October 8, 2025
By Dominic A. Pacyga
Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine covers the period 1870 to 2023 in an attempt to show the long evolution of what has come to be known as the Chicago way of politics. It further emphasizes the religious, specifically Judeo-Christian, communal roots of Chicago’s political machine and the eventual withering of those roots over time, including the impact of the Vatican II Ecumenical Council. The book emphasizes the political machine’s deep foundation in Irish Catholic and East European Jewish neighborhoods. Both Jewish and Catholic communalism played key roles in the creation of machine politics, this interwoven social and cultural history is essential for understanding Chicago politics. Given the often simplistic and ahistorical perspective many people have about Chicago’s political life, it is necessary to cover events during that wide ranging period and argue that you cannot fully and accurately understand today’s politics without seeing the larger – and indeed, longer – picture –the growth of the machine and its decline over time. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that the origins of Chicago’s clout-based approach to politics is not only intertwined with its social and cultural history but also that it predates the Richard J. Daley era. Ultimately, this is a book that seeks to anchor the reader’s experience in deep historical territory.
Chicago’s political history is a long and storied one. Much has been written about political legends such as Big Bill Thompson, Anton Cermak, Ed Kelly, and of course, the Daley family. Chicago’s well-known political corruption has long been a favorite topic as well. The goal of this book is to look beyond headline-making scandals, and partisan maneuverings to explore the religious and socio-cultural roots of the city’s politics. What were the precursors to the Democratic Party Machine in Chicago? How and why did this machine come to be? What were its roots? How did Chicago’s immigrant cultures shape it? How did race transform the machine? How did this governing system thrive, and how did it change over time? And finally, what factors contributed to the Machine’s decline in the last decades of the twentieth century?
Clout City surveys Chicago’s political history from the Great Fire (1871), through its flourishing and decline as an industrial city, until its emergence as a global city in the early twenty-first century. It concentrates on those cultural, economic, and demographic elements that shaped the Democratic Party Machine and its predecessors. It also focuses on those elements that transformed the Regular Democratic Organization of Cook County and led to its decline in the twenty-first century. The more contemporary period of Chicago politics is given only modest treatment because the quintessential Chicago machine reached its apex during the period 1930 to 1965. While political events, persons, and scandals are not ignored, Clout City argues that Chicago’s politics is understood best as a mixture of the sacred and profane, a combination of cultural and religious roots and more worldly pursuits. Chicago is a secular, capitalist city, but one with a religious core.
While cathedrals – sacred architecture – dominated medieval European cities, skyscrapers – secular architecture – dominated modern American cities and no place more so than the birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago. And no matter how much you stretch the metaphor of a skyscraper reaching to the heavens, there’s nothing sacred about a corporate office building. If there are sacred spaces in the industrial capitalist city, it is in the neighborhoods with their many houses of worship of every possible denomination. 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 meat packing, steel, or the garment industry.
Catholicism, especially the immigrant peasant version first brought over by the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, shaped Chicago politics. At the height of Catholic power in the region, more than 400 Roman Catholic parishes and parochial schools in the archdiocese created a largely Catholic sacred place. Neighborhoods became shared spaces largely defined by communal Catholicism. Out of this sacred cultural grounding was born the Democratic Machine as well as countless fraternal organizations and other institutions that provided support, services, and spiritual nourishment to residents from “cradle to grave.” That did not mean that all went well or that there was no crime or injustice, since the sacred and profane often collided and sometimes merged in the neighborhoods and in politics.
Dominic A. Pacyga is professor emeritus of history in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago, also from the University of Chicago Press.