Can Public Power be Kept Private?

Abstract

Chicago has been something of an anomaly in historical studies. Urban historians have written extensively on the politics, society, and economies of such major cities as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. They have chronicled the history of small cities whose past is less complicated, more amenable to the case study approach favored by many researchers. But, the nation's second-now third-largest city for decades attracted, more often than not, those who saw it as a dysfunctional environment, either for its lack of political reform, epitomized by its so-called machine politics, or for its ethnic and racial strife. Reading the titles on any shelf of books on Chicago history, sociology, and political science easily suggests more of an urban pathology than an urban history. Fortunately this situation has begun to change. The last five years have produced a flurry of new works on Chicago. Some of these examine the city's social groups, placing the city's residents into their urban context. 1 Other very recent works explore economic and technological aspects of the city's history that not only challenge us to rethink our preconceptions about how and why Chicago developed as it did, but also to see the growth of its political and social fabric as a function of the city's history, not as a pathology.2 Still, very little has yet been written about the development of Chicago's political structures, about the history of its municipal government. That is one reason why Robin Einhorn's book, Property Rules, is such a welcome addition to the literature on this fascinating city. Moreover, her examination of Chicago's political structures during its early years as an incorporated city illuminates a period of Chicago political history that has been even more neglected than others. In this book Einhorn reconstructs the workings of Chicago's municipal government in its initial decades, from the city's incorporation in 1833 to the immediate aftermath of its tragic fire in 1871. These forty years were the for-