Leadership Quote by Richard J. Daley

Daley’s line is a masterclass in machine-politics melodrama with a wink. “Vilified” and “crucified” are words of martyrdom, the vocabulary of saints and scapegoats, not mayors with a famously hard-knuckled grip on city hall. He stacks the charges in escalating, biblical register, daring you to see him as the beleaguered defender of order. Then comes the punchline: “they have even criticized me.” The sudden drop from persecution to mere critique is the tell. Daley isn’t confessing injury; he’s ridiculing the very idea that criticism should count as a serious offense against him.

The intent is twofold. First, it reframes scrutiny as hysteria. If opponents are “crucifying” him, their complaints sound less like accountability and more like mob theater. Second, it signals toughness to his base. Daley’s political persona thrived on the premise that Chicago needed a boss, not a therapist: someone willing to absorb noise from elites, reformers, and the press and keep the city running (as his coalition defined “running”). The joke isn’t self-deprecation so much as dominance: I’ve endured your moral panic, and I’m still here.

Context matters: Daley’s tenure was shadowed by civil rights battles, patronage warfare, and the national spectacle of 1968, when “law and order” became a stage set and Chicago a headline. Read that way, the line is strategic grievance before grievance became a genre. He turns criticism into proof of significance, and he turns outrage into evidence that he must be doing something effective.