What I have always enjoyed about Lindberg’s books is that he is willing to consider Chicago’s entire history. Too many conventional books suggest that Chicago history originated with Fort Dearborn and paused briefly due to the destruction occasioned by a great fire, but the city really came of age as of the opening of the Columbian Exposition.

Political corruption was endemic to Chicago from its inception and did not coming into being solely due to the passage of the Volstead Act. Big Mike McDonald was operating a few steps from City Hall decades before journalists objected to Al Capone doing the same thing. Electoral fraud and crooked politics were the norm in Chicago long before Prohibition. For whatever reason, too many authors choose to treat the first sixty-seven years of the municipality’s existence as if this period was simply the era of Marshall Field, George Pullman, Potter Palmer and the packinghouse millionaires. This brand of popular history omits much of the reality of the urban experience in a city that underwent expotential growth in the twenty-five years leading up to the turn of the century.

During his lifetime, many newspapers reported upon McDonald’s influence over the Democratic party caucuses and conventions (this was an era before nominations were secured in primary elections), but to review many popular books one would think that Roger Sullivan and his familiars were the architects of the machine that Cermak, Kelly and Daley would rationalize and refine. Not so. Mayor Carter Harrison and his son, Carter Harrison, Jr., labored mightily to deny that their political fortunes were closely tied to the proprietor of “The Store.”

I am eagerly awaiting this newest volume.