Democratic Mayor Research Articles

A Tale of Two Cities Revisited

This article examines the Philadelphia Mayoral Election of 2003, which was a re-match of the 1999 contest. The author contends that while Philadelphia remained a divided city, partisanship rather than race best explains the election’s outcome. By “nationalizing” the election, Democratic Mayor John Street tied his moderate Republican challenger, Sam Katz, to the unpopular Republican administration in Washington, D.C. The revelation of a recording device in Mayor Street’s office, rather than damaging Street, galvanized his African-American base while bringing a number of white Democrats back into the Street camp. These factors, along with a massive voter registration drive by Democratic Party operatives, transformed the party’s narrow victory of 1999 into a landslide four years later.

“Restoring” Charleston’s Dock Street Theatre

The imaginative reconstruction of the Dock Street Theatre, completed between 1935 and 1937 in Charleston, South Carolina, was a New Deal experiment in historic preservation. Funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and led by local architects Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham, the orchestrated re-creation of a lost eighteenth-century theater reflected the white elite’s desire to immortalize the city’s prosperous colonial and antebellum past in the historic built environment. While the project courted conservative interests and created a romanticized version of Old Charleston, the strong support of Democratic mayor Burnet Maybank and WPA director Harry L. Hopkins simultaneously pushed forward a progressive southern agenda. This dual and contradictory set of motivations culminated in an intriguing use of historic preservation to nurture a particular community’s sense of place and use historic buildings as a catalyst for cultural rebirth.

Mayoral Party Affiliation and Property Crime Rates in America's Most Populated Cities

This paper examines the role played by the party affiliation of a mayor and property crime rates in America’s 100 largest cities in 2019. The authors analyze the validity of claims made by former President Trump that Democratic cities have higher rates of property crime than Republican cities. Property crime rates (in general) and burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft rates (in particular) are compared in cities with a Democratic mayor to those with a Republican mayor. When all 100 largest cities are grouped together, there are significantly higher property crime rates in cities with Democratic mayors. But, when cities are arranged by size (top 20, 21 – 50, and 51 – 100), there is generally no evidence of a connection between mayoral political party and property crime rates in cities run by Democrats compared to cities run by Republicans.

Social Movement Gains and Losses: Dilemmas of Arena Creation

Social movements never entirely win or lose, nor do they suddenly appear or disappear. Just as their component parts recombine and continue in other forms, so movements have dozens of impacts of various kinds. To make sense of this complexity we propose examining the outcomes of political interactions for a variety of players (including individuals) across a range of arenas. Given the acknowledged tradeoffs and dilemmas of collective action, we would expect packages of outcomes to appear together sometimes; for example, gains in street mobilization may lead to losses in the form of a damaged reputation or police repression. The first step to explaining such patterns is to identify and name them. We examine one of these outcome patterns, the arena-ownership package, through the case of Seattle's historic $15 per hour wage law passed in 2014, the first ever in a major U.S. city. The players who crafted the bill included an avowed Socialist, the owner of Seattle's iconic Space Needle tower, many representatives of the city's labor movement, and the newly elected Democratic Mayor Ed Murray. These diverse players moved through a series of complex arenas to arrive at the legislative outcome. In this case, we find players who create new arenas, rather than only using already-existing arenas. This move is associated with a typical package of gains and losses: increased control for the player on the one hand, but corresponding losses and risks—the alienation of excluded players and increased perception of responsibility. The creating player is blamed for the arena's failures as well as credited with its successes.

