Author: Douglas Bukowski Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252066689 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
There are politics, politicians, and scandals, but only in Chicago can any combination of these spark the kind of fireworks they do. And no other American city has had a mayor like William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson, not in any of his political incarnations. A brilliant chameleon of a politician, Thompson could move from pro- to anti-prohibition, from opposing the Chicago Teachers Federation to opposing a superintendent hostile to it, from being anti-Catholic to winning, in huge numbers, the Catholic vote. Shape-shifter extraordinaire, Thompson stayed in power by repeatedly altering his political image. In Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image, Douglas Bukowski captures the essence of this wily urban politico as no other biographer or historian has. Using materials accessible only thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, Bukowski has fashioned an unforgettable story of a volatile Chicago leader and his era. And he does it with such grace and in such an irresistible style that readers will yearn to visit the local speakeasy and lift a glass to colorful politicians gone by. "An excellent book, written in a lively style with a contemporary resonance. A first rate meditation on the image and reality of 'Big Bill' in the context of actual and mythological Chicago political history." -- Steven P. Erie, author of Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemma of Urban Machine Politics "Written with a flair and a gentle sardonicism that makes it fun to read, Big Bill Thompson ... is a significant contribution to the literature of urban history and politics." -- Roger W. Biles, author of The South and the New Deal and Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago
Author: John M. Allswang Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421430738 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Originally published in 1986. Political machines, and the bosses who ran them, are largely a relic of the nineteenth century. A prominent feature in nineteenth-century urban politics, political machines mobilized urban voters by providing services in exchange for voters' support of a party or candidate. Allswang examines four machines and five urban bosses over the course of a century. He argues that efforts to extract a meaningful general theory from the American experience of political machines are difficult given the particularity of each city's history. A city's composition largely determined the character of its political machines. Furthermore, while political machines are often regarded as nondemocratic and corrupt, Allswang discusses the strengths of the urban machine approach—chief among those being its ability to organize voters around specific issues.
Author: John W. Stamper Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226770857 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
Since its opening in the 1920s, Chicago's North Michigan Avenue has been one of the city's most prestigious commerical corridors, lined by some of its most architecturally distinctive business, residential, and hotel buildings. Planned by Daniel Burnham in 1909, the avenue became the principal connecting link between downtown and the wealthy, residential "Gold Coast" north of the Loop. Some thirty buildings were constructed along its path in the ten-year period before the Depression, an urban expansion comparable in significance to that of Pennsylvania and Park Avenues. John W. Stamper traces the complex development of North Michigan Avenue from the 1880s to the 1920s building boom that solidified its character and economic base, describing the initiation of the planning process by private interests to its execution aided by the city's powerful condemnation and taxation proceedings. He focuses on individual buildings constructed on the avenue, including the Renaissance- and Gothic-inspired Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, and Drake Hotel, and places them within the context of factors governing their construction—property ownership, financing, zoning laws, design theory, and advertising. Stamper compares this stylistically diverse mixture of low- and high-rise structures with earlier, rejected planning proposals, all of which had prescribed a uniformly designed, European-like avenue of continuous cornice heights, consistent facade widths, and complementary stylistic features. He analyzes the drastically different character the avenue took by 1930, with high-rise towers reaching thirty stories and beyond, in terms of the clash among economic, political, and architectural interests. His argument—that the discrepancies between the rejected plans and reality illustrate the developers' choice of economic return on their investment over aesthetic community—is extended through to the present avenue and the virtual disregard of the urban qualities proposed at its inception. Generously illustrated, with an epilogue condensing the avenue's history between the end of World War II and the present, this is an exhaustive account of an important topic in the history of modern architecture and city planning.
Author: Nathan Godfried Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252065927 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
Chicago radio station WCFL was the first and longest surviving labor radio station in the nation, beginning in 1926 as a listener-supported station owned and operated by the Chicago Federation of Labor and lasting more than fifty years.
