Richard J. Daley Quotes
If a man can't put his arms around his sons and help them, then what's the world coming to?
What is most interesting about this quotation is not the fact of the corruption, but the blatant manner in which Daley admitted to it. Today, we look back and ask how such blatant, open corruption could be tolerated. At the time, while the public tended to see this as corruption, politicians actually saw it as a healthy part of the system. After all, they argued, we want the best men for high office, and we don’t want them to have large salaries at the expense of the taxpayer. The city needs the insurance, so no taxpayer is hurt if the mayor gives the insurance business to his son. Similarly, 4 decades later, most politicians do not view campaign contributions as corruption while many citizens do. This ethical and moral standard may change just as the steering of insurance contracts did.
Richard Joseph Daley, 1902-1976, Mayor of Chicago (Democrat), Response to criticism for steering millions of dollars in city insurance to an agency where his son worked, Quoted in The Man Who Made Chicago Work.”, Time Magazine Online, January 1977
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Richard Joseph Daley was an American politician who served as the Mayor of Chicago from 1955 and the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee from 1953 until his death. He has been called "the last of the big city bosses" who controlled and mobilized American cities. 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 was the patriarch of the Daley family, whose members include Richard M. Daley, another former mayor of Chicago; William M. Daley, a former United States Secretary of Commerce; John P. Daley, a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners; and Patrick Daley Thompson, an alderman of the Chicago City Council.
