The Boss

Introduction

Mike Royko began his journalism career as a reporter in 1956, moving in 1959 to the Chicago Daily News, where he began writing his now famous column. He moved to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1978 and finally to the rival Chicago Tribune in 1984. The focus of his contentious, call-'em-like-I-see-'em column ranges from the quotidian details of urban life to the broad themes of national politics (Royko, pp. 23). However, he has remained the common man's columnist, the practitioner of a beer-and-a-shot journalism whose ideal reader has always been more blue-collar than intellectual.

Discussion

Most of Royko's books are collections of his newspaper columns. An exception is Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago published in 1971 when the controversial mayor was beginning his fifth term. Saturday Review contributor Dan Walker called Boss a well-directed, devastating attack on the mayor and his machine, but the criticism never overstated; instead, the evidence builds and builds. Roy M. Fisher expresses a similar opinion in the New Republic. Royko's portrait of Daley adds much to one's understanding of why urban politics played as it is, Daley himself emerges as a complex mixture of integrity and debasement, of wisdom and stupidity, of vision and blindness, of compassion and brutality (Karolides, pp. 115). However, Washington Post Book World reviewer Charles Monaghan found fault with Royko for a "thorough, steely contempt for his subject" that renders Daley "a two-dimensional villain, a man of bad will, bad manners, bad grammar, and--one feels certain by the end--bad breath." Conversely, a Saturday Review correspondent felt that Boss "paints a tough, shrewd politician against a background of urban corruption and brutality. However, Daley is not without humanity." A Times Literary Supplement reviewer likewise noted that Royko's portrait is unsympathetic, but added: "Biased as it is, his book is a marvelously detailed analysis of what makes a boss tick; his strengths and weaknesses” (ibid). Walker concluded that by avoiding the sensationalizing of Chicago's problems, Royko has come up with a classic study of a big-city political machine and why we can do without it.

As his readership expanded beyond the borders of Chicago, at the time of his death in 1997, Royko's column appeared in more than six hundred newspapers nationwide, Royko also expanded the subject matter he explored. The columnist writes about every human activity from dieting to driving, about every social phenomenon from digital watches to draft evasion and every issue from feminism to racism. However, Royko did not soften his signature blue-collar tone, as his earthy, ethnic humor sometimes was out of step in the politically correct 1990s. After a 1996 column offended Chicago's Mexican Americans, they burnt him in effigy, in front of the Chicago Tribune offices. Washington Post Book World contributor William Howarth described Royko's tone as "barroom banter, with all the subtlety of an ad for Lite Beer. Howarth explained, however, that the style never masks the substance and that Royko is only mock macho; he likes to pound his readers both left and right. Royko was a moral ...