Robert Self on Gordon K. Mantler’s *The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington’s Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan’s America*

What would it mean for major cities in the United States to be engines of equity? For them to temper, or even to correct, the grinding inequality of modern global capitalism rather than to serve as the latter’s mortar and pestle? There was a time when a generation of urban reformers believed cities had precisely that potential. Their faith might seem naïve to our—the gentrification—generation. Despite their wealth of creative ideas and expansive vision, today’s urban reformers mostly fight rearguard action after rearguard action. But before the reckless urban embourgeoisement of the present, community activists and progressive politicos in the 1970s placed faith in a broad political coalition—fueled by the racial liberalisms and nationalisms of the era, an LGBTQ insurgency, and white good-government advocates—that prioritized people over capital and well-being over patronage.

A paradigmatic instance of that faith, and that coalition, is the movement that coalesced behind Harold Washington—charismatic, Black, and a committed reformer—in his two campaigns for mayor in 1980s Chicago. The story of the Washington coalition’s rise and fall receives its most exhaustive treatment to date in Gordon K. Mantler’s The Multiracial Promise. Building on the work of both political scientists and historians, and grounded in extensive archival research across the institutional landscape of Chicago’s libraries and universities, The Multiracial Promise is a densely rendered account of the city’s politics between the 1970s and the 1990s, with a focus on the decisive years in the mid-1980s when the Washington movement was the biggest story in urban America. Alongside his account of the city’s Black anti-machine activists, the traditional leads in the Washington drama, Mantler is especially attentive to restoring the city’s Latino (his chosen term) populations, composed primarily of people of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, to the arena of political contest. But from top to bottom, from those who controlled Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine down to the thick grassroots of the city’s well-developed neighborhood organizations, Mantler meets the city’s gritty complexity with an analytical sensibility and an eye for the intricacies of movement building derived from his previous research on Black-Brown anti-poverty coalitions in the 1960s.

Mantler’s principal thesis is not surprising, which ought not diminish its importance. Having forged a hard-earned multiracial, cross-class coalition—led by Black activists—that defied the Democratic Party machine and inaugurated the city’s first Black mayor, Washington and his administrative team faced constant, stiff headwinds at every turn. The machine was bruised and battered after Washington’s surprise victory in 1983, Mantler shows, but was not dead yet. Its patrons, mostly white but some Black as well, headed off as many of Washington’s reforms as they could while patiently waiting out his movement’s zeal—Washington never had a reform-oriented majority on the city’s notoriously fractious, and racially divided, city council. Meanwhile, the dismantling of federal urban policy accelerated under the Reagan Administration’s hostile watch. With no sluice of federal funds to support anything like the urban growth machines of mid-century, Chicago—like most cities in the austere eighties—had only private capital and property taxes on which to fall back. While Washington’s sudden death eight months into his second term was an undeniable crisis for the city’s people power, Mantler suggests that diminishing returns for the reformers were inevitable in any case. After the lackluster Black machine politician Eugene Sawyer completed the deceased Washington’s term, Richard M. Daley reconstructed his father’s Democratic Party apparatus, updated with “pinstripe patronage” and other corporate-friendly postures, and governed the city for twenty years. Would a healthy, fighting Washington have held off the frontal assault of Daley and his machine troops and charted a unique course for Chicago among U.S. cities? Maybe, but Mantler rightly seems skeptical.

The Multiracial Promise is clear about the meaning of Chicago’s experience, and its representativeness. Succeeding the Washington movement, “Daley’s Chicago” thrived within the “racially tinged national political culture” of the post-Reagan 1990s and offered a model “for centrist whites to take back power, whether it was city halls in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, or the White House itself” (228). That model turns out to be something quite familiar to modern readers: a re-packaging of urban diversity for middle-class white consumers (gentrifiers) coupled to generous public subsidies for private development capital, where the price of inclusion for people of color was a demobilized class politics—a neoliberal rainbow coalition, if you will. The second Mayor Daley, like big-city mayors of his generation from Los Angeles to Boston, turned toward the “urban quality of life issues” that “centrist whites” appreciated, while turning away from the “uncomfortable, persistent issues of racial, class, and gender inequity” (252). Thus did Washington’s Black-led multiracial people’s coalition give way to Daley’s white-led multiracial machine. Thus did the electoral turn of the insurgent racial mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s enter its denouement, its transformative promise contained and demobilized by a combination of virulent racism and the realpolitik of urban governance.