Fresh Pages from Charles Bowden

Fresh Pages from Charles Bowden Jennifer Powers-Murphy (bio) In 1991, I started working for Tim Schaffner, a young literary agent who the previous year had relocated the agency his father founded in New York City in 1948 to Tucson, Arizona. One of Tim's authors at the time was Chuck Bowden. Tim could see a wider audience for Chuck's work than purely regional interest and had taken him on as a client, adding to a roster that included Maxine Hong Kingston, C. E. Poverman, Gary Paul Nabhan, and the James Beard Estate. I met Chuck in May, when he stopped by the office to pick up finished copies of his book Desierto: Memories of the Future. Although he didn't know it, I was somewhat indebted to him for my new position. For some reason, Tim's previous assistant had been afraid of Chuck, which made her working relationship with him difficult, if not impossible. My friend Laura Greenberg had worked for Chuck and Dick Vonier at City Magazine, where she produced great work under their editorial guidance. Revered for quality writing, eclectic voices, and outstanding photography, City Magazine was a liberal-leaning publication that refused to pull punches, even if it meant going after one of their own. When they thought Tom Volgy, the Democratic mayor, wasn't devoting enough time to running Tucson, they ran a contest asking readers if they knew where the mayor was. I reasoned that if Laura could work with Chuck, I could too. I wanted to develop good working relationships with all of Tim's authors. The first thing I noticed when I met Chuck was his height. He was 6 feet 4 inches and had to duck to enter the office. The second was his voice. A twelve-grit low growl. Finally, there were his eyes. They looked straight into mine. Yours. Everyone's. It was this trio of physical traits combined with an insatiable curiosity that made people not just willing to answer Chuck's questions, but to divulge their most intimate and confidential details. [End Page 86] After the introductions, he complimented the Baja Arizona T-shirt I was wearing. I complimented him on his new book. Not long after, we were on the phone, and for reasons I don't recall, Ben Bradlee's name came up. Chuck acknowledged a job well done on Watergate, but was quick to bring up Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her story "Jimmy's World," about an eight-year-old heroin addict, that turned out to be fabricated. Chuck thought Bradlee should have recognized the story as fake straight away but overlooked it because she worked for the Post. I told him I suspected the story was fake when I started reading it, then became convinced by the time I got to the metaphor describing a needle going into the child's vein "like a straw pushed through the center of a freshly-baked cake." We recited the line in unison. Blood Orchid was on deck to be published next, but the opportunity to co-author a book on Charles Keating intervened. Chuck had interviewed Keating for City Magazine, and had contacts with people at American Continental. A deal was struck with Random House and Chuck developed an obsession with Keating that would consume him for the next two years. Although Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions exists as a bit of an anomaly in Chuck's body of work, it's the book he worked on for the majority of time I was professionally associated with him at Schaffner Agency. Chuck's creative process included a lot of verbalization, his first step in synthesizing the information he collected from research and interviews. The phone calls were epic, rarely less than an hour in duration. I listened carefully, noting questions to ask later rather than interrupt his train of thought, and answered honestly whenever he intoned, "You follow?" Chuck and I got to know each other very well during those conversations. The subjects were wide ranging and we agreed on more than we disagreed. We discussed politics a lot. He...

Chartering New Waters

As the first mayor in the United States to possess independent charter school authorizing authority, Mayor Bart Peterson oversaw the establishment and expansion of Indianapolis’s ambitious charter school initiative. In 2007, Democratic Mayor Peterson’s oversight of the initiative came to an end when he was unexpectedly defeated by Republican Gregory Ballard in the mayoral election. Despite this significant change in leadership, the transition between mayors and political parties was accomplished with minimal disruption to the operation of the charter school office, as well as to the schools themselves. Through the use of in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, this study investigates how the transition between administrations was undertaken to ensure continuity for Indianapolis mayor-sponsored charter schools and offers best practices for mayoral transitions. In addition, this study reveals that to provide continuity for charter schools, policies that insulate schools from political change must be developed and charter schools must be viewed apolitically.

Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Who governed American cities? The question has been central to urban studies over several generations and of special importance to those examining metropolitan public life during the late nineteenth century. For some, post–Civil War cities were quintessentially pluralistic settings, with power distributed across a multiplicity of groups and interests. Others argue that economic changes concentrated power in the hands of a new business elite. The labor historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov join this debate in Chicago in the Age of Capital, a thoroughly researched and convincing assessment of the interplay between the spread of industrial capitalism and the evolution of American democracy in an important city. On questions of power, the truth is usually in the details, and Jentz and Schneirov provide plenty of them. In their telling, the Civil War triggered a sudden transformation in the local economy, as Chicago shifted from being a trading entrepôt with a merchant elite to a city increasingly dominated by large-scale manufacturers. For workers, this change meant a shift to wage labor that undercut their aspirations for independent citizenship. Slowly, and in complex ways, they began to coalesce into a self-conscious class with a coherent political program. Only after the great fire of 1871, when the issues and alliances connected with the Civil War had faded, did the city's elite unite around an agenda of low taxes, municipal efficiency, and, for a time, temperance. Business leaders gained the upper hand in the battle against workers after the panic of 1873 but could not hold it. The city erupted during the great strike of 1877, at which point it became clear that Chicago workers were becoming a cohesive group capable of challenging capitalist power. Democratic mayor Carter Harrison Sr. (1879–1887, 1893) crafted a governing settlement, ensuring that the limited government and low taxes business leaders craved would endure by accommodating working-class demands, including leniency on temperance, the curtailment of police interference in strikes, and official appointments for labor leaders. The result was a new order that accepted industrial capitalism, wage labor, and limited government while also incorporating the immigrant working class into the polity where it restrained elite power.

