To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal Review

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To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal ReviewI'm an avowed Chicago history buff and found references in this book that simply cannot be found anywhere else. The bibliography alone has led to me several other books on the topic, which is appreciated. Really brought the city to life, and made you want to search out the street corners in question. I found myself asking older acquaintances if they ever met Richie Morrison.
However I have to say the publishers did not do their job here. This book is poorly edited, suffering from simple errors such as misspellings (it's ward heeler, not ward healer), and in general confusing to those of us unfamiliar with the arcane characters filling the pages. I often found myself having to backtrack to figure out who the author was referring to -- a problem compounded by the numerous Irish names and confusing nomenclature.To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal Overview

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The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology) Review

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The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology) ReviewThe book shows how the Chicago Democratic Party of the 1870s was beholden to tavern owners, who wished to stop legislation that would close them on Sundays, and brothel owners who sought a lack of police enforcement. The Democratic Party also found support from laborers who patronized these establishments. The use of patronage built a political electoral machine. Thus, the leader of Chicago's Democratic Party, Mike McDonald, was seen as a protector of criminal activity.
Nationally, Martin Van Buren helped create a Democratic Party that appealed to Irish immigrants, freeholders, and rural yeomen.
Mike McDonald's travel agency was a front for gambling. A number of pro-Southern Copperheads plotted to liberate about 8,000 Confederate soldiers from a prisoner of war camp. Many of the plotters later became leaders of Chicago's Democratic Party. It is unknown in McDonald was involved or not, except he was friends with the plotters.
Joseph Medill was elected Mayor in 1871. He got the legislature to increase gambling penalties. The Police Superintendent was removed for his hesitancy to close gambling establishments. Elmer Washburn became the new Superintendent. McDonald's establishment was among those raided by the newly aggressive police. Washburn was an outsider distrusted by local police officers. The Police Commission fired him in 1873 claiming he made unauthorized raids. Illegal activities resumed operating un-raided. Mayor Medill suddenly resigned and left town right before it was disclosed over half a million dollars of city funds were diverted by Democratic City Treasurer Dave Gage to personal accounts. Political opponents spread a rumor that Medill was a coward who left to avoid a possible cholera outbreak. For here, a half century of strong machine and police corruption emerged that allowed illegal ventures to operation.
In 1886, it became legal to use taverns as polling locations. Bartenders in 8,000 taverns were deputized to naturalize foreign residents. Foreign residents were given a free meal, gambling chips, and instructions on how to vote. Voters received free beer. Groups of people went from polling place to polling place for free beer and multiple voting.
Jacob Rehm became Police Superintendent. He favored minimal enforcement of gambling laws in areas where the Democratic Party wanted the police to ignore. The leadership of Chicago no longer was controlled, as it had been in the past, by upper class, high moral Republican Party Puritan-ists.
McDonald, who had supported Democrat Horatio Seymore over RepublicanUlysses Grant, switched to support President Grant's reelection in 1872. In doing so, Democrat McDonald greatly influenced Federal jobs patronage during a Republican Administration.
McDonald supported Perry Smith for Mayor in 1877. Mayor Heath had named Michael Hickes as Police Chief. Hickes sought to drive illegal gambling operations, especially McDonald's. McDonald closed his gambling operations for awhile. Hickes, though, looked the other way in letting vice operations remain. Citizens upset over this sought to oust Heath and Hickes. Smith ran on education reform issues. Heath won by 11,000 votes. McDonald though had enough pull to get City Council to reject Hickes's reappointment by 22 to 11.
The McDonald machine rigged bids to overpay friends. It even rigged grand juries Bribes won public contracts. Some stole from each other. The private banks were made public. A few people were charged with crimes but were acquitted.
McDonald introduced the Lundberg Process, or a 13 year courthouse operation. It was noted for shoddy repairs of crumbling limestone. A fire demonstrated the building was not properly fireproofed and a person died. A whole new building was proposed by planner Daniel Burnham, which was built from 1906 to 1908 and still stands.
McDonald supported Carter Harrison for Mayor in 1879. Harrison ignored McDonald's illegal campaign activities yet had an independent streak. He disagreed with McDonald over appointment and which candidates to support. Plus, Harrison sometime supported raising gambling parlors. McDonald was fine with raiding competing gambling houses and running them out of town.
McDonald and some business friends paid bribes to a corporation counsel and alderman for exclusive building rights along a West Lake Street elevated line. The bribery scheme went before a grand jury that about 13 Aldermen had been bought. No indictments resulted.
By 1885, the Cook County Board of Commissioners was composed of McDonald's friends. Private companies paid Commissioners in order to be selected for contracts. A grand jury looked into these abuses. Once again, there was not enough evidence for an indictment for McDonald.
Reformers won brief control of the Cook County Commissioners. Yet the city government remained corrupt, a state that continued for many decades.
The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology) Overview

