Reform in Chicago

An interesting story by Don Rose at The Week Behind:

Not only was it not ready for reform, it was about to double down on clout. In an era when the old urban machines were gasping and wheezing their last, Daley grabbed hold of both the mayor’s post and the county party chairmanship to retool the fearsome Chicago Democratic machine into the nation’s most powerful political organization. He became, in Sidney Lens’s phrase, not the last of the old-time bosses but the first of the new-time bosses.
He did it using a new political model that invited the business and financial communities—two traditionally WASP-ish groups that initially opposed his election–to share in the spoils. Their unwritten pact gave them almost unlimited control of business and real estate development downtown while he worked to stem the spread of Chicago’s burgeoning black population–that also threatened the central business district’s white sanctity.
In Daley’s Chicago, politics was intrinsically tied to race. He used every possible instrument of government, from schools, housing and employment to protective and recreational services to suppress the African American population and created the nation’s most segregated city. It took federal legislation, a potent local civil rights movement and a few brave politicians like Ralph Metcalfe and Al Raby to liberate Chicago’s black citizenry from what some called Massa Daley’s plantation.