Fire on the Prairie: Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race - Softcover

Rivlin, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805026983 ISBN 13: 9780805026986

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1993

Synopsis

Explains how Harold Washington and his associates overcame the Daley political machine and built an administration that crossed racial lines and transformed Chicago politics

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A mostly admiring--though contentious, flatly written, and somewhat overlong--political biography of Harold Washington, mayor of Chicago from 1983-87. Rivlin has covered Chicago politics for the Chicago Reader and The Nation. The first half of Rivlin's account is devoted to the final years of Richard Daley's political machine and the struggle for power that followed between Daley's prot‚g‚ Jane Byrne and--by Rivlin's account--his inept son, Richard Daley, Jr. The portraits of Byrne and Daley, Jr., are anything but flattering, but Rivlin's harshest words are reserved for Washington's rival Jesse Jackson, who emerges here as egotistical and opportunistic to a fault. When Washington won the Democratic primary for mayor in 1983, Jackson jumped forward and tried to introduce Washington's victory speech; when that failed, he tried to raise Washington's arm with his own as though it had been a joint triumph. Rivlin also gives much space to black nationalist Lu Palmer, and to a Polish city council powerhouse who in Washington's first term held sway over machine- loyal aldermen and prevented Washington from accomplishing much of anything. Washington gets high marks for an almost obsessive devotion to his job, for rising above considerations of race, for providing housing initiatives, and for attempting to lift Chicago government above the Daley legacy of cronyism. But he was not always effective as an administrator, Rivlin shows, and many of his own appointments were questionable. Washington's personal life was a shambles, with a succession of girlfriends, excessive drinking, and the tendency to be late or to miss appointments altogether. White backlash and wars with the city council put him under terrible stress, and he finally fell over at his desk with a coronary just at the point, in the beginning of his second term, when he had consolidated enough power to become truly effective. Perhaps his greatest legacy is that, to a large extent, he broke Daley's machine. Uneven and often, it seems, unfair, but Rivlin's research and intimate knowledge of the principals are impressive. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The first black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, who died in office in ok? 1987, welded a multiracial coalition that replaced the corrupt political machine put in place by ex-mayor Richard Daley during his 21-year tenure. Washington's embattled administration was, in the author's judgment, "a grand experiment with national ramifications," an assessment not entirely borne out by the facts in this engrossing behind-the-scenes account of the mayor's narrow electoral victory in 1983, the racial backlash his rule inspired and the rancorous City Council wars that deadlocked his reforms and almost subverted his program. Rivlin, who covered local politics for the Chicago Reader , blasts the press for stereotyping Washington as "racially polarizing" and for insinuating that his coalition was rotten. The book witheringly portrays Jesse Jackson as an ultra-ambitious, cunning opportunist who claimed undue credit for Washington's election. Rivlin's corrective critique provides a much-needed perspective on Chicago's racially divisive politics.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805026983
• ISBN 13: 9780805026986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464