“Goodbye to All That: The Rise, Dominance, and Decline of Machine Politics in Chicago” Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine, PacygaDominic A., Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2025, 393 pp.

Historian Dominic Pacyga's Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2025) offers a socio-cultural explanation of the emergence and long-term development of the dominant Cook County Democratic Party in Chicago. Focusing on the city's working-class Catholic neighborhoods in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Pacyga discerns a very specific group and individual mentality driving both the ambitions of political leaders and the routine political engagement of ward-level activists and voters. Pacyga's account, in many instances, aligns with the extensive literature on urban political machines, but his highly localized interpretation of machine politics in one city does clash with more materialistic accounts of the rise and fall of urban political machines.