the city, there was a housing project tower that confined poor people in an overcrowded ghetto".

[47] Daley was known by many Chicagoans as "Da Mare" ("The Mayor"), "Hizzoner" ("His Honor"), and "The Man on Five" (his office was on the fifth floor of City Hall).

During the civil rights era, some black Chicagoans referred to Daley as "Pharaoh", comparing him to the oppressive and unrelenting figure in the Book of Exodus.