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Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President Review

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Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President ReviewMcClelland's book is a very readable look at the voyage President Obama took from Harvard Law School to the winning of the Democratic Primary for the United States Senate in Illinois. This was tantamount to winning the general election in Illinois and a large stepping stone to the presidency. The fun part of reading the book was the learning process for the future president as he moved through Chicago's political jurisdictions. He had to learn to interact with politicians and the general populations in some of the all African-American and poor areas of the city. This did not come easily and he had much help from political friends in the city and at the University of Chicago. The book follows Mr. Obama through a lot of victories in city areas and a few losses. Along the way, McClelland writes about some of Chicago's historical politicians such as U.S. Senator Paul Simon, U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun and Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Young Mr. Obama is a fascinating and worthwhile look at the intricacies of a politician traveling through the sometimes new behaviors a recent outstanding graduate of Harvard Law School needed to learn in order to find his way through all of the varied communities of the city of Chicago.Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President Overview

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Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 Review

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Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 ReviewMaking a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 by Lizabeth Cohen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (England); New York, 1990. Pp. xviii + 526; illustrations. $47.95, cloth; $17.95, paper. Making a New Deal describes the evolution of Chicago's unskilled and semi-skilled labor force during the inter-war years from individuals bonded in groups only by a common ethnicity or race into a cohesive, broad-based alliance responsible, along with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the federal government, for the success of the union movement during the darkest days of the nation's Great Depression. Cohen's concentration is focused on five of the city's industrial giants and the neighborhoods in which they were located, from which they garnered their workforce: the garment industry in the Old Immigrant Neighborhoods of the near west and southwest sides, International Harvester's McCormick Works and Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in the Southwest Corridor, Armour and Swift located in Packingtown, U.S. Steel and Wisconsin Steel of Southeast Chicago, and, with no industry of its own, the Black Belt. Cohen pursues an answer to the question: how it was possible for these industrial workers to become a cohesive force in national politics in the mid-1930's in light of their disunity entering the decade of the 1920's? During the Twenties, church and a myriad of other neighborhood institutions, mass marketing, government, union organizers, and employers all exerted forces on these laborers. Cohen concludes that the metamorphosis was caused by "the change in the workers' own orientation during the 1920s." It took nothing less than a shift in their very value systems, as old symbols of ethnic security began failing or vanished completely, e.g., national churches, enthic-based savings and loan associations and insurance companies, local stores and, eventually, the welfare capitalism practiced by their employers. These events, according to the author, along with the new experiences infused by the 1920's mass culture, left the workers ripe for cooperation, if not unification, in achieving a "new deal" with the willing forces of the CIO and government as the depression deepened. Cohen's research on attitudes and behavioral patterns of the industrial workers is, in some cases, drawn directly from her sources; in others, however, she interpolates, that is, conclusions about the workers are induced by analysis of changes through time and events in the institutions the workers patronized. What results is a seeming seeming defeat of some of the historical myths about the period. For example, installment buying by the industrial worker was assumed to be a universal truth by their contemporaries. Cohen demonstrates that workers in this class were, instead, savers, a habit instilled through their purchase of Liberty bonds during World War I and reinforced by the 1920-21 depression. Another is the historical axiom that Americans who experienced the depression "were ashamed to be on government relief." Letters written to the Roosevelt administration document a different attitude, one of entitlement, rationalized by the workers as due them because of loyalty to country during war and to party during the 1932 and 1936 elections. The author further suggests that mass culture, instead of engendering a common culture as was thought to be the case, turned workers into a political force by eliminating fragmentation along cultural and ethnic lines and permitted an integration of goals. A classless culture was anticipated; a working-class culture was produced. Thus, in counterpoint to labor historians who claim unionism is a credit of the "artisan worker," Cohen is able to comfortably conclude that it was the factory worker that made the CIO a powerful reality. Making a New Deal is a snapshot of America at a pivotal point in its history. It is a snapshot because Cohen advises the reader not to judge the workers' efforts based on subsequent events of the 40's with its growing, more-intrusive government and top-heavy, national CIO, but to view their accomplishments as events unto themselves, results born out of experiences shared during the 1920's; it is pivotal because of the turn America made, leaving welfare capitalism of the 1920's behind and committing itself to becoming a welfare state.Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 Overview

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