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This chapter analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Harold Washington’s election, his education summit, and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Harold Washington’s election as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 was heralded by many as the ultimate attainment of Black Power and the success of the local Black Freedom Movement. His electoral victory was grounded in years of grassroots struggle by Black organizers fighting for integration, community control, and Black empowerment. While historians have largely considered the 1980s as a product of the political triumph of conservatism and the “Reagan revolution,” in Chicago a Black-led, urban, antimachine, progressive coalitional politics led to Washington’s electoral victory. The disparate programmatic and ideological camps detailed in previous chapters (desegregation activists, community control organizers, founders of independent Black institutions, Black educators) staked claims in Mayor Washington and his political organization. The politics of Washington’s education reform summits, however, exposed the fractures within this political coalition. The interracial and intraracial struggles over school reform in Chicago during the 1980s reveal the tensions between a politics of racial representation and a politics of progressive transformation and prefigure the increased privatization of public education in the decades that followed.

The failure of the Irish party over the years 1910–16 was not the result of systemic rottenness, nor of ideological obsolescence. Rather it was a consequence of it adopting policies which went fundamentally against the grain of nationalist opinion during the crisis of late 1913 and in the World War. The party's local ‘machine’ still functioned sufficiently well for it to weigh in behind its leader and implement Redmond's policies, but the roots of the Irish party were deeply embedded in small-town, provincial Irish life. Its local leadership was steeped in both the conservative respectability and the bellicosity of language, Catholicity, sense of victimhood, and antipathy to England which suffused provincial, nationalist life. The strains placed upon the party locally, in implementing policies which ran counter to its instinctive beliefs, were too great and, after Easter 1916, would break it.

Chapter Six focuses on the dramatic battle to elect the city's first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, arguing that black activists formed a mutually-beneficial alliance with the Republican machine. DePriest came into office as an ally of Republican machine mayor, William Hale Thompson. Though some scholars see black politicians as mere pawns or puppets of the white machine, this chapter contends that black activists used the machine to promote personal ambitions and serve community interests, when they could. Black activists, seeking representation on the City Council, emphasized race over party and helped to transform Chicago politics. They made race a central feature of urban politics while contributing to efforts to legitimize the machine brand of politics.

The book’s second chapter covers the decade of the Great Depression and the World War II years. One of its principal focuses is the rise of Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine, which emerged as the dominant force in Chicago machine politics after years of back-and-forth tussling with its Republican counterpart. Democratic leaders beginning in 1931 used the police force as a bludgeon against the Black community to try to force it to vote Democratic, and utilized it in other ways to control Black Chicago politically. This was seen most acutely within the context of the rising tide of political radicalism that shaped Black Chicago during this time, especially the labors of the Communist Party and, later, organizations with the Popular Front as they challenged Depression-era austerity and battled with the police as austerity’s frequent enforcers (as in the case of evictions). To check such radicalism, Democratic politicians unleashed the infamous Red Squad, which cracked down viciously on political dissidents, often violently and illegally, setting important precedents. The decade also saw the expansion of a practice known as “stop and seizure,” an antecedent to the infamous practice of “stop and frisk.”

This chapter presents a baseline of economic, political, and social development in Oakland from the beginning of the twentieth century to 1920. It also discusses the structural and conjunctural conditions that affected the formation of actors. The organization of urban machine politics helped foster the process of ethnic group formation in civil society. Patronage offered a solution to the problems of economic uncertainty and group inequality. By 1920, the machine as a whole was rapidly losing its capacity to hold together the actors in the urban polity. As the decade of the 1920s began, Oakland swung into a new phase of urban development, one that was to create the conditions for another challenge to the ethnic machine. This time, however, popular insurgency took the form of a white nativist movement, embodied in the mobilization led by the Ku Klux Klan.