When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or an Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.

Preserving the “Public” in Public Education for the Sake of Democracy

At the dawn of the 21st century, education in the United States is undergoing intense, fundamental change, a revolution possibly as remarkable as the common school movement that gave rise to publicly supported schools. The past few decades has brought a host of neo-conservative education reforms. We have witnessed the emergence and rapid expansion of charter schools (Bulkley & Fisler, 2002; Center for Education Reform, 2005), the proliferation of private voucher plans in metropolitan areas including New York City, Dayton, Ohio, San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, D.C. (Godwin & Kemerer 2002; Howell & Peterson, 2002), and the implementation of publicly-funded voucher programs in selected urban districts and statewide in Arizona, Florida, Maine, Ohio, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2007; Shaul, 2002). Moreover, these reforms have been gaining momentum from federal regulation and court rulings, most notably the charter school option in No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Supreme Court's decision upholding the constitutionality of tuition vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), and, more recently, the Obama administration's choice to keep vouchers in the D.C. school system and provide stimulus package incentives (e.g., Race to the Top funds) for states to permit or expand charter schools. Teacher unions are under constant attack as well. New York City Schools Chancellor Joseph Klein, for instance, called for an end to the three pillars of non-meritocracy--teachers' seniority rights, tenure, and pay scales (Gootman, 2003), and D.C.'s former Education Chancellor Michelle Rhee adopted an evaluation system that dismisses teachers who fail to improve students' standardized test scores despite fervent resistance from the teacher union (Edsall, 2009; Turque, 2009). Merit pay schemes have also reemerged in districts throughout the nation with political support from both the Bush and Obama administrations, and performance-based accountability (with dramatic implications for teachers and school administrators) has become the modus operandi of education (Hannaway & Hamilton, 2008). While primarily the province of neo-conservative policymakers, these reforms have also attracted (and in a few cases, such as Milwaukee's Democratic Mayor John Norquist, been led by) some liberals who have become disenchanted, indeed impatient, with the inability of traditional education reforms to improve educational opportunities for children most at risk of academic failure. In this article, we argue that while the influence of these reforms on classroom instruction and student achievement are still contested, these reforms may help schools achieve other goals that are part of their mission and promote outcomes for the common good--certain general conditions that are in an appropriate sense equally to everyone's (Rawls, 1971, p. 246). The first section of the manuscript provides an overview of the private and benefits of educational attainment. Arguments in the second section suggest that the current state of schools precludes schools from accomplishing these goals, in particular supporting a stable, democratic society. In the last section, we consider current reforms in light of goals and suggest that these reforms, coupled with accountability measures, may change how we think about public education and rekindle optimism in the ability of schools to meet their goals to the advantage of both the individuals receiving an education and society. Education as a Quasi-Public Good Because education not only produces benefits for the individual, but also yields benefits to the public, education is often considered a good. The term good is misleading, and at least partially erroneous. In the strict economic sense of the term a good: (a) is non-excludable--others cannot be prevented from using the good or service, (b) is non-rivalrous--use of the good or service does not prevent others from using the good or service at the same time, and (c) has externalities--provides benefits that extend beyond the person consuming the good or service. …

When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is the less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel data set combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.

The Bradley Effect Was about Guns, Not Racism

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Commentary The Bradley Effect Was about Guns, Not Racism Joe Mathews* The New America Foundation Nelson Rising, chairman of Tom Bradley’s 1982 campaign for California governor, still remembers the phone call. Bradley called him shortly after 4 a.m. on a long election night, when it was clear Bradley had lost to Republican attorney general George Deukmejian. “You were right,” Bradley told Rising a bit wearily. With those words, Bradley, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, acknowledged that a political mistake had cost him the governorship. And, despite all the theories that the election produced a “Bradley effect”—a supposed www.bepress.com/cjpp Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009 secret racist vote undetected by polling—the mayor himself knew that his loss had different causes. The main cause was guns. Against Rising’s advice, Bradley had endorsed Proposition 15, a statewide ballot initiative that would have put a freeze on purchases of new handguns. Bradley and Proposition 15 both had a lead in the polls when Bradley decided to back the initiative. But there was a huge backlash against Proposition 15 in conservative California precincts. The resulting turnout was so overwhelming that it took down Bradley—just as Rising had predicted in a campaign meeting months earlier. “I will never forget that meeting,” Rising recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t own a gun. I don’t intend to own a gun. If I could design a world without guns, I would. But Tom, if you support this, you can’t win.’” *Joe Mathews is an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. An abbreviated version of this story appeared in Politico.

