Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago - Hardcover

James L. Merriner

3.48

21 ratings by Goodreads

9780809325719: Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809325713 ISBN 13: 9780809325719

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

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Chicago’s reputation for corruption is the basis of local and national folklore and humor. Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago, 1833 2003 unfolds the city’s notorious history of corruption and the countervailing reform struggles that largely failed to clean it up. More than a regional history of crime in politics, this wide-ranging account of governmental malfeasances traces ongoing public corruption and reform to its nineteenth-century democratic roots. Former Chicago journalist James L. Merriner reveals the battles between corrupt politicos and ardent reformers to be expressions of conflicting class, ethnic, and religious values.

From Chicago’s earliest years in the 1830s, the city welcomed dollar-chasing businessmen and politicians, swiftly followed by reformers who strived to clean up the attendant corruption. Reformers in Chicago were called goo goos,” a derisive epithet short for good-government types.” Grafters and Goo Goos contends a certain synergy defined the relationship between corruption and reform. Politicians and reformers often behaved similarly, their separate ambitions merging into a conjoined politics of interdependency wherein the line between heroes and villains grew increasingly faint. The real story, asserts Merriner, has less to do with right against wrong than it does with the ways the cultural backgrounds of politicians and reformers steered their own agendas, animating and defining each other by their opposition.

Drawing on original and archival research, Merriner identifies constants in the struggle between corruption and reform amid a welter of changing social circumstances and customs decades of alternating war and peace, hardships and prosperity. Three areas of reform and resistance are identified: structural reform of the political system to promote honesty and efficiency, social reform to provide justice to the lower classes, and moral reform to combat vice. In the matter of corruption and reform, the constants might be stronger than the variables,” writes Merriner in the Preface. The players, rules, and scorekeepers change, but not the essential game.”

Complemented by eighteen illustrations, Grafters and Goo Goos is rife with shocking and amusing anecdotes and peppered with the personalities of famous muckrakers, bootleggers, mayors, and mobsters. While other studies have profiled infamous Chicago corruption cases and figures such as Al Capone and Richard J. Daley, this is the first to provide an overview appropriate for historians and general readers alike. In examining Chicago’s notorious saga of corruption and reform against a backdrop of social history, Merriner calls attention to our constant problems of both civic and national corruption and contributes to larger discussions about the American experiment of democratic self-government.

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About the Author:

James L. Merriner covered Chicago and national politics for more than two decades as political editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Atlanta Constitution. He is the author of Mr. Chairman: Power in Dan Rostenkowski’s America and The City Club of Chicago: A Centennial History, 1903 2003 and the coauthor of Against Long Odds: Citizens Who Challenge Congressional Incumbents. He was a James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University and teaches at Marietta College.

From Booklist:

If there is a single theme in this meticulously researched book, it is that "politicians tended to abuse their power while reformers tended to abuse their own, all while pursuing their own conceptions of self-interest as well as of the common good." Merriner examines their roles against a backdrop of social history in what he labels "a blend of anecdotes and analysis, a one-volume overview of a very big story." He defines corruption as the use of improper political influence for private gain and reform as the effort to prevent such activity. Merriner reminds readers that no alderman, committeeman, or candidate since 1964 has been shot, pistol-whipped, kidnapped, dumped in the sanitary canal, or encased in concrete: "This is progress." He argues that rather than attempt to reduce the amount of corruption with stricter laws, the remedy might lie in addressing the other side of the equation: reduce the amount of government. This book is a bit more about corruption than reform, but then so is Chicago. That's what makes the book so absorbing. George Cohen
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