The importance of organization, or more precisely the lack of it, to German liberalism has long been recognized. The general opinion is that the left liberals were not quite so ineffective as the National Liberals, but still suffered by not having the sort of powerful mass organizations which were at the disposal of the labour movement, political Catholicism, or Agrarian Conservatism. However, organization and agitation were far from being the poor relations of Wilhelmine politics. Even critics did not deny the importance of ‘machine politics’. Despite having the smallest and least funded formal organization, the left liberals proved capable of mounting forceful election campaigns, which even opponents recognized as being amongst the most powerful in Germany. Clearly, there was still a place for Honoratioren in the mass politics of Wilhelmine Germany. A shift of focus from formal to informal organization is required for an analysis of the most important left liberal response to the growing demands for money, men, and effort placed on political parties in Wilhelmine Germany. Here the role of newspapers was central.

This chapter explores the rise of the white Protestant middle-class population and its formation as a group. It argues that the Oakland Klan movement had its greatest impact on the city's majority white population. The rise and fall of the Oakland Klan did not simply occur as an outcome of the interactions between movement and regime, but involved a conjunctural conflict among at least three actors: machine, Klan, and “downtown.” The political mobilization of group identity took shape in an urban social movement led by the Ku Klux Klan. The downtown reformers altered the institutional terrain of Oakland politics. Michael Kelly joined forces with the Klan in a populist electoral alliance against the rising power of the downtown elites. The rise and fall of the Klan movement brought with them the end of popular machine politics and a decline in the salience of ethnicity as a political identity in Oakland.

This chapter explains the early history of the policy game in Chicago and details the long tradition of black entrepreneurship in the gambling business. The chapter characterizes the link between gambling and black politics, and explores the way in which the emergent black political leadership in the city tried to navigate the issue of gambling enforcement and advocate for the many thousands of Southside residents who were swept up in police raids on gambling spots.

The introduction outlines the focus, scope, and significance of the book, introducing the Black activists, educators, parents, and students who navigated, challenged, and contributed to the urban political and educational landscape from mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles through the recent corporate reorganization of the public sphere. Black women’s political and intellectual labor powered movements for racial justice and is centered in this discussion of Black politics, social movements, and education reform. The introduction explains how the book presents a different account of Black politics and urban communities in the period after the 1960s by challenging interpretations of urban decline and “urban crisis.” It also explains the historical and contemporary importance of education as a site of struggle that reveals the boundaries of U.S. democracy and changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. The introduction outlines how historical considerations of racial liberalism, the Great Migration, the New Deal, labor, Black protest, machine politics, deindustrialization, the politics of Black achievement, desegregation, self-determination, equity, and education reform inform subsequent chapters.

This chapter analyzes the mayoralty of Jersey City boss Frank Hague, portraying him not just as an autocrat who trampled on civil liberties, but as representative of city machine politics, municipal law, and law enforcement culture that prevailed before the 1930s. Much like other city leaders, he was a second-generation Irish Catholic boss who blended ward politics with Progressive “coercive moral reform.” Meanwhile, constitutional law under Davis v. Massachusetts (1897), municipal law’s “limits of power” doctrine, and the common law of “illegal assembly” allowed city police broad authority over speech, assembly, and picketing, while public concerns about crime and widespread police lawlessness abetted tough “law-and-order” police action in Jersey City and elsewhere. This old-fashioned legal culture shaped Jersey City’s reception of CIO organizers 1937-39.

This chapter shows how the mid-century, political competition between traditional machines and the managerial growth advocates representing downtown elites pushed issues of policing to the forefront of urban politics. Managerial growth proponents promised to centralize governance, maintain traditional standards of behavior, and promote redevelopment. These growth advocates pursued a police professionalism reform agenda in order to squelch the machine’s payola networks and to illustrate the efficacy of expert, top-down governance. Just as managerial growth advocates achieved power, however, contemporary scholars discovered that police officers on the beat enjoyed the discretion to set their own policies. By focusing on police policies in Chinatown and the development of stop-and-frisk policing, this chapter analyzes how managerial growth advocates rationalized continued police discretion.

Between 1900 and 1912, no political coalition could hold onto City Hall for long, and in the wake of the defeat of the Burnham Plan, there was no centralized authority to impose comprehensive urban planning. Led by James Rolph, the Mission Promotion Association (MPA) would capitalize on this circumstance, broadening its base by incorporating the unions that were moving to the Mission. The MPA established itself as a de facto urban planning authority not only within the Mission District, but in the entire southern half of San Francisco. It also wielded influence in the California state legislature and with the association that governed fire insurance rates for the entire Western United States. So powerful was this Progressive Era improvement club, that its opponents accused it of being a political machine.