Economic Anatomy of an 1891 Minor League Ball Club

The formation of the Lowell, Massachusetts, baseball club offers a particularly illustrative example of some of the economic pitfalls that threatened minor league teams in the 19th century. For a variety of reasons, the finances of the Lowell ball club were precarious from its inception; the whole venture failed less than three months into the 1891 playing season.Three obscure, long-defunct local newspapers-Lowell Daily News, Lowell Morning Mail, and the Evening Star-extensively covered the birth, brief life, and demise of the Lowell ball club in 1891. The three papers reported not only on-field events, but the activities of the management group that operated the team in 1891. The coverage by these three papers contrasted sharply to the skimpy coverage provided by the city's other daily newspapers-Lowell Daily Courier, Lowell Daily Citizen, and Lowell Morning Times- and the nonexistent coverage by the Lowell Sun, then a weekly, but today the city's sole surviving daily newspaper. The Sun and the Courier are the most accessible periodical resources to modern-day researchers.1Augmenting the Lowell-based newspaper resources were commentary in the longextinct Sporting Life, a weekly baseball publication, and daily coverage by the Boston Globe of all league games, which included attendance figures.2By integrating our knowledge of contemporary events in Lowell with emerging information about the club's management group, several interesting revelations have come to light. It appears that disingenuous motivations on the part of the management group may have been the primary culprit behind the shaky financial foundations that led to the club's collapse.Management GroupA group of men met on Thursday evening, March 19, 1891, at the American House (a hotel on Central Street in the heart of downtown Lowell) to discuss the formation of a baseball club to represent Lowell in the New England League. Since it seemed to be the unanimous opinion that Lowell is ripe for a club, and all that is wanted is somebody to start the ball rolling, a six-man group coalesced at this meeting to move matters forward- Martin Courtney, Edward Gallagher, William Hawes, John King, Ralph Stickney, and John Whittaker.3The composition of this group distinctly represented Democratic Party ideals, compared to the Republican Party leanings of Frank Howe and most of the other men who had operated the last financially successful Lowell ball club in 1887.4 This change in political persuasion coincided with the election by Lowell citizens of a Democratic mayor in December 1890, George Fifield, who defeated the Republican incumbent Charles Palmer. Fifield took offce in January 1891, as Democrats also replaced many Republicans on the Board of Alderman and were now poised to exercise greater influence in heavily industrialized Lowell, whose economy was dominated by textile mills. In general, the two political parties had polar ideologies, with Democrats favoring the working man and Republicans favoring business owners.Two major construction projects in Lowell were set to get underway in 1891: the construction of a new city hall and a library on land the city had acquired on Merrimack Street at the western edge of downtown Lowell. The Board of Alderman had authorized the projects in 1888, architects were selected in 1889, construction contracts were awarded in spring of 1890, and cornerstones were laid in fall of 1890.5 Both projects were intended to position Lowell-now the third-largest city in Massachusetts with 80,000 residents-as a major urban center that was now independent of the Boston industrialists who had initially developed it.A new era is dawning upon the city, Mayor John Pickman said at the dedication of the new city hall in 1893. Our city is no longer a mere workshop and an adjunct to Boston; the inhabitants are no longer the servants of the bell. Wealth has come to many of our citizens, and with wealth increased opportunities for culture and the development of taste. …

Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (review)