That arc is the book’s heart, but recounting it doesn’t do justice to this study’s principal strength: Mantler’s painstaking reconstruction of Chicago’s political ecology. To take one example, by the end of the 1970s Latinos made up 14 percent of the city’s population, and there were more than 200 organizations formed to address those communities’ needs. Mantler dives into that world, examining the work of activists such as Rudy Lozano, Chuy García, and Cha-Cha Jiménez—well-known, if historically underappreciated, Latino community organizers—and restoring the 1966 Division Street uprising (by Puerto Ricans against police violence) to its proper place in the city’s grassroots political history. But he goes even deeper, narrating the stories of Brown and Black women—women such as Pilsen Neighbors presidents Teresa Fraga and Mary Gonzales, and Nancy Jefferson, founder of Women’s Network for Washington, to name just three—who were responsible for so much of the neighborhood-level reform energy (and labor), even if they never rose very high in the city’s notoriously male political hierarchy. There is an admirable relentlessness to Mantler’s quest to document the people—the actual people, not just the concept of them—who forged the people power behind Washington.

So many critical themes of urban political history run through the book. What are the costs to grassroots activists and organizations when they turn to electoral politics? How is a “people’s politics” different from old-school political patronage? How do multiracial political coalitions manage their class, gender, and sexual fissures? Why so often doesn’t the appointment of reform-minded people of color to critical urban posts—Police Chief, Department of Housing head, Superintendent of Schools—produce meaningful change? Can a people-over-capital movement succeed in a city—a city trapped in a capitalist logic of markets over which city officials have little control—without broader structural (political and economic) transformation? And, perhaps most fundamentally, can a city governed for a century according to the logic of political patronage, pay-for-play, and white supremacy be transformed into a multiracial people’s republic governed according to the logic of inclusion and human well-being? Mantler ultimately offers uneven answers to these, and many other, core questions of urban political history. But because they so clearly guide his thinking and writing, the reader is drawn into the narrative in their own parallel pursuit of answers.

These strengths of The Multiracial Promise are also, at times, its blinders. Mantler exhibits such fidelity to the city’s intricate politics, and to keeping multiple themes and analytical questions in play, that broader lessons and conclusions are at times elusive. Cities, in most places but certainly in the United States, are not like little nation states. They are the prisoners of capitalist markets and jurisdictional federalism over which their populations, and their leaders, have little control. This crucial fact is implied in The Multiracial Promise but never elevated to an analytical or explanatory frame. Absent a robust national welfare state, cities mostly manage the ravages of capitalism, on people and communities. Moreover, cities in the United States have since their founding served as principal sites of racial arbitrage in housing, employment, and welfare—where artificial, racist constraints on the mobility, labor, and health of people of color generate profit for white workers and homeowners as well as willing entrepreneurs in various sectors (real estate and finance, for example). This elemental fact, too, remains overly implicit here. Elevating it to an analytical frame would sharpen Mantler’s analysis of the dilemmas the Washington coalition faced, as well as open up potential explanations for its ultimate fracturing.

On balance, Mantler prioritizes political explanations over structural ones. As a political historian, and not an urbanist, that’s an entirely defensible choice. This is a finely crafted and deeply sensitive book, which makes one of the most politically complex cities in North America legible, without over-simplifying its subjects or draining them of their humanity and particularity. It’s evident, too, as it was in his first book, that Mantler cares profoundly about his subjects, especially, in this case, that the multiracial Washington coalition did not achieve more, that its authors were unable to fulfill so much of the “promise” of the book’s title. What remains, for urban historians, is to craft an analytical periodization of U.S. cities in the last hundred years that successfully integrates the two eras of popular mobilization—the 1930s/1940s and the 1960s/1970s—into a broader narrative, both political and political economic, of urban structures and systems. Standing in the field of vision illuminated by The Multiracial Promise, we can begin to see what such a project might look like, even if Mantler has not himself taken up that charge.