Book review: “Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine” by Dominic A. Pacyga

Two-thirds of the way through his history of the Democratic political machine in Chicago, Clout City, Dominic A. Pacyga gives a handful of examples of the requests that came to Mayor Richard J. Daley for favors.

Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in South Chicago wanted help to upgrade its property, and Daley had Lewis Hill, the head of the city’s department of development and planning, look into it. The head of the Lakeside Bank asked the mayor to deposit some city funds to help the new financial institution get off the ground.

Someone needed assistance in getting an apartment in the Prairie Shores Housing complex—Daley wrote to the developer to have that person put on the waiting list—and others were looking for public housing apartments. A friend’s son was trying to get into dental school. The son-in-law of another was looking for a job. A Christian Brother wanted help to get a passport.

“All of these diverse and often highly individual or particular requests demonstrate the nature of the machine and of Daley personally as a benefactor,” writes Pacyga, one of the top present-day Chicago historians.  Although Daley and his circle of advisors were rooted in the Bridgeport community, the mayor helped many who asked for assistance, regardless of their neighborhood, because “the citywide machine needed citywide clout.” And this extended beyond the city’s borders to the rest of the state and the nation.

“Daley played the role of Chicago’s patron saint of patronage and clout,” Pacyga writes.

Not many people have ever referred to Daley or any other Chicago machine politician, for that matter, as a “patron saint,” but that’s an important image and idea for Pacyga.

 

Politics and faith

Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine is his story of how the Democratic political machine came to be and to dominate the city for nearly a century because of its hyper-local focus as a neighborhood institution and because of its alliance with and similarity to the Catholic Church.

Both represented, he writes, communalism in the face of the individualism that was the hallmark of American society as defined by the nation’s elites. Indeed, in this sense, both the machine and the church were countercultural.

For many Chicagoans, the neighborhood itself was a sacred space where families lived among friends and neighbors. It was a communal setting with institutions that served residents, but also connected them to the larger city. Most Chicagoans defined the neighborhood against downtown, “us” against the industrial giants that dominated local economies, such as meatpacking, steel, or the garment industry.

Pacyga writes that the immigrant version of Catholicism, as opposed to the less clannish, more open approach of the church after Vatican II in the 1960s, shaped Chicago politics. The city’s neighborhoods, for the most part, were defined by the Catholic parishes, a reference point used even by non-Catholics. “Out of this sacred cultural grounding was born the Democratic machine,” notes Pacyga.

There were other institutions as well, such as saloons, businesses and organized crime. And, he writes, “the sacred and profane often collided and sometimes merged in the neighborhoods and in politics.”

Throughout the history of the machine—from its start as a citywide entity with Mayor Anton Cermak in 1931 until its end in 2023 with the fall of Democratic powerhouses Michael J. Madigan and Edward M. Burke—success came through a reciprocal relationship with constituents.

The ward boss and other party members were like clan leaders back in the Old Country. They would attend wakes and funerals, distribute turkeys and hams at the holidays, and even deliver coal to a poor family. They became friends and protectors.

In this way, communalism was the foundation for clout and its effective use. Without a local politician’s support, it could be nearly impossible to get things done. In return for this kind of personal service, the politician asked for loyalty in the form of a vote and possibly a campaign donation.

 

“The dark side of communalism”

If residents saw a ward boss as a friend and protector, he was “much like a patron saint” of the community, Pacyga writes.

Even so, the machine was only one of several institutions in a neighborhood that worked together to make the community strong, based on a communal sense of obligation. And it wasn’t all sweetness and light. “The dark side of this reciprocal communalism in the political sphere lay in the repercussions that could ensue if a voter did not return a favor.”

For example, when Bernard Neistein, the committeeman of the 29^th ward on the West Side, was a precinct captain, he delivered every vote in his precinct except for three: a guy he’d gotten a job for and the man’s wife and mother-in-law. The morning after the election, Neistein had the man fired.

“They lived in a two-flat which I bought and then had them thrown out on their ass. Later, I sold the building at a $500 loss. It was worth every penny.”

 

The most focused look at the machine

Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine is the most focused and in-depth look at the Democratic organization and its impact on the city ever published and an important addition to the history of Chicago.

Although virtually every book about Chicago during the twentieth century mentions the machine to one extent or another, surprisingly few look directly at it. Three that do are Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago by Mike Royko (1971) and two by Milton L. Rakove, Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (1975) and We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent: An Oral History of the Daley Years (1979).

None of the three, though, examines the long arc of a century and a half in which smaller, more fragmented versions of the machine began to develop, such as those of the corrupt aldermen called the Gray Wolves, and then the construction of the multi-ethnic organization by Cermak, and then the machine’s high point in the 1960s under Daley.

The machine’s slow demise was due to many factors, most of which had to do with the decline in communal feeling in the neighborhoods.

The children of the immigrant generations, better educated than their parents, were anxious to move out to the newly developing suburbs in the latter half of the century. Reformers successfully targeted corrupt politicians and won anti-patronage rulings in court. Reforms in the methods of governance, some of which were instituted by Daley’s son Richard M. as mayor, cut down on the availability of political jobs. And changes in the Catholic Church after the Vatican Council reduced the tight focus on the parish that had helped foster the machine system.

Today, because of such vast cultural, economic and demographic shifts, the machine is a thing of the past.

The communal machine, based on local working-class interests and often held together by neighborhood places of worship and sociability, has disappeared….

The old communal machine, often too tribal, could not adjust to these changes. Weakened by the forces of change, it fell under the weight of corruption.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.16.25

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 12.17.25