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‘How would you like to hang for one minute.’ He was always
     a perfectionist.” And the nuns were, as countless Catholic memoirs have attested, often tyrants in habits. One chronicler
     of a parochial school in a parish not far from Bridgeport wrote that “children were sometimes asked to kneel on marbles, or
     eat soap, or scrape gum from the hallway stairs.” The curriculum at Nativity emphasized memorization, penmanship, and rote
     learning. The Catholic catechism drilled into Daley in religion class was, of course, the ultimate form of rote learning,
     reducing almost every question students could have about God or man to a memorized short answer. It was the ideal education
     for a young man who might find his way to a career in machine politics, where success lay in unquestioningly performing the
     tasks set out by powers above. But it was less helpful as training for a leader who would need to think independently and
     adapt himself to changing times. 21
    In school and out, Daley absorbed his neighborhood’s conservative values and flinty self-reliance. Bridgeport, with its legions
     of slaughterhouse workers marching off to their bloody and dangerous jobs each day, was a community dedicated to the virtues
     of industry. No Bridgeporter with any pride would rely on others for his daily bread: success came through constant toil and
     pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. The Catholic Church had its charities, but the overwhelming ethic in neighborhoods
     like Bridgeport was that except in the most dire cases of family death or illness it was an embarrassment to accept alms.
     “Poor people didn’t look to anybody for help or assistance,” observed the superintendent of Bridgeport’s parochial schools
     in the 1930s. Mr. Dooley tells of the down-on-his-luck laborer Callaghan who nevertheless musters the strength of character
     to tell the Saint Vincent de Paul almsgivers to “Take ye’er charity, an’ shove it down ye’er throats.” If the Callaghans had
     things tough, it was because this earthly life was a hard one. 22
    The pre–Vatican II Catholicism in which Daley was raised impressed on him a keen sense of man’s fallen state, and of the inevitability
     of sin. Man had to struggle hard against the influence of evil, which could be warded off only “if one chose the path of dutifulness
     and care, if one made sure by doing this twice over and respecting authority, if one closed off the energies of rebellion
     inside oneself.” It was an education that bred a wary, even skeptical view of one’s fellowman — a character trait Daley would
     carry with him through life. “He’s like a fellow who peeks in the bag to make sure the lady gave him a dozen buns,” a profile
     of Daley in the
Chicago Daily News
once observed. And it was an environment that left Daley with a lifelong skepticism of idealists of all kinds — whether they
     were reformers working to clean up machine politics or civil rights activists hoping to change hearts and minds on the question
     of race. These utopians all proceeded from an unduly optimistic vision of man’s perfectibility. “Look at the Lord’s Disciples,”
     Daley would later say in response to a charge of corruption in City Hall. “One denied Him, one doubted Him, one betrayed Him.
     If our Lord couldn’t have perfection, how are you going to have it in city government?” 23

    Daley was an obedient student, but not a particularly gifted one. He was “a very serious boy,” his teacher Sister Gabriel
     recalled. “A very studious boy. He played when he played. He worked when he worked. And he prayed when he prayed.” In 1916,
     after graduating from Nativity, Daley enrolled at De La Salle Institute, a three-year Catholic commercial high school known
     as “the Poor Boy’s College.” De La Salle was located at 3455 South Wabash, in a poor black neighborhood on the “wrong” side
     of the racial dividing line separating Bridgeport from the black