Reviewed by: Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot Cheryl Greenberg (bio) Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. By Edward Shapiro. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2006. xviii + 252 pp. Significant events like riots are not only part of history, they generate their own histories, and so it is with the riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991. When a member of the convoy escorting the Lubavitcher Hasidic Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson collided with an oncoming car, the resulting crash wounded one Guyanese child, Angela Cato, and killed her cousin, Gavin. Crowds gathered and became protesters; protesters became rioters. A few hours after the accident, several young black men shouting antisemitic insults stabbed Yankel Rosenbaum, a non-Hasidic, Jewish student, who died of his wounds early the next morning. The riot continued for three days before police brought it under control. The anger on both sides took far longer to calm, and the many conflicts it raised—between black and Jewish community groups; between Lubavitcher and non-Lubavitcher Jews; between West Indian and native-born Blacks; between black and white New York residents; between Mayor Dinkins and many of his constituents; and between the Democratic mayor and the Republican Senator D'Amato and Dinkins's Republican challenger Rudolph Giuliani—affected both local and national politics for more than a decade. It is these intertwined histories that Edward Shapiro relates in a book both thorough and compelling. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, Crown Heights is a systematic examination of community understandings of and attitudes toward the various events surrounding the riot: the precipitating accident, the deaths first of Cato and then of Rosenbaum, the slowness of police to quell the violence, the performance of Mayor David Dinkins, and the several trials of Charles Price and Lemrick Nelson, Jr., accused of murdering Rosenbaum. Not only did Blacks and Jews differ in their analysis of each of these issues, they differed on whether the riot itself should be understood as rooted in antisemitism, racism, political impotence, poverty, neighborhood frictions, or the cynical manipulation of agitators. But neither the Jewish community nor the black community were themselves monolithic; many Jews were suspicious of the Hasidic community and critical of its insularity; native-born African-Americans and West Indian immigrants had had a history of conflict beginning well before 1991. Thus internal divisions over the events proved as sharp as the more visible external ones, and Shapiro is careful to point these out as well as assess the merits of their respective claims. [End Page 108] Shapiro uses journalistic accounts, legal documents, political essays, speeches, and historical and sociological analyses to good effect, identifying claims and counter-claims, and evaluating their probity with evidence and a careful reading of historical context. He strives for balance, although the archives he consulted and interviews he conducted appear to be almost exclusively within the Jewish community. There may be good reason for this; nevertheless Shapiro is far more effective in articulating the Jewish perspectives than those of African-Americans or West Indians, which he is able to unearth only from published sources. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, Shapiro himself seems to have concluded that the riot was indeed centrally an expression of antisemitism, and the municipal responses to it motivated more by political correctness than moral rigor (although he is reticent to express his views explicitly). The whole episode was, therefore, more threatening and dangerous to the Jewish community than many there acknowledged. Still, Shapiro flags failings on the Lubavitcher side as well, beginning with the Rebbe's refusal to offer condolences to the Cato family or express his sorrow for the events that occurred. Those who remember the riot as well as those who study it will appreciate the range of views Shapiro presents and his detailed investigations, although given the intensity of emotions surrounding the Crown Heights riot, in the end few are likely to alter their views. Cheryl Greenberg Trinity College Cheryl Greenberg Cheryl Greenberg is Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her most recent book is Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (2006). Copyright © 2007 American Jewish Historical...

Storms of Memory: New Orleanians Surviving Katrina in Houston

abandonment of its own people, and Houston represents a rare and courageous affirmation of humanity, responsibility, and hope. In the days of the deluge, with pathetically few exceptions (notably the heroism of the US Coast Guard), the governmental response to the older city's need was at best inadequate and more often criminally negligent. The norm has been inexplicable indifference, broken promises, aid presumably marshaled but as yet undelivered. Some three hundred miles to the west, the response of Houston was compassionate, bipartisan, generous, and smart-to my mind, the nation's single greatest act of civic heroism in recent years. Bill White, the city's Democratic mayor, and Robert Eckels, the

Nashville, 1780-1860: From Frontier to City (review)

