Book review: Chicago "clout" and the community grew together
- Book review
- Clout City: The Rise & Fall of the Chicago Political Machine
- By Dominic A. Acyga
- University of Chicago Press, 2025
- “Clout” is that unique Chicago word for political power. It echoes the first Mayor Daley, convicted aldermen, padded payrolls, and favored contractors.
- “Clout” is used to disparage a corrupt political system, where backroom deals abounded, and ballot boxes were supposedly porous.
- “Clout” was more than corruption, as Dominic Pacyga explains in Clout City. It was a well-honed machine, but a machine attuned to the famed “city that works,” the grease that sustained an economy and urban neighborhoods.
- Reformers, and what were characterized in Chicago as “goo-goos,” good government advocates, were annoyances to endure, suppress, and ignore.
- Pacyga explains clout as more than political corruption; it represented a political system that delivered. Chicago was ruled by its wealthy, native-born elites in its early years, suppressing working-class agitation. Those working-class, immigrant communities found power – clout -- through the ballot box. The Irish may have led the way, but the wise ways of machine politics found elbow room for all, whether Eastern European, Jewish, Italian, Latino, or African American.
- The machine had three dynamic centers: the church or synagogue, the saloon, the ward boss, and, on the fringe, the gangster. Capitalism’s edict was to gain wealth. Based on both Catholic theology and Jewish teaching, machine politics recognized a different dynamic – communalism. A deep sense of neighborhood and family meant not rising above but rising together. Religious institutions formed a central moral core, building that community network, creating a spiritual, educational, and ethnically comfortable social space. The saloon represented community recreation, but also an open space for both community and labor organizing. The ward boss had the magic key – show loyalty to the community and vote appropriately, and a job might open up, or, in hard times, groceries and a load of coal appeared at the door.
- And if someone – the ward boss, the mayor, an ambitious community member – got a little extra in their pocket, that was just an accepted fee for the perceived good.
- Pacyga skillfully weaves how, after the 1971 Great Chicago Fire, Carter Harrison, both I and II, gained political power through working-class inclusion. Chicago’s political image might be Democratic, but its last Republican mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, created his own 1920s machine, including welcoming Great Migration African Americans into the fold. Thompson, like others before and after, turned a blind eye to gambling, prostitution, and other schemes, giving Chicago its wide-open aura during the Capone years. Pacyga well demonstrates how gambling, today done in state-certified casinos, sustained an employment base, particularly in the African American numbers game.
- It was Czech immigrant Anton Cermak who organized the modern machine, ensuring that diverse groups all had a city hall voice. Cut short by an assassin’s bullet in 1933, Edward Kelly, and then Richard J. Daley, perfected machine politics. Everyone – ethnic neighborhoods, labor unions, businesses – all received loyalty’s rewards.
- The machine’s wheels were falling off by the late 1960s and never recovered. The solid white ethnic vote dissolved as they fled to the suburbs. The anti-war and Civil Rights movement challenged power, and racism’s legacy finally came due. Deindustrialization destroyed the economic base that stabilized families. The city’s first African American mayor, Herald Washington, finally gained control of the city council and had thorough plans for neighborhood revival, cut short by his 1987 death early in his second term. Richard M. Daley gained the mayor’s seat, but the system his father ruled was gone. Daley succeeded with downtown redevelopment and brought new groups, like the LGBTQ+ community, into the political fold, but left swathes of the city in substandard housing, high crime, and poverty.
- No mayor since then has commanded the power that the machine mayors held. Corruption is still exposed, but when it is, it’s not helping the neighborhood, but simply avarice.
- Pacyga does an excellent job portraying the city’s political evolution, how the sacred, its parishes and synagogues, overlapped with the profane world, building a system at one level blatant in its corruption, yet also delivering for its voters.
- For those seeking a more nuanced look at how Chicago functioned economically, sociologically, and politically, Clout City is a fundamental and readable analysis of the City that Works.
- Mike Matejka