Author: John M. Allswang Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813185750 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
This book assesses the role of urban ethnic groups, particularly in terms of the rise of the Democratic Party to national predominance between 1928 and 1932. It builds quantitative and qualitative models for the study of ethnic groups in terms of political behavior. Focusing clearly upon political change and the role of ethnicity, the work advances the hypothesis that Chicago's ethnic groups responded as ethnic groups, rather than on socio-economic or other bases, when they shifted their party allegiances in the late twenties. This ethnic realignment was a major factor in the redistribution of power between parties Chicago. Employing a variety of quantitative measures and a number of conceptual tools from the social sciences, Mr. Allswang has utilized simple statistical procedures with clarity and discrimination. His statistical data is based on thorough research in unpublished census material and election returns. His qualitative data is based in part on a comprehensive examination of the foreign language press, supplemented by materials from other newspapers, personal interviews, and manuscript sources. The book studies nine ethnic groups over a generation of political development, affording insights into urban politics and history, and into dominant-minority and interethnic relations in politics and in the city. Crisp in style, thorough, methodologically innovative, A House for All Peoples will become a model for studies of United States political history.
Author: Joe Kraus Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press ISBN: 1501747339 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago's Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin "Zuckie the Bookie" Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate's "Jewish wing." These two men linked the early Jewish gangsters of the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street and Lawndale to the notorious Chicago Outfit that emerged from Al Capone's criminal confederation. Focusing on the murder of Zuckerman by Patrick, Kraus introduces us to the different models of organized crime they represented, a raft of largely forgotten Jewish gangsters, and the changing nature of Chicago's political corruption. Hard-to-believe anecdotes of corrupt politicians, seasoned killers, and in-over-their-heads criminal operators spotlight the magnitude and importance of Jewish gangsters to the story of Windy City mob rule. With an eye for the dramatic, The Kosher Capones takes us deep inside a hidden society and offers glimpses of the men who ran the Jewish criminal community in Chicago for more than sixty years.
Author: Kevin Mumford Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814795633 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Newark’s volatile past is infamous. The city has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis. Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of protest in the black community. Newark charts this important city's place in the nation, from its founding in 1666 by a dissident Puritan as a refuge from intolerance, through the days of Jim Crow and World War II civil rights activism, to the height of postwar integration and the election of its first black mayor. In this broad and balanced history of Newark, Kevin Mumford applies the concept of the public sphere to the problem of race relations, demonstrating how political ideas and print culture were instrumental in shaping African American consciousness. He draws on both public and personal archives, interpreting official documents - such as newspapers, commission testimony, and government records—alongside interviews, political flyers, meeting minutes, and rare photos. From the migration out of the South to the rise of public housing and ethnic conflict, Newark explains the impact of African Americans on the reconstruction of American cities in the twentieth century.
Author: Thomas A. Guglielmo Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199882584 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
Taking the mass Italian immigration of the late 19th century as his starting point and drawing on dozens of oral histories and a diverse array of primary sources in English and Italian, Guglielmo focuses on how perceptions of Italians' race and color were shaped in one of America's great centers of immigration and labor, Chicago. His account skillfully weaves together the major events of Chicago immigrant history--the "Chicago Color Riot" of 1919, the rise of Italian organized crime, and the rise of industrial unionism--with national and international events--such as the rise of fascism and the Italian-Ethiopian War of 1935-36--to present the story of how Italians approached, learned, and lived race. By tracking their evolving position in the city's racial hierarchy, Guglielmo reveals the impact of racial classification--both formal and informal--on immigrants' abilities to acquire homes and jobs, start families, and gain opportunities in America. White on Arrival was the winner of the 2004 Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians
Author: John Morris Knapp Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817361758 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
"A long overdue account of the pioneering life and work of controversial African American Congressman Arthur Wergs Mitchell of Chicago"--
Author: Douglas Bukowski
Author: Alex Gottfried
Author: John M. Allswang
Author: John W. Stamper
Author: Nathan Godfried
Author: John M. Allswang
Author: Joe Kraus
Author: Kevin Mumford
Author: Thomas A. Guglielmo
Author: John Morris Knapp