BOOK REVIEWS91 later, another set of Dispatches (1984), these by Michael Herr, provide no more graphic and literary account of war. Blackett deserves much credit for recovering and annotating these dispatches. As he demonstrated in Beating Against the Barriers (1986), he has a gift for locating relatively obscure historical figures and bringing them to life. Had space permitted, he might have included some of Chester's other writings such as his essays for the Colonization Herald, his lecture on Negro Self-Respect and Pride of Race, and his speeches and letters from his legal and political activities in New Orleans in the 1870s and 1880s. Chester is important not only for his presence on the Virginia front but for his place in African-American history and literature. Louis P. Masur University of California, Riverside Nashville, 1780-1860: From Frontier to City. By Anita Shafer Goodstein. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989. Pp. 278. $29.95.) Perhaps it is just as well that Andrew Jackson lived outside of the town limits of Nashville, for eventually he and his political followers were not welcome there. At least that is the distinct impression gained from Professor Goodstein's account of Nashville during the antebellum decades . Actually the entrepreneurial, enterprising Jackson would have had little difficulty fitting in; but the Jackson of the common or working man would have. Thereby hangs a tale. And it is a story well told by the author who offers an urban biography that is more traditional than "new" urban history. Goodstein depicts a town that moves from its late eighteenth century establishment as a frontier outpost to its mid-nineteenth century prominence as a city. In her micro study, she wittingly or unwittingly imitates Thomas P. Abernethy's sixty-year-old macro examination of the entire state: From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee. Goodstein places her primary emphasis upon the political life of the city but links it closely with economic development. She contends, for instance, that the county court and the militia were the chief institutions in Nashville's earliest years, and that land speculators were the town's principal leaders. The latter soon gave way, however, to farmers and planters and even to lawyers. Furthermore, the creation of the offices of mayor and aldermen in 1806 shifted much of the political focus away from the county court. While Nashville pushed toward developing "community," it also had to confront internal divisions, argues Goodstein. She thus turns to a discussion and analysis of blacks, because race was the most significant divisive factor. Their separation from the white community is emphasized, perhaps deliberately, by the author's decision to deal with blacks in two discrete chapters. Although never large in number, either absolute or 92CIVIL WAR history relative, Nashville blacks made their mark, particularly upon the institutional life of the city. Goodstein's chapters, though rewarding, leave the reader with a thirst for more information and insight. Much yet remains to be told about slaves and free blacks in antebellum Nashville. If there ever was any doubt previously, there should be none now: Nashville was a Whig city. Indeed one almost gets the impression from Goodstein that perhaps it was such even before the Whig party came into existence! The annual elections of mayor and of aldermen demonstrated beyond dispute that the voters preferred Whig leaders. After all, from 1839 to the Civil War, Randal McGavock, elected in 1858 to a single term, was the only Democratic mayor; and during this same period, Democrats never controlled the board of aldermen. In the early years of his presidential ambitions and of the presidency itself, Jackson enjoyed support in Nashville; but by the mid- 183Os that situation changed. This transformation was rooted in the reality that those leaders who opposed first Jackson, and then Van Buren, recruited followers by embracing a stance in favor of economic development that benefitted from government support. Contrary to stereotypical notions, mechanics and skilled workers moved into the Whig camp where their search for respectability and stability found satisfaction. In a word, as Goodstein expresses it, "party affiliation made a social statement" (160). Beginning in the 183Os and continuing through the 185Os, Whigs (or their allies...

Und ihr habt doch gesiegt, 1988

Every fall since 1968, a cultural festival known as the Styrian Autumn has been held in Graz, the capital of the Austrian province of Styria. The festival presents concerts, theater, and opera productions, film showings, symposia by writers, and art exhibitions. Although constituted as an independent organization, its director is chosen by a board on which representatives of the provincial and the city government play an important role. In 1988, the board was chaired by Professor Kurt Jungwirth, the deputy governor of Styria and a prominent member of the conservative party (OVP). Graz was represented by its social democratic mayor, Alfred Stingl (SPO), and its commissioner of culture Helmut Strobl (OVP). The festival is funded by the province, the city of Graz, and the Austrian government. Dr. Peter Vujica, the director of the Styrian Autumn in 1988, chose for the twentieth anniversary of the festival the motto Guilt and Innocence of Art and suggested that reference be made to Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. The Anschluss was the theme of a number of public events in Austria in the year of its fiftieth anniversary. Inevitably, the enthusiastic welcome Hitler received when his troops marched into Austria became the subject of agitated public debate. That debate was further fuelled by the controversy surrounding the role the recently elected Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, had played as a Wehrmacht officer in the Balkans during World War II. Dr. Vujica commissioned Dr. Werner Fenz, the curator of the city's Neue Galerie, to organize the visual arts section for 1988. Dr. Fenz invited artists from various countries to produce works for temporary installation in selected public places in Graz. He chose as Points of Reference 381/88 locations that had played a significant role during the Nazi regime, such as the police/Gestapo headquarters, city hall, squares where Nazi rallies had been held, the Hitler Youth headquarters, the bishop's palace, and so forth. One of the city's older monuments, the Marienstiule (Column of the Virgin Mary), rises in a square at the south end of Herrengasse, the most prominent street of Graz. A fluted column on a massive base, crowned by a gilded statue of the Virgin on a crescent moon, it was erected late in the seventeenth century to

Harold Washington and the Politics of Race in Chicago

A quarter of a century later, in another political confrontation highly charged by white racism, the overwhelming majority of Chicago's black population rejected its domination by the corrupt Democratic Party Machine and elected Harold Washington mayor of the city. Washington's reform administration was immediately confronted with a $121 million long-term deficit left by defeated Democratic Mayor Jane Byrne, as well as gross bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. But most striking to the new mayor was the petty vindictiveness of the old regime. On the first morning in the mayor's office, Washington discovered that virtually all crucial administrative files had vanished. Other