Edward Joseph Kelly was born on May 1, 1846 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the oldest of nine children of Stephen Kelly and Helen (Lang) Kelly. His mother was of German origin. His father, an Irish Catholic immigrant who worked as a city fireman and then as a policeman, found it difficult to support his evergrowing family.
Kelly left school when he was twelve. About 1893, to make up for his educational deficiencies, he enrolled in night classes at the Chicago Athenaeum, a school specializing in mathematics, and later studied engineering.
Edward Kelly began selling newspapers at the age of nine, for over five years he worked as a stock boy for a department store, a lawyer's messenger, a window washer, and an undertaker's apprentice. While watching a crew at work on the Columbian Exposition of 1893, he was inspired to become an engineer. His Democratic precinct captain got him a job as an axman with the Sanitary District of Chicago, the political authority controlling the city's sewage and water systems. Quick-witted and nimbleminded, he rose in the sanitary district to surveyor, assistant engineer (1908), and chief engineer (1920). As chief engineer, Kelly supervised projects in a twenty-year program costing $120 million and often served as a consultant on state and federal waterway planning. But the graft, mismanagement, payroll padding, nepotism, and reckless spending of this period earned it the label of the "whoopee era. "
In 1930 Kelly and nine other sanitary-district officials were named in a federal indictment charging conspiracy to defraud the district of $5 million. The indictment against Kelly was revoked for lack of evidence, but within two years he was cited for underpayment of income taxes between 1919 and 1929, a claim that he settled for $105, 000. Meanwhile, he was cementing his relationship with Patrick A. Nash, a leader in the local Democratic party and an affluent sewer contractor, whose firm had millions of dollars in sanitary-district contracts. Kelly's political connections won him a post on Chicago's South Park Board in 1922, and he became president two years later. When Mayor Anton J. Cermak was killed in 1933 by an assassin's bullet meant for President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nash, as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, ordered a subservient city council to appoint Kelly to serve out Cermak's term. Kelly remained the city's chief executive for fourteen years, winning election easily at the polls in 1935, 1939, and 1943.
Meanwhile, he built with Nash one of the nation's strongest political organizations through firm control of some 40, 000 patronage jobs. He faced occasional challenges from within his own party, the most serious in 1936, when he and Nash sought to keep Governor Henry Horner from running for a second term, reportedly because Horner had vetoed a bill to license racing handbooks. Horner denounced Kelly and Nash in the primary, defeated their candidate, and went on to win reelection. Tall, red-haired, and robust, Kelly was a dignified mayor. Increasingly he became the dominant force in what critics called "the Kelly-Nash machine. "
Kelly gloried in the efficiency of his organization. The difference between a politician and a statesman, he asserted, is that "a politician gets things done. " A civic booster in the grand tradition, Mayor Kelly did use his powers for considerable good. Chicago was virtually bankrupt when he first took office, with "payless paydays" for many city employees and millions of dollars in delinquent taxes and unpaid bills. Through federal public works projects and the mortgaging of land owned by the Board of Education, he restored the city's financial health. He pushed through innumerable physical improvements, from the widening of State Street, "the street of the merchants, " to the building of the first section of a $40 million subway system; he also developed the city's fire department into one of the nation's most efficient. He was a firm exponent of public housing, and despite political and neighborhood pressure, he insisted on a policy of nondiscrimination. He established the Chicago Recovery Administration and the Keep Chicago Ahead Committee, which worked for the development of business and industry; he initiated "Drama of Chicago on Parade, " a series of civic pageants; and secured $100 million for a superhighway program.
During World War II he established a group of servicemen's centers that made Chicago noted for its hospitality. On the national scene, Kelly established a rapport with President Roosevelt, who held him in esteem for his political pragmatism and vote-getting ability. As Democratic national committeeman, Kelly was listened to in high party councils, and in 1940 he spearheaded Roosevelt's third-term campaign.
For all the material improvements, Kelly's mayoral years were speckled with scandal. The city was wide open, and the police force, largely inefficient and ineffectual, made scant effort to enforce antigambling laws. Chicago's civil service system was manipulated to reward political underlings and their relatives. Despite sporadic cleanup campaigns, the streets and alleys remained the dirtiest in the world. Worst of all, the school system, run by a board and superintendent beholden to City Hall's every patronage wish, was under constant fire, principally from the National Education Association, whose 1945 report charged that "some of the personnel practices in Chicago schools are undemocratic and even fascist in nature. " Such adverse publicity, coupled with local Democratic losses in the 1946 elections, prompted party leaders led by Cook County chairman Jacob M. Arvey (Nash had died in 1943) to choose a new mayoral candidate in 1947--Martin H. Kennelly, a successful businessman and political neophyte. Kelly withdrew and, after completing his term, retired from active politics. In the last three years of his life he headed an engineering consulting firm and devoted much time to a campaign to raise $6 million for a new building for Chicago's Mercy Hospital.
Kelly was best known as a co-founder of one of the most powerful political organizations, called the "Kelly-Nash Machine. His major accomplishments during his tenure in politics included initiation of projects to beautify the city's lakefront; cooperation with the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in establishing Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry; construction of hundreds of miles of streets, sewers, sidewalks, and curbs, and appointment of African-Americans to unprecedented positions of authority in city government.
Kelly was a devout Catholic.
Kelly was a member of the Democratic Party.
Quotations: "In politics, the machine runs you or you run the machine. I run the machine. "
Kelly was married twice: on March 20, 1910, to Mary Edmunda Roche of Chicago, who died in 1918; and on January 25, 1922, to Margaret Ellen Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri. The only child by the first marriage, Edward Joseph, died at the age of fourteen. With his second wife, Kelly adopted three children: Patricia Anne, Joseph Michael, and Stephen Edward.
