Chicago's Modern Mayors: From Harold Washington to Lori LightfootThe Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's AmericaThe Daley Show: Inside the Transformative Reign of Richard M. Daley

Three new books dig into Chicago's twentieth- and twenty-first-century mayoral history and take into consideration the fact that Chicago is unique and yet not fully removed from broader trends in American politics. The authors of these books revel in opening doors to back rooms and revealing details of familiar stories, but none of them veer too far into the territory of dishy tell-all. Each of these books highlights the enormous power and responsibility held by Chicago mayors, while also making it very clear how many people operate in their circle—both political players and grassroots activists.Chicago's Modern Mayors: From Harold Washington to Lori Lightfoot is an edited volume by Dick Simpson and Betty O'Shaughnessy with chapters by journalists, politicos, and scholars from multiple disciplines.This volume designates Harold Washington, Eugene Sawyer, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and Lori Lightfoot as “Chicago's Modern Mayors.” Each of these mayors gets their own treatment by a different author or authors, but the organization of this book keeps it cohesive. Each chapter focuses on three primary questions: How did this person become mayor? What was their relationship with city council like? And what is their legacy? This format makes the book an information-heavy political history primer without being unnecessarily dense. As the individual chapters on each mayor follow the three-question format, several themes emerge, with economic development serving as one of the most consistently pressing issues the mayors tackled. The authors of each chapter make their own arguments, but the entire book makes it clear that Chicago is unique and representative of the whole country. In addition to the chapters, introduction, conclusion, and epilogue, Chicago's Modern Mayors includes other helpful resources: a “Contemporary Chicago Bibliography” in addition to each chapter's endnotes, a list of historic Chicago mayors, and an appendix charting aldermanic corruption. The clear structure of each chapter, these additional resources, and the straightforwardness of the writing render this book a potentially useful text for students in history or political science, or anyone hoping to learn more about city politics.Historian Gordon K. Mantler digs into 1980s Chicago history with The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's America. The subtitle might imply that the book is a biography of Harold Washington (with Ronald Reagan as a foil), but this is much more about the city that elected Washington than the man himself. This book is part of the University of North Carolina Press's Justice, Power, and Politics series, which is a good fit as Mantler approaches late twentieth-century Chicago from all three of these perspectives. The book focuses on grassroots movements and coalition-building of progressives in Chicago and relies on sources such as the Tribune and Sun-Times as well as the Chicago Reader. First-person accounts from activists, alderpersons, and mayoral candidates themselves add flavor and context. Unlike Chicago's Modern Mayors, this work's organizational scheme is not its strongest suit. Mantler discusses the role of Latino voters and activists and their relationship to Black voters and activists, and to a lesser degree the white “Lakefront Liberals.” Mantler's argument itself is compelling: The story of how grassroots activists got involved in electoral politics can be a warning for groups to not put all their eggs in the one proverbial basket. His broad definition of politics and discussion of ways that people were involved in political activism outside of the electoral process is a good reminder of the ways people have “done politics” outside of voting and contributed to making their communities better even when they were disenfranchised. This book is about politics removed from the machine. As such, this is highly detailed and has many, many characters of varying levels of fame. This book will be crucial for people interested in the relationship between Chicago politics and grassroots organizing, but the deep level of detail might strike general readers as too deeply in the weeds.The third book, The Daley Show: Inside the Transformative Reign of Chicago's Richard M. Daley, was not written by a historian or journalist, but by Forrest Claypool, Chicago politico and longtime associate of Daley. Claypool, who served twice as Daley's chief of staff, mentions in the acknowledgement section that he had several researchers assist with the book.The Daley Show is divided into sections based on Daley's record-holding six mayoral terms, with a first section called “Ascent,” which covers his pre-mayoral career. These sections are divided into 3–7 short chapters, each of which is titled after a specific issue or policy associated with that era, such as “Airport Wars,” “Millennium Park,” “Parking Meters,” or “Olympics.” This format makes the book useful for brushing up on specific issues or events in recent history, and most of these chapters can stand alone as short articles.While Claypool is unsurprisingly sympathetic to Daley overall, he does not shy away from addressing Daley's shortcomings or more criticized policies. Some of the language, including the term “reign” in the subtitle itself, is evocative of Daley as a prince set to inherit his father's kingdom. While that may not be an inaccurate image, it trends towards praise of Daley as someone both singularly qualified to be mayor of Chicago and somehow also a hapless inheritor of problems he did not cause. Claypool does do a good job of focusing on Richard M. Daley instead of writing a book that was only a father-son comparison. Richie mostly stands on his own terms here. If a reader is hoping for a nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes explanation of famous events in Chicago's history, this is a useful book, if read with a grain of salt. Claypool does do an excellent job of demonstrating just how long Daley's twenty-two years of mayorship were and how widespread his power and influence was.It might seem surprising in a review of three books about Chicago mayoral politics, but one thing these works all have in common is earnestness. Chicago's Modern Mayors's dedication reads: “For those who remember the past in order to create a better future for Chicago.” The Multiracial Promise is a story of different groups working together, and Mantler argues that the story can serve as an instructive window into the relationship between electoral politics and other forms of organizing—with the aim of achieving a more just society. No one can say that Forrest Claypool does not care about Chicago. Even though his conclusion highlights some of the city's struggles post-Daley, the story overall celebrates the city, even with its many challenges.In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the old political machine crumbled, but did not evaporate. Richard J. Daley modernized it, but after his tenure things changed. Several of the modern mayors highlighted in these featured books considered themselves reformers, yet sometimes they relied on machine-like tactics to achieve those reforms. In Chicago's Modern Mayors, the mayors are all categorized as either “establishment” or “progressive reform” candidates, which is more useful than “machine” or “not machine,” although there is some overlap. For instance, Harold Washington got his political start as a cog in the machine but worked to dismantle it as mayor. Simpson and O'Shaughnessy argue that establishment mayors saw the city as a company and themselves as the CEO, while progressive reform mayors focused more on neighborhoods than downtown and added social reform to good government reform goals.It might seem like three new books focused on Chicago's mayoral politics is plenty, and these books can certainly be read in conversation with each other and older books. Yet this is in no way excessive—mayoral history is still an area ripe for further research. Specifically, further research could be interdisciplinary, with historians, urban studies scholars, sociologists, and political scientists collaborating. Further research could focus more specifically on the relationship between Chicago's city hall and Springfield, and how that relationship has changed over time. The differences between Chicago politics and Illinois politics could be considered from many different angles—including the relationships between mayors and governors, and the various different pairings and power dynamics at play. These books focused on the relationships between Chicago mayors and alderpersons, with governors as bit players, but comparing mayoral and gubernatorial styles could be fruitful, as could an exploration of Chicago mayors and mayors of other major American cities. A more ground-up approach could consider how Chicagoans’ perceptions of mayors have changed as the role of mayor has changed—do Chicagoans know more or care more about mayors than residents of other big cities? Is their relationship to the mayor different because of the history of the machine and the personalities of the Daleys? It is certainly a compliment to these three books that they inspire more questions and could spark more conversations.Chicago has often been referred to as the “most American” American city. This maxim can be applied to any number of facets of the urban experience and is useful here for considering the city's modern political history: at times messy, corrupt, and disappointing, but at other times collaborative, sincere, and inspiring.