In the second primary, Scott replenished his finances and shored up his support from his main constituencies—labor, farmers, and blacks. His opponent, Charles Johnson, realized he had lost the momentum in the race and waged a more aggressive campaign—his “New Look” strategy. He attacked Scott and defended his record as treasurer, insisting that he was not a machine candidate. Scott continued his mantra that Johnson was the machine candidate and charged that the bankers of the state had accumulated a slush fund to buy the election for Johnson. Although Johnson predicted victory, Scott won handily, 217,620 votes to 182,684. Scott won because his core constituency turned out for him, the antimachine vote went to him, and he waged a more vigorous, effective, and aggressive fight. Johnson was overconfident, waged a listless race, and never got his message out. Kerr Scott had achieved one of the great political upsets in the state’s history, and his victory signaled a change from the conservative, staid machine politics of the past to a more progressive, populist leadership. Scott, the man of the people, now had the opportunity to make good on his promises.

“Voice of Betrayal” chronicles Clarks fall from grace after being at the center of a Cincinnati political scandal that involved the mass disfranchisement of African-American voters, fraud, and bribery.

This chapter shows how the political machine’s links to gangsters became increasingly liabilities in the case of Benjamin Zuckerman. The nature of Chicago’s machine politics was changing as the coalition that founded it matured and its members grew comfortable in their established offices. With senators and governors to elect, it did not help to be seen as attached to professional gamblers and thugs. At the same time, the confederation model of crime was giving way to the corporate one. As such, starting in the late 1930s, Zuckerman’s clubs began to be raided with more regularity, and there was evidence of his losing some of his standing. By the time Anixter died in 1943, Zuckerman was negotiating a new equation for securing his own standing.

This chapter turns to Jacob Arvey. More than anyone else in Jewish Chicago, it fell to him to negotiate the political sea change from the crude saloon-style politicking of Manny Abrahams, through the gangster-riddled days of Morris Eller, to the efficient Machine politics of the middle 1940s. Arvey came to personal power in a ward where it was often difficult to distinguish the politicians from the gangsters, and he could never entirely free his political apparatus from connections to organized crime. At the same time, however, he found a space between the corruption that preceded him and the impossible-to-achieve purity that reformers from outside his world clamored for. Arvey established that middle ground between crime and reform by building relationships. Some of those hands were relatively clean, but others were dirty enough that he could not entirely remove the stain they left behind.

This chapter discusses the relationship between regime type, popular support and nationalism in Russia. It describes the political system as ‘patronal presidentialism’. This term refers to a constitutionally strong presidency that exists in a social context where political collective action unfolds primarily through extensive networks of personal acquaintances. Even when such presidents use manipulation, coercion, and fraud to win elections, they run significant risks of losing power if they lose popular support. For that reason, Russia’s presidents have been highly sensitive to public opinion. A domestic political crisis that came to a head in late 2011, when tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets, changed the Kremlin’s calculus, forcing it to seek out new bases of public support. This eventually led to a far more prominent role for Russian nationalism in connection with Putin’s leadership, and helped to bring about the crisis involving Crimea and Ukraine.

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department evolved into a professional police organization based on the ideology of paternalism. The election of Thomas Dyer as mayor in 1856 started a five-year period of contestation over the basic shape of the new police force. On the surface, this fight pitted law-and-order Republicans against Democratic supporters of immigrants and looser law enforcement. But party politics tells only a fraction of the story. The underlying dispute was between two conflicting visions of the police, each of which had supporters particularly within the Republican Party. Some members of both parties, most notably Dyer, a Democratic, and Republican Mayor John Wentworth, sought to fit the police into the older paternalistic method of keeping order. This chapter considers how the Chicago police came to occupy a central place in city machine politics and discusses Wentworth's organizational police policies that were consistent with his broader paternalistic vision of the institution. It also describes the police's daily activity between 1855 and 1862, including dealing with the problems arising from the Civil War.